The real fight Atari versus Commodore

[Mazzspeed]

Just now, Faicuai said:

Well, it was you who wrote all that... simply because I described the UII nature for what is (and quite accurately).

 

And you did not like it. Sorry for having brought darkness and despair into your world...

 

If you are really true to your cause, Let's see if you wage your emotional literacy-crusade on your own C64 forum, chasing down users' opinion of Atari...

 

I would like to see that. ??

We're done here. There's nothing more to say.

[+mytek]

1 hour ago, Mazzspeed said:

We're done here. There's nothing more to say.

I've been watching this from the sidelines and have got to say I certainly understand where you are coming from.

 

It's truly sad that in this day and age, some 30-40 years later that we continue to see people unable to accept that all 8-bit computers have their merits, no matter the brand. And that although the Atari did some great things with their hardware design for the day, they weren't the only ones that did  . Be nice to share and make comparisons between the brands without it always having to go down this same road.

 

[Mazzspeed]

1 hour ago, mytek said:

I've been watching this from the sidelines and have got to say I certainly understand where you are coming from.

 

It's truly sad that in this day and age, some 30-40 years later that we continue to see people unable to accept that all 8-bit computers have their merits, no matter the brand. And that although the Atari did some great things with their hardware design for the day, they weren't the only ones that did  . Be nice to share and make comparisons between the brands without it always having to go down this same road.

 

Some rationale, thank you mytek.

 

They're both great computers, making full use of features in this modern day and age that their original designers implemented but really never used resulting in some very exciting advancements.

Edited April 8, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[sack-c0s]

The 1541 Ultimate isn't a 'surrogate processor'. It emulates a disk drive and a tape recorder, which is accessed in the same way that the real devices would be in a cycle-exact simulation, which means that they are compatible with turbo loaders.
As for the extra memory - that acts like a Ram Expansion Unit (REU) that was produced during the commercial life of the machine, only expanded to 16MB in the same way that other clones were. Honestly it's more like a RAM disk than a memory expansion, so not even as flexible as an Atari memory expansion. You need to copy in and out of the expansion RAM through a port and it stops the CPU whilst this is happening. You do get the advantage of a 1 byte per cycle transfer (which is impossible using a 6502 loop) but the downside is that it has to be a linear transfer so it's not easily abusable as a blitter. You can stop destination address incrementing however so it will hammer a single address with a sequence of bytes once per cpu cycle.

It adds nothing to the CPU power of the machine. That remains the same as ever.

The one awesome thing it does do that wasn't generally possible back in the day (unless you were a studio with an expensive PDS setup)is allow you to inject and run code into RAM over ethernet for cross-compiling and hardware testing, and if somebody ever points me towards an Atari 8-bit device that does the same thing you can be damn sure I'm having one of those!

[youxia]

3 hours ago, mytek said:

Be nice to share and make comparisons between the brands without it always having to go down this same road.

Perhaps it could still be possible, if we could ignore baiting from the usual suspects and not get tangled in the pointless hair-splitting. It does require strong will though, I'll admit.

 

I have both C64 & 65XE sitting happily alongside on my desk now, despite being a Sinclair man at heart.. It's all good

[Gury]

It would be best to have them all on desk if space permited that :)

I am an Atari man, but I like all retro. My wish is also to have ZX Spectrum alongside my Ataris.

 

It would be best to compare games which exist on all platforms. I saw screenshot comparisons here on the forum before. Great stuff.

 

[Mazzspeed]

9 minutes ago, Gury said:

It would be best to have them all on desk if space permited that

I am an Atari man, but I like all retro. My wish is also to have ZX Spectrum alongside my Ataris.

 

It would be best to compare games which exist on all platforms. I saw screenshot comparisons here on the forum before. Great stuff.

 

I have just enough space to have the C64 with 1541 UII+ on one side of the room and the A8 on the other side of the room with U1MB/SIDE3, with my main workstation and RPi400 in between. ?

 

I had to pack the Amiga 1200 with 68030/128MB fastram/Indivision AGA MkIICr away for a bit to make room, she needs a break anyway.

Edited April 8, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[youxia]

1 hour ago, Gury said:

It would be best to have them all on desk if space permited that

A magic desk, so I don't have to put my micros on rotation, would be awesome.

 

I love comparing games live side by side. Here are three different machines, can y'all guess which is which?

 

[Mazzspeed]

13 minutes ago, youxia said:

A magic desk, so I don't have to put my micros on rotation, would be awesome.

 

I love comparing games live side by side. Here are three different machines, can y'all guess which is which?

 

Geezus, I have no idea! I'm gonna say that because the machine on the right has less saturation in the sky that's a C64?

[youxia]

6 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said:

Geezus, I have no idea! I'm gonna say that because the machine on the right has less saturation in the sky that's a C64?

Nah, they're all 16-bit actually. The big hint is the aspect ratio's

[Mazzspeed]

9 minutes ago, youxia said:

Nah, they're all 16-bit actually. The big hint is the aspect ratio's

Well, I reckon that because I can see the pointer, the one far left is an Amiga running AmigaOS 3.1?

[youxia]

Yep, the Squished One.

[Mazzspeed]

2 hours ago, sack-c0s said:

Honestly it's more like a RAM disk than a memory expansion, so not even as flexible as an Atari memory expansion. You need to copy in and out of the expansion RAM through a port and it stops the CPU whilst this is happening.

You can use GeoRAM, which is banked and directly accessible by the CPU and available as an option in the UII+ setup.

Edited April 8, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[sack-c0s]

24 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said:

You can use GeoRAM, which is banked and directly accessible by the CPU and available as an option in the UII+ setup.

Not sure how I missed that feature. I should look into it

[Mazzspeed]

1 hour ago, sack-c0s said:

Not sure how I missed that feature. I should look into it

Also, due to Ultimax mode, DMA is actually slightly more versatile than just a ram disk. Having said that, people think 'ram disk' and they just think fast storage, the potential for the C64's implementation of DMA is actually very exciting. I guess it's one of the reasons C64 developers aren't hung up on banked ram?

 

...Well, it's exciting for a 30+yo machine.

Edited April 8, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[+Stephen]

12 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

And that's all that needs to be said really, isn't it?

 

You have never used the hardware in question, all you've ever done is read some documentation, and everything you claim regarding the 1541 UII+ is wrong and you post silly pictures of women.

 

You don't even really understand the architecture of the C64.

 

Now if you don't mind, I'm busy hands on learning about the A8 trying to resolve an issue. I'm not interested in your pointless crusade anymore.

Typical fanboi that won't let facts get in the way of a good argument.  Pretty sad that the same shit going on when I was 7 years old on the playground hasn't changed.  I'm a lifelong Mopar guy but you know what?  Ford and Chevy also made some cool cars.

[Faicuai]

5 hours ago, sack-c0s said:

The 1541 Ultimate isn't a 'surrogate processor'. It emulates a disk drive and a tape recorder

Of course it is (a storage processor / server, as described before), even running its own "DOS" command set and a lengthy host of other features (!) 

 

There is essentially nothing wrong with that. The point here is what it really is, and at the end it does not matter who like such definition or not.

 

I would like to see the actual results of a timed or looped RANDOM-sector read directed from the host, via DMA transfers and without them, via DOS or OS. Based on that, we could also look at a simple DOS backup from of a folder located in floppy-image onto fixed storage (HD), including files and folder re-creation and attributes management (a pretty mundane, routine operation on my end, for instance).

 

That would be really nice to see. ?

 

 

[Faicuai]

42 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Pretty sad that the same shit going on when I was 7 years old

 

If we objectively judge by your "genius"-filled vocabulary, it sounds like you are stuck sub-7, unfortunately:

 

 

 

Edited April 8, 2021 by Faicuai

[Faicuai]

 

2 hours ago, sack-c0s said:

Not sure how I missed that feature

 

Well, if I read correctly, it is essentially a joke, that's why you missed it:

 

"The geoRAM is a banked system. The registers at $dfff and $dffe select which 256 bytes page is visible in the $de00-$deff range. The $dfff register selects a 16KB block out of the total memory, the register at $dffe selects the actual 256 bytes page within the selected block. Valid values for a standard geoRAM are 0-31 for the block register and 0-63 for the window register. It is possible to extend the block register to 8-bit to create a 4MB "

 

Reminds me a bit of 800's $C000-$CFFF older banked ram expansions, but 4 Kbytes at a time. 

 

Unless you can actually bank in/out larger ram-blocks from the system bus, it seems it would take a brave soul to develop a complex app. like The Last Word, 256-bytes at a time... Unless, of course, we also beed another Banked-RAM literacy crusade from C64 Templar Knights... ?

Edited April 8, 2021 by Faicuai

[youxia]

So the thread was quite nice again, until the sun came up in Florida* ?. I see a pattern emerging

 

*No disrespect to any open-minded Floridians, of course

[tschak909]

Part of the reason FujiNet exists, is literally to provide a common form of connectivity between 8-bit systems, and bring them together. The Commodore 64 version is starting to work, and I am hoping someone will take it and bridge it at the very least, to the Apple // SmartPort.

 

As part of the process, we are truly understanding the commonalities and differences between these different systems.

 

(This was, also, ironically, the reason I founded the irata.online PLATO system.)

 

-Thom

 

[+mytek]

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Ford and Chevy also made some cool cars.

Don't forget Lexus ? . Sorry but if we are going to be all inclusive, I had to add what I drive now (of course this will start a new round of bashing centered around US vs. Japanese cars ).

 

8 minutes ago, tschak909 said:

Part of the reason FujiNet exists, is literally to provide a common form of connectivity between 8-bit systems, and bring them together. The Commodore 64 version is starting to work, and I am hoping someone will take it and bridge it at the very least, to the Apple // SmartPort.

 

As part of the process, we are truly understanding the commonalities and differences between these different systems.

Yes, yes, and yes!!! That is what we should be doing ?

[+x=usr(1536)]

12 minutes ago, mytek said:

Don't forget Lexus ? . Sorry but if we are going to be all inclusive, I had to add what I drive now (of course this will start a new round of bashing centered around US vs. Japanese cars ).

Having grown up in a country where there is no native motor industry and every car is an import, I feel that I can say the following with impunity: everyone's favourite car manufacturer sucks

Exceot for mine.

Edited April 8, 2021 by x=usr(1536)

[Faicuai]

52 minutes ago, youxia said:

So the thread was quite nice again

It was always nice, and "well mannered", with excellent choice of "vocabulary".

 

Just the usual hormonally-charged atmosphere surrounding discussions about defunct equipment, nothing really out of the ordinary. 

 

?

Edited April 8, 2021 by Faicuai

[Mazzspeed]

9 hours ago, Faicuai said:

Of course it is (a storage processor / server, as described before), even running its own "DOS" command set and a lengthy host of other features (!) 

 

There is essentially nothing wrong with that. The point here is what it really is, and at the end it does not matter who like such definition or not.

 

I would like to see the actual results of a timed or looped RANDOM-sector read directed from the host, via DMA transfers and without them, via DOS or OS. Based on that, we could also look at a simple DOS backup from of a folder located in floppy-image onto fixed storage (HD), including files and folder re-creation and attributes management (a pretty mundane, routine operation on my end, for instance).

 

That would be really nice to see. ?

 

 

Um...What?!

 

The 1541 had it's own processor and ram with certain features and drivers for the device contained in the devices ROM. Your IndusGT has it's own processor with ram and a ROM - They were all essentially based on a rudimentary serial network. This idea you have that the 1541 UII+ is any different is quite incorrect.

 

The 1541 UII+ is basically FujiNet/SIDE3 and U1MB all in one device.

Edited April 9, 2021 by Mazzspeed