Atari XL/XE vs ZX Spectrum... And the winner is...

[GameEngine]

Speccy, Atari and C64 were all very good computers

( for the price that is, many thanks to C. Sinclair and J.Tramiel)

[Waismann]

I've always had Atari computers. First 65xe, then 130xe with Indus drive. Today I also own ZX Spectrum 128. I am sorry BUTTTT I must say for the simplicity and much lesser cost that the ZX is, it is a much better machine. It has only 15-color palette and the colors are simply beautiful, very vibrant. It can display more at once in higher resolutions than the Atari 8-bit. Only take a look at some games like Dizzy VIII on the ZX. That game looks and also sounds just awesome. 

[atarilux]

I had both, firstly a ZX Spectrum then an Atari 800XL.  In terms of built in hardware e.g. serial ports etc the Atari won hands down. However, when it came to to games it is difficult to tell, clever programming on the Spectrum (as noted earlier) meant that many games seemed to offer far better graphics than the ATARI. Namely down to the way it handled colours and the default (only) graphics resolution.

 

The ATARI was far more of a hackers machine I would say than the Spectrum, but by virtue of simplicity the Spectrum was great of those starting out in programming such as myself. 

 

In the end a which is better argument is probably a bit futile. My plan is to get both up and running again for some crazy push the boundaries projects

Edited February 20, 2021 by atarilux

[Mazzspeed]

I've never even seen a Spectrum, I don't believe they were ever sold in Australia. I hope they were a vast improvement over the ZX80/81.

 

[Gury]

Did you hear about Nirvana engine? This engine can run on unmodified machine without any problems.

Here are some finished games:

El Stompo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMtJmf6ZE08

Manic Pietro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQI8Af6Wutg

Stormfinch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PesX1EOC_Ko

Gandalf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdYbeqP5KPs

GLUF 128k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwOdY96xRsU

 

Zx Spectrum 48k and Nirvana Engine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQajN1XWzJY

 

Edited February 20, 2021 by Gury

[zbyti]

I ? modern ZX Spectrum games :]

[Gury]

Yeah! I am Atari 8-bit man, but I am becoming ZX Spectrum fan either.

 

[zbyti]

Great interview 

 

[TGB1718]

1 hour ago, Mazzspeed said:

I've never even seen a Spectrum, I don't believe they were ever sold in Australia. I hope they were a vast improvement over the ZX80/81

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum#ZX_Spectrum_16K/48K

[Gury]

Super Mario Bros for 128K machine:

 

 

[zbyti]

 

 

 

 

 

My last favorites

[Gury]

Great selection!

 

[Mclaneinc]

There are some really nice Speccy games but I always have disliked the colour clash which is why I've never owned one but I do have a gamebase for the Spectrum so play the odd game in that. I'd been spoilt from seeing sprites and decent sounds so the Speccy was like a downgrade (well that is how it felt at the time). Shame, If I had bothered to look at some stuff I might have got one in the end back then..

 

Being a pretty game is nice, being a playable game is better..

 

[archeocomp]

This week I looked what it would be like to build a new Spectrum as cases, keyboards and pcbs are again being manufactured.  With 128kB Harlequin board and other parts everything adds up above 200,- EUR plus time to build it. And then I would need some storage solution.. sigh

[TGB1718]

11 minutes ago, archeocomp said:

And then I would need some storage solution.. sigh

Back to Cassette or Floopy (I think that's what they called it) or was it Micro Drive ?

[youxia]

I'm actually the other way around: grew up with the ZX, and only now am catching up with and appreciating the Atari

22 minutes ago, Mclaneinc said:

There are some really nice Speccy games but I always have disliked the colour clash which is why I've never owned one but I do have a gamebase for the Spectrum so play the odd game in that. I'd been spoilt from seeing sprites and decent sounds so the Speccy was like a downgrade (well that is how it felt at the time).

Spectrum had indeed the weakest hardware of the Big Micro 4, but paradoxically it has worked out in its favour, because devs were forced to get creative. And that has resulted in a huge number of amazingly innovative games (eg Knight Lore kickstarted the isometric genre because of that).

 

It's huge popularity also resulted in a flood of ports from other systems/arcades, something that CPC and A8 were lacking. They were sometimes not very good, but at the time it didn't matter that much, plus we had soem killer ports which were arguably better than on more poweful hardware (eg R-Type, Renegade, Bomb Jack, Chase HQ...)

 

18 minutes ago, archeocomp said:

This week I looked what it would be like to build a new Spectrum as cases, keyboards and pcbs are again being manufactured.  With 128kB Harlequin board and other parts everything adds up above 200,- EUR plus time to build it. And then I would need some storage solution.. sigh

Harlequins really do seem rather expensive these days; much better/cheaper just to get a normal Spectrum + DIV storage, or one of the numerous FPGA boards (ZX-Uno, ZX Dos, etc).

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 6/9/2006 at 12:01 PM, GameEngine said:

Speccy, Atari and C64 were all very good computers

( for the price that is, many thanks to C. Sinclair and J.Tramiel)

 

@GameEngine: sorry it took 14.5 years for your post to garner replies.  But better late than never, amirite?

 

Anyway, I grew up as an Atari user in ZX Spectrum (and Commodore) territory.  Never had a Spectrum, but did use them a bit at other kids' houses.

 

Comparing the Spectrum and the Atari really is an apples-and-oranges comparison.  The Spectrum was - just like nearly everything else Sinclair cranked out in the consumer electronics world - built to a price point, and that price point was rock-bottom low.  This dictated both its architecture, features, and physical construction.

 

Atari wasn't immune to this, either: obviously, any development and manufacturing process is going to seek to keep sunk costs to a minimum.  But the A8s were designed to move the state of the art forward.  Comparatively large amounts of RAM for their time, dedicated ICs for video, sound, and graphics, SIO, first-party peripherals available at launch, etc.

 

What's more relevant are the time and place of both machines' development.  The ZX80 and ZX81 were essentially obsolete at launch - but that didn't matter, because they were being launched in an era where home computing in the UK was just barely starting to take off.  The A8 machines had the benefit of the 2600's design to guide where improvements over that hardware needed to be implemented.  And while they were also under development at a time when home computing in the US was just starting to take off, they had one critical advantage over the ZX80 & ZX81: Americans had more disposable income to spend on things like home computers than people in Europe generally did.

 

This meant that the Sinclair machines absolutely had to target the cheapest price point possible, though it would be at the expense of features.  The Atari machines could sport a better featureset, but at a higher price because enough of the market could bear that price to eventually allow mass production and refresh cycles drive prices down.

 

Note that I'm not saying that the ZX Spectrum was rubbish, just that it was a product of its time and place of birth.  It remained a very influential machine into the early 1990s, and was responsible for giving huge numbers of people their first taste of computing outside of a miscalculated electricity bill.  Some of those people even went on to make careers out of that technological exposure.  And none of this is very much different to the A8 over its lifetime, just that the background was not the same.

Edited February 20, 2021 by x=usr(1536)

[Gury]

I agree with the comments above. Taking the technical stuff aside (special hardware for graphics and sound, SIO...), let's look at an example of a game, published for both machines.

 

StarQuake on Atari is a good game, but I think it is better on ZX Spectrum. It's great with all these vibrant colors, colorful sprites and fast playability, color clash is unnoticetable because of fast action. On Atari we can't get close to the look of Speccy version, no DLIs and P/M graphics would help here, considering ZX Spectrum graphics resolution is 256x192 in 15 colors using attributes of 2 colors (same brightness) in 8x8 color blocks anywhere on the screen.

Of course, there are games on Atari not matched on Speccy, but it is also the same in opposite way.

Don't forget, ZX Spectrum depends heavily on Z80 processor, with support of ULA chip. The point is, both machines have their good and bad aspects, all in all, both are great.

 

 

 

Edited February 20, 2021 by Gury

[Mclaneinc]

Some of their arcade ports were surprisingly good, shame I only found out that after the fact...Its not that I didn't have a Sinclair product before,  (ZX80 & 81) Just never followed on..Saw the first few games, thought they were naff and left it alone..Typical young person thinking....

[Gury]

9 minutes ago, Mclaneinc said:

Some of their arcade ports were surprisingly good, shame I only found out that after the fact...Its not that I didn't have a Sinclair product before,  (ZX80 & 81) Just never followed on..Saw the first few games, thought they were naff and left it alone..Typical young person thinking....

I agree! There were great ports, also listed above where I would add Robocop and Phoenix.

2 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Back to Cassette or Floopy (I think that's what they called it) or was it Micro Drive ?

Yes, Micro Drive was quite popular, but sometimes unreliable (but as said, it was used by many, because it was faster to load software than from ordinary tapes).

Spectrum +3 had disk drive installed.

[TGB1718]

I remember when they first announced the Spectrum, several of my workmates Pre-Ordered one and had to wait

several months before they arrived, very clever of "Uncle Clive" to get people to part with their money to pay for

the production costs of the early units.

[archeocomp]

2 hours ago, youxia said:

 

Spectrum had indeed the weakest hardware of the Big Micro 4

Atari, Commodore, Spectrum and was there realy another big one?

[TGB1718]

3 minutes ago, archeocomp said:

Atari, Commodore, Spectrum and was there realy another big one?

BBC Micro was big in the UK

[Faicuai]

48 minutes ago, Gury said:

I agree with the comments above. Taking the technical stuff aside (special hardware for graphics and sound, SIO...), let's look at an example of a game, published for both machines.

 

It seems all these type of discussions are (essentially) loose "ideological' cannons, unless they take place on a firmer, better defined context.

 

What is the primary application-aim at comparing? Raw potential? Productivity? Demos? Kiddie stuff, except for once-in-lifetime, memorable titles? What about OS architecture? What about HW architecture, interfacing and OS abstraction? There's quite a wide range of variables involved here, beyond sprites and crazy sound-tracks...

 

I actually like to start (first) from a systemic point-of-view. Take, for instance, these two (revealing) demos for the A8 (as soon as launched, it becomes very clear what they imply):

 

1. Super Boink: Super Boink.atr (needs Joystick for active pull up/down of overlay window)

2. Impossible Demo: The Impossible Demo.atr (press 1-0 keys, for an incremental view of how everything plays together).

 

What I would really like to see is the above workouts (which are a tour-de-force, by definition) on any platform out-there. It would be really cool to see them on ZX, BBC, Amstrad, C64, CXXX, IBM/PC, etc... And we already have brute-force examples on the A8-family (like Avery's video-player) that not only go really far on the host architecture, but most likely would make any other similar platform puke, if attempted in the same genuine and direct way as it runs on Atari.

 

Then from there we can later descend into comparing solid-color sprites and screen-objects vs. same-resolution, and same objects, with same solid-color approach... but just less colors.

 

 

Edited February 20, 2021 by Faicuai

[youxia]

43 minutes ago, archeocomp said:

Atari, Commodore, Spectrum and was there realy another big one?

Amstrad had the smallest userbase of the lot, but was still reasonably big in Europe (~3 million units).

 

42 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

...most likely would make any other similar platform puke...

This thread was surprisingly peaceful, tolerant and not at all ideological up till this point. I have a feeling it's about to change though...