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The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

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Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#21

Post by ataylor284_ »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #15

Author seems to tie things off after the C64 era, but the 6502 had a lot more to give. The penultimate video gaming on the 6502 is IMHO the Atari Lynx. 6502 + almost Amiga-esque (David Morse of Amiga fame was involved) custom graphics processor that could do 4096 colours, unlimited sprites, hardware multipliers and dividers, bunch of custom processing stuff to augment the CPU The combination of the excellent interrup…

The 65816 is a fascinating chip, even though it's a dead end in the evolution of home computing. It falls in a category with the Z8000 and maybe even the 80286: backwards compatible with their predecessors, but extending them in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Processors evolved and mostly discarded the vestigial weirdness of the original 8-bits, but its a special kind of fun to revisit assembly language programming in that style with some of the oppressive constraints (address space, addressing modes, minimal registers) lifted.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#22

Post by NonNefarious »

GFlaneur wrote: post #3

The article completely omits any mention of the Atari 8-bit computers which used 6502. It skips from Atari VCS/2600 to C64. Atari 400/800 GTIA & ANTIC were a massive improvement over the TIA in the VCS and came to market in 1979 more than 2 years before C64. Atari 8-bit had better colour than the C64 (palette of 128). C64 had much better sprites, but Al Charpentier had the benefit of seeing what had been already been…

Yeah, it's a baffling omission that undermines the whole thing. The Atari 8-bits were pretty incredible, combining the 6502 with not only a way better graphics co-processor than the VCS, but also dedicated sound and I/O chips.

The Atari 800 had S-video output, in 1978! Come on, that's pretty forward-thinking. I still have my 800 and Commodore (JVC) 1702 monitor, a state-of-the-art combo in its day.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#23

Post by nick__m »

musicale wrote: post #11
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tramiel and his sons and a big portion of the team around him at Commodore had their chance to make rock bottom price 16-bit machines after they left Commodore. That's what the Atari ST was. I loved mine, but it was no C64 in terms of market success. While it initially outsold the Amiga (because it came out earlier and cheaper) it plateaued and then lagged behind once the A500 came out. And both platforms hardly sold…

I have heard that the Atari ST was popular for music production into the 1990s.

If you want an extreme example of Atari ST capabilities, listen to the album Delete Yourself from Atari Teenage Riot.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#24

Post by dietrichepp »

Found some numbers for what other processors cost:

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/29/business/motorola-s-power...

> But as with all semiconductor products, the price of the 68000 plummetted as volume production began, and it now [in 1984] sells for about $15.

The 6502 evolved into the 65C816 but those price advantages relative to processor like the 68000 had a way of evaporating into thin air. If there’s anything that explained the “fall” of 6502 gaming, it’s the fact that the processor never really made it to the 32 bit era, and the 32-bit processors fell in price to the point that you weren’t saving money by using the 6502 or 65C816 in your designs.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#25

Post by eru »

ataylor284_ wrote: post #21
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #15

Author seems to tie things off after the C64 era, but the 6502 had a lot more to give. The penultimate video gaming on the 6502 is IMHO the Atari Lynx. 6502 + almost Amiga-esque (David Morse of Amiga fame was involved) custom graphics processor that could do 4096 colours, unlimited sprites, hardware multipliers and dividers, bunch of custom processing stuff to augment the CPU The combination of the excellent interrup…

The 65816 is a fascinating chip, even though it's a dead end in the evolution of home computing. It falls in a category with the Z8000 and maybe even the 80286: backwards compatible with their predecessors, but extending them in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Processors evolved and mostly discarded the vestigial weirdness of the original 8-bits, but its a special kind of fun to revisit assembly language programming in that…

The original Game Boy had some very interesting capabilities as well. In some aspects it outclasses the NES, in some others it lags behind.

(I specifically mean that the NES only had sprites and a single background layer. The Game Boy had an additional 'window' layer for drawing eg status bars, but also capable of doing funky things in eg boss battles. It also got some capabilities built-in that the NES needed extra chips on the cartridge for.)

Looking at what the Game Boy could do, you get the sense that they carefully optimized for the exact specialised capabilities they needed for games at minimal transistor-count cost. Being such a late 8-bit system helped a lot with that.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#26

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

NonNefarious wrote: post #19
satisfice wrote: post #9

The article makes it sounds like it was difficult to update the AppleII screen so that there was no flicker. It was not difficult. We had plenty of time. I seem to recall we could flip between two different high res screens and so we drew on the hidden one and then flipped to the other one when the vertical blank interrupt occurred. Also, we rarely had to update the entire screen all at once. Both the Apple and C64 h…

Mmmm, I don't think so. The Apple had only blitting, whereas the Atari, Commodore, and TI had hardware sprites. And I have no idea what you mean by "C64 had awkward graphics." It integrated ideas already present in the Atari computers, with some advantages and some disadvantages. Both those platforms utterly crushed the primitive graphics and "sound" available on the Apples, with their hardware sprites, fine scrollin…

Don’t forget shape tables!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_table

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#27

Post by flohofwoe »

sys_64738 wrote: post #5
GFlaneur wrote: post #3

The article completely omits any mention of the Atari 8-bit computers which used 6502. It skips from Atari VCS/2600 to C64. Atari 400/800 GTIA & ANTIC were a massive improvement over the TIA in the VCS and came to market in 1979 more than 2 years before C64. Atari 8-bit had better colour than the C64 (palette of 128). C64 had much better sprites, but Al Charpentier had the benefit of seeing what had been already been…

All the Atari 8-bit computers sold way less than Commodore 128s sold so there's hardly any value in mentioning them.

The Atari 400 was a much bigger technological achievement than the Commodore 8-bitters that were released later though. It deserves its place in history.

(it also was the predecessor of the greatest computer of all time: the Commodore Amiga ;P)

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#28

Post by tinus_hn »

NonNefarious wrote: post #19
satisfice wrote: post #9

The article makes it sounds like it was difficult to update the AppleII screen so that there was no flicker. It was not difficult. We had plenty of time. I seem to recall we could flip between two different high res screens and so we drew on the hidden one and then flipped to the other one when the vertical blank interrupt occurred. Also, we rarely had to update the entire screen all at once. Both the Apple and C64 h…

Mmmm, I don't think so. The Apple had only blitting, whereas the Atari, Commodore, and TI had hardware sprites. And I have no idea what you mean by "C64 had awkward graphics." It integrated ideas already present in the Atari computers, with some advantages and some disadvantages. Both those platforms utterly crushed the primitive graphics and "sound" available on the Apples, with their hardware sprites, fine scrollin…

The scrolling model used on the c64 means you have to copy the entire screen which is difficult to do quickly enough to avoid glitches. In contrast for instance the NES outputs the content of a sliding window on a large buffer so you only have to move the window and draw the newly exposed screen area. That way you can create more dynamic games with the same processor.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#29

Post by satisfice »

prvc wrote: post #16
satisfice wrote: post #9

The article makes it sounds like it was difficult to update the AppleII screen so that there was no flicker. It was not difficult. We had plenty of time. I seem to recall we could flip between two different high res screens and so we drew on the hidden one and then flipped to the other one when the vertical blank interrupt occurred. Also, we rarely had to update the entire screen all at once. Both the Apple and C64 h…

Which game?

It was the Fisher-Price series. Peter Rabbit Reading and Man in the Moon Math. I also did Alphabet Zoo, Adventure Creator, Hey Diddle Diddle, and maybe others I am forgetting.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 6502 Gaming (2020)

#30

Post by satisfice »

NonNefarious wrote: post #19
satisfice wrote: post #9

The article makes it sounds like it was difficult to update the AppleII screen so that there was no flicker. It was not difficult. We had plenty of time. I seem to recall we could flip between two different high res screens and so we drew on the hidden one and then flipped to the other one when the vertical blank interrupt occurred. Also, we rarely had to update the entire screen all at once. Both the Apple and C64 h…

Mmmm, I don't think so. The Apple had only blitting, whereas the Atari, Commodore, and TI had hardware sprites. And I have no idea what you mean by "C64 had awkward graphics." It integrated ideas already present in the Atari computers, with some advantages and some disadvantages. Both those platforms utterly crushed the primitive graphics and "sound" available on the Apples, with their hardware sprites, fine scrollin…

It by “blitting” you mean the Apple had a single 6502 chip which could move bytes around, then yes. But it had no dedicated blitting chip like the Amiga had (which I never got to work).

The Atari graphics were awkward, too, or so I was told by my boss at the time who did the Atari versions of our products. Good though. What I mean by awkward is just that I was surprised, as someone with no training in computer engineering, how many little quirks you had to work around. Apple graphics were primitive compared to the others, using a seven bit architecture for pixels and the high bit used for color information. At least the C64 had all eight bits for pixels, which made rendering a little faster. C64 sprites were interesting, but like the OP said we had to do tricks with interrupts to reuse them as the screen rastered.

I guess another reason I said awkward is that we had to do every trick we could to squeeze the art into memory. Alphabet Zoo was shipped as a 16k cartridge. I did an entire game with art in 16 kilobytes! I used nine bytes to encode my name, then later I needed those nine back again… so no easter egg for me.

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