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The Atari 1200XL fiasco

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Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#31

Post by sirwhinesalot »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #24
curiousObject wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#32

Post by bluGill »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23
JKCalhoun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only a few friends had Atari computers when I was a kid. The one thing that stuck out to me was it had a Help key but most programs told you to press 'H' or some other key for help instead of the Help key, which makes me wonder if knowledge of how to detect that key wasn't in the manual? Atari owners were passionate about their computers and seemed happy with them but at least in my little town, there just weren't ve…

The first 400 and 800 did not have a help key. As such if you used the help key you either had to refuse to work with the large installed based of those earlier systems, or you had to provide an alternative. The alternative won in most cases and then it wasn't seen as worth also supporting help (remember bytes mattered)

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#33

Post by bluGill »

ilamont wrote: post #21

Reports of other software incompatibilities due to the ROM changes would start to come out once the 1200XL was actually released and got into user’s hands, hurting its reputation. That wasn’t as big a deal in the 80s as it is now. Reputation was limited to real life friends and maybe a few homegrown newsletters or computer clubs. Very few people were using the Internet to share opinions in the early 1980s, so “reputa…

BBSes were a thing back then, and while it wasn't the interest you did have large discussion. If you could afford compuserve (which charged by the minute!) you had a nationwide audience on a platform that was bigger than the internet of the time. A few people also had access to the internet (via their university), or at least usenet (via their work or the internet) and so there was discussion that way - but compuserve was where it was at.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#34

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bluGill wrote: post #27
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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)

I mean I agree about Tramiel management. I was an Atari ST user from 86? 87? to 92.

But I also think there's just no way Atari Corp could have taken on e.g. Apple regardless of management. They simply didn't have the capital, market penetration, etc. to carve out a segment that big. Apple was already a big deal and although the Macintosh was not really a big success at that point, there was a giant company behind it with top tier talent, and lots of cash.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#35

Post by timbit42 »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #24
curiousObject wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#36

Post by os2warpman »

ilamont wrote: post #21

Reports of other software incompatibilities due to the ROM changes would start to come out once the 1200XL was actually released and got into user’s hands, hurting its reputation. That wasn’t as big a deal in the 80s as it is now. Reputation was limited to real life friends and maybe a few homegrown newsletters or computer clubs. Very few people were using the Internet to share opinions in the early 1980s, so “reputa…

>That wasn’t as big a deal in the 80s as it is now.

It was a big deal for me. Software expenses were a huge portion of the cost of owning a computer.

Almost always the price of the computer was less than the cost of buying software to run on the thing.

Letter Perfect was around $300. If it didn't run on the 1200XL I'm not shelling out $800 for the computer and another $300 for a compatible word processor.

I am convinced that cross-vendor incompatibility was THE reason for CP/M's failure. Not anti-competitive behavior, not shenanigans, but the fact that if you spent $495 on the Kaypro version of Wordstar and then bought an Osborne, it wouldn't work. Same Z80, same CP/M, wouldn't work.

Even today PC manufacturers are only starting to remove the BIOS compatibility layers that allow you to boot >30-year-old versions of DOS on a modern hardware, and Apple has provided binary translators since the 1994 PowerPC transition and supported them for years after breaking native compatibility.

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#37

Post by jfultz »

The 1200XL was my first computer. My family purchased it at a department store at a fire sale price (IIRC Montgomery Ward's, $199) after Atari stopped manufacturing and began dumping its inventory to make way for the 600XL/800XL. I had been researching a computer to get for ages, but my family was very careful about how we spent money, and it was a big purchase. We had seriously considered getting a TI-99/4A when TI exited the business, but we were concerned that it was just going to be a dead end. But the chance for a cheaper entry into an established ecosystem was great (that and me begging my mother to finally, finally get a computer!).

Re compatibility, I never came across software that didn't run on it. I'd read in magazines that there were issues, but never once experienced it. One interesting software change, though (but true of other XL computers, too) was that the color "artifacting" worked differently on it than it did the 400/800. For example, Ultima III used color artifacting, and so playing it on my system produced some incorrect colors...most notably the sea was red.

I did come across one hardware issue...a cheap third-party parallel interface adapter that didn't work, and that we thought at the time was defective, but I now think it's likely to have been affected by the incorrect power wiring in the 1200XL's SIO adapter. It was cheap enough that we didn't lose too much money on it, and I ended up getting the far superior ICD P:R: Connection instead.

The Atari community was a super great community to be in. And in so many ways, Atari was doing things that wouldn't be seen again for years, if not decades. Atari's SIO port is famously a predecessor/inspiration of USB. The APX Exchange was basically a third-party app store decades before Apple popularized the concept. The machine was hackable and moddable (I bought a 256KB upgrade kit for mine). When I migrated to PC for college use, it hurt to have to fall back to CGA...even EGA was just ugly, compared to what my 1200XL was capable of (although the 80 column displays were nice compared to Atari's 40-column).

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#39

Post by neonsunset »

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…

FWIW WinRT / WinUI 3 was ported onto NativeAOT (9). There is are greater ongoing efforts[0] to make the two play nice together from the people working in Windows. But I think it's just efforts from specific individuals who care and the outcome solely relies on their motivation and continued employment, and is not facilitated by the org or its culture in any way, if anything, it happens despite it.

[0]: For example https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/114024

Re: The Atari 1200XL fiasco

#40

Post by DrillShopper »

bluGill wrote: post #33
ilamont wrote: post #21

Reports of other software incompatibilities due to the ROM changes would start to come out once the 1200XL was actually released and got into user’s hands, hurting its reputation. That wasn’t as big a deal in the 80s as it is now. Reputation was limited to real life friends and maybe a few homegrown newsletters or computer clubs. Very few people were using the Internet to share opinions in the early 1980s, so “reputa…

BBSes were a thing back then, and while it wasn't the interest you did have large discussion. If you could afford compuserve (which charged by the minute!) you had a nationwide audience on a platform that was bigger than the internet of the time. A few people also had access to the internet (via their university), or at least usenet (via their work or the internet) and so there was discussion that way - but compuserv…

It'd be interesting to see the FidoNet echomail traffic about the 1200XL as that's likely the most widely available forum accessible to people with a modem since any local BBS could carry it.
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