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Foebane

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Posts posted by Foebane

  3. Posted

    Back in the day the Amoeba owners said you could never play mods or load pics with more than 16 colours on an ST. I did both. There are a ton of mod players and editors. Have a gander.

     

    While the Amiga owners eyes were failing due to excessive interlace and all those dramas just pulling a file off a PC...... its all coming back to me now, lol. And when I put 4MB chip ram in the STFM..... damn, we had fun back then.

     

    As I said, I had an ST before I had an Amiga, and I definitely remember playing mods with samples from the STampede disk magazine.

     

    And I've seen Spectrum 512, and ST/E demos that put hundreds of colours on screen at once, even fade ins and outs.

     

    Interlace on Amiga? Couldn't get enough of it. Seriously, I got used to it in the end, even on a TV. And I used to put PC floppies in my A1200 all the time, no problems there, except maybe for the differences concerning line feeds and carriage returns ;)

     

    Did the ST have "chip RAM"? I thought that was an Amiga thing only.

  4. Posted

    who am I kidding, the STFM was better than the A500 as far as I was concerned and we would constantly pull out demos and games that would silence the Amiga fraternity. For every advantage the A500 had, it also had flaws.

     

    A couple of weeks ago I was listening to MOD playback on my stock Falcon vs my A1200. Falcon was the clear winner. :-) I still love listening to MODs on the STFM too. Why? Because I just love my Ataris and I don't feel the need to justify that to anyone.

     

    1st paragraph: Hahahaha! You're DELUSIONAL, Atari030! What games and demos would "silence" us? Please, do tell.

     

    2nd paragraph: Fair enough, the Falcon had brand-spanking-new audio hardware whilst the A1200's was unchanged, so MODs were the same or clearer. But you listen to MODs on the ST as well? You LIKE that awful, scratchy sound?

  6. Posted

     

    What is this "expensive secondary hardware add-on" that you are talking about? You certainly can use professional (i.e. expensive) keyboards reliably with the built in MIDI ports. That's why it was so popular with professional and amateur musicians. :music:

     

    The keyboards are what I mean. How many people bought an Atari ST and then decided to buy a MIDI keyboard to go with it? Did I not make that obvious? I'm sure the price doubled to at least £600 with both!

  8. Posted

    #20

     

    And where DOES the ST "come into its own"?

     

    Every time I hear Atarians defend the ST over the Amiga, they usually spout how "the processing speed of the ST is faster", or "the ST can do MIDI" - I respond that "the Amiga custom chips make up exceedingly well for any shortfall in the processing speed, and essentially can do more stuff that the ST simply can't", and "what use is MIDI if you have to pay for an expensive secondary hardware add-on just to use it? I don't think many people have cheap MIDI keyboards".

     

    And yes, I have owned an ST myself, so I'm not speaking from ignorance.

  11. Posted

    I tried to run Sea of Colour by DHS on Hatari a long time ago but found it was rather sluggish and had problems, and it took a long time to load as well.

     

    I have used Steem SSE for a long time and found it faster, but in the last year Steven changed the "wait state" aspect of the emulator and there were glitches from then on, and Steem SSE has never had the best sound emulation in particular as it is.

  16. Posted

     

    Right, and don't forget according to Foebane:

     

    "4. The Amiga cost more because it had so much more, that's how pricing works."

     

    So by that argument, the PC was much better, and the Apple Lisa was freakin incredible :)

     

    I mean compared to the ST. Don't put words in my mouth. :P

  18. Posted

    In every way? hm...

    Some parts I really hated about the Amiga and asked myself, why they haven't built a solution around it.

     

    One was that separated double mono ... stereo. If the coder or the creator for music wanted real stereo sound , they had to build software mixing. A simple fading circuit could have solved a lot of problems.

    Also, a simple frequency doubler had been the solution to have the Amiga connected to a VGA monitor and Interlace had been no issue.

    The drive click? Simply: Why ? Everything worked fine, installing a driver that stopped that clicking.

    The ridiculous Filter . Seemed to be build in to have some similarity to SID sound, newer Amigas offered the possibility to turn it off and to have crystal clear sound. The only fun was the title tune of "BaaL" that played a little with it by using the filter on/off for some special bass FX.

     

    1. I tended to stick with mono for Amiga sound as a result. But with WinUAE, I can now mix both sides 50% and have a reasonable stereo effect. And many Amiga demos use WAVs and MP3s in their soundtracks with 14-bit audio that is perfect for the stereo sides (14-bit audio uses two voices per stereo side).

    2. I agree, interlace looked nice in pictures, but not for word processing or Workbench stuff.

    3. You could run a tiny program to stop the drive clicking, but not all drives were compatible: some would click even louder.

    4. The filter is an annoyance, but then low-playback rate samples without the filter sound worse. It was some kind of compromise. But from what I've seen, most demos and games turn it off.

  19. Posted

    Well it lacked the mono 71Hz mode which made the ST much nicer for serious work like DTP etc.

    It also lacked built in midi, which made the ST the standard in the music industry for about a decade.

    It lacked a PC compatible floppy drive for easy file transfers to PCs.

    It lacked ease of programming. The ST was known to be much easier to program.

     

    But most of all:

     

    It lacked an affordable price tag when it was released. I think the Amiga was at least three times he price of the 1040STFm when I bought that machine.

     

    The ST was much more an all rounder and I was happy to use it well into the 90s.

     

    So no....not everything was nicer on the Amiga

     

    Actually, it WAS nicer.

     

    1. Who cares about MIDI? Not many of us had MIDI keyboards back then, and anyway, Paula with its sample playback meant you could use any instrument possible.

    2. PC disks? I had no trouble using PC disks on Amiga, did it frequently for college work.

    3. Lacked "ease of programming"? Hello, AMOS and Blitz Basic! (feeble argument on your part)

    4. The Amiga cost more because it had so much more, that's how pricing works.

  20. Posted

    I "upgraded" from an Atari 800XL to an Atari 520 STFM, not having done any research on it or even gone to the local computer store to ask for a comparison, at my parents' expense (£300). I didn't know about the history of Atari and Commodore pulling at Amiga, and how it turned out, or even that the Amiga was the natural successor to the A8. I just foolishly stuck with the Atari brand, totally unaware.

     

    After a few months, I persuaded them to get me an Amiga 500, and as I recall, it was a tough sell. They relented, even though it cost my father another £400, and it turned out the first Amiga 500 was faulty, and my father seemed none too concerned about practically throwing it in front of me.

     

    Even though I'd had personal experience of shitty ST sound, I was still in-between camps concerning the ST and Amiga, but having tried a few games and demos, I was finally bitten by the Amiga bug and was a terminal case. The ST was sold later on. I can say I've had experience of both.

  21. Posted

    My favourite racing game on Amiga by far (bought it on budget back in the 1990s and was totally impressed). However, I cannot seem to win a race without using the booster, and I keep that button pressed down when it's necessary (like when my tyres are gripped to the road) although it's pot luck if I can complete all three laps before the growing chassis crack wrecks my stunt car. :_(

     

    Great, GREAT A8 conversion, however! :thumbsup:

  23. Posted · Edited by Foebane

    24 pixels across is three bytes so multiply that by 21 and you get 63 bytes per sprite definition; they're arranged on 64 byte boundaries in memory so you get 256 sprite definitions to each of the four 16K VIC-II banks. S'hard to know if that's an actual hardware limitation or merely the designers saving themselves a little space by going for a multiply by 64.

     

    Interesting. What is the 64th byte used for?

  24. Posted

     

     

    I believe "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brain Bagnall has some good quotes from Al Charpentier on the design of the VIC-II sprites. He said they looked at all the machines on the market with sprite capability (TI-99, Intellivision, and Atari) and analyzed the good and bad points of each system before designing the VIC-II sprites. So, yes the Commodore designers were inspired by Atari's sprites. And it is not surprising the C-64 has a better sprite system, given the number of examples Commodore had to work from.

     

    Answer me one question: Why are the C64 sprites 24 hi-res (or 12 lo-res) pixels wide and 21 pixels high? Why specifically 21? Why not 24? Some kind of hardware limitation?

     

    On the other hand, I remember trying to program sprites on the A8 back in the day and finding it ridiculously awkward for vertical movement, and then reading about how it was much more easily done on the C64 in both X and Y directions, and I was impressed. I can see why so many programmers loved the sprites.

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