Lynxpro
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Posts posted by Lynxpro
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I'm kinda on limited time at the moment so I can't respond to some of the postings above but I wanted to ask if GCC ever considered marketing the 7800 on their own...
And what was Warner Communications thinking with not just handing the 7800 over to Atari Corp? Did they have some idea of wrestling the home video game rights to the "Atari" name and assigning it to Atari Games Inc/Corp along with the 7800? It just doesn't make much sense what they did if they were trying to get Atari off their books...
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Since AMY was completed and Atari Corp apparently did figure out how to use the chip, why didn't it end up in the XEGS? After all, Tramiel had intended to put it in the 65XEM and the XEGS was a repackaged 65XE.
Maybe since the chip hadn't been fabbed they didn't want to go to the extra expense of doing so compared to the surplus of other 8-bit A8 chips they had at their disposal...
When I talked to Leonard about it, he said Amy never completely worked right. That's why they gave it to the outside firm (Light and Sound) to try and get things going with it.
Interesting. Any idea why Atari Corp. later sued them?
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Wow, I just read the filed NATCO claims from Curt's site. Had there been justice, the NATCO plaintiffs would've ended up owning a chunk of Atari Corp and Warner.... That was quite a read...It also shows how much Warner botched the transition . . . all those issues should have been dealt with before the sale went though and (ideally) much of Morgan's plans for NATCO and Atari consumer in general should have continued under TTL/Atari Corp. (they wouldn't have conflicted with Tramiel's plans either, and in fact would mean downsizing in a much more orderly manner than Tramiel was more or less forced to do -it was so much of a mess with the entire staff laid off by Warner, total chaos in the company, noone knowing what the hell was going on, lots of blame and animosity, frustration, lawsuits, etc, etc) Tramiel may have shifted Morgan's plans a little (Morgan wasn't pushing the 16-bit computers very hard), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. (especially since MICKY was dead -honestly I'm not sure how marketable such a high end game system would have been in 1984, maybe they'd use it in the arcade more so early on -there's no way to set up the amiga graphics chipset -let alone sound- with much less than 128k and still have it useful, 64k would be pushing it and you'd have to deal with single buffered graphics and 32k or less of work RAM).
Honestly, I don't see the Amiga (or rainbow) chipsets being attractive consoles in any configuration until 1987 at the very earliest. (and even then more dependent on consolidation and features cut out to customize for a console only chipset -you'd really want at least 128k DRAM -plus ROM, of course)
I think you may be giving too much credit to Jack Tramiel about his intentions being compatible with James Morgan's NATCO plans. The lawsuit specifically calls out Tramiel over unnecessary firings just to make him look aggressive to the media for maximum publicity...
Had Warner left NATCO alone, that would've probably been enough to prevail legally against Commodore's actions with Amiga since NATCO essentially was Atari Inc. Commodore would've been twiddling their thumbs at that point because they would've lost the Amiga and they would've still been involved with the lawsuit against TTL.
On that note: do you know if Atari/Warner management ever considered negotiations for a merger with Synertek? (it seems like they had a pretty strong workign partnership with them -at least as far as normal business relationships go- and Synertek does seem to have been in the smaller -and younger- category that would have favored a merger/buyout -probably more so than a company like MOS even, which was an idea tossed around at Atari Inc at one point apparently, and Synertek wasn't snapped up by Honeywell until after '79, so that's a pretty fair window to work with when Atari was doing well on the market -vs MOS which got snapped up by CBM back in '76)
Wgungfu, I believe Koolkitty89 is asking you this question....
I don't know if the proposed Atari Inc. purchase of MOS is widely known; I didn't hear about it until Al Alcorn mentioned at the Commodore 64's anniversary panel that he himself had tried to persuade the Warner brass about it [i'm assuming he meant he lobbied Manny Gerard with the idea]... I don't recall if Motorola was suing MOS in 1976 over the 6502 being an alleged copy of Motorola's chip but perhaps that might've made the Warner brass a bit risk averse over such a potential acquisition. I also have no idea how much impact the case would've had on the "second source" suppliers had MOS eventually lost the case too, but Atari Inc. never switched over to Motorola's 8-bit chip line nor to the Z80 or 8080 to mitigate such a negative outcome... *EDIT* I should've read Wgungfu's article first since it covered that lawsuit...
The amusing [and alt.history] idea of the whole potential Atari acquisition of MOS would be to c-block Tramiel from making Commodore vertically integrated and thus preventing him from launching his price war with the C64. Of course, I guess one could say that he could've responded by purchasing Synertek. He wouldn't have had the cash to buy Rockwell Semi, but I guess he could've made a run for Zilog and then the VIC-20 and C64 would've been Z80 powered...
And an Atari acquisition of MOS in 1976 would not have prevented them from acquiring Synertek later on in the game [especially when Atari Inc. was flush with cash]. Had they acquired both, MOS's East Coast operations and manufacturing probably would've been moved and consolidated to the Bay Area though...or somewhere else on the West Coast...
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GCC screwed up not having 8k of Ram instead of 4k inside the 7800 and a Pokey sound chip also. I would have like to say 16k of ram, but that sounds expensive when the 7800 was being designed.
I agree that if Tramiel had GCC and Atari's arcade division that Atari 7800 would have been better in terms of game library. The question mark would be if Tramiel would have allowed some ram into a cartridge for arcade ports. If the 7800 had 8k of Ram instead 4k, it would prevent some of the arcade division games for adding ram into a cartridge such as Marble Madness, and Gauntlet for an example. I don't know about some of the other Arcade games Atari Games did if 8k would be enough like Paperboy.
The NES had 2k of RAM and it got Paperboy courtesy of Atari Games/Tengen. Granted, it wasn't that good, but I digress.
The big challenge still would have been games that were not arcade or computer ports for the 7800. The 7800 needed games similar to Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. back in 1987 instead of 1990.SMB was an arcade port. Am I the only person that actually played it in the arcade?
Even with if Atari still had the arcade division, the sport genre still wouldn't great some areas.Atari Games had the rights to Namco's RBI Baseball, both in the arcades and on consoles via Tengen. Atari Games/Tengen had Cyberball which was huge in the arcades and did well on the other consoles.
if the program that has been programmed on the Nintendo was originally on say a c64 or whatever and was merely ported to the Nintendo, there would be nothing to stop Atari or someone else from having a version programmed for their systemThe rule was simple: If someone wanted to release a game on the NES, they couldn't release it on a competing console for two years, period. Computers versions of that same game were exempt.
Example: Say Epyx created IMPOSSIBLE MISSION II on C64. If they wanted to make a console version of Impossible Mission II and went to NES first (since it was biggest), they couldn't release Impossible Mission II for SMS, 7800 etc. for 2 years. They *COULD* release IMPOSSIBLE MISSION for Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS etc during those two years though.
The loophole that occasionally popped up was in situations where the company making the NES game licensed the title from someone else. For example, American Technos did DOUBLE DRAGON in the arcades. American Technos licensed DOUBLE DRAGON to Tradewest for the NES. Tradewest couldn't make the game for another console. However, American Technos could license the game to Sega and Activision for the SMS, 7800 and 2600.
Atari could and did find games that fell into that loophole. Xenophobe, Ikari Warriors and Commando fell into that zone. Ditto for Kung Fu Master, Rampage and Double Dragon.
But most of the hot titles on the NES couldn't be made on the 7800 because of the exclusitivity clause. Everyone was writing for NES first and then staying there. This is different from today when most games come out on 2 or more consoles.
Those licensed titles that eventually did make it to the 7800 made them later on in the console's life and not coincidentally during the time the Atari Corp v Nintendo of America antitrust lawsuit was getting heavy in the courts. Even though Nintendo ultimately won the case, they did relax the harsher parts of their "exclusive" contracts. Although the damage had already been done greatly during 1986-1988 which was the reason for the success of the NES.
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At least the Amiga OS has been updated since Commodore's demise. Damn good OS to. Was the first OS to have pre-emptive multitasking as well as other features. If I am not mistaken Hyperion had partnered with another company to make a PPC computer running Amiga OS about a year ago. Not sure what the status of that is. Guess it's been a while since I have been on the Amiga boards. The main point is that the Amiga OS has evolved into a modern OS that is actually feasible for a company to manufacture a computer around.
There's no reason AmigaOS couldn't emulate the route Apple went with MacOS [X]. They need to cut the cord and transition it to being a layer sitting atop BSD. But the diehards would say "that's not Amiga like!"
Yep, and if Atari Inc had been more aggressive marketing it, not only would Atari have been better known as a computer company (or rather the broad, multidivision company they truly were and NOT just a game company), but they'd also have had far greater success in market saturation with the A8 line. (of course, they needed to cater to the US and EU/UK markets separately)Atari Inc. spent a fortune on commercials for the XL line of computers. Alan Alda wasn't cheap and I can remember as a kid seeing Atari computer commercials all the time during prime time television [when I wasn't playing my 2600]. Even then, Alda seemed friendly and trustworthy, unlike George Plimpton and his Intellivision commercials which made him look like a douchebag.
Yes, and Atari WAS already a computer company, it just hadn't marketed that side of things well enough under Atari Inc to have it definitively ingrained in the public. (one of Warner's shortcomings)That wasn't Atari's or Warner's shortcomings; it was the American general publics fault to fail to recognize that Atari was more than just videogames. Atari Inc. advertised the computer line well, unlike Tramiel's Atari Corp that advertised at 3am in most cases.
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Hell, they had vertical integration on top of all that: they had their own Z80 and x86 CPU lines, PCB manufacturing, even DRAM production. (let alone various other logic chips, etc, etc -many components used by IBM, Sega, Nintendo, Atari, CBM, etc, etc)
We should all remember that IBM had all of those resources as well but the ongoing Federal antitrust case against them made IBM look to having their eventual PC made from off-the-shelf industry standard parts and outsourcing the whole OS as well.
The 7800 would have launched on schedule, the Jr would have gone more smoothly, the A8 line would have pushed ahead as planned, Amiga would have been sued more quickly and aggressively and the plans for Micky (and RBP/ST) may have been shifted over to the Rainbow chipset (still working with the nice UNIX based OS and GUI Atari Inc had), etc, etc.Are there any Snowcap GUI pics available or will they become available in a future update to Curt's website?
Honeywell halted Synertek's operations in '85 due to problems related to the video game crash, perhaps Atari Corp could have been in a position to take advantage of that situation even though money would still likely have been pretty tight -strong sales of the 2600, 7800, and A8 in late '84 and '85 along with promoted developments of new 16-bit machines may have given them the clout they needed to negotiate such with Honeywell -it may have involved taking on some debt tied to Synertek operations, but could have paid off in the long run -hell, if it involved taking on overstock of unsold chips, that may have been even better -especially since Synertek had a massive percentage of their operations tied to producing custom chips for Atari Inc along with 2nd sourcing MOS CPUs and support chips, so any such inventory could have actually been useful to Atari Corp)Is it confirmed Atari bought 6502s and 6507s from Synertek? The way the press has told it is Atari bought those CPUs from Commodore's MOS. Maybe Honeywell wanted too much money for Synertek in 85 because Tramiel was talking about the need for vertical integration practically right after Atari Corp. was christened.
Wow, I just read the filed NATCO claims from Curt's site. Had there been justice, the NATCO plaintiffs would've ended up owning a chunk of Atari Corp and Warner.... That was quite a read...
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I know the preferred version of Star Raiders is on the 8-bit Atari computer, but credit where it's due the 2600 version was pretty damn playable and I enjoyed it a lot. It ought to get at least some love and recognition
Not feeling that inspired by the remake though
Since I didn't have an A8, I played it on my 2600. My ship was blown up all the time. When a friend and I played - one of us would have the joystick and the other would use the keypad controller - we'd run out of my bedroom if the ship exploded... It was our way of "ejecting" and surviving. I think we were both 8 at the time.
In defense of the article, the article itself states the game was from the late 70s; it's the picture caption that misstates it as the early 70s.
So I wonder which "original" version of Star Raiders will be included as an Easter Egg... the A8 version, the 2600 version [probably], the 5200 version, or the ST version?
I should've bought the ST version back in the day.
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Just to point out, the Amiga (formerly made by commodore) only ceased to be a hardware platform a few years into gateway buying them out
And its been downhill ever since. The guy that owns [the name] Amiga Inc. makes Al Davis [Oakland Raiders] look like a competent businessman. Actually, Sam Tramiel is probably one thousand times smarter than that guy.
And unless i am missing something, arent the present commodore company making hardware (including amiga badged hardware)You mean that lame "Commodore USA" company run out of a furniture store with the vaporware website threatening to rebadge a bunch of low-tier [junk] computer equipment from China with the Commodore and Amiga brands?
Selling a rebadged "Amiga" computer would lack the AmigaOS to go along with it since Amiga Inc. is barred from selling it since Hyperion Entertainment owns all the AmigaOS IP past 3.x.
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The stock broker that I bought my Atari stock from said the very same thing; that the Tramiels actively traded the stock all the time...pumping and dumping.
Buying and selling stock is different than saying that they used company funds for personal things. Also, how do we know they violated any stock trading laws? Lots of executives buy and sell company stock.
I said my broker made that statement.
Even if there was said proof, the SEC never did anything.
Jack Tramiel was cheap though. At the shareholders meeting where the Jaguar was initially showed off at, there were ceramic coffee mugs with Atari's logo emblazoned on them. The Time Warner rep - and his entourage - was the first person to leave the meeting with the coffee cup(s). After they left, everyone else took their cup with them [including me]. I remember the look Jack Tramiel flashed when he saw people leaving with those cups. At the following year's shareholder's meeting, they had styrofoam cups.
As for the stock, what always struck me as surprising was Lee Isuger (sic) would write these articles praising Atari's stock and how the company was set to grow and then the stock would drop like a rock. The guy was kryptonite to Atari stock. I'm glad I never bought his portfolio software for my ST.
Yes, except they never "dusted off" anything, they were constantly trying to get the system out but with different roadblocks. (albeit the strong 2600 sales in mid/late 1985 did help boost things a bit -but Katz was already onboard earlier in the year, brought in after the 7800 dispute was finally settled)
The A8 computers had been active the entire time, so nothing had been dusted off as such there even. (a shame they didn't push somthing like the XEGS back in '85 -or maybe even by the end of '84- as an alternative for the 7800 -in limbo at that point-, or simply offer a gaming bundle of the 600XL before an actual game system form factor model was released -or a plain 600XL with a cheaper keyboard- . . . that could be fairly foolproof too since they could position it as a gaming/entry level computer and thus not be in direct conflict with the 7800 if it did end up being released -plus it would cater to the more computer friendly retail market during the crash and promote software support for the A8 line in general, a significant back library with existing stockpiles of cartridges, and existign stockpiles of computer components in general -actually, if the latter was significant enough, that would explain why they didn't introduce CGIA or push for a cost-cut POKEY derivative: they simply may have never used up the old stock of ANTIC+GTIA+POKEY chips left from Atari Inc, though if that was the case, they also could/should have matched or undercut the C64's price point with the 800XL/65XE since there was nothing to lose in terms of producing custom chips)
Since AMY was completed and Atari Corp apparently did figure out how to use the chip, why didn't it end up in the XEGS? After all, Tramiel had intended to put it in the 65XEM and the XEGS was a repackaged 65XE.
Maybe since the chip hadn't been fabbed they didn't want to go to the extra expense of doing so compared to the surplus of other 8-bit A8 chips they had at their disposal...
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I hear quite a lot of praise for GCC. And I'm sure they had a good reputation. But let's be careful to understand what that reputation was. After Atari settled with GCC, they were contracted to make two arcade games. The first one (Quantum) completely tanked. It was so bad that arcade operators were sending the machines back and asking for a refund. Food Fight did better, but it was never a AAA title and is not well remembered by the public.
Speak for yourself in that regard. Food Fight was well remembered by my circle. That was one of the first titles I bought for my 7800. Loved it in the arcade.
GCC also did a good job on Crazy Otto/Ms. Pac-Man as well as the Missile Attack mod...
As for some people in other threads doubting the power of Atari Games Corp. arcade titles and how they could've helped the 7800, I have to say that these people must not have been to many arcades back then. Atari Games titles were consistently amongst the most popular titles in the arcades, along with Sega's wares. They were also some of the most popular ports to the NES - official and unofficial - not to mention the Genesis/Mega Drive once Atari Games/Tengen moved on from the NES.
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Because the technology is worthless without the people who know how to maintain and enhance it.
The AMY chip debacle being a prime example of that.
I think it depends on the circumstances too, and how well the technology makes the transition to th new team. Atari Inc would have been doing just that with MICKEY, they would have full documentation and schematics (and presumably some consultation from the original engineers), but not have direct access to the Amiga staff as such, and anything going forward would be with Atari Inc staff. (they already had an OS in development intended for their 16-bit machines and/or the MICKY console.computer design)
Commodore basically did the same thing. It didn't take long for Jay Miner to exit and the whole "Commodore-Amiga, Inc." to be swallowed up into the rest of mediocre Commodore.
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Agreed. But what I wrote and postulated on was the two companies sharing the platform instead of spending a ton of money battling each other in the courts over it. Even in 1987ish when the two companies finally settled their legal cases, they should've agreed to combine the platforms together. After all, IBM and Apple later decided to try something similar with Taligent, not that that came to much fruition. My point is had the ST and Amiga become a single platform, the combined user base would have been sufficient to keep it going and we might have a viable 3rd platform today in competition with Windows and Mac OS X. [and no, I'm not considering Linux]. The rivalry between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould made that impossible and the computer industry today is poorer because of it.
The joys of a capitalist society and freedom of choice and I'm presuming that when you say "sharing the platform" you mean both companies, sitting down, holding hands, sharing a smoke and deciding between them which one (the ST or the Amiga or a combination of bits from both) they were going to go with? That sort of thing doesn't seem to fly these days as governments think of it as anti-competitive.
Are you kidding me? Did the Feds step in when Apple and IBM set up Taligent to hammer out a combined OS? What about all the companies that donate code to Linux and other shared open source software projects?
Did the Feds bust the cooperation amongst the PC Cloners in developing IDE?
Did the Feds ban the importation of the Compact Disc, DVD, DCC, and Blu-ray because all were developed amongst multiple companies?
The answer is no to all of the above. The only area the Feds stepped in - and it was the Supreme Court - that blocked IBM's "US Memories" consortium plan.
Atari and Commodore could've pooled their OS resources together and decided they both would build computers using a common OS and specs. One company could've marketed to the consumer market and the other to business. That is perfectly legal. But that never dawned upon Gould or Tramiel. That's my point.
IMHO, the Atari ST was a horrible computer.
Maybe so but it was the least horrible of a bunch of horrible choices. I'd certainly rather GEM existed as a viable GUI instead of Windows.
I can't see licensing being of any assistance at all to Atari. They'd moved so few units and the platform was so closed I can't imagine anyone would have been interested. By comparison the PC was a free for all, with high margins and high demand, and open to pretty much anybody who wanted in.
Windows Phone 7 is a dismal failure but it appears that won't stop Nokia from licensing it just so it can distinguish itself from all the other companies pushing Android based smart phones.
The PCs of that era sucked. Microsoft CLI instead of a decent GUI, CGA graphics, sound so bad it made the ST's Yamaha chip sound good, the 640k limitation, slow hardware, etc.
I disagree. I think the Tramiels made a big mistake trying to launch a 68000 based Macintosh clone on a shoestring budget without a definite hardware advantage over the Mac. They came to market about two years later with an inferior product at razor thin margins, one they couldn't really afford to promote well and one they weren't making enough money off of to effectively improve.The ST was color and the Mac was B&W. The ST had a monochrome monitor with higher res than the Mac. The ST was faster than the Mac. The ST had better sound than the Mac. The ST had MIDI built in. The ST was also about half the price as the Mac. If you used a Mac emulator on the ST, it ran faster than a regular Mac. The STacy was the best "Mac" laptop on the market when it debuted.
The only thing that the Mac excelled at over the ST - besides being far more expensive - was that it had system fonts built into the OS [unlike the ST and the often delayed GDOS]... So, what was your point?
And then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 rolled along, pretty much rendering the ST and Amigas totally obsolete.Have you ever used an ST before? Windows didn't eclipse TOS 1.0 in functionality and ease until Windows 95, 10 years after the ST debuted.
IBM manufactured the Jaguar, not Atari...thought that was common knowledge (Atari only marketed the games system, since it had already closed down/stopped hardware manufacturing)IBM was a contractor who built the Jag for Atari. Atari and Flare designed the Jag.
Your statement if applied to the current industry would mean that HP and most of the other PC companies only market their brand wares that are built by Chinese subcontractors.
What you're suggesting could also be considered collusion, and may have resulted in anti-trust suits or other legal action.
See my comments above. Several computer and consumer electronics companies "colluded" during that time period with no such legal action.
Again, the lack of cooperation was a totally separate issue from the weaker management/marketing at CBM (unless you're suggesting that Jack at Atari Corp would have an influence at CBM again), and also has nothing to do with the lack of licensing the chipsets to expand the platforms as market-wide standards. (or other mistakes/missed opportunities from limiting expansion -especially on the ST, to slow/poor evolutionary design, to Sam Tramiel's weak management from '89 onward, etc)No, what I was saying is that Atari and Commodore could've came to an agreement in 87 when they settled their lawsuits against each other. They could've opted to design a new platform that took the strengths of the ST and the Amiga and made it a common platform for both of them to ship products from. That isn't collusion any more than Philips and Sony "colluding" on Compact Disc and DVD.
As for Sam's management, I'd say Irving Gould was correct in preventing Tramiel nepotism to be practiced at Commodore.
They should have had 10/12/16 MHz models from the start with console and desktop form factors, or at least by '86 (maybe just 8 and 16 MHz),Atari and Amiga both probably should've went with the 68010 from the start so both platforms would've been 32-bit from the start...
The biggest blunder with the ST was shipping the SF354 drive. They should've only shipped the SF314 so all STs would've had 720k disk capacity. Splitting ownership between two different disk sizes meant the majority of the software shipped on the 360k disks. The Amiga platform didn't have that problem; they all did 880k with their "unique" disk format.
The Mega ST and the STe line should've shipped with the 68020.
And I do wonder how much games would've been better had Atari - or Amiga - had shipped with the 68881/2 math coprocessors standard. After all, PC platform gaming did leap once Intel harmonized their math coprocessors with the CPU directly with the 486DX.
Did MOS ever create a math co-processor for the 6502?
Already rehashed the Atari name business enough. Already discussed the keyboards. In your estimation, an early horrible (no function keys, no cursor control keys, no numeric keypad) keyboard or a late horrible (flimsy-ass chicklet-keyed disposable fly-away) keyboard both get a pass, if they're from the brand that YOU have chosen. Understood, fully. I thought the version of GEM they used was pretty good. I thought the MAC OS licked balls up until Mac OSX. But that's just my opinion, and it's no more or less valid than yours.I felt the same way. I hated Macs until Mac OS X. And to think Mac OS X is Apple's goodness layered atop BSD just as Atari's ATG was probably aiming for via BSD+Snowcap all those years ago...
quote name='SpaceDice2010' date='Thu Feb 10, 2011 9:53 PM' timestamp='1297403630' post='2207100']
No, Atari needed to boost their image in the computer market: that was a huge mistake on Warner's part. The very fact that Atari wasn't known as a computer company almost as much as a game company by 1984 is a testament of their faults in managing the excellent 8-bit computer line.
Why did Atari need to boost their image in the computer market? Wasn't the goal to sell computers? Changing your brand from a games company to a computer company costs money, something that Atari at the time did not have. If Nintendo decided to enter the US computer market today do you really think they would use the name Nintendo? I can see the press release now...
Atari could've done it with "Amiga" had they acquired the company and the tech. After all, when the Amiga 1000 was released, you didn't see the name "Commodore" attached to it in the fliers except at the bottom and listed as "Commodore-Amiga Inc."
One of the worst things about the Amiga 500 on was having that cheap Commodore logo affixed to the case.
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The deal with Commodore was already in play before Jack bought Consumer, and in fact they returned the money before Jack even started negotiating. Jack had no idea about Atari Inc.'s investment in Amiga, and had zero plans to use the Amiga. In fact he had visited them as TTL that May while looking at several different companies to buy technology from and nixed the idea when they couldn't come to an agreement (he was interested in the tech and not the staff that came with it).
And this is one of the cases where I have to question his strategy... It is not just RJ who states Jack Tramiel point blank said that he was interested in acquiring Amiga's tech but would can all of its staff. Multiple Amiga people said the very same thing. What rational business person would say something like that? Unless hindered by the agreement to purchase the company, you buy the company and then fire the staff. You don't tell them ahead of time before serious negotiations begin! That's a total WTF and it is a main reason why Amiga went running to Commodore to save them.
I believe Jack Tramiel may be Jack Tramiel's own worst enemy, not the late Irving Gould nor any of us irate old school Atari owners.
But in another case of a computer company executive behaving stupidly, you gotta hand it to Steve Jobs who dismissed acquiring Amiga because the tech was too complicated. WTF? Of course, that was Steve Jobs 1.0. I doubt post-1997 Steve Jobs v. 2.0 would make a similar statement even in a dismissive one sentence reply from his iPhone...
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Well it's no secret the Tramiel family used Atari's company money as their own personal bank accounts.
According to who???
That's kind of like saying, "I heard from someone, who heard from someone, who knows someone, who says that Rik likes to dress up in women's clothing and run around downtown Palm Beach singing No Doubt's 'I'm Just A Girl"." Clearly it must be true!
Seriously, Atari Corp was publicly traded and answered to the stockholders, subject to the laws of traded companies and requiring independent auditors to review their financial numbers.
The stock broker that I bought my Atari stock from said the very same thing; that the Tramiels actively traded the stock all the time...pumping and dumping. But my infinitely small amount of stock was meant just so I could attend the shareholder's meeting and pester the board with questions... And you gotta remember that Atari Corp alleged stock manipulation was rather small potatoes versus what Ray Kassar was accused of at the near height of Atari Inc's success...
I wish I could get my friend - a former Atari dealer - to jump online and share his story about the latter days of Atari Corp. and getting hit up by Sam to sell his buddy a Playstation for wholesale...
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IMHO it was too little too late. 5200 was not well received and lasted only two years. Atari did correct a lot of the problems of the 5200 in the 7800. I see the 7800 much like the Dreamcast. Both good systems, but people were burned by prior releases and the competition was too strong. Plus, Atari was to some extent cannibalizing its video game line by its computer line.
Atari didn't maximize the 5200 to its potential. For example, they failed to store the bodies of the executives of Nintendo Japan in the unit's joystick bin.
For all of Steve Ross's alleged mob connections, he just wasn't gangsta enough!
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.....then what Atari merged with a disk drive company, a disk drive company nobody has ever heard of at that, its a reverse merger so Atari's name will be no more, what the heck
JTS became rather [in]famous around Northern California since it had a record number of BBB complaints since Computer Warehouse was cramming a bunch of their [JTS] products into Computer Warehouse's screwdriver shop PCs. KCRA 3 also harassed them too in their "Call 3" segments during their news broadcasts roughly during the same time the BBB was sticking it to them.
India didn't turn out to be paved in gold silk for Atari/JTS and Amiga Inc. with their Amiga Nowhere platform.
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I don't believe that their are realy enouth of a difference between this and its PS1 counterpart to matter, I'm glad Jag won, but honestly it would be a tie to most people....Question How did Jag screw up, wasn't this suppose to be their new mascot game or least an exclusive, and then PS1 got it a week later and Saturn soon after, I guess I should be happy that we didn't get an incomplete beta release so Atari must of paid them off, but I remeber before it came out Ray got cover shots and everything and was touted as Ataris new mascot then out of nowher the PS1 vs came out
The rumor was that the Jag Rayman was finished an entire year before the PSX version but Sony paid off UBI soft to hold off the release until the PSX version was ready. That year head start on such a cool platformer may have made some difference.
It wasn't a rumor. UbiSoft sent via mail teasers and pre-order forms for Rayman to Jag owners and then they delayed the release date. If I remember right, the PS1 version ended up being released first...
I shouldn't have opened up about what I thought of UbiSoft - because of that incident - in an interview with Prima Publishing a few years later.
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Are you sure the US model VIC had a cardboard RF shield? The one I've got has plated steel sheeting. (I know some C64s used cardboard in Europe and had overheating problems -UK and some others had no shielding iirc, but some had tighter requirements -albeit short of the FCC and thus making cardboard attractive where steel sheet was unnecessary)
What self respecting electronics company voluntarily ships products with cardboard inside them?
F'n Commodore where the "C=" always stood for "cheap".
Speaking of Commodore's early products, has anyone ever had the [dis]pleasure of using a Commodore calculator? My mother had a friend from Croatia who had a 70s era Commodore calculator. It was fugly, like the giant power supply of the Commodore Plus 4. Jack Tramiel likes to claim TI did him dirty which almost led to Commodore's collapse but it might be because their products sucked.
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t's got to be a question of optimization (read: effort), as krewat just said.
No kidding. I get so tired of seeing some of the lazier devs out there refer to Wii as "GameCube 1.5" and then trying to blame their crappy "GameCube .25 level effort" on Wii hardware limitations. The way some tell the story, you'd swear the Wii had less processing power under the hood than a Super NES.
It is still an incredibly weak system compared to the competition and yet again another classic example of Nintendo making a fortune off inferior hardware, imho.
And they have no shame - or pride - in terms of milking their franchises to death's end. Say what you will about Bungie but they've voluntarily turned over the reigns to Halo. They went out on high.
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So in essence Warner still held the ProSystem, Jack couldn't/wouldn't buy the rights and was haggling for it. He couldn't get the rights on the front with no money down. He couldn't afford it (or may have been stingy). Is this correct?
The Tramiels were rich off Commodore so I don't understand this "woe is me" attitude that some are posting about Jack having to put some of his money into getting Atari Corp. going. He certainly had more to spare than Jay Miner and the Amiga Inc. guys had to keep the financing going with their pet project.
Considering how desperate they were later to find 7800 developers who weren't already tied to exclusive contracts with Nintendo or Sega, it would have been helpful to have GCC on board to develop new games after the relaunch;
It's interesting that "they were desperate to find 7800 developers". If I hadn't gone "off the grid" right after IM was released, I wonder how different things would have turned out. Computer Magic was, at this time, late 1988, early 1989, insolvent, or so I was led to believe. I can't imagine they wouldn't have JUMPED at the chance to develop more games, nor would they have ignored me, as I had the most knowledge about my own development system. I didn't leave them on bad terms, neither, except for the "pay me to fix IM or nothing happens" thing.
I'm not seeing a lot of info commented on about Atari's Chicago development operations from 1989 on... [until 1992?]...
And if it's not personal, why did you go "off the grid"?
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That one single thing would have made a world of difference. 32K would have just ... well ... been the cat's meow. For the price of the console, I can't imagine a single 256Kb static ram chip (or even a set of dynamic if you really HAD to go there) would have really done much to the price.Imagine not having to put ram in the carts. Sigh...
Indeed. Or a POKEY, for that matter. What's really sad is that 28-pin SRAMs are only available in 8K or 32K (someone correct me if I'm wrong about this), but Atari's cartridges could only support up to 16K. So if a game needed more than 8K, they had to put a 32K chip in there and then use only half of it. Very wasteful.
They probably could have fit more RAM inside the console if they had used larger RAM chips than the pair of 2K SRAMs that they went with. Perhaps two chips were used instead of one because they needed to be scanned independently by the hardware, but even so, larger ones would have been nice.
Imagine if there was a slot you could open up the 7800 and drop cartridge style slot RAM [a la the 800] into it to max out its capabilities... That would've been easy enough for Joe Consumer to upgrade the RAM for more intense "pro" and "super" games. Of course, it would be best to encourage it being done at an Atari Authorized Service Center....
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Just throwing this out there, but how would you guys feel about Crystal Castles? With the XM, an almost arcade perfect port could be produced.. and after all, it was in the works, but never release for the 7800.
I'd jump at it in a second! I love this game!
Third'ed. Too bad the 7800 never received a ProLine version of the Trackball controller...
So, does that mean the 2600 trakball doesn't work on the 7800?
It does but it isn't "pro". The trackball itself isn't that large, unlike the trackballs used by Atari [and Atari Games] in the arcades for Missile Command, Centipede, Millipede, Crystal Castles, Marble Madness, etc.
Too bad Atari didn't produce a 7800 themed trackball controller. Even the 5200 got one...
I forget...was the Colecovision's "Roller Controller" large?
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Wasn't going to happen.
The contract was dead before Atari Inc was even split (a bit of a fudge on Atari's side since they shouldn't have accepted Amiga's check).
Agreed. But what I wrote and postulated on was the two companies sharing the platform instead of spending a ton of money battling each other in the courts over it. Even in 1987ish when the two companies finally settled their legal cases, they should've agreed to combine the platforms together. After all, IBM and Apple later decided to try something similar with Taligent, not that that came to much fruition. My point is had the ST and Amiga become a single platform, the combined user base would have been sufficient to keep it going and we might have a viable 3rd platform today in competition with Windows and Mac OS X. [and no, I'm not considering Linux]. The rivalry between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould made that impossible and the computer industry today is poorer because of it.
A much more interesting premise is if Atari had moved on with its own advanced computer designs (several of which were more impressive than the Amiga) and sued Amiga for breech of contract on top of that.The plan had been to have the Amiga based console out in late '84, a minimal computer (128k) in '85, and an unlimited full computer in '86, but after that fell through, the in-house options would have been the obvious alternative. (a shame the Amiga runaround delayed a definitive push for the in-house 16-bit designs)
That very well may have happened after the fact had Morgan's plans continued. (Atari Inc may have already been looking into the Rainbow design as a game console and lower-cost next generation computer, but that all fell apart in the wake of the mess created by Warner's management of the split)
A proper transition to Atari Corp may have pushed Tramiel to favor a derivative of one of Atari Inc's existing (fully prototyped) 16-bit designs as well as the UNIX based OS and "Snowcap" GUI they'd been developing.
What I don't get is why the former Atari Inc. Advanced Technologies Group engineers didn't spill the beans about Atari Inc. having designed far more powerful computers than the ST or the Amiga just a couple of years after those two platforms debuted. I can remember in the March 87 issue of Antic Magazine Atari Corp. staff were denying the ST or any other advanced computer had been developed at Atari Inc. The Atari press were wide open back then to explore such a story yet John Palevich apparently didn't say a word.
I also don't understand why none of the ATG employees who later worked at DRI didn't mention to Atari Corp. that they had knowledge of the more advanced computers and would help redesign them for a price. Maybe they feared getting hauled off to jail over taking Atari Inc. stuff home with them during the TTL/Atari Corp. reorg; otherwise I can't see why they didn't and preferred working for DRI for salary on GEM... It's just weird to me.
And I don't understand why Jack Tramiel & Co. sued Sight & Sound a few years later after selling off the AMY chip to them. It makes no sense to me. Why did they not re-acquire the chip and use it in the STe? Sigh.
This issue could be settled quickly by:
3) Admitting that Atari management should have called you (even if you were 14 years old at the time) and placed you in charge, immediately.
What's left to argue about?
I was 12 at the time, thank you very much. And at least I had enough common sense to understand how angry Joe Consumer was going to be when JC purchased the Atari 7800 expecting all the cool new "Atari" arcade games to be ported to it, only to discover they were appearing on the NES instead.
Oh yeah, I was also the guy in March 1993 at our user's group public computer festival who pointed out to Mike Fulton - of Atari Corp. - that the unreleased-at-the-time STe/Falcon/Panther controllers - the ones that became the standard Jaguar controllers - needed to have 6 fire buttons on them to properly play the popular arcade games like Street Fighter 2. His reaction was "the controller already has enough buttons!" and kept on playing Road Riot 4WD. Of course, I was right and was vindicated when the Pro Controllers were later released...the controllers that should have been released from the very start.
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In '76, I think that would have been a bit iffy with Warner having just invested in Atari Inc (and furthering investment capital for AInc beyond the purchase).
Warner paid $28 Million'ish for Atari Inc. From what I've read, Warner was willing to pay $10 million more for the company.
They also wouldn't have had the leverage CBM had and may have thus lost it anyway. (the interval between the Warner acquisition of Atari and CBM buyout of MOS was pretty small)If I recall, MOS was acquired by Commodore for far less than $10 million. From what I can gather, the acquisition happened in November 1976. So Al Alcorn's timeline appears to be accurate. And an acquisition by Atari might not have triggered one of MOS's best engineers to immediate part company and set up his own chip design company WDC.
I've always wondered how much truth there was to the story that Atari Inc. - and Apple - bankrolled the creation of WDC's 65816 chip which Atari Inc./Corp never even used. [Although Apple and Nintendo certainly did]... Yet another product that apparently Atari Inc. funded yet other companies profited from. [cough, Amiga, cough].
Yes, whether or not it was deliberate, CBM certainly took advantage of the situation.From the "Dad Hacker" blog, it sounds consistent with every trick TTL/Atari Corp pulled during their "start up" phase when it came to creditors.
Sorry but I'm not very impressed with what Commodore did, ever. Sure the SID is nice but the C64 was not exactly superior to the A8 line even though the A8s were originally created for 1978, not 1982. I'm also amazed the VIC-20s didn't burn down houses with its cardboard with aluminum sprayed RF shielding. Maybe the PET Jet was made of the same stuff...
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7800 Atari Corp. Revival
in Atari 7800
Posted · Edited by Lynxpro
Didn't Commodore also push trade-in rebates for trading in not only other Commodore computers [VIC-20] but also competing computers? It's been a long time since I read The Home Computer Wars, but I do know practically all of the home computer companies - except Apple - were pushing rebates in order to compete with Commodore's insane price slashing...
And it was insane*. Jack gained massive market share but it cut Commodore's profits so much he was shown the exit door from his own company.
*Basically a personal vendetta to destroy TI in revenge for what they allegedly did to him and Commodore "personally" during the calculator "wars" with no respect to the interest of Commodore's shareholders...