frogstar_robot

There wasn't an inexpensive A8 until the 600XL/800XL. Prior to this time, you're looking at >$600 in late seventies/early eighties dollars just to get started with an A8. So the 2600 had over 5 years to entrench itself by the time the A8 was affordable to most people. Also home computer customers and console customers weren't very interchangeable even if so-called home computers were employed as gaming rigs 99% of the time. The Amiga simply belonged to another generation of machine and did more than anything else at it's price point. For many things, it did more than anything else period. A8 and Amiga customers weren't very interchangeable although the enlightened A8 user wanting a 16 bit upgrade that was more like his beloved A8 would have done better to go with the Amiga over the ST. At time both A8 and C-64 customers had strong brand loyalty so I don't think many A8 users at the time appreciated or widely understood that the Amiga was also a Jay Miner machine. I HAD an ST but still believe the Amiga a better and vastly more innovative machine. Granted the ST was much cheaper at first but that crisp BW mode+monitor was only a small point at best over the Amiga. Commodore also did a much better job evolving and supporting the Amiga than any Atari product other than the 2600. Other than the fact that the 2600 -> A8 -> Amiga represents a successive technical lineage, there isn't much in the way of comparison between the three. They differed in price, era, and intended customers.

I played the hell out of Frogger II Threedeep way back when. A8: C-64: http://www.archive.org/details/C64Gamevide...ive122-Frogger2 There is little difference between the two although the sound effects have a sharp cutoff on C-64 that the A8 version doesn't have that would grate on me after awhile. It occurs to me that may be a codec artifact. Does that happen when played in person? The colors on the A8 version are a bit brighter and some things are shaded with DLI's nicely. The C-64 has a better turtle on the first screen although the A8 has nicer Mama duck on the third stage. So I give a slight edge to the A8 on graphics and the animation seems a hair smoother there as well. Assuming the audio sounds that way due to the movie encoding, I'd had just as much fun playing this on a C-64.

Isn't it possible to get up to a 20% CPU speed increase in C-64 mode by enabling FAST mode during the VBI, running a routine crafted for that interval and then shutting FAST down at the end of the VBI? That isn't as cool as what you want though it does close some of the CPU gap between a C-64 and other 8-bits.

I've only seen one but a buddy of mine had a 64C. I mistook it for a 128 at first. As long as aesthetics are cricket, It felt solid to me and I liked the low profile. As for on-topic, I've seen Fractalus and Koronis Rift on both and my experience mirrors what others have mentioned. Lucasfilm did a good job playing to the A8's strengths. I also found a nice collection of C-64 game video clips on Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive So while we're on the subject, I also prefer Defender on the A8 to the C-64: http://www.archive.org/details/C64Gamevide...hive14-Defender (5200 version but it looks the same) C-64 Defender is higher res but I think the explosion effects and sound effects were better done on the Atari. I heard somewhere that A8/5200 Defender is a port from the Apple II and uses few of the A8's abilities save perhaps the slight edge in CPU power.

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/admin.htm

It was largely for nought. The huge installed base of the C-64 sucked most of the oxygen out of c128 native titles. Take a few features out and have at least ten times the audience for a title. The c128 was also a last generation 8-bit and had to compete with 16 bit machines from clone makers, Apple, Atari, and Commodore. Atari suffered the same problem from day one by largely differentiating machines by how much memory they had with 64K being the maximum for long time. The maximum audience for an Atari title could always be had with carts that required no more than 8K. The only thing I think Atari could have done that really would have made a difference would have been to take a leaf from Apple's book and have a machine that could accept 3rd party expansion cards. They started to go about it half-heartedly with PBI/ECI but didn't really have follow-through on it. Incidentally, this is largely the reason Apple's 8-bits hung in there so long with such primitive tech. That and Apple chased the education market pretty much from day one. 3rd parties would have evolved the platform waaay faster than Atari could. Sure Atari could have spiffed up the chipset but I suspect it would have just been the C-128 situation all over again. The smartest move would have been to get a 64KB inexpensive machine on the market quicker than they did and made that the minimum developer's case with the machine that accepted expansion cards as the next step up and a plug-in option to add that to the cheap model. Why hot-rod the chipset when you can't get the majority of games to quit targeting the 400? Incidentally, there are recent threads on a 7MHz 65816 upgrade and an enhancement to Antic/GTIA called the VideoBoard. It would currently take a bit of work to combine those two upgrades but the combination is a good take on what an "Atari IIGS" would have been like.

The OCS chipset would have but the presentation would likely have been very different. It would have had a different OS. Things like the case and keyboard would have been different as well. Perhaps Curt knows something about how that would have shaken out? In any case, it was best for the technology that it Atari didn't get it. It would have had a marketplace trajectory similar to the ST's with the Tramiels cheaping out on everything in sight from the fit and finish of the machine itself to the marketing and developer's kits. Commodore surely didn't always make the best decisions but a stock page on the wall and a set of darts could have outperformed the Tramiels.

If I'm not mistaken and I'm about to find out; one can only edit within a short time after posting. So you can still fix that post Add Reply typo but can't nuke the post later. Ok, just hit the quick edit. Yes we can still edit but don't have an arbitrary time to do it. I noticed the other day in this season's A8 vs C64 thread that editing seems to shut off after awhile. Any AA insiders want to talk about the change? I can see the sense of the change; I'm just curious how long the "edit clock" is.

The more thoughtful ones are actually posting code and sayings things like "Well, we don't have as many sprites but we can..." So interspersed in the personal attacks, interesting history and ways of overcoming limitations are coming up. Just put Fröhn, Oswald, Allison, and emkay on ignore and what's left is pretty fascinating.

The 7800 is the only system I'm interested in that lacks a decent emulator that runs natively in Linux. I'll look forward to trying it out.

Silly.....

Current consoles sometimes are programmed to the bare metal because it isn't customary to upgrade consoles apart from more space for savegames and whatnot. Early PCs used to have that in common with consoles but no longer. The model then was to hug the bare metal with display kernals and whatnot. Games would be developed on and look good on the primary platform then look half-hearted elsewhere. These days sheer brute force is used to present (mostly) consistent APIs regardless of underlying hardware. I too romanticize and am nostalgic about machines where you can know everything about what ever memory location and every chip does. But the current way is much more practical. I can run atari800 on Windows, OS X , Linux, handheld consoles, phones and as long as a certain minimum of graphics capability and cpu cycles are available, the same reasonable approximation of my old computer works the same on all of them. Yeah it leads to bloat. And it is an obscene waste of computing resources compared to the spare but efficient 8-bits we grew up on. But this way allows for a very broad ecosystem of development and the inability to host that ecosystem is why nobody but Apple is still around....and they build machines out of PC parts too these days.

Great job on the game itself but if were old Atari Commercial it would have gone more like this: "The new Tempest Extreme for the Atari XE gaming system!" (cue cheezy upbeat synth horn and synth violin music) "Blast your web clean" very brief shot of the game itself followed by kids jumping up and down and screaming "Yay!" "Watch out for those spikes" very brief shot of spike death followed by a cut to a nerdy bespectacled "Dad" scowling at the screen and manhandling his joystick. "Clobber your enemies with the particle beam!" cut to "Dad" grins triumphantly and pumps fist. "Get the AI droid!" cut to more kids jumping up and down "The new Tempest Extreme and it's ONLY for the Atari XE Video Game System." cut to Atari logo cue dit-dit-duh-duh-dit-duh-duh-duh theme "Have you played Atari today!?"

That large black cap looks bulged on top. There is also a large power semiconductor to the right you might want to look at.

That is what a RTOS and/or kernel level programming is for. Medical devices with such requirements don't run things like Windows or even Linux. Things like QNX give you time guarantees though what you have are dead reliable high resolution timers and rather high-level APIs rather than access to the bare metal unless you're developing or modifying drivers for specialty devices on those systems. Low-cost embedded systems are pretty much the last bastion of code that has to hug and squeeze every last bit of performance out the bare metal.

That isn't quite so. A little googling found these: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vc1541/ This was last developed on in 2003 but maybe there is enough there there to finish it up. I also found this: http://www.kotinet.com/1541/ It is DOS based but the author claims a high degree of emulation accuracy. Being DOS based wouldn't be a killer in Linux as we heathen Linux users have the excellent DOSEMU but who knows? XP might manage it unadorned and DOSBOX has a fair chance at running it. It is also open source and could be ported. The author claims that "multitasking operating systems are out of the question" due to exacting timing requirements but maybe not.

Indeed. We can fanboi rant about the drives back in the day but they aren't truly necessary for current enthusiasts. Devices that employ flash and devices that let you turn an old laptop into the equivalent of a stack of drives 10 stories tall make what we used way back when pretty sick. I once built a X1541 cable and imaged a buddy's childhood C-64 collection of BBS downloads and things he'd written for it. Damn ass lot of work for me and that stack of 20 floppies or so wouldn't even put a dent in a 15 dollar keyfob drive. At least recovering his Amiga hard drive was easy when his machine died as some kind enthusiast added Amiga partition tables to Linux. Well that may get the purists to chime in and I'll concede a point to them. Quite a bit of artwork and cleverness sometimes went into making loading sequences bearable. I just about fell out of my chair the first time I saw the mothership launching fighters to Fractulus and I've seen many well crafted splash screens. That and good disk based games like to let you know they're worth the wait. Things like that will often just fly by with the devices we can use now. Interfacing modern kit to these old eight bits is a lot like putting a supercharged Hemi into a Yugo.

I didn't remove it that in time as it is pouring a bit of gas on a fire but we haven't exactly flamed the guy to a crisp. He's gotten some heated retorts but it's been fairly civil. Seriously, do you hang out on C-64 boards to incessantly proclaim Atari superiority in all things?

removed. I'm through feeding trolls in this one.

The question was "what is a normal red?" which I answered. If anyone feels like doing it, the range of reds the A8 and C-64 can generate on correctly calibrated NTSC and PAL displays can be compared to various objective standards. If we're talking NTSC monitors then seeing who can come closest to matching the red stripe on the standard NTSC color bars would be a good place to start. Not that I give crap but this at least can be objectively measured.

That isn't necessarily the case. What IS true that the designer of SIO is one of the designers of USB. It isn't clear to me other than generalities how SIO is similar to USB. The two things were many years and projects apart. The following interview is strictly about SIO: http://www.atarimuseum.com/articles/joedecuir.html

whats the definition of a normal red color ? http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelen...Colors.html#red Better yet, on an RGB triple I'd expect to see a maximal R component and minimal G and B.

i'd want a 1541. =-) A 1450XLD has them all beat but that is too rare a bird to be clouting people over the head with! My preferred tool for such mayhem is an IBM Model M keyboard. Once the clouting is done, just put the keycaps back on and you're good to go. Come to think of it, I never saw a keyboard that nice on any eight bit.

The IBM name counted for a lot of business mindshare right off the bat. It also helped that the PC was entirely COTS except for the BIOS. Prior to the PC businesses looked at micros and the companies making them as hippy enclaves. This was perhaps less true of a company named "Commodore Business Machines" but then nobody ever got fired for buying IBM as they used to say then. The reason why PCs ultimately won and Macs these days are really cleverly designed PCs is that they commodtized computing. Ataris, TIs, Commodores, Apple IIs, and all the rest were proprietary architectures that mostly didn't interoperate in terms of either software or hardware and only the Apples were cloned with varying degrees of legality. Once Compaq showed that it was possible to create a legal "IBM Compatible" BIOS that opened the door for lots of companies to create mutually interoperable machines. The cleverness of things like the Amiga and even the ST (even an ST made a typical clone PC look pretty sick until the VGA adapters and Adlib cards started coming out) didn't stand a chance against the developing ecosystem of third-party development that commodity PCs made possible. Apple hung on quite a bit a longer by paying closer attention to ergonomics but all Apples made now use components that aren't out of place in a PC and many are running software from that world as well. Were Commodore a bit more adroit and Atari a LOT more adroit then the computing history of the eighties and early nineties might be a bit different. The end result was still inevitable and in time the stodgy PCs caught up to and surpassed those competitors to the point that they can emulate them in a window and still have the horsepower to get a rant posted on AtariAge.

That is strictly your take on it and not at my intention. As I mentioned before but I'll state it again: I respect and admire Jay Miner's genius irregardless of who his employer happened to be at any given time. Even the TIA from the 2600 has a certain elegance and quite the advance over the PONG-on-a-chip it was designed to replace. I've also stated I have no brand loyalty. Atari was an innovator during Bushnell's tenure but not so much during the Warner and Tramiel years. Were I fanboy, I'd have no criticisms for them. I have no problem conceding that Commodore did a better job of marketing and supporting their products during those times. For that matter, I liked many of their later products better than what Atari had. Even the Falcon and TTs didn't hold much of a candle to the Amiga line. But even the mighty Commodore had a few flops and they too were ground under the Wintel juggernaut. The mutually incestuous history of Atari and Commodore in the mid eighties is what it is. And strictly speaking, the Amiga was mostly developed before Commodore bought it.