frogstar_robot
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Posts posted by frogstar_robot
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You can't compare until you try out better controllers. If you get used to Atari 800 joysticks, all other joysticks seem inferior including modern XBOX joysticks. A5200 are useable if they are working, but pac-man definitely is better with the A800 type joystick.
If you mean a quality item with a ball top and leaf switches then I'll mostly agree with you. But the original Atari joysticks wear out quickly and an extended session always gives me a case of "Atari Thumb".
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It's also important to note that to many less enlightened people, the acronym DOS is only associated with Microsoft's MSDOS which was the operating system that IBM PC/AT and Compatible machines ran in the 80s and early 90s. For instance, if you ask your average windows-junkie IT guy or GeekSquad tech what DOS is, they will tell you that it's the OS that PCs used before Windows. As stated above, the pure and correct meaning for the acronym, DOS is DISK OPERATING SYSTEM.
It's worse than that. If somebody sees me working in a command shell they'll invariably say something like "What are you doing in DOS?"
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I got mine, and it worked fine the first time I used it, but the second session the TV kept losing color. I have a Sony Trinitron CRT television that has never had problems with console video signals before. Is this a known issue with the FB2?
This happens with both FB2s and classic 2600 hardware that has been modified to output composite. What the TIA throws out isn't exactly regulation NTSC video though old TVs receiving it through an RF modulator don't have trouble with it. Running the output of the FB2 through a time base corrector might help but that isn't exactly common hardware.
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Tac-Scan has to be one of the more underappreciated ones, always my favorite in the arcades back then.
Seconded. I loved that game.
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The VIC was cheap, & there were PETs in schools. Parents bought the VIC for their kids because it was a trivial investment, so that their kids might not grow up "Computer Illiterate". Sold units, but the machine was so bad that VERY FEW kids used it for anything, other than a stepping-stone to purchasing a C64, or going on to a bright future in Computer Illiteracy. lol. All of the 30-45 year olds that make up the so-called "Digital Divide", nowadays, were in all probability, VIC users. LOL!
Linus Torvald's first machine was a Vic-20. He seems fairly computer literate to me.
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But SIO port has the COMMAND/MOTOR/etc. which require a PIA would digital joysticks for complete compatibility.
If we're only making a few small changes to the 400 to emphasize it as a game console then there is no reason to leave the PIA out. Especially since it is supposed to be both a console first and an entry level A8 second.
If Atari had done this I do forsee one unhappy side effect. This machine would have had the highest installed base likely and would have been the development house target. Even less software would have been written for higher memory configurations of the A8 chipset.
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Why is it that dreams always end before the really good part happens? WHY????
I had some that didn't when I was a teenager.
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As has already been mentioned here but many arcades 79-84 had pokeys sound installed in them, same as Atari A8 though some arcades had 2 of them. For some newer arcade that had a distinctive "synthy" sound to them (GaPlus that someone posted comes to mind) it sounds just fine.
POKEY in that situation is slightly different animal. Arcade machines had more CPU to spare to drive POKEY. I wouldn't be surprised if many of those machines had a CPU and memory dedicated to the POKEY to create a sound system within the cab. So an arcade machine could spend resources diddling POKEY(or even up to four as you say) that an A8 doesn't have and still have grunt left over to drive the IO and the graphics.
I've also read about experiments in dynamically changing the clock that drives POKEY. I don't know if any arcade cabs did that but that is another dimension of POKEY unavailable to a stock A8.
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So you need a slightly bigger FPGA. Not much of a difference. The 1541 isn't exactly hard to emulate.
Though I have to wonder here. Vice and all other competent Commodore emulators have to emulate the 1541/71 drive logic in order to run everything. How hard would it be to lash that emulation to a hardware adapter so that APE-like peripheral emulation could come to the Commodores?
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That's already been done years ago, but requires MS-DOS ofcourse.
It apparently is difficult enough that only one old PC implementation exists and one viable modern hardware replacement exists. A custom FPGA certainly doesn't match the ease of 10 bucks worth of breadboard parts. The best A8 interfaces are USB and indeed have custom chips but that isn't necessary to have a serial port based solution that still outperforms the standard A8 floppy drives.
Not needing a DOS isn't a huge advantage. Things like games can get by with minimal loaders. I haven't seen that the requirement for a DOS inherently makes other 8-bits harder to use or necessarily saps a lot of system resources. I notice that even today peripherals tend not to be that smart. Excessive logic in them wasn't a great idea then and usually isn't now.
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I don't see any hardware problems? It's just a standard DD drive mech with some small computer. The only "bad" thing about 1541s is the slow CBM DOS routines which can be replaced by uploading own code to the drive.
The small computer IS the problem. It does very little to enhance the drive over what was available for other micros and it must be emulated or replicated if you want to replace it with anything. With other micros, it is only necessary to understand the protocol and timing requirements to emulate/replace their drives. This certainly isn't trivial to do but can be done with software and minimal additional hardware. With the C-64, speaking the drive protocol is of course a minimal challenge though that is replaced by the much more difficult problem of emulating another 6502 based machine.
Though I have to wonder here. Vice and all other competent Commodore emulators have to emulate the 1541/71 drive logic in order to run everything. How hard would it be to lash that emulation to a hardware adapter so that APE-like peripheral emulation could come to the Commodores?
And as I said in the earlier post. An unmodded 800XL suffices to run most things and that is a 64K machine. It is only excluded from a small handful of games, a rather more significant selection of demos, and limited audience utility software like BBSes that buffered everything up in big ramdisks. The size of that big memory library is probably comparable to C128-only library.
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But impressive things have been done to ameliorate those limitations and I always respect a good hack. Anyhoo, I'll let them have their fastloaders if they quit banging on about our memory expansions.
Extra RAM on A8 = homebrew hardware
Fastloader on C64 = software
Up to 128k was factory supported and configurations beyond that were commercially sold. Furthermore, use of up to 128k is common and customary though an unmodded 800XL suffices to run 99% of what's out there.
The fastloader may indeed be software but if you want to talk about hardware the C64 disc system is quite the nasty can of worms. It's nice the things can be used as a sort of co-processor and I did envy the larger stock capacity back in day but they largely preclude the sort of peripheral emulation that is common with A8s. I can emulate a stack of drives of arbitrary size up to 16M, printers, and modems with 10 bucks in Rat Shack parts and an old laptop. The best analogous solution for the C64 is the rather expensive and limited production 1541 Ultimate to emulate a 1541 to use SD cards....and SD card drives are an A8 option as well. It's good that was done but relatively dumb peripherals seem the better trade-off here.
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It's really interesting. They really hammer their argues over and over again... I'd bet that they finally will stop, if we all say that the C64 was the all over "far superior" machine. But why spreading a lie?
The retarded CPU and the hard colour limits, the 3.6kHz restriction, only 3 channels, the huge borders, the slow Floppy access
... just NO ! It's only if you like this combinaton, you could get happy with it.
But impressive things have been done to ameliorate those limitations and I always respect a good hack. Anyhoo, I'll let them have their fastloaders if they quit banging on about our memory expansions.
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yes you could do Star Raiders in colour. the only potential stumbling block i can see is the use of "particle" graphics for explosions, which drags down the 1.8mhz atari chip so is certain to have a similar impact on the c64. however i would have thought that the use of c64 sprites to generate the rest of the graphics would compensate somewhat.
There was a hack floating around this forum a year or two ago that cut the number of particles down to avoid the slowdown. I remember reading the posts and playing with the bin but I had no luck searching out. Perhaps someone with a better memory....
Star Raiders is also interesting in that it was the killer app for the 400/800 launch. That game running on store displays sold some A8s. It is also notable for packing a fair amount of depth into an 8K cart.
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In my opinion (all we have here is opinion), the C64 didn't need to be backward-compatible with the Vic-20 because the C64 was a quantum leap in performance - graphics and sound-wise, and perhaps in other ways3 of the period.....not to mention the crazy world now....thank goodness for Geritol and Viagra.
We technically enlightened types should not call a "substantial advance" a "quantum leap". Idiot marketing types started doing that because that particular phrase from particle physics sounds all hi-tech and reminds people of an action adventure time-travel show with Scott Bakula. It sounds hi-tech in the same way boops, beeps, and flashing lights in a Buck Rogers episode sounds hi-tech. To anyone who knows the least thing about either science or technology it's bad acting. In nature, a "quantum leap" is the "smallest possible step". Now I'm not a fan of the C64 but it was a big step forward from the Vic and a significant milestone in consumer computing. I wouldn't denigrate it with the term "quantum leap".
The phenomenon from particle physics that is closest to what is meant by the asinine use of "quantum leap" is "tunneling". Tunneling is when a system in a stable energy state is able to suddenly jump to an otherwise forbidden state due to uncertainty effects. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate well to marketspeke.
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And what makes you think a hardware clone is going to "act, look, and sound like a real Atari 2600"?I say clone, but one of my hopes is that 'Atari' will finally allow someone to make a new updated version of the real Atari 2600 or Atari 7800. 'Atari' wouldn't have to do much of anything, just give permission. They might say that someone can make a real Atari, but it can't have the Atari name on it. No problem. As long as the guts work as expected, who cares about the name? (Just no cat names!
). . . and after all you are video modding your 2600s to get better pictures out of them than from "a real Atari 2600". Doesn't make sense to me. If you want the real thing, use the real thing.There is a big difference between emulated video and crisp, clean video from a real modded Atari 2600. There's no law that says you have to play Atari on a TV in fuzzy vision with patterns and wavy lines all over the screen. As long as the games work correctly and sound the way they are supposed to, why not have a crystal clear screen?
Weren't you calling for a brainstorming?Feel free to brainstorm all you want, just know that emulation is a no-brainer. Of course we could use emulation. Emulation is improving, but it still kind of sucks compared to the real thing. A day will come when emulation will be so much like the real thing that nobody will be able to tell the difference. That day isn't here yet.
As I mentioned in another post, utilizing video from the "real thing" is getting to be a harder and harder proposition. For many, it no longer suffices to simply hook up a 2600 to a TV or monitor because video devices these days are implicitly assuming highly compliant NTSC signals. What the TIA throws out is anything but although TVs and monitors from back in the day handled it fine. Anymore, playing the "real thing" also means having a functional vintage monitor to play it with. I suspect normalizing the TIA output in such a way that developer intent is rendered accurately on a monitor display would be a formidable project in it's own right. And I'm not talking about super hi-def output or crazy expansions where you might as well do your gaming on a Nintendo DS or something. I mean a steady picture that plays on a modern LCD or plasma the same way it would on a 25 year old CRT.
Take a look at the Flashback 2. It is a highly competent stab at the subject of this topic. Lo and behold, it has the same issues that a composite modded "real thing" has with many modern displays.
I'll also note that if you want to be strictly Alan Turing about it that a re-implementation is a re-implementation is a re-implementation whether done in software or hardware. Other than having fewer translation steps for the output and input (which I concede can cause major and problematic issues) hardware re-implementation has no intrinsic property that makes it more accurate. Atariksi may argue plausibly that consumer PCs have properties that necessarily limit emulation accuracy but that doesn't preclude platforms that CAN emulate every bit as well as hardware.
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Yeah, basically that's my point. The reason Atari doesn't look to good on modern TV's, is they have simply moved on and aren't properly compatible with the signal the 2600 outputs. That it works at all is a not so minor miracle that people seem to ignore though. But yeah, a custom chip added after TIA basically, to pre process the image into something a modern day TV is compatible with is basically what I'm talking about. You could even have a few built in features like auto stretching, fill screen, or a more traditional look...
Maybe that TIA signal modernizer is the best place to start. It would be of help to people with composite/SVHS modded 2600s and it would also help with the FlashBack II. I understand the FBII and composite modded 2600s are both subject to many TVs not working correctly with them. My own experiences with an FBII are as follows
circa 1999 Phillips TV - picture is in black and white
Ikegami monitor (not sure of model) - no picture
circa 2003 projector - rolling torn picture with flashes of color
32" 1080p Spectre TV - mostly works. some titles like Yar's return have some distortion and/or cause the TV to lose sync occasionally. some graphics show downscaling artifacts same any other NTSC I feed this TV.
Oddly enough, the most modern of the display devices I have access to worked the best though noticibly impaired at times. I know the FBII is working correctly. It is just that it successfully re-implements the TIA design and that was meant to work with analog TVs that could handle some fast and loose video just because most of them at the time were connected to rabbit ears.
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Obviously since we've been discussing 'computers' I opted to leave out the VCS and family since it would be clearly out-gunned in on-screen appearances when compared to the the Ultimax & Commodore-GS consoles
I hear 2600 Pac-Man and Donkey Kong sound effects used all over the places in movies and commercials. I suppose those noises must be included in stock collections of foley effects. They're probably described in generic terms like Video Game Bleeping #3 and those using them may not have any idea where they came from. Used that way they only get funnier over time because games have used predominantly digitized sound since the early 90s but older people who didn't play video games probably still think of "beeps and boops" in connection with video games.
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I had a thought about Rybag's 480i mode. I'm NOT parroting the following speculation as fact. I'm wondering if it is possible. In 480i, the A8 can take advantage of alternating fields to double vertical resolution. So we can have potentially a 320x480 interlaced 2-bit color screen. At least if I understand what has been done thus far correctly. I know the 160 modes can be doubled.
It seems to me that rather than double the vertical resolution of the 320 mode, the luminance possibilities could be doubled. I assume DLIs can still only be set over a full field of a given mode so two successive lines of a 480 mode would share the DLI. What if we treat each 1x2 "cell" as one pixel? This object would have four states: both on, both off, top on only, bottom on only. So that is four color states per line if we treat such a screen as a 320x200 display. Additionally, each "cell" is also subject to artifacting rules on NTSC composite displays.
It seems some nice pix could be made this way. (I could care less if the results aren't seen as "good" by C-64 fans.)
This much is an obvious use of Rybag's technique. If DLIs can at least sometimes be set on just the individual field lines then even more interesting possibilities open up. Alas, I suspect it can't work that way though I'd love to be proven wrong on that.
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I have to go with A8 here. The A8 is a superset of the 5200 capabilities and all of the 5200's titles with the unfortunate exception of Adventure II have been converted. Minus Adventure 2, you can play all 5200 and A8 titles on an A8.
Another post mentioned the small handful of 5200 titles that benefit from absolute positioning or trackball control. There is no reason in principle why the A8 couldn't also enjoy such benefits but in practice most titles are joystick or joystick+keyboard. Still, if you want to whip a Missile Command cursor about the screen or weave graceful curves in Star Raiders then the 5200 has an edge there.
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I look at it this way: Atari should have given it 40 bytes for the playfield in the first place.
It'd be nice if Atari had done any number of things but it is very easy to lose sight of just how expensive all of this stuff was back in 1977. They were trying to hit a price point of less than $200 in 1978 dollars. Remember how expensive the XBox360 was at launch? This is what Atari and everybody else getting into this market was contending with. Every feature in the machine had a tangible cost that would impact the bottom line. It wasn't like today where the equivalent of $10 1978 dollars will buy you a well featured single board computer.
Contrast the 2600 feature set with the A8's feature set. That was designed a year later and was originally intended for a follow on console before being re-imagined as a Home Computer. Even a 400 cost something just shy of $500. And we're talking about something that corrects all the 2600 deficiencies as Atari saw them.
Considerable cleverness went to producing even what the 2600 could do and still be affordable enough to stick under a Christmas tree.
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Thanks for the excellent info. I saw an APE interface from a seller on eBay that I plan to purchase a lot of things from (seller has a lot of titles for $4). I suppose with some research I could use the APE Face interface I saw in the auction...We're definitely talking NTSC so I may try to pick up an 800XL (or maybe a boxed 1200XL) from the same seller...
I appreciate all the info...
An unmodded 1200XL has unique compatibility issues compared to both XEs and the more common members of the XL line the 600XL and the 800XL. That machine definitely has it's points as a collectible so you may want to have one but it won't do as well software compatibility wise as a 600XL, 800XL, 130XE, or XEGS. Those four are the most common NTSC A8s. Of those the 600XL will need a pretty much mandatory memory upgrade. The 800XL will play probably 98% or 99% of the post 1982 titles and can be modded to be identical with the 130XE capability wise if that is REALLY wanted. The 600XLs and 800XLs also have build quality that is light years ahead of the XE line.
Go for the 800XL with MAYBE a memory upgrade.
And I wasn't talking about the old Ape-Face interfaces from back in the day. I was thinking of SIO2PC cables that can connect either to RS232 serial ports or the newer ones that are USB. These cables allow you to use a PC or laptop as a stack of A8 floppy drives, hard drive, modem or printer. The simplest varieties can be built from about 10 bucks worth of Rat Shack parts.
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I guess I mean is there anything that would be a good focus? I really like a lot of the 400/800 Sirius titles, but those seem to be more expensive. Also, I'd like to grab some items in the original manufacturers box...I'd like to get things that hold their value, but also things I'll enjoy...
BTW, I'm from the NES generation (born in 82)...I just got into the Atari computers for some reason.
You may want to pick up a 130XE or 800XL to play titles written to the machines that came out after the 800. And if getting an 800XL, it may not be a bad idea to install at least a 130XE compatible memory upgrade as there are a handful of titles that take advantage of the extra banks of ram. If we're talking NTSC then you can pretty much stop there. If PAL there are demos and games written in the last ten years that can use banked memory up to 576K.
I would also recommend an either an APE compatible interface or SIO2SD-style device. Of the two, the APE interface and software are easier to come by though either will facilitate using software downloaded from the net and either is more reliable then your good ole 1050.
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So, keep at it, please! But do me one favour... next time, please use ZIP and not RAR to compress. I don't seem to have an easy way to uncompress a RAR file. I'm using a 30 day trial version, and I'm not keen on spending $30 to buy it.
If using Windows, give Peazip or IZarc a try. Both are free and unpack many many kinds of archives.
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It's funny.. In the other thread I say the A8 can't do this, can't do that, and I get shouted at 'oh yes it can!'. But when I've got my Atari hat on and say Atari can do this and can do that, I still get told it can't.. Oh the irony.. I think I just laughed up my pelvis
We A8 fans aren't a monolith. I have no problem acknowledging the A8s shortcomings. I'm just not going to cry then bow and scrape before the Altar Of C-64 because the likes of Rockford say that I should. I wasn't even saying that a good Galaga is impossible on the A8. I just have doubts about the 7800 codebase being a good starting point for one. Though I'd be delighted if you proved me wrong in this.
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Question about the vcs adapter
in Atari 5200
Posted
I'm pretty sure it works just like the Coleco one: pretty much a complete 2600 in the adapter.