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It has been a long time but I seem to recall the Atari and Commodore systems were practically clones of each other. I remember this because all the good games a
by sigmaprimus 5y ago
It has been a long time but I seem to recall the Atari and Commodore systems were practically clones of each other. I remember this because all the good games appeared at retailers simultaneously for both systems and I was an unfortunate(or fortunate) child of the 80s who's father was of the opinion that the Texas Instruments offering was a "Far better Machine" and that he "Wouldn't waste money on a gaming system!"...."Far better Machine" is exactly what he also said about Beta Vs. VHS too!
I must say I would thank him now if I could for not buying a "game machine" as I believe it prevented my brain from developing as many addictive synapsis at such an early age.
- emrah 5y agoI think they both used the same 8-bit cpu but had different peripheral chips for sound, gfx etc
- LocalH 5y agoFun fact: Atari 8-bit and C64 have the same lowercase font
- rbanffy 5y ago> but I seem to recall the Atari and Commodore systems were practically clones of each other. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The only thing they had in common was the CPU. Apples did everything with discrete logic and graphics were a bit primitive, and color depended on NTSC artifacts. Sound was done by the CPU controlling the state of the speaker, pushing out a square wave. If you could hog the CPU, you could do PWM audio, but it wouldn't sound great. Ataris had outstanding graphics. Their “GPU” ran a display list that generated the video output. There was no such thing as a frame buffer or a video mode - everything was rendered on the fly. Sound was OK-ish, driven by a sound chip. Ataris also ran the 6502 at twice the clock of the Apple and Commodore. Commodores had somewhat more primitive graphics than the Ataris, but compensated that with an excellent palette and a sound chip with very sophisticated capabilities.
- sigmaprimus 5y agointeresting, I wonder if the common cpu made it easier to port the games for those two systems or possibly a shared compiler? I'm pretty sure the TI994a had somewhat of a video buffer in the form of sprites (I know it was capable of parallax scrolling) and it's own sound chip that was the one used in speak and spells(That may have been a separate module called speech synthesizer). Later models of Atari and Amiga may be the units I am thinking of being very similar.
- bluGill 5y agoThe 8 bit Atari design team had a lot to do with the amiga computer. The 16 Atari st series shared a CPU with the amiga, but otherwise was very different.
- timbit42 5y agoThe Atari ST was largely a 16-bit Commodore 64. The designer was an engineer on the C64 team, Shiraz Shivji.
- rbanffy 5y agoThe common CPU helps, but considering how different the machines were, I doubt it’d help that much.