Best 8-bit computer of all time

[+save2600]

Cool!

 

Well, the full setup was really a pretty nice combination. For some reason, the assembly stuff just didn't jell back then. I just sort of bumped into the TI and didn't have the motivation I did toward the other machines. Bet that's a big part of my perception today. I had friends with Ataris, C64's and CoCo's, so there was some energy and people to talk to, just not there on the TI.

 

See... and I can appreciate that. But where I grew up (Libertyville, IL), I had at least 3 friends that were

seriously into the TI. In fact, the TI was my very first computer and was bought second hand from a fellow

classmate. Shortly after my purchase, I met another person who turned me onto games like Miner 2049'er,

Burgertime (wow), Star Trek (THE absolute best conversion, complete with speech) and Centipede (again,

the best home version bar none). WICO even made an arcade roller ball for games (like Centipede) and

applications!

 

What made the TI so cool to me was that I would invite friends over that had the Aquarius (basically a

programmable Intellivision) or an Apple ][+ and would be floored by my system. I convinced them to buy

their own TI setups and before too long, I knew about 10 TI enthusiasts that were into programming

and gaming alike! Having friends you played games with every now and again is one thing. Having friends

you could play games with AND share programming tips and tricks with is entirely another. The Amiga

computer is the only other system I could relate that to. If it wasn't trying to figure out how to get a few

extra half-brite images to zip across the screen at once, we were making music via midi and/or many of

the sound production programs of the time. Kids today do not have the first clue about programming. In

fact, they hardly even know how their computers work at all. Why bother to learn machine code, assembly,

Basic, C++, Java, HTML when there are so many modules/kits or commercial software that will do all this

for you?

 

Extended BASIC is pretty sweet. I seem to remember it being capable of 32 single color 8x8 sprites on screen at one time, with free motion on all of them. There was a line limit (4 or 5) per line, but it had a multiplexer built in, which really was a great feature at the time. That left the would be programmer to focus more on just doing stuff, than enabling the ability to then do stuff.

 

This is exactly how it was. And such a great concept for the time. Real powerful computing on a

consumer level. Again - the Amiga comes to mind.

 

What I don't understand is that people get so excited about a homebrew game that may or may not have

been released for the 2600 back in the 80's. A game that does not even include a title screen or much else

that aligns itself with legitimacy or professionalism.

 

Think about all of the non-commercial "homebrews" that have been programmed for the TI, Commie, Apple,

Atari, Amiga, etc. throughout the years by BRILLIANT people. Many of them SUPERIOR to anything released

commercially. It would make your head spin. Put that in a "complete-ists" pipe and tell them to smoke it.

 

I wrote a program in Extended Basic for the TI called 'Snowball Fight' in the mid 80's and modeled it after my own

backyard growing up. The playfield was "3D" as in 'Marble Madness' 3D (not necessarily 3/4), with the "camera"

being static from my bedroom window. The grill, the vehicles, the garage, trees and the picnic bench were all

obstacles or things you could hide/duck behind. It was basically Combat, but with humanoid looking sprites that

threw a snowball instead of shooting a gun. I even had the gee-whiz to include a title screen and incorporate 2-player

simultaneous play - unlike the Dead Sea game (or whatever it is called). Should I ever dig this up... would it be

worth thousands like Birthday Mania or whatever?? Doubtful... and I can hear all of the rationalizing from "collectors"

and "complete-ists" now. Well, if the TI had as much of a following as.... <blah, blah, blah>. It's all cra$, I mean...

bits and bytes. For some reason, placing intrinsic value on stuff like this reminds me of the Beastie Boys album:

"Check Your Head". lol

 

I don't remember that BASIC being as fast as some others, but it had a lot of nice features.

 

Basic for the TI is slow - but powerful nonetheless. The GCHAR call is worth the price of admission alone.

 

I've had 400's and 800's in the 80's, but never got into the peeking and poking thing... LOL! I chose to save

that kind of activity for the ladies in my life

 

Had lots of fun with the voice thingy too. IMHO, another machine just begging for home brews.

 

Well, might have to start doing some digging then. Snowball Fight is around here somewhere...

Edited December 16, 2007 by save2600

[potatohead]

You should go digging. Funny how the whole retro scene ends up being pretty decent today. Go figure. Polish that TI game up and let it out! Somebody's gonna have some fun playing it. And with all the info available today, putting some spit 'n polish on it likely is not that big of a job. Include the story with it, and it's gonna be a good read for plenty of people.

 

I really wanted the Spectrum ZX machine at one point! It was cheap, but came with some nice features. Didn't have a lot of money back then, so cheap was a powerful attractor.

 

NOBODY owned one though. That kind of killed the whole idea of it for me. It's good to see the ports happening these days. There's a guy from the UK, working on the Propeller chip right now. His first effort was Manic Miner. I totally enjoyed playing that game for the first time, just this year --and on a little microcontroller, sitting on a breadboard with a few parts hooked up to it, no less! (Not strictly true. Played it first on a dev board, but have since assembled a few breadboard setups for more in-depth tinkering.)

 

I suspect there are plenty of gems in Spectrum land, just waiting for ports, or to be re-imagined on other machines.

 

Getting a group together to enjoy the machines really was where it's at. It still is, and that's the beauty of the Internet. Who freaking knew we would be able to talk old school computing with lots of other people, from anywhere in the world, when ever we want to, for next to nothing!

 

I'm rambling a bit (sorry)

 

A full TI setup was (is) pretty impressive. Did you have the expansion box? The one I got to futz with did. Had the disk, modem and serial / parallel goodies. Weighed a ton. Looked sharp all setup though. Probably one of my favorites on that score. The Atari floored people with games and all the controllers and such. Star Raiders, Ghost Hunter (two player Pac Man that was way better than the actual Pac Man), and similar gaming experiences were great. The 400 was killer living room gaming. Was built just right for that, where the 800 and goodies filled a desk nicely.

 

The really impressive systems for my peer group ended up being Apple][ systems, of all things. The school had a whole batch of the things, outfitted with multiple disk drives, expansion ram, mice, 80 column and language cards. A //e, well equipped was just excellent. A good friend had a sweet CoCo setup too. At one point, we were running it multi-user on OS/9. Very interesting stuff for the time.

 

I wasn't the only one that checked out the TI, but cost and general software availability really impacted what we thought of it then. If anything, I think that's an area where both the original Atari 8 bitters and the C64 fall short. Expansion. The later XL models had the bus exposed and ended being capable of greater things. Nod goes to the TI and Apple for having that done, outta the gate. Might not have been all that cheap, but it was there for those who wanted / needed it.

 

Still kind of want a //e Would be fun to build out some expansion cards and do stuff, using the core machine as more of an interface than actual computer... Maybe just a II+ instead. Nice, simple, clean.

 

PEEKing and POKEing... yeah. That was a PITA. However, it did trigger me to do a coupla good things:

 

-ended up assembling lots of stuff on paper, during class to be boiled down to some simple DATA statements

 

-wrote a crude assembler / disassembler

 

-got some stuff done really, really fast and that meant:

 

-saving my pennies for MAC / 65.

 

I think the Apple deserves some kind of honorable mention for full schematics (same for CoCo), annotated ROM listing, and included mini assembler / monitor. It was a workstation proper in that respect.

Edited December 16, 2007 by potatohead

[+save2600]

Getting a group together to enjoy the machines really was where it's at. It still is, and that's the beauty of the Internet. Who freaking knew we would be able to talk old school computing with lots of other people, from anywhere in the world, when ever we want to, for next to nothing!

 

I totally agree. Neat how such a simple activity can unite all walks of people. In these times and even Nolan Bushnell has

talked about the societal decline witnessed by anyone with a clue - the degradation of interaction we used to get naturally

with board games and to a lesser extent, multi-player video games. When they took away multi-player gaming out of the

box is when it started going downhill. It's part and parcel to the 90's "me" culture that inundates the 2000's Ritalin children.

Very little interaction with quality adults + poor nutrition = today's youth. And we thought the 60's were messed up!

 

A full TI setup was (is) pretty impressive. Did you have the expansion box?

 

Not back in the day. The PE box and its cards were too expensive for my needs. I put my money into other

things back then and what was made available to me at a decent cost is what I made do with. I was perfectly

happy with my tape drive and 16k (more with Mini-Memory) and speaking of Mini-Memory... did you know that

this is basically a flash RAM device? Okay, so there's a battery inside of it, but you can store a certain amount of

your code in there to be recalled at anytime. For small programs, this was way cooler than tapes OR disks back then.

 

The only really neat peripheral I had for the TI was a parallel printer adapter that plugged into the joystick port.

Not sure how the hell it worked, but it did. And it worked great with my 9-pin Gorilla-Banana printer :-)

 

Someone (I believe Kyle) that sells a lot of TI stuff on eBay recently had a PE box card that allows you to plug

USB devices into the TI! And then I've seen a compact flash device where I'm assuming, you'd load it up

with GROMS/ROMS/disk images, etc. and the TI sees it as a disk drive!! That may be my next purchase and

would be a no brainer if only to play Tutankham, when/if that ever gets dumped :-(

 

It's just so neat people keeping these things alive. This is more than just a hobby. There is a lot of nostalgia to

be sure, but coolness never goes out of fashion. I WILL be messing around with my TI, Atari's and Amiga's

LOOOOONG after people have forgotten about their PSX's/Nintendo's/Micro$oft boxes.

[Pengwin]

I totally agree. Neat how such a simple activity can unite all walks of people. In these times and even Nolan Bushnell has

talked about the societal decline witnessed by anyone with a clue - the degradation of interaction we used to get naturally

with board games and to a lesser extent, multi-player video games. When they took away multi-player gaming out of the

box is when it started going downhill. It's part and parcel to the 90's "me" culture that inundates the 2000's Ritalin children.

Very little interaction with quality adults + poor nutrition = today's youth. And we thought the 60's were messed up!

Speak for yourself. I wasn't around in the 60's

[+save2600]

Speak for yourself. I wasn't around in the 60's

 

Neither was I, but you don't have to be from Auschwitz to know what happened there

 

 

Ahh... I see you are a Tripods fan! I have the complete series (2 seasons) of BBC shows on DVD.

Brilliant stuff and an obvious War of the Worlds rip (of which I am a bigger fan of). Hey - which reminds

me... I have a Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds ZX-Spectrum video game on tape. Am I sitting on my

retirement here in the States or what? lol Only way to play it though is through a Speccie emulator

on my Amiga :-) AWESOME adventure/arcade/strategy type game for those that have never played it...

[BydoEmpire]

I have to go c64. The software library was amazing, it did a heck of a lot for a 6502 machine (fantastic arcade ports, the SID chip, the programmable disk drive), and it was in production for what, 10 years? Of course, I didn't grow up with an A8 (I really enjoy my XE now) so it's hard to do a fair comparison, but I still think the c64 had an amazing run.

[vdub_bobby]

Overall?

 

A8, baby, A8.

 

Thanks for leading me to a computer I've never met before. Only two things keep it from immediately taking the crown on raw power: it can't run all 256 colors in it's high resolution mode ( I've only seen one color, with shading. ) and there are no sprites.

 

What it can do is harder to find; most of it's games are emulated from other computers...

 

It's a mystery.

 

I'm hooked.

You're right, the high-resolution 320x192 mode is a 1.5 color mode.

 

But no sprites? It has five 8x192 sprites. With DLIs, obviously, you can get many, many more sprites; then you are just limited to 5 per line.

 

And "most if it's games are emulated from other computers?" That's an odd statement...but leaving that aside, here are some of my favorite A8 games:

Donkey Kong

Dropzone

Defender

Montezuma's Revenge

Mr. Do!

Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory

O'Riley's Mine

Pitfall II

Spelunker

Wavy Navy

Ballblazer

Star Raiders

 

Other good games that I haven't played much:

Rescue on Fractalus

Alternate Reality: The City

Edited December 16, 2007 by vdub_bobby

[A Sprite]

Overall?

 

A8, baby, A8.

 

Thanks for leading me to a computer I've never met before. Only two things keep it from immediately taking the crown on raw power: it can't run all 256 colors in it's high resolution mode ( I've only seen one color, with shading. ) and there are no sprites.

 

What it can do is harder to find; most of it's games are emulated from other computers...

 

It's a mystery.

 

I'm hooked.

You're right, the high-resolution 320x192 mode is a 1.5 color mode.

 

But no sprites? It has five 8x192 sprites. With DLIs, obviously, you can get many, many more sprites; then you are just limited to 5 per line.

 

And "most if it's games are emulated from other computers?" That's an odd statement...but leaving that aside, here are some of my favorite A8 games:

Donkey Kong

Dropzone

Defender

Montezuma's Revenge

Mr. Do!

Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory

O'Riley's Mine

Pitfall II

Spelunker

Wavy Navy

Ballblazer

Star Raiders

 

Other good games that I haven't played much:

Rescue on Fractalus

Alternate Reality: The City

 

Quote the rest of the post I quoted.

 

I'm talking about the Enterprise 128...

Edited December 16, 2007 by A Sprite

[thomasholzer]

Getting a group together to enjoy the machines really was where it's at. It still is, and that's the beauty of the Internet. Who freaking knew we would be able to talk old school computing with lots of other people, from anywhere in the world, when ever we want to, for next to nothing!

 

I totally agree. Neat how such a simple activity can unite all walks of people. In these times and even Nolan Bushnell has

talked about the societal decline witnessed by anyone with a clue - the degradation of interaction we used to get naturally

with board games and to a lesser extent, multi-player video games. When they took away multi-player gaming out of the

box is when it started going downhill. It's part and parcel to the 90's "me" culture that inundates the 2000's Ritalin children.

Very little interaction with quality adults + poor nutrition = today's youth. And we thought the 60's were messed up!

 

A full TI setup was (is) pretty impressive. Did you have the expansion box?

 

Not back in the day. The PE box and its cards were too expensive for my needs. I put my money into other

things back then and what was made available to me at a decent cost is what I made do with. I was perfectly

happy with my tape drive and 16k (more with Mini-Memory) and speaking of Mini-Memory... did you know that

this is basically a flash RAM device? Okay, so there's a battery inside of it, but you can store a certain amount of

your code in there to be recalled at anytime. For small programs, this was way cooler than tapes OR disks back then.

 

The only really neat peripheral I had for the TI was a parallel printer adapter that plugged into the joystick port.

Not sure how the hell it worked, but it did. And it worked great with my 9-pin Gorilla-Banana printer :-)

 

Someone (I believe Kyle) that sells a lot of TI stuff on eBay recently had a PE box card that allows you to plug

USB devices into the TI! And then I've seen a compact flash device where I'm assuming, you'd load it up

with GROMS/ROMS/disk images, etc. and the TI sees it as a disk drive!! That may be my next purchase and

would be a no brainer if only to play Tutankham, when/if that ever gets dumped :-(

 

It's just so neat people keeping these things alive. This is more than just a hobby. There is a lot of nostalgia to

be sure, but coolness never goes out of fashion. I WILL be messing around with my TI, Atari's and Amiga's

LOOOOONG after people have forgotten about their PSX's/Nintendo's/Micro$oft boxes.

 

Whilst the TI99/4A was an excellent machine, a comparison with 8 bitters don't count, as mentioned earlier in the thread, the TI is 16-bit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI99/4A

 

so please take the TI comparison here:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=118144

Edited December 16, 2007 by thomasholzer

[Spector]

The Uk'ers will defend their Spectrum saying it was awesome when actually it was not, mainly because it was British (Maggy Thatcher waved a Spectrum in front of some Japanese people shouting 'we're gonna conquer the world in electronics with this, watch out Japan'!!), it didn't work properly (just like Clive Sinclairs C5, the Microdrive, the electric bike accessory and the tiny in-ear radio), and it was cheap enough for 9 year old to buy (or ask for at Christmas).

Thankfully that machine was only a huge success in UK, whilst we (the rest of the world) enjoyed decent computers with disk drives and joystick ports built-in.

Having said that, as already mentioned, many (well alright...a few) UK programmers started out on the Speccy and became worldwide successful programmers for companies like Sony and Nintendo.

 

I've just been playing the Atari 800 version of Jet Set Willy that has just been released- pretty poor compared to the Spectrum version because it couldn't handle the colour, ironically enough. To be fair though, it's not bad considering the weaknesses of the A800.

 

Ah, those deluded fanboys - bless em

Edited December 16, 2007 by Spector

[thomasholzer]

The Uk'ers will defend their Spectrum saying it was awesome when actually it was not, mainly because it was British (Maggy Thatcher waved a Spectrum in front of some Japanese people shouting 'we're gonna conquer the world in electronics with this, watch out Japan'!!), it didn't work properly (just like Clive Sinclairs C5, the Microdrive, the electric bike accessory and the tiny in-ear radio), and it was cheap enough for 9 year old to buy (or ask for at Christmas).

Thankfully that machine was only a huge success in UK, whilst we (the rest of the world) enjoyed decent computers with disk drives and joystick ports built-in.

Having said that, as already mentioned, many (well alright...a few) UK programmers started out on the Speccy and became worldwide successful programmers for companies like Sony and Nintendo.

 

I've just been playing the Atari 800 version of Jet Set Willy that has just been released- pretty poor compared to the Spectrum version because it couldn't handle the colour, ironically enough. To be fair though, it's not bad considering the weaknesses of the A800.

 

Ah, those deluded fanboys - bless em

 

 

Oh no, the WOS people are logging in now, take cover!!

It's funny how Spectrum people's only ammunition is ALWAYS JSW, a to start off with below par P&L title anyway (but you're right probably the best the Spectrum had to offer by miles).

 

The JSW 2007 version is quite good actually (so far), not much colour true, but far more playable than the Spectrum version (as for colour, it could have been done without problems, just read the JSW2007 link in the A8 section......XXL says: if i got free time next weekend, i upload fixed version - colour/load screen/auto basic off/maybe other bugs.....). Now the new version also looks better than the Spectrum version!

 

Now, the 80s Tynesoft version, not much effort's gone into this one (more colour but banged together by a British programmer on a weekend).

(but back then we didn't even need below average UK ports, as the A8 is blessed with loads of quality (and colorful) P&L games from the USA).

 

And because we are deluded fanboys, read my sig, even Matthew Smith hated the Spectrum, ouch!

Edited December 16, 2007 by thomasholzer

[potatohead]

Sorry bout the TI stuff. Just yakking. To me, it fits in with the 8bitters, and this thread shook loose a few impressions. Better to let 'em fly before they are lost again.

 

Color cells, sprites, Z80, 6502, 1.7Mhz, 1.0, 6809, DLI's, 4 channels, 3 channels, cart port, 256 pixels, 320, 160, expansion bus, box, slot, 2 port, 4 port, paddles, light pen, 64K, 48K, chicklet keys, real keys, heavy, light, cheap, expensive, etc...

 

All just card stacking. Shuffle them good and most of the significant 8 bitters kicks total ass at something.

 

Look at the whole overall package, and only a few machines really hit on a lot of those metrics.

 

I wanted a ZX, because it was really cheap, and had a Z80. Didn't get a chance to program on one of those little chips.

 

I find the regional differences very interesting. There are coarse differences between US and UK, for example. Zooming in even closer, you go from major town to major town, county, district, etc... and this computer, or that one really got established. Depending on where you grew up, who you could talk to, explore with, really brought out the good in some specific computers and not others.

 

Another facet of this was what one did. If the whole thing was about games, then it's a whole different comparison. On the other hand, if one was doing computing, maybe some I/O, controlling things, HAM radio, etc... it's a whole new comparison. That happens to be why I really like the CoCo 2 & 3. One could run some really powerful stuff on those little machines. Nice I/O too. If one got the expansion setup, coupla disks, serial, etc... that was a really great rig. Of course the 2 was just powerful, with ugly GFX. The 3 fixed all of that, but was late to the party...

 

The 800 found common ground for me. It was good enough in all the areas to really empower doing lots of stuff. That's why I think it's best. All around computing potential, not just games, but programming, and other things. I found I could do a lot of that stuff on the 800, but they could not always do what the 800 did.

[cdoty]

I grew up on the C-64, and it was probably the most popular computer.

 

The Amstrad CPC was probably the most advanced. The CPC did suffer a lot from direct Spectrum ports, but games that directly took advantage of the CPC were very impressive.

 

The MSX was probably the best supported, and possibly most global computer. The C-64 is probably a close 2nd in global presence. The MSX also saw to most true upgrades. (MSX, MSX2, MSX2+, TurboR).

 

Granted there was the C-128, but it was never truely pushed to it's limits. And, the Atari 130XE didn't really add anything new to the Atari line of computers.

Edited December 16, 2007 by cdoty

[cdoty]

Whilst the TI99/4A was an excellent machine, a comparison with 8 bitters don't count, as mentioned earlier in the thread, the TI is 16-bit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI99/4A

 

The only problem is that the TI was so crippled that comparisons with 16 bit computers is unfair. In fact it used a graphics chip similar (or possibly the same?) as the MSX series.

[Prodos8]

Whilst the TI99/4A was an excellent machine, a comparison with 8 bitters don't count, as mentioned earlier in the thread, the TI is 16-bit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI99/4A

 

The only problem is that the TI was so crippled that comparisons with 16 bit computers is unfair. In fact it used a graphics chip similar (or possibly the same?) as the MSX series.

Yep...the only thing 16-bit about the TI was the processor. Great machine though, but poor marketing and support.

 

My personal fav is the Apple II. I didn't have any other 8-bit until they were well past their prime. I know now that the C64 and Atari were far better for graphics and sound.

 

The Apple II is really a computer of the '70s but with add-on cards and more memory it was able to keep up pretty well.

[JamesD]

Well, this has been touched on before but...

 

All around best doesn't just mean games.

 

All around... the Apple II series. Not even a contest. One of the first 8 bits available and also one of the last. That says a lot right there.

It had more published titles than any other 8 bit (games and business) and the IIgs had the best built in sound, some of the best graphics (no sprites), lots of RAM, more speed than most and a GUI. It was also very easy to expand. If you pick specific categories it's beatable but overall I don't think anything else comes close. It built the Apple cult and only Apple is still producing machines today. Without the II's success, we probably wouldn't have Mac's today.

 

The CoCo 3 had an excellent CPU, plenty of RAM, one of the best BASIC's made, the most powerful add on OS of the day (OS-9), some of the best graphics (no sprites) and excellent add on sound capabilities. It just didn't receive enough support thanks to Tandy. I think it had the most potential but Tandy didn't want it to compete with their PC Clones so it's relegated to something other than the top spot. Where on the list depends on what you want to do. I rate it higher that other machines here because if far outsold any other Radio Shack machine of it's day (millions of CoCo's were sold but Tandy never released exact numbers), it had a reasonable amount of software and probably more potential than any other 8 bit. A look at the recent port of Donkey Kong should tell you just how much could have been done with the machine if Tandy hadn't abandoned and then killed it.

 

The MSX Turbo R is certainly up near the top of the list but there were so few made that I can't place it any higher. The only reason I place it higher than other machines that saw limited distribution is because it still ran older MSX/MSX-2 software so it had a decent software base. It also happens to be one of the fastest 8 bits ever made.

 

There were many powerful 8 bit machines that came out too late to really have an impact. The Enterprise certainly stands out as the best of those. It had hardware acceleration of many things bordering on Amiga like capabilities. If it had used the same CPU as the Turbo R it certainly would have arguably the most powerful 8 bit out of the box.

 

For business CP/M was an excellent choice. Later CP/M machines even had great gaming capabilities but it was too late.

 

That brings us to the Atari, C64 and Speccy. They were big for games. but lets face it... the base of business titles doesn't come close to Apple on any of them. All three have BASICs that differ from what was considered to be the standard of the time.

However, since they were the video game consoles of the day and could still do other things they are on the list.

I give the edge to Atari in BASIC thanks to the number of compatible replacements and an actual version of MS Basic.

The benchmarks recently run also show some of the aftermarket interpreters to be amongst the fastest on the market.

As to which machine is best for games depends on the game.

The Speccy had a lot of 3D and isometric games but no sprites, no sound chip and some of the worst color clash to appear on any machine. When color was used creatively games looked beautiful... other times it was downright ugly. It had plenty of shoot em ups as too but without sprites or sound chip it kinda takes a back seat to other machines in that department. The BASIC keyword entry and original keyboard just kill it for me. Later machines had a better keyboard and a sound chip but introduced compatibility issues with some older games. So... for those reasons I have to place it behind the Atari and C64.

C64 or Atari... I'd have to say it depends on the game. I have to give a slight edge to the C64 due to better sprites and a more advanced sound chip but the Atari CPU was faster and I think the quality of games on the Atari are more consistent. I will say that if some other machines had faster CPUs to begin with, sprites wouldn't have mattered.

[thrax]

I'd say the apple II just on their expandibility alone. Eight expansion slots with plenty of options from early on in its life. I got my II in the late 70s and was easily able to upgrade it to keep it on par with newer apple iis. This included memory upgrades, video card upgrade, even a keyboard upgrade to use those new fangled "lower case" keys :-) Also price wasn't as much of a factor as one would think due to the large amount of clones available as well.

 

I've known plenty of people who've used their IIs so long they were able to skip the 16 bit generation of computers and either go into a 32 bit Mac or PC in the mid 90s. Part of the reason they were able to do this was the Appleworks productivity software was very powerful for 8bit computing, supported many hardware upgrades and was well supported by tons of software vendors.

[thrax]

Whilst the TI99/4A was an excellent machine, a comparison with 8 bitters don't count, as mentioned earlier in the thread, the TI is 16-bit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI99/4A

 

The only problem is that the TI was so crippled that comparisons with 16 bit computers is unfair. In fact it used a graphics chip similar (or possibly the same?) as the MSX series.

Yep...the only thing 16-bit about the TI was the processor. Great machine though, but poor marketing and support.

 

My personal fav is the Apple II. I didn't have any other 8-bit until they were well past their prime. I know now that the C64 and Atari were far better for graphics and sound.

 

The Apple II is really a computer of the '70s but with add-on cards and more memory it was able to keep up pretty well.

 

Last line. I was one of them

[A Sprite]

Well, this has been touched on before but...

 

All around best doesn't just mean games.

 

All around... the Apple II series. Not even a contest. One of the first 8 bits available and also one of the last. That says a lot right there.

It had more published titles than any other 8 bit (games and business) and the IIgs had the best built in sound, some of the best graphics (no sprites), lots of RAM, more speed than most and a GUI. It was also very easy to expand. If you pick specific categories it's beatable but overall I don't think anything else comes close. It built the Apple cult and only Apple is still producing machines today. Without the II's success, we probably wouldn't have Mac's today.

 

The CoCo 3 had an excellent CPU, plenty of RAM, one of the best BASIC's made, the most powerful add on OS of the day (OS-9), some of the best graphics (no sprites) and excellent add on sound capabilities. It just didn't receive enough support thanks to Tandy. I think it had the most potential but Tandy didn't want it to compete with their PC Clones so it's relegated to something other than the top spot. Where on the list depends on what you want to do. I rate it higher that other machines here because if far outsold any other Radio Shack machine of it's day (millions of CoCo's were sold but Tandy never released exact numbers), it had a reasonable amount of software and probably more potential than any other 8 bit. A look at the recent port of Donkey Kong should tell you just how much could have been done with the machine if Tandy hadn't abandoned and then killed it.

 

The MSX Turbo R is certainly up near the top of the list but there were so few made that I can't place it any higher. The only reason I place it higher than other machines that saw limited distribution is because it still ran older MSX/MSX-2 software so it had a decent software base. It also happens to be one of the fastest 8 bits ever made.

 

There were many powerful 8 bit machines that came out too late to really have an impact. The Enterprise certainly stands out as the best of those. It had hardware acceleration of many things bordering on Amiga like capabilities. If it had used the same CPU as the Turbo R it certainly would have arguably the most powerful 8 bit out of the box.

 

For business CP/M was an excellent choice. Later CP/M machines even had great gaming capabilities but it was too late.

 

That brings us to the Atari, C64 and Speccy. They were big for games. but lets face it... the base of business titles doesn't come close to Apple on any of them. All three have BASICs that differ from what was considered to be the standard of the time.

However, since they were the video game consoles of the day and could still do other things they are on the list.

I give the edge to Atari in BASIC thanks to the number of compatible replacements and an actual version of MS Basic.

The benchmarks recently run also show some of the aftermarket interpreters to be amongst the fastest on the market.

As to which machine is best for games depends on the game.

The Speccy had a lot of 3D and isometric games but no sprites, no sound chip and some of the worst color clash to appear on any machine. When color was used creatively games looked beautiful... other times it was downright ugly. It had plenty of shoot em ups as too but without sprites or sound chip it kinda takes a back seat to other machines in that department. The BASIC keyword entry and original keyboard just kill it for me. Later machines had a better keyboard and a sound chip but introduced compatibility issues with some older games. So... for those reasons I have to place it behind the Atari and C64.

C64 or Atari... I'd have to say it depends on the game. I have to give a slight edge to the C64 due to better sprites and a more advanced sound chip but the Atari CPU was faster and I think the quality of games on the Atari are more consistent. I will say that if some other machines had faster CPUs to begin with, sprites wouldn't have mattered.

 

Many good points, but the IIGs and the MSX TurboR are both 16bit.

[JamesD]

Many good points, but the IIGs and the MSX TurboR are both 16bit.

 

Have you actually looked at the 65816 instruction set and how it actually does 16 bit?

 

Whether or not the Turbo R also had a 16 bit CPU as well doesn't change the fact that it has an 8 bit one.

[supercat]

IIRC, the C64 was capable of only eight on screen sprites at once (without special programming routines). That's a real limitation for games such as shoot'em up's. Great system nonethless....

 

The C64 could use 8 sprites without mid-screen repositioning; each sprite was 24 single-color or 12 multi-color pixels wide. The Atari 8-bits could do eight single-color sprites, of which four were eight pixels wide and four were two pixels wide; the Atari's sprites could be of arbitrary height.

 

Using mid-screen repositioning, both machines could display much more.

 

The one spot were the C64's sprite system had a disadvantage is that, so far as I know, there was no way to show a sprite in two places on the screen without at least one scan line of vertical gap between them. The Atari 8-bits had no such limitation. In every other way, the C64's sprite engine was superior.

[potatohead]

Reading the Apple ][ comments is interesting. I would have to agree.

 

A well equipped Apple is a fantastic workstation computer. That's tougher to say about a lot of the other 8 bitters. I would easily put the CoCo 2 & 3 especially there too.

 

Here's an interesting test. One that makes me reconsider the A800.

 

If you could equip any 8 bitter today, with any of the available options of the time, which would most closely approach the utility of the modern personal computer, running Linux, win32, or MAC OS?

 

I would have to say an Apple //e or maybe c. One could get a hard disk, mouse, quality graphics cards, Apple works, spreadsheet, lots of programming stuff, post script printer, just about any kind of I/O one wanted, run CP/M and other things on co-processor cards, and get lots of RAM. That combination was supported by a lot of software too. Despite my love of the Atari, C64 and CoCo machines, the Apple had that real computer feel to a higher degree than all of them, save the CoCo, and on software won no contest!

 

Having used an Apple setup like that, I must say it was just excellent. Could use it today for a lot of stuff.

[+wood_jl]

Best 8-bit computer of all time is the NES. So it has no keyboard. But it has a 6502.

 

I'd like to see "Super Mario Bros" on an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 or TI99 or whatever you want to compare to.

 

I had an Atari8 at the time it came out. I talked trash....then I went over to a friend's house and played Super Mario Bros. and my prejudice was lifted.

 

Since all I use 8-bit computers for now days is playing games, the lines between consoles and and computers (of that era)have blurred retrospectively, unless you surf the web with your Commdore 64.

[thomasholzer]

Best 8-bit computer of all time is the NES. So it has no keyboard. But it has a 6502.

 

of course it does (well, the famicom anyway):

[JamesD]

The NES used tile graphics and exactly how many business programs did it have? Zero? Then how is it best all around?