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The Atari 1200XL fiasco

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Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#11

Post by alexisread »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #9
glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

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 interes…

Actually, it can do a fair impression as well: Crownland has transparent parallax 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=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.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#12

Post by sirwhinesalot »

alexisread wrote: post #11
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interes…

Actually, it can do a fair impression as well: Crownland has transparent parallax 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=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.

Oh yeah, for sure. Atari was horrifically mismanaged.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#13

Post by pavlov »

rbanffy wrote: post #5
glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

The big pro of the Ataris was their graphics. Replacing a frame buffer with a display list and a dedicated processor that keeps banging out pixels based on its "program" is brilliant. It's an interesting maximalist counterpoint to the Apple II's minimalist approach to color graphics.

It’s a bit like an early GPU.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#14

Post by cmrdporcupine »

alexisread wrote: post #11
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interes…

Actually, it can do a fair impression as well: Crownland has transparent parallax 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=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.

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.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#15

Post by cmrdporcupine »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #9
glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

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 interes…

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

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#16

Post by karmakaze »

rbanffy wrote: post #5
glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

The big pro of the Ataris was their graphics. Replacing a frame buffer with a display list and a dedicated processor that keeps banging out pixels based on its "program" is brilliant. It's an interesting maximalist counterpoint to the Apple II's minimalist approach to color graphics.

The C64 definitely had better sprites and music, no contest. But there's a certain elegance to the way the Atari did their graphics in particular. It was so much more with simple building blocks where you could immediately see the power of it and take a long time extracting value from it.

The SIO of the Atari is also another standout design, which flies under the radar. It enabled a much cheaper diskette drive than the C64. The designer of the SIO, Joe Decuir went on to make USB and credits his work on SIO as the basis of USB[0].

Even the use of letters for devices was already ahead of DOS with D: being for diskette, but that was shorthand for D1:, with D2: being another and any other letter could be an installable device with numbered instances. Keyboard/screen I/O was addressable as E:.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#17

Post by JKCalhoun »

glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

I was able to get an Atari 400 (not XL, sadly) for a firesale price. The problem with all the Atari's in my mind was that they were not dev-friendly machines.

Commodore machines came with a rather hefty serial bound book that introduced you to programming and gave you a memory map of the hardware, important PEEKs and POKEs.

Atari's came with trade secrets.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#18

Post by mst »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #17
glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

I was able to get an Atari 400 (not XL, sadly) for a firesale price. The problem with all the Atari's in my mind was that they were not dev-friendly machines. Commodore machines came with a rather hefty serial bound book that introduced you to programming and gave you a memory map of the hardware, important PEEKs and POKEs. Atari's came with trade secrets.

My first Archimedes came with a ring bound user's manual that was, IIRC, about 1/3 a guide to using the Risc OS GUI, and then 2/3 a programming guide to the version of BBC BASIC that shipped with it.

(I remember reading it end to end as a child laid on my parents' bed because the light was better in there than in my room, shortly followed by developing the programming addiction that has stuck with me the rest of my life ;)

It didn't cover arm2 assembly, but my parents bought me an extremely good book that did - and described the chip architecture itself in detail as well.

I only touched a Commodore at a friend's place to play games on it, but it sounds like they also understood hobbyists :D

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#19

Post by Mountain_Skies »

pjmlp wrote: post #8
userbinator wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS has unfortunately now fallen greatly from that, and gotten onto the same aggressive and hostile trendchasing practices as the rest of Big Tech. Only their legacy keeps them from totally losing the market at this point.

As someone that bought into WinRT, saw it as .NET 1.0 done right, and went through all the technology reboots between Windows 8 and WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, I can only double down on that remark. It was gone so bad that most Windows developers, me included, advise focusing on Win32/Windows Forms/WPF, at BUILD 2024 WPF got back into the spotlight as official Windows GUI framework (WinUI 3.0 keeps being years away from fea…

It doesn't seem like Microsoft and Anders Hejlsberg understand what they did when they picked Go over any dotnet language for the Typescript compiler. Anders and his fans insist it was merely picking the right tool for the job but when even the father of C# prefers using Go, combined with Microsoft's tendency to get old technology rot instead of officially cancelling, it sends a very bad message about the future of dotnet. No one wants the shitshow that has been Microsoft's desktop UI over the past decade to spread into the rest of the dotnet ecosystem but most are wary of it happening. Anders was the very last person in the company who should have been the face of the Typescript compiler project using Go.

Many have pointed this out but just get shouted down by those haven't had to endure the UI framework pain that the company has put developers through over the past ten to fifteen years. Microsoft officially is completely behind dotnet and is committed to its continued success. Same message they've given for all their UI frameworks. The only difference being dotnet still gets lots of resources but so did all of the frameworks before they were left to rot from resource and leadership starvation.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#20

Post by plefebvre »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #17
glimshe wrote: post #2

Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL. They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.

I was able to get an Atari 400 (not XL, sadly) for a firesale price. The problem with all the Atari's in my mind was that they were not dev-friendly machines. Commodore machines came with a rather hefty serial bound book that introduced you to programming and gave you a memory map of the hardware, important PEEKs and POKEs. Atari's came with trade secrets.

True, the Atari 8-bits did not come with developer docs and in the early years little information was available. This certainly hurt its initial adoption.

But starting with De Re Atari by Chris Crawford in 1982, a lot of development material became available. Compute! had a great line of books, including Mapping the Atari.

It was shame it took so long for that material to appear because the Atari 8-bit have a rather elegant OS, especially compared to its contemporaries.

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