sack-c0s

I disagree - remove every ARM-powered device from your surroundings and then tell me that the Acorn Archimedes wasn't the most important machine that most people have never even heard of.

So the UK isn't important? we bloodywell are for Apple! look at the iOS devices: CPU: ARM (Cambridge) GPU: PowerVR from Imagination Technologies (just north of London). I know for a fact a good amount of the staff there cut their teeth on a C64, BBC micro or Spectrum because I'm one of 'em. Physical Design: Not sure where the work takes place, but Jonathan Ives is from South London. most smartphones (which are currently one of the biggest gaming platforms) are built on an ARM/powerVR pair. If they don't use powerVR they'll most likely use ARMs Mali instead. The Sony PS Vita is also an ARM/PowerVR combo. Those devices are a lot more British than you might first realise. I wouldn't describe the UK as unimportant.

the MSX is probably closer to the Sega SG1000/colecovision than the Spectrum. The importance of the spectrum wasn't the power - it was the price. The best home computer in the world is completely meaningless if you can't afford one. Luckily for me my dad jumped on the Commodore 16 firesale bandwagon and got me something a little better (albeit with very few games) for little cash and then quickly moved on the the C64.

I think the Spectrum was a *bit* bigger than that. It was very big in the UK, Spain, clones in Russia and probably other corners I don't know much about either. And it even got it's own Google doodle for the 30th anniversary of it's unveiling.

That sounds terribly like my mastersystem and Amiga tools...

90% of games an *all platforms* aren't much good. If you look carefully on the C64, Spectrum, Atari or any other platform you'll notice that discussion pretty much revolves around the same dozen titles a vast majority of the time. It's down to who got the classics, and at that point pretty much all platforms seem to level out at about a dozen essential games...

Tried that with formatwar.net Not only did the usual suspects not step foot on there people ended up using it for reasonable technical discussion and collaboration. People just won't use anything for its intended purpose

Given that the fundamental technique behind forth programming is *extending the base language by defining keywords* it should give him very little to complain about

It was - which is why I figured it'd stop him bitching about various dialects of BASIC

somebody get SIO99 a fricking Jupiter Ace!

I asked my dad for 'a computer' and he got me a commodore 16 because 'They were cheap and colourful, and the spectrum looked shit.' (direct quote from him there). In hindsight I'm surprised I didn't actually end up with an Atari around 1986 instead because it would've fit his criteria. Probably something to do with the commodore fanboy he worked with who taught me to program in the first place...

I agree. I'm not sick of the C64 itself, as I like the machine. I'm sick of the C64 being mentioned in this part of the ATARI forum, especially when the C64 isn't even related to the A8 at all. Amen! I generally go to lemon 64 if I want to talk C64, formatwar if I want to argue the toss between different machines and would prefer to just come here for the Atari stuff. On *every other forum* I read - world of spectrum, english Amiga board, stardot, you name it... *nobody even asks or mentions* what other machines I have, like or am currently doing stuff for. Here it's just a bloody overriding obsession that tends to wipe out everything else. If I didn't like the Atari *I won't bloodywell be here*. Sometimes it's fair enough to mention the other machines as you might want to entice their coders/artists/musicians across, or they have a technique that looks interesting and might form a basis of something we could adapt and use on the A8 but can we drop using C64 ownership as a shitty stick to beat people with? Anyway - Nothing the rev says counts in my book anyway - he's one of those people how likes to be abrasive for the sake of being abrasive and would probably argue for kitten genocide if he thought it'd get people talking about him in anger.

If you don't like the idea of problem solving them maybe programming on any machine in any language isn't for you. You know what they say about a bad workman...

the CPC was a lovely static graphics machine, but it was let down on 3 fronts: 1) too similar to spectrum - see previous post 2) too much screen memory to shovel around and build a game around it. There were some good efforts when people got used to it though, and the upgraded plus machines were a brilliant vision of what could have been given hardware sprites, albeit far too late. 3) the bloody greenscreen model. my cousin had one and we thought the games looked okay-ish, but we figured it'd all be so much better in colour. One colour modulator later and you found that there were some bloody *hideous* colour combinations chosen because they gave better contrast on the greenscreen.

the 6502 was a good CPU for the Atari. You think people didn't pay enough heed to the abilities of the Atari as it was? Just look at what happened with the Amstrad CPC - having a Z80 and a screen that could be configured in a similar manner to the Spectrum meant ports got shovelled across and looking no better than the Speccy originals. Had the Atari had a Z80 at its heart I'm pretty sure you'd have got the same.

If we're talking BASIC to assembler - this is something Acorn got right on the BBC, and carried over into the 32-bit machines: 10 DIM org 100: REM program ends up in here 20 FOR pass=0 TO 3 STEP 3 30 P%=org 40 [ OPT pass 50 LDA #0 60 STA ... 70 .... 80 Assembler goes here 90 .... 100 ] 110 NEXT pass 120 CALL org so there was a nice, powerful BASIC there (it scaled so well that in ARMBASIC you could even write fully-fledge RISC OS desktop apps) so you didn't have to leave basic, but at the same time there were no obstacles preventing you learning 6502/ARM. The other bonus is that some folks didn't bother saving out the assembled code and shipped the BASIC that compiled and called the resulting code, so you had a form of open source as a reference. I myself did benefit from the 'all the convenience of assembler with half the speed of BASIC' that commodore BASIC V2 gave. V3.5 was nicer on the C16/plus4 though - graphics and sound commands and a machinecode monitor.

Yes you were - with the cheap digs about 'brick sized pixels' back in post 21. If THAT's a cause for anyone to feel "attacked" , he really has some psychological problem.... not only some biased point of view. Calling the 160x100 pixels "lego" sized, is also very humorous, as they were smaller or even par to games from "other" platforms. If you guys only knowed how biased you were, we could have a possibly friendlier communication. As has already been said - this thread started with a spirit of cooperation, either learning techniques from c64 folks or teaching them to see what they can do on the A8. Then you moved in with your typically predictable anti-c64 comments, pulling what was looking like a pretty decent thread off course. The thread is there for all to read, as are the others, so don't even bother telling us what you wrote because we can just read it for ourselves.

Yes you were - with the cheap digs about 'brick sized pixels' back in post 21.

I did read somewhere that Bob Yannes said that if he was given a couple more months the sound specs would've been on par with the SNES, but there's 2 caveats: 1) I can't remember where I read it, so it might not even be right 2) even if he did indeed say it there's no way of knowing if he'd have actually managed it

They have their own unique quirks and unique ways of doing things, from the very basics to the complex trickery - and that comes through into the games and software that is produced to give it a unique feeling. It's not just limited to the Atari though - the C64, the spectrum, the BBC, the Amstrad CPC, and all the others have a bit of personality in that respect. So do the Amiga, Archimedes and ST. It's not something that's solely limited to the Atari, more the fact that the only place you *don't* find it is the PC. On the c64 front I'm sure that 65533/65535 bytes of RAM are usable if you think around things a bit (like not putting your music player in the same memory space as the SID chip). If you stick to the logic that a C64 only has 38K then the same logic dictates there's no such thing as a 128k Atari.

forgot about the SID change.. in hindsight I'm bloody glad they left the VIC-II alone - Imagine if they either removed the quirks from it so it only worked as per the programmers reference guide, or altered the characteristics of them...

I didn't think the difference in time between the chipset development and the C64/ultiMAX was that great. I thought the chipset was started in 1980?

arrgh! what to do? - on one hand a feedline like this only comes along every few years. On the other hand if I bite it's pretty much a certain ban. What a dilemma...

Space Harrier certainly scared me away for the A8 - it's just not natural that it should run that well. It's witchcraft I tell you! BURN IT!

the problem with c64 basic is that it's crap. PEEK, POKE and SYS are about the only decent commands it has so consequently and half-decent 'BASIC' typein will end up just being a loop to poke a machine code program into memory and call that instead. so if a C64 program uses 'purely BASIC' then it'll be trivial to port to the Atari, but a bit rubbish. If it uses assembly then at best it's going to be a heavy rewrite of the 6502 it dumps into memory, at worst a total rewrite. BBC basic is also a problem because it's probably the best BASIC, or to look at it another way the best damn macro assembler you'll ever use - you can put 6502 between square brackets and use the BASIC to control assembly to create macros, fill out lookup tables, etc. So a lot of it could end up being 6502 and not BASIC. On the plus side though it's a pretty barebones 'framebuffer strapped to a CPU' type machine and you do have the 6502 source to look at. The ZX Spectrum basic is a bit of a pig to code in (it's like keyboard twister - left finger SYMBOL SHIFT, right thumb J, etc.) but maybe reading the code it should be fairly generic and one of the less painful machine to port from. Being a very popular machine in the UK there should be a lot of listings around for it too. But whichever machine you go for it's going to be an effort