-The real Atari 8bit Computer Successor

[Keatah]

I don't know.. about successors and all that, if that sort of thing actually means anything. It seems at the time a lot of companies were throwing shit at a wall and whatever stuck became standard of the month.

 

The only systems which I believe had true successors in their lineages were the PC, Apple II, and Mac. These products seem to have the most forward & backward compatibility across models and through the years. They maintained enough compatibility to ease upgrading costs. They didn't make you feel like your "investment" would be instantly made null with next year's model. You could get some of next year's performance gains in your existing model with piecemeal upgrades.

 

I clearly recall upgrading from the Apple II+ to a //e, it cost me just the cost of the console, and 64k/80-column card. All my hardware transfered over except for the 16K Langauge card - which I kept installed in the II+. But for a time I had stripped the memory chips from it to stuff a hardware printer buffer. So even there I recouped some cost. Eventually when memory prices fell even further I put the memory chips back where they came from. The Amiga, ST, 400/800, C64, Vic-20, none of those, none of those offered this ease-of-transisition.

 

And let me not forget to mention the Disk II and its standard interface card. Got that in closing years of the 1970's. And it still operated just fine in the IIgs some 10 or 12 years later. Granted it didn't match cosmetically, bad as a fat hooker in an overtightened corset. But it WORKED! And I never felt guilty about having spent money on peripherals that would sit idle. For they didn't.

 

Ohh sure there some incompatibilities like lowercase chips and some slot-0 and slot-3 specialty cards. 80-column boards and memory boards. But we could pull their memory and TTL parts for projects and use elsewhere. Reprogram & re-use the EPROMS.. That sort of thing.

 

And I didn't even touch on software. But suffice it to say, software I had in 1977 on the Apple II continued to operate just fine on the last Apple II models, the Platinum //e, //c+, and IIgs. That's 12 years later. And had I been in on the very ground floor of the PC/XT/AT and Mac, I would have also enjoyed that same level of software compatibility over the years. Other contemporary machines of that era? No frakking way..

Edited December 5, 2014 by Keatah

[Chilly Willy]

I am an engineer, both of hardware and software, so when it came time to update from my venerable A400, I looked into it, and it was OBVIOUS even 25 years ago that the Amiga was the successor of the A8. It wasn't heretical, all us engineers knew and acknowledged it. So even if it meant changing which company we bought from, we bought the design we knew was best and most familiar to us. What was also clear was that the ST was NOT the next generation A8.

[+wood_jl]

I'm not sure what an A8 to Amiga convert is. I'm guessing someone who went from an A8 to an Amiga when it came time to upgrade?

Yup. Exactly. There's no reason to apologize, nor is there a reason to "qualify" the purchase as "true A8 successor." It doesn't look the same (quite different). It doesn't "feel" the same - the OS. If someone smarter than me hadn't explained that it was designed by some of the same people, I'd have never known. Neither would you. Neither would anybody. That's my point. It wasn't like switching on an Apple IIgs and being able to run the same software, or even a Commodore 128 (in 64 mode), for that matter.

 

Like a great deal of A8 users, I bought an ST. And like most (nearly all?) users, I had no idea about the shared DNA between A8 and Amiga.

Right, exactly. Until it was explained by smarter people, nobody could. Using the 2 systems (A8 and Amiga) had absolutely NO RELATION to each other.

 

 

As an A8 user who loved Bill Williams games like Necromancer, I was surprised that the first Amiga game I saw in a store was Bill William's Mindwalker, and the games seemed so incredibly similar that it was stunning. The use of ambient sound and music alongside rainbows of rotating color was so similar it was like someone took an Atari 8-bit game and put it on steroids. Even the rectangular pixel aspect ratio was just like the Atari!

I appreciate your nostalgia, but one could say that every game since the 2600 is just "on steroids." My point was that the A8 and the Amiga had no "look and feel" that was effectively comparable. When PCs became fast enough to accurately emulate Atari8s (say, Pentium 4) then the pendulum swung the other way, although "merely" in emulation.

 

My other favorite A8 app was RAMBrandt. My first ST purchase was Degas, but imagine my surprise when I saw DPaint on an Amiga - same ala carte style color and resolution selection, same pixel aspect, same non-embedded fonts. It was so reminiscent of the A8 that it was uncanny. It was these sorts things that made me sit up and take notice of Amiga. Not the other way around as you seem to think. I didn't initially want to like the Amiga, I just wanted a 16-bit Atari 800. I just couldn't escape how the Amiga, despite being a commodore product, was somehow impossibly similar to my old Atari.

As incompatible (and absolutely different and distinct in use) as A8 and Amiga are, Dpaint (or any other software, for that matter) is just as viable on any other alternative platform. It's really *COOL* to imagine this lineage (we all love Dynastys, whether in computers or politics, don't we?) but for any practical purpose, using an Amiga doesn't conjure up one iota of using an Atari8 to me. Neither does using an ST. Neither does using a PC. Neither does using anything else. When I turn on an A8 and listen to SIO beeps, the "Atari Fart" sound, etc....etc...etc....(could go on).....it is a unique experience that no other platform replicates. It's *COOL* to know about Jay Miner (et al) and the Amiga team, but using that computer (Amiga) reminds me no more of using an actual Atari8 than does a PC - save for the aforementioned Atari8 emulators.

 

But I respect your opinion that you're entitled to. I just don't see using my Amiga 500 as even *remotely* the same experience as using my 800, despite my vivid imagination.

[+wood_jl]

I am an engineer, both of hardware and software, so when it came time to update from my venerable A400, I looked into it, and it was OBVIOUS even 25 years ago that the Amiga was the successor of the A8.

Yet when I turn on my Amiga, I don't see anything remotely-similar. No SIO beeps. No same software. No Atari DOS. No SpartaDos. No NOTHING the same. I guess that's obvious, to you. Less-so to me. But this is an opinion-based topic, of course. (Neither was the ST, either, for that matter. There was no OBVIOUS A8 successor. There was an OBVIOUS Apple II successor (IIgs) and it wasn't the Macintosh).

 

It wasn't heretical, all us engineers knew and acknowledged it. So even if it meant changing which company we bought from, we bought the design we knew was best and most familiar to us. What was also clear was that the ST was NOT the next generation A8.

I applaud the engineers for their engineering prowess. It's not so much the company, but the fact that there actually was no 65816 successor to the Atari8, like the Apple II had. 68000 != 65816. I don't have to be an engineer to know that, and we can split hairs to the end of the world. But turning on an Apple IIgs can be similar to turning on an Apple IIe, and ***DOES*** run the same software. Turning on an Atari8 and an Amiga are vastly-different experiences, and there isn't ONE IOTA of similarity between turning either on, and zero software compatibility. But since you're an engineer (and I am not), I give the tip of the hat to you on that account alone, despite the truth of my claims.

[FastRobPlus]

I appreciate your nostalgia, but one could say that every game since the 2600 is just "on steroids." My point was that the A8 and the Amiga had no "look and feel" that was effectively comparable. When PCs became fast enough to accurately emulate Atari8s (say, Pentium 4) then the pendulum swung the other way, although "merely" in emulation.

 

 

I don't disagree with much of what you said, but I do on the point you made above.

 

 

You can tell the difference between Atari VCS, INTV and Odyssey games in a number of ways. The games were made in a way that played to the strengths of each system. For example, many VCS games had graphics that were cruder but employed color that made the other systems look pastel by comparison. That can be said for the A8 as well. While the C64 looked more pastel and sharp, the A8 employed zones of cycling color, often splitting the screen and displaying different graphic modes on the same monitor. The Amiga sacrificed sharpness for color too (check out the HAM artifacting in Mindwalker) often splitting the screen and displaying different graphic modes on the same monitor. But seemingly no other systems did this. It struck me as odd how similar just these 3 systems (and no others) were, until I learned later that they were all touched by the same person.

 

Sort of like Nebulon said earlier. You can like a band at face value and not quite place why - something about the mixing or sound or cadence that isn't common but reminds you of an earlier band you loved. If you later find out the band shares a producer and lyricist with that earlier band you love, then suddenly the pieces fit.

[Keatah]

VCS games were faster than Intellivision games.

 

Amiga games' controls felt more disconnected, buffered, isolated, from the game action than other machines. There was too much activity going on inside the bus and custom chips and all that. Too much latency. Amiga games felt like a stuffy nose compared to the crisp response of an 8-bit machine. Even the b/w original Mac was fast responding.

 

Sound was a big issue here. Like in Jet and Flight Simulator on the Amiga, the engine sound would play before the simulation was ready. Or it would play after the simulated plane crashed. This felt cheap and disconnected. Whereas in the 8-bit machines graphics and sound were tightly synchronized.

 

If there was any Atari "DNA" in the Amiga it was surely buried under the kludgey OS.

[Fletch]

I bought a 520ST when it came out, so to me that was the 8-bit's true successor. The 800XL left my desk and went to university with my brother, the 520ST moved onto the newly vacant desk. I was 15 years old, and knew nothing about the corporate goings on. It said Atari on it, It looked like a color Macintosh and I could afford it.

 

Maybe Jay Miner wasn't involved, but it had a Fuji on it and at that point in my life that is really all I cared about.

 

-Pete

[FastRobPlus]

VCS games were faster than Intellivision games.

 

Amiga games' controls felt more disconnected, buffered, isolated, from the game action than other machines. There was too much activity going on inside the bus and custom chips and all that. Too much latency. Amiga games felt like a stuffy nose compared to the crisp response of an 8-bit machine. Even the b/w original Mac was fast responding.

 

Sound was a big issue here. Like in Jet and Flight Simulator on the Amiga, the engine sound would play before the simulation was ready. Or it would play after the simulated plane crashed. This felt cheap and disconnected. Whereas in the 8-bit machines graphics and sound were tightly synchronized.

 

If there was any Atari "DNA" in the Amiga it was surely buried under the kludgey OS.

 

I don't remember Jet or FS for any system being responsive in any measurable way, so I can't understand the analogy there.

 

But let's talk about F/A 18 Interceptor. That game launched from within the OS and was system friendly, a feat that Windows would not achieve for another 10 years! That game did have an odd disconnected feeling (you heard the engine noise before you saw the game screen), but in hindsight this was the natural abstraction of a game running peacefully within a multitasking OS. With F/A 18, you could accelerate the system and the game became smoother, just like modern games. This applied to a lot of games that had to be processor, OS version, or resolution agnostic. Games like Wing Commander, MMIII, Fighter Duel Pro, Battlefort, and Kyrandia for example.

 

This would have been a major jolt to gamers used to the OS-disabling nature of earlier games, but Amiga twitch and arcade style games used old school techniques to bypass the OS and bang the hardware directly and were as responsive as anything that had come before.

 

What you perceive as a weakness was also a huge and never before seen strength.

[FastRobPlus]

I bought a 520ST when it came out, so to me that was the 8-bit's true successor. The 800XL left my desk and went to university with my brother, the 520ST moved onto the newly vacant desk. I was 15 years old, and knew nothing about the corporate goings on. It said Atari on it, It looked like a color Macintosh and I could afford it.

 

Maybe Jay Miner wasn't involved, but it had a Fuji on it and at that point in my life that is really all I cared about.

 

-Pete

 

I think anything that you get after the thing you had before is a "successor". Technically my current dog is the successor to my deceased spitz.

 

As for DNA/lineage, the A8 was redesigned to have the same industrial design aesthetic as the Atari ST, so there was not only the Fuji logo but also a super strong family resemblance in the plastics.

[almightytodd]

I find this discussion interesting and I'd like to weigh in. I was an enlisted U.S. Navy sailor from 1985 to 1993, and a struggling young father of three. There was certainly no place in my budget for a home computer system that would have cost the equivalent of $2,000 of today's dollars; which includes the ST, Amiga, anything IBM and anything Apple. My younger brother, on the other hand, was single, still living with our parents, and working at a Federated Group retail store right around the time that Atari was working on a deal to acquire Federated. So he was able to get an Amiga 1000 system that he used mostly for gaming. He got me an Atari 7800 a few years later. He also added to our family's collection of 2600 games, most of which ended up with me (along with our family's original 1977 heavy sixer).

My feelings about all of these events were clouded by my perceptions of video game and microcomputer technology. I was a teenager during the 1970s, so I lived during the Atari Age - I played "Pong" and "Computer Space" on the original hardware when they were new. As stated before, our family had an original 1977 heavy sixer - it was our family Christmas present. Everybody knew the best coin-op games were Atari... ...and for some reason "Kee games" seemed to be pretty good too.

In 1977 three major microcomputers became available; the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II. The TRS and PET each came with a monochrome video monitor. The Apple did not, but it featured a color display output and it could be hooked up to your television set. Still, it cost twice as much as the TRS-80. Anyway, to me the Radio Shack and Commodore computers seemed more like "real" computers to me, because their monochrome video screens looked more like the 80-column video text character display terminals I'd seen used in time-sharing systems.

When the Atari 8-bit systems came out they seemed more like Apple computers to me; but better in every way (...same CPU, more sounds, more colors, more memory, lower price). And then the IBM PC came out. The thing is, you didn't just "buy" an IBM computer; you bought components and built a "system". I don't remember the exact prices but as I recall it went something like this... "Oh, you want an IBM PC? Sure it's $1,200... that buys you desktop unit, motherboard, and 16-bit CPU. Oh wait, you want to power it up? You'll need a power supply! That's 300 bucks! Now you'll need some RAM, 50 bucks for every 8k...". The same pattern follows when you add a floppy drive, monitor, keyboard... ...was PC-DOS a separate charge? It wouldn't surprise me. Anyway, by the time you ended up with an actual "system" that could actually boot-up and run some software, you'd be in the neighborhood of $4,000.

Commodore tried to compete with this with their "CBM" "Commodore Business Machines" line and I found myself kind of rooting for them. These were "real" computers with 80-column monitors and disk drives. They were outside the price range of something for the home, but still offered small businesses an option to the IBM solution for substantially less money. But it seemed that this advantage was overcome by the saying that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Besides that, within a few years the PC clones started showing up with software compatibility with the IBM machines; offering all of the advantages of IBM without the high cost.

Meanwhile Apple upped the ante by producing the Lisa, with the Motorola 68000 chip, the Graphical User Interface and the concept of the Office Suite. But the $10,000 price tag was over-the-top. The Macintosh followed, at a price that was at least "reasonable", but if you'll recall, the initial 1984 256K Macintosh couldn't really do anything.

Which brings us to the Amiga and Atari ST. The Amiga seemed more focused to me. It wasn't "trying" to be an IBM or a Mac. It was it's own thing. It was a machine that spurred the imagination. I was a computer to make using a computer "fun" again. In that way, it had more of the "spirit" of the Atari 8-bit line; although it was more than game-console with a keyboard.

The ST on the other hand, seemed rushed (because it was). It could emulate (sort of) an IBM PC or a Macintosh. I recall a Computer Chronicles episode where an add-on circuit board was demonstrated that would allow it to run Macintosh software slightly faster than a real Macintosh... ...provided the Macintosh software was written correctly. But you had to decide if you wanted a Mac-like monochrome display, or if you wanted color. If you decided on color, then you were stuck with a lower resolution desktop that seemed more like an evolution of the Atari 8-bit line.

I also realize that the situation for all of these machines was different outside of the U.S. It seems to me that the issue of cost for both IBM and Apple was magnified outside of the states, making both the Atari and Commodore machines more accessible.

One aspect that I frequently find absent from discussions like this one, is the role that the used computer market played in the disappearance of Commodore and Atari computers. My first "real" computer (I had a Timex/Sinclair) was a 486 PC clone hand-me-down from work, when all of their PCs were upgraded to Pentiums. I'm sure that a lot of other out-dated PC ATs, 386s, and 486SXs had a similar fate. These machines needed to go somewhere.

A used PC-compatible from work had two other advantages over a shiny-new 68000-based computer; I already new how to use it, and I could probably get some software for it. In the days before the Internet, Moore's Law really mattered for businesses and they had to upgrade all of their equipment every three years in order to even run the latest software. I'm sure I'm not the only person who experienced this kind of circumstance.

[+Stephen]

Yup. Exactly. There's no reason to apologize, nor is there a reason to "qualify" the purchase as "true A8 successor." It doesn't look the same (quite different). It doesn't "feel" the same - the OS. If someone smarter than me hadn't explained that it was designed by some of the same people, I'd have never known. Neither would you. Neither would anybody. That's my point. It wasn't like switching on an Apple IIgs and being able to run the same software, or even a Commodore 128 (in 64 mode), for that matter.

That's entirely not true. Anybody who programmed "down to the metal" - which was anybody worth a shit in those days, would see exactly the similarities in the machine. Same as 2600 went from a kernel display to the ANTIC, the 400/800 went from simple DLIs to copper lists. The list goes on.

[FastRobPlus]

That's entirely not true. Anybody who programmed "down to the metal" - which was anybody worth a shit in those days, would see exactly the similarities in the machine. Same as 2600 went from a kernel display to the ANTIC, the 400/800 went from simple DLIs to copper lists. The list goes on.

Good callout. Here's the Wikipedia entry on copper lists:

 

One of the earliest popular systems with true display list was the Atari 8-bit family. The display list (actually called so in Atari terminology) is a series of instructions for ANTIC, the video co-processor used in these machines. This program, stored in the computer's memory and executed by ANTIC in real time, can specify blank lines, any of six text modes and eight graphics modes, which sections of the screen can be horizontally or vertically fine scrolled, and trigger Display List Interrupts (called Raster interrupts or HBI on other systems).

Another system using a Display List-like feature in hardware is the Amiga, which, not coincidentally, was also designed by some of the same people who made the Atari 8-bits custom hardware. The Amiga hardware was extremely sophisticated, and once directed to produce a display mode, it would do so automatically. However, the computer also included a dedicated co-processor, called "Copper", which ran a simple program ("Copper List") oriented toward the display. The Copper List instructions could direct the Copper to wait for the display to reach a specific position on the screen, and then change the contents of hardware registers. In effect, it was a processor dedicated to servicing Raster interrupts. The Copper was used by Workbench to mix multiple display modes (multiple resolutions and color palettes on the monitor at the same time), and by numerous programs to create rainbow and gradient effects on the screen.

[FastRobPlus]

Like I said 20-30 posts ago, I'm still stunned at how many people think it's somehow apocryphal to even admit that these two platforms are related.

 

Nobody is trying to tarnish the ST's legacy or suggest that if you peel an Amiga 1000 logo off you'll see Atari 1850XL emblem underneath...

[Keatah]

I bought a 520ST when it came out, so to me that was the 8-bit's true successor. The 800XL left my desk and went to university with my brother, the 520ST moved onto the newly vacant desk. I was 15 years old, and knew nothing about the corporate goings on. It said Atari on it, It looked like a color Macintosh and I could afford it.

 

Maybe Jay Miner wasn't involved, but it had a Fuji on it and at that point in my life that is really all I cared about.

 

-Pete

 

I was a shitfaced bratty kid back then, and I didn't understand or did I care about corporations and their politics. I wanted my wAReZ and that was that.

 

In the context of your (my) next machine being the successor of what we had previously, that's absolutely true. In my case it would be: KIM-1 -> Apple II -> Amiga -> Apple II -> PC. It was when I failed to be able to do anything with the Amiga that I upgraded back to the Apple II and eventually a PC.

 

 

I don't remember Jet or FS for any system being responsive in any measurable way, so I can't understand the analogy there.

 

But let's talk about F/A 18 Interceptor. That game launched from within the OS and was system friendly, a feat that Windows would not achieve for another 10 years! That game did have an odd disconnected feeling (you heard the engine noise before you saw the game screen), but in hindsight this was the natural abstraction of a game running peacefully within a multitasking OS.

 

I'll grant you that, Jet and FSII were sluggish on many systems. And it disappointed me to no end that the 16-bit versions running on the ST and Amiga were no better.

 

F/A 18 Interceptor was one pretty cool game. One of the 5 or 6 things I actually enjoyed on the Amiga. I always thought (and still do) that any game with disconnected sound is cheaply done. The programmers never paid attention to the fine details. Maybe it can be whiled-away as a result of a smooth-flowing multi-tasking OS. I call it sloppy.

 

 

In 1977 three major microcomputers became available; the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II. The TRS and PET each came with a monochrome video monitor. The Apple did not, but it featured a color display output and it could be hooked up to your television set. Still, it cost twice as much as the TRS-80. Anyway, to me the Radio Shack and Commodore computers seemed more like "real" computers to me, because their monochrome video screens looked more like the 80-column video text character display terminals I'd seen used in time-sharing systems.

 

This was one of the unspoken virtues of the PC. It came across as a serious can-do machine. And businesses liked that. The last thing a company wanted was some campy colorful game machine made from cheap plastic.

 

 

A used PC-compatible from work had two other advantages over a shiny-new 68000-based computer; I already new how to use it, and I could probably get some software for it. In the days before the Internet, Moore's Law really mattered for businesses and they had to upgrade all of their equipment every three years in order to even run the latest software. I'm sure I'm not the only person who experienced this kind of circumstance.

 

Once you got into the PC ecosphere, you knew how to use past, present, and future machines with equal aplomb. And they had the same x86 architecture. The same DOS, the same Windows.. With the game-company 16-bit machines, data interchangeability was tedious at best.

[FastRobPlus]

 

In the context of your (my) next machine being the successor of what we had previously, that's absolutely true. In my case it would be: KIM-1 -> Apple II -> Amiga -> Apple II -> PC. It was when I failed to be able to do anything with the Amiga that I upgraded back to the Apple II and eventually a PC.

 

 

For me I think it went:

 

Compumate SpectraVideo -> TI99/4a/Vic20 -> Atari 1200XL -> C64 -> Northstar Advantage -> Atari 520ST (no f or m!) -> Amiga -> 386 -> Amiga -> Pentium

 

I did the same thing you did with the Apple II. After using a 386 for a while, I looked back at Amiga and thought "this is crazy, why am using this POS 386 clone?"

 

I left the A8 for a petty reason, it had no music in Ultima IV...

[atari8warez]

If there was any Atari "DNA" in the Amiga it was surely buried under the kludgey OS.

 

Maybe all we needed was a graphical OS on the A8 to establish that hidden lineage with the Amiga

[Heaven/TQA]

I went from 2600 --> VIC-20 --> Atari 800 XL --> 130 XE 1MB --> Atari 1040 STe --> A1200 --> PC Pentium (baeh)

 

as coder I did not know that the Amiga Jay Miner and 2600/XL were connected. (there was no Internet... still remember those times? ). When trying to move to 68000 coding (good CPU ) but were let down by the ST hardware and STe hardware even the STe had some nice features... the ugly borders (even you can remove that)... no waitsync, no display list, arkward bitplane organisation... 3 channel Yamaha, no softcrolling or when using hard to use when coming from XL... etc

[emkay]

Amiga Ball had been done to show that a demo can be handled easily . The real benefit was that a demo could run in the background, while you write something in you Wordprocessor.

 

The flexible DMA control with Antic allowed something similar ...

 

[Bryan]

This whole thread is really about the semantics of 'successor'.

 

-Is the ST the successor of the Atari 8-bit? Yes. It was the next Atari branded computer and the vast majority of the Atari 8-bit community moved over to it and supported it. This includes many of the remaining Atari Inc. employees, the dealer network, the developer community, and the user base.

 

-Is the Amiga the successor of the Atari 8-bit? Yes. Some of the key players behind the development of the Atari 8-bit were also involved with Amiga and the hardware has many design similarities. In fact, the Amiga would have been designed at Atari if Ray Kassar had agreed to it.

 

-Is there a successor to the Atari 8-bit? No. After the XE line, it was abandoned and there was no machine developed which had Atari 8-bit compatibility or used any of it's custom components or firmware.

 

I was an An Atari fanboy and lived in the world of the first definition for a long time. Today, as someone who is much more aware of the engineering aspects of these computers, I consider myself more in the 2nd camp. But I realize the reality of the situation is more complicated than that.

[FastRobPlus]

Possession of the family name seems to be nine-tenths of succession.

 

I think there was a story this week involving King Richard III. If I understood it correctly, there are breaks in the legitimacy of his line of descendants, opening questions about whether even the current royal family of England have actual royal blood.

[ricortes]

This whole thread is really about the semantics of 'successor'.

True that. And that being said...

 

Atari had all the engineering designs for Antic, POKEY, GTIA, in silicon and the engineers who knew how to wield them. How much work would it have been to design an actual successor as the technology matured? Trivial IMHO. For instance adding another couple of bits of address to the ANTIC so it could cross a 4k boundary w/o having to use a LMS instruction. All the hardware chips took up a full page of address so things we do with hardware hacks like dual POKEYs could have been done in silicon. Ditto for some other hacks like Bob's dual video chip except on the die instead of a birds nest of wiring.

 

Ditto for the 6502. What the 6502 should have become what the ARM is with clear linage. Instead of abandoning the 6502 for the 68000 or the migrating to the 65816, it could have been done better. Meh, 14 MHz 65C816! We should have a 1.5 GHz quad core code compatible 6502 running Android cellphones instead of ARMs. Atari should be the supplier of chips to Apple and Samsung.

 

The true successor of the 800/400 would still run PacMan but it would also run Candy Crush Saga and make phone calls. There was just a serious and profound lack of effort in that direction even by the engineers that originally did those designs. It was like the engineers that did the original designs were treated like they had cooties<well known fact> and their successors wanted their own claim to fame. From an engineering standpoint, you can't say the VW Rabbit was a successor to the VW Beetle just because they came from the same company. Porsche on the other hand... Small block Chevy V8 to LS1... It can and has been done. Not like you are asking for something pie in the sky from and engineering standpoint. It should be noted that both Porsche and the SBC are still going strong while you would have a tough time buying a new Rabbit.

[Bryan]

Atari had all the engineering designs for Antic, POKEY, GTIA, in silicon and the engineers who knew how to wield them. How much work would it have been to design an actual successor as the technology matured? Trivial IMHO. For instance adding another couple of bits of address to the ANTIC so it could cross a 4k boundary w/o having to use a LMS instruction. All the hardware chips took up a full page of address so things we do with hardware hacks like dual POKEYs could have been done in silicon. Ditto for some other hacks like Bob's dual video chip except on the die instead of a birds nest of wiring.

Atari spent a ton on R&D money on all kinds of weird stuff they never used, but never thought to improve the basic capabilities of the A8 chipset. The XL line should have had some tiny new hardware feature. I think all we ever got was the DRAM refresh modification to Antic and a 6502 that needed fewer support chips. Oh, I guess we got Freddie, but it was just another cost reduction chip. None of this improved the end experience at all. Of course, Atari tended to piss off their chip designers so that didn't help.

[Nebulon]

Turning on an Atari8 and an Amiga are vastly-different experiences, and there isn't ONE IOTA of similarity between turning either on, and zero software compatibility.

 

That same logic could be applied to the A8 and the ST.

 

When I get up from noodling around on my 800XL and then power up the Atari STe, I find those two machines to be two totally different experiences too and I certainly don't get the feeling of "Hey, I'm using the successor to the A8 right now!". The ST feels more like a SEGA Genesis with a keyboard to me than it does a next-gen A8 machine.

 

I enjoy messing around on all three machines (A8, ST, and Amiga). Each definitely has its own 'feel'.

[+Stephen]

 

That same logic could be applied to the A8 and the ST.

 

When I get up from noodling around on my 800XL and then power up the Atari STe, I find those two machines to be two totally different experiences too and I certainly don't get the feeling of "Hey, I'm using the successor to the A8 right now!". The ST feels more like a SEGA Genesis with a keyboard to me than it does a next-gen A8 machine.

 

I enjoy messing around on all three machines (A8, ST, and Amiga). Each definitely has its own 'feel'.

That right there is what I miss about the old machines. Like old cars, they had distinct "personalities".

[emkay]

This whole thread is really about the semantics of 'successor'.

 

-Is the ST the successor of the Atari 8-bit? Yes. It was the next Atari branded computer and the vast majority of the Atari 8-bit community moved over to it and supported it. This includes many of the remaining Atari Inc. employees, the dealer network, the developer community, and the user base.

Is the McFlurry a successor of the Hamburger? If you buy them at McDonald's, they have the same brand on it.

 

-Is the Amiga the successor of the Atari 8-bit? Yes. Some of the key players behind the development of the Atari 8-bit were also involved with Amiga and the hardware has many design similarities. In fact, the Amiga would have been designed at Atari if Ray Kassar had agreed to it.

The real point is that there is a missing link. Or to say it in other words: The Amiga is the successor of an anticipated successor at Atari.

 

-Is there a successor to the Atari 8-bit? No. After the XE line, it was abandoned and there was no machine developed which had Atari 8-bit compatibility or used any of it's custom components or firmware.

Well, an "8086" is a PC, a "Core I7" is a PC.... and no one doubt about the successor dependency , because the "Idea" is still common.

But they have less in common, than the Atari 8 Bits and the Amiga line...

I was an An Atari fanboy and lived in the world of the first definition for a long time. Today, as someone who is much more aware of the engineering aspects of these computers, I consider myself more in the 2nd camp. But I realize the reality of the situation is more complicated than that.

Actually, I bought an ST , because it was an Atari, but less than 2 years later an Amiga was on that place

And, well, it didn't took long to see that the Amiga is the real successor to the A8. ROM-OS and the "user interface" loading by disk. The handling of the screens. the sprites, it all brought that feeling of a "know before" environment. It's only some "cosmetics" that made it look "Commodore".

And I'm still happy, that the "Amiga" made it to "Big C" because it made it selling well, back in that days. An expensive Computer would have been dead from the start at Atari.