Nebulon
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Posts posted by Nebulon
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Hm, someone beat me to it with 1982 prices. Interesting to see how some things got SLASHED in prices during the Crash, while some stuff didn't. And interesting to see indications of price slashing in fall of 82. I don't think anyone realized what was going on at the time. The 5200 basically did nothing but drop in price from day one of release.
But the best part is that we have proof of someone giving an "A" rating to the 5200 controllers.
I notice he mentions the 5200 as being released soon. I'm guessing that he didn't get a chance to actually use one.
Then-again, he also gives the ColecoVision controllers an 'A' as well.
Maybe the magazine was really trying to hype the new consoles -- to the point of bending the ratings.
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The ColecoVision expansion module #1 was half the price of the Atari 2600.
Pages 58 and 60:
http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/vgp/vgp_fall82.pdf
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Even as a ColecoVision fan, I really don't think Coleco should have been allowed to get away with this.
And Coleco's claim about Atari's deal with Namco being unfair is nonsense. Especially considering that Atari and Namco had a working relationship (and that Namco used to be Atari's Japanese division).
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There hasn't been a desktop type computer that can boot to OS and be ready in 3 seconds or less. The best I have gotten from power on to ready with Windows 8 is about 30 seconds and that's with a $150 SSD on SATA 6G.
Computer manufacturers really need to address this. Not so much for the older generation of computer users, but for the newer one. As a friend of mine observed, kids are getting so used to the instant-on of web-connected phones that they simply will not wait for a conventional computer to finish starting up. Instead they'll say "frag-it" and just search the information on their phone instead.
Eventually, the laptop and desktop manufacturers will wonder to themselves, "Why did people stop buying our products in favor of phones and mobile devices?"
I'd hate to see that happen, because I definitely prefer 'traditional' computers.
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Here is a scary scenario for you...
It's 2025, all the kids and young adults have never known a world without the Internet. Most people no longer have 'REAL BOOKS' containing real knowledge, everything is electronic or 'on the cloud'. In one millisecond an EMP goes off in the upper atmosphere, electronics are destroyed, the Internet and electric infrastructure is simply 'OFF'. Knowledge is out of reach, possibly even lost, bank cards are useless, they cannot talk, text or even think for themselves... How do you think they would adjust?
There's a ton of highly-specialized knowledge packed into the brains of the elderly right now that isn't recorded anywhere. Soon it will be gone.
To those who still have grandparents -- when you have a chance to talk to them, be sure to listen. You may just pick up skill and technique-based information that could prove very useful in the future. Better yet, document it before it's gone and be sure to use your brain's memory and not just a computer to record it.
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"Vintage PCs" for me are Sun 3/60, SparcStation IPX, SPARCclassic, etc, and the various "VT100" terms and XTerms we used to access them from our personal desks in the 1990's. About 1998 we dumped the XTerms and most of the Suns and switched our desktops to far cheaper Debian Linux on 150-333 MHz Pentiums. (My workstations were dual-CPU HP Vectra/Kayak XUs)
My Wintel experience jumped directly from a DOS on a 1988 8086 to Windows 7 on a 2010 Core i5.
I'm very glad I mostly missed the weird and expensive Wintel PC years of the 1990's-2000's, though I do appreciate the oddball hardware of the era as historical artifacts. Looks like you essentially had the Rolls-Royce experience through the 90s with all those workstations.
I wanted to get my hands on machines like that, but had to wait until 1996 when I started working with SGI machines. By then though, the DEC Alpha was putting a dent into their market-share (soon followed by the Pentium Pro/II/III CPUs).
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In any case what would be the cutoff for determining whether a PC is classic or not? I was thinking 486-class machines. But then I started wondering maybe all x86 machines up to the point where they stated advertising new instruction sets to the general public on TV, Pentium with MMX. You know before the dot-com era started the bloatware trend.
Good question.
I like to think of classic as just before the Pentium Pro came out, since that was a definite departure and a radical jump in the PC's evolution. I suppose people could argue the same thing about the arrival of the P4.
Or maybe the 20-year cut-off you mentioned is the way to go...
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That would be weird. Atari would hold the patent, and that would have been an asset to be transferred when they were sold. I've never heard of a person, let alone the designer, owning rights to a piece like that.
Even if it was freelance work-for-hire stuff, Atari would own something that important.
You'd think it would fall under the 'work for hire' category and fall back to the employer -- as you mentioned.
Personally, I dunno. I'm just basing it on the quote on page 462 of the book, "Atari Inc.: Business is fun"
http://books.google.ca/books?id=3FwGMtRafrAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false
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The salesman told me that this computer was used to make Babylon-5. And therefore that is what I expected. I expected to zoom the ships around and all that! Make laser blast sounds and graphic explosions. I mean they said the computer had chips like no other, and it was light-years ahead of anything else.
Did I have too blunt and too-literal an expectation? ..perhaps, but that was what I was told and that was what I expected. Even an assassin has a better code of ethics than most salesmen!!!
Everytime I tried LightWave on my stock A500 the damned thing slowed down or crashed or something. But it was basically un-usable.
The Amiga store made promises upon promises and preached the machines virtues to kingdom come. They had all these demos going, and being a kid still, I didn't know they were simply looping animations or videos. I was reading (with vague understanding) about realtime graphics and the advertisements made me believe too much MAGIC was crammed into custom chips. I mean with the industry making rapid advances every other week, why wouldn't anyone believe the amiga ads. They always say low price and the stuff was coming down continually. Sure it was, all of it was, except for the $1,000's upon $1,000's of extras needed just to get Lightwave running and outputting to a VCR. Ughh.. This was worse than the dark ages.
Wow. I really enjoyed how you explained that.
It's unfortunate that the salesman you were dealing with didn't know what he was talking about and actually sold you an Amiga 500 while hyping a show like Babylon 5. The first season of B5 was done using Amiga 4000 machines. Essentially, he sold you the wrong computer (or didn't bother to mention necessary CPU, RAM, and hard drive upgrades). A bit like telling you what a Pentium could do while pointing at a 386sx.
The truth is, you'll run into good and bad sales people for any platform. I will admit though, some of the Amiga hype could get a bit out of hand at times.
As for LightWave costing a lot. It was a much better deal when they broke it away from the Video Toaster and sold it as a separate software app. LW 3D Version 3.5 was complete and less than a thousand dollars. Pretty good for a full-featured modeling, animation, texturing, and rendering app.
Since you were a kid at the time, I can see the misunderstanding between pre-rendered and real-time. At the time the A4000 was released, you'd be looking at similar rendering times on pretty much all higher-end home computers. Of course, later in the decade, the PC, SGI, and the Dec Alpha were to take the lead in rendering speeds (but that was the future at the time).
The Amiga's real lead was from around 1985 to 1989. After that it started to get somewhat ambiguous with things like multitasking, video editing/genlocking, the GUI, serial transfer speeds, and -- to some degree -- audio as things that kept it relevant until around 1995. From then on, it was pretty much game over for the un-accelerated Amiga.
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Can't Stop Rockin - ZZ Top
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That's absolutely what I wanted to say. Of course there's thousands of developers for tablets today.
But if you purchased a classic 8-bit machine, 16-bit machine, or early PC - you were much more likely to create something original. Whether it was technical stuff with real programming language or a database framework, or writing in a word processor or doing some kind of art work.. Whatever! The users of older hardware tended to explore it more, and how it worked and how to do something new.
For example I was learning fractal mathematics and electronic circuit simulation. And that was one of the reasons I got a DX2/50 back then. That and to play Doom! I also wanted something that was more in-line with business, file-interchange and interoperability, and a more options for longer term storage with higher capacity.
As I transitioned from the Apple II to the PC, I had a series of hissy-fits and rampages with that god forsaken amiga. Nothing worked on the damned thing, except a few high-cost store bought games. And anytime I wanted to do something it seems I had to outlay loads of cash.
I kept waiting for games with Babylon-5 graphics to come out. They never did.
I missed the whole 8086, 286, and 386 era, mostly, because of that bastardized amiga! The promise of multi-media, art and graphics and sound and video production and 3D rendering. FUCK IT ALL YOU SHIT BASTARD COMMODORE! Do you know how much extra money you'd need to spend to do any of those things in any substantial form? Thousands upon thousands! And the piss headed marketing guys made you think the computer was all ready to do that out of the box!
BULLSHIT!!!
Playing with my mom's pig-bastard was more honest fun than anything this machine could offer.
Wow. The anger -- all rooted from an unrealistic view of what a mid-80s/early-90s computer is capable of. Name one home computer prior to 1993 that can do Babylon 5 graphics in real-time. Even an SGI workstation couldn't do that back then.
As for doing 3D on an Amiga, I had no issues getting great results from LightWave (one of the least-expensive 3D apps on the market).
Video production - The Toaster (and Flyer) was descent for its time, although I didn't like having to pay extra for time-base correctors. But the alternatives were far more expensive.
And before Photoshop got its act together, what other choice was there for doing layering and transparencies in 2D paint apps other than the ones for the Amiga and Atari ST?
AmigaVision was a nice cheap way to do multimedia. Other computer manufacturers even set up kiosks with a PC in view and an Amiga running the actual multimedia presentation.
The first commercial VR stations by W-Industries were A3000 machines. I can't think of a more cost-effective way to run VR at the time.
Sound sampling and editing was a snap on that machine. A great example is DSS8+. It was cheap and excellent for its time. Then there was Sonix for analog synthesizer sound design on the Amiga. It sounded like a Moog. Not to mention tons of great MIDI sequencers (Music X, Bars and Pipes, etc...).
I spent years repairing and configuring 8086, 286, and 386 PCs. You didn't miss out on much. So why complain?
I'm curious to know what games actually didn't work on your Amiga. I ran thousands of them with no trouble and very rarely had issues. Usually it had to do with running the wrong region game on the machine.
As for the marketing comment.... I wasn't aware that Commodore did any marketing
Examples of Sonix output (see the Rob Baxter MP3s on the bottom half of the page):
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Which brings me to another thought about Vintage PC's. I'm tending to want to build them as dedicated function machines. Each with a certain purpose in mind. And minimal hardware to support that function. IDK. Maybe that's a dumb way of viewing it.
I think that's a great way of doing things. I've found that PCs can only handle a certain amount of 'stuff' before they start to go flakey. Setting up different PC workstations for different purposes has really helped to alleviate a ton of issues.
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The design is really quite cool and the keyboard gives it that extra touch of colour that the 800 misses. Apart from the colour the keyboard is well....drool-proof.... I especially like that overall wedge shape.
I recently bought a 400 myself but still wait for parts to replace those that were smashed in transit. That upper grille is quite brittle and needs loving handling.
It's really too bad about the brittleness of the plastic. I spent the first evening feeding crazy glue into the hairline cracks on the 400. Apparently the guy who designed the case (Doug Hardy) holds the patent to it. I wonder if anyone will ever approach him to make a new run of Atari 400 cases (assuming it doesn't cost a fortune to manufacture them).
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I was very fortunate - when my folks got me my 1st computer, a 400 back in 1982, it has the B-Key upgrade. A few months later, my dad & I spent days typing in and debugging Compute's "Caves of Ice", we realized it needed 48kB. Good memories.
Back in the day, I had to settle for a 64K Color Computer 2. I was big into graphics and sound so maybe the TRS-80 wasn't the right choice. A buddy of mine was a hardcore robotics programmer; I think he got a lot more out of the CoCo than I did. Anyway, your story reminds me of when I decided to make the 'ultimate' text adventure in BASIC (yeah, I know -- wrong choice of programming language) and I soon hit the 32K BASIC memory limit. So much for the super-awesome dungeon adventure....
I always had this nagging feeling that the Atari 8-bit was the machine I was meant to use. -
Instead, I ask them to use a simple text editor first, concentrating only on the text, and then to move the text into Word and apply the formatting only after the text has been finalized (or close to it).
I use Windows Notepad pretty much every single day.
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The Tandy 1000 left a positive impression on me. Thexder runs great on it and makes good use of the sound chip.
In fact, I still have one that I play Thexder and Silpheed on.
Here's a quick list of old DOS commands for anyone who might find them useful:
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An Atari 400.
I've wanted one of these for over 14 years now.
I recall seeing the 800 in a store running Pac-Man and was BLOWN AWAY.
Then later in 1979, I was at a friend's house and he had a shiny new Atari 400. Needless to say, it left a strong impression on me. The case design is shweeeeeet!
Interestingly, the flat keyboard works a lot better than I thought it would. I tried typing on it and it was actually not that bad. I wouldn't want to try to write an essay on it, but it's workable (especially considering that they were initially thinking of not including a keyboard on the 400). I'm amazed by how much computer people got for the price when the 400 and 800 first arrived on the scene. These are real technological marvels.
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Defender
Pac-Man
Missile Command
All on the Atari 400.
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What are the best games on the Atari ST? In particular, I'm thinking of SHMUP, platform, and racing games...
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The Order of Death - Public Image Ltd.
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Yep. That's the one.
And -- of course -- I insist on working in low-light a lot of the time ('cause it looks cool).
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The Blitter just moves stuff around in RAM (and can do some time-saving operations on the blocks of graphics that it works on). Apparently a blitter can move raw data around and isn't just restricted to graphics data.
Graphics modes and palettes are assigned separately.
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I'm not aware of any games on the Amiga OCS that use 4096 colors in-game. I think the maximum anyone's hit is possibly around 512 colors -- with a few sitting in the 200-ish range (see Vital Light).
So I wouldn't expect the Ste to be cranking out 4096 in-game colors. HAM on the Amiga is pretty much just for still images, and I'm guessing that'd be the case for 4096-color images on the STe as well.
A 1MB Amiga 500 and an Atari 1040 STe are a pretty close match. The A500 has the advantage of a 32-color mode +EHB and the STe has enhanced joystick ports and MIDI included.
Currently, I'm running both systems at the same time.
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My classic computer is better than today's modern machines because..
in Classic Computing Discussion
Posted
I will admit, my Windows 8 machine has been booting up pretty darned fast. We'll see how it does after a few years though....
As for some of the previous versions of Windows, I've seen lots of issues with machines that either don't wake up or ones that spin-up but conveniently forget to activate the output to the monitor. It's mighty hard to trouble-shoot a modern PC when you can't see the screen.