frogstar_robot
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Posts posted by frogstar_robot
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Why "wrong"? Before Tramiel bought Atari, Atari didn't want Miners Amiga project. That's why he left and build the Amiga company. Or do you believe that only because he worked at Atari for a while they kinda own him?I believe no such thing. I believe Oswald to be a fanboy who sees anything with an Atari badge on it as bad and primitive and anything with a Commodore badge on it as flawlessly good. It is nonetheless a fact that the Amiga tech could have been used in an Atari project and if that had happened then Oswald would be here today trashing it. I've indicated in another post that it was probably for the best that it wasn't and I've indicated in yet another post that that Warner was the impetus behind Atari's best and brightest leaving them.
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funny history revisionism & boasting here
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/mickey.html
No "funny revisionism" in that.
there is: "Jay had designed chips for the Atari Amiga which he suddenly refused to release to the company." No, he didnt design amiga for atari. neither for commodore. the chip/machine design was (almost?) ready when the atari/commodore stepped in.
funny atarian boasting in this link aswell:
"The Amiga system had always been intended to be a better version of the Atari 800 using the same multi-processor design (one processor for graphics, another for sound, etc.)."
no it wasnt to be a successor to the a800, neither the a800 is a multi cpu system. or if it is then about any 8bit computer is.
"with some kind of custom "AtariDOS" additions"
yeah, sure...
You seem to be cut from the same bolt of cloth as Rush Limbaugh. Since the facts I dredged up aren't your liking, you find a wingnut (on another board no less) and use that wingnut to tar everybody who has the temerity to like anything from Atari. A poster wrote something you didn't like and added an inaccuracy (the AtariDOS bit)....so what?
Miner didn't necessarily intend the Amiga as a better 800 but Warner Atari did. Nonethess, both share a design aesthetic: a fairly dumb scanline generator controlled by a processor. And yes ANTIC is a processor though a VPU rather than a CPU.
If I wanted to stoop to your level, I could dredge the net for C-64 wingnuts and use them to discredit all C-64 fans. Some of your posts would qualify. But then that wouldn't be fair to the more thoughtful ones like TMR.
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I'm pretty sure. If ATARI sold the AMIGA, today people would also ask "what is an AMIGA", referring to my view last week on a german GAME TV , asking "what is an 800 XL" ...So - beeing a little twisted- I'm happy that Commodore got the rights.
Doubtless you're right. It would have been Tramiel Atari that owned it and Tramiel Atari couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag. Being a fan of the machine and it's tech rather than the nameplate on it, I too am glad the Amiga had the time in the sun that it did.
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funny history revisionism & boasting here
I only included that link for the photo. Nonetheless, the A8 and 2600 are Jay Miner designs and Atari once had a contract option to buy the tech that went into the Amiga which Commodore nullified by buying Miner's company outright. This was the subject of a lawsuit. Actual text of that contract here:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/mickey.html
No "funny revisionism" in that.
The poster gets it wrong in that it was Miner refusing to deal with Atari. Warner Atari was dithering on the subject so Commodore came up with the cash immediately provoking a contract dispute which had to be settled. Ironically, it was Tramiel in charge of Atari at this point that disputed that contract.
And if that hadn't happened this way, I have little doubt you'd be here heaping scorn on the Amiga tech for having the wrong corporate nameplate on it.
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No, it's an opinion. Other people disagree and it's therefore subjective and if we're getting subjective there's always the Atari 400... what the hell were they thinking?That has an answer. It isn't a good answer mind you but an answer. ANTIC+GTIA+POKEY were originally intended for the next generation game console after the 2600 and were developed with that in mind. Neither the A8 nor the 5200 were originally intended to happen and I'd be interested in the original plan for that console but I begin to digress. Nonetheless, that thinking colored a lot of the A8's early history.
The 400 was primarily intended to play cartridge based games. Game carts from the late seventies and early eighties did not have memory requirements that exceeded the 16K the 400 had. The membrane keyboard was good enough to play games like Star Raiders so the positioning of the machine wasn't unlike the Odyssey2. The keyboard could be wiped clean and wasn't prone to having things fall between the keys. Again, this makes the machine more console-like than computer like. In the following link there is a picture of an "Entertainer" pack that comes with two joysticks and cartridge games which one might get to go with their 400 "Basic Computer" pack.
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If you intend to use the built-in BASIC, you'll want to have a Rev C. BASIC installed in the unit. Rev B. has as infamous problem associated with repeated loads and saves of the same program. Basically, a heavily edited program will grow to fill all memory but will overwrite memory locations that are used as registers by the OS before that happens and crash the machine. There is a workaround but using Rev C. BASIC or BASIC XL or XE is a better idea.
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C64's biggest shortcoming is that is was a poorly made POS.When i got my 800XL for Christmas it didn't work properly, it would throw up a red screen four or five times a day on average so i returned it a few days after new years day, described the fault to the clerk in the shop and he didn't even bother firing it up to test the problem because the chain of stores had already received several hundred returns with the same issue by that point. Compared to my first C64, a 1984 issue machine that had been thrashed by it's previous owners (a local software development firm) and subsequently took a major pounding from me as well but still works to this day, i know which one i'd call poorly made and it doesn't tally with what you've said...
My first 800XL had a fed-up SELECT key but the exchange unit lasted for 7 years until I lost it in a move. That sucker was tough as nails. There was nothing cheesy about the 800s either. Now the XEs on the other hand have to be some of cruddiest plasticky looking things I've ever seen. And the XF551 drive is infamous for lousy solder joints on the SIO port. On the other hand, a buddy of mine got a whole shed-load of C-64s he wanted to use for a video wall project. There were in the neighborhood of 18 machines in that lot and it took a bit of chip and board swappery to get 14 or so good machines out of that lot. None were that bad cosmetically but we didn't know how they treated by the previous owner. I'd say they were between the 800XLs and XEs in terms of materials used and I don't recall QC horror stories from when they were new units. I rather liked the build-style of the 128s and 64Cs better. Just losing all that empty space made them feel more rigid and solid IMHO though I suppose the older units would be easier to internally mod.
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its even more amusing how atari fans are trying to byte of pieces of amiga's fame for their 8 bit machine.I'm more of a Jay Miner fan than an Atari fan and would have preferred Amigas over STs even if they had something like an Osborne label slapped on them. No brand loyalty here. Sorry.
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. I don't understand how a company as innovative as Atari was from 1972 to 1979 managed almost nothing afterwards.Stephen Anderson
They were innovative under Bushnell. It isn't that Bushnell was a particularly inspired leader but he did seem to know how to let the engineers get on with designing something. The Video Music was not the product of an anal-retentive company. And while it wasn't a huge success in and of itself, the tech used seemed to segue into the 2600 pretty nicely. In that era, marketing and management centric computer companies weren't going to do well making consumer devices because the market hadn't been defined yet so letting the engineers throw things at the wall and watching carefully what stuck was the best way to go about it.
Warner Bros was a media company pure and simple and obviously wanted to market games like they marketing music and movies. Games at that time hadn't fused with movies and music and couldn't be marketed or developed that way. It was during the Warner tenure that so many of Atari's best and brightest left to start their own companies. Jay Miner's engineering team and the programmers who went on to form companies like Imagic and Activision were Atari (and I find Commodore partisans who praise the Amiga and C-64 while despising the A8 to be ESPECIALLY amusing given that the A8 and the Amiga shared so many core designers. If Warner Atari had a bit more foresight, the Amiga would have been an Atari as well as they had the opportunity to buy that tech from Miner's company. I'll also note that the core of the ST engineering team worked on Commodore projects going clear back to the calculator days and yes the PET, Vic-20, C-64 as well.) At least they were the aesthetic soul of Atari and the ones left had to be content to do what they were told by PHBs.
Tramiel seemed to want to make Atari the IKEA of computers. It worked in the 70s and early 80s but at this point the business uses of micros were beginning to predominate. The only innovations the Tramiels were interested in were cost cutting ones.
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The other thing is, the main reason the '(Re)Build an Atari 8-Bit' thread went severely every which way was that there are sooooooooo many cool things that could be done. The problem was that they do all cost money, and no one really wanted to settle on a design. That thread got pretty heated, too, everyone wanted to be right, so sometimes fabulous ideas were completely overlooked. On the other hand, it's a great record of brainstorming.VBXE and the 7.16 Mhz 65816 upgrades have the virtue of actually existing. Both will also have the virtue of being publicly documented. Bob indicates in the VBXE thread that getting both physically installed would be a challenge and there may be a small amount of clock signal work to get them to play together nice. Since the installation of either results in a machine that is a superset of the A8, it makes more sense to me if they were combined into one upgrade. That way we only have one common superset of the A8 rather than three: 7.16 Mhz, VBXE, VBXE+7.16Mhz (separates). It also alleviates the problems that may exist with physically plugging both in. I'm also of the opinion that the 7.16 65816 is a better impedance match for the VBXE capabilities than the stock 1.79 Mhz 6502.
In any case if an A8 is breadboarded from scratch then ample physical room can be left to explore these possibilities. This is a "New Atari" that has a shot at being reality.
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Well since a lot of Atari demos have ripped off C64 demos, you pretty much know some C64 stuff already without having noticed it yet. I saw lot's of graphics and routines ripped from C64 demos in A8 demos.I thought one-upmanship was a major point of that scene? I doubt "ripped from" is a good way to put it. It isn't as though C-64 code that hugs the bare metal will run on an A8 or vice versa. I would have thought A8 or C-64 coders showing they can replicate a given effect to be perfectly cricket. I also have severe doubts about particular platforms owning particular effects having watched many demos on many different sorts of machines.
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And I suppose there is no reason you couldn't run something like STEEM under ARAnyM for those few bits of gaming oddments.You can't run STeem 'under' aranym as you suggest. I take it you never tried it.
I have a Hades060 Atari clone, which is hardware based. I can tell you from experience even aranym falls short of running 'all' productivity (tos/gem) software. Some stuff just don't work so I find that about page misleading and it's not an upgrade to me, but a downgrade.
Definitely can't make everyone happen.
Improving aranym enough to be completely useful may not be likely but it is more possible than all new hardware from scratch. If Aranym is run on top of Linux or a BSD than STEEM could be run alongside even if not on Aranym proper.
The best answer if one truly insists on a fast authentic machine is to be ready to pay some real money for an upgraded Falcon, TT, or clone.
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I suspect that a "modern" ST that runs all the old stuff natively just isn't going to happen. It is possible but the money and skills required to do it argue against. On the other hand we have ARAnyM. ARAnyM is intended to let a modern PC mimic a TOS clone rather than be a 100% low level emulation of an ST. And I suppose there is no reason you couldn't run something like STEEM under ARAnyM for those few bits of gaming oddments.
Such a solution won't make two groups of people happy: purists and gamers. But it does seem to be suitable for running the high-end productivity applications for the ST line.
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This is probably more of a question for the author of Atari++. Atari++ plays the animations but the colors look almost greyscale. Atari800 does a reasonably good job with the colors.
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That looks fast and fluid. Most impressive!
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Well,for those few Atarians that like tip animations, I have prepared a small archive, sorted by memory requirements (it does not include the x-rated animations, to avoid further complaints)... Today, I am starting with the 64k tip animations (including two new animations by me and some new and/or updated animations by Miker)... no sources included, since no-one seems to use them... -Andreas Koch.
Thanks for putting those up. I can't say think much of the complaints. This is a new tool and you and Miker are at least plumbing it's strengths and weaknesses so that everybody else can learn what works, what doesn't, and what you need to do if you particularly want an animation to come out well. I also appreciate that time and effort went into this and everybody else gets to download and possibly enjoy for free.
Don't let the whingers get you down!
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Hmmm... 80 columns ? Together with standard GTIA output ? And maybe with scrolling ? Colors ? ... HmmmmLook at this:
http://www.fotosik.pl/pokaz_obrazek/3e54d68925202526.html
Yes but can we get all that goodness in a plug-n-play upgrade that doesn't require a screwdriver or soldering skills?
Though that said, if VBXE and bob1200XL's upgrades can co-exist then we have something that makes more sense. Since you're already in for a penny modding an A8 into a superset of itself then might as well go for the full pound. A 7.14 Mhz 16-bit processor with a lotsa memory and a flash storage adaptor is a good bet to feed VBXE anyway. A few months back we had a thread about a "new A8". That combo would give us what an "Atari IIGS" might have looked like.
The upgrade under discussion in this thread is trivially installable and removable assuming featuritus is avoided. Require internal installation and the balance of merit swings in favor of VBXE since it is already engineered and would be $50 more at most. If this upgrade retains the cartridge/PBI/ECI installation characteristic then it can still offer a range of possibilities over stock video that are worthwhile even if it can never be as powerful as VBXE.
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That basically leaves low-level programming enthusiasts one choice to produce the best of the 8-bit and 16-bit machines-- memory map the Atari 8-bit into the Amiga's memory space. Perhaps, reserve 64K..128K of the megabytes of 680x0 memory space for the 6502 and internally genlock the Atari video output on the Amiga's. I guess we would run into the similar problem as the Apple of trying to get copy-protected or incompatible formatted disks' data fed into the Atari's disk input.It wouldn't be trivial. The faster models of the Amiga might manage to emulate the 6502 acceptably but something like an A500 wouldn't manage it. Also, the Amiga isn't a 1 for 1 upgrade of the A8. It is an entirely different machine that has an engineering concept in common with the A8 (dumb but versatile scanline generator controlled by either a co-processor or the host cpu). Nonethless, I believe any Amiga could manage a passable simulation of the A8 chipset but emulating a 6502 CPU on top of that is a killer. As it happens the Atari800 emu is supported on the Amiga but I imagine it requires at least an A3000 and maybe even a 4000. Since Atari800 is crossplatform, I imagine the artful mapping of Amiga features to A8 features is minimal.
This Apple emulator we're discussing is possible because the Apple and A8 use the same CPU and the Apple II generally has a simpler video system than the A8 that can be mapped to the A8 with some degree of success.
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Our family's first computer was a 1040ST and of course it had a fancier processor and fancier video than the 8-bit line but other than that, I'm not overly impressed. For some reason it seems to have a somewhat strong following too. I actually bought a 130XE just because it reminded me of the ST, yet I think it's a better computer
You'd probably like playing with Amigas then. Many of the same engineers behind the 2600 and the A8 chipset designed the Amiga chipset including the legendary Jay Miner. Interestingly, the ST hardware shares engineering personnell with the C-64 designers. These two companies went through a brief period of incestuous personnell interchange in the mid-eighties.
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I wonder how that SpongeBob animation would look.
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Perhaps, but wouldn't a piece of bitBlt hardware that was hardwired to Conway's "Life" meet that criterion? I would suggest that a more useful requirement for calling something a "processor" would be that it must be able to perform general operations at a speed at least vaguely comparable to the rate it which it performs specialized ones.It depends how "hardwired" it is. A Turing complete machine must be able to solve any computable problem in principle. The definition of Turing completeness doesn't specify a time frame so if it takes the machine 100,000 years to add 100 numbers then so be it. It also doesn't specify niceties like ease of development, architecture, input, output, or any form of usefulness whatsoever.
I suspect the definition of "processor" falls prey to the same sort of vagueness that the bitness of a given architecture is. And there are no end of useful digital devices like the video processors in some machines that aren't Turing complete...but the the CPUs controlling them generally are.
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No computer with finite memory is Turing complete. A simple hardwired graphics manipulation system, if it performed logical bitBlt operations on an infinite-resolution screen, would be.Architectures are colloquially understood to be Turing complete if all they need to complete the definition is unlimited storage. Basically if you can implement the P'' language or equivalent (like say brainf*ck) then the computing device is potentially Turing complete. A true Turing complete machine is an ideal that will most likely never be realized (that infinite storage bit is a real monster) but we CAN build machines that support all of the operations of the simplest Turing complete computer.
P'': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_prime_prime
Good behavior requires googling the brainf*ck article as an exercise for the reader
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I collect a particular misfit computer system myself - the Mindset M1001 (www.mindsetcomputer.com) so I understand.Curt
The computer animations in the following video were done on a Mindset.
You piqued my curiosity so I googled up the Mindset, found that video, and read a bit. Misfit it may be but capability wise, it was a competitive machine in it's time and was an influence on the design of the ST line.
I have no hate for the Aquarius. Indeed, I never got closer to one than a few magazine ads back in the day. But from what I've read and the few screenshots I've been able to find, it seems .. truncated compared to contemporary machines. Be a hoot to watch a working one though.
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Is opening the machine to install an upgrade that much of an issue? Yes it could be a pain in the case of having to remove chips that are soldered on the board, but think about the alternatives:Yeah. I see posts all the time to the effect of "Can someone do this mod for me?" or "I'm not an electronics wizard..."
Cartridge. Precludes the use of other cartridges, unless it has its own connector for pass-through, which still results in an ugly stack of devices protruding from the machine.So use disk based software that can utilize the upgrade. Yeah that is a minus but I believe it a smaller minus than desoldering ICs to get the thing in. And it has the virtue of being plug compatible with most Ataris.
PBI/ECI device. Needs an adaptor to fit the other kind of port, and if you have an A8 without PBI/ECI you're out of luck.That's a tradeoff that splits the difference in performance and capability between a simple cart and a solder-in module. This too is an audience limiter only we are limiting the audience based on which Atari you have rather than your workbench skills or time to employ them. Still if the basic concept is proven with a cart, we may see a more capable derivative that uses the ECI/PBI.
How many people who are still inclined to use Ataris after all these years have never opened the case?I'm capable of installing such a mod but somewhat limited living space and a wife and kid means I won't be doing it. All of my workbench hobbies are on hold until the living situation changes. I can drag my 130XE of the box now and then and hook it up to the TV quickly. I love all things Atari but life means I have to be a little sparing with that love.
I use emulation even more often not because it is superior but because it is convenient. If any of these devices passes a certain threshold of popularity then emulators will simulate it as well.
However, even though the VBXE looks like a very capable and well-designed device, $130 plus shipping is a bit steep for what is basically a toy.Fully agreed. The combination of a relatively steep price (especially these days) and the necessity to desolder things on many units doesn't bode well for it IMHO. And I don't mean to disparage an outstanding technical achievement. It is doubtless faster, more sophisticated, and capable then what we are discussing. But we Atarians well know that it takes more than great technology to have a winner.
As for the cartridge-based device being discussed, I'm sure that at $50-75 it would sell larger numbers. But I would like to see a certain minimum level of functionality, like directly addressable display memory through the cartridge port window for instance.Simple things tend to be hackable things. It looks like what Claus has in mind is to get a simple device working and then show us how he did it and what problems he ran into. We can kick it around from there and figure out how to make it optimal in terms of skill to install and use, price, performance, and ease of development for. The best outcome is if we get a spec for an upgrade many of us could protoboard and build. A fully specced inexpensive upgrade that uses a minimum of custom components and is noninvasive to install has the best chance of being widely adopted.
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Atari v Commodore
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
Isn't it possible to drive the GTIA directly from the 6502 ala the 2600 with a "display kernal"? Not that it would happen much.