frogstar_robot

It sounds more like reframing the argument so that you have a strawman to beat the crap out of. The A8 chipset has no "graphics modes" it has line modes which are built into "graphics modes" as well as various ways individual modelines can be affected under anywhere from minimal to moderate CPU intervention which is exactly what Mr. Miner's team intended. It is expected by A8 developers that the graphics hardware will be directed. And yes, quite usable and artful displays can be build with plenty of CPU time left over for other tasks. The rate at which the CPU runs, the DMA, interrupts, Display Lists and so-forth are all of an integrated piece. It is supposed to work that way and Atari devs are quite correct to think "WTH?" when tasked with such facetious argument.

Looking at the specs, they don't seem completely horrible though only having 8 colors is quite the limitation. But then these machines have 640x200 resolutions available. Could be fun watching C-64 fanbois and X1 fanbois going at it over which has the better pictures with the X1 fanbois posting carefully contrived super hi-res photos .

But...but...but...these cheap super powered system can't be programmed with sub-microsecond accuracy. You can't at any given time know where the non-existent raster beam is on an LCD. They're junk I tell you just junk. A8s and Amigas are superior to a Core Duo with a 1GB video card and 4GB of ram for that reason and many others.......... Joking aside there does appear to be a need for better general purpose timers in consumer computers, emulation being one example of the need, but the days of application developers driving the bare metal to do Incredible Things are (sadly) over.

That is a workable solution. Though the developers are getting a point about the GPL3 wrong. The site states they make the firmware for the device available under the GPL3 and that "the code or parts thereof may not be sold". If that is their intent then the GPL3 is the wrong license. Code under either the GPL2 or 3 can indeed be sold though the customer can freely redistribute under the terms of the license. Paying someone for specific improvements is one reason why the license allows this.

Ya know, speaking as someone who grew up loving and still loves things Atari I find that uncool . Many of us here may dislike old Commodore gear or at least love it less than our Atari gear but it isn't wrong for others to love it as much we like our stuff. Aside from imperfect FPGA reproductions and emulation, all of the computers we grew up with are becoming increasingly rare birds. Though I don't have enough space to indulge myself in many such things; I still smile to come across a TI, a C-64, or yes even a Vic-20 in a thrift and hope they find good homes. It wouldn't kill you to just give the stuff to some Commodore guy though much of it seems to command perfectly unreasonable prices on E-Bay and you could get some jollies overcharging there if the thought of putting a smile on a Commodore fan is too much.

PS. The big "B" is in the flowers.

I'll also note this recent addition to the A8's text resources. http://www.atari8.co.uk/lastword/lastword.htm I won't be surprised to see these methods show up A8 editors, terminals, and so-forth.

I provided two links that show it is rational. Yes the C64 can only output 16 actual colors from it's hardware and yes PAL and NTSC quirks and page flipping can be used to generate the appearance of more colors than that. And yes I know that if versions of those techniques are employed on an A8 then the apparent color depth goes up past anything a C64 will be able to do. Nonetheless without extensive register diddling, the A8 320x200 screen has count 'em two colors. This color resolution can be vastly increased vertically but one still only has two colors per scanline. Tricks to get it up horizontally are at least as onerous as the C-64 restrictions on their modes if not more so. Indeed, software mode 320x200 pix (C8 mode say) aren't terribly common. I think my original point fully valid: The C64 can do some amazing things in the right hands and it won't kill us to admit it. And I've already said that I prefer A8s over Commodores but that isn't a need to ensure the A8 must be the winner of every possible comparison. I think making ANY of these old 8-bits exceed what their original designers thought possible is very very cool.

Well perhaps not "easily" and not strict 320x200x16 screens but good results are nonetheless possible with the VIC-II and a C-64 CAN build 16 color 320x200 screens with a mix of liberties and restrictions that isn't open to the A8. A C64 can achieve a fine grained screen with less apparent effort than an A8 can. And what I said about "apparent" colors is not to be neglected. As much as I hate to defend Commies here, it isn't going to kill you to admit that a C-64 can do some amazing things in the right hands: http://www.cascade64.de/csc_graphics.php http://www.studiostyle.sk/dmagic/gallery/gfxmodes.htm

The best thing to do is to never close the thread. After all, two or three months down the road someone will innocently ask something like "Which games were superior on the C-64 and on the A8?" Rather than pointing them at this thread, it starts aaaaaaaaaaalllllll over again. The C-64 can sometimes do better scrolling, has more sprites, can easily do a 320x200 16 color screen, with cleverness can do screens with more apperant colors, often has more flexibility for charmode screens, has a sound chip that that very like a early analog synth and is thus very plastic for music and has some VERY good sidescrollers to it's name. I have no problem giving the 64 those points and some others I no doubt left out. I still like the A8's particular bag of strengths and weaknesses better. So neyyyuhhhhh!

No man, the best seller computer always be the cheaper computer. (And this, nothing to do with the quality, its a matter of marketing. Other way, C64 have a respectable quality for his time) When i bought my C64, i knew has scroll hardware, but never suspect how powerful in comparison with Atari after many years after. Even, other computers without scroll by hardware sold more games than Atari 8bit. I'll have to go along with this. The issues being debated here would mostly only have been known to professional game developers at the time and for that matter they wouldn't know many of the tricks used by today's developers or have the advantage of every A8 or C-64 that is ever going to be made frozen in stone. Both machines are comparable enough in ability that it really wouldn't have been a selling point compared to something like a Timex Sinclair where the low capability is obvious even to a novice. It would have been parents buying these things for their kids for the most part. Price, the kid wanting what his friends have, the games on the shelf, marketing, and other factors of this nature would have been the deciders. Prior to the XL line, the C-64 definitely delivered more bang for the buck. The 400/800 was priced in the stratosphere by comparison. And a C-64 for $129 has little trouble making a toy looking 400 at $300+ look very very sick. The XL line fixed the price problem after giving the C-64 over a year to establish itself in homes and hearts and neither Warner Atari or Tramiel Atari marketed things very well.

Both machines had very similar TI graphics and sound chips. The major difference between the two other than one being a console and the other a home computer is that the ColecoVision has a Z-80 CPU and the TI has a TMS9900 CPU. Both have the same amount of video memory but the TI can potentially have more non-dedicated RAM. I'd be interested to know how many titles were directly ported between the two. The machine code would be very different but could have very similar results in the end. I also wonder which of the two processors have more power to drive the sound and and video hardware and how much of a difference can it make to have 48K or more of RAM to play with. Actually, I think that would be a more interesting comparison thread. Rather than having two sets of sound and video hardware with very different strengths and weaknesses we have two machines with very different CPUs and RAM available.

In it's heyday, I very much envied Colecovisions. In the 82-84 timeframe there was nothing else like it. Compared to Intellivision and 2600, it had very strong arcade ports. Donkey Kong (where's the pie factory?!), Looping, Frenzy, Ladybug, Venture and others just wowed me by pretty much looking and acting like the arcade games in a way that 2600 games of the time just couldn't. In that timeframe, I only encountered one 5200 though I thought that Pac-Man looked GREAT.

Indeed, I was able to find a picture of one like what you had but was not able to find a picture of mine. My 520 and a 1040 a friend gave me later both had a little niche on the bottom left of the machine underneath the keyboard that the joysticks plugged into. The plugs could only be grasped just above the point the cord enters the plugs. The boxlike niche interfered with any other grip while plugging them in. In addition, the ports were rather tight and pretty hard to shove the plugs into on top of not being able to properly grip them.

No, they were placed 10 different kinds of awful. Many is the time I either tilted the machine up on it's back or hung the front of it off the desk then eyeballed from underneath to get them plugged in. At one point, I had 6ft extensions permanently plugged in just so I wouldn't have to finagle around getting joysticks plugged it. The 520/1040 ST joystick ports easily win the worst-port-placement contest of any machine that I have owned or used.

I remember being blown away by Intellivision graphics when it came out but disliking the disc controllers. Later 2600 titles with bigger roms and sometimes RAM closed a lot of the graphics gap though.

If using Windows, Atari800Win seems to be the standard. Atari++ sometimes has better emulation but it has a somewhat awkward interface.

There is some strategy to that and if you don't pay attention to your shield/laser colors then that is indeed very frustrating. It isn't so bad once you acquire a good battery and generator. My way of getting through sections heavy on saucers was to have a couple of shields with opposing colors and change out my laser at the mothership if I wasn't destroying saucers quickly enough. Getting a handle on "chromodynamics" is essential to finishing this game which brings me to my own irritation with Koronis Rift. After finally winning through the final rift there is no payoff. The game just ends.

AFAIK, the maximum size of SD card that the Wii will read is 2GB. I suspect that has to do with the FAT driver. It may well be that using other filesystems with say Wii Linux may allow larger cards in that case but it doesn't help you with homebrew. For most practical purposes, the Wii is limited to 2GB or less SD cards.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=139456

Musicians would need less software help to do anything with the SID. The SID is modeled after the analog synths of that era and musicians are easily able to mentally model what they want a SID to do. If a SID is recased as a musical instrument, then designing a set of musician friendly controls for it is fairly straightforward and while some some software would need to be written to really make it sing it needn't be terribly elaborate. POKEY on the other hand was designed for sound effects from the get go and is a fairly obvious extension of TIA sound capabilities. Yes, one can do music that sounds really good on it but it takes a bit more in the software department. A POKEY recased as a musical instrument would need a good engine written for it and the knobs provided to the musician would mostly have to manipulate that engine rather than registers directly in the chip. Since it would take so much software, there would be more room for interpretation as well. It could be done though. Even the lowly TIA has software to turn it into a delightfully rude beat box: http://qotile.net/synth.html A funny thing I notice with some C-64 games is when I fire my blaster or whatever that it tends to sound more musical kinda like I'm firing a toy piano at my enemies unless the developer took a bit of care with his sound effects.

I did like the part with the rotating morphing polyhedra. That sort of thing isn't very common in C-64 demos. And clipping it with a plane while it was in motion was nifty too. I still have to go with what seems to be the consensus. It is a very well done demo but it isn't going to make C-64 fanboys out of us.

Kings Island in Cincinnati Ohio had a GREAT arcade in it back in the early eighties. I played a few rounds of Star Fire there. I saw my first PaperBoy there though that wasn't a rare title.

I think I remember playing that one. Galaxian clone wasn't it? And couldn't you at intervals hit a special attack button and rise up the screen and smash into your enemies rather than shooting them? It's a funny thing but I've played a good many of the titles others are mentioning. I only ever saw a Red Baron once. Pity too, it was a fun games. At one time or another I've seen most of Atari's vectors. I don't believe Black Widow was all that common either though someone was always playing it at the Gold Mine. Come to think of it, that Gold Mine had Thayer's Quest as well as Space Ace and Dragon's Lair though not all at the same time. They packed that location so tight with games that they'd round out their floorspace with what had to have been seen as B-List titles at the time. The same mall had another Gold Mine in another wing, it was smaller but I also played M.A.C.H 3, Firefox, and a "holographic" title that was a cowboy themed gun game there. A mall in Ashland, KY had the only Exterminator cab I've ever seen. It broke down a lot but was really fun when it was working. Smashing cartoon frogs with a semi-realistic rendered fist was hilarious and fun. At the time, I didn't appreciate these places being the wondrosities that they were.

I didn't think of those as rare. I've played those too. Krull I could take or leave but I believe it was Gottlieb who made that as well as a game called Mad Planets which was at a recording studio of all places. Cloak and Dagger was seriously fun though.