Re: [stella] Hardware comparisons

Subject: Re: [stella] Hardware comparisons
From: Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:27:44 -0700
At 12:09 PM 4/25/00 +0200, you wrote:
The Amiga actually is more comparable to the Atari 8-bits than to the C-64
(because it was done by partly the same engineers). Downsides to the 8-bits
is that the "indirection level", which would create a character mode and a
way of building up the screen of tiles, is gone now, so everything has to be

I'm not sure how many games on the 8-bit used character mode graphics. The big advantage of doing this was speed. It was faster to blit a custom character set than update a true bitmap. I heard that Ballblazers used a character system, though.


the sprites has improved, but still isn't as flexible than on the C-64. They
can now move up and down without having to re-write everything, but there
still has to be an own chunk of memory for every object displayed, even if

Yes, but most Amiga games started using BLOBs, or Blitter objects. Basically software sprites. The Amiga was fast enough with its blitter to increase the apparent spritecount this way. This worked better than software sprites on the Atari 8-bit, for instance, which tended to really strain the CPU.


Ah yes, and the 7800 seems to be a side-step in this history, in that it has
no such things as "background", "sprites" or whatever... it simply clashes
everything upon each other as long as you want, until you run out of
processing time. Maybe you could say what the Blitter does to the bitmap on
the Amiga, the 7800 does to each scanline... at real time.

One notable difference between the 7800 and the Amiga was clocking. The original Amiga was 7.56? mhz which is 2x colorburst. The custom chips match this clock. If you implement an accellerator, you need to separate "chip" RAM with "fast" RAM so that the CPU can numbercrunch without being slowed down by the graphics chips. So in any modern Amiga like my editing workstation, the CPU runs at many orders of magnitudes faster than the custom chipset. This was something that, unfortunately, was never really viable on the Atari 8-bit system, which is why you don't see 8+mhz Atari 8-bit accellerators like you do for the C=64. The 8-bit was so closely tied to the chipset that even if you did manage to separate the two it would break most software compatibility.


The 7800 goes the opposite way. The CPU remains 1.79mhz and the graphics chips are 7.56mhz. I think the TG16 may also be that way, having an overpowering graphics chip compared to the CPU. The SNES also relied on the graphics chip rather than the mhz of the CPU.


fact, for that time they were surely advanced pieces of tech. But does
anyone know how much an Atari 800 costed in 1979 or 1980?

Around $800 I believe, depending on configuration. Memory and disk drives were very expensive. Even when I got my 1200XL in late 82/early 83 I chose a tape drive to get started because 1050 disk drives cost about as much if not more than the computer did.


I don't think the Atari's were overpriced, but it limited their market.

I read somewhere that by 1980 there were only TENS OF THOUSANDS of home computers in America. Maybe it was in the low hundreds of thousands, but that's a tiny market share, really. It really didn't take off until the prices dropped on a complete system to under a grand. That's probably because mostly kids got them and kids did not get that kind of money for purchases! I still rail at the standard $1,500 pricepoint for PCs. People didn't notice the speed problem on an Atari or C=64 the way you do today because the OSs on them were so miniscule and there were no 3D renderers or photoshops. It's nice that there are some sub-$1K PCs out there now. If you run a non-Microsoft OS on them they won't feel very slow.

Anyway, Atari 400 and 800s were built very well compared to subsequent cost-reduced computers like the C=64. The Atari XLs just copied the C=64 formula complete with sub par keyboards, video output circuitry, and so on. The 1200XL was somewhere in the middle as it had a kick ass keyboard but really bad video out (not that many used it since Atari didn't market a monitor). The XEs were the worst. The keyboards were gummy mush, even worse than today's $10 suction cup keyboards, and you could literally twist the case with your hands and force a reboot.

There really never was an ultimate Atari 8-bit. The 1400XL would have been the best as it had the parallel bus interface, 64K, XL OS, good keyboard, built-in Basic, and even a speech chip and modem. Unfortunately the way the speech and modem are wired it breaks compatibility with the 2 PBI devices people used for the 8-bit, the MIO and the Black Box. I found that out myself when I acquired a 1400XL prototype.






Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc


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