classic battle atari 8bit vs commodore 64

[emkay]

Talking about "Dizzy" games you have to know that those games were absolute low budget releases which were sold for £1.99 in the UK. Most of those games are just quick Spectrum ports and in no way show any C64 specific stuff.

 

Who says that the expensive always is better?

Mainly, I'm using this game for arguing because really no one ever made such hires colour game on the A8. Is it impossible ? No!

 

Well, C64 people always say their machine can do Hispeed transfers. But, I'm pretty sure: If commodore was sure about the stable function with all their Machines, they would have built it in by standard.

I have used fastloader cartridges on C64 for 20 years now. They ARE stable. The reasons why Commodore never did their own: They feared compability problems. That's also the reason why the C128 offers so little C128 features in it's C64 mode.

 

Perhaps we're getting closer

Why should commodore have fears about compatibility if all C64 are able to do the same?

Actually, the C64 had no predescessor like the A8 XL/XE series which made many games suffering of kept fit into 16k or 48k.

So the only "logic" thing was that the first 1-3 year C64 had problems with the "highspeed-transfers" not all, but too much spread ... but a compatibility issue? to what?

The step from the C64 to the C128 is really a logic thing with compatibility. No doubt.

This reminds me about the hardware-stack overflow on VIA based PCs. After appoaching that problem, they heavily dropped the speed of the controller for handling this.

Edited July 22, 2007 by emkay

[Fröhn]

The Commi guys always deny that the AMIGA comes originally from ATARI. Well, ATARI wanted to built a 16 bit machine that was compatible with the 8-bit line. Jay Miner wanted to go a fully new way.

 

Well.... Guess why the chipset clocking is a "multiple" of the A8...

1,79 / 3,58 / 7,16 / 14,32 ....

So what? It's not a "multiple of the A8 clocking" but some clock derived from the PAL/NTSC color carriers. Pretty much like EVERY 8 bit computer had to save a part. Examples for PAL machines:

 

C64 : 4.43361875 MHz * 2/9 = 0.985 MHz

A8 : 4.43361875 MHz * 2/5 = 1.773 MHz

VIC20 : 4.43361875 MHz * 1/4 = 1.108 MHz

 

If guess, if Miner stayed at ATARI, the XL line would have been something like an Hybrid between the 800 and the AMIGA 1000.

And a faster computer with a 65xx(x) cpu easily could be clocked by a straight ratio to have full backward compatibility.

If Miner stayed at Atari, he wouldn't be able to do what he wanted.

 

Why should commodore have fears about compatibility if all C64 are able to do the same?

All C64s are able to do the same just because Commodore cared for compability so much. If they found only one program which failed because of another feature, they simply didn't add it. C64 mode in the C128 is a prime example. In an interview Bil Herd said, that he removed all kinds of C128 features until everything he tested worked. And if he had known that there was also programs not working because of the 2 MHz mode accessibility in C64 mode, he would have removed that too.

[JamesD]

Touching as many subtopics as I can stand in a single post.

 

 

Reguarding the slow C64 drive discussion...

 

The slow C64 disk drive issue goes all the way back to the Vic20. The chip in the Vic20 which would have allowed fast transfers (6522) was buggy and it wasn't detected until production of the chip had already started. So they just made it a slow software driven bit banger interface.

 

The C64 had fixed hardware (6526) but for compatibility with the Vic20 drive, didn't use it. A marketing decision.

And, because the processor in the C64 is turned off for 40 microseconds every 512 microseconds, it kept missing the interrupt signals that control the disk interface. The solution: slow the drive down even further. Boggles the mind doesn't it? They weren't allowed to make it faster but it was ok to make it slower.

 

Attaching a couple wires between the port and serial chip along with a driver allow the C64 to use the C128 burst mode that was available on later drives. That mode was supposed to be available on the Vic20 from the beginning btw.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~albert/Dev/burst/

 

 

 

As for Atari VS C64...

 

The C64 had a better sound chip technically speaking but it was used to the point of annoyance in a lot of games.

It definitely had better sprite hardware and better graphics in SOME ways.

 

The Atari had more colors, a faster clock speed and 4 voice sound. And Atari licensed a lot of arcade games which lead to a lot of titles for it. The serial bus was also pretty advanced for it's day.

 

To be honest neither machine is drastically superior to the other and depending on what you were doing either could be the better choice.

This also applies to other machines as well.

 

The Speccy had a pretty decent clock speed among Z80 machines and due to the way it's display works you could drive graphics to it pretty fast. It probably has the largest library of 3D or isometric games of all the 8 bits.

 

The Plus/4 makes up for the lack of sprites and a SID with with fast speed, more memory and more colors. I've seen some of the best looking 8 bit graphics out there on this "loser" of a machine. It also offered an excellent BASIC with more available RAM for BASIC programmers out of the box than any other 8 bit system. It definitely looks cooler than a breadbox C64.

 

The Tandy CoCo had the best 8 bit CPU and the artifact graphics of the older models were used to do some amazing things from a 2 color mode... unless you didn't have an NTSC machine and then it was pretty blah.

Extended Color Basic was the best built in BASIC of the day which is why I got one. The CoCo 3 is nothing short of amazing in the hands of a great programmer. The new Donkey Kong game is by far the best version for an 8 bit. But then the author does work on video games for a living and had access to the original source apperently.

 

The Apple II display was a total hack but they made it work. It had a decent BASIC, one of the nicest boxes and floppies were common. Games were everywhere. With it's expandability and some marketing guaranteed it a solid place in the industry. 80 column text and floppies made it a hit with businesses.

 

The TRS-80 Model I beat the Apple II to market and evolved into the Model III/IV machines which were a hit with businesses. Game wise... there was some cool stuff in spite of it's limitations. The Atari Star Trek game discussed elsewhere on these forums grew out of a Model I game.

 

 

 

In reguards to the Amiga discussion...

 

Atari funded them at some point but Jay Miner was NOT an Atari employee at that point. The Amiga was neither an Atari or Commodore. Atari had no exclusive and did not direct the design of the machine. They should have asked for first right to purchase the technology in their financial agreement but they didn't and Commodore swept in with an offer and bought the technology.

If anything the Amiga was a product of Jay Miner but Jay = employee... not Atari and not Commodore.

As a person that used to sell Amiga machines I can tell you that we always talked about Amiga like it was a different company than Commodore.

Edited July 23, 2007 by JamesD

[Bryan]

The Tandy CoCo had the best 8 bit CPU and the artifact graphics of the older models were used to do some amazing things from a 2 color mode... unless you didn't have an NTSC machine and then it was pretty blah.

 

The CoCo had a great (but expensive) CPU. The NTSC artifacts weren't reliable (you had to reset until it looked right). Like the Apple II, it had almost no sound hardware. Most peripherals had to be plugged into the cartridge slot. It was an example of the pitfalls of using off-the-shelf hardware. It can be argued that Radio Shack never took the machine seriously.

 

The CoCo 3 is nothing short of amazing in the hands of a great programmer. The new Donkey Kong game is by far the best version for an 8 bit. But then the author does work on video games for a living and had access to the original source apperently.

 

The CoCo 3 had a lot of features for an 8-bit machine, but was released in the shadow of the Amiga and ST, which were much more capable.

 

-Bry

Edited July 22, 2007 by Bryan

[potatohead]

Didn't the CoCo have an 8bit DAC built in for the cassette? It wasn't stereo, but the great CPU allowed for some excellent sounds. PITA, compared to having a chip, but not as bad as all that.

 

The CoCo3, had it been released earlier, really would have shined IMHO. It's probably my favorite 8 bitter, next to the A800. On NTSC televisions, artifacting allowed for a *lot* of on screen colors. I think the 640x192x(4?) color mode, was the sweet one. Using an effective resolution of 160 pixels, it did at least 128 colors, if not more. One just had to setup a Color Lookup Table with all the bit patterns and go.

 

At the time I had one, I wrote a fractal computation program with this mode. Looked sweet.

 

The big feature, IMHO, was the nice and powerful onboard MMU. Any 8K bank could be swapped for any other 8K bank with relative ease. Where getting good use out of > 64K RAM is concerned, I think this machine was the most powerful of the 8bitters.

 

Crappy game controllers, nice and fast disks, great cassette interface too. (worked with file names and had a very high tolerance for tape variations and ran at 1200 baud --screaming at the time.

 

Fun CPU on that thing. Programming assembly on the 6809 was just pure fun. Beautiful 8 bit design. It was expensive, but clearly best in class.

 

Lack of hardware sprites is kind of a bummer, but it had plenty of ram, making double buffered displays with lots of colors easy enough. Given the CPU, I'm not sure it's a big of a limitation as some people thought at the time.

 

The real limitation was programs. Compared to other 8bitters, almost nothing good was released for it The ugliness of the CoCo 1 & 2 probably had a lot to do with that, as did the potential for outselling the Tandy 1000. That was a running joke too. With the CPU clocked down by half, it still performed well compared to the 1000.

 

If I had it all to do over, I would have spent much more time on the CoCo3.

[JamesD]

Didn't the CoCo have an 8bit DAC built in for the cassette? It wasn't stereo, but the great CPU allowed for some excellent sounds. PITA, compared to having a chip, but not as bad as all that.

 

It had an 8 bit DAC but 2 bits were used for cassette and 6 for sound. It made making good sounds during action more difficult since you had to keep driving the DAC from an interrupt. The CoCo3 added a programmable interrupt timer that could be used just for that purpose so it was much better for sound.

They also had the sound n speech cartridge which even had it's own PIC microcontroller that could drive the sound and speech chip while the cpu did something else. Sadly they priced it too high at first and it didn't sell real well. It did get quite a bit of software support from some companies.

It's too bad they didn't make all 8 bits of the DAC available for sound. They could have multiplexed the chip outputs. It would have offered better dynamic range and sound quality. You had to write to all 8 bits anyway so it's not like it would have been slower.

 

There are programs that will play music in 4 part harmony over that lowly DAC and as time went on more and more games did the same.

 

The CoCo3, had it been released earlier, really would have shined IMHO. It's probably my favorite 8 bitter, next to the A800. On NTSC televisions, artifacting allowed for a *lot* of on screen colors. I think the 640x192x(4?) color mode, was the sweet one. Using an effective resolution of 160 pixels, it did at least 128 colors, if not more. One just had to setup a Color Lookup Table with all the bit patterns and go.

The CoCo3 had a true 16 color modes up to 320x200 as well with palette registers and 64 colors. With artifacting you could easily get hundreds on a TV if you wanted. It was also planned to have a true 256 color mode but it required weird steps to turn it on. Tandy never released the info and destroyed all the Coco stuff when they canceled it so we'll never know if it made it into production machines and how to turn it on if it did.

 

Too bad Tandy drug their feet with the CoCo from day one. If the Coco 3 had come out instead of the CoCo2... it would have been a major player.

They still sold millions of the machines. It was Tandy's top seller right up until it was discontinued.

 

At the time I had one, I wrote a fractal computation program with this mode. Looked sweet.

 

The big feature, IMHO, was the nice and powerful onboard MMU. Any 8K bank could be swapped for any other 8K bank with relative ease. Where getting good use out of > 64K RAM is concerned, I think this machine was the most powerful of the 8bitters.

 

The MMU was nice. With OS-9 you could run multiple programs at once with true preemptive multitasking before the Amiga.

You could bank the graphics mem in and out of the CPU address space so it didn't take up all your program space. The GIME chip would access it wherever you placed it even if it wasn't loaded in to the CPU address space which makes it a lot more convenient than some of the other setups other systems used.

There was even a program that would let you use the additional RAM for BASIC programs.

 

The only other machine that might have been better than the CoCo 3 was the Apple IIgs.

 

It's sound chip was designed by one of the people that designed the SID if I remember right and it was a whole lot better... hands down the best sound chip of any 8 bit machine. It was something strait out of a synthesizer. But then it came years after the other machines.

 

The 65816 isn't quite as good as the 6809 but it did have extended memory addressing built in and higher clock speeds... though the 6309 is even faster than the 6809 and just plugs in place of it. Something like 30% faster at the same clock speed.

 

The IIgs had similar graphics modes to the CoCo 3 but even had a mode where the hardware could have different pallets for different sections of the screen and it was handled in hardware. It allowed many more colors on the screen even though only 16 were used at any location. You could do the same thing on the CoCo but you had to manually change the palette which took clock cycles. For that matter the CoCo I/II could switch color sets on the fly resulting in more colors on a screen than it officially supported. Dragonfire used that trick.

 

Crappy game controllers, nice and fast disks, great cassette interface too. (worked with file names and had a very high tolerance for tape variations and ran at 1200 baud --screaming at the time.

Actually, the deluxe joysticks were pretty nice. The tape interface was 1500 baud and worked really well. If your CoCo could handle the double speed poke you could save tapes at about double speed. It took a few pokes to get the machine to read them back in but it did work pretty reliably.

A cassette faster than some disk drives... pretty nice.

 

Fun CPU on that thing. Programming assembly on the 6809 was just pure fun. Beautiful 8 bit design. It was expensive, but clearly best in class.

I've been working on a port of a C compiler for it from time to time and I must say that the 6809 supports high level languages and operating systems much better than any other 8 bit CPU of the time.

 

Instead of just page 0 you have a direct page register that lets you access any page in memory with faster instructions. 16 bit pointer registers, multiply instruction, multiple stack pointers, auto increment or decrement... the thing was great. But then you knew that if you programmed it.

 

Lack of hardware sprites is kind of a bummer, but it had plenty of ram, making double buffered displays with lots of colors easy enough. Given the CPU, I'm not sure it's a big of a limitation as some people thought at the time.

Some people have been able to drive a lot of sprites with just the CPU but you almost have to convert each sprite to code to reduce the clock cycles if you really want to push things. At 4MHz the thing probably would have been able to keep up with hardware sprites but sadly, they never came out with a model based on one of the faster 6809s. I think there were some available that could handle 8MHz.

 

The real limitation was programs. Compared to other 8bitters, almost nothing good was released for it The ugliness of the CoCo 1 & 2 probably had a lot to do with that, as did the potential for outselling the Tandy 1000. That was a running joke too. With the CPU clocked down by half, it still performed well compared to the 1000.

Well... there were versions of almost every arcade game but they weren't licensed versions. Tandy was clearly to blame for a lot of that since they barely supported the machine. It wasn't until later in the CoCo's life that Tandy offered a program where you could order a lot of aftermarket software through your local Radio Shack. Otherwise it was pick up a magazine and order it.

Radio Shack actually pulled additional sound support and the 256 color mode from the CoCo3 so it wouldn't interfere with 1000 sales.

 

If I had it all to do over, I would have spent much more time on the CoCo3.

I switched to the Amiga instead of the Coco3 and didn't buy one till years later. Looking back I wish I had gotten a CoCo3 when they first came out.

[Gury]

The Speccy had a pretty decent clock speed among Z80 machines and due to the way it's display works you could drive graphics to it pretty fast. It probably has the largest library of 3D or isometric games of all the 8 bits.

Speccy was pretty decent machine for the time, despite its functionality on only one compact chip, generating graphics, scrolling and objects with the help of the Z80 CPU with no integrated custom chips. Amstrad CPC was other computer with the same CPU, but the slowdown was more evident because CPC custom chips steal even more cycles from the CPU. So, even if ZX Spectrum did not feature sprites and hardware scroll, it would probably be on my list for the second retro computer machine.

[Fröhn]

Amstrad CPC was other computer with the same CPU, but the slowdown was more evident because CPC custom chips steal even more cycles from the CPU.

The slowdown is not because of the cycle stealing, but because of the huge display buffer. Each mode has 16k of memory to be moved if you want to scroll, which is far too much for a small 8 Bit CPU. For comparision: Imagine the A8 having to move 12k of memory, or the C64 move 8k.

[Gury]

Amstrad CPC was other computer with the same CPU, but the slowdown was more evident because CPC custom chips steal even more cycles from the CPU.

The slowdown is not because of the cycle stealing, but because of the huge display buffer. Each mode has 16k of memory to be moved if you want to scroll, which is far too much for a small 8 Bit CPU. For comparision: Imagine the A8 having to move 12k of memory, or the C64 move 8k.

Thanks for info. What about Speccy display requirements? And as far as I know, its screen memory pointer location is static?

[Fröhn]

Thanks for info. What about Speccy display requirements? And as far as I know, its screen memory pointer location is static?

The Speccy had a 6k bitmap screen with 768 bytes color information. So the CPC had to move almost 3 times as much data with the same CPU which had almost the same MHz. Easy to see that the CPC has a hard time to do fast paced games.

 

And yeps, the Speccy screen pointer is hardwired. You can't even do double buffer except for the newer Spectrum clones which can map more memory banks in at the bitmap location.

[JamesD]

It had an 8 bit DAC but 2 bits were used for cassette and 6 for sound.

Actually, now that I think about it... it had an 8 bit register arranged like that. I don't know if it was an 8 bit DAC or 6 bit.

Either way, they probably could have multiplexed the lines so it could have had an 8 bit DAC output.

[Gorf]

Commodore 64 has been released 3 years after Atari 800 (XL and XE are similar to the original 800) so I think it's normal that C64 hardware is more powerful.

 

The C-64 finally beat out the Pokey with Sid that ADSR envelope saves a lot of tricks in software.

Great sound chip. I still think the pokey kicks a serious sound though.... historical love there.

 

However...the graphics still go to the Atari...Those DLI's and the 4 player/missles are way more

flexible(the player/missiles are rather able if you know the tricks). And the DLI 's being able to

switch resolution modes on every scan line of the display is simply brilliant.

 

The C-64 is no slouch as it has 8 sprites that are actually simpler to deal with than the player/missles

and 16 color modes. The Atari does have higher color modes too but the horizontal resolutions suffer

in those modes. Still, masterful use of them can still yield great looking games...that robot is actually

using one of those modes as a matter of fact.

[Gorf]

Commodore 64 has been released 3 years after Atari 800 (XL and XE are similar to the original 800) so I think it's normal that C64 hardware is more powerful.

 

The C-64 finally beat out the Pokey with Sid that ADSR envelope saves a lot of tricks in software.

Great sound chip. I still think the pokey kicks a serious sound though.... historical love there.

 

However...the graphics still go to the Atari...Those DLI's and the 4 player/missles are way more

flexible(the player/missiles are rather able if you know the tricks). And the DLI 's being able to

switch resolution modes on every scan line of the display is simply brilliant.

 

The C-64 is no slouch as it has 8 sprites that are actually simpler to deal with than the player/missles

and 16 color modes. The Atari does have higher color modes too but the horizontal resolutions suffer

in those modes. Still, masterful use of them can still yield great looking games...that robot is actually

using one of those modes as a matter of fact.

 

 

 

 

I correct myself.....The C64 only has 16 colors total and can only use 4 colors on screen at once.

 

The sprites may allow for 16 colors though...l dont remember.

 

This is important as the Atari's have 128/256 colors depending on which generation of graphics

chips the used. The player/missles are only one color unless you play tricks.

[Bryan]

I correct myself.....The C64 only has 16 colors total and can only use 4 colors on screen at once.

 

Umm, the 64 has independent color on a per-character basis. Getting all 16 on the screen is not a problem.

 

-Bry

[Fröhn]

Great sound chip. I still think the pokey kicks a serious sound though.... historical love there.

The POKEY is one of the better 8 bit soundchips.

 

I correct myself.....The C64 only has 16 colors total and can only use 4 colors on screen at once.

No, all 16 colors can be used in all modes. In lores mode (160x200) you can have 1 color for the entire screen and 3 independent colors for every 4x8 pixels. In hires mode (320x200) you have two colors every 8x8 pixels (similar to the Spectrum, but a bit more flexible). Those 4x8/8x8 color cells can be reduced to 4x1/8x1 color cells. Atleast in 160x200 you are able to have a mode which is almost a true 160x200 mode with 16 colors. In 320x200 it heavily depends on the artist.

 

The sprites may allow for 16 colors though...l dont remember.

Sprites can be used to enhance the gfx modes. This is used especially in 320x200 mode, since the color restrictions are otherwise a bit too difficult to work with. But even with sprites it's not easy to work with this mode.

[supercat]

The C-64 finally beat out the Pokey with Sid that ADSR envelope saves a lot of tricks in software.

Great sound chip. I still think the pokey kicks a serious sound though.... historical love there.

 

I never liked the envelopes, actually (had a C-64 in the day). It would have been much better to have had two 8-bit registers called "target" and "rate". On a continuous basis, the current volume of each voice would change toward "target" at a rate specified by "rate". Code would have to hit the sound chip at the transition point between attack and decay, but I don't see that as a limitation.

 

I find it puzzling that it was cheaper to have 4-bit latches for the ADSR parameters, along with at least two 16x8 ROMs, than to simply use 8-bit latches.

 

Incidentally, one thing I might have suggested as a silicon-saving measure in a C64 design (at least given my present knowledge of things) may have been to divide the VIC and SID chips' I/O spaces into regions that should always read back the data written, and regions that read back 'live' stuff. Then arrange the mapping circuitry so that writes to those devices could go to both the I/O devices and the underlying RAM, while reads would come from the RAM. This would provide most of the advantages of having readback registers, but without the cost in silicon. The utility impairment of some RAM at $D000 might be slightly irksome, but the silicon that was saved could have been used to provide some more features.

[Gorf]

Great sound chip. I still think the pokey kicks a serious sound though.... historical love there.

The POKEY is one of the better 8 bit soundchips.

 

I correct myself.....The C64 only has 16 colors total and can only use 4 colors on screen at once.

No, all 16 colors can be used in all modes. In lores mode (160x200) you can have 1 color for the entire screen and 3 independent colors for every 4x8 pixels. In hires mode (320x200) you have two colors every 8x8 pixels (similar to the Spectrum, but a bit more flexible). Those 4x8/8x8 color cells can be reduced to 4x1/8x1 color cells. Atleast in 160x200 you are able to have a mode which is almost a true 160x200 mode with 16 colors. In 320x200 it heavily depends on the artist.

 

The sprites may allow for 16 colors though...l dont remember.

Sprites can be used to enhance the gfx modes. This is used especially in 320x200 mode, since the color restrictions are otherwise a bit too difficult to work with. But even with sprites it's not easy to work with this mode.

 

 

Ok...it has been awhile since I played with the thing. I remember now, you have the color bits

per character.

[Gorf]

No matter how you slice it.....They aer both great machines and I still have mine and do not plan to

get rid of them any time soon.

[Bryan]

No matter how you slice it.....They aer both great machines and I still have mine and do not plan to

get rid of them any time soon.

 

Yeah, but who won the debate this time?

[deadmeow]

I am an Apple II guy, so I have no horse in this race. When it comes down to it, its quality versus quanity. The Atari 8 bits were quality hardware, and had quality software. The C64's were low priced budget computers designed to bring home computers to the masses. Although you could buy both Atari's and Commodores at the toy store, I never saw an Atari computer at Eckerd Drugs, unlike the Commodores, and Texas Instruments.

 

I always took for granted, inserting a disk into my Apple and turning it on(and having it boot). On the C64, you had to go into basic and type some weird ass commands to start a C64 disk, and then wait for an eternity.

[JamesD]

I am an Apple II guy, so I have no horse in this race. When it comes down to it, its quality versus quanity. The Atari 8 bits were quality hardware, and had quality software. The C64's were low priced budget computers designed to bring home computers to the masses. Although you could buy both Atari's and Commodores at the toy store, I never saw an Atari computer at Eckerd Drugs, unlike the Commodores, and Texas Instruments.

 

I always took for granted, inserting a disk into my Apple and turning it on(and having it boot). On the C64, you had to go into basic and type some weird ass commands to start a C64 disk, and then wait for an eternity.

 

Let's face it... if you pick and choose you can make any 8 bit look bad.

For example:

 

Hmmm... high quality says the Apple II fan.

Apple II's... no color text... unless you used graphics... which were a memory mapped nightmare.

And text is a rainbow mess in hi-res or you have to use a very large font that is then barely readable on a monochrome monitor because its a dot pattern.

And as for color... red? What's that? We just use NTSC artifacting and it can't generate red.

And sound... bzzzzz click click click bzzzzzaaaaaat... unless you buy a card costing more than the other machines and not all games would use it.

Speed? 1MHz... not exactly best in class.

Hardware sprites? Who needs em when you have a crappy display that eats CPU cycles for breakfast when you try to display arcade graphics.

The commands on the C64 are oh so weird... kinda like PR#6 or CALL -151? (I believe those were Apple)

And it was all carried forward until the IIgs which finally had a decent graphics memory map in the new modes and added decent sound... too bad they didn't bother adding sprites or a CPU fast enough to keep up with anything else of the day... but hey... it still cost more.

Oh... and how could I possibly forget the Apple III which gets hot and spits out it's chips! If it stops working... DROP IT!!!!!!

You mean that kind of quality?

 

See what I mean? All of that stuff may be true but I loved the Apple II series and I think they were great machines.

I spent almost as much time programming my friend's Apple II+ in high school as I did my CoCo... up until I bought a disk drive anyway.

My 8 bit computer collection includes more Apple II type machines than any other 8 bit.

1 Apple II+, 1 Apple IIe, 2 Apple IIc Pluses, 1 Apple IIgs, 1 Laser 128, 1 Franklin Ace 1000 and 1 Apple III.

I love the IIgs.

 

 

There really wasn't anything low quality about the C64. It was just a later design that took advantage of a higher level of integration.

Later Atari's did the same.

There were crap games for both machines (ok... all machines) and there were great games for both.

If you pick and choose you can find games that were great on one machine but not the other no matter which is your favorite.

BTW, if you had a C64 you probably had a fastload cart... most of which also had a "DOS Wedge" that had simplified drive commands.

[Jetboot Jack]

Well I have little Apple or CoCo 3 knowledge (although I am very intrested to read and see the best they can offer, certainly the CoCo 3 is pretty cool it appears).

 

But back to C64 vs A8!!

 

For me the argument has always been my favorite games were on the A8, and if they existed the C64 versions were not as good (Ballblazer, Koronis Rift, Atari Arcade Ports on cart, Fort Apocalypse, Alleycat etc). I stopped really using my A8 for games in 1985 - I got an ST and and Amiga 1000. Sure I worked on the machines up until 1991, and kept collecting nice games here or there, but I was not an 8bit user late in it's life.

 

However some later titles made me wish the A8 had a longer life - SCUMM games would have been awesome, and I would LOVE to work on something like Maniac Mansion for the 8bit.

 

My favorite game to pull outta the hat when people knock the 8bit is Henry's House. The 8bit images should be very easy to differentiate from the C64, and I think even when the C64 uses the hi-res mono characters it looks much less lovely than the 8bit version (thanks to atarimania and lemon C64 for the images) - bear in mind Chris did the C64 version FIRST AFAIK, so the game was not designed around the A8's strengths...

 

sTeVE

Edited July 25, 2007 by Jetboot Jack

[carmel_andrews]

The interesting thing is that the only company that succeeded to 'amiga-ise' the 8bit computer (i.e. managed to get product onto the market) was amstrad

 

All amstrad did from memory is slightly expand the gfx chip; to handling hi rez gfx modes and 4096 colours and stick a stereo version of the speccy/amstrad/ST YM chip in there

 

Unfortunately for amstrad, the existing cpc series was too well established (software wise) and very few companies were willing to make versions of their software specifically for the CPC+/GX series

 

Atari would later have the same problem with the ST/STE as again the ST was too well established s/w wise and v. few companies were willing to make STE specific versions of their software, and that basically hit STE sales hard, after all, what's the point of buying a machine when v. few companies are going to support it with software that uses that machines enhanced features

 

And now you know why very little Atari 8bit software exists that uses 64k, let alone 128k of the XE (same problems again, like the Amstrad CPC+ and the STE)

 

Commodore tried to get something on the market (the c65, basically a c64 with improved basic, built in 3.5 in d/d, stereo SID, and updated VIC chip with hirez gfx modes and 4096 colours)

 

The reason why commodore pulled out of the '8bit upgrade' market was because they saw the hash job Amstrad did on marketing the CPC+ (and the console version the 'GX' series), that's probably why commodore only made about 1000 (apparently) c65 machines (i guess most of them went to software developers and a few hardware testers)

 

Even if Atari managed to get out it's own version of the amiga chip set (probably as some sort of upgrade for the A8) because tramiel was essentially starting from scratch again R&D Wise (as he'd either closed down or sold of most if not all warners R&D infrastructure and replaced it with an untried v. small R&D team with an untried computer, namely the ST) and that most if not all of his energy and money was on the ST, the chances of any 8bit upgrade succeeding in the market was v. slim at best as tramiel didn't want anything to hinder the ST and hit potential ST sales, as any amiga stylee A8 upgrade would have done exactly that

 

After all it was alleged that Dataque (the original designers of the turbo 8/16 upgrade) had intended to making the o/s processor upgrade 100 p/c A8 o/s compatible, unfortunatelly due to 'missinformation' that tramiel received , tramiel basically nixed the deal and any possibilty of dataques turbo 8/16 processor/os upgrade from being 100 A8 o/s compatible

[Fröhn]

The 8bit images should be very easy to differentiate from the C64, and I think even when the C64 uses the hi-res mono characters it looks much less lovely than the 8bit version (thanks to atarimania and lemon C64 for the images)

Huh? They almost look the same. Or do you love the rasterbars at the bottom so much?

 

- bear in mind Chris did the C64 version FIRST AFAIK, so the game was not designed around the A8's strengths...

It's not exactly a game showing C64 strengths either

 

The interesting thing is that the only company that succeeded to 'amiga-ise' the 8bit computer (i.e. managed to get product onto the market) was amstrad

 

Unfortunately for amstrad, the existing cpc series was too well established (software wise) and very few companies were willing to make versions of their software specifically for the CPC+/GX series

The CPC was already suffering from a far too much underpowered CPU concerning the gfx modes, how do you think "enhancing" the gfx has effect? Yeps, the underpowered CPU gets even more underpowered.

 

The reason why commodore pulled out of the '8bit upgrade' market was because they saw the hash job Amstrad did on marketing the CPC+

The main reason is the Amiga. 8 bit was going nowhere, every idiot was able to see that.

Edited July 25, 2007 by Fröhn

[peteym5]

I am an Apple II guy, so I have no horse in this race. When it comes down to it, its quality versus quanity. The Atari 8 bits were quality hardware, and had quality software.....

I always took for granted, inserting a disk into my Apple and turning it on(and having it boot). On the C64, you had to go into basic and type some weird ass commands to start a C64 disk, and then wait for an eternity.

 

I agree the Commodores' did not have the best front end interface for your disk drive. Apple, IBM, and Atari all had independent Disk Operating Systems separated from the Basic Programming Language. I know later, independent venders came up with a DOS on the Commodore 64 similar to the other computer systems.

 

I have noticed people saying the reason why one game was not developed for one system was it wasn't capable. This may be more of a copyright and licensing issue and same issues are going on with our modern gaming systems. Atari owned many arcade rights and did make some games for the Commodore systems (AKA Atarisoft). Companies were contracted to make a game exclusive for one computer system and were prohibited to make it for another.

 

It has been stated here that the Atari 8-bit chipset was a few years older and the Commodore 64 was alittle better because it was newer. Atari stuck with the same graphics chipset from the 400 to the XEGS. The XL seen improvements in chip consolidation and improved the operating system.

 

I admit I think Ataris' error was with the XE and XEGS was not upgrading the graphics chipset back in '85. They were just a cheaper 800XL with more ram in a new case. The technology existed to make improved chips, and there were even a propose new sound chip called "AMY". Did hear rumors of graphic upgrades. Of course when Tramiel took over, all this was abandoned.

 

Now people are working on Duel & Quad Pokeys, new Video Board XE, USB, IDE upgrades now are good ideals. I even suggested a Duel Pokey with a 3rd alternate sound chip. What has me wondering is it took all this time for someone to come up with a video upgrade. I am sure a few probably were proposed since the 80's but I cannot find any information on them. Personally would have like to see an updated Antic chip with a switch to double the hoz resolution for text and graphics (80 columns) or more PMGs on an updated GTIA chip.

 

Commodore did continue upgrading their video chip set, the C128 had an 80 column screen. However I also stated what put a halt on the technology was introduction of 16bit systems and the 8bit systems lost out. An issue I have with Commodore was with all their 8bit computers, each system was not compatible with the other. The C64 could not run Vic20 programs, same with the 16 and 4+. It was not till the C128 that did was backward compatible with the C64. By doing this you were asking poeple to buy new software each time you got a new computer system. Apple and Atari, keep this pretty much the same, the XL/XE did run 800 programs with emulation or selectable OS hardware mod. IBM-PC kept it stardard from 1980 to present.

Edited July 25, 2007 by peteym5