Disappointments in Classic Computing -- (Your stories here)

[Keatah]

Another disappoint for me was that programmers didn't fully utilize the "16-bits" of the 16-bit computers like the ST, Amiga, TI99/4a, or other 16-bit gaming consoles.

 

It seemed that 16-bit gaming was all about beefing up sprites and backgrounds and making games longer-length in play time. Sprites and backgrounds felt like paper cutouts and slapped together. Interactivity and liveliness was lost. The hand-eye coordination and arcade speed went missing or got toned down. None of the extra 8-bits afforded us was used to increase game complexity or world fidelity.

 

Sound and music also tended to become a whole other process that just kinda droned on in the background. Platformers, side-scrollers, SHMUPS all sounded like a circus. Explosion noises and the firing of weapons being the the only interactive auditory elements present.

 

This was prelude to FMV, which while good for setting the stage of a game, was completely useless to the game itself.

[JamesD]

Another disappoint for me was that programmers didn't fully utilize the "16-bits" of the 16-bit computers like the ST, Amiga, TI99/4a, or other 16-bit gaming consoles.

 

It seemed that 16-bit gaming was all about beefing up sprites and backgrounds and making games longer-length in play time. Sprites and backgrounds felt like paper cutouts and slapped together. Interactivity and liveliness was lost. The hand-eye coordination and arcade speed went missing or got toned down. None of the extra 8-bits afforded us was used to increase game complexity or world fidelity.

 

Sound and music also tended to become a whole other process that just kinda droned on in the background. Platformers, side-scrollers, SHMUPS all sounded like a circus. Explosion noises and the firing of weapons being the the only interactive auditory elements present.

 

This was prelude to FMV, which while good for setting the stage of a game, was completely useless to the game itself.

I think it depended on what genera you liked to play.

 

Many of the games consisted of just adding a little more color, a little more sound, more levels or they ran off of one disk instead of 4.

Some of the Amiga games I saw looked a lot like the C64 version and even used sampled sounds from the C64.

What was the point of that?

 

On the other hand, games like Populous weren't practical until the 16 bit systems.

Notice I said practical rather than possible.

They were mostly written in 'C', had codebase over 500K, benefited from 16 or 32 color graphics, used many sampled sounds and required several 3.5" disks.

The only 8 bit machines even close to being up to the task would have been the Apple IIgs, CoCo 3 and maybe the MSX Turbo R but I think the compilers would have had to be better than what was available at the time. (yes I'm including the 65816 as an 8 bit CPU)

Really, to get enough speed out of 8 bits it would have required writing a lot of assembly, it would have required some sort of large RAM expansion that hardly anyone owned, it would have taken several times as long to develop and the disk swapping would have been horrible on 5.25" systems.

[The Usotsuki]

(Delorted)

Edited August 20, 2014 by The Usotsuki

[Keatah]

You're both wrong! It is two separate computers in one. It has two distinct data buses. Irregardless if the //e's bus is mostly contained in the Mega II chip. It's an 8/16 hybrid. And we referred to it as such. Now that that's settled..

 

As a kid I would have hoped stuff from the 16-bit era focused on speed. As speed was everything with computers (at least to me). Instead they seemed to slow down. Took agonizing minutes to boot and configure an Amiga for example.

[Tempest]

Being an Atari user, I was envious of software that was made for Apple or C= but not Atari. I'd go into Lechmere where they had a computer rack and I'd be lucky to find one piece of Atari software. If it was available for Atari, it wasn't on the shelves. It was enough to give me quite the nerd inferiority complex.

I remember the same feeling being an Apple user once the C64 was in full swing. Way too many games I wanted were DOS/C64/Amiga only. C64 games were everywhere while Apple II games were only in specific computer stores in quickly shrinking sections.

[Omega-TI]

I remember the same feeling being an Apple user once the C64 was in full swing. Way too many games I wanted were DOS/C64/Amiga only. C64 games were everywhere while Apple II games were only in specific computer stores in quickly shrinking sections.

 

I can relate! Imagine having a TI-99/4A when Texas Instruments ABANDONS the market place. Most people saw the writing on the wall and abandoned the platform too. I remember a one point in time I was the ONLY TI-99/4A user in my town, well at least on the BBS's or anyone I personally knew. I had to drive 30 miles every month just to get to the nearest computer club.

[Aquaman]

The biggest disappointments were not the machines capabilities itself, but the software houses which made crappy Arcade ports and film licenses(most notable US Gold). Much of the potential, of for example the Commodore Amiga, were never used because of porting an already crappy game on the Atari ST directly to the Amiga with maybe some better music added. When they would have made some real effort in producing for the Amiga itself, many games could have been as good as or near arcade perfect.

[Tempest]

The biggest disappointments were not the machines capabilities itself, but the software houses which made crappy Arcade ports and film licenses(most notable US Gold). Much of the potential, of for example the Commodore Amiga, were never used because of porting an already crappy game on the Atari ST directly to the Amiga with maybe some better music added. When they would have made some real effort in producing for the Amiga itself, many games could have been as good as or near arcade perfect.

The IIgs had a similar issue. It had graphics capabilities that could rival the Amiga and it's sound blew everything else out of the water, but many of the ports were taken from the DOS EGA versions of the game with almost no enhancements. Sigh.

[Keatah]

IIRC there were several ports of Apple 8-bit games that when transfered over to the Atari 400/800 systems were near identical. The sounds had the same clicks and blips that were "trademark" of Apple II games - going so far as to click the 400/800 speaker. And the scrolling and movement of objects was tit-for-tat. No effort was made to use the custom sound and graphics hardware afforded by these more complex systems.

 

In a way it was nice, because not all Apple II games were sucky in the a/v department and you got the same experience wherever you went. On the other hand a lot of potential was never realized.

[JamesD]

You're both wrong! It is two separate computers in one. It has two distinct data buses. Irregardless if the //e's bus is mostly contained in the Mega II chip. It's an 8/16 hybrid. And we referred to it as such. Now that that's settled..

 

As a kid I would have hoped stuff from the 16-bit era focused on speed. As speed was everything with computers (at least to me). Instead they seemed to slow down. Took agonizing minutes to boot and configure an Amiga for example.

Irregardless? I'm pretty sure it's regardless or irrespective.

 

My choice to call the IIgs 8 bit simply has to do with the fact that the CPU is primarily 8 bit oriented. Even the new hardware on the IIgs is on an 8 bit data buss.

You guys refer to the 68000 as 16 bit but it has 32 bit registers. By that standard, the 65816 must be 8 bit.

If you call the 65816 16 bit, that would mean the 68000 would be 32 bit. But then the Z80 has a 4 bit ALU and it's called an 8 bit. Clear as mud?

Let's just say that 65816 and IIgs still have one foot solidly planted in the 8 bit world as do the other systems I listed.

 

Populous did make it to the SNES which has a 65816 but it has some hardware the IIgs doesn't even without counting the add on hardware some carts used. The SNES also sold over 40 million more units than the IIgs, about 20 million more in the US alone which makes it look a whole lot more attractive for anyone writing games and makes conversion to assembly more cost effective. That might be more units than the top 5 selling 8 bit computers combined.

 

Keatah, from all your comments it sounds like you were traumatized by the Amiga. Poor kid, you must have been very disappointed.

Large sound samples, bigger programs, more graphics but the same drive speed... not a good combination.

I think it's a case of the rest of the hardware outpacing the affordable mass storage options and the boom in 16 bit machines lead to accelerated development of storage technology.

8 bits weren't exactly pushing the speed limit of floppies, I think disk capacity and size was the key issue there.

If the 500 had included an IDE interface like the 600 from the start, it would have been a much better machine but I'm not sure if IDE existed yet and we couldn't even get 3.5" drives let alone 2.5".

 

[Tempest]

IIRC there were several ports of Apple 8-bit games that when transfered over to the Atari 400/800 systems were near identical. The sounds had the same clicks and blips that were "trademark" of Apple II games - going so far as to click the 400/800 speaker. And the scrolling and movement of objects was tit-for-tat. No effort was made to use the custom sound and graphics hardware afforded by these more complex systems.

 

In a way it was nice, because not all Apple II games were sucky in the a/v department and you got the same experience wherever you went. On the other hand a lot of potential was never realized.

I think 90% of the games that used artifacting on the Atari 8-bit started life as Apple II games. At least that's what I've seen.

 

 

 

 

My choice to call the IIgs 8 bit simply has to do with the fact that the CPU is primarily 8 bit oriented. Even the new hardware on the IIgs is on an 8 bit data buss

Thems fightin' words where I come from.

[JamesD]

Thems fightin' words where I come from.

Well then, I guess I should point out that any new instruction dealing with 16 bits that require any post bytes to the opcode really don't benefit from a 16 bit ALU over an 8 bit one.

That is what? The majority of the new instructions?

Buy hey, the designers of the chip also claimed the 6502 is pipelined even though it's just an instruction prefetch so it doesn't surprise me if they claim that the 65816 is 16 bit.

I guess a little marketing never hurt eh?

 

[Keatah]

Irregardless? I'm pretty sure it's regardless or irrespective.

..of course..

 

 

Keatah, from all your comments it sounds like you were traumatized by the Amiga. Poor kid, you must have been very disappointed.

Large sound samples, bigger programs, more graphics but the same drive speed... not a good combination.

I think it's a case of the rest of the hardware outpacing the affordable mass storage options and the boom in 16 bit machines lead to accelerated development of storage technology.

8 bits weren't exactly pushing the speed limit of floppies, I think disk capacity and size was the key issue there.

If the 500 had included an IDE interface like the 600 from the start, it would have been a much better machine but I'm not sure if IDE existed yet and we couldn't even get 3.5" drives let alone 2.5".

I was! It was a very bad experience. And it nearly made me dump my original Apple II paraphernalia. I thought the Amiga was going to be the end-all be-all. It was not. I had visions of playing enhanced arcade games and doing Babylon-5 graphics. None of that came to pass. I even got thrown out of the computer store when I tried to copy the IBM emulator (Transformer) IIRC. Assholes let me spend 30 minutes copying disks and then took them away right as I finished the last one. Other stores like The TRS-80 Computer Center and Compu-Shop (Apple) were more than helpful in pretending to be busy while we messed with their systems. They seemed to encourage it.

 

Anyways.. I couldn't understand why with three powerful custom chips and a 7MHz 16/32-bit processor and gobs of memory, why no one did arcade-exact copies of even the most rudimentary games. And the remakes that did come out had all these puffy overcolored sprites and they looked gay. The sound clicked and it was a dead giveaway it is a lame-ass recording. Not synthesized like on the Apple II or 400/800 or 64. And combined with the Wico Command Control "slushsticks" I was in gaming hell. I had to get away.

 

I'm not sure what was driving the expansion of storage options in those days. Storage seems to have kept pace with industry demands rather nicely I thought. But the consumer grade 16-bit computers using 3.5" drives were lousy through and through.

 

To directly answer the question of if IDE was available at the Amiga-500 introduction. No.

 

The connector was established in 1986, and it was intended to remain compatible with ST-506. IDE as it is commonly known was officially standardized around 1994, but disks as early as 1990 adhered to the protocol. I got one in 1992, and it still works on a "modern" motherboard.

 

If the designers of the A500 were thinking about IDE, they would have had to use an interim solution known as XT-IDE.

 

I don't know what the speed of the stock Amiga floppy drives were, but they had to be slower than the Apple Disk II. I swear! And if they weren't then they were ill-chosen for the task. If you're going to be pushing around a lot of bits then you best damned well have the infrastructure.

 

Having come from the Apple II ecosphere I couldn't understand why the Amiga disks were unreliable. I was used to the Apple being able to format seemingly everything (including the headcleaner disk*). I was unaccustomed to having to get certain brands and densities for the 3.5" drive. And even then I kept losing data from time to time. But not as bad as the 1541 for the 64.

 

I even recall there being almost imperceptible delays from when I'd press enter till the time the motor spun-up and engaged the spindle. Then we had to wait for head to swing into position. And endure more delay while info was located within the track, sorted and placed on the interface bus. And once that happened it had yet to make its way through the custom chips.. ughh!!

 

SD DD QD HD ED SS DS - all of these abbreviations related to the 3.5" formfactor. No one told me what to use, so I tried them all. They worked, but then some failed. Fuck that. Stick the goddammned thing in there and be done with it! I don't want to be dick'n around with awkward density differences when I could be doing warez.

 

As far as the bitness of the IIGS, can't we just go by the CPU datasheet? It's been done that way for years. w65c816s.pdf

 

* No not really. But in 35+ years of using the Disk II and 4000 disks later, I've only had 4 or 5 disks go bad. Add 2 more to casualty list if you count the BBS boot and log disks - these were near 24/7 operation for months on end. Impressive for a medium all these naysayers said wouldn't last half-way to the next century. And here we are, almost 15 years into it. They just drummed up fear to make you replace your stuff and buy their next product, the bastardized 3.5 format.

 

TRIVIA: The Apple Disk II unit transfers information at 156,000 bits per second. Impressive for consumer hardware done up in 1978.

Edited August 21, 2014 by Keatah

[Keatah]

Ah hah! I am vindicated! Look, read this from -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%22_Floppy_Disk

 

"The raw maximum transfer rate of 3½-inch HD floppy drives and interfaces, disregarding overheads, is as much as 1000 kilobits/s, or approximately 83% that of single-speed CD‑ROM (71% of audio CD). This represents the speed of raw data bits moving under the read head; however, because of the very high amount of overhead in the system (use of soft sectors with headers, sync issues preventing sequential reads of an entire 18-sector track in a single rotation, etc.), the actual user data read/write speed is much lower. In fact, a DSHD diskette formatted with an efficient non-sequential (interleaved or "twist") sector layout could sync and read an average of only slightly more than three double-sided pairs of 512‑byte sectors per 0.2 s revolution, or a little over 15 sectors/second, for an effective data rate of approximately 125 kbit/s. At this speed, a single, disk-filling file would take a good 90 seconds to transfer; smaller or fragmented files further reduced transfer speed because of the slow head seek speed and the requirement to re-read the FAT from Track 0 along with any folder data, as removable media is rarely cached."

 

..so they are slower than the Apple Disk II drives. Even figuring in a little overhead for the Disk II, it's still faster. And you don't have nearly as much overhead anyway.

[JamesD]

I thought the data transfer rate was the same and 3.5" disks just had more tracks and greater density to fit in the smaller form factor.
I have a 3.5" drive on my CoCo in the same case and on the same cable as the 5 1/4" drive.
Your maximum seek time can be greater due to the larger number of tracks but transfer speed is the same.

There was even a utility to read Apple disks if I remember right. Unless Apple drives spun the disk faster, the data transfer rate should be the same.
GCR encoding allows greater density of data than MFM so you'll have some difference there but the Amiga used it's own format which stored 800K per disk rather than 720K so it won't be the exactly like the PC. There was a noticeable difference in speed between pre-fast filesystem versions of AmigaDOS and later versions. That was introduced with Workbench 1.2.
I think it had to do with interleave, buffering of data and how data was managed but I haven't looked at the info in around 20 years.

I worked on a driver to read CoCo disks using the 5 1/4" Amiga drive and it was a bit over my head at the time. I couldn't get it to sync the data properly. I'm pretty sure I just didn't have a complete understanding of the data encoding at the time and how to identify the start of the track.

[Tempest]

TRIVIA: The Apple Disk II unit transfers information at 156,000 bits per second. Impressive for consumer hardware done up in 1978.

I always thought the Apple II load times for games was pretty short. Even the slowest games loaded in 30-45 seconds. Compared to other systems of the time and the Apple II was one of the quickest.

[The Usotsuki]

Aren't Apple DD 3.5" floppy drives CLV as opposed to CAV, or something like that?

[JamesD]

As far as the bitness of the IIGS, can't we just go by the CPU datasheet? It's been done that way for years. w65c816s.pdf

Since there is no industry standard to determine bitness of a CPU, a bit of marketing comes into play when you leave it to the manufacturer.

The guys than designed the 6502 claim it's pipelined even though it only has a prefetch so they had a history of being creative with describing features.

I could make a CPU than has a 4 bit ALU and 8 bit data buss that can deal with up to 64 bit numbers and could call it 64 bit but would that make it 64 bit?

The Atari Jaguar is the perfect example of leaving things up to the manufacturer.

 

I think Motorola's choice of calling the 6809 an 8/16 bit cpu is probably more honest. You have a little of both worlds, the 65816 has 8 bit opcodes, an 8 bit data buss and it can deal with 16 bit numbers. I think since the 65816 came after 16 bit CPU machines had been introduced they basically had to call it 16 bit so the IIgs would have a chance.

The biggest enhancements to the 65816 don't include the 16 bit ALU anyway IMHO, they are 16 bit index registers, stack relative addressing, the 16 bit stack pointer and the movable direct page. With or without the 16 bit ALU those offer the biggest speed boost, improved memory use and increased capabilities.

Besides, a hybrid 8/16 bit CPU like the 65816 is more memory efficient than a CPU with 16 bit opcodes and a 16 bit data buss like the 9900 so it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

[JamesD]

Aren't Apple DD 3.5" floppy drives CLV as opposed to CAV, or something like that?

The drive changed speed for different tracks to hold more data? I vaguely remember it was something along those lines. I can't remember the details. You couldn't use just any drive with a Mac or Apple II.

Now that you mention it, there was also that whole thing about having to buffer data on the IIc+ when they first designed it to deal with a different drive speed or something like that.

[JamesD]

BTW, it's not like WD or most of the Apple loving world is going to stop calling the 65816 16 bit just because I say so.

[Keatah]

I always enjoyed getting "free" things and exploring performance-enhancing software that seemed to play around with the "magic" inside the chips in mysterious ways.

Like with the Apple COPYA, it was the first program I ever used to make a copy of a disk. And I went running around the house like a crazed idiot with my head blown off I was so ecstatic. Even if the process took several minutes. Mommy mommeeeeee!! Look!! I was so proud of myself. I did a somersault down the stairs, then UP the stairs. Bouncing off the walls. This fit went on for like 10 minutes. I had just discovered the world of free games by trading with my fellow classmates and neighbors. This was so different than cartridges which could never ever in a million years be copied.

Then I discovered the various versions of enhanced fast DOS. A big improvement in speed was at hand. I'll spare you all the breakdown of the benefits of each (which were numerous). And now some of my games loaded much faster.

One thing that stands out as a great memory was the LockSmith Fast Copy utility. This would copy a disk in under 30 seconds. I was older and didn't have any fits or crazy wall-bouncing episodes, but nonetheless I swelled up with pride and vowed to expand my two shoebox game collection into the biggest and baddest library of all time. I always wondered how we could load games as fast as LSFC.

One of my favorite games of the time was, Repton. It would take over a minute to load with standard DOS 3.3. Some of the fast DOS chopped that in half or even a third. And today we have CompatiBoot which is based off the LSFC routines. Routines that could read and entire floppy, all 34 tracks, in 9 seconds. And so therefore it can load all my single-load BRUN games in like 4 seconds on real hardware! Or instantaneously in AppleWin with the "enhanced speed" option turned on. Now I now have VCS cartridge loading speeds!

It was continued improvements and developments like I just described that made the Amiga so disappointing - because it didn't do "magic" stuff like the Apple II could. As time went on things seemed to get faster and better with Apple II storage systems in a real and tangible way. So imagine my disappointment with the sluggish Amiga.

It didn't matter what the specifications of parts and subsystems were. All that mattered was how the system performed. I wasn't about sit on my ass all day long waiting for a text file to load. Furthermore, it seemed the Amiga disks could start up on their own or seemed to continue running way after you finished the op. OR even worse, they seemed to have to first load stuff totally unrelated to what you originally wanted. Ahh yes, the Amiga's DOS and command line commands had to page themselves in and out of memory.

It seemed that Apple DOS 3.3 (and derivatives) could do anything one ever needed in a DOS at the time. So I didn't understand the bullshit lollygagging the Amiga was doing.

[Nebulon]

It was continued improvements and developments like I just described that made the Amiga so disappointing - because it didn't do "magic" stuff like the Apple II could. As time went on things seemed to get faster and better with Apple II storage systems in a real and tangible way. So imagine my disappointment with the sluggish Amiga.

 

It didn't matter what the specifications of parts and subsystems were. All that mattered was how the system performed. I wasn't about sit on my ass all day long waiting for a text file to load. Furthermore, it seemed the Amiga disks could start up on their own or seemed to continue running way after you finished the op. OR even worse, they seemed to have to first load stuff totally unrelated to what you originally wanted. Ahh yes, the Amiga's DOS and command line commands had to page themselves in and out of memory.

 

It seemed that Apple DOS 3.3 (and derivatives) could do anything one ever needed in a DOS at the time. So I didn't understand the bullshit lollygagging the Amiga was doing.

 

I think a lot of what you're nitpicking on is really just perception and programming issues.

 

Rather than talking about how fast either machine could copy a disk, maybe it would be better to figure out how long it takes each machine to copy the same amount of data. After all, the Apple II is only 140K per side whereas the Amiga diskettes are 880K. I'd be happy to post some Amiga disk copy speeds for you, just to prove that it's as fast as any other machine at the time that used 3.5" DS/DD media.

 

In regards to diskette access speed on the Amiga, I think you owe it to yourself to try loading the Psygnosis game Blood Money on an Amiga 500. Then tell me if you still think the disk drives are slow. And I can assure you that I've seen some pretty neat magic tricks done with an Amiga diskette drive (like copying to a write-protected diskette).

 

The hard drive option for the Amiga 500 was SCSI (a superior interface to IDE).

 

As for drives that start and don't stop.... You're actually describing something more typical of an Apple II (see Wozniak's original Apple hardware documentation for why that's the case).

 

The issue with the AmigaDOS external commands paging themselves in and out of memory is also a user option. It's set that way to save on RAM. If you don't like it, just have the Amiga copy those commands to RAM on boot-up. Problem solved. It's not like it's hard-coded or anything. No harder than editing a batch file on a PC.

 

Finally we get to the part about arcade conversions. Maybe check out Rodland, Bubble Bobble, Marble Madness, and the freeware versions of Defender and Star Castle... for a start. The rest of the answer to your question is simply "sloppy programming".

[Keatah]

Perhaps..

 

The Amiga signified inefficiency and seemed to be ushering in the era of bloatware. The Apple just used it's storage resources so much better. From power on to playing a game could happen in as little as 10 seconds if the disk had a fast loader. It took a million times longer for the Amiga to drag its ass up through the Kickstart screen and then load god knows how much shit before you could even begin to load your program - which sometimes required swapping disks 2x or 3x times.

 

Regarding the operating system, everything that was on disk should have been included in ROM somehow. The Amiga tried to do too much at the cost of making doing what it did so much less efficient.

 

Everything was just a waiting experience. About as exciting as watching a .Zip archive do its thing. And if progress bars ever needed advertising and glorification, the Amiga would be the poster child.

 

Well I tried Defender through Win UAE 2.8.1 and couldn't get it going, all it did was give me vertical bars. I tried enough options till I got sick and tired of the damned thing. I got the Defender II image working, it was dumb, and stupid. Sloppy programming indeed.

Edited August 21, 2014 by Keatah

[JamesD]

Perhaps..

 

The Amiga signified inefficiency and seemed to be ushering in the era of bloatware. The Apple just used it's storage resources so much better. From power on to playing a game could happen in as little as 10 seconds if the disk had a fast loader. It took a million times longer for the Amiga to drag its ass up through the Kickstart screen and then load god knows how much shit before you could even begin to load your program - which sometimes required swapping disks 2x or 3x times.

 

Regarding the operating system, everything that was on disk should have been included in ROM somehow. The Amiga tried to do too much at the cost of making doing what it did so much less efficient.

 

Everything was just a waiting experience. About as exciting as watching a .Zip archive do its thing. And if progress bars ever needed advertising and glorification, the Amiga would be the poster child.

 

Well I tried Defender through Win UAE 2.8.1 and couldn't get it going, all it did was give me vertical bars. I tried enough options till I got sick and tired of the damned thing. I got the Defender II image working, it was dumb, and stupid. Sloppy programming indeed.

Do I really need to point out that some Apple II games required as little as 16K?

Games that required 48K had at least 6.25K reserved for hi-res graphics plus a little for DOS and you end up with a game that takes a little over 40K.

A 320x200 16 color Amiga screen is 16K alone.

 

Most of the AmigaOS is in ROM.

The default startup-sequence on the Amiga was slower than it needed to be because it was loading more than it really needed to.

If you set it up right it would load quite a bit faster than how it was shipped.

If you removed unnecessary stuff from the startup-sequence, unneeded commands, unneeded libraries, etc... it really helped.

[am1933]

My biggest dissapointment in computing was the Aquarius,I have already posted in this thread saying the same thing but-it was so dissapointing it deserves to be mentioned twice.