oky2000

I/O speed is useful especially today since people won't wait all day these to load stuff (including games) so warp speed disk simulators and ability to load large amounts of data from remote machine (as in a distributed program) are useful for survival of 8-bit systems in modern times. >I asked simple question "example of a game that would suffer in terms of playability with less colours" and even stated that Im not looking for Atari game... Any game... Be it on XBOX, SONY or PC or Flash or on Paper or with sticks and ropes if you like.... It's a question which implies some sort of doubt about having a larger palette. It's obvious that any game done with a larger palette and then mapped to a restricted palette can only get/look worse. At best it's the same. >Did I say protovisions adapter was better solution than ataris bult in 4 ports ? NO. I think it was very nice of atari to put in those two additional ports. >so.... >4. I admit Atari 800 had more joystick ports than C64 and that it improved gameplay. > Since you mixed up someone else's words to be mine, I'm going to answer this for someone else. Atari had more joystick ports, but that's not that big of a deal as the implementation of being able to read both joystick ports together using one LDA 54016 or LDA 54017 rather than two LDAs and then merging two nibbles together. That allows some interesting software to control i/o from/to devices or other machines using BYTE mode of operation rather than nibble mode of operation. So Atari has the edge in being able to execute the LDA faster and also double bandwidth (8-bit i/o instead of 4 or 5 bit i/o). The C64 has a separate parallel port available via the user port so no need to mess about with joystick ports like that. The Commodore SFD1001 drive was lightning fast because it interface via that port and not the standard serial port, which is quite important when using 1mb capacity 5 1/4 disks on that system We're talking standard ports so you can do your LOAD "*",8,1 and not rely on custom drivers or cartridge expansions. Joystick ports are standard across many systems and SIO is standard on Atari for booting. The SFD1001 disk drive is a STANDARD Commodore drive and used with a STANDARD IEEE interface cable connected to the user port and sold by Commodore dealers for use with the C64 or C128 so it is still standard and you can still type in LOAD "*",8,1 using this. The drive was sold as a bare unit and purchased as a package with a PET or C64 specific interface solution rather than design different drives for different machines. Still the worlds most advanced drive for speed or capacity too, way beyond what Apple or IBM ever did with 5 1/4 drives.

I/O speed is useful especially today since people won't wait all day these to load stuff (including games) so warp speed disk simulators and ability to load large amounts of data from remote machine (as in a distributed program) are useful for survival of 8-bit systems in modern times. >I asked simple question "example of a game that would suffer in terms of playability with less colours" and even stated that Im not looking for Atari game... Any game... Be it on XBOX, SONY or PC or Flash or on Paper or with sticks and ropes if you like.... It's a question which implies some sort of doubt about having a larger palette. It's obvious that any game done with a larger palette and then mapped to a restricted palette can only get/look worse. At best it's the same. >Did I say protovisions adapter was better solution than ataris bult in 4 ports ? NO. I think it was very nice of atari to put in those two additional ports. >so.... >4. I admit Atari 800 had more joystick ports than C64 and that it improved gameplay. > Since you mixed up someone else's words to be mine, I'm going to answer this for someone else. Atari had more joystick ports, but that's not that big of a deal as the implementation of being able to read both joystick ports together using one LDA 54016 or LDA 54017 rather than two LDAs and then merging two nibbles together. That allows some interesting software to control i/o from/to devices or other machines using BYTE mode of operation rather than nibble mode of operation. So Atari has the edge in being able to execute the LDA faster and also double bandwidth (8-bit i/o instead of 4 or 5 bit i/o). The C64 has a separate parallel port available via the user port so no need to mess about with joystick ports like that. The Commodore SFD1001 drive was lightning fast because it interface via that port and not the standard serial port, which is quite important when using 1mb capacity 5 1/4 disks on that system

Depends on what you want to achieve with it. Well a perfect 8bit then would be something with all the best features of each machine. Not only would it have the best version of every kind of game (2D, Vector, Sega style pseudo 3D scaling etc with the most colours and the best sound)and business software but the best GUI, peripherals (like Midi software/interface bundles for example) best keyboard and maximum expandability. All in a high quality system with the best basic AND hardware support in M/code.

I would like to ask what you think would be included in the design of a new Atari console by Bushnell that isn't in either the Wii, the 360 or the PS3? If the only difference would be games then why isn't there any such games for the 360 or PS3 with such massive amounts of graphical and CPU horsepower? Or the Wii with those goofy controls?

heh. Don't get me started on the speccy or the amstrad. I could complain all day about them. Well, I know there are a few guys here who like the Speccy, but almost everything looks like it's through a plastic overlay. Almost every machine has a situation where its compromises become its strength. The Z80 and small and simple screen memory setup made the Spectrum the most plausible candidate for an 8-bit conversion of Starglider, which it pulled off quite nicely. But yeah most of the time the lack of colour or sprites is really gaudy looking and flickery. There was no real sound on the original machine either, and no joystick ports. What were they thinking? Actually I know what they were thinking.....ZX81 + colour + 16k built in = ZX Spectrum. That's how Clive Sinclair described its aim and that's pretty much what it is. Amstrad suffers more though, no hardware assist for all the extra colours on screen! But then again even the Amstrad had its day with a fantastic conversion of the 3D racer Chase HQ too. No single machine is perfect 100% though.

The SAM Coupe was another last ditch 8bit super machine with ST style 16 colour 320x200 resolution screens using I think a Z80. It was an unusual machine but it wasn't long before the ST was only a litte bit more and with 512mb and internal drive with a 68k @ 8mhz was much better value especially with games like Starglider II and The Guild of Thieves and Dungeon Master etc. Then there was the totally crazy Commodore 65, why oh why waste time designing these 8 bits when you have incredibly powerful 16 bit machines to sell people. Atari were right to concentrate on the ST and drop the price as costs come down. Millions of people got a better computer than the Apple Mac thanks to Jack's pricing

Thanks for the information. Impressive stats for an FPGA system to implement.

I've not seen the exact features of this board anywhere and the internet homepage for it is so useless that it would make no difference if they had save 10 minutes and not made it. Does anyone have some proper technical information on this board. IE exact resolutions, total colour palette, colours on screen, max hardware sprites (if any) per line and max colours of each sprite, speed of the blitter, any new dual or more playfield parallax modes blah blah. Also is it all left to the 6502A to control all this extra graphics performance or is there faster CPU included somewhere? Thanks, google is being rubbish.

I have Atari 800Xl. Excuse me if I'm wrong but as I know (Im not at home but will take a look when I get there..) my Atari has only two joystick ports ??? Is there some adapter to make two additional joysticks to work? Or some other way of connecting joysticks ? On a commodore side there are adapters for additional two joysticks... http://www.protovision-online.de/hardw/hardwstart.htm On Original Atari 400 and 800 (from 1979) there were 4 joystick port onboard. 2 have been removed on XL series... (surely to reduce cost , i guess). That quote about Gauntlet on the Atari 800 was from me, and yes Atari 800 not XL/XE etc. Point was games themselves don't need to be the cutting edge of technology at all, look at sales of Nintendo Wii (gamecube + fancy controller) and 360/PS3. And again with Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. However there are some games that would just be too slow on a DS compared to a PSP running 5x faster and without a touch screen you can't have DS games on the PSP. So technical sophistication does influence what kind of games work on some systems and what can't be done too. However if it wasn't fun to use a Wii or DS then people wouldn't be buying it 4x more than it's rivals. (I don't wish to own a Wii or DS before anyone thinks I'm a Nintendo fan boy too lol I don't like the last generation graphics of Nintendo games lately)

Colourspace The witnesses for the defence rest, your honour. I found it on: http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_16/page_12.htm quote from the text: "Colourspace is going to be difficult to put into words. It is easier to describe what it is not. It is not a game, it is not a utility, it is not an adventure, you do not score points, there is no goal, no competition, no final outcome. What on earth is it then? It is what no software company has come up with for many years something quite unique." So as a tech achievement I'm taking my hat of... praised be the color palette of Atari Is it a game? Colorspace is just an interactive visualizer though not a game as such, think winAMP vizualizers + joystick input There you go quite easy to describe it It is nice and colourful, can't remember what mode it runs in but the blocks are quite large so could easily get away with 80x100 or something I guess but good use of the A8 palette.

I meant games that work on regular atari 8 bit hardware... not the ones with added FPGA based graphic adapter... Well if we are including FPGA modifications from 3 decades after the machine was launched then we might as well look at the C64 DTV which has a 256 colour 320x200 mode added as previously stated too That's not to distract from it looking like a nice game btw, just pointing out that hardware add on isn't anything to do with the A8 chipset as designed by Jay Miner.

Why set the bar so low? Converting from one 8bit to another is a waste of time. I mean given that the C64 can already do a late 80s Konami style arcade game with triple parallax scrolling and 100s of objects moving on screen... So I say you pick a 1990s arcade game from the actual arcade. Maybe Final Fight, maybe Vulcan Venture, anything with multi parallax extremely colourful LARGE graphics with plenty of animation frame and super smooth scrolling. You decide but there is no point converting an old 8bit game or even a 16bit game, stretch the machine to it's maximum. Soundtrack AND special fx too.

Depends if you count the Page 6 buy out, when it became New Atari User. I think I have all the issues of this magazine. Unfortuanatly I am working abroad at he moment, so have not got the abilty to check I do still have many ST magazines. I really must sort them one day, but time and distance are not working in favor of this at the moment. Guess I have a lot of scanning to do then.........

I've noticed that many magazines have been scanned and made available but not come across this particular one. I have quite a few issues across all four volumes issued (was 4 yes?) and if nobody else has done this I may scan them once and for all. I'm missing about 10 or so issues so hopefully a bit of ebay detective work should finish that up for me. That is if nobody else has scanned them. ST magazines also would be great but I don't have any of those any more.

Well there is three levels of overlaid full screen parallax scrolling with transparent sections, and the lowest level has about 10 levels of single plane horizontal variable scroll. And on top of that there is the fact there is more than a whole screen worth of moving objects all the time via multiplexing to the maximum and it's all in 16 colours full screen with mixed hires and multicolour (320h and 160h) graphics. Those are what makes it a stunning piece of coding for the C64 that's what I say, because it's doing things that really shouldn't be possible. The point is you only stretch any machine by trying to program a level or two above like Salamander arcade conversion or Amiga/Arcade conversion of Buggy Boy etc Mayhem trying to copy Sonic and Crownland trying to copy Super Mario Brothers. Talking about Archon/Donkey Kong/Pacman etc is a complete waste of time unless anybody here believes it is even using 25% of the machines capability be it A8 or C64. Technology <> supreme playability though sure. For example if they could have squeezed Gauntlet into 48k so it could be played with 4 players on an Atari 800 instead of 64k only and 2 player only it would have been more fun to play than any other 8bit version. I agree there is nothing impossible between 8bit machines, just some machines will do a certain game better than others...for example the DLI extremely colourful background effect on Attack of the Mutant Camels makes a big difference on the A8 version and you need the extra palette to do that. To people wishing to have a proper non-fanboy type discussion I am ready any time. I have just chosen to ignore 3 posters who constantly post 100% inaccurate 'facts' now though.

Stereo Pokey edition of Draconus on disk I would say.

Archon didn't make it to the C64. Probably it would have worked with some interlace for more shades of a colour . Well frameratewise, many games were not possible to convert to either both machine, if a game uses at least one advantage of the original used hardware. That's why I don't bother with your posts really. Archon 1 2 and 3 are all on the C64, it's hardly pushing ANY machine to do that game. Not like Enforcer II which is clearly impossible on any A8. Archon C64

Other than the inevitable green and purple tinging, the C64 is producing quite a nice likeness of it. You need to look closely; C64 image is dithered in addition to being miscolored. You need to take your fanboy glasses OFF and notice the Atari image posted looks much worse and amatuerish in the first place. Use a consistent base for your comparisons please...no wait you can't because you are nothing more than a trolling fanboy trying to use deception and distraction from true bare faced facts to 'win' and argument with inferior 'evidence' like emkay. Maybe you two should hook up outside the forum, sure you will both get on like a house on fire in your own delusional world

Well, thank you, and it takes one to know one....unskilled that is, and we established that you are quite some posts back already. "takes one to know one" is kinda cheap. Like a C64 perhaps? They seem to thrive on 'cheap'. Obviously a troll who doesn't read anything other than fanboy Atari posts and skips the rest. The C64 may have been $599 not $799 and the reason why is...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore OWNED MOS Technologies, MOS employees designed the VIC-II and SID for FREE, and produced the chips at COST PRICE for Commodore. The real price of producing the C64 for any other company would have been double the price. These are facts...please pay attention or you will just get ignored for ignorant trolling thanks The reason why Jack Tramiel was the ONLY businessman in the world to ever screw Bill Gates over in business (he didn't pay Microsoft any royalties until the Commodore 128 version of Basic) is because he is clever, and because he was so damned clever in business he bought MOS Technologies with Irvine Gould's money so he would never get screwed over again by a 3rd party chip manufacturer after Texas Instruments screwed him on calculator chips. He did to everyone else with the C64 hardware and MOS ownership what Texas Instruments did to him with calculator chips. What is cheap without a doubt is the horrible spongey 65XE/130XE keyboards (800 and 800XL had great keyboards)...now that was a cheap and nasty machine to type on for sure compared to the C64 frenchman...feel free to try and hurt my feelings with dumb nonfactual off topic insults about that though man LOL LMAO the original C64 keyboard was a really POS, Not that they 65XE/130XE was great but to say it was worse that C64 is laughable. And the typing angle on C64 , just god awful. Was a dealer, sold both. C64 was crappy. Also... if Jack was so smart. What happened later when he gave Atari 8bit the jack treatment.. Erm are you really saying the XE keyboard is better than the C64? LMAO? now I know you're an idiot the XE keyboard is probably the worst 8bit keyboard out there. It's unusable for anything other than 1 finger typing noobs As for the 8bit...what did you expect him to do....spend the last of his cash on streamlining production costs for something that software houses found a pain in the arse to program compared to the rival 8bit machines out there....OR....make a modern 16bit machine that beat the pants of the Mac in speed and cost This is why this thread is useless, for every wolfram there is 10 atari idiots still sniffing there butts and dreaming of 'what might have been' what actually happened was your 1978 difficult to handle technology was superceded with simpler machines producing the same or better results. XE keyboard better than a proper keyboard....lol yeh ok mate....stop smoking the weed k? Personal insults are a waste of time, if you can't see what a POS the C64 KB (proper my ass) is then there is no point talking to you. You just won't get it. I can't help you with a different perspective , but to each his own. On the Jack stuff, actually the 800xl's he was moving out cheap, out cheaped the C64 that season and they sold ton's it was a recommended buy from CR that year I believe. Value for the money. I can't help that there were idiots prior to that time that bought a crappy, cheap machine because it was cheap which it was. The result was a larger base to sell to, therefore more programs, Atari was just fine to program as many have shown here and as evidenced by thousands of titles. I would have expected him maybe to license some titles, get some venture capital from others and really make a go of the fight. If "Business is war" and you only have $50million sized gun, well you better get some bigger guns! He had great products. A cheap consumer machine (130xe), A Mac Killer(ST) just advertise where someone can see it an push HARD. Lynx,easily the best handheld of it's day, Then later the Jag. Talk about a failure to license and advertise not to mention making programming tools available.DUH! Hard to loose when your are dealt mostly aces. Compromise and get some capital! With Jack it was always about control and everything was personal. I personally am grateful he kept it going (drives Commodore people crazy) and in the end Atari did outlast Commodore. He could have done more that is all. License decent titles for Lynx, advertise in general. Funny thing is that Commodore seemed to have forgotten what to do without Jack as well. Good products, not much advertising. The reality is that often the most popular item is usually not the best one, but one that will do the job in an ok fashion and is cheap. People are cheap. Applies to cars, phones, etc. Look at Ipod restrictive software, not the best tech(ok iTouch is nice) but it's an apple... the Hanna Montana syndrome. Well if a 'crap' machine can produce a game like Enforcer II with no funny add ons at all then what does that make a so called super powerful games machine like the A8 hmmm? I have yet to see a single fast arcade game as impressive as that piece of coding linked to on youtube by a single member in this forum. The XE keyboard IS a POS and therefore you ARE being an idiot over it. Like I said the 800 and 800XL had great keyboards (and better than the C64 as I said) XEGS keyboard, 65XE and 130XE had a POS for a keyboard. If you take that as a personal insult then I suggest you never leave your house into the world of facts...... Most A8 games looked like 1983 first generation C64 stuff at best. The fact was generally games on the C64 looked and sounded better, games on the Amiga looked and sounded better.....history tells the rest. You are living in a dream world mate, if this was a multiformat machine forum where any kind of level headed common sense was required you would have been banned for trolling within days of joining it...sadly the moderators here are Atari fanboys looking at the banning of JUST frohn so it's a shame that I shall have to leave you Atarians in this section of the forum to live in your delusional world that your machine is a super fantastic 100 slamdunk winner against any other 8bit machine ever produced in the world

Typo sorry, yes it is 8mhz clock for VIC-II indeed which is why the C128 had the same VIC-II and ran the same bus and CPU speeds. 16mhz VIC-II wasn't possible for 2mhz CPU in C128 mode. Being able to control an ADSR via software on Pokey to claim it has ADSR as standard is like saying the ST (not STE) has the same sample playback facility as the Amiga via the CPU and we all know how different sample playback quality is on those machines Be consistent. If you are comparing hardware features and don't allow software simulations of ADSR then you should also accept there's no hardware scrolling on C64 (beyond 3 bits). You contradicted yourself in the very next post #5349 claiming C64 can do scroll using software. that's logical. I like that Atariski. and you are right... And there is another Point. I'm not writing incoherent stuff. 1. POKEY has real ADRS features. It is a timed offset between the main voice and the filter voice, making volume vatiations possible even between "50Hz" steps. 2. Ring modulation works. You know the plastic pop remake. It is a basically working ring modulation. 3. And, well sinewaves. The video shown in the other thread shows clearly sinewaves and they are pitch correct. Well, back in the 80s I read a book about POKEY and that it is possible to have those analog sinewaves... ADSR stands for hardware completely un monitored/modified transformation of muscial notes pertaining to the note's Attack rate Decay rate Sustain duration before silence release duration to silence What ever it is you are trying to get us to believe it sure as hell isn't ADSR as defined by every manufacturer of musical hardware. And VSP scrolling is hardware scrolling. It is no more effort than sprite multiplexing which is specifically hinted at in the 1982 official documentation of specification as detailed by the phrase "8 sprites per horizontal line, more with rasters" and certainly no more effort than getting more than for different unique colours per 160x200 screen than the A8 supports. So take a pick? Be consistent yourself.

Well, thank you, and it takes one to know one....unskilled that is, and we established that you are quite some posts back already. "takes one to know one" is kinda cheap. Like a C64 perhaps? They seem to thrive on 'cheap'. Obviously a troll who doesn't read anything other than fanboy Atari posts and skips the rest. The C64 may have been $599 not $799 and the reason why is...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore OWNED MOS Technologies, MOS employees designed the VIC-II and SID for FREE, and produced the chips at COST PRICE for Commodore. The real price of producing the C64 for any other company would have been double the price. These are facts...please pay attention or you will just get ignored for ignorant trolling thanks The reason why Jack Tramiel was the ONLY businessman in the world to ever screw Bill Gates over in business (he didn't pay Microsoft any royalties until the Commodore 128 version of Basic) is because he is clever, and because he was so damned clever in business he bought MOS Technologies with Irvine Gould's money so he would never get screwed over again by a 3rd party chip manufacturer after Texas Instruments screwed him on calculator chips. He did to everyone else with the C64 hardware and MOS ownership what Texas Instruments did to him with calculator chips. What is cheap without a doubt is the horrible spongey 65XE/130XE keyboards (800 and 800XL had great keyboards)...now that was a cheap and nasty machine to type on for sure compared to the C64 frenchman...feel free to try and hurt my feelings with dumb nonfactual off topic insults about that though man LOL LMAO the original C64 keyboard was a really POS, Not that they 65XE/130XE was great but to say it was worse that C64 is laughable. And the typing angle on C64 , just god awful. Was a dealer, sold both. C64 was crappy. Also... if Jack was so smart. What happened later when he gave Atari 8bit the jack treatment.. Erm are you really saying the XE keyboard is better than the C64? LMAO? now I know you're an idiot the XE keyboard is probably the worst 8bit keyboard out there. It's unusable for anything other than 1 finger typing noobs As for the 8bit...what did you expect him to do....spend the last of his cash on streamlining production costs for something that software houses found a pain in the arse to program compared to the rival 8bit machines out there....OR....make a modern 16bit machine that beat the pants of the Mac in speed and cost This is why this thread is useless, for every wolfram there is 10 atari idiots still sniffing there butts and dreaming of 'what might have been' what actually happened was your 1978 difficult to handle technology was superceded with simpler machines producing the same or better results. XE keyboard better than a proper keyboard....lol yeh ok mate....stop smoking the weed k?

Simulating the char mode used by Turbo Charge, Powerdrift and Turbo Outrun used on the C64 for the A8 uses up so much CPU time for you that it will never make it.... a. look as good colour wise b. move as fast as those games mentioned. (If you don't supply a video of a better routine running on a stock 800xl via youtube please don't bother quoting me again as i want PROOF) So that's just wishful thinking. Compare your Outrun project with those 3 scaling graphics semi 3D racing games. As for scrolling, well as you have been pointed to many times already in this thread the VSP full screen scroll method allows fast and smooth scrolling in all 4 directions WITH overlaid parallax at a speed similar to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega consoles. (Mayhem in Monsterland) And if you didn't have to depend on bitmap modes maybe the A8 could produce something as technically stunning as Enforcer II level 2 game running on a stock 1982 C64 with triple overlaid transparent parallax playfield and 100+ moving objects in places.

Typo sorry, yes it is 8mhz clock for VIC-II indeed which is why the C128 had the same VIC-II and ran the same bus and CPU speeds. 16mhz VIC-II wasn't possible for 2mhz CPU in C128 mode. Being able to control an ADSR via software on Pokey to claim it has ADSR as standard is like saying the ST (not STE) has the same sample playback facility as the Amiga via the CPU and we all know how different sample playback quality is on those machines

Well, obviously that'll be you then (a troll that is) as I mentioned that ...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore purchased MOS after it went bust quite some posts ago. I know it's sunday, but wake up man. So then you don't know what the meaning of the word "cheap" is then? or you are just deliberately baiting like a troll in the thread just for the sake of making personal insults? Because you are either very bad at remembering your own posts or you are baiting for a flame war when some of us here who actually bother to put up the odd fact are attempting some sort of discussion. I notice you left out your offending comment in my original quoted post when replying to me above, I am full awake don't worry

sorry, but the same can be said to a8 g2f pictures. but it can be only be said if you take off your bias glasses. the engineers could have done A500 quality gfx if wanted (same goes for a8 before you complain). but it was not only about engineering, it was made for a market to compete, it had to be made within certain limits. they had to make compromises. 16 colors is a very good compromise imho. 2 different colors can be stuffed in one byte. I think its a much better design for a gfx chip to have as many colors as many it can display without difficulties, vs having 256 colors with 4/16 colored screens. I think the Atari Sentinel picture looks better. I think the C64 palette is not enough for those kind of pictures (fine for sprites etc in games) because the C64 DTV 256 colour images look stunning, much better than the A8 256 colour pictures. The C64 would have had 256 colours if it wasn't rushed to market to make sure it was finished before the Japanese copied the VIC20 chips. Adding 256 colours to the C64 was a simple thing according to Jeri Elsworth who designed the DTV chip for Tulip. The hooks are there for a C64 compatible machine with extra 256 colour mode in VIC-II already which is why it only took a few days extra work for Jeri to add it in the DTV. The reason they chose just 16 is because when you have 4 colours @ 160x200 it isn't going to make a huge difference in 1981 except for the marketing department selling and advertising the machine, it's unusable in games on the A8....looks good on Technicolor Dream pictures though using all the CPU to get all the colours on screen that I won't dispute. (the DTV is 100% VIC-II hardware emulation, not a replacement compatible chip, so adding the colours in DTV means it is possible to remake a VIC-II with 256 colours on a real C64 if Commodore wanted to...but they bought Amiga by then)