kimchipenguin
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Posts posted by kimchipenguin
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QuoteI believe Atari only sold about 2 million 8-bits and those are everywhere. If they sold 4-6 millions, those would be everywhere as well. Europe may have been the market, but that was small in comparison to Apple and Big Blue. As for musical folks, that was really a small demographic specialty area. Let's face it, Atari was not a leader in the consumer computer segment. Innovative as hell, but terrible marketers.
So why ask for sales numbers if you believe in your made up ones?
Millions of home computers were sold in Europe, it was by no means a small market. STs and TTs were doing quite well in the business market in Germany - thousands of STs were used as terminals or in self-service machines for printing business cards. But business machines aren't usually kept for nostalgia afterwards. What you see in museums, collections or on eBay are just the survivors. BITD the TT wasn't a rare machine. Now it's rare to see one on eBay.
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Apple is doing very fine and they sell approx. the same number of Macs each year. Doesn't matter if they lose market share as long as they keep their very healthy margin.
Atari chose the mass market though, with slim margins. This would never have worked out against an army of PC clones. More innovation would've bought Atari a few more years, not more.
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There were more: https://www.atariuptodate.de/en/emulators
(Emulators - Screen, not all are mono/color emulators).
I used Emula on my Atari to emulate mono resolution.
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If you'd like to see the Atari ST version of New Aladdin, I uploaded it here:
https://archive.org/details/the-new-aladdin-col-287-atari-st/
It's the "Fun at the White House" issue
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This is the only game in the contest I don't understand. Tried it on two Lynx emulators and there were no "space crystals". At my first play attempt there were plenty of enemies, later attempts - barely any enemy at all.
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I'd suggest checking out www.stcarchiv.de which is a (mostly) Atari magazine archive for German-language ST magazines. Articles are in HTML so you can use any online translation tool.
Old articles can be a useful source but still need to be checked obviously...
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Seems he hasn't changed that much over the last twenty years. Here's an interview from 2001 (mostly about the ST but also Jaguar):
http://www.stcarchiv.de/stc2001/11/leonard-tramiel-interview
I don't think Leonard has ever been made a scapegoat by others. Unlike Sam and Jack, he was never in the spotlight - although he did appear in some trade shows.
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On 10/7/2019 at 8:21 PM, pacman000 said:And two million units to retailers doesn't sound all that incredible; if ten thousand stores each ordered two hundred units you'd have 2,000,000 preorders. (Or twenty thousand stores ordered 100 units, etc.)
Of course this is highly speculative & based on a few assumptions. Consider it a hypothesis, one which needs a lot of testing.
Just having ten thousand stores selling the Jaguar would've been a huge success for Atari. In Germany, the Jaguar was mainly sold & advertized by small mail order dealers or some dealers who sold Atari computers - and why would they stock 100 units with only a couple of games available? Some shops offered pre-orders, even for games that were never released (or never developed as it turned out). Atari couldn't even deliver Jaguar kiosks to the big department stores...
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I owned all three (GameBoy first, then GameGear, later Lynx when it was heavily discounted).
First, very few people buy a system based on its specs and the GameBoy was already a huge improvement over what came before (Game&Watch, Microvision). Nintendo already had a huge advantage because their previous system was the NES. They had the trust of both consumers and developers, plus the marketing to make the GB a success. Internally, multiple teams were developing games and they had connections to almost every third-party developer. Atari only had Epyx as a third-party developer in the launch window. The GB's library quickly grew and you had franchises that were popular on the NES (Castlevania, Super Mario etc.). They didn't look as good, but playing such games mobile was a huge deal.
The Lynx's other competitor, the GameGear, didn't enjoy the third-party support the GB did, but basing the hardware on the Master System was a genius move. With very little effort, Sega and other developers could port their Master System games over to the Game Gear. These ports not only included arcade games that were popular in the mid-80's either, Sega released Sonic games and their jump'n'runs based on Disney characters.
So Atari had two rivals that specialized in game consoles and were very capable at developing games. Both had successful franchises and consoles that were still current by the time their handheld systems launched. They had business relations with big third-party developers and could concentrate their marketing dollars and yens on their consoles. Atari had none of those. They still had their computer business that released three systems in 1989 (Stacy, STE, Portfolio) and Atari still suffered financially from their purchase of the Federated stores. The regional branches of Atari had some freedom on advertizing too, thus the Lynx saw little support from Atari Germany. Atari Germany's ads for the Lynx II were awful, still concentrating on the color screen instead of the games.
Considering all these circumstances, the Lynx still did pretty well...
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There are two flaws I found in this game compared to River Raid:
a) shooting the fuel tank only awards ten points - it would improve the game mechanic (should I shoot for more points?) to increase it beyond the points awarded for destroying enemies
b) You can't speed up or slow down the plane.
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It's probably the most impressive game in the contest visually and shows great promise for a full release. Lynx Quest feels as if you had released a couple of Lynx games before...
BTW, I wouldn't mind a Time Pilot port to the Lynx
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On 6/8/2019 at 7:19 PM, oracle_jedi said:The Atari ST was remarkable for being introduced so quickly, but the machine lacked serious graphical and audio capabilities that are a requirement for a video game platform. He seemed to think his 1040ST with cheap laser printer was a good fit for small businesses, but who was going to support it when he had burned all his distribution bridges?
There was simply not enough time to improve the hardware further. The laser printer however was a brilliant business move: Mega ST + Atari SLM804 + Calamus opened a new niche market for the ST. Germany had quite a good support network for Atari DTP too.
On 6/9/2019 at 6:22 PM, 6BQ5 said:Now, accelerate something like the STe to 1987. In 1989 release the Falcon and update the STe to something like the STe Plus. Now there is a "low" offering and a "high" offering. Follow up with the TT in 1990. Now there is "low", "medium", and "high". In parallel, Jack could have slowly expanding the gaming console offering. Give the XE and XEGS the 65816 processor. Eliminate the 65XE and only offer the 130XE. The potential for success was enormous.
A 1989 Falcon wouldn't have been the Falcon we know today. And there was little potential for success in the 8 bit gaming market. Support for 8 Bit Ataris was already slowing down in Europe - C64 was more popular, Spectrum of course and the CPC too. Any Atari console would face the same difficulties that the 7800 did: Nintendo had a lock on many games, Sega had their huge arcade library while Atari only had the rights to their own aging arcade titles.
On 6/15/2019 at 9:51 AM, ParanoidLittleMan said:Wrong. In 1983 C64 price, without it's tape recorder was about 1200 DEM in Germany. In 1987 Atari 520 ST, with single sided drive 1000 DEM . Surely, some C64 was more affordable in 1987, but who wanted C64 then ? People wanted more power, more things possible to do ... And 1000 DEM was affordable, even for some poor "communist country" people.
Some of the best C64 games were released in 1987 and the C64 sold extremely well despite the 520ST. Many people were still quite happy with their Commodore back then.
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In Germany, I've never seen a Jaguar ready to play at the big retailers back in the day, nor any print or television ads. Atari did however advertise the Lynx as late as 1993. Atari Inside magazine did print a two page list of developers and titles that were presumably in development, but that magazine was never a reliable source and they probably copied that list from somewhere else. Same with some retailers that advertised games as pre-orders that would never be released.
Also, Atari didn't handle distribution themselves in Germany and Austria. They left it to Pagedown, an Atari retailer with little experience with game consoles. Excerpt from an interview with Pagedown (Atari Inside magazine) in 1994:
Pagedown: Nach unbestätigten Aussagen sind in den USA bisher ca. 800.000 Konsolen verkauft worden. Im Mai 1994 nannte uns Mr. Paul Welch (Sales Manager ATARI UK) die Zahl von ca. 500.000 Geräten für die USA. Der Absatz in Deutschland sollte leicht 30% des amerikanischen Marktes erreichen."Pagedown: According to unconfirmed statements, 800000 consoles have been sold in the U.S. to date. In May 1994, Paul Welch (Sales Manager Atari UK), told us about 500000 units for the U.S.. Our sales volume for Germany should reach 30% of the American market easily.".
Pagedown didn't have any connections with department stores and were relying on the Jaguar's success to expand marketing. I'm not sure whether they ever expanded their advertising beyond the two Atari magazines but with such a small window of opportunity for the Jaguar, I doubt it. There was also a German Jaguar print magazine that supposedly had a circulation of 15000, even though it was sold at Atari retailers only...
The other Atari magazine in Germany, ST-Computer, mostly ignored rumors and supposedly soon-to-be-released Jaguar titles and just reviewed games that were actually released. Video game magazines did the same.
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At the Toronto Pet Users Group show last December, I met with a few Commodore groupies who stated a solid and confirmed number of fifty C65 units sold/given away in the Toronto region. There were also units in various states of assembly that also made it out, so I’m suggesting 100 out of Canada, and certainly some may have been leaked in Europe, so 200 is certainly possible. I’ve only ever seen North American units up for sale (twice in fifteen years) though. The TPUG group seems like the best place to source one today, though the price would be north of 5K.
The TPUG members I talked with also said some local users have coded programs to use the C65’s native modes. All utilities, and no games from what I could tell.
At least more than a couple of units were shipped to Germany, because there was an actual advert in German 64'er magazine announcing that prototype units could be bought. Maybe they were shipped from the U.S.? 64'er reviewed the C65 in their 3/94 issue and gave away a unit to celebrate the magazine's ten year anniversary. The import price was 598 DM + shipment. McWill (who does the Lynx and Game Gear display replacements) owns a C65 motherboard with the CPU and VIC-III missing.
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Regarding Lynx at ejagfest: There are always at least six Lynx consoles at the ejagfest for the Checkered Flag competition. In the last two years McWill also participated and modded consoles during the event. It's probably the best place to show off your game. I'll probably go there to get some news for my magazine ST-Computer which also covers Lynx, Jaguar and the VCS consoles (or: "everything except Atari 8-bit computers"
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Hmm. I'm not sure it was like that. The Alcyon compiler didn't produce very optimized code. You can tell just by looking at the earlier versions of TOS. Let alone that the Alcyon toolset was extremely primitive and awfully slow to compile.
I didn't use Alycon too much. Initially I didn't have a hard disk, and compiling from floppies with Alycon was unbearable. I mostly used Megamax tools, much more user friendly, let alone from floppies. Megamax compiler produced faster and more compact code. But the compiler provided by later version of the Atari Developer Kit was Mark Williams C. I didn't use MWC much either. Eventually Lattice C become the most popular compiler for the Atari ST.
There was also Turbo C, a port of Borland compiler for the PC. But was released only on Germany?
In anycase, you can find several versions on: https://www.dev-docs.org/docs/
Turbo C/Pure C was by far the most popular C compiler in Germany, which meant great support by various GEM libraries.
It's unfortunate that the sources for Milan TOS aren't available. Milan claimed in 1999 that they recompiled TOS 4.x with a more modern compiler.
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The NES didn't dominate every market and was far from being a dominant force in Europe. The 2600 was also much cheaper, I picked up mine with the 32-in-1 cartridge.
Looking at how much stuff Atari still had when they liquidated their inventory, they could've easily bundled the XEGS with six games and 12 joysticks
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Lots of early articles about the ST contain errors and I guess the author had little time to write a good review (or didn't have a review unit at all). Of course the 260ST had the same connectors as the 520ST, so the difference is just the memory and price. "Kurzerhand verdoppelt" just means that Atari doubled the RAM capacity, not that it's any easier for users to upgrade.
Other sources indicate that the 520ST was sold in Germany along with the 260ST, but the 520ST was sold together with disk drive and monitor while the 260ST was sold without either. I can't confirm this, my first ST was the 520STM (connected to a SCART TV
)- by that time the ST lineup made more sense -
It was on the market for a while - Atari advertised the 260ST twice in Germany:
https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;pic=165
https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;pic=166
There's also a review of the 260ST: http://stcarchiv.de/hc1985/12/atari-260-st
All STs had at least 512 KB RAM, although there were plans for 128KB and 256KB STs at one point. Hatari supports both memory configurations.
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Lynx User Magazine 6 and two issues of Atari Entertainment are here:
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1. No support for ST Low (and most ST Low software wouldn't work anyway)
3. No.
4. The Coldfire is not a superset of the 060 instructions. Software which was designed for the Falcon won't work (no DSP).
6. FireTOS is a modified version of TOS 4.x with various enhancements.
Don't think of the FireBee as a super ST or Falcon, it's more like a successor to the Milan or Medusa, i.e. a machine for GEM software.
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Didn't the Mega ST gain some traction with desktop publishing folks?
Burda, one of the biggest publishers in Germany, did the layout on TTs well into the 90's. They were even using custom keyboards.
Lots of smaller publishers used the Mega ST and later TT, especially in Germany. German ST-Magazin introduced a magazine within a magazine that was all about DTP and featured a list of printing companies you could use to professionally print your Calamus documents. Of course, if you had some spare money, you could buy a Linotype and connect it to your Atari.
Back on topic:
I switched from C64 to ST because the Amiga was too expensive
Didn't regret it though.Then later I switched (but still kept) my Falcon for a PC because of the Internet.
In 2004 I bought my first Mac because I started writing for a Mac magazine.
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Not to hijack your post here but what other TOS patches are out there?
There were dozens of TOS patches to fix bugs or enhance parts of the OS. TOSPATCH is a program that allows you to selectively apply patches and generate a patched TOS image.
KAOS was probably one of the more extensive ones, there's the TOS 1.7 by Level 16, TEX and TNT-Crew and a TOS 2.08 for the STE that is a backport of TOS 4.x. The TOS v4.04 used by the FireBee and CT60 also include enhancements as did the Milan TOS (TOS 4.08).
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Alternate Atari History
in Atari General
Posted
Even in an alternate history, it might take too long for Sega and Atari to break the exclusivity contracts through lawsuit. The contracts only worked because of the Master System's poor performance in Japan and NA. Nintendo obviously had very strong first-party titles, system sellers, which in turn attracted other companies to develop for the NES.
- Let Sega have a strong mascot early in the Master System's life. Sonic 1985!
- Both Sega and Atari should realise much sooner that gaming has moved on from early 80's arcade ports. If they can't innovate, let them have faster copy machines!
- Nintendo were actually quite hesitant to fully invest into the video game market - and they licensed their arcade games to other companies. Maybe the people at Atari were big fans of the toy company from Kyoto and made a much more general deal that allows to port any Nintendo game to any Atari video game system for the next ten years!
So no more Nintendo exclusives. Whatever Miyamoto-san comes up with will appear a couple of months later on the 7800 and in an awfully mutilated form on the 2600. Fortunately for Nintendo, the deal will run out by 1989. Unfortunately for Nintendo, Miyamoto-san left the company for Sega years before then.