rpiguy9907

That was my point the ADAM was only good for playing simple arcade games that mostly ran on single screens. Pacman and Buck Rogers are really primitive games - the Colecovision versions were certainly much better than the C64 versions, but the games are very primitive compared to what was available for the C64. So it is mainly a matter of preference, if you want to play simple games that are ported from old arcade games, the Colecovision would have been a better choice. Those ports were definitely better on the Coleco/ADAM. The C64 had games in its library that were much more impressive, but if your goal is to play the best version of Pac Man then in 1984 the Coleco/ADAM version was the way to go. And since you mention modern Colecovision games... the modern C64 games are much more impressive. Mayhem in Monster Land came out 20 years ago and looks and scrolls better than anything the Colecovision could do, for example.

What you consider to be a "best video game" is highly subjective. The Colecovision/ADAM had the best conversions of old, simple, arcade titles with no smooth scrolling and unimpressive gameplay. Yes the games looked very good, but they were inferior in both gameplay and technology to the newer, original games being released on the Atari and Commodore platforms. You would never see something cutting edge like Rescue on Fractalus on the Colecovision/ADAM. The Commodore 64 already had a software library 10 times as large by 1985 (though of varying quality). Nothing on the Colecovision animates nearly as well as Impossible Mission or Winter Games. No RPGs like Bard's Tale. Nothing comparable to Seven Cities of Gold. The games available on the Colecovision were well behind what was available for Commodore and Atari by 1985.

ADAM did not have the best video games. It had a small library of original titles and mostly ran Colecovision games, of which only 129 were ever released in the US (I think 145 world wide). It had tiny monochrome sprites and no smooth scrolling. To access video memory you hand to go through a slow port on the video controller. It was terrible. The Atari ST was only faster in CPU speed. It did not have smooth scrolling, like the Amiga, or sprites, or a blitter (at least initially). The Atari ST was a more elegant design, in my opinion, but in raw, pixel pushing power the Amiga wins.

There are a couple of cheapish, empty cases on eBay right now, but none of them include the keyboard. Might be better off just building a wooden box for it and then building a PS/2 keyboard adaptor and hooking up and external keyboard to it. https://knzl.at/ps2-keyboard-for-apple-ii/

Ultimate Micro Transwarp GS has been delayed at least another two to three months. This is very frustrating for those of us who paid in June for an estimated July delivery. I wonder what their track record is on delivering products. I am starting to get nervous.

Thanks! I googled it but got nothing. Mystery solved.

Anyone recognize this? Came with an eBay ST in the joystick port.

Commodore marketing did a great job of marketing the VIC as a more serious computer than it actually was. See the attached chart. Commodore Interface magazine covered the VIC20 extensively, though interestingly most of the advertising was for PET products through most of 1981.

Um, I am the OP (perhaps you need the optometrist, lol. ) and I specifically pointed out things like IC count and manufacturing cost, of which nothing was mentioned in the small, unrelated news blurb about a price cut in the user group magazine. Commodore: The Amiga Years does go into detail about the A1000 being made in Japan instead of Hong Kong making it pricier, as well as the added cost of the mezzanine PCB for Kickstart. The book is also very clear that very few dealers sold the A1000 the first year due to mistrust of Commodore.

Yes it was better than Commodore BASIC 2.0. Bill Gates himself worked on Color BASIC and was quit proud of it. https://archive.org/stream/80-U.S._Volume_IV_Number_3_1981-05_80-Northwest_Publishing_US#page/n9/mode/2up Extended Color Was even better with five byte floating point just like the Commodores.

Legend has it that the engineers were arguing over whether to put 6K or 4K in the machine. 6K would have allowed for a larger character buffer. Tramiel supposedly solved the arguement by declaring 5K as the answer. This left the VIC with only 512 bytes for the screen, which resulted in the 22 column display (176 pixels wide). That is why the characters are huge.

Thats more of a news blurb, no insights into the discussion.

Did you link to wrong issue I see nothing on 14-15.

It is better than that. Microsoft wanted $1 per copy but Tramiel said something to the effect of I am already married. He negotiated a lifetime license of MS BASIC for somewhere between 25K and 50K depending on who tells the story. All future versions were included but they made some sort of deal over BASIC 7 on the C128 because they needed MS to write a new version of BASIc for the Amiga. BASIC 2 actually had better floating point support than many contemporaries, it was good for business.

The Coco came out later, cost more, and had less RAM. The VIC-20 hit a sweet spot on price and because of it's PET lineage the software market was quick to support it. Software support and great marketing were the real keys to its success. A ton of publishers put out games and applications for it and a lot of commercial applications supported RAM expanders, which were cheap and plentiful. The Coco, Atari, and TI-99/4 never had the software support that the VIC-20 had. You could buy a Coco and have a trickle of commercial games and ten more columns of text, or you could have a VIC-20 with a ton of games and applications. The Apple II had similar software support, but the price was stratospheric compared to the VIC-20.

You can get a working image of the compiler for the C64 version, but not the editor/interpreter disk. This was recently discussed at length here: https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/81989-abacus-tiny-pascal-von-1980-für-c64-und-pet-cbm/ Abacus, circa 1980, published a version of Tiny Pascal for the CBM 4032/8032. You will find many advertisements for it in publications of the time. Later they released a version of Tiny Pascal for the C64 in 1982. They are both exceedingly rare these days. I hope someone stumbles upon them.

Amstrad PcW16, Acorn Communicator...

I thought in the US most 64s were sold with monitors and disk drives.

Correct. I wonder why they removed it from the XL.

The 64s without the cage use the RF shield that goes over the entire motherboard as a heat sink. However I agree it is very possible to run a VIC without and probably varies by revision and packaging (ceramic, plastic, etc.)

This is incorrect, neither the Atari 800 nor the 800XL offered Y/C video. They only offered composite or Luma (monochrome) on the video port. The idea being you would hook to either a composite monitor, or a monochrome monitor. Atari never hooked up the Chroma signal to their video port until the XE-series in 1985. So Commodore was the first to offer it to the mass market, and this also explains why no Y/C monitors appeared for Atari in the 3 year period between when the 800 was released and the C64 was released. Also, this is a topic for another thread, but the 2mhz 8502 in the C128 would clean the clock of a 3.58mhz Z/80 :-)

I would like a US keyboard for the Amiga 500. My A500 has a German keyboard, making typing very challenging.

Just dark and dull, doesn't look like soot.

The heart beat should be more prominent. Great work so far!

Sadly if it were as easy as accelerating an Apple II I think other options would have appeared on the market by now, or even back in the day. I hope A2Heaven can figure out a way to do it that is less costly than the Transwarp method, but I doubt a simple solution would achieve the level of compatibility that the Transwarp and ZipGS achieved.