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Mix of price, compatibility, dev support. Atari was behaving like a consumer electronics company and left the developers starved for information on the computer

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.

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.