cathrynm

Will this card work with DMA, specifically the Drive Turbo card? Or will it also have the same limitation that the AppleSqueezer has? It would be nice to have the ability to work with DMA, even if at reduced speed.

The C compiler does make the Atari side easier relative to old days where everything had to be in Assembler. Showing the image previews would require some Atari specific knowledge, but doing it with text, maybe you could figure out if you have basic programming ability.

My view is that the problem with Atari wasn't that 'CPUs weren't fast enough.' The reason why Mac and PC became dominant is because they kept backwards compatibility in mind, generally. Eventually the very old stuff got abandoned with Apple, but Macs generally could run the previous generation's software. DOS software was still running pretty late in with Windows. Tramiel's went from PET, to Vic20 to C64, to Plus4, to ST, to TT, to Falcon -- all of these platforms had compatibility issues with previous platform. In the early 80's you could get away with this, but going into late 1980's and 90's, this just wasn't going to stand anymore. Users had money invested in their software, and they weren't going to throw that all away for a slightly faster PC. The hint of this should have been failure of Apple 3. Apple backtracked and went to the IIe that was backwards compatible. Radio Shack went down a similar path of making a handful of platforms where compatibility was confusing, I remember looking at catalogs and not really understanding this. This was a dead end. I believe now, looking backwards in time, the key to survival was backwards compatibility, and a quality GUI. Both of these things are hard engineering problems for the time. It's much easier to start clean. For Atari to survive out of the 1990's, they had to solve both of these. I don't see too much evidence they actually cared that much about either.

That Alan Alda wasn't lying when he pitched the Atariwriter on TV. I still have my cart. When we did 'Electronic Novels' at Synapse, we put all the writers on Atariwriter.

I suppose it might be possible on 2E/2GS to plugin a card, that remaps pr#1 to the printer, though I'm not sure if that's the spirit of the thing or not here. I'm not sure what that 'slots' menu on the GS settings does exactly. I believe that remaps the ROM in those slots, but I have no idea what the hardware is capable of, if it can map this to RAM and custom code or not. The stuff the FujiApple guys are doing with SmartPart is next level Apple Oscura. It's kind of makes the device interesting, though maybe not at its full potential yet, I suppose.

I guess he made more off of Necromancer, I'm pretty sure Alley Cat was later. Basically at Synapse the games that made money were the ones that came out early. What happened at the end was the music driver had a bug that broke the games on Atari 1200XL/800XE, stores just returned them all in large quantities, and then the stores all ordered Zaxxon for C64 in exchange. He might have gotten caught up in that.

I guess it's not possible, right? Though I don't know. Fujinet Printer is some kind of SmartPort character device -- which I never even knew existed until Fujinet. That's not, a PR#1 type thing, I think. I've been poking around with it, and have had no luck so far. I did get the Modem working fine from the program on the website.

Really? I saw the same quote on Google, but I had no idea. I made quite a bit more than that with Shamus.

I agree with all this. Old pre-Warner, maybe going into Warner-era Atari had some pretty sharp guys working over there, if they hadn't been idiots, they might have been a contender with Apple even, but by the time of the crash and the Tramiel era, all the software and UI brains had left the building. MacOS and the UI was the heart of why Apple became Apple and it's what mattered. I don't think the Tramiels had it in them to build this kind of software product.

For game systems, SNES was on 65816, Sega Genesis was on 68000, and I don't think it really made that much difference. Both systems had exactly the same games, sometimes, obviously built with the same art, probably from the same source code to both platforms. SNES was a hint, that chip was available cheap in large quantities, but yeah, I don't think Antic/GTIA was on the path to evolving to take on something like Sega Genesis. On the PC side, pre-VGA, games were getting built from C rather than assembly, so anything with 16-color, 320x200, probably might have gotten a conversion if there were enough units out there. It would have fit more in the Tandy 1000 category, I suppose. An upgraded 8-bit with ST-level graphics would have obliterated ST completely, kind of my take. That basic the same games, but people can still plugin their old floppy drives. Would have been a natural upgrade path to all those XEGS buyers, and old 8-bit people. Atari would have hobbled together a GUI of some point, but GEM wasn't that great either. The problem is that it'd have taken slightly longer to design, and that delay might have been a deal killer. On the applications side, Atari was just doomed because of Gem, is my take. The UI was sloppy, the rules for programming a compatible game that would survive upgrades were unclear. They had 68000 just like Mac but they never made the jump to the next CPU, not really. When Atari went to 68030 too much stuff broke and those platforms all failed pretty hard. Tramiels never cared much about backwards compatibility, but by the late 80's and 90's, it mattered. I don't think they got that, and that's why they failed.

I just did a quick google. I'm not an expert on this, but it's just what comes up first. HDMI isn't free to use. https://www.symmetryelectronics.com/blog/what-are-the-licensing-costs-associated-with-hdmi/

C128 was hackish, but it did the job. To me, the logical progression from Atari 8-bit maybe would have been more like the Apple 2GS than the C128. Compatibility with old 8-bit chips built into a single chip, but then a 16-bit 65816 mode with ST-ish/VGA-ish video modes and a SCSI port for hard drive, maybe a blitter. I do think Atari ST had basically a lot of the right decisions for features for the time. Just GEM was a sloppy mess compared to MacOS, and Tramiel had burned a few too many bridges.

That sounds really good as is. That sounds total plausible, that GSOS is spending all its time copying to video memory, I wonder now if emulators simulate this aspect accurately. I like the idea of a real 65816, though I might pick up an applesqueezer too if that shows up on the market. (I'm mostly commenting just so when this gets released I get notified, as I recently picked up a GS and have no acceleration at all.)

And really, Atari 8-bit doesn't need ADC for audio input. It would be enough just to mix audio input with your audio output to handle everything the physical hardware does.