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Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

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Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#51

Post by mschaef »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #40
_lbaq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likewise, I think Tramiel could have done something similar instead of diving down the 68000 path with the Atari ST. The Atari ST was built from scratch in less than 8 months after the deal to license the Amiga chipset fell trouhg. The ST is an amazing engineering feat considering the insane schedule. I agree on you that the 68k is a terrible CPU for gaming, but it got better when there was some cache added to it, s…

Yeah don't get me wrong, I was an ST user and loved it. It was a business and technical accomplishment. All respect to it. My point was only that for that class of machines what we really needed was wider address buses, not necessarily wider data buses. Along with a wider data bus came slower cycle times for a bunch of operations. And cost.

> [Atari] ST.... what we really needed was wider address buses,

Are you sure? With memory costing hundreds of dollars per MB in the mid-80's, I remember thinking a 24-bit address bus was plenty. (I actually don't think I personally had a computer with enough RAM to need more than 24-bits of physical addressing until the mid-90's.)

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#52

Post by reaperducer »

spc476 wrote: post #39
reaperducer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BASIC is a terrible language, and the only reason it became popular is that there was a book published with a lot of games written in that language. Not even close. BASIC was a very powerful language. Not "powerful" in the way we think of languages today with OOP and all that, but powerful in its flexibility. Each machine had its own version of BASIC that made the most of each machine's unique capabilities. Games wer…

No, not every version of BASIC made the most of the underlying machine's capabilities. The BASIC on the C64 (the most popular 8-bit machine of all time) did not support graphics or sound. Seriously, there was no support for what made the C64 the C64 in the C64 BASIC! You wanted grpahics? PEEK and POKE. Sound? PEEK and POKE.

You're right, there was no direct CIRCLE or BOX or other easy BASIC commands on the 64 unless you had a Simon's BASIC cart or something similar.

That said, I didn't have any trouble doing graphics on the 64 with PEEKS and POKES that was good enough to get one of my screens on the cover of Run Magazine. It wasn't easy, but once you got your brain around it, I remember it being pretty fun.

Sound, however... no argument there. But that could be because I've never been musical in any way whatsoever. Never understood notes and scales and such.

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#53

Post by jhbadger »

mschaef wrote: post #50
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the death of 8-bit systems was obvious by 89, but so was the death of the 68000. Motorola was already pushing the failed 88000 by the late 80s. And the 68000 itself was killed off only a couple years later. So I don't really agree with you here. The 68000 was as big of a dead end, and IMHO was a terrible CPU for home computers and gaming machines. It was fast for 16 and 32 bit integer arithmetic, so basically go…

> Yes, the death of 8-bit systems was obvious by 89, but so was the death of the 68000. Motorola was already pushing the failed 88000 by the late 80s. And the 68000 itself was killed off only a couple years later. You may be overstating the death of the 68000... the 68060 was introduced in 1994, and I remember doing embedded work on 68000 based designs in 1999-2000. (In fact, some of the processors are still availabl…

And even into the early 2000s, Palm and other handhelds had Freescale Dragonball processors inside, and that was based off of the 68000 core which was licensed from Motorola.

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#54

Post by kyberias »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #38
kyberias wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Amiga would have been more responsive What was the problem with Amiga responsiveness? Never heard about this. Interrupt response? What? For several years, it had the best games. The bitplane-based graphics system became a hindrance with FPS-games but that was never about the CPU.

If you go back and look at those games again, the frame rate, it's not that great. Many of the 8-bit machines actually had better responsiveness and frame rates. Yes, the Amiga was awesome. It was not perfect. Also, as far as 68000-based machines goes, the X68000 kicks the Amiga's ass.

Frame rate? I don't see how any lack of framerate on Amiga was due to CPU because peripheral chips performed all the video and audio using DMA from dedicated graphics (CHIP) memory.

Again, what "responsiveness"? There doesn't seem to be any problem with that on Amiga other than what you say.

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#55

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mschaef wrote: post #51
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I was an ST user and loved it. It was a business and technical accomplishment. All respect to it. My point was only that for that class of machines what we really needed was wider address buses, not necessarily wider data buses. Along with a wider data bus came slower cycle times for a bunch of operations. And cost.

> [Atari] ST.... what we really needed was wider address buses, Are you sure? With memory costing hundreds of dollars per MB in the mid-80's, I remember thinking a 24-bit address bus was plenty. (I actually don't think I personally had a computer with enough RAM to need more than 24-bits of physical addressing until the mid-90's.)

I never meant wider than 24 bits. I meant wider than the 16 bits on the 8-bit machines. Sorry if I was unclear. I didn't need a machine with more than 16MB until the mid 90s.

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#56

Post by mschaef »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #55
mschaef wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Atari] ST.... what we really needed was wider address buses, Are you sure? With memory costing hundreds of dollars per MB in the mid-80's, I remember thinking a 24-bit address bus was plenty. (I actually don't think I personally had a computer with enough RAM to need more than 24-bits of physical addressing until the mid-90's.)

I never meant wider than 24 bits. I meant wider than the 16 bits on the 8-bit machines. Sorry if I was unclear. I didn't need a machine with more than 16MB until the mid 90s.

Agreed... 16-bit physical addressing was very limiting. (x86's 16-bit segment offsets were bad enough.)

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#57

Post by Flow »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #38
kyberias wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Amiga would have been more responsive What was the problem with Amiga responsiveness? Never heard about this. Interrupt response? What? For several years, it had the best games. The bitplane-based graphics system became a hindrance with FPS-games but that was never about the CPU.

If you go back and look at those games again, the frame rate, it's not that great. Many of the 8-bit machines actually had better responsiveness and frame rates. Yes, the Amiga was awesome. It was not perfect. Also, as far as 68000-based machines goes, the X68000 kicks the Amiga's ass.

I think you remember wrong. Most of the games were ports from the Atari ST and seldom used the blitter, sprites or dual-playfield. When you have a 80's computer with pretty severe limitations you often design your game visuals around those limitations.

As for your statement on "many of the 8-bit machines", only the C64 had good 50/60fps shooters of the 8-bit home computers. The 8-bit consoles had better graphics hardware than the C64 and sometimes had the better games.

Properly implemented Amiga games were not that many though. It was hard to utilize the machine and it required good graphic artists to make it look fresh and sharp with the limitations of dual playfields.

But take a look at these games, I think they all run on a 512kb chipmem only OCS Amiga.

Mega Typhoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk3LNdPTnMw

Agony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a839o59Bt4s

Apidya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBJNbDidxcM

And of course the R-Type and Turrican series. Those were 12 or 25fps on the ST but silky smooth 50fps on the Amiga 500. Especially Mega Typhoon looks like a Raiden clone. It's very hectic, lots of bullets and big enemies and snake formations. The only thing that stands out is the lack of colors. I suspect this is because of using dual playfield and that limits the number of colors to 8+8+sprite colors.

I'm an old demo coder(C64 and Amiga) and was very picky about framerate back then. The only shootemups I liked that was not 50fps was Battle Squadron and Wings of Death.

And then you talk vaguely about responsiveness. Do you mean the number of cycles spent by the machinery to process and IRQ? I never saw that as a problem. On the Atari ST they use timer IRQ's to make rasterbars in demos and games. Seems to me they would not do that if the cost was too high.

The Amiga mouse-pointer was a sprite. I never saw a delay on that. It felt like a game character. At most 1 frame delay. And dragging Amiga "screens" up and down was usually only one frame after the sprite movement. But that's logical since the system copperlist has to be updated and that is definitely one frame delay on that.

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#58

Post by Flow »

pjc50 wrote: post #35
Lio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder if considering the processor and the “chunky pixels” of the Archimedes if had had something like a Wolfenstein or Doom back in 1987 if it would have driven sales enough to change. Ofcourse that was probably pretty unlikely considering the Acorn/Olivetti bet so heavily on the education market.

Probably not quite enough raw MIPS in 1987, but people have since ported it: http://gerph.org/riscos/ramble/doomplus.html

Maybe it was more a lack of the DOOM source code or know-how?

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Millio... the ARM2 at 8MHz was 4MIPS. The 386DX at 33MHz was 4.3MIPS. The 8MHz 68000 was 1.4MIPS.

Of course there could be other things that made it hard, such as too few bus cycles when running the 8-bit chunky graphics mode? Or that sound did not use DMA(I don't know if the Archimedes had sound DMA) or that the CPU had to mix samples instead of the sound hardware doing it?

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#59

Post by mabcat »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #32
teddyh wrote: post #7

I would hope it runs something other than BASIC. BASIC is a terrible language, and the only reason it became popular is that there was a book published with a lot of games written in that language. People buying a home computer wanted games, and the commercial game market was initially nonexistent, so people wanted a computer with BASIC, since then they assumed they could play those games. The designers of this new c…

I...don't think that's accurate. As far as I can tell, just about every significant 8-bit personal computer shipped with its own version of BASIC, starting with the Apple II in 1977. I really doubt that all of those were inspired by one book, especially since they used such different implementations that only the very simplest text-only programs could be ported without modification.

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

That's the book I learned to program from, a compilation of games in BASIC published in 1973. I don't know the truth of the GP's claim but reportedly that book was very influential so there might be something to it.

Re: Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

#60

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jhbadger wrote: post #53
mschaef wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, the death of 8-bit systems was obvious by 89, but so was the death of the 68000. Motorola was already pushing the failed 88000 by the late 80s. And the 68000 itself was killed off only a couple years later. You may be overstating the death of the 68000... the 68060 was introduced in 1994, and I remember doing embedded work on 68000 based designs in 1999-2000. (In fact, some of the processors are still availabl…

And even into the early 2000s, Palm and other handhelds had Freescale Dragonball processors inside, and that was based off of the 68000 core which was licensed from Motorola.

Sure, and ColdFire is still around to some degree. But Motorola/Freescale was not promoting this architecture for new desktop designs past the very early 90s. Yes, Apple and others continued to make machines until the mid-90s around 68k, but it was seen as dead in the water and the push was to get onto PowerPC (itself an unfortunate dead-end).

I still like the 68k. It has a very nice instruction set. It makes a great target for C compilers. I still enjoy writing assembler for it here and there. I like my Atari STs.

But for the market that Atari and Amiga were going for, I am still not convinced it was appropriate. I think Apple made the right choices with the IIgs. Except they underclocked it, overpriced it, and handicapped it in favour of promoting the Macintosh despite the II line being a big profit centre for them.

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