Devil Whiskey

[Jethro Q. Walrustitty]

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.

[bruce]

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 <i>is</i>. 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 <i>not</i> 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 <i>the slightest fucking relevance</i> 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, <i>no relevance</i> 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 <i>still</i> 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 <i>was</i> 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 <i>TYPE A COUPLE EXTRA CHARACTERS</i> 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, <i>support</i> your position on the topics we're debating, such as SID-vs.-POKEY, which is, if you recall, where this whole thing started.

Bruce

[Lysander]

...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.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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.

[Jethro Q. Walrustitty]

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.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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.)

[bruce]

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 <i>Castle Wolfenstein</i> 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 <b><i>FUCKING WRONG</i></b> 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

[Jethro Q. Walrustitty]

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.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Also, thanks for killing my Devil Whiskey thread.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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.

[Worm]

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

[Vitriola]

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

[Worm]

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