carlsson

After a couple of hours where I thought I was going insane, it struck me that the default configuration in Whittaker's driver is that voices 1 & 2 are merged into a 16-bit voice. It appears that arpeggio (trill) and vibratio effects don't work at all in that one, and I'm not even sure if the different types of distortion yield the intended effects. Once I used logic channels 2 and 3 (mapped onto POKEY voices 3 and 4), I got all the effects to work as advertised. Perhaps there is a way to get at least vibratos to work on the 16-bit channel too, but at the moment I'll move onto my newfound knowledge and use sounds and effects according to that.

Sure. If we count the actual titles advertised there, I'm getting to 16 + 16 + 16 = 48 titles on the C64, and 19 + 25 = 44 titles on the VIC-20 which means that by Spring 1984 when the VIC-20 was just about to get discontinued, Commodore themselves advertised 4 more software packages for the less than two years old C64 than they advertised for the more than three years old VIC. But yes, after adding Infocom adventures and more which Commodore actually did sell under their own label, in the long run the C64 probably edges out the VIC regarding "1st party" software. In both cases, I'd say that after ~3 years on the market, the number of 1st party titles greatly declined as there begun to arrive plenty of quality 3rd party software. Infocom is an interesting case as they released Atari 8-bit versions of their adventures in 1983 but not until 1984 they grew tired (?) of Commodore's distribution and released their own versions of their own games on the C64. Obviously in a count of "Commodore" software, we can't count Infocom's own Atari releases, but should we count Commodore's releases as unique Commodore software?

I think it was the 8-Bit Guy's video above that brought the subject. He listed 40 popular games of the era: Asteroids, Battlezone, Breakout, Centipede, Choplifter, Congo Bongo, Defender, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Frogger, Galaga, Galaxian, Gorf, H.E.R.O., Joust, Jr Pac-Man, Jumpman, Lode Runner, Mario Bros, Millipede, Miner 2049'er, Missile Command, Montezuma's Revenge, Moon Patrol, Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pitfall, Pitfall II, Pitstop, Pole Position, Popeye, Q*Bert, Qix, River Raid, Robotron 2084, Space Invaders, Spy Hunter, Zaxxon, Xevious Out of those, I count 6 games by Atari plus at least 15 games from other publishers where Atari for a while held the license for home versions. If it wasn't for the fact that Atari released their own and others' titles for competiting formats under the Atarisoft label, the Atari systems would win hands down which format has the biggest library of these selected games. Obviously Atari could not dictate which formats Sega, Activision, Broderbund, Epyx etc should target, but e.g. the above list of arcade games on the C64 would be reduced from 26 of 40 to only 18 of 40 if Atari never had published C64 games. AtariAge user thetick1 commented that he should make a similar video about which format had the biggest library of Commodore's own games, expecting the C64 to have the biggest library. The numbers I crunched indicates that the VIC-20 might have more of those titles, though as noted above there are some 30-40 educational disk titles for the C64 that would indicate that indeed the C64 has the most Commodore published software. Quite likely the Atari 8-bit has close to zero of those titles, as most of Commodore's games were clones or licensed arcade games that probably appeared on the Atari without the intervention of Commodore, and the utility and productivity software most of the time would already have counter options on the Atari.

I vote that RedThunder gets a bonus point!

Bill: I did take tapes into consideration. If you have a better or more complete source than c64tapes.org, I'll gladly use it. Also if you have a list of Commodore software on disk, which needs to be in the range of at least 65-70 titles to break even. Considering third party software is out of the question since the topic just recently changed to which format has the largest library of first party (or licensed) software. A number of those VIC-20 cartridges were licensed and unlicensed clones of arcade games but I'll count those anyway since Commodore released them commercially, hoping that Namco, Taito etc wouldn't notice.

Thanks for the price info. I kind of expected a little more aggressive pricing than so, but I realize that every $10 in 1977 equals $40 today so it is easy to be blinded by the numbers themselves without considering the buying power back then. The RCA Studio II also was some $40-50 less than the Atari VCS so when it comes to competition you could get a Studio II with two extra games for the price of just the VCS.

Honestly I think the VIC-20 has more official Commodore software than the C64 has. Using the VIC-20 Cartlist and Mayhem64's collection of C64 cartrdges, the two sites vic20tapes.org and c64tapes.org, I'm getting these rough numbers of how many titles were released by Commodore: VIC-20: 49 cartridges (including utilities but not pure memory expansions), 145 tapes, likely 0 floppy disks = total 194 unique titles C64: 43 cartridges (including some utilities, rare German releases and a few C64GS ones), 83 tapes and unknown number of floppy disks = total 126 unique titles I don't know if there is a definitive list of disk releases, but Commodore needed to put out at least 68 of them, both games and utilities, to equal the VIC-20.

A couple of possibly frequently asked questions: 1) How many Atari 8-bit cartridges are known to exist? I tried to look it up a while ago but my Google-fu failed me. On the C64 side, Mayhem's collection is usually quoted to have around 300 unique cartridges. 2) What was the capacity of Atari 8-bit cartridges around 1984? Back then C64 cartridges were 8-16K each, and anything larger meant tape or disk release. Not until much later, bank switched games of greater capacity emerged. If the Atari easily can take 32-64K per cartridge, I understand why it would have more cartridge releases for the more popular games.

I might be forgetting something, but have you unearthed any RRP lists, in particular during the later part of the Studio II lifetime? In another thread about the Unisonic Champion 2711 (see the Intellivision programming section) there was a feature from Popular Mechanics, December 1977 where they did a round-up of existing video game systems. They listed the recommended retail price for the Studio II at $150 which should be the same as the launch price in April. I would've imagined the price had dropped after more than six months, or perhaps RCA held their prices until they dropped the system completely?

Thanks for the link. It means the APF MP-1000 was already out by then, a full year earlier than I had anticipated though $50 higher than in my prediction. I would think the Channel F would have dropped in price in a year and possibly the Studio II but since Popular Mechanics had obtained the RRP from manufacturers, I suppose the prices still stood although some retailers perhaps sold them for less. The price per game seems to be the same all over the line. The magazine doesn't seem to have done much of a comparison between the systems, which they thought offered the best value for money.

So the market at the end of 1977 would look something like this: Bally Astrocade: $300 (launched in Oct 1977) Atari VCS/2600: $200 (launched in Sep 1977) Unisonic Champion 2711: $150, games $20 each (brand new) RCA Studio II: ?? (launched in Jan 1977 at $150) Fairchild Channel F: ?? (launched in Nov 1976 at $170) A few systems not yet on the market: APF MP-1000: $130 (launched in Dec 1978?) 1292 APVS family: $130-ish (launched in 1978? sometimes claimed to be ahead of the Channel F but I think that myth is debunked) Odyssey^2: $199 (launched in Dec 1978) That is only counting cartridge ROM based systems. Sure, the Unisonic is superior to the Studio II and at least is better at displaying text than the Channel F. I understand that the Atari VCS struggled in the beginning when all it had were rather simple games and it had a bunch of technical problems to solve, so perhaps there still was a little room on the market for a $150 system, before the class of 1978 arrived.

It is a common misconception that BASIC V2 on the VIC-20 and C64 is identical to BASIC V2 on the PET/CBM series. Actually Commodore took BASIC V4 on the CBM 4032/8032, cut away commands for disk access and garbage collection and relabeled it as V2. Yes, it was cost saving - in particular for the VIC-20 - but most of the bug fixes in V4 carried over to the BASIC in the home computers. Also all chips were newly manufactured, so it is not a case of having leftover ROM chips to use, rather that Commodore didn't want to throw in more than 20K ROM (8K BASIC, 8K KERNAL, 4K CHAR) in these computers. Sure they could have added back disk access on the C64, possibly at the cost of having 4K RAM beyond what BASIC can access.

So for a POKEY newbie, are these the distortion values as used in David Whittaker's routine? ; Descriptions grabbed from "Mapping the Atari" ; $00 five bit, then 17 bit, polys ; $20 five bit poly only ; $40 five bit, then four bit, polys ; $60 five bit poly only ; $80 17 bit poly only ; $a0 no poly counters (pure tone) ; $c0 four bit poly only ; $e0 no poly counters (pure tone) I'm also trying to figure out the EffectsTab. So far these are wild guesses from my side, anyone who has the answer is welcome to correct me. EffectsTab: .BYTE 0, $A0, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 1 = Silence .BYTE 9, $C0, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 2 = Bass .BYTE 3, $80, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 3 = Snare w/ tone .BYTE 1, $80, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 4 = Snare toneless .BYTE 4, $A0, 0, 1 ; ENVELOPE 5 = Long vibrato? Medium fade .BYTE 5, $A0, 0, 1 ; ENVELOPE 6 = Short vibrato? Partial fade .BYTE 4, $A0, 3, 0 ; ENVELOPE 7 = Arpeggio minor .BYTE 4, $A0, 4, 0 ; ENVELOPE 8 = Arpeggio major .BYTE 7, $C0, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 9 = Melody no vib? .BYTE 7, $A0, 0, 1 ; ENVELOPE 10 = Melody vibrato? .BYTE 5, $A0, 0, 1 ; ENVELOPE 11 = Short vibrato? Partial fade .BYTE 5, $C0, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 12 = Short no vib? Partial fade .BYTE 8, $A0, $C, 0 ; ENVELOPE 13 = Octave, full fade .BYTE 5, $A0, $C, 0 ; ENVELOPE 14 = Octave, partial fade .BYTE 5, $A0, 3, 0 ; ENVELOPE 15 = Arpeggio minor, partial fade .BYTE 6, $C0, 0, 0 ; ENVELOPE 16 = Staccato no vib?

Aha, ENVELOPE points to the EffectsTab list which sets an actual envelope, distortion, trill (arpeggio) and an effect byte (glissando etc?). That makes far more sense.

I'm not sure how envelopes are addressed in this routine. I realize that envelope 1 is silence (Env0) but the demo song seems to use envelopes 1-7 and 11-13 while the code has labels for Env0 to Env9. Is the macro syntax in MADS some kind of octal form so 11 equals 8+1 = 9 and 13 equals 8+3 = 11? Besides I think tbe Env6 label is wrong by one line, shouldn't it begin with BYTE $A? I believe the first byte in each envelope sets the tone, the following bytes set the volume. I also rearranged the note macros so it starts at E1 (lowest note) and ends at C6 (highest note). I understand that many sound chips work the other way around, so the highest possible value equals the lowest frequency and vice versa, but musically it doesn't make sense to address octaves backwards. (I'm not taking this too seriously, just trying to see if I understand it)

Videocart 2 is a Combat game. You can find most (?) games here: http://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/pg70-fairchild.htm#page=games

Step #1 finished: adapting the code to DASM format. I only slowed down the demo tune a little to verify that everything works. It generates a PRG file that has the same format as the XEX file. While I don't understand the contents of the format, it works in Altirra which is my primary goal. dw-dasm.zip

Wednesday February 13th 2019, meaning we'll be playing Qix for an entire year?

Ok. I am a DASM guy by heart so I'll see if I can adapt the syntax before downloading yet another cross assembler.

Ok, so the makefile that suggests CC65 should be ignored, just use MADS or some other cross assembler as appropriate? No need for additional libs beyond what the assembler source contains?

In 1992, US Gold released Summer Games, Summer Games II and California Games II for the Amiga. However they never ported Winter Games, World Games nor California Games 1. I suppose the main reason for porting Summer Games eight years after the 8-bit versions was to have some multi sports event ready for Barcelona '92, even if it had aged quite a lot. It seems that US Gold secured the rights for Lillehammer '94 which probably was why they never bothered porting Winter Games.

Yes, the Sun "shoe boxes" are neat in size, a bit of a precursor of the Mini-ITX form factor. However I used & administrated them so much in the late 90's that eventually I grew tired of them. I think the LX series were the hottest in that form factor, at least before upgrades.

Intellivision: Grail of the Gods - 60 min. New homebrew that over last week was incrementally improved with graphics, sounds, music etc. Based on a DarkBASIC program from 2010 that got ported to the Tandy MC-10, later on the TI-99/4A, now Intellivision and I saw there is a version under way for the Colecovision too, perhaps more formats as applicable.

It seems Bob Yannes was looking for 32 voices but only 1 oscillator, which I suppose means all the voices would share the same waveform, filter and other settings. While it had opened for a great deal of polyphony, it also would've made the chip much less flexible in how it can combine different types of sounds (or angry bees in a wet cloth if you belong to that camp). Having a chip with 32 individual oscillators would have been spectacular but probably too much silicon even if they could finish it in time for manufacturing. Perhaps something like 3 oscillators with 2-3 voices (notes) per oscillator had been doable in the best of worlds which would mean most of the arpeggio effects would never have emerged on the SID if people could make an oscillator play chords and secondary melody lines naturally.