frogstar_robot

Someone got a new in box Touch Tablet and made a slideshow of the unboxing and hook-up: http://technologizer.com/2009/01/19/ataris...retro-unboxing/

The player character moves about the screen faster on C-64 but many of the screen objects appear to be coarser in their animation. Still being able to whip your guy about the screen faster means the C-64 version will play different and not just look different. Some people will like being able to scoot through the screens faster on C-64 and that may be worth overlooking that the visuals and animation aren't as pretty as the XL.

This must be exploited. The A8 needs interlaced pr0n as well! That was quite the achievement on the C-128. It does have a bit that isn't work safe though.

In terms of graphic and sound horsepower they pretty much had. No doubt you can find little corner casey things that Amigas do better than today's PCs and if you want to argue that Amiga is more elegant from an engineering POV then no argument from me. But the fact remains that today's PCs can accomplish anything a classic Amiga* can even if it has to use sheer brute force to emulate the Amiga itself. *The funny little closed PCs that may more may not come out sometime "soon" are modern machines that emulate the old stuff if they bothers to run it at all. Braaaaaaaaaiiinnnns!

The point that I was making was that PCs were starting to catch up at that point. They hadn't caught all the way up in '88 but they pretty much had by '92.

From the marketing at the time, the ST and Amiga didn't play up "home computing" so much even though 99% of both machines wound up being glorified game consoles. Both seemed to be trying to be the "affordable Macintosh" though neither company officially sanctioned the inevitable emulation products. The mainstream PC OS was still DOS and mainstream PCs were still running stodgy menu driven business software and really grotty looking games with that beeper for sound when both machines were introduced. These things came with mice and desktop GUIs. People who might want a Mac but couldn't afford one and perhaps found them boring when not using a WYSIWYG word processor were a conceivable market. Perhaps the real mistake was catering to geeks a bit too much and not so much to the artier types that went for Macs. Come '88 we start seeing PCs with the Adlib board and VGA. Those machines were top end and rather expensive and PCs of that magnitude didn't start getting affordable until 90 and that is when they became mainstream for gaming. I saw Doom and Descent on Radio Shack branded PCs in '92. Games like Myst and 7th Guest weren't far behind. The writing really was on the wall at that point. The time to adapt the Amiga into a PC chipset would have been when the Adlib and VGA were getting common but the mentality just didn't exist. It also wouldn't have made much sense with anything less than a 286 and a 386 would have been better. The window to do that was short and the mentality simply didn't exist to exploit it. Even that would have only bought so much time before it had to compete with the likes of Creative and NVidia. And as just another multimedia chipset it wouldn't have seemed so special running Windows.

I agree that Commodore made mistakes but were still better stewards of Miner's 16-bit work than either Warner or Tramiel Atari would have been. Warner Atari was dithering and in that time-frame hemorrhaging money and Tramiel Atari was just cheap whatever good Jack did others want to cite. That and Tramiel just wanted the chipset from Miner's team but not the team. So a "Tramiel Amiga" would have only evolved in trivial ways just like the ST did. The pinnacles of the ST line were the Falcon and the TT. Neither provide much competition to a tricked out Amiga 4000. Commodore also put off the mistake of subjecting engineers and software devs to "TPS Report Syndrome" longer. If a company is to be innovative then being crass to the talent is just stupid. The Tramiels were infamous for doing things like knocking 7800s off the table. I agree that pricing on the lower end Amigas was higher at first. The major reasons I went with a 520ST were one that I could (barely) afford it and two I didn't understand at the time that the Amiga was much more like my beloved 800XL than the ST turned out to be. It wasn't a terrible machine but the STs I've seen didn't impress me nearly as much as the Amigas friends I made in college had. I do think you are being a bit rosy about the "introductory Amiga that could have been". This stuff was so frightfully expensive then. A 512MB upgrade for my 520ST was in the $400 dollar range and absolutely prohibitive for my teenage budget. I imagine the 14Mhz 68000 part commanded quite the premium too. For all that, the Amiga still destroyed the Macs in terms of value per dollar (as did the ST). Anybody have some of the old Computer Shoppers? Sure the Amiga OS liked to meditate on that Yoga mat but when it was working....wow! That trick with sliding desktops and fullscreen apps over top of each other was just amazing. That and it was really first out the consumer gate with multi-tasking. Pity that it wasn't first out the gate with "memory protection". The one thing they didn't add at first was a true memory controller and with that the Amiga could have been more on a par with the UNIXes rather than infamous for crashing. But still......

The only thing worse than Commodore marketing was Atari marketing. And by that I mean Warner was worse and Tramiel was the worst. I believe at the time Commodore was a better place for that tech. Warner Atari wasn't even sure if they wanted to be in computers and video games much less build next generation ones. Tramiel just wanted the chipset but didn't want Miner and his team. If Warner HAD developed it we've gotten an interesting line of computers and/or consoles out of it that only a few old die-hard geeks would still be talking about. Kinda like now but there would far fewer of them and I doubt Amiga would be the modern day zombie of the I.T. landscape staggering about and chanting "braaaaaaaiiins". This is because neither Warner Atari nor Tramiel Atari would have allowed to evolve as it did under Commodore. We wouldn't have seen things like the Video Toaster. I have no idea what the OS would have been like but the one Commodore adapted to it WAS innovative even if it wasn't all that Miner wanted for it. On the bright side, we wouldn't have Commodore fanbois who only acknowlege Miner's genius when the work has a Commodore nameplate on it.

There is another thing about Space Invaders that usually isn't done right and that is the sound. The arcade game had a big loud crungy sound that got right in your face. Pretty much every port I've seen has sounded more musical than the unabashed big boops, beeps, and bassline of the arcade. This is another aspect of games that screenshots don't get across well. In addition to the graphics, I don't see anything about the sound effects that both machines couldn't do very effectively. Especially in the old days, I think game devs would just come up with some plausible sound effects and call it done. For that matter even the lowly 2600 can do a good Space Invaders if effort is put into crafting it as there are several decent versions that can be downloaded from this site's hacks and homebrews.

Some of the early cartridge games for C64 also worked on the Commodore MAX Machine with 2.5 kB of memory Wow. That thing is the Commodore 5200 and 400 rolled into one. I take it this machine is too rare a bird to modify? And one couldn't add 64K of ram and make a C-64 out of one from what a little googling tells me. The machine appears to differ from a C-64 in the following difficult ways: Only 2.5K ram Different memory map ala the 5200/400 Different BASIC User port missing It isn't clear to me if the keyboard has missing/different keys in addition to being a membrane. This one seems to be for collectors only.

Antiflicker is not enabled. I just tried enabling it and the only difference it makes is to steady the actually flickery TIP frames. Someone with real hardware driving an NTSC or PAL set would have to tell if washed out color in those modes is what actually occurs. I'll tell you an interesting thing that happens though. If I use a screenshot application to take a snap of a TIP frame then the color returns. If I had to guess, I'd say my LCD monitor interacts in an unfortunate way with how Atari++ deals with TIP pictures.

I did think of one application for an A8 analog stick. 5200 conversions to the A8 also involve converting the input to do something sane with the digital sticks even if the analog stick of the 5200 controller allowed finer control. The ship in 5200 Star Raiders can be turned slowly or quickly for one. If the A8 had an analog stick...and I don't advocate a converter for the 5200's...then such games would be easier to convert and more faithful in their control. The idea I'd like best for that is a converter for old PC analog sticks. I don't believe they use the same pots so something like a FET circuit would have to be used to show the A8 the range of resistance it expects. I get a beautiful but totally blue sky idea from this. Given that the A8 has the analog control and mapping say the number keys on the A8 to the 5200 keypad and start/pause/reset mapped to the console keys then perhaps a 5200 cartridge adapter for the A8 is possible. This device would be a 5200 cartridge port, modified 5200 OS and glue logic that plugs into the A8 cart port. The glue logic would make the A8's memory map appear to be the 5200's memory map so that 5200 carts could be played unmodified on an A8. Still such an adapter can't gloss over the analog sticks so one would have to be provided. I suppose the PBI/ECI port may have to be employed as well for such a thing. Blue sky as I say. It would take a lot of actual work to make such a thing.

That is very evident in the TIP animations that have been so popular recently. Atari800 displays them in a highly colorful way that seems fairly accurate. Many either look b&w or almost b&w on Atari++.

This is a higher contrast version of the one I posted first. I rotate through a number of backgrounds and it has stood out well on all of them so far. It isn't a Windows ico file because KDE is pretty flexable about what graphics it'll let you use as icon so I've been using it as is. I can convert it though.

Professional audio work in Windows is usually done with ASIO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Stream_Input/Output The basic idea is to bypass as many Windows APIs as possible give applications thin driver that gives very low level access to the sound card. This thin driver still presents a consistent interface but pretty much only pro sound apps use it as it throws out the standard Windows sound APIs. Incidentally, I imagine modern pro audio cards have hi-res timers in them and the ability to sync from studio time sources besides.

It isn't uncommon for serious Linux audio enthusiasts to use a kernel that has been patched for lower latency and/or some form of "realtime". These enthusiasts also tend to run pro or semi-pro audio cards that can be synced to studio time sources. Though it runs on top of ALSA, most prosumer Linux audio apps also run on top of an audio system called JACK which is intended to keep multiple sources locked to each other within a minimum amount of latency. All of these latency tweaks probably degrade raw i/o throughput to some extent so these systems aren't the best for non-audio non-realtime work. I suppose a hard-core emulator author could exploit this but it seems too little gain for too much pain.

That one won't work so well on my desktop because of the black background, but thanks just the same. Do you have that icon without the black background? (Yeah, I know that I could try to remove the black background myself but graphics apps aren't my forte. I'd just end up making the fuji look really crappy.) I removed the black background and left transparency in it's place. I also trimmed up the "Atari" a bit as it some of the off white pixels make it look raggy without the high contrast black background. atari_icon.ico

That one won't work so well on my desktop because of the black background, but thanks just the same. Do you have that icon without the black background? (Yeah, I know that I could try to remove the black background myself but graphics apps aren't my forte. I'd just end up making the fuji look really crappy.) I removed the black background and set an alpha channel in it's place (transparent where it used to be black). ...edited... Never mind. it looks awful against a white background. I'll play with it later.

Don't know how good this is but here you go.....

I'll post the one I'm using when I get home this evening.

The Mac II retailed at damn near $4K in it's base configuration and could be as much as $10K with maximum storage and memory. A cursory read of my other posts will tell you that I'm not a big fan of the ST. I am even less of a fan of ANY Mac that DOESN'T run OS X. I am an Apple Certified Technician and have been since OS 8.6 was a current OS so I'm quite entitled to negative opinions of what could be quite large PITAs. Oh the hardware wasn't bad, it was quite good considering. But however much the OS may have been "friendly" it was a technical disaster. Macs of that era were overpriced and employed a non-memory protected form of co-operative multitasking. An application didn't have to do what we now call a segfault to crash. All it had to do was get stuck in a state that it couldn't pass the timeslice token to the next app in the chain but if it did segfault then unrelated apps could die for no apparant reason or the machine would just lock. And that happened....a lot. I did extension removal bisections to isolate crashes more than I want to think about as well as "trashing preferences". Suck suck suckity suck sucked (and yes Windows had it's own list of suck. I hated it ALMOST as much.) The bulk of Mac software in that time frame targeted the lower spec 68000 machines like the Plus which still retailed for twice as much as any ST or Amiga. Those low spec machines were targeted due to people being able to somewhat afford them and therefore having them. In terms of computing power per dollar spent an ST BADLY outclassed the lower priced models in the Apple's product range. So what you had were crashy overpriced machines with occasionally nifty software. Why pay that kind of money when an Amiga or ST would run the stuff as well (or not) as the real thing? There's things I don't like about Apple, OS X, and odd holes in Apple's product line-up. But obscenely priced hardware that runs a flakey crashy OS is no longer one of them.

Was that MicroCenter by any chance?

There was a period in the mid eighties where you could use a product called Magic Sac that took a couple of Mac OS roms. Once started from that cartridge you had an ST that was cheaper and faster than contempory Macs. Later, the Spectre GCR which replaced the Magic Sac took the 128K roms and could run the MultiFinder and drive laser printers.

I'd like to see a return to old Atari mantra: "Easy to learn but a lifetime to master." It looks like they releasing the same sort of things other studios are releasing which is interactive movies and games that require an excess of controls and arcanum just to learn how to play. I don't advocate them strictly publishing rehashed retro titles but I would like to see them re-embrace the engaging elegant simplicity of the old Atari. A different thing they could do games for platforms like cell phones and "casual gaming" titles for things like PSPs. I'd also like to see titles that put speed and responsiveness ahead of eyecandy. Again, I don't advocate the spartanness of a 2600 title but making those the priority would be a refreshing change.

I wouldn't say the CV and Inty are overrated. I thought the games for them more or less lived up to the hype around the systems at the time. But I think you're correct in that those system were perceived as radically better than the A2600 but in fact only had incremental improvements and were worse in some ways. It wasn't until '82 that we started seeing carts for the 2600 that pushed it a bit like Raiders Of The Lost Ark and carts that bankswitched both ROM and RAM. But I can still remember the infamous Plimpton ads for the Inty and yes the Inty and the CV had better versions of many games. Take something like StarPath Frogger. That version is every bit as good as the versions on CV and Inty. With bigger and better carts, the 2600 was at least competitive with those systems. I still think the CV and to a lesser extent the Inty were easier to develop for so it took both a roided cart and gifted developers to really show what the 2600 could do.