Bryan

..........that box was the product of a box of magazines sitting in my house, a digital camera, and 5 mins. in Micrografx Picture Publisher...........

I think America had a large number of early Ataris in service (400/800) while overseas things picked up around the time of the XL/XE. Limitations were put on software developed in America that weren't necessary on European software. How about that? -Bry

Just to clear this up... The 1st 800's and 400's shipped had CTIA. Within a very short time, all machines had GTIA. I've only seen 1 machine (an 800) with a CTIA. The vast majority of 400's have GTIA. -Bry

This is an excellent point. No more crappy games!! I'm hoping to show everyone my project soon, and hopefully only a couple people will call it crappy! (can't please everyone...) -Bry

I really think you're trying to give this guy a hard time with his english. I took his question to mean, "If you weren't an Atari user, what games have graphics that would still look good to you." In other words, don't judge them relative to what you know is possible. It might produce a different set depending on the knowledge you have of the system. A coder might see a game doing something that shouldn't be possible, and judge that to be the best looking game even if the average Joe would pick another prettier game. Now, that said, I think the topic of 'best games' has been beaten to death. I don't think there's anything on the 8-bit that's going to blow anyone away without a little perspective (We've all seen the PS2, etc..). Obviously Ballblazer is one of the few good 1st person games, and still has a slick look. -Bry

"games are crap..." Yeah! Utilities RULE!! Woohoo! Everybody to my place for a round of Sector Copier!!! -Bry

I can believe that, I'm listening again and there is clearly some voice-stealing going on, it's certainly not full 4-voice music but still sounds reasonably full-bodied (don't know if they reserved voices for sound effects in the game though). So the question still stands, regardless of how many channels are joined together, how is it actually making this SID sound? It's because the combination of features in Pokey have some interesting side effects. Many Pokey sounds never happened before because not much was documented about anything other than 'standard' register settings. Once you're modulating one voice with another, you get some very interesting trippy effects. With the right settings, you can get things that sound like buzzing UFO's, stomach noises, or triangle waves. Since its a sound that can be started, and left running with no intervention, I'd call it a hardware feature. Pokey also has a Volume-Only mode where it will simply hold a voltage level placed in the volume bits. This is a simple 4-bit DAC (and there are tricks to do this on just about any sound chip), but a documented feature as well. -Bry

You're confusing volume envelopes with waveforms. The YM doesn't produce triangle waves, but it can ramp the volume in a triangle fashion. A simple routine would do the same thing: Write vol to YM Subtract 1 from Volume If Volume = -1, then Volume = 15 Wait Jump to top That's what the YM can do internally, it will produce a dinging sound, but it still produces square waves. -Bry

I'm not sure what you mean here. The YM2149 produces square waves and noise, and has automatic ADSR control. Pokey has many different distortions ranging from pure squares to pure noise, but has no built-in ASDR control. I'd say Pokey actually produces a wider range of waveforms. The reason the YM2149 produced as many sounds as it did was because it had a 68000 pushing it. -Bry

I don't want to start any wars or anything, but if I wanted to publish a game for Atari systems, who would people recommend I deal with? Should I keep it all here at AA? Atari2600.com? Others? -Bry

I messed with Racing Destruction Set for all of 10 minutes. It was so bad I wondered why they bothered at all. -Bry

Yup.. There are 2 basic types of display organization (I'm sure there are others, though). If the screen is stored as multiples of 1 bit images, they're called bitplanes. If the bits are together, it's called chunky. -Bry P.S. I was wrong above on one point. Parallax is much easier with bitplanes, and can be combined with transparency, since they're both basically the same effect, the only downside is it eats up color registers in a big way.

Right.. think of it this way: On the ST, in low rez mode, each pixel is 4 bits. These bits are not stored together, as on the 800, but in separate memory locations, (each corresponding to a bit-plane). The 1st pixel's color is determined by the 1st bit of the 1st 4 words. The 2nd pixel's color is determined by the 2nd bit of the 1st 4 words. .... The 16th pixel's color is determined by the last bit of the 1st 4 words. The 17th pixel's color is determined by the 1st bit of words 5-8 (the 2nd 4 words). etc.... in the 4 color mode, you eliminate 2 of the planes. in the 1 color mode, you eliminate 3 of the planes. The main point is that the bits in a pixel are not together in memory. There are up to 4 words that need to be accessed per pixel. -Bry

The difference is that the Amiga can have 5 of them. Now chunky pixels don't make sense, because who wants to manage 5-bit pixels in 16-bit words. With the Amiga's sprites and blitter, the idea was that you wouldn't have to mess with the bitplanes directly too much. So you know, I'm not an Amiga user here to bash the ST. I owned an ST, Mega STE, and F030. I did lots of ST programming in BASIC, C, & 68K. I didn't get an Amiga, mainly because I was fiercely loyal to anything with a Fuji on it, but I always knew the Amiga was more capable, so I believed all the rumors about what a terrible machine it was. It wasn't until recently I actually messed with one and looked into what it could really do. By the way, games that have to render an entire screen and redraw it every new frame benefit from not having to deal with bitplanes too. When you render pixels, it's nice to shift them and drop them into one word of the bitmap instead of having to mask off & shift each bit and drop them into 4 planes. I've realized it wasn't the biggest hardware mistake, though. The Yamaha YM2149F was the biggest one. It isn't much harder with Chunky pixels. You have to shift all the 4 or 5 bitplanes out by 1 bit (and into the next word). With Chunky, you have to shift each word by 4 bits. Sure. My only point is that the ST didn't need to use them. It really wouldn't have been difficult to make Shifter read 1, 2 or 4 pixels in a row. This was a shortcut they shouldn't have taken, like leaving out the register bits to make 4096 colors possible from the start. I just don't understand some of the decisions that were made. At least I understand why the soundchip was used... it was available and had 2 8-bit IO ports built in. It may have been like putting an 8-track player in a new Lexus, but at least you could see the savings in boardspace. Shifter's shortcomings have everything to do with speedy design. Well, 8 & 16 bit wide pixels up your DMA bandwidth big-time ($$). I understand why 16 colors was the limit. Yes. Agreed. Totally. What I'm saying is that the Amiga needed them, and the ST didn't. If Jack wanted a performance advantage over the Amiga, he should have offered what the Amiga could not. A little more work on Shifter and the ST would have had graphics modes that were a joy to program for, and 4096 colors to boot! The whole point of my message was that both machines were rushed. The ST had rushed hardware/software, and the Amiga had rushed software. After all these years, my 800XL is still my favorite Atari. -Bry

Just tried Xagon... interesting.... -Bry

On the Amiga it was used for a purpose, to allow adjustable color depth. On the ST, it's just there to simplify Shifter. Most programs used software sprites that only modified small parts of the screen. Redrawing a whole new screen wouldn't be efficient for most things. It makes some esoteric effects faster, but it makes the important things slower. Transparency effects didn't have much application on a machine with 16 available colors, unless all you run are demos. The clever workarounds I spoke of were things like having 16 preshifted copies of each sprite to make dealing with bitplanes easier. Palette flash was seen because Atari's own routines copied one bitplane at a time, making it possible to see an image where some planes contained old data, giving the wrong colors. Again, I meant more by workarounds than just timing your redraws. Chunky pixels (where the pixel bits are arranged together) would have made ST graphics faster. Bill Gates in an e-mail news letter about spam, June 24, 2003. Notice that Bill Gates doesn't complain about the "enlarge your manhood" spam. -Bry

It's due to the coloring agents used in plastics, and their sensitivity to UV. I have an XE where about 1/3 of the keys are yellowed, meaning they have a different plastic mix than the others. I'm pretty sure it's all the result of cheap offshore manufacturing. -Bry

The interesting thing is that both machines were rushed in a major way. The ST was rushed from start to finish, and was made under some duress. Jack needed a 16-bit computer in a hurry, and he was seriously sore at Commodore for not allowing him to basically 'steal' the Amiga chipset. If you read the stories from the Amiga guys, Jack's offer was lousy, but it was all they had, until Commodore came along. Jack was only interested in the chips, which he would then hand to his own R&D staff. Commodore brought the Amiga guys along to work on the project. Atari was basically Jack's vehicle for revenge, and Jack's method was to reinvent the 64 by producing a lower cost machine with a lot of memory. The Amiga clearly (very clearly) has better hardware. It was in development for much longer and can do much more. The Amiga computer, however, was very much a work-in-progress when it was released, which may have helped Atari somewhat. Until Commodore bought the Amiga, there wasn't any serious 16-bit computer development going on at either company, which is what appalls me. For this reason, there was a certain 'prototype' feel to the 16-bit crop in my opinion. Things got better, but we all saw a lot of bombs and Meditation errors. BIGGEST ST hardware mistake: Shifter's dumbass memory arrangement wasted most of the 68000's power when it came to manipulating the screen. To change 1 low-rez pixel required 4 reads, 4 modifys, and 4 writes!! This is why it was common to see 'palette flash' during screen updates, because sometimes you would catch a glimpse of a modification in progress. People came up with clever work-arounds, but what a freakin' mess!! -Bry

Well, if it's any consolation, no one offered to sell you another 5200. -Bry

I want to know who all of ET's 'friends' are supposed to be. Let's see, we've got a Tree, A yellow thing in the tree with red socks, and a goiter under its right arm, A very happy potato chip, A Don King cherry dude with a baloon, and a piece of purple toast with jelly. ET himself appears to have whatever skin disease Michael Jackson claims to have, and kinda looks like a white gangsta to me. The foreign designer of the cart knew enough about ET to rename it "ET Go Home", but obviously didn't know enough to realize that ET was not a Saturday morning cartoon show. Maybe the alternate spelling was for a Mystique version. (I didn't just go there, did I?) -Bry

To try out the 2 Pokey sound you can get the SAP Music Player for the PC here: http://grayscale.scene.pl/en_index.php?inf...no=0&version=en Any SAP file that displays the message "In Stereo" is using 2 Pokeys. Some good places for SAP files: Grayscale Music Compo Winners: http://grayscale.scene.pl/en_compo.php SAP Music Archive: http://mp3.musichall.cz/Pulse/radio/ Check out the Upgrade FAQ for a little info on the 'Gumby' upgrade. I couldn't find anything better on the spur of the moment, but a little research should turn up the plans. http://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/05/03/05.php -Bry

I doubt that gluing the silicon chip to the pcb is as reliable as a fully encased IC. Moisture and vibration may eventually take their toll, plus there's probably worse heat dissipation. -Bry

I remember there being an obscure game that said that, but I can't remember what it was either. My friends and I used to mimic it at the end of a game. Google turned up nothing. -Bry

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I believe there was always a plain box inside of the printed box. Maybe the first ones didn't have printed outer boxes. I found this rare box, but I can't vouch for its authenticity.