JamesD

Look at old issues of 80 Micro if you think TRS-80's weren't in the home. The price war, plus the intro of the C64, and the NES killed any momentum Atari had by 1984. The Atari's main advantage had been as a games machine, and that advantage was now gone. The intro of the Mac (84), Atari ST (85), and Amiga (85) made GUI's, Mice, lots of RAM, full keyboards, and built in 3.5" floppy drives the new norm on the high end, leaving price as the main driving factor for most 8 bits. Atari bumped the 8 Bit up to 128K RAM with the 130XE intro in 1985, but any sales bump it might have caused was countered by the competition's upgrades. The Bard's Tale came out in 1985. You have to think if there were strong software sales the Atari 8 bit would have been supported, but companies were dropping platforms that had slow sales. The Bard's Tale could have looked really good on the CoCo 3, and Atari 8 bit.

How many 80s game on the list can say they have a modern handheld version?

Z80 I/O ports are memory mapped, they just use a separate select signal, and separate instructions to use the I/O region. IN & OUT are simply LD & ST instructions for the I/O region. Z80 BASICs normally include IN & OUT functions to use I/O. So this does not make accessing hardware I/O ports slower. It does make hardware mapping easier because you can just decode one byte to address a 256 byte I/O region if you want, and it might make the I/O code faster. You can use the full 64K if you test all the address lines. So you could have 64K of RAM/ROM + 64K of I/O. Samsung's first PC interfaced it's graphics memory of of the I/O buss. This leaves a lot of RAM for code (it could run CP/M), but it brings up one limitation of the Z80. There are no logical operators for the I/O region, and no indexed operators for I/O, just the load (in) & store (out). This would significantly slow down the 64 column graphics text driver I wrote for other machines. Paging graphics RAM in & out of regular RAM would be much faster. Most other Z80 machines had memory mapped video RAM, or separate video RAM was accessed via ports on the VDP.

The TRS-80 Model I sold several hundred thousand units by 1980. Apple II sales didn't really take off until the II+, and Visicalc were introduced. In 1981, Apple sold over 210,000 machines, matching sales numbers of the TRS-80 Model I. Prior to that, Atari was outselling the Apple II about 4 to 1, but numbers were well behind the TRS-80. But by 81 the Model I was discontinued, and there were no sales numbers for the Model III, Model II, CoCo, etc... so the info is incomplete. Tandy said the CoCo was always their best seller somewhere around 1987, so it wasn't doing poorly.

Battle For Wesnoth is free on steam

Throw enough additional hardware on a CPU, and it can do a lot. If all the CPU has to do is turn on, off, update the position of sprites, change which sprite cell is displayed, and check for hardware generated collision data... hundreds is pretty easy. If the CPU has to worry about multiplexing sprites because the hardware doesn't support that many, or actually drawing bitmapped sprites, etc... that is a totally different matter. If you look at Robotron, it's based on the 6809. Look at how much stuff is moving. Between the blitter, sprites, and a CPU to deal with sound, there is a lot happening on the screen. Even with the added hardware, you'll notice the robots don't all move every frame. Memory bandwith on such an old system limits how many of the non-hardware sprites can be updated with the blitter per frame. That's kinda how games like that look, and I really don't care for games like that. They just look too... busy. Crap flying everywhere.

Um, because of the graphics chip?

What exactly is fairly well? The Wiki says: "Atari sold about 700,000 computers in 1984, compared to Commodore's two million.[54] As his new company prepared to ship the Atari ST in 1985, Tramiel stated that sales of Atari 8-bit computers were "very, very slow". They were never an important part of Atari's business compared to video games, and it is possible that the 8-bit line was never profitable for the company despite selling almost 1.5 million computers by early 1986." That leaves only 800,000 machines sold from 1979 to 1983, or 200,000 per year on average. Someone shared sales numbers for carts Atari released for the machines (there should be a thread about it). Sales weren't blockbuster numbers. There's a reason so many Atari prototypes exist of almost finished games that were cancelled. They weren't making money. One of the references in the Wiki was to Antic magazine which happened to point to the same page as another article that said 1984 had been Antic's most challenging year. That got me curious. The Dec 1984 issue of Antic has 116 pages. The Dec 1984 issue of Rainbow Magazine has over 300 pages. The Oct 1984 issue of Color Computer Magazine (no Dec issue scanned) is 102 pages. Hot CoCo Magazine wasn't out yet, but it topped out at just over 100 pages.

C-64 outsold everything else for sure, and Apple II sold around 7 million machines, but things get hazy after that. Most of the machines that sold big numbers, did so largely based on price including the C64. The Apple II is the only exception. Atari didn't sell nearly as well as people think. There are some articles from magazines where Atari execs express frustration over sales. It was too expensive at first, didn't really compete well in the business or education markets that Apple dominated, and it was more expensive than the C64. 3rd party software was scarce at first, and C64 software titles quickly surpassed those for the Atari. They must have sold several million machines, but was it 3? 4? 5? More? A lot of people want to say 5, but I think that's just because they like the number. Support for the CoCo in multi-platform magazines was horrible compared to CoCo specific magazines. Rainbow Magazine which had over 260 pages per issue for some time (it topped out at around 300 pages in some issues), Color Computer Magazine, Hot CoCo, a couple Australian magazines, etc... exclusive to the CoCo. Compute!, one of the only multi-platform mags to support the CoCo, had a formula for making games, and it usually involved user definable text characters, which the CoCo didn't have. Compute! purchased Hot CoCo or Color Computer Magazine (not sure which), discontinued it, and then fulfilled subscriptions with Compute! which only had 1 or 2 horrible CoCo games per issue that paled in comparison to what the original magazine published. Compute! put extra effort going into Apple versions with articles dedicated to code to print hi-res text on a graphics screen, or for making sound, just so they could create an Apple port of a game published in a following issue. But the CoCo? They refused to support 32K, and Extended BASIC. CoCo support was dropped after a rather short period.

Keep in mind that Tandy wouldn't carry 3rd party products for a long time, and the CoCo only sold in Radio Shack stores. Tandy also stopped publishing # of each machine sold around 1980, and published sales in $ instead. To this day, nobody really knows what market share the CoCo had, though Tandy did claim it was their top seller according to an article in Rainbow Magazine

How about starting a new topic since this isn't directly related?

3 new freebies on EPIC Games Drawful 2, Gone Home, and Hob

The IIgs doesn't run Mac software, so how can you call it a Mac?

It may have inspired someone to hack an Asteroids clone originally called Microbes. Not sure if they were serious or not yet. Made me think of the old 8 bit game 'Outhouse'

EPIC Games has three free games at the moment including... https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/world-war-z-is-free-on-the-epic-games-store/

It's definitely not a black like my PC keyboard or my Oric Atmos, but I'm not sure I'd call it brown. I don't like the breadbin case no matter what color it is. I think it's ugly.

Star Raiders made me want an Atari, but it came out in the 70s, so does it even count here? As for Monkey Island, how is 1990 part of the 80s again? I actually looked it up because I thought it was deserving, but... 1990 ain't the 80s. I'd love to include Infocom games, but text adventures started in the 70s so I pass on them. At least games like 'The Pawn' also had graphics. Populous, War Monger. Wizardry, Dungeon Master, Ultima, and King's Quest have to be on the short list. Dungeons of Daggorath would be on my list, but the key commands make it a bit awkward, and it didn't sell nearly as many copies as the others.

The Commodore 16 is black

'Child of Light' is free on the Ubisoft UPlay store. It was at the top of the NEWS page on the app when I loaded it. You can also play 'Ghost Recon Breakpoint' first mission for free. https://www.pcgamer.com/stylish-rpg-child-of-light-is-free-to-keep-at-the-moment/

Every one I've seen has a mod like that

Speaking of Tomb Raider https://www.pcgamer.com/tomb-raider-is-free-on-steam-and-you-can-keep-it *edit* Didn't notice it was already on the free list above

There are also a bunch of "Play for free" for a limited time demos going on over on Steam. Check through the list to see if any of those interest you and give it a try!

New Epic Freebies are up. Watchdogs is one of them.

GOG Freebies https://www.gog.com/partner/stay_at_home

Epic games just put up 3 more freebies. Don't remember the names, wasn't anything I recognized.