frogstar_robot

But then exploiting interlace is still new on the A8. It may well be impossible on the C-64 but all we really know is that the C-128 has an 80 column chip as well as a VICII quirk that can't be exploited on the C-64. But there may be other ways of doing it on the C-64.

All I see in the thrifts now are tired 486s, Pentium Is of various speeds, 14 in. CRTs, and other such detritus from the early part of the computing era we're now in. A few months back I did see a TI99/4a and last month I saw some common A8 carts. What was a cheap hobby is becoming very expensive on E-Bay and being an Atari guy, I'd be delighted to see a slew of cheap C-64s in a thrift. Alas, the days of scoring all the toys I wanted as a kid out of thrifts seem to be over. And to answer the question that started this thread, someone gave me C-64 and a data cassette recorder to go with it and a handful of games on cassette. I did load a few just see what that was like as even the Commodore guys I knew back in the day had 1541s and 1571s. It made me very glad of diskette drives. Around that time a friend of mine made a kind of home automation system controlled with the user port on one of his C-64s. Now THAT was some neat stuff. That port can easily control simple electronics and is a nice boon to an enthusiast of both computing and electronics. The equivalent on the A8 is a third-party and hard to find teaching lab set of some kind.

I can recall a couple of games I've played that were at least uncommon: Tac-Scan - Sega That was a VERY nice vector shooter with a lot of originality. Quantum - Atari I only saw one example of both of those games. Tac-Scan was at a health club my family had a membership at in the early eighties. The Quantum was at a Gold Mine at the Huntington Mall in Barboursville WV. Interesting that both of mine were vectors.

Robotron was always a fun two player game. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...p;#entry1683875

We have a real nice 2500+ post thread for that. Now run along to it......... http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=134852

I had a very disturbing thought in connection with this thing: Robotron.

Douglas Englebart showed off a working networked mouse-drive hypertext system in 1968. A couple of years back there was talk of some British Telecom scuzzbuckets demanding teh Mega Royalties for everyone to use the Internet on the strength of a 1974 patent. The following would have shut that down toot suite: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

It really isn't necessary to do an adapter. Apart from Adventure II and perhaps one or two other recent homebrews, most 5200 titles have been ported to the A8. Although I do like the idea of an adapter that interfaces the 5200 controllers to the A8 because there are some titles that make use of the analog control in ways that the A8 versions of those games do not like Star Raiders and Rescue On Fractalus which allow proportional steering. So for games like that, I like the idea of a controller adapter. The 5200 titles that could benefit would still need to be (re)ported to this configuration. Course that is still a lot of pain for little gain but it isn't as much pain as a device that would require the PCI/ECI and probably internal mods to the A8 as well.

I know how such displays work. What is an issue for me is the result: an animated display generated under computer control. Raster versus vector is an implementation detail though try explaining that to a lawyer. Exactly. There is a lot of self-serving going on around the term "video game". I have no disrespect for Mr Baer or his achievements but I have no respect for the abuse of IP law. To me, the fact that a game is implemented on a vector display doesn't make it a complete non-sequitur. IMHO IP law was abused with those early Odyssey patents. And I for one only see Baur as "The father of games on raster displays". If we are going to accord the title of "Father of Video Games" today then it will be as the term "Video Game" is used today. Baer doesn't qualify.

I still miss it. It had a local flavor and small club feel that Internet blogs don't often capture.

So what do we call things like the Vectrex, Asteroids, Tac-Scan and many many others? What I see on the screens of those things isn't raster scanned but it sure as hell is video. The only differences between Tennis For Two and a vector title were of degree not kind.

That argument is a load of horse hockey. So vector games like Aztarac and Major Havoc aren't video games because they are vector titles and Star Raiders and Turrican aren't video games because they run on "Home Computers". There was a computer, an output display, and means for opponents to interact with each other and the computer. "Tennis For Two" was a video game.

That is like my wife's Wii. She plays games ON the Wii and I play WITH the Wii doing things like the Homebrew Channel and so-forth. In any case, I know the geek's compulsion to fix-fix-fix-it-up-until-its-perfect all too well. Anybody with even an ounce of consideration won't look down on you if you give this a rest for awhile.

That disables the built-in basic which many disk games require to run. Such games tend to be self booting. Public domain disks and things of that nature may need to be run from a DOS. This is awkward to do from DOS 2.5 which is pretty much the DOS everybody uses if they stick to an Atari DOS. If interested, we'll dig up how you go about doing that. The better class of multi-game disks boot to a menu and let run game by picking number or letter. There are also menu disks that you can boot and then you stick in your disk of games and then again try to run things by picking the letter. Of course some games are done in BASIC or a combination of BASIC and machine language. In that case, you'd boot a DOS without holding down option. It's been a long time since I ran a basic game but I believe you have to type DOS, get a listing of D1: (or whichever), exit DOS then do LOAD "D1:mygame.com" followed run RUN. If you already know the filename, you can forgo the listing. BASIC XL and BASIC XE have nicer disk handling and will run programs much faster. Quite nice if you have it.

It's been answered elsewhere in one of the threads on this but that is true. However the part of the upgrade that connects to the inside of the machine can be unplugged from the new personality boards and the old RAM boards put back in to make the machine behave as a normal 800 again.

The Huntington Mall in Barboursville WV had two Gold Mines with some titles in one and not the other. The Gold Mine near the theatre tended to carry Atari vector titles. I enjoyed the hell out of Quantum and Black Widow especially. It also had a Wizard Of Wor which was a perfect sort of game to have in a darkened Gold Mine. The other Gold Mine tended to have large sit down cabs like M.A.C.H 3. Good times. A dark Gold Mine with cabs cranked loud and packed to the gills with games is still my idea of a proper arcade. I also spent time at the Scratch 'N' Tilt in Huntington WV which was a pinball/pool hall that very naturally added a slowly changing but well maintained selection to the front of the place. I was also local to Ashland KY which got a new mall in '87 or so with an arcade I don't recall the name of but then I wasn't as fond of it as the others. This place had the only Exterminator cab I ever saw. Neat game when it was working. About the time the mall in Ashland went in, the Gold Mines at the Huntington Mall were shut down and replaced with a wretched "Family Fun Center" that badly maintained their cabs; this place was my first exposure to the shift towards redemption games. There are few things sadder than a Hard Drivin' with a badly calibrated wheel and the force feedback out. The WV arcades are all defunct now and so is the one in Ashland most likely. The last arcade I spent a lot of time in was a no-name arcade at the mall in Lancaster OH in the mid-nineties. They had four T-Meks networked together that I played the hell out of though I got irritated with the Nintendiods who were forever using special codes to play in the "special arenas" that were mostly lame. Aw well, all were fair Suicide Mek fodder. It wasn't highly frequented when I moved so I doubt this place is around either.

Also the quality of the composite output varies across the A8 line and some models lack all the signals to do split Y-C (AKA S-VHS) on the video output port. There are video mods to address all this. I'll note that the composite output on an unmodded 130XE of mine is pretty weedy. I'd recommend seeing if a mod exists for your A8, applying it, and create a DIN to S-VHS adaptor for best quality. Note, some games (very few) rely on artifacting to generate extra colors and using chroma+luma on some displays like recent LCDs may reveal those colors to be the alternate striped lines they truly are.

How about the words Atari800Win done in the "Atari font" with the DLI rainbow effect superimposed on it? The rainbow is an oft-used effect and immediately recognizable to anyone who's spent any time time at all with an A8 or 2600.

I actually tried this one in an emulator: 10 A=PEEK(624) 20 B=PEEK(625) 30 PRINT A; 40 PRINT " "; 50 PRINT B 60 GOTO 10

It's easy to lose sight of just how much computing hardware cost back then. This was Tramiel's major insight with the 64: create a computer with good graphics and sound that is affordable. The XL line was meant to fix the major flaw of A8s being priced in the stratosphere at that time. It took competition from the C-64 for Atari to get it right pricewise with the 800XL. Any console with Amiga-like capabilities would have been the 3DO of 1982. It would have blown away anybody who saw it but nobody would have been able to afford it.

A common disease of human thinking is that one's choices in things like cars and computers is an absolute indicator of one's good taste and judgment. Of course, someone else making different choices is evidence of their pigheadedness and stupidity. This is what fuels vs. flamewars. Another truth is back in the day, your first computer was likely what your parents thought was a good buy and you just learned to love what you had. Course if your friend's parents down the block got him something different...... Yeah, some Commodore fans and some Atari fans give a sh*t to a level I'd call diseased. Read the C-64 vs Atari thread that is only just now losing it's oxygen, though some strategic posting lockouts took the mean out of it about a month ago.

Software wise not so much. Things tend to be loaded up from floppies or hard drives. The cart port on the ST was used more as a low rent expansion bus than a proper cart port. There are some 68000 Mac emulation products that use it and if memory doesn't deceive me there were also 3D glasses that used. Bigger ST hands than I am may tell you more on the ST forum. For the 800XL you mention, that is basically true. If you're both lucky and into modding, some XLs have socketed chips. Socketed or not the XL machines are well built. My 800XL was a tank basically. The XE line was something of a tryout for the style of housing the ST came in. IMHO the XEs, 520STs, and 1040STs are a bit on the creaky flimsy side. The more spendy Mega STs were built a bit tougher though. An interesting irony of history that many Commodore fans don't like mentioned is that the chipsets for the A8 and the Amiga were both engineered by Jay Miner led teams. As the A8 chipset was originally intended for a follow-on game console, it was originally developed to correct the biggest bottlenecks in the A2600 TIA which was also designed by a Miner led team. If you dig into the A8 and notice that at times it feels like the Amiga's 8-bit older cousin, it isn't co-incidental. The original Amiga chipset corrects the biggest bottlenecks of the A8 Antic/GTIA combo and is 16-bit to boot. The other half of the irony is that the ST shares a lot of engineering personnel with the C-64 designers though the ST doesn't feel like a C-64 writ 16 bits large. The feel is more of a faster, cheaper, and more colorful machine that is more like the Macs of the day.

In Atari Basic it means something like this: 10 PRINT PADDLE(0);" ";PADDLE(1) 20 GOTO 10 The PADDLE statements are just convenient shorthand for something like: 10 PRINT PEEK(624);" ";PEEK(625) 20 GOTO 10 What the first line does in either program is print the current position of the paddle knobs. The axes on the tablet look to the Atari like paddle knobs. The second line just executes the first line again and the whole thing continues executing until interrupted: a loop. So what you'll see is two columns of numbers between 0-255 that change as you move the stylus about the pad eg: 200 100 199 101 198 99 and so on.

I doubt it would have been successful for the reasons others have mentioned but a good take on what one could have been like is possible now. We have Bob's 65816 upgrade and the VideoBoard XE. My understand is that the two can't currently be installed at the same time but it wouldn't be technically overwhelming to do this and I believe both upgrades would make much more sense if they were combined into one. Be that as it may be, these upgrades give us the better video and CPU pieces. Others have speculated that a sound upgrade that incorporates the Ensoniq chip the IIgs uses is doable. The only bit remaining would be to break out the PBI/ECI into a proper set of expansion slots. That is very possible but physically awkward without designing a new board; since we're speculating about an "Atari IIgs" then why not? This could be as simple as a lightly reworked 130XE board and a daughtercard shoehorned into a tower. I'd make the slots be physical replicas of the PBI/ECI port itself since PBI upgrades exist but a new physical form factor for the cards would have no upgrades possible. Any of this a good idea? I dunno. But it is all plausible to do.

LOL - wonder if it has that Cheech&Chong smell to it? Setphen Anderson This was Warner Atari. How are they going to smell anything after abusing their noses like that? Bushnell Atari on the other hand.....