oky2000

? LDA #$40 STA $D01B $D01B SPBGPR Sprite Priority Register so... what now? What now? Well the fact that you need to multiplex four missile graphics to make ONE sprite so thats 5 register writes to 4 just for ONE C64 hardware sprite type graphic using missiles for EVERY SINGLE ONE. Sorry that one just got me started

That's a subjective matter of opinion - personally, the games are one of the reasons i got a C64 after a year of owning my 800XL to be honest, there was almost nothing i found to be anywhere near as playable as the games i was seeing on a friend's machine, i think Mercenary and Elektraglide were the two exceptions and the majority of titles either existed on both (usually with a better soundtrack, One Man And His Droid, The Last V8 or Thrust as a couple of random examples) or were only on the C64. Another factor was not being able to find a bloody assembler i could A) afford and B) use on a tape-based machine! =-) There's a reason for that, the majority of games are 2D so it's a huge plus for the C64 for those titles. I am giving a reasonable answer based on the games I had as compared to the same games on C64 (without getting into hardware technicalities): Super Break Out, Frogger, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Defender and some others. Didn't have a big collection initially since even Defender cost me $50 from Sears. Well, you can stress the same feature but it does not prove a machine superior unless you systematically go through each feature and show software that takes advantage of that feature better than the other machine. And it's not 2D-- it's X-axis. Y-axis is also part of 2D and Atari excels when you start to optimize in that dimension. So your whole argument for which machine is better is based on technically simple games written on limited cartridge memory? LOL well I have a suprise, we went way beyond that level of simplicity on the C64 about a quarter of a century ago ... No, I gave one answer where I stated my observations since YOU complained that you don't want to hear "technical" stuff and then you decided to be a hypocrite and start claiming technical things although not correct. You are reading out of context. The argument was answer to games that were better even in the early years (w/o GTIA). >Well even if we talk about commercial games the Atari A8 wouldn't have a hope in hell of doing the following arcade ... I don't go by my limited experience. Oh, here's a game that's superior on C64-- so C64 is better. Oops, someone recently created/found a better version on Atari. Atari is better. No, they just upgraded the C64 version so C64 is better. Etc. Etc. I rather stick to a more rational approach than yours. >...CPU instruction set is all better on the C64 FACT. PM graphics are just a little better than VCS, and the Pokey has kinda nice style to it but it neither has the frequency range, sophisticated operators or special effects built into the SID. Pokey tunes all kinda sound the same, listen to Panther on the A8 and then on the C64, it is my 'atari fanboy test' track Again going by some limited sample to generalize over entire POKEY. You NEVER read this thread because you are raising the same points without refuting the replies that were made to your points in this thread. CPU instructions work along with ANTIC DL instructions at 1.79Mhz whereas your instruction set is just 6502. As I stated, POKEY can play 68Khz sampled audio on 4 DACs. >The ONLY thing the A8 is better at is total available color palette, shame you can't even get the same 16 colours on screen AT THE SAME TIME as the C64 palette in 160x200 OR with the same amount of multiplexed 24x21 pixeled sprites ... You are BIASED. I am more interested in the truth than your bias toward a machine. "ONLY" colors! I just stated a bunch of things that are superior on A8. You can get all 256 colors on-screen. You can get GPRIOR effects in 160*200 and also do sprite overlays. You are biased in comparing standard mode with a sprite-enhanced mode on the C64. >16 shades of the same colour are a bit useless for most games. The C64 is officially 8 sprites per scanline, it is in the 1983 Programmer's Reference Guide which actually tells you this, it is not TOTAL of 8 just like A8 is not just a total of 4 Missile and 1 Player graphic also by the way. You have a lot to learn if you are going to argue hardware. You have no idea how GTIA modes work. There are three of them and sprites work with them. You can also use GPRIOR in Graphics 10 which is paletted mode-- regardless of what you do to your C64, you won't get this mode. And 16 shades of one color are useful for photographs. Stop calling people names if you haven't even read the thread nor understood the argument. First go back and answer all the remarks in this thread regarding C64 inferiority before you call people names. Once you call people names instead of answering the point, you lose and are no longer interested in the truth... I am so sorry you bought an inferior machine thinking it was superior to A8 but people make mistakes in life and you have to live with it. But you are making things worse for yourself by arguing against reality. Talking about games like Defender or Pac-Man and their rubbish Atarisoft C64 versions (when the VIC-20 versions were suspiciously the best available but the 64 versions were piles of shit it was either on purpose OR they can't program for shit so went bust anyway...oh wait...they did go bust LOL) Inferior in what way....your VCS sounding rubbish Pokey chip? Show me a Pokey playing electric guitar sounds without samples then? No? didn't think so PM's better than Sprites? Oh ok show me a game with a screen full of 100s of PM graphics in 4 colours? No? Oh wait no because PM is shit compared to sprites Graphics? Erm I already said 256 colours is nice but show me one fast action game with ALL 16 colours animated on screen at once like Alleykat or Uridium? No? Oh yes I forgot because you can't do it except for Copper list type raster effects in the background as there is no Char mode screen like the C64s SHOW ME SOME EXAMPLES!! Here are 3 more examples of MODERN GAMES BETTER ON THE C64 Gauntlet Druid Arkanoid (the sound will never be done on any other 8bit computer in the world like that C64 version FACT) Now show me some videos to back up this claim the machine is superior or just go and cry into your technical manuals because there is no video. Show me ONE GAME AS GOOD AS URIDIUM? hmmm where is your hardware super smooth scrolling...I can't see anything faster and smoother or more responsive than Uridium...such a simple game idea but you just can't show me one scrolling game of variable speed like that 1986 classic Uridium oh dear But my whole point was that the first game video I posted for Enforcer 2 IS PROOF of what a C64 is graphically capable of and PROOF of the versatility of the SID chip was with a simple non sample using little riff that sounds 99% like an electric guitar using the SID. Of course the SID can do many different sounds without samples which is why the music sounds so diverse and different but that was a simple example of the power of the built in waveforms alone. The point is those two games I showed were giving proof of the machine in action and not theory. If I said 'in theory it is quite possible to get an electric guitar instrument on SID with no sample playback or CPU overhead' nobody would believe me hence I wanted examples in response to my own which I would have been happy to hear with an open mind but this is not happening never mind ho hum. In your opinion. If SID is so much better than POKEY, why is it that a simple game like pacman can't it get the sounds dead on? POKEY did. Defender? You have got to be joking. the POKEY sounds are arcade perfect and far from close on the C64. Defender is dead on with the Atari, especially the sound and the graphics. The C64 is laughable sound wise....not a good example of SID at all. SID is NOT as flexible as the POKEY, just a lot easier to get it to do CERTAIN things. Music is one only becasue it would take a lot of work on the coders of an A8 to add all the ADSR and other SID features. We still have that option. With the right software control, POKEY will outflex SID anyday. Really? show me an example of this. I bet I acn cover a screen bettter with the player than you could ever hope to with 8 24x16 pixel sprites. 256 color choises verse 16 with the sprites. This is the kool-Aid talking and tells me you have not seen much on the A8. One game dont cut it even if this were the case. This is beyond laughable. Scanline accurate timers the same thing as display lists? It's now clear you are talking out of your ass and not from factual information. Show me all the graphic modes on one screen at once like an Atari 8 bit can with a simple list.....Oh that's right....you can't. You have to write a complicated timer based interrupt scheme and still wont come close. The 6510 varies from 6502 only in the implementation of 6 I/O ports at addresses 0000 and 0001. Go do some research before you further make a fool of yourself. Clearly this shows me you dont know a thing about the power and flexibility of the display lists features of the A8. I can have any of 256 colors for those 4 colors and not just a paltry choice of 16 colors. I can also have with the display list many more than four colors on screen and also with simple interrupt tricks. The C64 cant because it at max has only 16 colors....this was just plain ridiculous and quite uninformed C64 fan boy on your part. Perfectly chosen range? I want to see violet and purple and jade sahdes....oh that's right they are not perfect choices so C64 cant use them. Sprites The hardware in the 64 is 8 registers worth of sprites. To show more than 8 sprites on screen you HAVE to reuse the sprites by quickly moving them. There will never be more than 8 sprites on screen physically with the C=64. Its an illusion just like with the player missiles of the A8. The difference is the players can have the full height of the screen for images. There are advantages for either hardware here. I like the multi color mode of the C64. 4 colour out of 256 when we already have 4 shades or red green blue gray cyan orange blah blah so yeh it doesn't matter if you can only have 4...we can have ALL 16 on screen in 4x8 blocks with ZERO CPU overhead due to the hardware setup If your Pokey is so good why do all the tunes have the same rubbish instruments that sound like Atari VCS stuff? Like I said listen to Panther soundtrack on C64 (sounds unique) and then to the Pokey version for the A8 game of Panther (sounds rubbish and the same baseline as VCS type instrument in all pokey music I hear) Pac-Man tune is perfectly reproduced on other games thanks, why can't the Pokey make the Donkey Kong sound effects perfectly like our Nintendo Licensed Version in the UK NOT programmed by those lame idiots at Atarisoft in 1985? hmmm oh wait it doesn't matter now I bet right? I also pointed out Guardian by Alligata software is a spot on conversion of Defender, it is identical to Defender in sound and graphics NOT the shitty Atarisoft program (which again suspiciously along with PacMan and Galaxians was excellent on Vic20 but rubbish on C64...I wonder why? LOL) As for sprites it is a single value poked into a single register once ever 22nd scanline. If you want to use 1 sprite as a 24x200 pixel unit that is simple, and uses no CPU time at all really, it takes just 5 Pokes to one register per 50 or 60 screen refreshes to have EIGHT 24x200 column sprites in 2 or four colours before H or V expansion tricks We just CHOOSE to multiplex them to have 64 hardware sprites seperate on the screen...which is a little bit more usefull I think No one with multiple brain cells would prefer the PM graphics rubbish over the C64 sprites come on. As for the screen modes then how comes Mayhem in Monsterland has no equal on the A8 for total number of colours on screen? I can't find a single game with the same high quality animation/scrolling/colour graphics as that. I want examples of moderm A8 games that are really pushing the machine..like I said Space Harrier is a good example keep that coming. Stop quoting me shit early 80s games that could probably be reprogrammed for the VIC20 or an MSX or something (can't be bothered to read anymore in here, nobody is posting a single game that looks better than Mayhem in Monsterland, Buggy Boy/Turbocharge,Enforcer 2. So that is platform game, shootemup and driving covered) PS If someone had mentioned Encounter on the A8 I would have been impressed, that was actually better than the C64 version and a good fast game as well. The games DO exist but you are all too busy trying to not have an intelligent discussion and getting upset that you miss the gems like Encounter My intention is not to troll but if others want to write unfounded rubbish then carry on. I have posted many examples of modern games that use many features of the C64 be it sprites/char mode gfx for 16 colours/samples or SID waveforms/effects. All I am seeing is upset fanboys writing a load of crap now. If I was a fan boy I wouldn't play the following games exclusively on A8 than any other 8bit machine.. RoF (KR and Eidolon are too similar in speed but RoF is better if a slightly lower res so I prefer the speed of it) Star Raiders Galaxian (the only 80s arcade game not done better by anyone on the C64...see you just need to think and find the games) Encounter I just wanted to see more games of the quality of Space Harrier A8 because that truly looks like something pushing the machine properly...not bloody Atarisoft Pacman/Donkey Kong AGAIN when I post awesome 8bit coding skills present in Enforcer 2 (even if it was on another 8bit as true retrogamers you should be in awe of that game's achievements...only a fan boy will look at those 8bit graphics and try and rubbish them just because they are NOT on an A8. Jealousy is no good people...you just miss out on great games. I had an ST and Amiga, I was not stupid enough to miss out on ST Gauntlet 1 (Gauntlet 2 is shit on both and not on Amiga) just because I had an Amiga. You should look at each game on each machine and take it on its merits not steadfastly live in a blinkered A8 world with 1984 quality graphics/sound ok?

That's a subjective matter of opinion - personally, the games are one of the reasons i got a C64 after a year of owning my 800XL to be honest, there was almost nothing i found to be anywhere near as playable as the games i was seeing on a friend's machine, i think Mercenary and Elektraglide were the two exceptions and the majority of titles either existed on both (usually with a better soundtrack, One Man And His Droid, The Last V8 or Thrust as a couple of random examples) or were only on the C64. Another factor was not being able to find a bloody assembler i could A) afford and B) use on a tape-based machine! =-) There's a reason for that, the majority of games are 2D so it's a huge plus for the C64 for those titles. I am giving a reasonable answer based on the games I had as compared to the same games on C64 (without getting into hardware technicalities): Super Break Out, Frogger, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Defender and some others. Didn't have a big collection initially since even Defender cost me $50 from Sears. Well, you can stress the same feature but it does not prove a machine superior unless you systematically go through each feature and show software that takes advantage of that feature better than the other machine. And it's not 2D-- it's X-axis. Y-axis is also part of 2D and Atari excels when you start to optimize in that dimension. So your whole argument for which machine is better is based on technically simple games written on limited cartridge memory? LOL well I have a suprise, we went way beyond that level of simplicity on the C64 about a quarter of a century ago Well even if we talk about commercial games the Atari A8 wouldn't have a hope in hell of doing the following arcade conversion anywhere near as good as the C64 really for was programmed in a couple of months by a few people at Ocean, and it's a bit delusional if you think that is because of lack of effort it can't be done on the A8, the C64 was a better compromise, no the only compromise the C64 made was a fixed 4bit palette look up table that's it, Sprites, scrolling, SID, CPU instruction set is all better on the C64 FACT. PM graphics are just a little better than VCS, and the Pokey has kinda nice style to it but it neither has the frequency range, sophisticated operators or special effects built into the SID. Pokey tunes all kinda sound the same, listen to Panther on the A8 and then on the C64, it is my 'atari fanboy test' track The ONLY thing the A8 is better at is total available color palette, shame you can't even get the same 16 colours on screen AT THE SAME TIME as the C64 palette in 160x200 OR with the same amount of multiplexed 24x21 pixeled sprites per 24 scanlines without using ANY extra CPU/Graphics chip cycles. 16 shades of the same colour are a bit useless for most games. The C64 is officially 8 sprites per scanline, it is in the 1983 Programmer's Reference Guide which actually tells you this, it is not TOTAL of 8 just like A8 is not just a total of 4 Missile and 1 Player graphic also by the way. There are some games on the A8 I love don't get me wrong but to say it is a better machine than the C64 based on things that don't even come close to fully utilising the C64 is a bit silly really like Pac Man or Moon Patrol etc and even then Zaxxon and Super Zaxxon cartridge (the inferior version on C64 the tape versios were even better) still look heaps better than the 4 colour mess on A8, but if that's the only way people can justify a stupid argument then be my guest. Also Atarisoft did really shit conversions for the C64 anyway (on puprose derrr) which is why Oceans Donkey Kong C64 is so much better than Atari's effort on C64 (which is still better than the stretched blocky graphics of A8, ditto C64 Defender and PacMan are just ok but there are clones which are better and arcade perfect anyway for most games) Galaxian is an example of an A8 early 80s game that is really better on A8 but then we have an absolutely awesome conversion of Skramble and Time Pilot instead. But like I said these are caveman programs written by amateurs anyway s why bother. I was hoping to see more game like Space Harrier A8 myself than seeing silly posts comparing ancient simplistic games, oh well never mind I'll leave this post alone then and know not to bother next time If anybody thinks the C64 is only good for mildly breathed over VCS games like Donkey Kong then you're a bit of an idiot if those are the only type of games that are compared too whilst conveniently ignoring all the incredibly advanced games that the A8 could never do due to lack of VIC-II/SID features! Turbocharge, Enforcer, Buggy Boy, Last Ninja, Ghosts & Goblins, Mayhem in Monsterland...these games are NOT possible on an A8 until anyone bothers to show me some linked videos to BETTER games technically I am sticking to that. Never mind those games the A8 doesn't even have a version of Skramble as good as or anything like it written in 1983 I shall assume from the lack of EVIDENCE to the contrary that the A8 is actually inferior in every way to the C64 except a useless 256 colour pallette....yeah great 4 out of 256 colors in 160x200 is soooo much better than 4/16 colors per 8x8 pixel block ANYWHERE on the screen isn't guys LOL The facts are Pokey is INFERIOR to SID 1 extra channel with waveforms that all sound the same the C64 is 3 with 5 waveform types/3 special effects plus filters PLUS sample channel) PM is INFERIOR to Sprites (You can cover the entire screen with Sprites with very little effort, some coders uses sprites for parallax scrolling) both have H/W scrolling but Uridium is FASTER AND SMOOTHER than any A8 scrolling game I have seen EVER. DL vs Raster, it's the same thing, the C64 has scanline accurate timers so it is identical CPU is faster on A8 but 6510 has better instruction set/ optimised version of 6502 A8 uses. Max resolution is the same on both for games (320x200x2 colours or 160x200x4 colour) EXCEPT we have 4 colours per 4x8 pixel block too and you have 16 luminance on XL/XE only in 160x200....I know which one ALL games coders use. Colour Palette easy win for A8..shame it makes no difference for anything except copper type vertical shading effects under the crappy PM graphics. Wow I can choose my 4 colours from 256 @ 160x200...I'm sure they will be radically different to the perfectly chosen range of 16 colours available on VIC-II huh? ONLY Palette is larger on A8, but like I said who cares when @ 160x200 you can only have four colours anyway big deal PS C64 had an arcade perfect version of Defender on tape (which loaded in about 2-3 minutes) for £6 so who cares how crap Atari programmed the C64 version for £30, no wonder they went bust and C= made billions under Jack Tramiel! I keep hearing all this 'theoretical' rubbish and yet no one can post a single game that looks faster and better with better sound than the four main ones I mentioned (Turbocharge, Enforcer, Buggy Boy, Last Ninja, Ghosts & Goblins, Mayhem in Monsterland) I smell a lot of Atari BULLCRAP in this thread http://www.archive.org/details/C64Gamevide...hive18-Skramble omfg I can't waste anymore time on this.... even with the fastload cart starting was a what I remembered got sandwich got drink. and the stupid load procedures..... Erm you should be looking at the MORE THAN 4 COLOUR 160x200 graphics and the sound. The game was 1983 and was char scroll routine in software not hardware. show me a A8 Skramble game with 16 different COLOURS NOT HUES @ 160x200 in 1983 and then come back to me Even the VIC20 16k version by the same company has very good graphics (and why it is a char softscroll as it was a quick port in the C64s launch year so shovelware) Which is why A8 tapes take 1 hour to load 64k and the C64 takes 5-6 minutes with it's turbo loaders overwriting the tape loader shadowed in RAM from ROM and overwritten/replaced by the programmer. Fairly important to have SOFTWARE turbo tape and disk loaders I think Turbo loader carts only worked with Pirated disk games, you need to replace the CIA chip with a new turbo rom at least for some success in the early days. I just can't understand the argument that until you show that game is do-able on A8, C64 is better. There are some Apple II games/applications that don't exist for Atari nor C64, but that doesn't mean they are not do-able. C64 was made with cheaper parts to outsell the Atari not to beat it technically. That's wrong, typical response but still ok.... Whilst Commodore had you all paying through the nose for MOS Technologies items as customers like the 6502C etc etc Commodore got all their stuff at cost price and FREE design work. I will say it again, Bob Yannes designed the SID chip @ standard employee rates for Commodore, ie NOTHING PEANUTS etc, MOS made it for Commodore for the same cost as TI spent making their own calculator chips and tried to screw Commodore in 1975/6 etc because Commodore couldn't make their own so they had to buy them for more. Truth is the VIC-II and SID would cost ANY OTHER COMPANY a fortune to be commissioned by a chip designer..Commodore got it for 2x 6 months paycheck It is called vertical integration. The real cost of making and designing a C64 FOR EVERYONE ELSE would similar to the cost of producing an Atari 800 but Commodore OWNED MOS Technologies so it cost them $165 to make and sell for $399 not $799 Also if the SID is so rubbish why do different tunes from different musicians sound different (ie Martin Galway/Rob Hubbard/Matt Grey etc) but ALL Pokey music has the SAME SOUND INSTRUMENT/BASELINE Why don't you play some of the good games instead? He gave you a few examples: "Turbocharge, Enforcer, Buggy Boy, Last Ninja, Ghosts & Goblins, Mayhem in Monsterland...these games are NOT possible on an A8 until anyone bothers to show me some linked videos to BETTER games technically I am sticking to that." You guys make me crazy.... OFCOURSE the A8 can do those games. Possibly not at 50Hz. But who cares? The whole C64 community doesn't care about 3D is slow as hell, or the movement is ridiculously blocky on the C64. According to your facts about "the A8 cannot do this or that", the C64 cannot do : -Space Harrier -Rescue on Fractalus -Koronis Rift -The Eidolon -Stunt Car Racer -Amaurote -Test Drive -Turbo Charge -Power Drift and so on.... Oh yes because Pit Stop is so much better graphically than Turbo Charge isn't it, oh yes forgive me LOL Your Space Harrier has taken 3 years, does not run on an 800XL or XE and still isn't finished, ours took 2 weeks to write by one man as only his second game ever written commercially for a software company and all done 2 decades ago by himself with no extra features documented. Rof/KR/Eidolon all use a lower screen resolution than the C64, so it is faster but more blocky just like Mercenary, little faster lower resolution on 800XL/XE I don't see many games like Turbo outrun, Turbcharge OR Power Drift anywhere near as fast as the C64 on A8..show me a racing game as good....Death Race? LOL please...oh and how is your Outrun coming? How about Taladega? Another shitty 1985 game light years behind C64 Turbo Outrun or Power Drift in speed but we MUST BELIEVE THEORETICALLY possible on A8 and better with NO EVIDENCE? LOL please stop making me laugh. Buggy Boy on C64 has no comparison on A8, it simply is not possible as you do not have the same VIC-II screen mode addressing sorry FACT. Sluggish? You are simply trying the wrong games. IO And yes, the A8 couldn't do that. Finally something that responds more like what I am use to! Graphics are very Atari like too! A decent side scroller, I give it about an 81%. but the music in the game is different in the video you posted. It is not SID, and the smoothing in the video must be due to youtube codec, much like the other 8 bit posts we see. I shouldn't have to work that hard or need an expert to direct me to a good responsive game, it kinda sums up the experience. I don't think I am keeping the c64 for a couple of games. But I will say this I find some of GEOS pretty interesting. I think if anyone wants to play along and truly compare they need to do what I am doing a real Atari 800XL/XE vs a Real c64. Looks like lemon64 has most of what we need to get the software. And then run em, then the truth of the audio and video as well as gameplay can be seen. And the lemon votes kinda back up my number it looks like they rated it an 80 percent as well. The lemon64 review also notes slow response of ship. I personally like the fact it is a little more challenging than the other 64 games right at the start. Having to start over to know where the bad guys are coming from because the ship can't cross the screen fast enough otherwise is a little daunting. LoL I am still waiting to see ONE GAME with the same 16 DIFFERENT colours @ 160x200 and same quality sound as that ONE C64 game called IO...or shall we talk about A8 Defender being better If you can't see the quality of those graphics done by Bob being better than anything else around in the 80s for the Atari and even now you need to get some glasses from your OWN DOCTOR

No offence but there are two questions that just instantly pop into my mind when going through all this... 1. Did you choose cartridge release ONLY on purpose as some sort of anit-piracy measure? Because apart from that it would have been much better if it could go onto a disk (and you could get some NEW packaging for it then too instead of used/2nd hand cases and cartridges etc) 2. Any reason why you didn't just go to a professional copiers and get them to make you up some classic printouts in A3 cardboard, just like a real 2600/5200/XL, with professional photoquality results for about the same cost. All you would have to do is fold and glue the boxes. The price you are charging is just too much for all these used things making up the package but the cost isn't an issue if you just thought about this release more. Were these boxes scrounged for free? And just because you need the logic board on the carts doesn't mean you can't buy a $1 blank cart for heavens sake

French,German, Spanish, and Italian. Allan Is there a problem with making the artwork available to other members rather than all this hush hush pally pally email the scan to one person only attitude depite a few request on page 1? Anyway nice to see Curt is well

you mean Gauntlet?, I have the sequel and (for that one anyway) you're right! I did that all the time playing solo to play a very long game... as soon as a player is about to die, start up someone else Works for Gauntlet 1 also PS G1 is a much closer arcade conversion, almost pixel perfect if you squint at your portable TV An awesome conversion and my 1st ST games purchase I think.

That's a subjective matter of opinion - personally, the games are one of the reasons i got a C64 after a year of owning my 800XL to be honest, there was almost nothing i found to be anywhere near as playable as the games i was seeing on a friend's machine, i think Mercenary and Elektraglide were the two exceptions and the majority of titles either existed on both (usually with a better soundtrack, One Man And His Droid, The Last V8 or Thrust as a couple of random examples) or were only on the C64. Another factor was not being able to find a bloody assembler i could A) afford and B) use on a tape-based machine! =-) There's a reason for that, the majority of games are 2D so it's a huge plus for the C64 for those titles. I am giving a reasonable answer based on the games I had as compared to the same games on C64 (without getting into hardware technicalities): Super Break Out, Frogger, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Defender and some others. Didn't have a big collection initially since even Defender cost me $50 from Sears. Well, you can stress the same feature but it does not prove a machine superior unless you systematically go through each feature and show software that takes advantage of that feature better than the other machine. And it's not 2D-- it's X-axis. Y-axis is also part of 2D and Atari excels when you start to optimize in that dimension. So your whole argument for which machine is better is based on technically simple games written on limited cartridge memory? LOL well I have a suprise, we went way beyond that level of simplicity on the C64 about a quarter of a century ago Well even if we talk about commercial games the Atari A8 wouldn't have a hope in hell of doing the following arcade conversion anywhere near as good as the C64 really for was programmed in a couple of months by a few people at Ocean, and it's a bit delusional if you think that is because of lack of effort it can't be done on the A8, the C64 was a better compromise, no the only compromise the C64 made was a fixed 4bit palette look up table that's it, Sprites, scrolling, SID, CPU instruction set is all better on the C64 FACT. PM graphics are just a little better than VCS, and the Pokey has kinda nice style to it but it neither has the frequency range, sophisticated operators or special effects built into the SID. Pokey tunes all kinda sound the same, listen to Panther on the A8 and then on the C64, it is my 'atari fanboy test' track The ONLY thing the A8 is better at is total available color palette, shame you can't even get the same 16 colours on screen AT THE SAME TIME as the C64 palette in 160x200 OR with the same amount of multiplexed 24x21 pixeled sprites per 24 scanlines without using ANY extra CPU/Graphics chip cycles. 16 shades of the same colour are a bit useless for most games. The C64 is officially 8 sprites per scanline, it is in the 1983 Programmer's Reference Guide which actually tells you this, it is not TOTAL of 8 just like A8 is not just a total of 4 Missile and 1 Player graphic also by the way. There are some games on the A8 I love don't get me wrong but to say it is a better machine than the C64 based on things that don't even come close to fully utilising the C64 is a bit silly really like Pac Man or Moon Patrol etc and even then Zaxxon and Super Zaxxon cartridge (the inferior version on C64 the tape versios were even better) still look heaps better than the 4 colour mess on A8, but if that's the only way people can justify a stupid argument then be my guest. Also Atarisoft did really shit conversions for the C64 anyway (on puprose derrr) which is why Oceans Donkey Kong C64 is so much better than Atari's effort on C64 (which is still better than the stretched blocky graphics of A8, ditto C64 Defender and PacMan are just ok but there are clones which are better and arcade perfect anyway for most games) Galaxian is an example of an A8 early 80s game that is really better on A8 but then we have an absolutely awesome conversion of Skramble and Time Pilot instead. But like I said these are caveman programs written by amateurs anyway s why bother. I was hoping to see more game like Space Harrier A8 myself than seeing silly posts comparing ancient simplistic games, oh well never mind I'll leave this post alone then and know not to bother next time If anybody thinks the C64 is only good for mildly breathed over VCS games like Donkey Kong then you're a bit of an idiot if those are the only type of games that are compared too whilst conveniently ignoring all the incredibly advanced games that the A8 could never do due to lack of VIC-II/SID features! Turbocharge, Enforcer, Buggy Boy, Last Ninja, Ghosts & Goblins, Mayhem in Monsterland...these games are NOT possible on an A8 until anyone bothers to show me some linked videos to BETTER games technically I am sticking to that. Never mind those games the A8 doesn't even have a version of Skramble as good as or anything like it written in 1983 I shall assume from the lack of EVIDENCE to the contrary that the A8 is actually inferior in every way to the C64 except a useless 256 colour pallette....yeah great 4 out of 256 colors in 160x200 is soooo much better than 4/16 colors per 8x8 pixel block ANYWHERE on the screen isn't guys LOL The facts are Pokey is INFERIOR to SID 1 extra channel with waveforms that all sound the same the C64 is 3 with 5 waveform types/3 special effects plus filters PLUS sample channel) PM is INFERIOR to Sprites (You can cover the entire screen with Sprites with very little effort, some coders uses sprites for parallax scrolling) both have H/W scrolling but Uridium is FASTER AND SMOOTHER than any A8 scrolling game I have seen EVER. DL vs Raster, it's the same thing, the C64 has scanline accurate timers so it is identical CPU is faster on A8 but 6510 has better instruction set/ optimised version of 6502 A8 uses. Max resolution is the same on both for games (320x200x2 colours or 160x200x4 colour) EXCEPT we have 4 colours per 4x8 pixel block too and you have 16 luminance on XL/XE only in 160x200....I know which one ALL games coders use. Colour Palette easy win for A8..shame it makes no difference for anything except copper type vertical shading effects under the crappy PM graphics. Wow I can choose my 4 colours from 256 @ 160x200...I'm sure they will be radically different to the perfectly chosen range of 16 colours available on VIC-II huh? ONLY Palette is larger on A8, but like I said who cares when @ 160x200 you can only have four colours anyway big deal PS C64 had an arcade perfect version of Defender on tape (which loaded in about 2-3 minutes) for £6 so who cares how crap Atari programmed the C64 version for £30, no wonder they went bust and C= made billions under Jack Tramiel! I keep hearing all this 'theoretical' rubbish and yet no one can post a single game that looks faster and better with better sound than the four main ones I mentioned (Turbocharge, Enforcer, Buggy Boy, Last Ninja, Ghosts & Goblins, Mayhem in Monsterland) I smell a lot of Atari BULLCRAP in this thread

When was that the topic? Sorry, after 100+ pages I must have zoned out... Last time I checked, the topics were: OP: Atari and C64 games released at the same time - were the Atari versions ever better? Later someone changed it to: C64 was more reliable than the Atari. 64C outsold C64 by a wide margin according to my internal facts Later, someone else changed it to: Okay fine, Atari wins everything else but at least we agree the C64 is prettier than the Atari 800. Next, it got changed to techno babble about granularity of audio resolution. It sort of went downhill(er) from there... Right well if people want to compare the piles of rubbish games coded in 1983 using 25-50% of the machines (both cases) capability then fair enough. I am showing code that is pushing the C64 much more than examples given, in response to A8 coding/games that are taking years 3 decades after launch. Fair's fair and compare like for like unless you don't want a fair comparison We were getting people comparing Space Harrier on C64 (and the UK version as well which is even more shit than the US version update for NTSC) with A8 Space Harrier written 20 years later and still going on after 4 years of coding. Chris Butler wrote Space Harrier for the C64 in two weeks for a client that was it. So I am just evening the scores with games like A8 Bomb Jack and Space Harrier being mentioned by showing you what is being done NOW on the C64 this decade by people taking their time and using 95% of the machine to showcase it's abilities not 3 before Of course it IS an Atari forum so it doesn't really matter, but me personally I own every 8bit console or computer ever sold in PAL format and I have no bias at all. And how much commercial coding happened on either machine doesn't matter anyway it's the demo coders and homebrew games people pushing BOTH machines to their limit today that is important. IF Space Harrier was launched in 1985 for A8 it would have been as shit as any other game because it was about money not love for the machine, getting paid for doing the bare minimum to fulfill the contract and buy food and gas! So do you want to talk about which machine is best by posting cutting edge coding on BOTH machines or shall I just leave this as a lost cause on a machine specific forum? Like I said I am happy to look at any examples with an open mind, I want to see what both machines can do, that is the joy of retro computing for me

The great thing is after all this hullaballoo over this video I have found some nice looking games I never knew existed for the Jag! Battlesphere. Super Burnout (I think...the one like Hang-on arcade) A Descent lookalike game. A shmup called Native So any publicity is good see...gets you out there looking and finding cool things.

Ahh I mean better as in frame rate/speed. Yes the polygons and colour depth are not the same but playability is what matters for sales of the console really. The 32X version which is a fairer comparison is also faster so miles better to play regardless of how sophisticated the polygons are. Club drive is another one, that's not slow though but looks quite rubbish to play on the videos and the graphics look like Hard Drivin on a 16bit machine. I posted about WTR in another thread about AVGN Jaguar review, it does look really good actually, you can forgive the frame rate because it is quite nicely detailed and still looks fast enough to play well Like I say in that AVGN thread it is more the bad coding and not the machine. I found an excellent looking Descent clone on Youtube just now I guess what I am trying to say is given the sprite scaling quality of Super Burnout I think Atari would have been better to personally fund development of something like Power Drift which Activision had bought the right to already and done that. Power Drift 99% arcade perfect would have sold a lot more Jags than Chequered Flag or Club Drive to be honest. Ditto with Afterburner and well anything using that kind of technology. It's best to show your strengths to customers than weaknesses, and around that time a pixel perfect copy of Galaxy Force II would have been better than Cybermorph too really. You have to get to a certain level of 3D sophistication for people to go wow...and sadly that level was Playstation 1 and Ridge Racer (which its self is quite flawed compared to the colour and polygon resolution of the arcade). They just were trying too hard for something that wasn't going to be, arcade games need to be fast and Daytona on the Saturn sold a lot of PLAYSTATION Consoles!

Yes I agree apart from Lotus II I don't really think there is good Outrun style racers on 16bits. It was more to show the same man's progression in his technical skill. Space Harrier, Power Drift and Turbocharge are all by the same programmer. Turbocharge does well for what it is plus he isn't really going full speed (don't think the player worked out the high gear/turbo button ) but most were rubbish yes. Have a closer look, the background layer is at a horizontal resolution of 320 pixels, the foreground at 160 pixels. Only the grey metallic/metal bits on the very top and bottom, the R-type style graphics, are 160x200 but the overlaid parallax of the blue diagonal tiles on top of the red raster type parallax background behind is clearly 320x200 rez if you look at the diagonal lines and probably 1 shade of red and blue each (youtube is too compressed to tell how many colours is there). The grey scale section on top of that again may be doubled up to save on memory (remember it all has to fit in a standard C64 with about 55k spare) or they could be multiplexed multicolour sprites @ 160x200.

The processors in the Jaguar are already powerful enough. Another DSP on the cart would only further complicate an already complicated system and it would hurt performance more than help it. The cart slot of the Jaguar is not fast enough for another processor. Nonsense. Nothing else was doing shaded polies outside of 3DO and PC out of the box. Yeah by todays 3D standards, its crap. Back then it was cutting edge, like the game or not. Please! With one quarter the polycount and not even 8 bit color? Try again. From a layman point of view and someone that does not understand the technical aspects, sure. In reality? Not even close. It's why I find it charming. Sorry my post sounded a bit troll like, that was not my intention at all. The thing with the games was the speed and the clipping/draw distance. It is a bad decision by the developers and that's why I didn't like those games. World Tour Racing on the other hand is much better (Jaguar CD game but I didn't know if it used any extra hardware in the Jag CD at all). It all comes down to playability though and sometimes it is better to use less graphical sophistication and keep the speed up for gameplay reasons with simpler graphics for something like a 3D shootemup or racing game with polygons. Doom was better than the 32X version and AvP was even better than Doom so clearly the machine was very good hardware wise. 3DO NeoGeo(and NeoGeo CD) and CD32 as well as the 32X was competing for the same customers and apart from possibly the 3DO (because I don't know if the Jag could do Need for Speed really) it was the most powerful of the lot really. Fight for Life doesn't look that different to 32X Virtua Figher. As I said a lot of games were just ports of Amiga games or PC VGA games and the problem was the software houses not the machine really. For the time it was very good and it could easily have done an arcade perfect port of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo etc or possibly even games like Outrun maybe (I don't know enough about the hardware to say for sure). Another game I think you could do on the Jag is Resident Evil 1. The backgrounds are pre-rendered and there is only 1 or 2 gourad shaded figures with not that many polygons and it is a slow paced game. Perfect for Jag CD if you ask me. But we never got these games and the machine was unloved by the big companies really, that's the sad part of it all. Now there are two 5 second videos on Youtube for some Jaguar game called Native? One is of a beutifully animated Octopuss This looks really awesome but no more videos of it than these very short clips. With this quality you could have had Gradius 3 or Salamander 2 coin-ops perfectly too. What is this game? It looks awesome

Please watch ALL the video before commenting @ everyone. The game if you watch it will actually show the 12 or so horizontal layers of non overlapping parallax on the single background level you talk about (which is simple enough sure I agree) but then at 15 seconds onwards it will overlap with a complete second level on top of that covering the entire screen in multicolour graphics scrolling smoother and faster still and with transparent areas so you can clearly it is proper parallax scrolling on top of what the DL interrupt type raster parallax scrolling on the background most layer you mention. The A8 can not do the full overlaid graphics this guy is doing no way. There is no char mode screen to manipulate. Even the Amiga rarely does it and that has hardware dual playfield (with 2x 8 colours) On top of this there is probably about 50 sprites on screen and some of the enemy ships would need ALL the PM graphics of Atari just to do one of the enemy space craft (about half way in) just because of the size of sprites vs PM graphics really. I'm just trying to get back on topic and the question is which is better. So........I am showing you some state of the art coding on the C64 because when you talk about Space Harrier it is being done now and is taking years so no point comparing it to Chris Butler's C64 UK Space Harrier conversion which he did in 2 weeks in 1985 (and 1 day extra to do the raster floor for the Sega USA release) for about £1500 so he didn't really care to make it perfect spending 48 months on it every week. The colours are very washed out in that video so here is another one that has correct colours recorded on an actual TV running on the C64 I am open to watch any game anyone posts (Space Harrier is one that impresses me so I am not biased and will happily watch anything) I am just trying to open up some friendly competition in the forum not flame or troll anybody elses comments For 3D Outrun style scaling graphics racing into the screen games Chris Butler wrote a game called Turbocharge which is very impressive compared to any kind of Outrun type game on the C64 (he also did Power Drift which is quite nice) as one of his last games and his technical skill is incredible using every trick in the book he could find to pull it off. He is not playing it at full speed sadly most of the time. Also make sure you watch it around 1:00 because then it is drawing a lot of char blocks for the tunnels like in level two of Sega Outrun. Please only challenge these videos WITH BETTER ATARI A8 Youtube videos to PROVE IT CAN DO IT SAME OR BETTER. I don't want to read any nerdy technical possible explanations and theories I want to see the video or hear the sound chip please so we keep it factual and no trolling or flaming thanks Like I said Space Harrier looks good on 130XE (is it 128k or more? if it is more then Atari didn't make a 256/192/320kb machine so it doesn't count, all my videos are running on stock 1982 Commodore 64 that I can play those games on today or in 1982 if they made them remember so keep it equal)

The 3D games he showed on there were PATHETIC, and whether the SNES or Genesis used a $5 chip doesn't matter, why didn't Atari put a $5 DSP inside the carts to make games like Club Drive etc LESS SLOW. Cybermorph is really crap looking and he was spot on with his comments. Virtua Racing on the Genesis with a cheap DSP also runs faster than just about every racing game on Jag, looks just as good on a TV most of the time and the cartridge costs the same and the console 1/2 the price. His points were spot on, he talks about the games and he was right. I agree that Atari did a terrible job with Jaguar, it was too hard to write fast code on, too complex and they sold so few most companies didn't care. His comments are a reflection of the games that were released and the controllers. He actually stated the games never really showed the full potential of the machine either so he is already hinting it is the games programmers fault not the machine and I totally agree. And come on EVERYONE thinks the Jag CD looks like a toilet, don't pretend it doesn't

But the Megadrive version of Virtua Racing is miles better than any polygon racing game on the Jag and all it is is a cheap DSP on a cart helping the 68k in the console really for $10. Apart from that though probably not much else. Still we will never know because most games on the Jag were done really badly and used Amiga/SNES graphics anyway for non 3D stuff. I'm sure the Jag could have done 2D games in Neo Geo quality.

Magic I should still have it somewhere, it is a yellow labelled blue DD disk with ST Emu/TurboST written in silver marker on the label in huge letters and the disk is in standard PC 720k format....with the other 5000 or so disk that is edit: I notice the original poster is from NTSC land, would the PAL version of the game allow more CPU time to calculate the polygons over the NTSC version by any chance?

Well I don't think exact comparison is necessary really, just pick a game type and link it to a youtube video on either machine. Let me start it off, here is a technically stunning shootem up for the C64 on youtube called Enforcer II with 3 level overlapped parallax and about 12 levels of non overlapping parallax on the bottom layer all in full 16 colour graphics and massive amounts of soft/hardware sprites on screen and everything is super smooth 50fps frame locked. Technically stunning piece of code I don't think the A8 can do (don't say it can PROVE IT with a youtube video please) Enforcer II C64 Youtube video Also for sound I am going to vote for Wizball's electric guitar riff using NO SAMPLES just pure SID standard waveform which Pokey could never do anything like a real instrument like an electric guitar so realistically etc. C64 Wizball Lemon64 information page When you get to the webpage it will be for the game Wizball so just click on 'Listen online' next to music and a SIDplayer will load and select track 8 and listen to that amazing electric guitar solo that is in the game. Like I say please only respond to these posts with proof to show a link to music we can hear and videos of gameplay we can see to keep it all nice and fair.

Talking of Blitter chips I remember that when I had both an ST and an Amiga I had this ST emulator (which is a bit of a stretch more like a top level GEM desktop simulation) and that came with a boot disk for the emulator. The boot disk had a program called TurboST on it which turned out to be a software emulator which I copied to a real ST disk and ran it. Boy what a huge difference that was to using things in GEM. Does anyone know where I could possibly get this software blitter from the net to use again?

That will not work. Feeding those 4 DACs alone is already quite a job for a 6502, but it won't be able to do it at different frequencies per channel. I think we are getting beyond ourselves here. Amiga means 3 chips only as far as programmers in the 80/90s were concerned Agnus (Blitter etc) Daphne (Copper? + other stuff) Paul (4x 8bit DACs plus I/O) But you get the idea. When a game was written for the A1000 it worked on the A500, A1500,A2000 because a 16bit Amiga all had the same basic capabilities (early A1000s without 64 colour lores and lores 'lace modes being the exception) and it worked in the same way ie writing ?? to register ?? produced the same results. Memory was the only issue needing code to be modified for register addresses sometimes that's it. In the 80s a PC could have 1 of 100 graphics cards all different technology and capabilities and 10 different sound cards. It was a complete mess and that's why PC games up until the early/mid 90s were a complete pile of shit compared to Amiga games. Sound was usually midi/wavetable tunes which sounded like example tunes on cheap $100 synthesizers. VGA was hardly supported because the number of PCs with 256 colour VGA was so small it wasn't worth doing graphics for them (like the old days when Amiga games had ST graphics because it wasn't worth paying an artist to do extra graphics for a few Amiga games they might sell and it looked good enough on RF connection to TV ) And this was if you were lucky to get games to work! Half the time there wasn't enough stupid DOS memory (640k business) even though you had a 1mb or 4mb PC! And then the mouse drivers didn't work, the CD-ROM drive and 2 sound cards didn't work because of IRQ channel conflicts. What a mess! Thank fuck we had ST/Amiga machines to just load the game and play it just like a games console haha!

PCs can read disks formatted on the ST (but not always vice versa before TOS 1.4 machines right?) So I guess you just format a disk on the ST and write to it from your PC and pop the disk back in your ST and double click the .PRG file. (someone will surely point out if I am wrong but hell what have you got to lose and it probably does work like that)

It only happens on the C64 because of the way the joysticks are read, ie the unprotected nature of the CIA chips on the C64 IIRC, in combination with how the Megadrive (and other) pads draw extra power from the joystick port. The Amiga doesn't suffer this but the only extra button Joypads that work on games with 2 buttons being detected are the CD32 pad or compatible ones like Competition Pro's much improved pad which is pretty much identical to the UK 3 button Megadrive pads so if you ever see one for sale go for one of them on ebay Interesting thing is those side expansions like the 8mb board on your A500...well if you turn them upside down and connect them to the expansion port on the A1000 (which is the other side of the machine) you can use them too!! I would really love to see an internal CPU accelerator for the A500 for sale as I could use that to stick inside my A1000. Only have 2mb on it now but 8mb would be great for using live video captures as anim brushes on Dpaint, With 2mb I'm stuck with about 150 frames with 8mb I could make some impressive anim movies with video grabs of Battlestar Galactica

That sounds a lot like the ICD Novia ADD IDE card interface. It's the only A500 2.5 IDE notebook drive adaptor I know of. I think it's connected to a board which goes in the 68000 CPU socket and then the 68000 piggybacks on top of that. The IDE is worth more than everything else! The Mac floppy drive is required to be used with software macintosh emulators on the Amiga as their drives use a variable speed of rotation on their 400k disk formats before they switched to PC style HD 1.4mb disks with CV speed formats. If it is an 8mb RAM expansion it's highly likely it is a GVP accelerator card + RAM, again worth a lot as they are pretty rare now. The max memory using a 68000 was 2mb or 2.5mb so I'm sure it's a GVP 68030 expansion. If you have all that memory you can get disks which load kickstart 2.1 from a disk into memory and then use workbench 2 without buying any expensive chips either

The trouble DOS coders faced was that there was a million possible combinations of hardware specification inside each "PC" most notably the graphics chips could have nothing in common beyond the most basic functionality. Some VGA/EGA cards weren't even 100% VESA compatible. What was nice about the Amiga and the ST was that you could just write something to particular addresses and you knew everyone's machine would more or less just do what it was doing on your machine in front of you. Serious coders absolutely trashed the Amiga OS to gain absolute maximum performance and free up all 512k or 1mb of memory. Man I miss those days, this kind of continuity of hardware now only exists for console coders. As for the tearing on the movies I mentioned...it is when something really crap (like Adobe Flash) is sucking up cycles and ruins all the timing in XP/Vista. Killing the tasks responsible will get back perfect video playback but until you kill those tasks even outputting to an external 60fps projector causes the tearing even with a CORE2DUO. The problem has always been that the PC is never a standard machine, no two graphics cards are identical in the DOS days and could not really be programmed in machine code the same way as the ST shifter/DMA or Amiga Copper/Blitter. The only checks you needed to do on the ST/Amiga was total RAM size and modify your code at worst for each size other than that your code would work on any model within reason (forget Amiga AGA <===>ECS/OCS as not many people had to do that). The PSP manages to emulate an Amiga 500 with 366mhz because of the same reason (fixed hardware platform so you can optimise your code until there is zero wasted cycles) but the PC needs about twice that power and STILL will give you screen tears on a 30FPS game displayed on a 60hz screen mode because PCs are just crap, and this is a legacy of the open standard. Good thing every 6 months a faster CPU is released by Intel then

Hey, I thought I would post this here as despite being 68000 based machines these were produced by Warner owned Atari for possible introduction after the Atari 800/XL line as 16bit successors. Does anyone have any good information more than a paragraph on these two machines and their design/functionality/chipset capabilites ie colours/resolution etc? I know that Sierra used the AMY chip for sound and there is some info for that somewhere I remember but the rest is really a blank. Is it lost in the ravages of time forgotten under the all crushing wheels of Apple/Wintel computing for the last 1/4 of a century wiping out the real history of the past with stupid tales of gay jobs and gates???

The 128D with the metal case has the 64kb video chip the more attractive 128D in the plastic case and the regular 128 keyboard only machine may have the 16kb or 64kb video chip but all are identical when it comes to C64 compatibility. Was a weird machine though as even in 128 mode the CPU was crippled back to 1mhz except if you didn't use the standard VIC-II chip of the C64 which limited it's appeal. You couldn't even use the damned Z80 built in on the motherboard as a co-processor. A terrible design that made little use of all the expensive hardware they shoved into the machine! I would never have bought one at the time as it was way too close to the price of an Amiga 500 and because so few 128 specific games came out, but the 128D plastic models are lovely machines with fantastic keyboards and high build quality indeed. I think people are catching on now though as the keyboard alone on ebay goes for £30-40 let alone a 128D in good condition.