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Atari v Commodore


stevelanc

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An analogue synthesizer (well technically an analogue phase accumulator) with full ring modulation/synchronisation/filtering and FULL ADSR enveloping on ALL channels PLUS a fourth sample channel effectively...compared to what? A limited VCS sounding chip which hasn't got a hope in hell of making either a decent piano sound or electric guitar sound let alone both let alone in more than two channel mode...hmmmm?

 

I hope you are exaggerating here when you claim the A8 sounds like the VCS. No way, man.

...

Once every few weeks, you get the SAME arguments from oky2000 and some others as if the fanboy reset button was pressed. Then you get the same arguments as answered many many times: Atari can only do 2 colors in 320 mode, 4 colors in 160 mode, electric guitar on SID, etc. etc. Just one-sided views. And comparing with C16 as if thread is C64+C16 vs. A8. I would recommend comparing A8+A7800 vs. C16+C64. C16 colors are still less and it's incompatible. C16 came too late but at least Commodore realized palette isn't subjective. POKEY DACs running at high frequency or combined to form higher sound bit depth is much easier than what SID can do. And it fits in well with the superior hardware design of A8 since you can have SIO or joystick ports doing streaming audio/imagery without having to worry about all the timing issues involved with synchronized audio/video events.

My point about Pokey is that 99% of the time even today the 'instruments' sound the same on the music, whereas even in 1985 a David Whittaker tune sounded nothing like a Martin Galway tune which sounded nothing like a Rob Hubbard tune. That's three composers who made tunes that if you played them to the man on the street he would be hard pressed to say they were produced by the same sound chip. Diversity of sound = superiority simple as that really.

 

And the colour comments are excluding the screen modes with many shades of the same colour like 16 shades of blue OR any kind of CPU draining assistance to do palette swaps or mix modes etc. If this wasn't the case then Last Ninja on A8 would have been finished months ago!

Personal preference but I nearly always thought SID sounded like a bunch of angry bees and had a horrid grating sound. Mostly in games and it lacked an authentic arcade sound to it. As has already been mentioned here but many arcades 79-84 had pokeys sound installed in them, same as Atari A8 though some arcades had 2 of them. For some newer arcade that had a distinctive "synthy" sound to them (GaPlus that someone posted comes to mind) it sounds just fine.

 

Personal preference is a factor sure but listen to the SID tunes from the game Rambo and then listen to the soundtrack...very very close in feel and sound...and then listen to something by David Whittaker which sounds very 80s synth-pop from the UK...and Hubbard stuff just sounds like trip hop. If more colours and resolution = more diversity in graphics so for example on the Amiga you can do pictures in the style of Monet or Constable or Picasso so it is just as true the more diverse the style of music on the soundchip = greater ability. Sure some people refuse to like anything on the SID and some people refuse to like the graphical abilities of the Amiga...but neither is a case for saying they weren't the best use of the available technology. I've listened to the Pokey interpretation of the Rob Hubbard tune from the loading theme of the game Sanxion and as good as it is it still has that kind of Pokey twang about the intruments, ditto with Warhawk....you just can't get rid of that Pokey twang on any of the 2000+ A8 tunes I downloaded. I have only heard one tune on Pokey that doesn't have this twang and it is from 2009 and is using a lot of experimental stuff to get around the standard Pokey sound...that's 3 decades to do what 4 composers did in 12 months on the C64 in 1985.

 

Gauntlet arcade has Pokey on the motherboard I believe but as I can no longer find a link to the technical details of that board I can't tell you what it is doing...might even be two of them on there, but it's been over a decade since my last work on Gauntlet with Neil Corrolette of the Multi Guantlet Emulator fame (was working on doing a pixel perfect port of it for the A1200 Amiga without emulator code overhead as you already have a 680x0 onboard anyway)

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Personal preference but I nearly always thought SID sounded like a bunch of angry bees and had a horrid grating sound. Mostly in games and it lacked an authentic arcade sound to it. As has already been mentioned here but many arcades 79-84 had pokeys sound installed in them, same as Atari A8 though some arcades had 2 of them. For some newer arcade that had a distinctive "synthy" sound to them (GaPlus that someone posted comes to mind) it sounds just fine.

 

Do u HONESTLY expect anyone who has heard something like the arcade Commando music to prefer it to the Hubbard Commando version?

 

Pokeys do not offer "authentic" sound they offer "cheap" sound and they only reason they sound like arcade machines is that the early-mid 1980s arcade machines used the same type of crap chips in there to keep the costs down.

 

there is absolutely no question that the SID chip music sold c64 software. i would hazard a guess that the pokeys "authentic" sound effects never did.

 

troll on mate.

 

Steve

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Personal preference but I nearly always thought SID sounded like a bunch of angry bees and had a horrid grating sound. Mostly in games and it lacked an authentic arcade sound to it. As has already been mentioned here but many arcades 79-84 had pokeys sound installed in them, same as Atari A8 though some arcades had 2 of them. For some newer arcade that had a distinctive "synthy" sound to them (GaPlus that someone posted comes to mind) it sounds just fine.

 

Do u HONESTLY expect anyone who has heard something like the arcade Commando music to prefer it to the Hubbard Commando version?

 

Pokeys do not offer "authentic" sound they offer "cheap" sound and they only reason they sound like arcade machines is that the early-mid 1980s arcade machines used the same type of crap chips in there to keep the costs down.

 

there is absolutely no question that the SID chip music sold c64 software. i would hazard a guess that the pokeys "authentic" sound effects never did.

 

troll on mate.

 

Steve

 

commandoplus.zip

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Yawn... just another C64 freak with polite words.

 

The whole tread meanwhile is about "vice versa"...

 

C64 guys come along to an Atari forum, telling everyone that the C64 is the deus ex machina, thus not accepting that the A8 has its superiorities. So, please go back to lemon, thanks.

Congratulations, you have just been banned for a week and you will not be welcome back to this thread.

 

..Al

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Personal preference but I nearly always thought SID sounded like a bunch of angry bees and had a horrid grating sound. Mostly in games and it lacked an authentic arcade sound to it. As has already been mentioned here but many arcades 79-84 had pokeys sound installed in them, same as Atari A8 though some arcades had 2 of them. For some newer arcade that had a distinctive "synthy" sound to them (GaPlus that someone posted comes to mind) it sounds just fine.

 

Do u HONESTLY expect anyone who has heard something like the arcade Commando music to prefer it to the Hubbard Commando version?

 

Pokeys do not offer "authentic" sound they offer "cheap" sound and they only reason they sound like arcade machines is that the early-mid 1980s arcade machines used the same type of crap chips in there to keep the costs down.

 

there is absolutely no question that the SID chip music sold c64 software. i would hazard a guess that the pokeys "authentic" sound effects never did.

 

troll on mate.

 

Steve

 

commandoplus.zip

 

See that tune still has the same Pokey 'twang' to it and is a poor cousin to the SID tune it is trying to replicate in my opinion. The Sanxion loader is a much better translation, albeit inferior one, of the original Hubbard tune on SID. The volume of the different channels is also mismatched, some parts are barely audible whilst the twangy instruments are too loud too.

 

Edit: Hubbard tunes are probably not the best ones to try to convert as he spent a lot of time making his unusual sounding instruments by hammering the various functions of the SID til he got the sound he wanted to be fair.

Edited by oky2000
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As has already been mentioned here but many arcades 79-84 had pokeys sound installed in them, same as Atari A8 though some arcades had 2 of them. For some newer arcade that had a distinctive "synthy" sound to them (GaPlus that someone posted comes to mind) it sounds just fine.

 

POKEY in that situation is slightly different animal. Arcade machines had more CPU to spare to drive POKEY. I wouldn't be surprised if many of those machines had a CPU and memory dedicated to the POKEY to create a sound system within the cab. So an arcade machine could spend resources diddling POKEY(or even up to four as you say) that an A8 doesn't have and still have grunt left over to drive the IO and the graphics.

 

I've also read about experiments in dynamically changing the clock that drives POKEY. I don't know if any arcade cabs did that but that is another dimension of POKEY unavailable to a stock A8.

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Yawn... just another C64 freak with polite words.

 

The whole tread meanwhile is about "vice versa"...

 

C64 guys come along to an Atari forum, telling everyone that the C64 is the deus ex machina, thus not accepting that the A8 has its superiorities. So, please go back to lemon, thanks.

Congratulations, you have just been banned for a week and you will not be welcome back to this thread.

 

..Al

 

Noooooooooooooo what happened to the lovely dragon avatar you had?!?!?!!?

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I had to register on these forums just to reply to this thread - the link to which I've seen on the Lemon 64 forums. This has to be the thread with some of the silliest posts on the entire Internet!

 

 

You're telling us....silliest posts....and those are just the ones from the Commodore users.

 

nice of you to finally admit you are trolling. Now be on your way. :D You are changing no minds here.

I'm only going to say this ONCE.

 

These posts contribute nothing to this thread. A warning to all of you to stay on topic. If you have nothing positive to contribute to the thread, don't post. If you don't like someone's posts, ignore them. Especially don't respond saying, "Waahhhh, you're trolling!" If you feel someone is trolling, use the report button on that specific post.

 

From this point forward, I will ban anyone in this thread who continues to post messages such as the above, or personal attacks against anyone or any body of people. Please stop with the stupid fanboyism as well. There are many new posts on AtariAge every day--I do not have time to babysit this single thread with its large number of new daily posts.

 

There is a wealth of great technical information and discussion in this thread and if a decent signal to noise ratio cannot be maintained, this thread will be locked. Those that contributed to it being locked will be banned from the Atari 8-bit forum (and I don't care if you're an Atari fan or Commodore fan).

 

..Al

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Hi there, Irgendwer. How is your work going ? Have you managed to make these Lemon score comparisons ? LOL :D Did you come to tell us about the progress of your work or you just dropped by to say something comical...as always. :D

You have just been banned for a week as well.

 

..Al

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There is no much to say here that hasn't previously said. We compared both machines from different angles, and the real thing is any Atarian don't think C64 is a great machine. The initial post asking what games on Atari are better than C64 version, was covered a long posts ago.

 

C64 users enter into this post to defend some opinions from his point of view. But some of them enter to provoque Atarian people.

Edited by Allas
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There is no much to say here that hasn't previously said. We compared both machines from different angles, and the real thing is any Atarian think C64 is a great machine. The initial post asking what games on Atari are better than C64 version, was covered a long posts ago.

This could also be said of the site in general--there's quite a bit that gets rehashed over and over again in various forums here. However, this thread has gone on long enough that the same arguments are being recycled and I believe we may have reached the point of diminishing returns (yes, I know some people will say that occurred long ago).

 

You are correct in that this thread has deviated a fair bit over the initial thread.

 

The original poster has not posted since page five of this thread, stating,

 

Guys / Gals

 

I posted the original question.

 

I have just taken delivery of a SIO2SD and a MMC64. I think the optimum solution is to fire them up, have a play, and make my own decision.

 

Steve

He really had the right idea above. I have both a Commodore 64 and an Atari 800XL sitting here on my desk. Both machines are inexpensive, and it's easy to get software from your PC into them. Sure, there are aspects of both machines that may be better on one versus the other. But trying to compare these machines in absolutes and saying one is better than the other is not being fair to either machine. Please, enjoy them both if you can. :)

 

So for various reasons, including the fact that the original poster has long since moved on, I think it's fair to close this thread and allow people to vest their energy in more productive threads. Please, nobody else start another Commodore vs. Atari thread. :ponder:

 

And to anyone who posted in this thread with the intent to stir up trouble (you know who you are), poo on you. I was relatively lax in this thread until recently. I will not be so in the future.

 

..Al

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