6 ms·

The Atari line was much better at scrolling, had a much much better master palette, supported display lists (nicer than setting up interrupts in the C64) and th

The Atari line was much better at scrolling, had a much much better master palette, supported display lists (nicer than setting up interrupts in the C64) and the POKEY had some advantages over the SID, not just the extra channel but also in doing beefy sound effects. I don't think any of this is denied by C64 fans. The C64 on the other hand could push nearly 6x the sprite data per line, had Color RAM for more interesting tile work, the SID was more capable for music, and it had much much better support for high resolution graphics. For their time they were very comparable but when (ab)used just right the C64 can do a neat NES impression. The Atari can't do that, but it can do some bonkers 3D using the super low resolution modes.

curiousObject 2y ago
The 6502-based Atari computers had the CPU clock held at 80% higher than the C64. That must have been a very significant impact at a time when the CPU had to do most of the work.
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  It was. Wasn't the Atari's CPU 1.79MHz (3.58Mhz NTSC clock/3)? The NTSC C64 was close to 1Mhz. But it's worse: The C64's CPU was also slowed down by the VIC-II every 8 scan lines to fetch video data, and slowed down additionally if sprites were enabled. The PAL C64 was actually slightly under 1Mhz but you had a lot more VBlank time to do stuff.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Atari's CPU was slower in PAL countries, but I don't recall what the speed was. (speed based on something in PAL like the NTSC color clock, but I don't recall what it was called)
    - pezezin 2y ago
      The colorburst signal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorburst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorburst
  - sirwhinesalot 2y ago
    The graphics chip on the Atari also steals CPU cycles, but if you use the 160x100 mode (instead of 160x200) then it can run full speed which means full 1.79MHz no questions asked. The lower resolution also means less time plotting pixels so for any sort of software rendered effect the Atari machines are miles ahead.
  - timbit42 2y ago
    The C64's CPU wasn't slowed down much at all by the badlines, less than a few percent. I'm not sure how much the sprites slowed it. The Atari was faster but how much it was slowed by depended on the video mode. Higher res and higher colors slowed it more, leaving the CPU at around 1.3 MHz. I also don't know how much the Atari player/missile graphics slowed the CPU.
alexisread 2y ago
Actually, it can do a fair impression as well: Crownland has transparent parallax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5fSp0XGzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5fSp0XGzI You're right about the bonkers 3D! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwcN9FraNjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwcN9FraNjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KatdrdEVEwY&t=532s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KatdrdEVEwY&t=532s I think the main thing was that Atari (pre83 company) abandoned the 8 bit line too early, and didn't make the 5200 cross-compatible.
- sirwhinesalot 2y ago
  Oh yeah, for sure. Atari was horrifically mismanaged.
  - mrighele 2y ago
    It's not like Commodore was managed much better, in the end.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  I dunno, Tramiel's Atari Corp kept the 8-bit line going for years after the changeover, adding new models. And they even had relative success later in places like Poland. One problem is that these kinds of architectures that relied on special custom chips have inevitable obsolescence built in. When your "API" for graphics programming is a custom chipset at a certain clock rate with certain capabilities, it's just not going to scale up past a certain point. You get initial superpowers, but then Moore's law just makes it pointless. See also: Amiga.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Tramiel arguably mismanaged Atari worse than Warner brothers. Sure Tramiel cared about computers, but his management style was hostile to getting anything done. I agree that the custom chips were a dead end. However the ST line could have beat the mac if management was any good. (as could/should the Amiga, though I was Atari locked at the time and so I didn't pay attention to what they were doing)
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
The C64 had some advantages as you say but its chief one was just... price. It was simply much cheaper from the start.
justin66 2y ago
> For their time they were very comparable We can say that now, but it's worth remembering the Atari 8 bit computers came out over two years before the C64. Not such a big gap in computing today, but back then it was a lot. ex-Atari people talking about what they could have done better is always an interesting youtube phenomenon. (as with, for example, ex-Sun people, you hear a lot of theories but you never encounter anyone who says "yeah, I was the guy who made the whole thing fail")
- mrandish 2y ago
  > ex-Atari people talking about what they could have done better As someone super into retro computing now, who also lived through the history getting my first computer in 1981, participating in users groups, reading all the zines, going to regional and national trade shows for 8-bit home computers, etc, this was (and still is) a significant recurring theme. Owners of 8-bit and 16-bit computers in the 80s/early 90s (and retro hobbyists/collectors today) obsess about the mistakes made by their respective manufacturers. Often this armchair analysis results in frustrated conclusions like "If only (Atari/Commodore/Tandy) had done X" the computer would have "made it" (ie survived against the PC). I engaged in this prevalent pastime myself for years and even today there are forums full of questions seeking to post mortem the "the fatal mistake(s)". The fascinating part for me is that my early hobby computing led to programming, product-making and tech startup entrepreneurship. By the mid and late 90s I'd evolved from sneaking into Comdex and CES circa 1983 to now launching products in my startup's huge Comdex booth literally next to Microsoft's, with our own private hospitality suites and VIP parties. I'd somehow gone from fanboy to insider. During this era I had multiple private business meetings with industry luminaries I'd idolized including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove and many others. I'd even met, had a meal with or otherwise gotten to personally know 8-bit era luminaries including Nolan Bushnell, Jay Miner (designer of the Amiga), a couple of Tramiels and so many others. I got to ask my fanboy era questions directly to the players - and the best part was that I was then a peer and the meetings were private. I got a lot more color and perspective than the answers they gave to the press or even at retro-computing conference panels. It was fascinating! But overall I also learned that, aside from a couple notable exceptions, there was no single "Big Mistake". The reality was far more complicated and kind of boring: there were complex business, financial, manufacturing and distribution challenges far beyond users group hobby analysis. The future was unknowable and they were living through the first iteration of what only later became obvious patterns - and they were just doing the best they could to figure it out enough to survive. By the late 2000s I'd graduated to selling my third startup to a Fortune 500 valley tech giant and became a senior exec driving strategy and identifying new opportunities and markets, as well as leading large teams of MBAs, bankers and lawyers to identify, analyze and negotiate multi-billion dollar acquisitions of other tech companies. And this perspective is the one that most informed my prior obsession with identifying "the fatal mistake" which doomed Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Sinclair and so many others. Having recently retired early, just for fun I've delved into the history and using my post-2000s expertise done rigorous strategic analyses. In every case the answer is the same and, frankly, a little disappointing: Nothing they could have done would have "saved" them for more than a couple years. While Atari, Commodore, Tandy et al did make many mistakes, none of them were the root cause of their eventual demise. Even if those mistakes had been avoided, it would only have delayed the inevitable. In each case, macro factors beyond their control that were baked into the market, the technology or their own DNA, doomed them. For example, one of the Amiga's greatest advantages in 1985 was the brilliant custom chipset designed to exploit every quirk of analog video timing. And by the early 90s that great advantage was one of its biggest weaknesses. Also, the much-beloved 68000 series processors at the heart of the Amiga and Atari ST were ultimately doomed by the combination of being made by Motorola and being, perhaps, the ultimate expression of CISC architecture (which made them fun to program by hand in assembly language). But RISC was ultimately the only way forward when Moore's Law scaling kept delivering ever more gates into the 90s. But bridging over from CISC to a RISC ISA while maintaining backward compatibility was enormously complex. Only Intel eventually managed it and very nearly died in the attempt. Intel's lead in process fabrication helped them over the hump but Motorola was too far behind in fab tech because they hadn't invested as deeply. For Intel it their lifeblood and, ultimately, existential. For Motorola's board of directors, CPUs were just another business in their portfolio of businesses. Motorola was a decades old conglomerate that made prudent financial calculations. Intel was born as a chip startup and would either live or die as one. Andy Grove had to bet the company and find a way to make it work. Motorola didn't.

curiousObject 2y ago

The 6502-based Atari computers had the CPU clock held at 80% higher than the C64. That must have been a very significant impact at a time when the CPU had to do most of the work.

RiverCrochet 2y ago
It was. Wasn't the Atari's CPU 1.79MHz (3.58Mhz NTSC clock/3)? The NTSC C64 was close to 1Mhz. But it's worse: The C64's CPU was also slowed down by the VIC-II every 8 scan lines to fetch video data, and slowed down additionally if sprites were enabled. The PAL C64 was actually slightly under 1Mhz but you had a lot more VBlank time to do stuff.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Atari's CPU was slower in PAL countries, but I don't recall what the speed was. (speed based on something in PAL like the NTSC color clock, but I don't recall what it was called)
  - pezezin 2y ago
    The colorburst signal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorburst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorburst
- sirwhinesalot 2y ago
  The graphics chip on the Atari also steals CPU cycles, but if you use the 160x100 mode (instead of 160x200) then it can run full speed which means full 1.79MHz no questions asked. The lower resolution also means less time plotting pixels so for any sort of software rendered effect the Atari machines are miles ahead.
- timbit42 2y ago
  The C64's CPU wasn't slowed down much at all by the badlines, less than a few percent. I'm not sure how much the sprites slowed it. The Atari was faster but how much it was slowed by depended on the video mode. Higher res and higher colors slowed it more, leaving the CPU at around 1.3 MHz. I also don't know how much the Atari player/missile graphics slowed the CPU.

alexisread 2y ago

Actually, it can do a fair impression as well: Crownland has transparent parallax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5fSp0XGzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5fSp0XGzI You're right about the bonkers 3D! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwcN9FraNjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwcN9FraNjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KatdrdEVEwY&t=532s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KatdrdEVEwY&t=532s I think the main thing was that Atari (pre83 company) abandoned the 8 bit line too early, and didn't make the 5200 cross-compatible.

sirwhinesalot 2y ago
Oh yeah, for sure. Atari was horrifically mismanaged.
- mrighele 2y ago
  It's not like Commodore was managed much better, in the end.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
I dunno, Tramiel's Atari Corp kept the 8-bit line going for years after the changeover, adding new models. And they even had relative success later in places like Poland. One problem is that these kinds of architectures that relied on special custom chips have inevitable obsolescence built in. When your "API" for graphics programming is a custom chipset at a certain clock rate with certain capabilities, it's just not going to scale up past a certain point. You get initial superpowers, but then Moore's law just makes it pointless. See also: Amiga.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Tramiel arguably mismanaged Atari worse than Warner brothers. Sure Tramiel cared about computers, but his management style was hostile to getting anything done. I agree that the custom chips were a dead end. However the ST line could have beat the mac if management was any good. (as could/should the Amiga, though I was Atari locked at the time and so I didn't pay attention to what they were doing)

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

The C64 had some advantages as you say but its chief one was just... price. It was simply much cheaper from the start.

justin66 2y ago

> For their time they were very comparable We can say that now, but it's worth remembering the Atari 8 bit computers came out over two years before the C64. Not such a big gap in computing today, but back then it was a lot. ex-Atari people talking about what they could have done better is always an interesting youtube phenomenon. (as with, for example, ex-Sun people, you hear a lot of theories but you never encounter anyone who says "yeah, I was the guy who made the whole thing fail")

mrandish 2y ago
> ex-Atari people talking about what they could have done better As someone super into retro computing now, who also lived through the history getting my first computer in 1981, participating in users groups, reading all the zines, going to regional and national trade shows for 8-bit home computers, etc, this was (and still is) a significant recurring theme. Owners of 8-bit and 16-bit computers in the 80s/early 90s (and retro hobbyists/collectors today) obsess about the mistakes made by their respective manufacturers. Often this armchair analysis results in frustrated conclusions like "If only (Atari/Commodore/Tandy) had done X" the computer would have "made it" (ie survived against the PC). I engaged in this prevalent pastime myself for years and even today there are forums full of questions seeking to post mortem the "the fatal mistake(s)". The fascinating part for me is that my early hobby computing led to programming, product-making and tech startup entrepreneurship. By the mid and late 90s I'd evolved from sneaking into Comdex and CES circa 1983 to now launching products in my startup's huge Comdex booth literally next to Microsoft's, with our own private hospitality suites and VIP parties. I'd somehow gone from fanboy to insider. During this era I had multiple private business meetings with industry luminaries I'd idolized including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove and many others. I'd even met, had a meal with or otherwise gotten to personally know 8-bit era luminaries including Nolan Bushnell, Jay Miner (designer of the Amiga), a couple of Tramiels and so many others. I got to ask my fanboy era questions directly to the players - and the best part was that I was then a peer and the meetings were private. I got a lot more color and perspective than the answers they gave to the press or even at retro-computing conference panels. It was fascinating! But overall I also learned that, aside from a couple notable exceptions, there was no single "Big Mistake". The reality was far more complicated and kind of boring: there were complex business, financial, manufacturing and distribution challenges far beyond users group hobby analysis. The future was unknowable and they were living through the first iteration of what only later became obvious patterns - and they were just doing the best they could to figure it out enough to survive. By the late 2000s I'd graduated to selling my third startup to a Fortune 500 valley tech giant and became a senior exec driving strategy and identifying new opportunities and markets, as well as leading large teams of MBAs, bankers and lawyers to identify, analyze and negotiate multi-billion dollar acquisitions of other tech companies. And this perspective is the one that most informed my prior obsession with identifying "the fatal mistake" which doomed Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Sinclair and so many others. Having recently retired early, just for fun I've delved into the history and using my post-2000s expertise done rigorous strategic analyses. In every case the answer is the same and, frankly, a little disappointing: Nothing they could have done would have "saved" them for more than a couple years. While Atari, Commodore, Tandy et al did make many mistakes, none of them were the root cause of their eventual demise. Even if those mistakes had been avoided, it would only have delayed the inevitable. In each case, macro factors beyond their control that were baked into the market, the technology or their own DNA, doomed them. For example, one of the Amiga's greatest advantages in 1985 was the brilliant custom chipset designed to exploit every quirk of analog video timing. And by the early 90s that great advantage was one of its biggest weaknesses. Also, the much-beloved 68000 series processors at the heart of the Amiga and Atari ST were ultimately doomed by the combination of being made by Motorola and being, perhaps, the ultimate expression of CISC architecture (which made them fun to program by hand in assembly language). But RISC was ultimately the only way forward when Moore's Law scaling kept delivering ever more gates into the 90s. But bridging over from CISC to a RISC ISA while maintaining backward compatibility was enormously complex. Only Intel eventually managed it and very nearly died in the attempt. Intel's lead in process fabrication helped them over the hump but Motorola was too far behind in fab tech because they hadn't invested as deeply. For Intel it their lifeblood and, ultimately, existential. For Motorola's board of directors, CPUs were just another business in their portfolio of businesses. Motorola was a decades old conglomerate that made prudent financial calculations. Intel was born as a chip startup and would either live or die as one. Andy Grove had to bet the company and find a way to make it work. Motorola didn't.