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Originally Posted by
Thenewguy
I don't know dude, I think Commodore pushed the C64 too early in the UK anyway, it got utterly raped by the Spectrum for the 1st few years until the price of the hardware dropped and they started focussing on the tape deck instead of the disc drive, it wasn't just the more advanced hardware driving up the price, the higher cost of bringing in a product from overseas ramped the price of those US machines up even more.
Hmm, Commodore was notorious for being cheap in the US, especially with the price war against TI in '82/83, but I'm not sure how that translated to Europe, and I know UK/EU prices were considerably higher for electronics in general. (probably a big part of why something as limited as the Speccy could proliferate as it did)
Plus disks were the preferred medium, not carts either, unlike the Atari machines. (I recall carts being preferred to disks on 8-bit micros in Europe by a good margin, but tapes still being top preference, of course, due to the very low cost of the media and tape drives -though Atari required proprietary tape drives using the SIO port iirc)
Was the VIC-20 at all popular in Europe? That was certainly a cheaper machine (less than 1/2 the price as released in 1981 than the C64 the following year in the US), but it was only 5 kB unexpanded. (not so bad for cart based games, but for tapes or disks the lack of RAM would probably have made it less attractive than the contemporary BBC Micro -or likely the Speccy if they waited a year from the US release)
But it would seem that such an affordable machine could have been more popular for a time, unless Commodore simply didn't push it. (apparently it was more of a diversionary marketing tactic used in the interim before the C64 could be released the following year)
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No. remember that there were huge differences between every European country, the Amstrad was the biggest and most popular home micro in France, France went from being dominated by the Oric computers in the early 80s to the Amstrad during the mid to late 80s. MSX was popular in Spain and the Netherlands.
Ah OK, I seem to remember reading that now, but I think some UK-centric discussions kind of skewed that. :)
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Yes the Amstrad came out a little later, but In my opinion the CPC was helped a hell of a lot by its similarities to the Spectrum, which was the most popular computer in Britain with the most popular software, I think it only really got a lot of software support early on simply because developers could convert and release their Spectrum games to Amstrad with little to no effort, making the game library grow extremely fast. The Amstrad even got some ports of the Spectrum's killer aps that the C64 didn't, such as Knight Lore and Alien 8.
Hmm, the CPC doesn't seem THAT similar to the Speccy... same CPU (slightly faster) and same sound chip (which the Spectrum 48k initially lacked -beeper only), with general lack of hardware graphics features. (no sprites or scrolling) But other than that the graphics hardeware seems considerably difference. Spectrum with 320x200 monochrome+cell block color bitmap system using 4-bit RGB-I and CPC with odd 3-level RGB graphics and 320x200 4-color or the usually used 160x200 16-color mode. If by some chance the memory map or bios was similar that might help a bit, but otherwise it's just the CPU and sound chip. (probably mostly the CPU)
And in that case, the MSX would fit quite well, same CPU (3.58 MHz to the speccy's 3.5 MHz) and same sound chip, but rather different graphics with tile/character based bitmap modes (no direct framebuffer), and hardware sprites, but no scrolling. (so a good bit more suited to games than much of the competition, but certainly weaker in general compared to the C64 or Atari machines -both had V/H hardware scrolling and sprites as well)
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So basically, I think though it was late the Amstrad basically leached off of the Spectrum until it had gained a foothold, and then started to get its own proper software. it also had some other features which were liked, such as the fact that it was an "all in one" system (they came with tape decks built in and monitors as standard) the guy who made it, Alan Sugar (cockroach) was basically famous for doing this, and had built his business up by simply selling all in one hi fi's or something like that.
Interesting that France became a leading market for it given the SCART Mandated TVs around the time meaning they could be used as RGB monitors too, though I seem to recall that Amstrad took a long time to produce official SCART cables (to boos monitor sales?), but there were homebrew and aftermarket cables available iirc.
The Speccy out lasted it too, but Amstrad had bought out Sinclair by that point too. There was the rater considerably upgraded CPC Plus, but that seems to have gotten comparably little support. (and Sinclair's interesting Loki project ended up halting with the buy-out when the design team left and formed Flare starting a new project based on their experience which became the Flare 1 chipset later consolidated as the ASIC used in the Multisystem -now THAT really would have been interesting to see in place of the CPC Plus, or especially the GX-4000 -the Flare 1 was completed ~1987 iirc, the Slipstream ASIC ~1989)
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I'm not sure about whether the Atari 8-bits were similar enough to C64 to leach off that system (I seem to remember some close ports of really old games between the two) but this would have been less preferable anyway as the C64 didn't have masses of popular original software here until the mid to late 80s, before then the biggest games arrived on Spectrum, and were then ported to C64 a few months later, the notable exceptions being Impossible Mission, and Beach Head
The C64 would likely be leeching off the A8 more the vice versa, at least early on. The A8 was probably the leading game computer in North America up to the C64's rise. (the Apple II got a lot of support too, but probably more due to its install base -facilitated by earlier release and less than ideal marketing on Atari's part -the Apple II was rather expensive and much less capable for games in general -didn't stop some dedicated programmers from pushing pretty hard)
Atari kind of blew it in 1983 with the A8 (really critical years in the US market), after taking ages to consolidate the overbuilt 1979 chasis (both in terms of boards and the aluminum castings necessary for older FCC spec) a botched transition to new models with the release with the 1200 XL in 1982 and then the 600 and 800 XL having to catch up in '83, but then the halt on all products that fall killing that chance for the 600/800 to catch-up and losing the holiday market. (the halt done as the initial stages of reorganization of the red-tape riddled bureaucratic mess that was Atari Inc -and otherwise promising undertaking by James Morgan, but the timing of that halt/evaluation period was very unfortunate, and of course Warner rashly sold Atari before the reorganization could even complete...)
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Cart based C64 games never really took off that well in the UK, they only started to gain a small amount of popularity towards the end of the system's lifespan, they were just too expensive for what they were.
I don't think cart based C64 games really took off anywhere. :) I may be wrong but I think disk was the primary media expected to be used when it was launched in 1982 unlike the Atari systems with the heavy emphasis on cartridges. (possibly more than any other home computer platform)
There were carts, but afik they weren't particularly popular.
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Its a shame the C64 didn't stay popular in the US for longer as I could really see the system there becoming more of a cartridge based machine to compete with the NES. Really, if you program the C64 carefully and use high res overlays and such the C64 can look quite comparable to the NES, was there any other plus points for using cartridges instead of tape/disc other than load times? (ie could you do more with the game)
Commodore did try that, but exceptionally poorly with the C64GS. It wasn't even a game console, but a repackaged computer (like the Atari XEGS), but unlike the XEGS it lacked a keyboard making the large portion of games requiring key inputs useless; that and it came out in 1990 compared to the XEGS in 1988. (and again, the XEGS was a fully functional Atari 65XE computer)
By that point, a consolized Amiga would have been much more attractive... though really even that should have been more like '88/89. (A C64 game system in '86 perhaps, but CBM management seems to have been less than ideal by that point, or pretty much from 1984 onwards -possibly tied to jack Tramiel's departure -not that he would necessarily have pushed for a game console, but the Amiga marketing issue for one, or the C64's management, or the mess with the C128, Plus/4, etc -C65 could have been great, at least had it come about several years earlier than it did)
As for carts in general, the big advantage was not having to load into RAM, but run code and pull data directly from ROM (at least in these slow systems, but later on cheap ROM stayed relatively slow compared to RAM and loading/paging to RAM was almost always done -so for Jaguar, Lynx, N64, etc). Thus you can use much less RAM that you otherwise would need.
That, and in the case of paging to RAM the load tines are exceptionally fast faciliating things liek dynamic updates. (especially for animation -though in cases with the video bus directly mapped to ROM, reading from ROM directly would also be possible as with the VCS, A8/5200, 7800, and NES, though the latter has a dedicated video bus mapped to the cart slot while others have shared CPU/Video buses)
No way the 2600 would work with just 128 bytes or RAM otherwise. ;) (the starpath supercharger of course adds a chunk of RAM for the casette to load into, rather like the Sega Channel adapter) Same for most consoles as such, relying on ROM with limited onboard RAM.
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I just checked up on it, I've found one source saying the Atari 8-bit was released late 1980 in the UK for £649, which surprises me, but at that price no wonder I didn't think it existed until years later.
According to Wikipedia the C64 was released in 1983 at £399
Hmm, OK but that's still pretty vague: the Atari 400 would have been FAR cheaper than the 800 (it was ~$550 vs ~$1000 in 1979 with 8 kB in the US and I think by '82 they were down to ~$250 and ~$500 -not counting rebates- with 16 and 48 kB respectively).
And given that print ad which seems to have been from 1982 (almost definitely no later than '83), the 16 kB 400 was down to £160. (which would have been totally fine for most, if not all cart based games -not some very late XE/XL specific games though- for tapes/disks it's more limitng, but I think a fair amount of software was made for 16 or even 8 kB systems -given the lowest common denominator being non-upgraded 8k 400s) Given the relative price of the 800, it seems likely to be in the £300 range.
I think it might be more due to marketing/distribution problems in the region as they certainly had a very competitive (if not the most competitive) library of games in the early 80s. From discussions I've had before, distribution does indeed seem to have been very limited. (compared to the VCS/2600 and the ST and 7800 later on, of course)
I could see the proprietary tape drive being somewhat a hindrance (especially with the higher cost due to SIO hardware), but the base units seem to have been pretty cheap and even the custom cassette decks should have been relatively affordable. The bigger issue would simply have been availability of software on that format, the same issue Commodore had early on. (except Atari had carts as a major format and while not cheap, they didn't require an accessory to use, let alone an expensive disk drive)
Tapes were popular early on for the A8-bits in the US, but more as program storage (including hobbyists and programmers) than a software distribution format iirc. (I should ask the guys on AtariAge) I'm pretty sure by the early 80s disks were more common though and increasingly so. (for 79/80/81 perhaps tapes were more attractive, but again most software, especially games would have been on carts)
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All I'm going to say is that Slap Fight music wouldn't fool a Master System/C64 owner for a second, the synthetic electric guitar sound may not be as prominent, but its still there.
Where? I don't here it... Unless you're talking about the title screen/demo. (and that's more the buzzy unfiltered sawtooth sound than the filtered pulse wave guitar sound last I listened to it)
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Some of the mid levels in Super Turrican just sound clearer and classier than those Capcom games, same goes for a lot of other European games, they sound more polished, you'd have to play some of those games yourself to tell if there's any actual technical reason why they sound better because I wouldn't know where to start unfortunately.
Could be composers actually catering to the forced interpolation and filtering of the SNES thus selecting sounds/instruments that cater to that. (I've definitely heard some that sound great normally but really wrong with interpolation disabled in emulators -not so with most/all capcom games, but the case with Star Fox and several other Nintendo games, need to check out Super Turican though)
Otherwise it could simply be the compositions used too.
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I just had a minor check of subsequent years out of curiosity, and the NES seems to have had a much better 1987 in the US than the Master System, MS just really has Outrun, Wonder Boy, Miracle Warriors (first JRPG released in the US?), and Zillion as stand-outs, with a good few decent games, I think
Holy crap, the box art seems to have substantially improved by 1987! Look at Miracle Warriers: http://www.pwned.com/gamecovers/sega..._Dark_Lord.jpg
Or was that released in 1988 in the US... that would make sense as most of the decent to good art seems to have come after the shift to Tonka. Like with Wonder Boy in Monster Land and such.
Especially with the terrible Wonder Boy and Zillion box covers in '87.
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1988 was a really great Master System year though, with certainly some of the most advanced software for that year arriving on Master System Phantasy Star, Ys, Golvellius, Aleste, R-Type (PC-Engine didn't arrive in the US until 1989), Shinobi, as well as large numbers of good games.
I really wonder how well the SMS was doing under Tonka. It's market share certainly fell, but all that necessarily means is Nintendo was growing much faster, Sega could still have had an increase in sales at the time, but a modest one. (the marketing -box art and advertising at least- seem to have improved by a huge margin from '86/87)
None were as cool as some of the Japanese ads though.
