5 ms·

The C64 SID really was an improvement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o321fq7O7-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o321fq7O7-Q (Jump to 10:30 for Atari) I won

by bullen 6y ago

The C64 SID really was an improvement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o321fq7O7-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o321fq7O7-Q (Jump to 10:30 for Atari) I wonder why 8-bit Atari failed against Commodore, must have been pricing? The VIC-20 was released after the 400/800 but at half the price of the 400! Then the failed launch of the 1200XL at the same time as the C64 at 1/4 of that price... Jack Tramiel was a wizard of numbers! And getting people to work very hard!

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Not for long. Tramiel developed a very bad reputation for screwing over retailers, and his management style led to longer term problems once his family took over Atari Corp. And the terms "platforms" and "compatibility" meant nothing to Commodore in that era. Each machine they built was incompatible with the next, and the C64 was the only truly successful one. The Pokey had/has its own charm. The SID is nice, but that's hardly what was selling C64s. Anyways, you're right, pricing. My cousin had an 800XL and I had a VIC-20 and my neighbour a C64. Given a choice, I would have taken the 800XL; its specs were so much better in so many ways and damn that case design was nice. But that product line was always more expensive. If the original 400/800 had been cheaper, Atari would have owned the industry and something like the C64 never would have succeeded. From many points of view it is a superior platform (apart, from as you say, the SID). According to Wikipedia: "After losing $563 million in the first nine months of the year, Atari that month announced that prices would rise in January, stating that it "has no intention of participating in these suicidal price wars".[48] The 600XL and 800XL's prices in early 1984 were $50 higher than for the Commodore VIC-20 and 64,[49] and a rumor stated that the company planned to discontinue hardware and only sell software." Warner Bros axed things and Tramiel picked up the corpse after he was pushed out of Commodore. I own them all now :-)
- bullen 6y ago
  I just bought a first version C64 Reloaded: http://move.rupy.se/file/reloaded_sink.jpg http://move.rupy.se/file/reloaded_sink.jpg Also in that picture RR-Net for instant loading of .prg and multiplayer. The Nunchuk64; an adapter for the new (S)NES Classic/Mini controllers: It's some kind of revenge to play Super Mario Bros on the C64 with an original new NES controller from Nintendo! I got the new transparent case too, waiting for the MechBoard64 keyboard and new Keycaps! The VIC-2 chip also has it's upsides, even if the palette and 2-pixel-wide 4-color mode is weird; the community today is the most active and it's growing: http://csdb.dk http://csdb.dk Edit: Atari: "by November 1983 one toy store chain sold the 800XL for $149.97" C64: "In June 1983 the company lowered the price to $300, and some stores sold the computer for $199." So it wasn't price, I guess software then!?
  - jhallenworld 6y ago
    Maybe better ads? Maybe parents thought a computer from a "business machines" company was better than one from a video game company? The 800XL OS and disk system were way better. The BASIC was better, though slower. The 800 keyboard is better than C64 which is slightly better than 800XL. The reason is that although the C64 keyboard is mushy, you can type faster on it for some reason.
    - bullen 6y ago
      Funny that the C64 was better at games! 2 of my favuorite recent releases: https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/zeta-wing https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/zeta-wing https://carletonhandley.itch.io/runn-n-gunn https://carletonhandley.itch.io/runn-n-gunn Does the Atari get new games?
- kabdib 6y ago
  The Tramiels were notoriously tight with money, and would often just refuse to pay people when they thought they could get away with it. We had some Vax 11/780s (for engineering and finance), and DEC's service technicians were instructed to collect a cashier's check at the door or walk away. I got handy with diagnostic software and a soldering iron. In one incident, we had some Motorola VME/10 68K-based workstations that kept failing and needing things like motherboard replacements (they were not well designed). About a year after we pivoted development to the Atari STs (hey, dogfood...) Sam Tramiel asked me if we were still using the VME/10s. "Hell no," I said, "They were pieces of junk. They're over there in a corner." I pointed to a corner where a couple of them were stacked up, gathering dust. "Okay, we won't pay them, then," said Sam. He was grinning. I felt a little sick. You really did not want Atari to owe you money, especially if you were a "little guy".
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Did you guys ever bring up TOS / GEM etc. on those VME/10s? Or were they just for cross compiling?
    - kabdib 6y ago
      Those were just cross-development for non-GUI stuff (BIOS, drivers and languages). Folks doing graphics bringup were mostly working on Apple LISA systems booted into CP/M-68K (ugh), since they were similar to the ST with a monochrome monitor.
      - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        Not sure if you pay attention to this stuff, but some folks recently brought EmuTOS up on the Apple Lisa. This was after some people got original DR GEMDOS 68K/GEM to boot on it again. So, from software archeology to full circle. Thread here, if you Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emutos/posts/4067291733301377 https://www.facebook.com/emutos/posts/4067291733301377
megameter 6y ago
Mix of price, compatibility, dev support. Atari was behaving like a consumer electronics company and left the developers starved for information on the computer, while Commodore shipped every unit with a very comprehensive manual. The C64 was a clean break from predecessors in most respects and the VIC II was more straightfoward to program for typical raster graphics(even if it missed some of the neat features of Antic and CTIA/GTIA), while the Atari had a legacy install base with lower memory capacity. So, by the mid 80's the Commodore had become the defacto cheap game machine, in absence of new console competition. It was never a great applications computer, in fact(I/O limits derived from the low cost architecture meant it did less than an Apple II for many development and business tasks) but it hit a certain sweet spot of being a great first computer. Atari after the Warner acquisition was a hugely dysfunctional company - there are a lot of proposed alternate histories where different projects got prioritized and execution was better, that would have given them a stronger position in the computer market. As it is, they still put out some pretty cool hardware.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  De Re Atari was published by Atari and was a treasure trove of detailed material. I remember buying it (as a pre-teen) and devouring it, trying to imagine “who thought of all this stuff?!” It didn’t ship with every unit, but any dev could easily get one, given I was able to get one as just an interested kid. I still remember the magic of writing HBlank interrupt routines to change player-missile positions and colors to “reuse” PMs to get more than 4+4
  - thought_alarm 6y ago
    Atari eventually provided excellent support for 3rd party developers, but for the first few years they didn't support any kind of 3rd party development and kept the technical documentation under lock and key. Atari also didn't want to cannibalize their game console business, so they restricted the types of 1st party games they would develop for the system. As a result, they squandered their significant head start in the game-focused home computer market.

by bullen 6y ago

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Not for long. Tramiel developed a very bad reputation for screwing over retailers, and his management style led to longer term problems once his family took over Atari Corp. And the terms "platforms" and "compatibility" meant nothing to Commodore in that era. Each machine they built was incompatible with the next, and the C64 was the only truly successful one. The Pokey had/has its own charm. The SID is nice, but that's hardly what was selling C64s. Anyways, you're right, pricing. My cousin had an 800XL and I had a VIC-20 and my neighbour a C64. Given a choice, I would have taken the 800XL; its specs were so much better in so many ways and damn that case design was nice. But that product line was always more expensive. If the original 400/800 had been cheaper, Atari would have owned the industry and something like the C64 never would have succeeded. From many points of view it is a superior platform (apart, from as you say, the SID). According to Wikipedia: "After losing $563 million in the first nine months of the year, Atari that month announced that prices would rise in January, stating that it "has no intention of participating in these suicidal price wars".[48] The 600XL and 800XL's prices in early 1984 were $50 higher than for the Commodore VIC-20 and 64,[49] and a rumor stated that the company planned to discontinue hardware and only sell software." Warner Bros axed things and Tramiel picked up the corpse after he was pushed out of Commodore. I own them all now :-)

bullen 6y ago
I just bought a first version C64 Reloaded: http://move.rupy.se/file/reloaded_sink.jpg http://move.rupy.se/file/reloaded_sink.jpg Also in that picture RR-Net for instant loading of .prg and multiplayer. The Nunchuk64; an adapter for the new (S)NES Classic/Mini controllers: It's some kind of revenge to play Super Mario Bros on the C64 with an original new NES controller from Nintendo! I got the new transparent case too, waiting for the MechBoard64 keyboard and new Keycaps! The VIC-2 chip also has it's upsides, even if the palette and 2-pixel-wide 4-color mode is weird; the community today is the most active and it's growing: http://csdb.dk http://csdb.dk Edit: Atari: "by November 1983 one toy store chain sold the 800XL for $149.97" C64: "In June 1983 the company lowered the price to $300, and some stores sold the computer for $199." So it wasn't price, I guess software then!?
- jhallenworld 6y ago
  Maybe better ads? Maybe parents thought a computer from a "business machines" company was better than one from a video game company? The 800XL OS and disk system were way better. The BASIC was better, though slower. The 800 keyboard is better than C64 which is slightly better than 800XL. The reason is that although the C64 keyboard is mushy, you can type faster on it for some reason.
  - bullen 6y ago
    Funny that the C64 was better at games! 2 of my favuorite recent releases: https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/zeta-wing https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/zeta-wing https://carletonhandley.itch.io/runn-n-gunn https://carletonhandley.itch.io/runn-n-gunn Does the Atari get new games?
kabdib 6y ago
The Tramiels were notoriously tight with money, and would often just refuse to pay people when they thought they could get away with it. We had some Vax 11/780s (for engineering and finance), and DEC's service technicians were instructed to collect a cashier's check at the door or walk away. I got handy with diagnostic software and a soldering iron. In one incident, we had some Motorola VME/10 68K-based workstations that kept failing and needing things like motherboard replacements (they were not well designed). About a year after we pivoted development to the Atari STs (hey, dogfood...) Sam Tramiel asked me if we were still using the VME/10s. "Hell no," I said, "They were pieces of junk. They're over there in a corner." I pointed to a corner where a couple of them were stacked up, gathering dust. "Okay, we won't pay them, then," said Sam. He was grinning. I felt a little sick. You really did not want Atari to owe you money, especially if you were a "little guy".
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Did you guys ever bring up TOS / GEM etc. on those VME/10s? Or were they just for cross compiling?
  - kabdib 6y ago
    Those were just cross-development for non-GUI stuff (BIOS, drivers and languages). Folks doing graphics bringup were mostly working on Apple LISA systems booted into CP/M-68K (ugh), since they were similar to the ST with a monochrome monitor.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      Not sure if you pay attention to this stuff, but some folks recently brought EmuTOS up on the Apple Lisa. This was after some people got original DR GEMDOS 68K/GEM to boot on it again. So, from software archeology to full circle. Thread here, if you Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emutos/posts/4067291733301377 https://www.facebook.com/emutos/posts/4067291733301377

megameter 6y ago

Mix of price, compatibility, dev support. Atari was behaving like a consumer electronics company and left the developers starved for information on the computer, while Commodore shipped every unit with a very comprehensive manual. The C64 was a clean break from predecessors in most respects and the VIC II was more straightfoward to program for typical raster graphics(even if it missed some of the neat features of Antic and CTIA/GTIA), while the Atari had a legacy install base with lower memory capacity. So, by the mid 80's the Commodore had become the defacto cheap game machine, in absence of new console competition. It was never a great applications computer, in fact(I/O limits derived from the low cost architecture meant it did less than an Apple II for many development and business tasks) but it hit a certain sweet spot of being a great first computer. Atari after the Warner acquisition was a hugely dysfunctional company - there are a lot of proposed alternate histories where different projects got prioritized and execution was better, that would have given them a stronger position in the computer market. As it is, they still put out some pretty cool hardware.

sokoloff 6y ago
De Re Atari was published by Atari and was a treasure trove of detailed material. I remember buying it (as a pre-teen) and devouring it, trying to imagine “who thought of all this stuff?!” It didn’t ship with every unit, but any dev could easily get one, given I was able to get one as just an interested kid. I still remember the magic of writing HBlank interrupt routines to change player-missile positions and colors to “reuse” PMs to get more than 4+4
- thought_alarm 6y ago
  Atari eventually provided excellent support for 3rd party developers, but for the first few years they didn't support any kind of 3rd party development and kept the technical documentation under lock and key. Atari also didn't want to cannibalize their game console business, so they restricted the types of 1st party games they would develop for the system. As a result, they squandered their significant head start in the game-focused home computer market.