Lynxpro
-
Content Count
4,140 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Posts posted by Lynxpro
-
-
Using the Expansion module, can a developer utilize all three sound chips at once in a game? If so, I'm looking forward to seeing what the musicians and sound effects folks can pull off with this!
Always was annoyed that only two released 7800 games used a POKEY (Ballblazer and Commando) and only one used a POKEY and a TIA (Commando).
I just watched a clip of Commando on the A8 and it was terrible. The conspiracist in me is quick to believe the A8/XEGS version was purposefully meant to be weaker than the 7800 version. After all, Sculptured Software did both ports...
The developers who did the C64 version seemed to go out of their way with the music although at the cost of it being less faithful to the arcade original. The NES version just looked terrible.
-
I'm afraid it wouldn't look as good as the PSP version...
Seriously, I have a very low opinion of the Wii; it doesn't even seem to have enough power to run most classic arcade ROMs via MAME...
I would think it's all about who is writing the software. Right from the MAME faq: 'Modern MAME has relatively high CPU requirements even for games you might consider to be “simple”.'
An eMac from 2003 doesn't have similar problems even though it has a weaker version of the PowerPC processor in it. A 10 year old HP laptop running Linux has less issues with MAME than the Gamecube 1.5, err, excuse me, Wii.
-
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...
-
1
-
-
Ballblazer.
-
Do it on the WII?
I'm afraid it wouldn't look as good as the PSP version...
Seriously, I have a very low opinion of the Wii; it doesn't even seem to have enough power to run most classic arcade ROMs via MAME...
-
Have you ever listened to the Softsynth tunes on the A8? The waveforms were calculated via CPU and played writing to all 4 "DAC"s. due to the real 4 channels, no interferences happen there.
The source of such tune is slightly higher than "normal" POKEY tunes. But the waves are "free" . No need for Megabytes of DMA. Just the CPU could do faster there.
Wow. Now just for the sake of argument, what do you think that artist could do with the same tune using Dual Pokeys?
-
I'd have to agree with the consensus...and having owned both machines,
I'd say that the Amiga's sound was generally better.
Having said that though, I still like a lot of the ST's sounds. The
pipes from SOTB were mentioned. I've played the game on both, and
there's no doubt the Amiga version is better, but...I *like* the ST
versions music in the intro. Also, I love the pounding soundtrack to
StarDust on my Mega STe (of course that's an STe, but SD was brought
up). Several arcade games with the "chiptune" sound were fine by me,
I like the music to "Venus, the Flytrap", for example. Ultima 3's
dungeon music is unforgettable. I love the bard's music from the
Bards Tale, etc, etc,...
Keep in mind - a trained musician, I'm not, just "IMHO" and "YMMV".
It's too bad Atari Corp. couldn't get the AMY sound chip working and included in the ST. It [probably] would've cleaned the Amiga's clock in terms of musical abilities.
Although several years later, the Motorola DSP in the Falcon ruled. I read somewhere that it was "now" being used in the iPod Shuffle from a few years back...
-
Couldn't find the article again but have all the magazines here. No link found for £299 to £399 for 520STFM. Article mentioned both machines and the catastrophic price change for Atari due to both events.
Commodore's DRAM supply unaffected, Atari's supply affected. Amiga 500 price cut is just coincidence I suspect.
I thought Commodore/MOS only produced in-house their custom chips [not to mention the 6502 CPU and its variations] and the DRAM was acquired elsewhere. I was under the impression that MOS had tried DRAM after the Commodore takeover but it didn't work out profitably for them.
But that still would've given Commodore a leg up since they themselves were manufacturing much of the Amiga's custom chips in-house whereas Atari Corp. had to rely upon other manufacturers to produce their custom chips [as just about any ST owner can give you an earful about the fiascos involved with producing the BLItter and getting it to market].
Can anyone definitively state what Styra Semiconductor did? Maybe they were just a chip engineering company. Atari bought them circa 1989 but never really explained the company in the shareholder's reports and it was eventually closed down like many Atari Corp. acquisitions...
*Nevermind*. Just did a Google Search and found some former employees of Styra Semiconductor/Atari Microsystems. They developed chipsets but it sounds like they didn't manufacturer them. A fabless semiconductor design shop.
-
I never understood why Microsoft, when planning the XBOX, didn't by the Atari name and IP, I think it was sold for 5 million bucks in the late 90's? (I'm not 100% on that, so don't flame me if its inaccurate).
I'm sure it would have been interesting to see the XBOX released as the new Atari. I'm not saying I'd be happy with it, given the sometimes interesting quality concerns Microsoft has, but from Microsoft's point of view, it would have made some sense?
Microsoft is an arrogant organization that is in love with their own tarnished brand name.
I'd like to see a shareholder revolt that sacks Ballmer and then has the guts to split up the company [into 4 different pieces: Windows OS, Office, Xbox, and Live/Bing]. In that situation, I would totally support the Xbox division buying up Atari/Infogrames and christening themselves "Atari". Just imagine what "Atari" could do with some of that monopoly cash Microsoft has accumulated... If only CalPERS would demand a split of Microsoft, it could happen...
-
Some of what you are saying reads a bit like "I'm doing well selling hotdogs, but I'm going to completely ignore all those people who have told me they want to buy a burger".
I can't see how anyone could call Atari entering the 16-bit market with the ST a mistake and you can't call the ST share of the market and its impact "puny" either, and I'm someone who wouldn't have touched an ST with a barge pole back in the late eighties and early nineties.
I was a staunch ST owner back then but perhaps in hindsight Atari and Commodore should've settled their lawsuits and divided the Amiga up between the two of them. They could've had a deal where Atari had "home" computer market exclusivity on the Amiga for a good 2 years while Commodore had an exclusivity in the pro market for that same time period. That would've technically worked since Atari bolted out the gate with the 520ST at the lower price point while Commodore went with the Amiga 1000 at a considerably higher price point at the start.
Imagine what could have been done had the talents of both companies had essentially worked together on this. The eventual end users would have been on a single platform and they could've better devoted their combined bile against Apple and the PC cloners. The demo scene certainly would've been different!
-
Let's keep this somewhat on topic
(sorry, that's the ford-trucks.com Super moderator in me talking)
I bought Impossible Mission for the 7800 at Federated so it's on-topic.
I never saw an Atari Federated store but wanted to.
Speaking of it, here's a Tramiel internal video
Interesting. Looking back, I'd say one of the downfalls of the chain was the wasted floor space. Most of the Federated stores here in the Sacramento region had huge floor plans and you'd walk from one department - basically a station - to another and it was empty space. It reminds me of the difference between the Incredible Universe store we had here in town and what Fry's did to it after they took over. In that comparison, Incredible Universe wasted about 70% of the floor space compared to Fry's. Granted, their customer service was much better. As for Federated, one thing that differentiated them from their competition was "Fred Rated" in their crazy commercials which the Tramiels foolishly ended and replaced with boring commercials. The massively expanding Circuit City steamrolled them along with Silo and other regional consumer electronics retailer "super stores". Federated was one of the few stores where I actually saw one of the all-in-one Atari monitors with a disk drive built into it. None of the local Atari specific computer dealers around here ever had them, and I'm talking right after the 520ST was released, not after the Tramiel takeover of the chain...
Does anyone else have any ideas on improving Impossible Mission for the 7800? What else can we do to help?
-
Has anyone ever tried adding the Maria chip to an Atari 8-bit computer?
-
How it was portrayed in the media in the States was the DRAM price increases were caused by the Reagan Administration's tariffs imposed on the Japanese for dumping DRAM and wrecking the domestic DRAM biz. I can remember Antic/STart lamenting that Atari was choosing to shift supplies of the ST/Mega ST over to the European countries to evade the tariff increases and maximize their sales. That was circa 87.
Around the same time, the US Supreme Court ruled that IBM's "US Memories" plan was illegal which was the final nail in the coffin of serious domestic DRAM production outside of IBM producing it for themselves and Micron's manufacturing. That must've been one of the stupidest rulings the Supremes made in the 80s. How they concluded that yet allowed for organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA to continue is beyond me.
Also around this time, Atari sued Micron for allegedly violating an oral contract made between Jack Tramiel and their company over DRAM pricing...
It was all a giant cluster****.
Add to that the various DRAM plant fires in Taiwan and South Korea nearly each time DRAM hit incredibly low prices. Of course, this also tends to happen in the fuel business when oil hits lows and guess what? An oil refinery catches fire in California or Texas, always conveniently.
-
Does anyone have a count of how many Pokey chips are available to source outside of recycling Ballblazer carts?B&C sell them for $10. You could ask them.
Good point. A while back, I came across an aftermarket arcade game business selling arcade parts for refurbishing projects and they too had a stash of Pokey chips.
So maybe that's an option....the extra work to put the carts together notwithstanding, offer a Pokey-cart version for $10 more. But my opinion would be XM only for the reasons mentioned above (i.e. people without XM can still play until/if they decide to upgrade).
Maybe this should be called the 'Save the Ballblazer Carts' thread!!
Too funny. But Ballblazer is one of the 7800's best games - IMHO - so every 7800 enthusiast physically collecting it and the games should have a copy. It should be a 1-to-1 statistic.
Too bad the 2600 ET game didn't include a Pokey chip; nobody would cry over the destruction of those carts to get to that chip...
-
I ended up getting Sky Fox on my ST.
Man, that PISSED ME OFF that Sky Fox never came out. Come to think of it, the 7800 box was a bit traumatic for me!
I remember looking at the back of the 7800 box and being particularly grabbed by Sky Fox, Impossible Mission, Winter Games, Desert Falcon and Karateka.
- Sky Fox never arrived. Grrr!
- Desert Falcon was a bit disappointing to me, though I liked the graphics.
- Impossible Mission never seemed to be in stock in Atari Canada. When I got it from the US during a trip to Florida, I couldn't actually finish it. Thankfully, Art is on the case.
- And Karateka (which I loved on my friend's computers) was probably my biggest disappointment in gaming history when I played it on the 7800. If I knew how to code like Bob or Mark, that would be the first game I'd fix on the 7800, with Double Dragon being second.
Strangely, the one 'super game' I had about zip interest in was Ballblazer. It looked goofy on the back of the box and I'd never seen it in action on another machine.
When I did, my opinion did a complete 180!
Karateka was responsible for the destruction of one Pro Line controller but I beat that game. That damn bird, I still detest it...
Here in California, you had to cover all the bases to find 7800 carts. They were at Toys R Us, KB Toys, and Atari's own Federated. It was haphazard to say the least. Even Federated didn't get some of the titles. I'm still kicking myself for not buying Ballblazer and ROF for the 5200 in the Atari/Lucasfilm packaging during the time Atari was using Federated to clear out their warehouse inventories.
-
I also voted for the XM. It sounds like Ballblazer is getting rarer and rarer. Presumably, a bunch will be used for the XM too, which will further diminish the supply.
Personally, I'd focus on the XM. Having some exclusive releases will help it out and maybe help it become a little better established. And as a dual boot game, people who don't have the XM can still play it.
Does anyone have a count of how many Pokey chips are available to source outside of recycling Ballblazer carts?
-
Weird, I was prohibited from editing my comment above that got posted accidentally before I finished it...
If you really wanted to "save" Atari, you'd need to take a time machine back to late 1981, and fix the 1200XL and the 5200 before they launched in '82.
No, you'd have to go back to 1976 and tell Nolan to hold out for $38 million or more for the buyout offer and/or call up Michael Milken and finance Atari Inc. through junk bonds and remain independent. Either way, you take those extra monies and buy MOS Technology thereby c-blocking Tramiel from purchasing the company and thus preventing his later price war at Commodore. Actually, Commodore may not have existed for long w/o MOS because the PET design came from Chuck Peddle [if I'm not mistaken] at MOS. You'd take the PET design and offer to trade it to Philips in order to settle the patent infringement lawsuits and for that intellectual property to be transferred to Atari. Philips later crashes and burns with the PET now known as the Odyssey 2 or 3.
If Atari is still sold to Warners, you "create" the Activision spin-off as a cover - much like Key Games was before - and then license "Puck Man" from Namco and run with it in every territory outside of Japan and use the huge cash infusion to launch a takeover of Warner Communications itself.
Of course, there's still other side projects to accomplish. You expose that Microsoft BASIC is actually DEC BASIC and have DEC sue Microsoft and Bill Gates personally into oblivion. You invest in VisiCALC and you convince them to copyright the code thereby preventing Lotus from stealing spreadsheet software later. You do the same with DRI so when IBM decides to launch the PC, it is CP/M that is selected as the OS.
That would lead to a much better time line tech-wise.
Now where's that chap with the Jelly Babies so I can whack him upside his head and steal his TARDIS to complete this mission... ?
-
What a mess! I have a new found respect for Jack, Amazing he was able to pull it off. Dealing with all that,putting in your own cash,most of it from what you mention. That really is puuting you money where you mouth is. A concept few other than business owners can relate to..Even sadder though that Warner was so inept and killed a great thing. Very sad indeed..
Atari should have been a permanant corporate Icon ,instead warnwer was too squemish to put it on the line.Typical of companies that have been taken over. Look what happened at Chrysler and others,great when there are assets and making money but run for the hills when the result of being mismanaged arrive..
Again, nobody is mentioning the reason why Warner was trying to get Atari off the books. It was solely due to Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover attempts that fueled the need to part with the majority of Atari quickly. Steve Ross didn't want to get rid of the company. That was evident in the biographies written of the man. He was the master of the deal and the architect of Time Warner Inc. which his replacements [Levin, in particular] - per his untimely death - screwed up. After all, Warner's point man on Atari, Manny Gerard, has done very well for himself in the video game industry since then... Basically, Atari in its diminished state was still not a screwup acquisition on Warner's part like Knickerbocker was.
Jack's accomplishments with "Atari" are rather diminished when one considers he used the Atari assets and our Atari fandom - and with it our Dollars, Sterling, Marks, and Francs - to fuel his personal vendetta against Irving Gould and the company he founded [Commodore]. Had Atari Corp and Commodore not tried to destroy each other in their tit-for-tat struggle and had actually come to terms in their settlement of the Amiga lawsuits and combined the platforms, we might possibly have a viable [and commercial] third computer platform to this day. Then there's also Jack's viewpoint. While Jobs & Woz was motivated to put an Apple computer on every student's desktop and thus change the world for the better [and Atari's was to innovate and have lots of fun], Jack's famous motto was "basically, I'm here to make money".
As for Gil and Apple, wasn't the iMac started under Gil's reign yet Jobs receives all the credit for it?
This was shot in 2002 or 2003 for BBS Documentary. Haven't lived in Staten Island for almost 10 years... I'm about 75 miles north of Manhattan.
Loved that documentary. Are they still trying to sell it or has it all ended up on YouTube?
Then again, if Digital Research had agreed to the CP/M deal with IBM, things would have been very different on the PC OS front from the beginning. (and DR would have been far stronger in general, with the backing of IBM to stave off Apple litigation over GEM
)I want GEM back. I wish the owners of DRI would create a community foundation to get GEM up and running as a viable environment so the clowns behind KDE and Gnome can be pushed to the backburner on all other *nix platforms besides OS X. And Ubuntu's colors remind me of 70s shag carpet. Utterly terrible.
Then again, I didn't think DRI's GEM was as nice to look at as Atari's versions...
Morgan would have done far better, if only he had been given a reasonable amount of time.
Has anyone interviewed Morgan in the past few years? I'd like to know if he wishes he could've remained at Atari and revived it instead of going back to RJR and giving his infamous testimony to Congress about how tobacco wasn't so bad... I'd imagine he'd switch places with even John Sculley at this point...
So when's the Tramiel book coming out?
A much less documented part of Atari's history, don't you think Curt and Marty ....... best get a move on ....
Offer to write the Tramiels accounts if they'll part with the holy Sword Quest sword.
I'm with the Angry Video Game Nerd on that one, the contest must continue!
In the US Amiga almost killed Commodore or at least the A1000 did as it was so very overpriced and somewhat incomplete and not ready at launch, ST had them on the run at two to one for the first few years, it wasnt until they decide to take the "jack" approach and sell it cheap, and ST were picking up in EU so supplies were down here and ST's were hard to get.
Atari did however out last them
Atari Corp. did outlast Commodore but when it comes to platforms surviving to this day, it looks like development on Amiga OS 4.x seems to be much further along than any work being done with TOS at this point...
If you really wanted to "save" Atari, you'd need to take a time machine back to late 1981, and fix the 1200XL and the 5200 before they launched in '82.
-
The main reason the voice sample didn't make it into the 7800 was time. As in, none left to even TRY making it work.
I wonder how much time was squandered by Atari & Co. before you were contracted for your work... Impossible Mission [not to mention Sky Fox] was one of the titles that was shown the 7800's box as a "Super Game" and if I recall, it was chronically delayed. Wasn't it mid 87 or 88 when it finally was released?
I ended up getting Sky Fox on my ST. And unlike with Gauntlet, Xevious was terrible on the ST, IMHO.
quote name='peedenmark7' date='Fri Feb 4, 2011 4:33 PM' timestamp='1296866001' post='2201766']
IM for 7800 with the C64 sounds would be killer !
Heck, at this point, might as well just grab the digitized voices off the PSP/DS versions. Granted, that particular publisher might not be "happy" about that but as a PSP owner, I can honestly say I've never seen that game on Best Buy's shelves. And from all my experience as an owner of Atari consoles in their non-popular years, I have extensive experience searching for titles misplaced on store shelves as PSP titles commonly are treated these days...
Sweet! At least yours isn't from a second source like mine was.I've got two of those XT drives. They're actually in an IBM PC (a genuine Model 5150!), but I believe they're 360K drives. If nobody else has one to send, I'll pull them and send them out.
It's amazing that 5.25" drive mechs of any kind are becoming so rare, isn't it? It doesn't seem all that long ago that I saw a stack of used ones on clearance at my local Computer City for something like $5 each, but now that I think back, that was in 1998.
I'll try to remember to pull the drives this evening. If I can get one working with one of my Pentium motherboards and my own 360K diskettes, I'm sure it will work for krewat.
When I hear about community e-waste collections, it makes me wonder how much useful classic computer items are being discarded and recycled. Forgive me if I can't really shed a tear over generic PCs being recycled, but the thought of [Atari] 8-bit computers recycled doesn't make me happy. I'm sure there's a lot of Atari STe and Amiga fans who could put to use pre-1997 SIMM memory chips in some of those recycled PCs...
I miss dot matrix printers. The only institution I see them still in use at is Kaiser...
-
That sounds a bit odd. You were really keeping up with events in such detail back then? (most people -even atari fans- didn't really understand the actual fact of Atari Games being a separate company or Atari Corp being a totally different company than any previous "Atari") Nintendo was a nobody on the consumer hardware market in the US until spring of 1986 anyway, they weren't big news nationwide until that fall/winter and even then only people who actually took interested in the industry.
What about Sega? They'd have been just as prominent at the time as a competitor.
I was a big time Atari fan as a kid. That and Star Wars. After its publication, I was checking out Infoworld's Guide to the Atari book weekly from the local library and from that I became rather fixated on the nearly-unreleased 7800 and the Mindlink system. I also had Zap the Rise and Fall of Atari. Since my parents were looking at buying a computer for me, I was doing research on it so we were purchasing the Antic, Analog, and Atari Explorer magazines in order to keep up with news about what Atari was doing and especially with the ST. Sending letters to Atari Customer Service prior to the re-launch of the 7800 would land you a letter response stating Atari Corp. had no plans of releasing it. Imagine my surprise when the Sears catalog came with the 7800 prominently featured in it.
I learned the shocking news of Atari Games still being a separate company when Analog magazine had a write-up of some of the issues that had been going on there and some clashes with Namco's management. That and the fact that "Tengen" was releasing Atari Games arcade titles on the NES and none of them were heading to "Atari's" own console.
I also joined the local Atari computer user's group after my parents bought me the 1040ST after it was released. When my group of friends learned that Atari Games was still a separate company and thus our favorite arcade games were heading to the NES, they all got NES systems. I had my trusty 7800 but I also bought a used NES with Christmas money which I later sold in order to buy the Lynx when it first debuted. I should note that in the rocky 1984 period, most of my friends families bought Commodore 64s since they were receiving better support from the mass merchants than the Atari 8-bit line at the time. I had tried to get my parents [and my grandmother] to go to one of the real estate/vacation/time share seminars in order to get a free 800XL in 84 but they didn't go. It seemed like every one of those time share companies were giving away "free" computers back then. My aunt went to one and got a TI 99/4A for my cousins. When my grandmother finally decided to go to one, instead of the 800XL, she got the Commodore Plus4. That was terrible. My dad opted to skip the 8-bits and hold out for the 16-bit computers. The 1040ST was ideal especially since at the time it appeared Commodore was in a downward spiral and the Amiga 1000 wasn't really selling well due to its rather high price in comparison to the ST line; they didn't turn around until the Amiga 500 the following year.
So yeah, I guess you could say I wasn't the usual pre-teen Atari user back then...
-
Another Sac-Who-mentan? Nice.
Natomas represent...
Is "Who" a reference to something else, something scifi'ish?
-
I don't get all the anti-Microsoft vitriol. If you don't like them, don't buy their products. If you like them, or simply don't care (raising hand here) then buy their products if you get a good deal. No further concern necessary.
It's hard to ignore them because they have a habit of jumping into every [profitable] portion of the tech industry they can with their mediocre wares.
I have no respect for a company that built their success on ripping off the technology of others and passing it off as their own. And I'm not talking about Windows vs. Mac/Atari/Amiga, I'm talking about the pilfering of DEC's version of BASIC, followed by ripping off CP/M nearly line for line for their PC-DOS.
As for American pride and Microsoft, just remember they tried to sell out the entire American computer industry by creating the MSX "standard" as the launchpad for the Japanese invasion of the home computer industry.
To me, Microsoft is "The Mule" from Asimov's Foundation series.
-
1
-
-
[
You don't have to like a businessman. That's not the measure of a businessman. The measure is success in business - the very game they are in. Murdoch has proven himself - time and time again - to be a shrewed businessman, or he'd be out by now.
One word... MySpace.
Murdoch really doesn't understand the internet. He's old media. He's like the Polish army fighting German tanks with men on horses [except he's rich].
In contrast, the problem with the late Steve Ross - much like Governor Jerry Brown - is that he was a good 20+ years ahead of his time.
-
One feature I'd like to see on all versions of Pac-Man - including authorized releases from Namco - would be the addition of the "Zoom" button feature. It was probably an unauthorized mod created by GCC but I vividly remember a lot of arcades here in Sacramento having it installed on their Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man units. It was like a super turbo boost to the game. If GCC actually created it, it's a shame they didn't include it by default in the 7800 version.
I've found very little info about it on the web but I know I didn't imagine it!Tengen's ports had it.
I did not know that. Better fire up the NES emulator with those game images. Loved the Atari Games/Tengen version of Tetris. Far superior to Nintendo's weak-but-legal offering.
-
1
-
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Atari, 1988, and the DRAM shortage
in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers
Posted · Edited by Lynxpro
Actually, if you watch the Computer History Museum's video of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, you would see Al Alcorn stand up and segway into related topics about what happened at Atari at the time. Al clearly states that he tried to convince the Warner brass to sign off on purchasing MOS for Atari but Warner management wouldn't agree to it. That was obviously before Commodore stepped in and took that company over.
It is repeated online often that MOS's financial problems prior to the Commodore acquisition was caused by Commodore deliberately delaying payments to MOS for already accepted product shipments.
That's some interesting info on Synertek...
79 would've been favorable. If I recall, Warner [also] nixed creating a $500 million Atari campus around 1980 or so that would've consolidated almost all of Atari's Bay Area operations. Instead, they operated in 75-80'ish separate buildings scattered throughout Silicon Valley.
To think Atari bought ROMs from Commodore all the while Commodore was selling the ViC-20 and the C64 in direct competition with Atari's computers and game systems. It just boggles the mind. That would be like supply arms to the Taliban and then fighting them. Oh, wait...
In hindsight, Atari really should've stomped Commodore into oblivion. They just weren't bloodthirsty enough; maybe it was due to all the pot...