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Bryan

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Everything posted by Bryan

  1. That's one reason the C64 is kind of a love/hate thing with me. Everything about the 400/800 needed was about quality. The construction was solid, the expansion methods were elegant, it had unmatched graphics and sound capabilities, the OS was robust. Unlike other PCs of the day, this one was being made to be friendly for non-techie types while still costing less than many of the options out there. Commodore recognized that many households were holding off getting a computer because of the cost and that bringing the price down was more important than a premium system. Revamping their budget machine with the new chips and 64K of RAM (which is what really got people's attention before they knew what the chips could do) is what did the trick. There was a wave of enthusiasm for that machine like the industry hadn't seen before.
  2. I'm not sure from your reply if you're following what I meant, but... What I meant was that the C64 is a great games machine even though I hate to admit it. I always figured the C64 scene was bigger.
  3. Despite the C64's shortcomings (and all the years I hated it for the stuff it got that I didn't), it's got it where it counts.
  4. #1 fact of IP law. A party does not need to be right. A party only needs enough money to bleed the other party dry.
  5. It appears to drive Pin 20, which looks unused in the schematic. I'm guessing it's an address decoder for some other device.
  6. IMO both these machines are very easy to program for as long as you're painting by numbers. A program that draws a simple background and has a few moving objects and sound effects probably won't take much time at all. They become difficult when you want to write something more than a magazine game and you have to start doing things on the fly instead of once per frame.
  7. How you remember the C64 depends on when you got into it. I had an 800 in 1981 and some of my friends had C64's starting in late 1982 or early 1983. At that time, the 1541 was miserable. You'd start a game loading and walk away for a while. If you didn't hear any activity for a while, you'd pop the door open to see if the drive went nuts meaning it was still loading. If you didn't have good ventilation around the drive (like shoved onto a desk shelf with other stuff around it), it would get incredibly hot and and stop working. I didn't know anyone with a Fast Load until a couple years later (it was released in 1984), and even then it didn't work with everything. At least a software solution was possible, though.
  8. The Atari chipset was designed to bridge the gap between a game console and a computer terminal. For games, it would use 160x hardware based on the video generation methods used in the 2600, but with a dedicated DMA engine (Antic). For applications, it would also have a basic 320 mode with minimal features. This was considered sufficient in the late '70s. The real crime is that Atari spent millions on various projects that never saw the light of day, but the development of their graphics capabilities ended with GTIA (and the subsequent chasing off of their best engineers). That was the beginning of the end.
  9. Well, the sprites beat anything the Atari has. There's eight of them and they're multi-color. The screen has a color attribute per character cell so you can put all 16 colors on the screen without tricks. Those are the main advantages. You can get really colorful stuff on the Atari if you throw the CPU at the screen, but then you lose the freedom of movement the C64 has. To me, the C64 feels like a klunky budget machine in every other way, but the VIC II chip is impressive. SID is impressive too, but I think a lot of the game effects were better on Pokey.
  10. It's a tough choice. I think the Atari has a better overall system architecture, but the C64 has features that allow for better looking games. And, of course, the Atari was available from the beginning of 1980.
  11. Oh, wow. That's sad to hear. People come and go from the boards but you rarely know why. We should all leave instructions with someone of where/how to post a parting message if we go.
  12. Wife and I just had a debate about washing things that go in the recycling. I'm not sure why I should use water to clean the garbage.

    1. Show previous comments  11 more
    2. Skippy B. Coyote

      Skippy B. Coyote

      We wash all our recyclable containers, if for no other reason than the sake of the people who have to work with the recycling.

    3. Eltigro

      Eltigro

      Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants. (By not washing the food off the recycling.)

    4. save2600
  13. I wrote some stuff to demo it a long time ago. I'll see if I can find it. It gave me roughly 9-bit pitch and sounded pretty good for lower notes, but higher ones needed a faster switching frequency to sound clean.
  14. Also remember that Todd has given different explanations of how he got his time, including shifting into 2nd before the race starts.
  15. I mostly want cool new software tricks for the old beast.
  16. It seemed to me that the low frequencies were cut off pretty bad in the ST. Even with a direct line out, it still sounded much thinner than Pokey.
  17. It really isn't that bad because you can easily throw out cases with inputs that the game doesn't care about and sub-optimal progress is pretty easy to cull out (like not accelerating for a frame). Once you're down to only the permutations of meaningful actions, you could write a program to run through them all. The only other possibility becomes if someone finds a bug that makes a poor run suddenly return a good time.
  18. I'm not going to address all of this other than to say I had a personal computer then and I had friends who did too. Most of us had lots of copied software and getting our hands on an art program was no big deal. I knew even more people with 2600's. We could have easily pulled this off. You keep saying it's too uncommon, but I never said Activision was getting a fake photo from every kid in America. I was just saying it would have been possible for me and some others I knew, and I also knew kids who were always lying/bragging who would have done it if they could. It was never meant to be more than a theory.
  19. We're talking 160 resolution max and some clever kids trying to cheat. Fire up a paint program and put a ruler on the screen. Flip back and forth until you can't tell which is which.
  20. Never said it was common, I'm just saying that I bet they got some laughable fakes and a few good ones. I had an 800 at that time. I could have made anyone a perfect looking Dragster photo.
  21. You're assuming these were the only fabricated results they ever got. They probably knew how the scoring went so they could throw away impossible scores. From what was left, there were a few 5.51's that looked like they might be legit, so they published them and Crane went back to the code to try and calculate a perfect score.
  22. I believe something isn't right, though. No one has been able to prove 5.51 possible, and seeing your name in print is a compelling reason to fake a photo. It's also possible that there was a clerical error at Activision which has never been 'fessed up to. Has anyone ever produced a 5.51 certificate? The one Todd produced was shown (TG forum) to be a modified version of one of his others with a certificate number that is out of sequence with other known certificates. EDIT: Here's what I think probably happened. In any large contest there are cheaters. It makes total sense that Activision would get faked photos and someone had to sort them out. David Crane has stated that they did some internal tests to try to determine the best possible time. They determined it was 5.54, one tick off of the 5.57 given by code analysis. Why did they do this? Probably in response to some sketchy photos. They got 3 showing 5.51 which was a possible increment (I'm sure they probably got some with illogical times too), and after Crane's analysis they probably took Dragster off the charts completely. Today, David stands by the Todd's time but it's probably more to avoid being in the middle of a sh!t storm over a 35 year old game.
  23. Or that Activision was easily fooled. Remember that they then removed the other scores and listed only Todd's and we don't know why. If I were going to cheat, I'd just use a home computer (the A8 has the same resolutions and colors available) and draw whatever game screen I wanted. Dragster isn't very colorful, after all.
  24. I think it would be a lot more fun to make something that had several 8-bit clients.
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