History of Atari 8-Bit Computers @ Gamasutra !

[abbotkinneydude]

Finally !!!

 

A History of Gaming Platforms: Atari 8-Bit Computers

 

(And yes... a lot of information is missing but it's always a first step for Gamasutra regarding the 8-Bit line).

[Bill Loguidice]

Finally !!!

 

A History of Gaming Platforms: Atari 8-Bit Computers

 

(And yes... a lot of information is missing but it's always a first step for Gamasutra regarding the 8-Bit line).

 

Like the other entries excerpted from the book, it was not meant to be exhaustive, merely as thorough a look from a US-perspective at the system(s) in question as the space allows. In the book, there are over 40 other entries just like that. The idea was to provide anyone, even someone new to the system, all they would need to know about the platform in question to be empowered to discover more about it in an informed manner. Thanks for reading it and posting about it!

[TMR]

Like the other entries excerpted from the book, it was not meant to be exhaustive, merely as thorough a look from a US-perspective at the system(s) in question as the space allows. In the book, there are over 40 other entries just like that. The idea was to provide anyone, even someone new to the system, all they would need to know about the platform in question to be empowered to discover more about it in an informed manner. Thanks for reading it and posting about it!

 

An interesting piece but a little... well, vague in a few places; as Gregg Tavares pointed out in the comments the specs given at the start for resolution are somewhat misleading (and the 80x192 mode wasn't available on the first machines either). Still, as was already said it's nice to see it there. =-)

Edited August 4, 2008 by TMR

[Bill Loguidice]

Like the other entries excerpted from the book, it was not meant to be exhaustive, merely as thorough a look from a US-perspective at the system(s) in question as the space allows. In the book, there are over 40 other entries just like that. The idea was to provide anyone, even someone new to the system, all they would need to know about the platform in question to be empowered to discover more about it in an informed manner. Thanks for reading it and posting about it!

 

An interesting piece but a little... well, vague; as Gregg Tavares pointed out in the comments the specs given at the start are pretty misleading (and the 80x192 mode wasn't available on the first machines either). Still, as was already said it's nice to see it there. =-)

 

 

Again, they're taken a bit out of context of the book. The idea was to give "common system specifications" in real-world usage. Obviously the Atari 8-bit had lots of software in the 16K - 64K range, but to pick just one, it makes sense to choose 48K as a common specification. 80x192, though it's a GTIA mode, is as good of a common resolution of the system's many to pick as any. If you could pick just one commonly used resolution, what would you pick and why? (I'm being serious, as I can certainly consider a change for the final version)

[mellis]

Again, they're taken a bit out of context of the book. The idea was to give "common system specifications" in real-world usage. Obviously the Atari 8-bit had lots of software in the 16K - 64K range, but to pick just one, it makes sense to choose 48K as a common specification. 80x192, though it's a GTIA mode, is as good of a common resolution of the system's many to pick as any. If you could pick just one commonly used resolution, what would you pick and why? (I'm being serious, as I can certainly consider a change for the final version)

 

Ummm... how about Antic Mode E's 160 x 192?

 

In the 1980s, most sources listed the Atari 8-bit's maximum resolution of 320x192 (Antic Mode F), but given the artifacts associated with positioning pixels on half color-clocks, I would concede 160x192 (with four colors per line) as being more representative of the system's typical display in games.

[Bill Loguidice]

Again, they're taken a bit out of context of the book. The idea was to give "common system specifications" in real-world usage. Obviously the Atari 8-bit had lots of software in the 16K - 64K range, but to pick just one, it makes sense to choose 48K as a common specification. 80x192, though it's a GTIA mode, is as good of a common resolution of the system's many to pick as any. If you could pick just one commonly used resolution, what would you pick and why? (I'm being serious, as I can certainly consider a change for the final version)

 

Ummm... how about Antic Mode E's 160 x 192?

 

In the 1980s, most sources listed the Atari 8-bit's maximum resolution of 320x192 (Antic Mode F), but given the artifacts associated with positioning pixels on half color-clocks, I would concede 160x192 (with four colors per line) as being more representative of the system's typical display in games.

 

I would be comfortable with making the change to 160x192, as it would look better against other systems of the time. The idea is not to show one system being better than another (though the book's rating do provide that to a small degree), but in practical, real world results.

 

Anyone else have thoughts on a good representative resolution besides 160x192?

[Retro Rogue]

Like the other entries excerpted from the book, it was not meant to be exhaustive, merely as thorough a look from a US-perspective at the system(s) in question as the space allows. In the book, there are over 40 other entries just like that. The idea was to provide anyone, even someone new to the system, all they would need to know about the platform in question to be empowered to discover more about it in an informed manner. Thanks for reading it and posting about it!

 

Bill - good article as usual, but the intro summary info is a little off. The computers and computer division were started under Nolan - in fact work on the PCS's started up immediately after the design completion of the VCS. Its a common misconception that Nolan wanted nothing to do with computers, and I have no idea why that keeps getting repeated - probably something to do with the whole Apple I thing. What Ray did is push them in the direction of "consumer appliances" and went so far as wanting them in different colors etc. to appeal to women (foreshadowing Job's colored iMac's 20 years later). In fact when he announced this during his first meeting with everyone just after taking over as CEO, he pissed off a lot of people with the way he presented that last bit.

[Bryan]

I would be comfortable with making the change to 160x192, as it would look better against other systems of the time. The idea is not to show one system being better than another (though the book's rating do provide that to a small degree), but in practical, real world results.

 

Anyone else have thoughts on a good representative resolution besides 160x192?

 

The chipset's most natural resolution is 160. The 320 modes are pretty much handled as modified 160 modes- with a different LUM value for both halves of the pixel clock.

[TMR]

I would be comfortable with making the change to 160x192, as it would look better against other systems of the time. The idea is not to show one system being better than another (though the book's rating do provide that to a small degree), but in practical, real world results.

 

Anyone else have thoughts on a good representative resolution besides 160x192?

 

The chipset's most natural resolution is 160. The 320 modes are pretty much handled as modified 160 modes- with a different LUM value for both halves of the pixel clock.

 

[Nods] That's pretty much what i'd have said, the machine "thinks" in 160x192 and from my experience there is a good proportion of software that uses it; 80x192 can do some interesting things but it's nowhere near as common. i'd also say that 128 colours is more representative of what the machine can do.

[Bill Loguidice]

I would be comfortable with making the change to 160x192, as it would look better against other systems of the time. The idea is not to show one system being better than another (though the book's rating do provide that to a small degree), but in practical, real world results.

 

Anyone else have thoughts on a good representative resolution besides 160x192?

 

The chipset's most natural resolution is 160. The 320 modes are pretty much handled as modified 160 modes- with a different LUM value for both halves of the pixel clock.

 

[Nods] That's pretty much what i'd have said, the machine "thinks" in 160x192 and from my experience there is a good proportion of software that uses it; 80x192 can do some interesting things but it's nowhere near as common. i'd also say that 128 colours is more representative of what the machine can do.

 

I'd rather stick with on-screen colors, rather than total pallet, so I think 16 is a good compromise across the various released games.

[Bryan]

I'd rather stick with on-screen colors, rather than total pallet, so I think 16 is a good compromise across the various released games.

 

That's a tough one since there's normally a 128 color palette, and the most colorful CTIA mode has 5 colors available. Of course there's 4 PM colors, so without any mid-screen changes there's a maximum of 9, so it may be best to say that the hardware directly supports 9 onscreen colors.

 

Of course, this ignores a few of the color mixing options that allow you to get a 3rd color in a player-player or even player-playfield overlapping region. Then there's 2 GTIA modes which allow 16 from a palette of 256 (plus a third that allows 9). It's kinda confusing and no one knows why the full 256 aren't available in the CTIA modes.

Edited August 4, 2008 by Bryan

[potatohead]

IMHO, 160x192 is the right spec to give. Ok with all of that discussion.

 

Also, IMHO, the colors should be listed as 128/256. Having the larger palette to draw from made the Atari machines distinctive at the time. Also distinctive is the variety of display mode options.

 

These two things together give an Atari, it's Atari look and feel display wise. Color cycling, mixed modes, scrolling, etc... all define the system in key ways, not shared in the same fashion as the other machines.

 

Great articles! (went and read the 2600 one too!)

 

I particularly enjoy the Modern Activity bit. Just the idea that there is modern activity is great to have out there. Maybe the retro hobby will continue to grow and thrive.

[TMR]

Also, IMHO, the colors should be listed as 128/256. Having the larger palette to draw from made the Atari machines distinctive at the time. Also distinctive is the variety of display mode options.

 

i'm thinking trade off a bit; if it says 128 colours it's less than halfway from the 16 Bill wants to say and the 256 the machine has available - hows that for a compromise? =-)

[Bill Loguidice]

Again, I'm not talking pallet, I'm talking what's actually on the screen at any one time, minimizing things like background elements, which can drive the number of on-screen colors way up. I'm also not talking a handful of games either. If that's the case, then we could say the Amiga 500 does 4,096 color on-screen for its games, when in fact only a handful used that mode, with the majority using 32 colors.

[+Philsan]

I would have written:

Resolution: max 320x192 Palette: 256 colors

 

It is important to mention palette because many computers of the time were monochromatic or with a small palette (for example C64, 1982, had only a 16 colors palette).

Edited August 4, 2008 by Philsan

[carmel_andrews]

Interesting article, So it missed off quite a bit of info, but it did cover the main point's fairly well in the space the section was given

[TMR]

Again, I'm not talking pallet, I'm talking what's actually on the screen at any one time, minimizing things like background elements, which can drive the number of on-screen colors way up.

 

At any one time varied greatly with the program to be honest and there are quite a few that, for presentation purposes at least, were really going for it; more games clear 16 colours than not, many go for the full 128 colours on their title or attract sequences and some do it during play too.

 

Thing is, if you're going to purely base it by what's on screen on average then the Commodore 264 series will be listed as 8 colour machines because that's what a lot of the games look like, despite having 121 colours and the ability to put 'em all on screen at once.

[Rybags]

If you really want to get fussy, then the actual highest resolution is more like 352x240.

 

And, we established not long ago that you can get something like 23 colours onscreen with PMG mixing provided you have the colours set the right way (since they get ORed together).

[frogstar_robot]

There is no hard and fast "number of onscreen colors at once". Depending on the tradeoffs the developer wants to make between CPU time, resolution, and how he/she wants to structure the display, the answer is anywhere between 2 and 256. And that is before talking about "software modes" that interleave or interframe the hardware modes in various ways. To be sure, one cannot arbitrarily write any of the 256 colors to a 320x192 mode but 9 of any hue/luma is available in one 80x192 mode without extensively programming the hardware. If the graphics hardware is programmed in ways common and known in the mid-eighties, it wasn't uncommon to see anywhere from 16 to 32 in extant software of the time.

 

Current techniques considerably extend on what was done "back in the day". The following Wikipedia article is a fairly broad but incomplete overview of some "software modes":

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-driv...8-bit_computers

Edited August 4, 2008 by frogstar_robot

[accousticguitar]

The reference to flash carts and SIO2PC was pretty vague. I would like to see one more paragraph in the article expounding on these. It is amazing what you can do with SIO2PC. The fact that you can spend less than $100 for the ability to play literally thousands of games should be mentioned in my opinion.

 

I liked that the high level of support for Atari was mentioned. I do think that it has the best support of any classic computer.

[potatohead]

@TMR: Yeah, I like it! Nicely played.

 

Ok, so how about number of colors on-screen, 9-32+, or ~24, or something? My experience says a number like 64 is too much. Didn't happen often enough, or in enough diverse game scenarios to crow about. On the other hand, 16 is too low. Plenty of titles demonstrated that level of sophistication. Then, there are the core games for the thing at release time. Lot of 9's in there...

 

With an Atari, this just isn't some number you can nail down as it just varied too much.

 

 

On the other hand, probably nobody cares but us!

 

 

Discussions like these, where the various boxes just don't fit into little rows and columns of specs is what made that time a very fun computing time. Seems to me, a single sentence speaking to that, along with some more fuzzy specs, captures the spirit of that nicely, which is part of what the history articles are supposed to do right?

 

(yeah, I know it's a design away the question answer, but hey? What's the harm in tossing that about?)

[Bill Loguidice]

The reference to flash carts and SIO2PC was pretty vague. I would like to see one more paragraph in the article expounding on these. It is amazing what you can do with SIO2PC. The fact that you can spend less than $100 for the ability to play literally thousands of games should be mentioned in my opinion.

 

I liked that the high level of support for Atari was mentioned. I do think that it has the best support of any classic computer.

 

 

ha ha, I'm not going to go too much more into this, but it was purposely vague about things like that. I essentially wanted to indicate that in general, those things exist, but not name too many specifics as the number of options tends to grow on a regular basis. Nevertheless, the way the Atari 8-bit article was written is how the 40+ other system chapters are written, so for obvious reasons there will be some necessary omissions. The idea is to mention as much as possible and try to come at each system/platform from the standpoint of a reader coming to the system for the very first time and give them a thorough and as detailed an education as possible (and certainly for companies like Apple, Commodore, Atari, etc., with multiple platform chapters, tell bits of their overall story in each). I purposely avoided going into too much about specifications and tried to talk about real world stuff, i.e., stuff a reader would actually realistically experience if he or she emulated the platform or collected for the thing. There are plenty of places a reader can go for hard technical facts if they're into that sort of thing.

Edited August 5, 2008 by Bill_Loguidice

[accousticguitar]

The reference to flash carts and SIO2PC was pretty vague. I would like to see one more paragraph in the article expounding on these. It is amazing what you can do with SIO2PC. The fact that you can spend less than $100 for the ability to play literally thousands of games should be mentioned in my opinion.

 

I liked that the high level of support for Atari was mentioned. I do think that it has the best support of any classic computer.

 

 

ha ha, I'm not going to go too much more into this, but it was purposely vague about things like that. I essentially wanted to indicate that in general, those things exist, but not name too many specifics as the number of options tends to grow on a regular basis. Nevertheless, the way the Atari 8-bit article was written is how the 40+ other system chapters are written, so for obvious reasons there will be some necessary omissions. The idea is to mention as much as possible and try to come at each system/platform from the standpoint of a reader coming to the system for the very first time and give them a thorough and as detailed an education as possible (and certainly for companies like Apple, Commodore, Atari, etc., with multiple platform chapters, tell bits of their overall story in each). I purposely avoided going into too much about specifications and tried to talk about real world stuff, i.e., stuff a reader would actually realistically experience if he or she emulated the platform or collected for the thing. There are plenty of places a reader can go for hard technical facts if they're into that sort of thing.

How about saying something like "with the right modern hardware it is possible to play nearly every game ever programmed for the Atari computer of which there were thousands"?

 

That way you wouldn't have to get any more specific about the hardware and it would convey the most important message that I think is missing from the article.

[Gunstar]

Like the other entries excerpted from the book, it was not meant to be exhaustive, merely as thorough a look from a US-perspective at the system(s) in question as the space allows. In the book, there are over 40 other entries just like that. The idea was to provide anyone, even someone new to the system, all they would need to know about the platform in question to be empowered to discover more about it in an informed manner. Thanks for reading it and posting about it!

 

An interesting piece but a little... well, vague; as Gregg Tavares pointed out in the comments the specs given at the start are pretty misleading (and the 80x192 mode wasn't available on the first machines either). Still, as was already said it's nice to see it there. =-)

 

 

Again, they're taken a bit out of context of the book. The idea was to give "common system specifications" in real-world usage. Obviously the Atari 8-bit had lots of software in the 16K - 64K range, but to pick just one, it makes sense to choose 48K as a common specification. 80x192, though it's a GTIA mode, is as good of a common resolution of the system's many to pick as any. If you could pick just one commonly used resolution, what would you pick and why? (I'm being serious, as I can certainly consider a change for the final version)

 

I'd pick the resolutions most commonly used, like 160x192. But it isn't helpful to just list one resolution, especially the less used GTIA modes. ALL possible resolutions should be included. Or, just give it's highest resolution, 320x192. Using a low resolution GTIA mode is very misleading and If I didn't know any better I'd be turned off by the machine if I just saw the 80x192 resolution. 80x192 is definately not a "commonly used resolution."

The best solution would be to say at least: "resolutions: from 80x192, 16 colors to 320x192, monochrome"

 

I also agree that it's great to see it mentioned, but it's far, far to misleading and makes the A8 seem much weaker in technical specs than it really is, with memory too, it should be 16-128K versions.

Edited August 5, 2008 by Gunstar

[mos6507]

IMHO, 160x192 is the right spec to give. Ok with all of that discussion.

 

The A8 is not a machine that can be summed up quite so easily. Any one-line spec like that is going to miss the bigger picture.