Dr. Van Thorp

http://www.heimcomputer.de/english/konsole...0compumate.html I found this web site. I didn't know that such a thing actually made it to market. It had a 16k basic and 1750 bytes of RAM. I would have rather had an 8k basic and 8k of RAM, but maybe there was some design limitation that I don't know about.

Yep, that's what I was talking about. Now that they have the C=64 on a chip, they can license it for that kind of stuff.

http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/cons...2600/a3000.html http://home.comcast.net/~vbriel/ The above links are to two web pages of interest. The first page describes the unreleased "Graduate" computer console that was supposed to make the 2600 in to a desktop computer. The second page describes a recently built clone of Apple's original Apple I computer. You can buy these replicas assembled and in kit form. The Graduate, according to the web site, was developed by a startup founded by some Commodore defectors. It was never released, reportedly because Atari got overambitious about the specifications for the machine, and kept demanding that the developers add new features to the design. This prolonged development, and gave competators time to grab market share and lower their prices, dooming the Graduate. Some unreleased prototypes of Atari games have found their way in to the hands of Atari 2600 enthusiests. People are still making new 2600 cartridegs and building new hardware for the Atari 8-bit machines. Would it be too far of a stretch to suggest that a version of the Graduate could be built by hobbyinsts, based on what information is available? The web site offers a dead link to a 115-page PDF file containing the original design notes. Also, it appears that someone has the original prototypes that are shown in the photos on the web site.

I just aquired a Tandyvision Intelevision console from a second hand store. When you hook it up and turn it on, the TV changes from snow to black. When you press the reset button, the screen sometimes flickers for a fraction of a second. I have tried several cartridges with the same results, so the problem is definately in the console. It is possible to get these machines repaired, and can it be done more cheaply that I can buy another console from eBay?

Thanks for the info. I didn't know that anyone was doing anything that complicated on the VIC 20. It didn't have sprites, and I don't remember it having any sort of raster register (certainly no raster interupt) so it had never occured to me that the raster would even recieve attention in any VIC-20 graphics software. So what were Imagic and Sirius doing with Raster timing? I'm guessing that they were pushing to get extra colors in to the VIC's character blocks. To get a full screen of bitmapped graphics, you had to us an 8x16 character mode, so you could only get 2 colors in an 8x16 high-res block, or 4 colors in a 4x16 multi-color block with double-wide pixels. A significant limitation on a michine with 176x184 resolution.

There are currently many devices available that use old Super Nintendo technology. Now that the C-64 on a chip has been developed, it should be ripe for licensing to whoever wants to build a device. It might even have an advantage over the Super Nintendo ship in that many thousands of programmers had early experience with the C-64 technology.

I really don't remember there being a lot of tricks in VIC-20 programs that would have made much of a difference when played on a PAL or NTSC machine. Could you please enlighten me on this matter?

Do they think that they can make 28 million on lawsuits? They would become another SCO if they tried that.

I didn't know that this kind of stuff was being done at academic institutions. I think that the next logical step would be to port the software to a microcontroller, so that a stand-alone box containing a 3 3/4 drive and a few chips could emulate the Atari 800 disk drive.

Yeahronimo says that they are going to make MP3 players that can also play Commodore 64 games, so they actually are guying Commodore for the computers.

What were the basic graphics hardware capabilites of the ST? I remember that when it first came out, I read reviews of it, and thought that it was underpowered compared to the Amiga. I think that it has 512 colors (31 chromas at 16 luma levels or some such thing). It did not have a blitter (which made me think that blitters were invented by Amiga, which was not true). The sound hardware, if I remember correctly, required a bit more CPU involvement than the Amiga. I think that there was a hardware hack or ad-on that would make the ST run the Macintosh OS, so I'd consider it a better machine than the early Macs.

There are actual applications for GEOS. WYSIWYG word proccessors, paint programs, web browsers, even (recently) full motion video viewers. It does more than move files around.

Is there an organization for GEOS users and developers?

The C-64 has the advantage that GEOS allready works on it. However, it would not be impossible to port the software. The GEOS interface, as I remember it, was black-and-white, like the early Macintosh computer, and definatley not beyond the capabilities of the Atari. I have heard of a version of GEOS for Apple-II computers, which are farther removed from the C-64 than the Atari is. There have been recent revisions of the GEOS OS that run on a C-64 with an external 16-bit proccessor called the SuperCPU, which is not available for the Atari. The hardware hackers will have to get to work on an Atari version.

To bring this back to the original topic of the Commodore 64 being a copy of the Atari 800: There are some similarities; same number of columns and rows, similar graphics modes, etc. Atari has more colors. C-64 has better sound and a better sprite system. I could imagine Commodore's engineering team buying an Atari 800, and giving it a look-over to see what the competition is up to. They probably did the same with Apple-II, TI99/4a, and CoCo. I don't think that the similarities of the Atari and Commodore machines are unique enough to be called copies. Apple-II and many others had 40 columns. TI/994A had programmable characters, and eight sprites (the sprites were 8x8 pixels). I found this web page: http://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/ which has a bit of information about Commodore's color system for computers, and I think that they surpassed Atari at least for vividness and clairity of colors, if not for quantity. So their's at least one place where there is documentation of original thought at Commodore.[/url]

Do you think that they were trying (once again) to discourage third-party developers?

Pokey is the sound chip (also interface chip) in old Atari 8-bit computers like the Atari 800. FPGA is a chip that can be reprogramed to perform the functions of all sorts of other chips. Field Programmable Gate Array. It is a chip full of little electronic components that can be programmed and reprogrammed to connect together in different configurations to perform different electronic tasks. Often used for small production runs when it isn't feasable to make a custom chip. Also used in some graphics cards and similar devices. Good for hobby projects.

The licensing of developers came in to existance when the console manufacturers got really greedy, and decided that they needed to make money on every game sold. To do this, the machines had to be sophisticated enough to have patentable cartidge designs or encription. Even some game controllers have encrypted signals that are sent through the wire to the game system, so that controller manufacturers can't make unlicensed controllers. Greedy bastards.

I can't see how Commodore could have had any control whatsoever over people that were developing products for the Apple or Atari. This has to be some sort of urban myth created by someone that didn't know much about how business works.

I don't even understand the premis of this claim. What was it that these shops were developing that would justify doing an extra project for the C-64? Were they PET developers? To sell a thousand PET programms, they were forced by Commodore to sell a hundred thousand Commodore 64 programs? And why were these developers so dependent on Commodore?

I thought that Mavis Beacon was a revised version of an earlier program called "Typing Tutor", which was available on many 8-bit machines.

I think that the Atari-800 joystick game is a pipe dream. When regular folk think of Atari, they think of a keyboardless wood-grain box that plays a bad flickery version of Pac-Man.

There was also Hero One from Heath/Zenith. It was about a thousand dollars, and was way more sophisticated than Androbot or the Omnibot robots. In the mid 1980's there was a boom in robots for hobbyists. They didn't catch on. Actaully, they couldn't do much, except for some room-explorer type stuff like early laboratory robots. I think that what people really want is to have their rugs vacuumed.

I have found message boards like this one dedicated to the Atari 8-bit computers. I've found Commodore message boards. I've found message boards for computers never sold in the United States. Oddly, there is a shortage of message boards for the Apple II. I remember that back in the day, the Apple II people would often look down their noses at everyone else, but now they are no where to be found.

I'm guessing 8 x 12 x 3 Lets see how close I am. A little bit off topic. Is that the motor out of a Big Trak in the photo under your name?