Jolt Country

Bah. Atari 8bits were the absolute king of disk (and tape) access time. Also, the only ones with "smart" drives, which everything else had "dumb" drives. Apples were for furrytooths who were into the worst graphics ever. What, four colors? And you could only get them via artifacting?

The Commodore systems were laughable in their inability to read data quickly, and were sneered at by everyone.

...

Good to see that, over 20 years later, some debates never die. Though only the most foolish would deny that the Ataris had the technical power to shame anything else available at the time, especially if you're talking games.

(Although, I don't think Bard's Tale ever came out for the Atari 8bits. I did the last two TOSEC Atari game databases, and I don't remember such a thing.) It did come out for the Atari ST.

True, but C64 did have the most asskicking music. On a game like "Times of Lore," I find the gameplay to be better on the C64 than any of the other ports I have tried it on. It's still a wonder I played it to the end, considering all those load times.

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote:(Although, I don't think Bard's Tale ever came out for the Atari 8bits. I did the last two TOSEC Atari game databases, and I don't remember such a thing.) It did come out for the Atari ST.

Right. Your inferior 8-bit system couldn't handle them. Any one of them. Not Bard's Tale I. Not Bard's Tale II. Not Bard's Tale III THE THIEF OF FATE. And certainly, you silly, simpering grudgefuck, it couldn't handle The (mighty) Bard's Tale Construction Set.

I mean, it is to laugh.... an Atari 400 running the "BTCS"?! Moo-hoo-hoo-hahahahaha!

Glarr-hahahaha!

Nyyyaah-hahahaha!

Ah, fuckit, I liked the 8-bit better than the C64. I'm just gonna state otherwise for this thread. We haven't had a good 8-bit war in a while.

COMMODORE FOREVER.

I forgot to acknowledge before that yeah, the Atari ST was pretty fucking hot. I played Bard's Tale and several Magnetic Scrolls games on that.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:I forgot to acknowledge before that yeah, the Atari ST was pretty fucking hot. I played Bard's Tale and several Magnetic Scrolls games on that.

LIES.

Try to find a game like Omnitrend's Universe for the C64.

I still have the manual, with comes in a thick padded 3-ring binder. Complex! Complexxxxxxx!

Roody, technically Ataris had better sound hardware than C64s. Having nearly the twice mHz and a whole lot more support chips meant that games always, always, always looked and played the best on the Ataris.

Oh, and the Ataris came out several years before the C64. Before even the VIC-20. I still am amazed that there was never really any serious competition.

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote: Roody, technically Ataris had better sound hardware than C64s. Having nearly the twice mHz and a whole lot more support chips meant that games always, always, always looked and played the best on the Ataris.

Once again, Jeff is smoking the big crack rock.

While the sprite support in the Atari was probably superior to the C64 it's debatable; the C64 had more colors at higher resolution, but did not have display lists or the ability to get subtle color effects at low resolution.

Look at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/arc ... 00052.html for a good analysis.

But sound? I think on most days, SID beats POKEY. Maybe not hands-down, but the SID is easier to use and more powerful. Take a look at
http://www.myatari.net/issues/may2003/tao.htm for instance.

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.

Bruce

Thanks, Bruce, I was hoping you'd step in. I was hoping I didn't have to start finding the appropriate passage in "The Ultimate History of Video Games."

I'm really liking me "High Score!" Second Edition, which seems to be a lot more complete (not so America-centric), for settling arguments with Kelly. Most of the time she is right, but that doesn't make up for her being a Nintendo fan.

I prefer the term "Nintendo sympathiser".

How about "sheep"?

Yea, because forking your cash over to ciggarette and alcohol companies is so fucking "punk rock". If you are going to exercise "corporate hate" in America and don't live in a fucking shack you have it all wrong.

bruce wrote:Once again, Jeff is smoking the big crack rock.

OK, let's see why.

While the sprite support in the Atari was probably superior to the C64

Probably? Probably? Player/missile graphics spanked sprites. And, they could be in any color.

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. (Well, 128 originally with the CTIA chip, but the 256-color GTIA chip still precedes C64s at all, IIRC - off the top of my head. CTIA was quickly retired and was only in the 400/800s, I think.)

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. It was a legit technique and was used in countless games (probably the vast majority) to provide very colorful games. Add in the player-missiles in their own colors, and you've got all the colors you needed in the late '70s/early '80s.

Toss in vertical-blank interrupts, to allow you to mix and match your graphics mode (usually used to give a nice solid text box at the top of the screen for scores, but used for other stuff too - virtually infinite graphics modes were hence available), and the C64 was left coughing and weezing. Factor in the CPU that was 45% slower and disk/tape access that was far, far slower and less reliable, and the C64 looks positively wretched.

But sound? I think on most days, SID beats POKEY. Maybe not hands-down, but the SID is easier to use and more powerful. Take a look at
http://www.myatari.net/issues/may2003/tao.htm for instance.

SID was three channels. Atari was four channels of sound. If you wanted true 16-bit sound, you could have that, too, at the cost of a channel - there was a taxi game that touted its 16-bit sound, but it was pretty much a gimmick and no other game ever bothered.

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

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.)

As for expandability in general - high-memory hacked-up Ataris were very common. The 130XE that I still use occasionally has 320k of memory (switchable to 192k to retain compatability with one or two picky games), the ability to use extra memory as a RAMdisk and even boot off that RAMdisk and a hardware switch to write-protect the RAMdisk, and three OSs, selectable with a switch. One was the 400/800 OS (for compatability with a few early games that only worked with the earlier OS revision), another was the standard XL/XE OS, and the third was the very hacked UltraSpeed Plus OS, which, among other things, had "UltraSpeed" turned on by default, which increased the already relatively fast disk I/O by a faster of 3x. (The disk drives were also modified - 1050s set to full double density, a write-protect switch, UltraSpeed chip, etc.) That thing can boot up fast and I do mean fast.

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.

...and, if you want to really break it down, I could point out that I did have a MIDI adapter and a synthesizer hooked to my Atari 8bit for a while. Beat that!

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 <i>read</i>? 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 <i>2600</i> 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 <i>square wave</i> on which you could vary the duty cycle. That's <i>why</i> 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

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

No, but it's good.

bruce wrote:

Display-list interrupts were fantastic. 256 colors on the screen at one time - nothing else could come close.

The fucking <i>2600</i> 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.

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.

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 <i>can</i> 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 <i>is</i> 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 <i>near</i> 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 <i>quadrupled</i> 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

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.