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Atari v Commodore


stevelanc

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orchestra playing SID music:

...

 

What are you trying to tell: SID can play a score and an orchestra too? SID invented the score?

 

You still not answered my question: Are you honest?

 

BTW: Your 'people dancing to SID-vid' is somewhat useless, since the they dancing to something

which contains 'SID' but was improved with other 'instruments' too...

 

CU

Irgendwer

 

1. dont redefine my statements.

2. I am honest.. (in what regard?!)

3. that SID tune has only an extra drummline, 90% of the tune is pure SID.

 

same party, first part of the vid: SID tune unimproved, only a little bit of mixing, then when changing to 2nd SID tune somewhere before 3:00 some non siddish sounds, then pure SID only again till the end (edit: drums are here added again, but so subtle I didnt noticed):

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVJdZPC2bNE...feature=related

 

proof:

 

2nd SID music: http://www.c64.org/HVSC/MUSICIANS/T/Tel_Je.../Dan_Dare_3.sid

(excuse me but I dont know the name of the 1st one.. have heard the original tho a few times)

 

when will we see people screaming&rocking to pokey music ?

Edited by Wolfram
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I think wolfram gets too excited sometimes and takes an extra unrelated step in his excitement that's all. The most popular music is not always the best, look at all the Bruce Springstien crap we had to listen to in the 90s ;) haha but there is just far too many facts technically speaking (ADSR,frequency range,variable filtering,and cummulative synchronistation and ring modulation) that do point to the better piece of silicon....the fact that 4 or 5 really talented musicians worked on the SID is just a nice coincidence.

 

GOD /o\. its not about music, its about the SID, which was (IS!) CAPABLE of making popular music. pokey is not.

 

He stated that the reasons you gave were not suitable and for that I agreed with him man.

 

I didn't get upset when Ariston used the Gameboy version of the Robocop soundtrack and NOT the C64 version, the Gameboy has a pretty iffy soundchip...the Spectrum and Amstrad version of the Robocop tune is pretty close. Pokey is better than the AY chip in the Spectrum and Amstrad really so there you have it.

 

Warhawk by Hubbard on the A8 is pretty good tune I think, better than most Yamaha AY chiptunes and yet there are still great tunes on the ST (which uses a similar chip) like Xenon 1 soundtrack by David Whittaker. I even remixed that tune using the AY sounds myself and to me it sounds better than the SID version but that has nothing to do with the fact the SID is better than the ST AY styel Yamaha chip.

 

All I'm saying is quantity is not quality as Marius1976 said, but I also said for technical reasons the SID is one of the best analogue synth chips ever made. As anyone with an interest in professional music equipment will know Bob Yannes designed the SID in a couple of months, even he says in interviews he could have made it even more sophisticated BUT Commodore refused to let him complicate the design even more as they needed it FAST and the yields needed to be reliably high in production. Jack Tramiel wanted the C64 out there before the competitors copied the VIC20.

 

Bob Yannes designed the soundchips for the very famous and very capable Ensoniq synthesizers, and his genius shows in the SID.

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He stated that the reasons you gave were not suitable and for that I agreed with him man.

 

yeah but in most cases, and if you use common sense, people prefer "stuff" which is better. it's an academic refute. dont applies to real world in most cases.

 

Pokey is better than the AY chip in the Spectrum and Amstrad really so there you have it.

 

I strongly disagree. the 8 bit freq places very heavy restrictions on the melodies/apreggios, no slides possible, a lot of tones will be mistuned, etc. (you have 2 channels 16 bit freq, or 3 chanel 1 16 bit, 2 8 bit, or 4 channel 8 bit.. ugh)

 

http://plopbox.net/

 

filter to YM tunes, and check out the ones made by scavenger.... (oh no pokey listed on this site... hmm.. )

Edited by Wolfram
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You probably are. Gay and unskilled. Gay would be fine...

 

Well, thank you, and it takes one to know one....unskilled that is, and we established that you are quite some posts back already.

"takes one to know one" is kinda cheap.

 

Like a C64 perhaps? They seem to thrive on 'cheap'.

 

Obviously a troll who doesn't read anything other than fanboy Atari posts and skips the rest. The C64 may have been $599 not $799 and the reason why is...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore OWNED MOS Technologies, MOS employees designed the VIC-II and SID for FREE, and produced the chips at COST PRICE for Commodore. The real price of producing the C64 for any other company would have been double the price. These are facts...please pay attention or you will just get ignored for ignorant trolling thanks :)

 

The reason why Jack Tramiel was the ONLY businessman in the world to ever screw Bill Gates over in business (he didn't pay Microsoft any royalties until the Commodore 128 version of Basic) is because he is clever, and because he was so damned clever in business he bought MOS Technologies with Irvine Gould's money so he would never get screwed over again by a 3rd party chip manufacturer after Texas Instruments screwed him on calculator chips. He did to everyone else with the C64 hardware and MOS ownership what Texas Instruments did to him with calculator chips.

 

What is cheap without a doubt is the horrible spongey 65XE/130XE keyboards (800 and 800XL had great keyboards)...now that was a cheap and nasty machine to type on for sure compared to the C64 frenchman...feel free to try and hurt my feelings with dumb nonfactual off topic insults about that though man LOL

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yeah c64 has better gfx, proof:

 

58066.png

57719.png

54307.png

53729.png

53087.png

43065.gif

41581.gif

41469.png

40476.gif

39953.gif

 

You know, good graphics produce good feelings. Those colours cause nausea. There is nothing any good there, except you have distorted receptors in your eyes, or else...

 

sid vs pokey..

 

show me people going to parties to celebrate pokey music, to dance to pure pokey music:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UccfIsAj0uA...feature=related

 

show me orchestras playing pokey music, show me commercial music artists using pokey music in their works...

 

Wolfram always mixes up "Sound" with "Music". YES, it is easy to handle SID for making 3 channel Music.

But, did anyone hear a clean analog sinewave played by SID, or something higher than 3.5kHz?

POKEY can produce clean analog waves, which is far superior to the SID sound generators.

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I am basing it on unbiased observation. It's crap in comparison to Atari 800/XL/XE machines that I have. None of the Ataris have broken down for me over many years. C64, used only a few times, broke down. It's not an attack but a true statement.

 

You are right, but the samples are not representative.

 

It's not just me who has evidence this a cheaper (lower quality) machine. I also had some PETs and they never stopped working and that stuff was heavy duty and prior to C64. You have to buy some hardware to protect your 6526 (CIA) chips:

 

http://www.oldsoftware.com/6526.html

 

You can see some parts yourself-- open up the machine and there's the aluminum foil shielding, some white "glue" on some of the chips, etc. Heck, I can even repair the "Out of Memory" error on this particular C64 machine as most of the chips are non-socketed.

 

OKOK, I had only problem with your reasoning:

 

1. You told your observations

2. You conclude that C64 is crap (I mean low quality)

3. You told that your conclusion is based on unbiased observation

 

Okay, that word should be "can't" not "can". I can't even repair 'Out of Memory' error due to non-socketed chips (too much soldering/desoldering).

 

My conclusion is based on the 4 C64 machines I have (none work currently). Yeah, I can't experience all the C64s on the planet but have to rely on reports from others. If it was a logically proveable point, I wouldn't have to rely on other people's reports.

Don't worry, your conclusion is correct, I was and am a retailer and sold Atari and Commodore throughout the period. Distibutors would fly me in to CES each year.

Until the 64C all the other units were crap with cheap parts and a high failure rates. For those of you who might have gotten lucky, I can tell you having had to do the weekly RMA/Returns on them, they were awful! Not Xbox360 awful but for the time very bad. If you want to have 10 units to sell in a week you had better order 17 to 18 as that was what the failure rate was during the warranty period, over half of that was bad out of the box. Keyboards, power supplies, bad video, smoking when turned on. That is not to say Atari pre Tramiel did not have failures but when we sold 300 units per month(we had retail and mail order) of 800xl(800 before that) we might have 4-6 and most of those were loose socketed chips. 800xl had a little higher rate than the 800 but still very low. We were selling maybe 40-60 c64's per month in 83 and early 84 so that was nearly 100 units ordered to get 60 units to stay out the door. Vic disk drives were terrible too, not as bad as the machine but 4 times the rate of an 810 or 1050.C64 problems continued though improved somewhat in mid to late 85.

After Jack Tramiel introduced the XE machine failure rates went up. (Keyboards,some video issues) but never as high as the old c64 days.

To be fair the 64C was a much better machine, low failure rates, usually only the power brick but if it went usually so did the machine. It was nicely made but also too little to late as Amiga and St were coming. Everyone wanted to dump their 8-bit. We accepted trades and C64/C128 people as well as Atari people dumped like crazy and software sales dropped through the floor on both machines,late 1985 all through 86.

 

So how comes then I own THREE fully working Commodore 64 machines from 1981 with the original motherboard/keyboard/6510/VIC-II/SID all labelled 1981 and serial numbers between 10,000 and 22,000?

 

They could not have been repaired as all the chips are date stamped for the same year as the motherboard on them all. Actually I have 23 commodore 64 machines here (I sell them) and all the ones that I bought as working never had a problem nor did any others I have sold. I wish the STs I bought were as reliable or the 800s (XL/XE is ok so far) as they always get funny weird faults too. But I put that down to luck except for the STs loose TOS roms problem which is a bad design.

 

So unless someone wants to show me OFFICIAL statistical sample results for a minimum of 10,000 units on returns in warranty period I call bullshit on ANY reliability claims anyone here wants to throw in the thread from now. Lets keep the facts HIGH and the emotions low thanks :)

 

(PS The aluminium shielding as you put it is either cardboard for RF frequency reduction which is a requirement by US law. Or the heatsink for the VIC-II which runs at 18mhz so no suprise there then!)

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You know, good graphics produce good feelings. Those colours cause nausea. There is nothing any good there, except you have distorted receptors in your eyes, or else...

 

lets compare, every 2nd one is a8, rest is c64:

 

58066.png

bash-frog_atari_dely.png

57719.png

allterrainvehiclesimulator_c64_gonzo.png

54307.png

crazylemming_c64_tebe.png

53729.png

ccs2_c64_tebe.png

53087.png

stislefinal3_atari_powrooz.png

43065.gif

recalltitlefinal_atari_powrooz.png

41581.gif

pang.theend_pc_tebe.png

41469.png

beforeisleep_atari_dely.png

40476.gif

rabbit_atari_powrooz.png

39953.gif

 

 

 

 

Wolfram always mixes up "Sound" with "Music". YES, it is easy to handle SID for making 3 channel Music.

But, did anyone hear a clean analog sinewave played by SID, or something higher than 3.5kHz?

POKEY can produce clean analog waves, which is far superior to the SID sound generators.

 

thats a lie. proove I do that mixup. looks like infact you mix up sound with music. one sinewave doesnt makes the pokey better, its just a sound. SID has many many features pokey is missing.

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2. I am honest.. (in what regard?!)

 

Tracking back to my first 'are you honest', that means you find the C64 Sentinel title screen more convincing than the G2F version.

Intresting.

 

3. that SID tune has only an extra drummline, 90% of the tune is pure SID.

 

Erm, a single drumline (I doubt that this is a 'one channel' line) would mean 75% SID maximum.

I think SID is a very capable chip with nice features, but like thorfdgb stated: It's not needed for avr. gaming. In fact

I think the 4th channel of Pokey is an advantage for the avr. game, since it's easier to sacrifice one channel for sound FX.

 

BTW: It's like a hen/egg question, but you mentioned more than once, that the C64 can handle the typical eighties gameing

scenario better than the A8. Could it be possible that the 'typical' scenario was supported in respect to the capabilities of the

most popular machine of that time? Browsing through the A8 catalogue of titles I find much more diversity in respect to the total

number.

 

when will we see people screaming&rocking to pokey music ?

 

I'm sure you know the techno version of the soundtrack 'Das Boot' (Alex Christensen). This was a very popular title at least here in Germany.

It contains the voice playback from a ST speech synthesizer. Is the Yamaha chip superior than SID because it made more people screaming & dancing?

I don't think so...

 

CU

Irgendwer

Edited by Irgendwer
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Wolfram always mixes up "Sound" with "Music". YES, it is easy to handle SID for making 3 channel Music.

But, did anyone hear a clean analog sinewave played by SID, or something higher than 3.5kHz?

POKEY can produce clean analog waves, which is far superior to the SID sound generators.

 

Come down, emkay. SID can also play clean analog waves, and on top of that it offers lowpass, bandpass and highpass filters. It can generate four basic waveforms instead of the simple digital output of POKEY. It lacks a fourth voice, but except that, it's a pretty damn good design. Oh yeah, I own two 800XLs and no C64, ever.

 

You should try to broaden your perspective a bit - try to look at this from the engineering perspective. I don't say that you can run some advanced hackery on the POKEY, but the chip wasn't engineered to do that. It was engineered as a simple chip to generate game sounds and music, and not to generate complicated analog waveforms or play resp. immitate instruments.

 

Yeah, you can sample every musical score at 4 bits resolution and play that using most of the CPU time on POKEY, but that is not the point. The point is what the chip was designed to do, and it was designed as something considerably simpler than SID.

 

So long,

Thomas

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He stated that the reasons you gave were not suitable and for that I agreed with him man.

 

yeah but in most cases, and if you use common sense, people prefer "stuff" which is better. it's an academic refute. dont applies to real world in most cases.

 

Pokey is better than the AY chip in the Spectrum and Amstrad really so there you have it.

 

I strongly disagree. the 8 bit freq places very heavy restrictions on the melodies/apreggios, no slides possible, a lot of tones will be mistuned, etc. (you have 2 channels 16 bit freq, or 3 chanel 1 16 bit, 2 8 bit, or 4 channel 8 bit.. ugh)

 

http://plopbox.net/

 

filter to YM tunes, and check out the ones made by scavenger.... (oh no pokey listed on this site... hmm.. )

 

Couldn't disagree more, I would rather listen to an album by Tangerine Dream than the latest rubbish clogging up the top 40 charts because people buy crap like the Spice Girls and Nsync and make those idiots rich because most people are idiots. Same with cars...the Toyota Corolla is the worlds best selling car...it's a total piece of crap only good for my dog to pop on its tyres if you ask me...my car sells nothing like that but I can lose my licence instantly with it :)

 

You are confusing the happy situation of commercial success and technical excellence that the C64 enjoyed with the real world wolfram ;)

 

I know what the SID can do, and the Yamaha chips though but thanks for the link. No two people have the same favourite chip tunes anyway, but I have no problem with that at all dude.

 

My favourite SID tunes of all time are on a demo game (not in the full release) which you can watch here on

 

Sure not everyone will like it but that's music for you eh :)

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You know, good graphics produce good feelings. Those colours cause nausea. There is nothing any good there, except you have distorted receptors in your eyes, or else...

 

lets compare, every 2nd one is a8, rest is c64:

 

58066.png

bash-frog_atari_dely.png

57719.png

allterrainvehiclesimulator_c64_gonzo.png

54307.png

crazylemming_c64_tebe.png

53729.png

ccs2_c64_tebe.png

53087.png

stislefinal3_atari_powrooz.png

43065.gif

recalltitlefinal_atari_powrooz.png

41581.gif

pang.theend_pc_tebe.png

41469.png

beforeisleep_atari_dely.png

40476.gif

rabbit_atari_powrooz.png

39953.gif

 

 

And those look same to you?

 

Wolfram always mixes up "Sound" with "Music". YES, it is easy to handle SID for making 3 channel Music.

But, did anyone hear a clean analog sinewave played by SID, or something higher than 3.5kHz?

POKEY can produce clean analog waves, which is far superior to the SID sound generators.

 

thats a lie. proove I do that mixup. looks like infact you mix up sound with music. one sinewave doesnt makes the pokey better, its just a sound. SID has many many features pokey is missing.

 

What is Pokey missing?

 

Analog low pass filter, yes

 

Ring Modulation, no

ADSR features, no

PWM , no

Frequency range, no

Sawtooth ? Well, Pokey has three different variations there.

Triangle ? There

Sine , also

 

And it has 4 voices

And it has 4 DAC channels (GTIA not to forget)

 

...

 

 

 

...

 

...

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yeah c64 has better gfx, proof:

...

 

Sorry, but those images look like eye-cancer to me. The colors are pretty wrong - kinda like impressionistic art. I could look at this as an art-form, but due to the limited color palette, the images are also pretty limited and are all the same type of "art". As much as I respect the SID engineering, as little can I admire the playfield subsytem of the C64.

 

I think those images show a pretty severe limitation of the C64 VIC, indeed: Instead of using fixed colors, the VIC engineers should have added an indirection layer where each of the sixteen slots addresses a color register allowing you to define a hue and a luminance of a color from a larger palette.

 

To come back to the argument: This is the matter of the quality of the engineering design: Instead of providing rather obvious and simple flexibility, users are locked into the palette design decision forever. Bad engineering. SID is right the other way around: Very flexible, pretty good engineering.

 

So long,

Thomas

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Wolfram always mixes up "Sound" with "Music". YES, it is easy to handle SID for making 3 channel Music.

But, did anyone hear a clean analog sinewave played by SID, or something higher than 3.5kHz?

POKEY can produce clean analog waves, which is far superior to the SID sound generators.

 

Come down, emkay. SID can also play clean analog waves, and on top of that it offers lowpass, bandpass and highpass filters. It can generate four basic waveforms instead of the simple digital output of POKEY. It lacks a fourth voice, but except that, it's a pretty damn good design. Oh yeah, I own two 800XLs and no C64, ever.

 

You should try to broaden your perspective a bit - try to look at this from the engineering perspective. I don't say that you can run some advanced hackery on the POKEY, but the chip wasn't engineered to do that. It was engineered as a simple chip to generate game sounds and music, and not to generate complicated analog waveforms or play resp. immitate instruments.

 

Yeah, you can sample every musical score at 4 bits resolution and play that using most of the CPU time on POKEY, but that is not the point. The point is what the chip was designed to do, and it was designed as something considerably simpler than SID.

 

So long,

Thomas

 

As far as a computer connected to a TV there is no issue with the C64 sound wave output. However I know for a fact you can NOT recreate an electric guitar sound (the most difficult sound to reproduce without samples) on the Pokey but you can on the SID. You may get some 'noise' from the actual motherboard BUT that's a bit rich to mention when some A8 models can't even display a clean picture on the TV screen

 

As for the extra channel comment later (can't be bothered to double edit emkays posts any more) the simple fact is having speech/sample sound AND 3 SID channels AND running a 50fps game is not a problem. Mega-Apocalypse is a classic example where obviously it does NOT use excessive CPU time at all. So having sampled drum tracks in tunes like Arkanoid is not an issue and anyway it's no different to using DLIs on the A8 to get more colours on screen. Feature of the machine sorry, try again emkay :)

 

Sure the speech is nice on Berzerk but everything stops while the sample is played ;)

 

Oh and EVERY soundchip has some ADSR control the pokey has nowhere near the same level of control over individual attack/decay/sustain/release. Cumulative Ring mod and sync AND pulsed phased waveforms together.

 

SOUND CAPABILITY: Three Tone Oscillators (0 - 4 kHz Range) / Four Waveforms per Oscillator (Triangle, Sawtooth, Variable Pulse & Noise) / Three Amplitude Modulators (48 dB Range) / Three Envelope Generators (Attack Rate: 2 ms - 8 s, Decay Rate: 6 ms - 24 s, Sustain Level: 0 - Peak Volume, Release Rate: 6 ms - 24 s) / Oscillator Synchronization / Ring Modulation / Programmable Filter (Cutoff Range 30 Hz - 12 kHz, 12 dB Octave Rolloff, Low Pass, Band Pass, High Pass, Notch Outputs, Variable Resonance) / External Audio Input

 

emkay you are looking REALLY stupid with your Pokey is technically better than SID bullshit really. We get this all the time, you are the only idiot in the world still trying to push this lie on your fanboy posse dude. Enough already the whole world WITH A BRAIN knows the SID is one level above Pokey AND AY soundchips simple facts.

Edited by oky2000
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Sorry, but those images look like eye-cancer to me. The colors are pretty wrong - kinda like impressionistic art.

 

sorry, but the same can be said to a8 g2f pictures. but it can be only be said if you take off your bias glasses.

 

 

I think those images show a pretty severe limitation of the C64 VIC, indeed: Instead of using fixed colors, the VIC engineers should have added an indirection layer where each of the sixteen slots addresses a color register allowing you to define a hue and a luminance of a color from a larger palette.

 

the engineers could have done A500 quality gfx if wanted (same goes for a8 before you complain). but it was not only about engineering, it was made for a market to compete, it had to be made within certain limits. they had to make compromises. 16 colors is a very good compromise imho. 2 different colors can be stuffed in one byte.

 

To come back to the argument: This is the matter of the quality of the engineering design: Instead of providing rather obvious and simple flexibility, users are locked into the palette design decision forever. Bad engineering. SID is right the other way around: Very flexible, pretty good engineering.

 

I think its a much better design for a gfx chip to have as many colors as many it can display without difficulties, vs having 256 colors with 4/16 colored screens.

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Obviously a troll who doesn't read anything other than fanboy Atari posts and skips the rest. The C64 may have been $599 not $799 and the reason why is...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore OWNED MOS Technologies,

 

 

Well, obviously that'll be you then (a troll that is) as I mentioned that ...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore purchased MOS after it went bust quite some posts ago. I know it's sunday, but wake up man.

Edited by frenchman
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What is Pokey missing?

 

Analog low pass filter, yes

 

Ring Modulation, no

ADSR features, no

PWM , no

Frequency range, no

Sawtooth ? Well, Pokey has three different variations there.

Triangle ? There

Sine , also

 

And it has 4 voices

And it has 4 DAC channels (GTIA not to forget)

 

Sorry, POKEY has *no* ring modulator. It contains a simple AND gate to combine two channels, which is a simple digital filter, but not an analog ring modulator.

 

Pokey neither has ADSR capabilities. For SID, you fire off the ADSR slope and the chip does it all itself. This is ADSR support. Not the capability of being able to do it on the CPU by writing into the registers. SID does it by itself. Pokey doesn't.

 

Neither has POKEY sawtooth support. You can use advanced hackery and the low-pass characteristics of the audio output to simulate something, but one sawtooth wave requires two audio channels, and the chip wasn't designed to do that, it's hackery.

 

There is neither any triangle support built into the chip, it's again additional trickery and it depends on side-effects of the audio hardware.

 

There is no sine support either built inot the chip.

 

And you can barely count the GTIA on-off channel a digital channel and a feature of POKEY.

 

It does have four voices, and it supports the generation of suitable in-game sounds, which is what it was designed for. That, and not more.

 

So long,

Thomas

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And those look same to you?

 

the c64 examples were made by the same artist. if that is your problem. c64 gfx can be very diverse.

 

44355.png

40585.gif

2118.gif

58961.png

76259.png

9582.png

59666.png

 

 

edit: btw the madonna pic is interlaced, the rest of the 320x looking is true 320x resolution...

Edited by Wolfram
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Sorry, but those images look like eye-cancer to me. The colors are pretty wrong - kinda like impressionistic art.

 

sorry, but the same can be said to a8 g2f pictures. but it can be only be said if you take off your bias glasses.

 

 

I think those images show a pretty severe limitation of the C64 VIC, indeed: Instead of using fixed colors, the VIC engineers should have added an indirection layer where each of the sixteen slots addresses a color register allowing you to define a hue and a luminance of a color from a larger palette.

 

the engineers could have done A500 quality gfx if wanted (same goes for a8 before you complain). but it was not only about engineering, it was made for a market to compete, it had to be made within certain limits. they had to make compromises. 16 colors is a very good compromise imho. 2 different colors can be stuffed in one byte.

 

To come back to the argument: This is the matter of the quality of the engineering design: Instead of providing rather obvious and simple flexibility, users are locked into the palette design decision forever. Bad engineering. SID is right the other way around: Very flexible, pretty good engineering.

 

I think its a much better design for a gfx chip to have as many colors as many it can display without difficulties, vs having 256 colors with 4/16 colored screens.

 

I think the Atari Sentinel picture looks better. I think the C64 palette is not enough for those kind of pictures (fine for sprites etc in games) because the C64 DTV 256 colour images look stunning, much better than the A8 256 colour pictures. The C64 would have had 256 colours if it wasn't rushed to market to make sure it was finished before the Japanese copied the VIC20 chips. Adding 256 colours to the C64 was a simple thing according to Jeri Elsworth who designed the DTV chip for Tulip. The hooks are there for a C64 compatible machine with extra 256 colour mode in VIC-II already which is why it only took a few days extra work for Jeri to add it in the DTV.

 

The reason they chose just 16 is because when you have 4 colours @ 160x200 it isn't going to make a huge difference in 1981 except for the marketing department selling and advertising the machine, it's unusable in games on the A8....looks good on Technicolor Dream pictures though using all the CPU to get all the colours on screen that I won't dispute.

 

(the DTV is 100% VIC-II hardware emulation, not a replacement compatible chip, so adding the colours in DTV means it is possible to remake a VIC-II with 256 colours on a real C64 if Commodore wanted to...but they bought Amiga by then)

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35737.gif

 

true 320x200, no interlace. c64 has better gfx. period.

 

That's a nice image ( and the other pictures are pretty good as well )

I think ( at the time ) I was more impressed with the 256 colour atari images ( APAC ) - photorealistic graphics ( even when only at 80x112 ) really showed stuff on the Atari that no other computer could do.

Looking at the G2F stuff now is also pretty amazing - seeing 160x pictures that rival the equiv. C64 pictures, and sometimes look better due to the wider palletes.

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Those Atari pictures look better than the '64 ones.

 

Putting artistic qualities aside, the Atari pics each have a different looking palette, practically all the '64 ones look the same.

 

C64 - It's like buying your kid one of those packs of 72 textas but losing three quarters of them on the way home... actually, you probably lost a few more than that.

 

VIC-II runs at 18 MHz? I kinda doubt that. Doesn't matter a lot anyway. Antic runs at 1.8 MHz, but outputs data to GTIA on both edges of the clock.

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I think its a much better design for a gfx chip to have as many colors as many it can display without difficulties, vs having 256 colors with 4/16 colored screens.

 

The point is: It can't. It can only display 16 colors, and there is no way around that - it's a simple stupid limitation that could have been avoided.

 

But I think it's all mood to argue with you - you don't see the point I'm trying to make. As I said above, if an unnecessary artificial limitation is built into the chip - by that I mean resolving it wouldn't neither have costed much money nor much resources - then that's bad engineering. I'm talking about the engineering process, not the market success, nor those pictures in specific. I'm trying to judge the quality of the overall product from the point how well the system engineers did their job. And I don't think the unorthogonal and limited design of the VIC playfield (not sprite!) system is a master piece of engineering. ANTIC, however, is a brilliant chip design probably four or five years ahead of its time.

 

So long,

Thomas

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Obviously a troll who doesn't read anything other than fanboy Atari posts and skips the rest. The C64 may have been $599 not $799 and the reason why is...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore OWNED MOS Technologies,

 

 

Well, obviously that'll be you then (a troll that is) as I mentioned that ...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore purchased MOS after it went bust quite some posts ago. I know it's sunday, but wake up man.

 

So then you don't know what the meaning of the word "cheap" is then? or you are just deliberately baiting like a troll in the thread just for the sake of making personal insults?

 

Because you are either very bad at remembering your own posts or you are baiting for a flame war when some of us here who actually bother to put up the odd fact are attempting some sort of discussion.

 

I notice you left out your offending comment in my original quoted post when replying to me above, I am full awake don't worry ;)

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Those Atari pictures look better than the '64 ones.

 

I cant believe that's what you're really thinking honestly. most of the 64 ones were made by people pixeling since 10-20 years, even living from doing gfx/design. putting technicals aside they are better.

 

 

Putting artistic qualities aside, the Atari pics each have a different looking palette, practically all the '64 ones look the same.

 

what a suprise.... so the atari pics look nice because each of them has a different palette. cant believe you're trying to sneak that in :)

 

technically what we have there is c64 demonstrating the abiltiy to show many many different colored pixels in tight areas. you dont see that on any of the a8 pictures.

 

 

 

VIC-II runs at 18 MHz? I kinda doubt that. Doesn't matter a lot anyway. Antic runs at 1.8 MHz, but outputs data to GTIA on both edges of the clock.

 

 

mee too, its more like 8mhz. (8 pixels displayed / 1 clock at ~1 mhz) but I'm just guessing here.

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Pokey neither has ADSR capabilities. For SID, you fire off the ADSR slope and the chip does it all itself. This is ADSR support. Not the capability of being able to do it on the CPU by writing into the registers. SID does it by itself. Pokey doesn't.

Well POKEY has 4 volume registers for each channel and can do ADSR by software. Less precise than the SID ADSR but still ADSR.

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