Devil Whiskey

by **Worm** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 8:53 pm

It could get more boring. Though the whole point of blogging is eliminated when people perform like they do on web forums.

by **Vitriola** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 6:53 pm

Also? Worm? You have the most boring blog ever.

by **Worm** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 4:29 pm

How much is it? Also do I pay for a download or can I get sent a CD?

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 12:46 pm

And I'd like to reiterate that the IBM PC/PCjr won.

And that Devil Whiskey has been patched and is AWESOME. You should all go get it.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 12:40 pm

Also, thanks for killing my Devil Whiskey thread.

by **Jethro Q. Walrustitty** » Fri Feb 13, 2004 12:54 pm

This has grown tiresome.

I will point out that artifacting was, as I said, vertical lines, not diagonal ones.

Regarding modification, just saying that out of the box, the Ataris could trump anything else - and were as or much more modifiable as anything else.

And lastly, Indus GT true double-density and high-speed drives were available well before the 1050.

by **bruce** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:49 pm

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote:Bruce: Nuts, nuts, yer nuts.

The guy says that the SID is good to program for - the quality of the resulting sound is a "draw". I believe that wraps up the original debate.

Are you sure that he wasn't saying that the sound of each is a draw to the platform, like, a reason to use the Atari or Commodore over other contemporary machines? 'Cause that's what I thought he meant.

Apple add-ins are not entering in the discussion. I am locking the debate at the exact week that the C64 was released.

Are you sure you want to do that? August 1982 is the date you're looking at. At that point, the Disk II drive was well-established, and the 1050, which you have such a hard-on for, was not to be introduced until 1983, I think, with the 600 and 800 XL.

Regarding speech, I believe that "SAM" for the Atari 8bits was the first commonly-available speech synthesizer.

TI Speech Synthesizer for the TI-99/4? 1979.

Software-only? No idea, but you could certainly do speech synthesis on the Apple II with its glorious 1-bit sound. Look at Castle Wolfenstein for the canonical example.

The original Apple 2s were not color. The only color could be had via artifacting - drawing every other dot horizontally would give a sort of blue, and inversing them would give a sort of brown. As far as the Apple itself was concerned, it was still just black and white.

You're just plain FUCKING WRONG here.

You could set the high-resolution drawing color to any of eight values. In order, those are black-1, green, violet, white-1, black-2, orange, blue, and white-2. Now, you did get artifacting by drawing diagonal lines across regions of color, on standard TV sets (although not, I think, on high-resolution monitors). And the two different white and blacks ended up at different ends of the pixel, sort of, so you wanted to use white-2 and black-2 when drawing next to blue and orange, and white-1 and black-1 when adjacent to green and purple.

(BTW: I had misremembered the Apple's graphical resolution. It's 280x192, and double-hi-res was 560x192(x16).)

So in hi-res mode, you basically had six colors. In low-res you had 16, but no one used that after about 1979.

Face it, Walrustitty: you're an ignorant slut.

The Atari could do the same thing in its high resolution mode, and indeed, most ports from Apple games used that technique, sloppy though it was. It also doesn't work too well when I hook up my 130XE with S-Video instead of composite. (You see the actual lines sans artifacting.)

Yes, that's why you didn't get the artifacting on high-resolution monitors, either: the monitor is capable of changing colors quickly enough to keep up with the colors the computer thinks it's drawing. It's also why classic video games look a little weird on modern monitors: you don't get the analog fuzz around the edges of the characters that gives them a softer, antialiased appearance.

Bruce

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:27 pm

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote:Apple add-ins are not entering in the discussion. I am locking the debate at the exact week that the C64 was released.

If you're going to prop the Ataris for being modifiable then you have to be fair, now.

(I wish I had my Atari with me out here. What a great game system. Plus, the last proof we had that Diamond Dave the Loooooooooove Slave once walked among us.)

by **Jethro Q. Walrustitty** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:16 pm

Bruce: Nuts, nuts, yer nuts.

The guy says that the SID is good to program for - the quality of the resulting sound is a "draw". I believe that wraps up the original debate.

Apple add-ins are not entering in the discussion. I am locking the debate at the exact week that the C64 was released.

Regarding speech, I believe that "SAM" for the Atari 8bits was the first commonly-available speech synthesizer.

The original Apple 2s were not color. The only color could be had via artifacting - drawing every other dot horizontally would give a sort of blue, and inversing them would give a sort of brown. As far as the Apple itself was concerned, it was still just black and white. The Atari could do the same thing in its high resolution mode, and indeed, most ports from Apple games used that technique, sloppy though it was. It also doesn't work too well when I hook up my 130XE with S-Video instead of composite. (You see the actual lines sans artifacting.)

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 1:18 pm

Here's a sum up:

Atari: Nice graphics
C64: Nice sound
Apple: Nice disk drive
IBM: Nice... well, not nice hardware -- nice making all of this irrelevant, though, because WE WON.

Bwa-hahahaha!

(signed)

ICJ, x86 user since 1985.

by **Lysander** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 5:49 pm

...Yeah, I'm gonna have to jump in here for a sec and agree with Bruce; not only did the Apple have graphics, but the sound quality was clear, even from the internal speaker. And you can, actually, get an external speaker--which you can play digital sound on. I know this. Do not argue with me. I know this. I used an Apple 2GS for five long, horrible, painful years when I was in ellementary school, and the one I used--which was, admitedly, not standard--had a speaker on it, with a volume control, and out of it, I would hear... voices. Voices voices voices voices. The voices tell me to vote republican. I can't run from the voices! Actually, all the voices told me was to increase my typing speed and that I could not run from the tax man, the arrogant little shits. I grant you that this voice made the computer constantly sound like it would spontaneously break out into All Your Base-type linguistics, and did silly things like pronounce 0 ceo--but it was speech nonetheless.

by **bruce** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 3:03 pm

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote: Note that I didn't say the "standard resolution" for TVs, I said the "same as the C64 or any other computer designed to work on regular TV screens." 320 wide. Or less, if you go back to the VIC-20 days. (I suppose you could make an arguement that the X-Box is a computer designed to work on regular TV screens. But then I'd fart at you.)

On what grounds? It is. So is any modern PC with a video card that does component or S-Video out, for that matter.

You're also claiming that the Apple has a "smart" drive, yet you then say "all of the Apple II's drive intelligence was in the Apple, rather than the drive". Doesn't sound very smart to me.

Nowhere did I claim the Apple II had a smart drive. I claimed that the design was very clever, and that very clever copy protection schemes were possible because you could leverage the computer to do rude things to the bits on disk.

The actual concept is not in fact very different from getting clever graphical effects out of the Atari 2600 or 8-bit by actually controlling the display at a 1-dimensional raster level rather than by doing sprite manipulation.

You claimed that VBI/DLIs could only be done at the cost of horizontal resolution - yet both work perfectly no matter what resolution the computer is in.

I never said anything about VBI/DLIs. I said that you get 320 dots of horizontal resolution at the expense of lots of colors per line.

From the Atari 8-bit FAQ, fer Crissakes:

GRAPHICS MODES:
ANTIC CIO/BASIC Display Resolution Number of
Mode # Graphics # Type (full screen) Colors
---------------------------------------------------------------
2 0 Char 40 x 24 1 *
3 - Char 40 x 19 1 *
4 12 ++ Char 40 x 24 5
5 13 ++ Char 40 x 12 5
6 1 Char 20 x 24 5
7 2 Char 20 x 12 5
8 3 Map 40 x 24 4
9 4 Map 80 x 48 2
A 5 Map 80 x 48 4
B 6 Map 160 x 96 2
C 14 ++ Map 160 x 192 2
D 7 Map 160 x 96 4
E 15 ++ Map 160 x 192 4
F 8 Map 320 x 192 1 *
F 9 + Map 80 x 192 1 **
F 10 + Map 80 x 192 9
F 11 + Map 80 x 192 16 ***
* 1 Hue; 2 Luminances
** 1 Hue; 16 Luminances
*** 16 Hues; 1 Luminance
+ require the GTIA chip. 1979-1981 400/800's shipped with CTIA
++ Not available via the BASIC GRAPHICS command in 400/800's.

I mean, at least try to read what you're responding to, eh?

You claim that the Apple drive transferred data at 256kbps - yet a C64 (and probably an Apple II), running at the same 1.0mHz of the Apple, couldn't even do 9600 baud on a modem at full speed.

This is wrong in so many ways that I don't even know where to begin. For starters, the Apple did not use a serial interface to the disk drive, as the Atari and the C64 did.

For seconds, the C64 used a 6551 ACIA serial chip, which is what the Apple used in the Super Serial card. The Apple did not come standard with an RS-232C interface, but the SSC was what everyone who needed a serial port used. It can do 19200 easily, and 38400 if you frame the bits as 8N2, at a 1Mhz clock speed. None of which has the slightest fucking relevance to drive speed.

You want some funky drive stuff? Here ya go.
[...]

Ah, so you've said that unless you hack it, the Atari drive is less capable than the Apple's, because you don't have the same low-level control over the disk hardware. Thanks for sharing, I guess, although it has, again, no relevance to the discussion.

But then comes the crowning glory of the diarrhetic torrent you unleashed onto the board:

Speed? This indicates that the basic Apple drives were ever slower than C64 drives.

...the GCR encoding schemes used by Apple vs Commodore. With Apple's method, 3 decoded bytes were obtained out of 4 GCR bytes. With Commodore's method, 4 decoded bytes were obtained out of 5 GCR bytes. Commodore's method yielded higher storage capacity with the exact same track length. The 1541, 1571, and clones all had 4 density zones (Zone1:1-18, Zone2:19-24: Zone3:25-30: Zone4:31-35). Electronically switching the data rate was not only faster, it also was incredibly reliable and stable from drive to drive. The older Apple ][ drives had a single speed zone, and had fewer sectors as you got closer to the spindle (which was why only about 100K of storage was possible vs. Commodore 1541's 170K of storage).

Christ, you really can't read, can you? This says nothing at all about the data transfer speed of the drive. It tells you that the Apple drive used GCR encoding while the C64 and Atari drives used MFM. This gave the Atari and C64 170K per floppy, while 16-sector Apple diskettes had 140K and, I guess, 13-sector diskettes (before my time, really) had about 100K.

Yeah: you got higher bit density with Atari and C64 drives. I never claimed otherwise. And I guess it's neat that the drive was an approximation of constant angular velocity rather than constant linear velocity, but it still doesn't say anything about how fast you could get data off the diskette, which in the C64, unmodified, was 1200 bps, in the Atari, unmodified, was 19.2 kbps, and in the Apple II, unmodified, 245 kbps.

Here's another little blurb about C64/Atari/Apple:
On the level of learning to program graphics hardware, I feel the Atari is by far the better choice. For understanding how to program sound, the Commodore 64's SID chip is far-and-away superior (even though I considered both machine's sound hardware to be a draw). Also, Atari's operating system is a thing of beauty whereas the C-64's kernel has a generational, quilt-like feeling similar to, although not quite as bad as, that of the Apple II computer.

Oh, wait, what was this originally about? Oh, that's right, SID vs. POKEY. Um, you might want to read that paragraph you just quoted again. Especially the part that says "far-and-away superior".

To sum up:
Apple isn't even in the ballpark. I mean, it's not even color, for God's sake. Its sound was only the internal speaker. (Which the Atari has as well, and is usually not even mentioned.) It also cost many times what anything else cost. It was (and is) a total mess.
C64 is limited to 16 colors, three sound voices, no DLIs, no VBIs, only, what, three graphics modes, incredibly slow I/O, 1.0mHz, and a horrible user interface.
Atari? 256 colors, four sound voices, DLIs, VBIs, 12 graphics modes (plus infinite more via DLIs), your choice of DOS, 1.79mHz, and an extremely advanced interface. (Say you're editing a program - you can arrow up to a line, modify it, and hit enter in the middle, and that line will be modified - whereas the Apple will save each arrow as an new character on the line you started on.) Oh, and ATASCII - gotta love ATASCII.

Hell, several of my old programs couldn't even look right on a C64 as I often had my screens fade in and out. Easy to do with many shades of gray - not so easy when there are 16 colors total.

I never claimed that the Apple graphics hardware came close to the Atari or C64, although it certainly was color, you ignorant assjack, and with the advent of the Double-Hi-Res-Graphics-Card and extra 64K of memory in 1982 or 1983, it could do 320x192x16. If you wanted decent sound, yeah, you pretty much bought a Mockingboard, which was a lovely little FM synthesizer, about the capability of a Sound Blaster Original, but, what, 5 years earlier?

You conveniently forgot to mention that the C64 had screen editing facilities like the Atari's; to do that with an Apple, gosh, you had to TYPE A COUPLE EXTRA CHARACTERS to get into the right editing mode and, yes, forward space to the end of the line before hitting return.

Please: try one more time, and this time, try to dispute what I wrote, rather than some bizarre fantasy of what I wrote. You might also want to try to quote writers that, you know, support your position on the topics we're debating, such as SID-vs.-POKEY, which is, if you recall, where this whole thing started.

Bruce

by **Jethro Q. Walrustitty** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 1:27 pm

Oh, yeah, did I mention page flipping? Or the best use of that trick that allows that, which is perfectly smooth scrolling for side-scrolling games?

The video could be displayed from any point in memory. Hence, if you wanted a side-scrolling game, you drew all the graphics in memory, then just moved the display memory over it. Sort of like moving a piece of paper with a hole in it over a photograph. Made for extremely high-quality scrolling with very little work by the developer or the CPU.

by **Jethro Q. Walrustitty** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 1:24 pm

Sigh. What an idiot. Paragraph after paragraph of technical nonsense to tell me what I already know.

Let's break it down:
C64 - 16 colors max, no matter what
Atari - 256 colors max

C64 highest resolution: 320x200
Atari highest resolution: 320x192 officially, unofficially you could overscan quite a bit more
Note that I didn't say the "standard resolution" for TVs, I said the "same as the C64 or any other computer designed to work on regular TV screens." 320 wide. Or less, if you go back to the VIC-20 days. (I suppose you could make an arguement that the X-Box is a computer designed to work on regular TV screens. But then I'd fart at you.)

Vertical blanking, C64: none
Vertical blanking, Atari: unlimited

Display list interrupt, C64: nope
Display list interrupt, Atari: unlimited

You're also claiming that the Apple has a "smart" drive, yet you then say "all of the Apple II's drive intelligence was in the Apple, rather than the drive". Doesn't sound very smart to me.
You claimed that VBI/DLIs could only be done at the cost of horizontal resolution - yet both work perfectly no matter what resolution the computer is in.
You claim that the Apple drive transferred data at 256kbps - yet a C64 (and probably an Apple II), running at the same 1.0mHz of the Apple, couldn't even do 9600 baud on a modem at full speed.

You want some funky drive stuff? Here ya go.

The original form of copy protection on the Atari was the standard hard-error bad sector. That was one MAJOR difference between the Atari and the Apple II. The Apple disk controller was in the machine itself, and subject to complete software control. The Atari controller, on the other hand, was inside the drive. Because of this, only specified operations could be performed on the Atari, and thus modified disk formats were very difficult. That is, until the advent of modified disk controllers, of which the Happy Drive was the first. Another one, called "The Chip" was a drop-in replacement for the Atari disk controller. The Happy drive was actually an additional logic board which provided even more capabilities than The Chip. It buffered reads by track, for example.

Duplicate sectors were fairly neat. What happened was two identical sector numbers would be written onto the disk, but with different data within the sector.. When the program called for a disk read on that sector number, one of those sectors would be read in -- but which one depended on where the disk head was currently located! So the test was (a simplified example) to read in sector 7, then sector 8 (the duplicate sector), then sector 10, then sector 8. Then compare the two reads from sector "8". If it was the original disk, you'd see different data.

Short sectors were fairly simple to check for as well. You'd initialize a 128-byte block of memory to a value (arbitrarily assume 0x55), then read in the known short sector. If all 128 bytes were altered, you'd know the short sector didn't exist. SIO would only copy the data it could read into RAM. If you just did a straight disk copy on a short-sectored disk, those sectors would (usually, depended on your copy program) read back zeros in the copy of the unused area on the original (i.e. if the sector on the original had only 50 bytes of data before the end-of-sector marker, and you make a sector-by-sector copy with SIO, the duplicate sector would have 128 bytes on it, and thus when that sector was read back in, the buffer you had allocated would change).

Speed? This indicates that the basic Apple drives were ever slower than C64 drives.

...the GCR encoding schemes used by Apple vs Commodore. With Apple's method, 3 decoded bytes were obtained out of 4 GCR bytes. With Commodore's method, 4 decoded bytes were obtained out of 5 GCR bytes. Commodore's method yielded higher storage capacity with the exact same track length. The 1541, 1571, and clones all had 4 density zones (Zone1:1-18, Zone2:19-24: Zone3:25-30: Zone4:31-35). Electronically switching the data rate was not only faster, it also was incredibly reliable and stable from drive to drive. The older Apple ][ drives had a single speed zone, and had fewer sectors as you got closer to the spindle (which was why only about 100K of storage was possible vs. Commodore 1541's 170K of storage).

Here's another little blurb about C64/Atari/Apple:
On the level of learning to program graphics hardware, I feel the Atari is by far the better choice. For understanding how to program sound, the Commodore 64's SID chip is far-and-away superior (even though I considered both machine's sound hardware to be a draw). Also, Atari's operating system is a thing of beauty whereas the C-64's kernel has a generational, quilt-like feeling similar to, although not quite as bad as, that of the Apple II computer.

To sum up:
Apple isn't even in the ballpark. I mean, it's not even color, for God's sake. Its sound was only the internal speaker. (Which the Atari has as well, and is usually not even mentioned.) It also cost many times what anything else cost. It was (and is) a total mess.
C64 is limited to 16 colors, three sound voices, no DLIs, no VBIs, only, what, three graphics modes, incredibly slow I/O, 1.0mHz, and a horrible user interface.
Atari? 256 colors, four sound voices, DLIs, VBIs, 12 graphics modes (plus infinite more via DLIs), your choice of DOS, 1.79mHz, and an extremely advanced interface. (Say you're editing a program - you can arrow up to a line, modify it, and hit enter in the middle, and that line will be modified - whereas the Apple will save each arrow as an new character on the line you started on.) Oh, and ATASCII - gotta love ATASCII.

Hell, several of my old programs couldn't even look right on a C64 as I often had my screens fade in and out. Easy to do with many shades of gray - not so easy when there are 16 colors total.

by **bruce** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 4:51 pm

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote: Ladies and gentlemen, this guy just said that the Atari 2600 can do 256 colors on the screen at the same time.

Turns out you're right. It can only do 128. I had remembered it as having 4 bits of luminance information, but it doesn't, it only has 3 bits. So you have sixteen positions around the color wheel and eight positions within each of those for luminance.

Now, you can get 24-bit color out of the 2600, but it's not really "all at once" because it's relying on the persistence of vision to blend colors across multiple frames. Google for "atari 2600 chronocolor" and you'll see what I mean. Doesn't look all that good on an emulator, but looks terrific on a TV.

It was the same horizontal resolution as the C64 or any other computer designed to work on regular TV screens.

Here's a clue, spoogeweasel: there is no standard horizontal resolution. A TV uses an analog signal. How many times you can change color on a given scan line is entirely a function of how often you can update the chroma/luma information, up to the limits of resolution of your TV, which varies, of course, by TV. A DVD has 720 horizontal pixels, which, given a 4:3 aspect ratio, means that it can really display 540 distinct vertical lines in a square area of the TV. Most TVs can't resolve anywhere near this well. Broadcast TV is typically about 330.

You have 63.5 microseconds per scan line. Of this, ten is used for horizontal retrace (five of that ten is your HSYNC pulse). So you have 53.5 microseconds per line. The Atari 2600 uses a TIA clocked at 3 Mhz to draw to this. Therefore its effective horizontal resolution is 3 cycles per microsecond * 53.5 microseconds per line = 160 cycles per line, which is 160 distinct regions.

Note that this means that every time the CPU clock ticks, you've gone 3 more pixels to the right. This is why display kernels are hard. The TIA lets you load an 8-bit register with a bit pattern that gets drawn, but that means you use up two-and-two-thirds machine cycles per register draw. So if you're doing a classic Atari 48-bit-wide sprite, by setting both Player 1 and Player 2 in triplicate mode (the TIA supports this directly), then you have five cycles to reload each player register before the TIA reads it again. This is, however, just enough time to do a zero-page indexed load and increment your index register, which is why Dragonfire and Dragster, for instance, work.

For 320-dot horizontal resolution, you need a 6 Mhz clock. Both the C64 and the Atari 8-bit could do this, but you could use your full 16-color pallette in the C64 high-res mode.

The C64 did not have video hardware that allowed you line-by-line access to the raster; instead, it used a model that took a lot of control out of the programmer's hands by simply memory-mapping sprites.

The Atari 8-bits, on the other hand, used a refinement of the 2600's video system so you could, if you really wanted to, paint your screen a scan line at a time. The disadvantage of this was that you couldn't do that at 6 Mhz and still update your chroma-luma data beyond one bit of luma information.

320 pixels of horizontal resolution is therefore pretty common because it uses an nice round number for the oscillator frequency (6 Mhz), and, because it's close to what most broadcast signals are, it'll probably look pretty good on a TV that is adequate for watching over-the-air programming. But there's certainly no "standard horizontal resolution."

Do you understand this, or is this like trying to explain Donkey Kong scoring to my dog?

Also, you're smoking worse things than crack if you're claiming that the Apples had superior disk speed to the Ataris - especially if you're discounting UltraSpeed which was very common amongst anyone who knew what they were doing. Come to think of it, I can't really remember anyone who didn't have an UltraSpeed-capable double-density 1050.

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". The singular of "anecdote" certainly isn't. Show me some reference comparing Atari and Apple drive speeds. The stock drive was 19.2 kbps. Let's say that Ultraspeed quadrupled that. That gives you 80 kbps. The number you're trying to beat is 245 kbps.

Come on, show me a reference disputing this.

As for drives, I don't remember the specifics (be fair, we're talking 20+ years ago), but the Atari disk drives were absolutely capable of doing far more than any competition. Modifying the drive itself was standard fare, not so with the C64 drives. I also believe that no other system had the elaborate copy protection of the Atari disks (which still causes headaches for people making images - there is really no collection of copy-protected Atari disk images out there, though there is a format (.pro) for them.) Bad sectors, fuzzy sectors, ghost sectors, etc.

"I don't remember...but accept my assertions as gospel!"

You can Google just like I can. Show me some evidence that indicates that Atari had a wider variety of copy-protection methods than the Apple II did. Because all of the Apple II's drive intelligence was in the Apple, rather than the drive, you could do much, much ruder things to the disk format than you could with either the Commodore or the Atari.

Come back when you have something besides strident whining to show.

Bruce

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 3:10 pm

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote:Ladies and gentlemen, this guy just said that the Atari 2600 can do 256 colors on the screen at the same time.

The requirement for the Activision Action Pack is a Windows computer in 256 color mode.

=(

Actually, I don't know what I'm frowning for. I didn't make any statements that I had to defend. I'm frowning in a more general sense. For mankind, if you will. I'm sure that Bruce will name a number of carts for the 2600 that have 256 colors on the screen at the same time, what with the fact that homebrew games have been all the rage for the last 15 years.

by **Jethro Q. Walrustitty** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 2:59 pm

bruce wrote:
Display-list interrupts were fantastic. 256 colors on the screen at one time - nothing else could come close.
The fucking 2600 can do that. Any graphics hardware which gives you access to the NTSC color burst and lets you use it in an Atari-2600-like one-dimensional-graphics-buffer mode lets you do that; you can probably change colors a couple of times a scan line, and each scan line is independent. But you pay the price in that you can't do that at a very high horizontal resolution. That's my point.

Ladies and gentlemen, this guy just said that the Atari 2600 can do 256 colors on the screen at the same time.

Also, that "anything" can do DLIs or VBIs - when the fact is that no other computer of its era could do it. Find me a C64 game with mixed graphics modes. It can't do it. The Ataris could do VBIs in any resolution, at no cost to horizontal resolution. It was the same horizontal resolution as the C64 or any other computer designed to work on regular TV screens.

Also, you're smoking worse things than crack if you're claiming that the Apples had superior disk speed to the Ataris - especially if you're discounting UltraSpeed which was very common amongst anyone who knew what they were doing. Come to think of it, I can't really remember anyone who didn't have an UltraSpeed-capable double-density 1050.

As for drives, I don't remember the specifics (be fair, we're talking 20+ years ago), but the Atari disk drives were absolutely capable of doing far more than any competition. Modifying the drive itself was standard fare, not so with the C64 drives. I also believe that no other system had the elaborate copy protection of the Atari disks (which still causes headaches for people making images - there is really no collection of copy-protected Atari disk images out there, though there is a format (.pro) for them.) Bad sectors, fuzzy sectors, ghost sectors, etc.

by **Jack Straw** » Fri Jan 30, 2004 6:48 pm

No, but it's good.

by **pinback** » Fri Jan 30, 2004 5:43 pm

Does anybody have any idea what these people are talking about?

by **bruce** » Fri Jan 30, 2004 5:35 pm

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote:
Bruce wrote:it's debatable; the C64 had more colors at higher resolution
More colors? All sixteen colors? A fucking Crayola box has more colors. Ataris were rockin' with the 256-color pallette.

Can you even read? What are the last three words of my quote?

but did not have display lists or the ability to get subtle color effects at low resolution.
Display-list interrupts were fantastic. 256 colors on the screen at one time - nothing else could come close.

The fucking 2600 can do that. Any graphics hardware which gives you access to the NTSC color burst and lets you use it in an Atari-2600-like one-dimensional-graphics-buffer mode lets you do that; you can probably change colors a couple of times a scan line, and each scan line is independent. But you pay the price in that you can't do that at a very high horizontal resolution. That's my point.

In short: Compare MULE, Archon, etc, to the C64 versions, and you'll clearly hear the superior sound of the Atari.

Have you got a spare Atari 800 power supply? I have an otherwise-functional (I think) A800, and a working C64, and I'm happy to try this with MULE when I get home.

That said, I still love the Apple II, which had neither the graphics nor the sound. But did have a really nice extensible bus architecture and clever and fast disk hardware.
C'mon, now, keep it real in the field, Bruce. Yes, it had bus expandability, but it did not have clever nor fast disc access. Apple drives were, like C64 drives, "dumb" - Atari was the only company to have "smart" disk drives (which also meant far more sophisticated copy protection.)

Put down the butane torch and step away from the crack pipe there.

The Apple Disk II was indeed dumb; its design was extremely clever. It was cheap--precisely because of its lack of intrinsic brains--fast, and because it relied on the host for most of its smarts, reasonably easy to program to do crazy quarter-and-half tracking schemes, or spiral tracking, or all sorts of crazy shit . And it was much, much faster than the Atari's 19200 bps, thank you very much. 245kbps IIRC.

Yeah, 19.2K is fast compared to the C64. Sucked ASS next to the Apple II.

As for smart: the Atari and Commodore drives both contained 6502s (well, an '07 in the Atari case, but the '07, familiar as the 2600's CPU, is just an '02 missing its top four address lines). That's why you could program the drives on either the C64 or the Atari so they could do stuff without interrupting the host. C64 fastcopy programs made extensive use of this. Fastloaders replaced the C64 serial routines with their own, and used the drive CPU to generate the serial bits. I see nothing to indicate they 1050 is any smarter than the 1541. And to be fair, the model equivalent to the Disk II and the 1541 is probably the 810. The 1050 would correspond roughly to the Apple Duodisk era and the 1571.

So, in which way am I smoking the crack pipe? Even you admit that it's debatable whether or not SID can beat POKEY. I stand by my statement, because the Atari had four solid sound channels. I see little in the linked article that points to SID being superior.

What different waveforms did the POKEY provide? Oh, that's right, a customizable 1-bit waveform. So you could get a square wave on which you could vary the duty cycle. That's why POKEY music is always so metallic: the corners of that square wave generate all those nasty high-order harmonics. You can get much more variation in the sound coming out of SID.

Bruce

Devil Whiskey

Post a reply

Expand view Topic review: Devil Whiskey