General Home Computer gaming/tech discussion thread

[kool kitty89]

A lot of MSX stuff looks a lot better, especially the colors used, but yeah, horizontal software scrolling was character by character on the MSX1, so a bit choppy for low speed scrolling. (the faster the scrollign, th ebetter it looks and at a certain point you could even drop to 16 pixel wide chunks rather than 8). Of course, Colecovision and SG-100 games would also apply for comparison. (many, many better MSX games and SG-100 games were closer to NES than Speccy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpOzTwhDTAI



Then there's hardware sprites and lack of screen tearing.

Sound if another thing alltogether though, the easly speccy (ie not 128k) was extremely limited in sound while contemporaries (A8, MSX, C64, BBC Micro and such were far suprior -even the VCS and Electron were superior).

Did any reviewers mention sound?

Honestly that's a bigger kicker than the speccy graphics, really simple sound, more so than the PC speaker, but more like the Apple II (though that had a bit more exceptions from what I've seen). The 128k addressed that of course, but rather late.


And the asthetics thing is really out the window, I wasn't talking about th bulk anyway, that was unavoidable and not desirable as such (Atari had to make them that big, and they had to put heavy cast aluminum enclosures due to the FCC in the late 70s). But really, the speccy looks really cheap next to any of the others. The Specc+ looks a lot better though, the 128 a bit more so.

Of course, anythign with a chicklet or membrane keyboard took a big hit for that in the US as users tended to hate them. (not so much an issue for gamers who would be using paddles, joysticks, or keypads instead most of the time)

[kool kitty89]

Some of these are actually very good ports. For example, the A8 ports of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. are recognized as some of the best, mainly because they have stuff that was cut out of other ports.

A8 and 5200 mario bros is very altered from the arcade game, it's unique, though not very attractive IMO. (and uses software rendered on a bitmap display, hence the lack of clicker and the slowdown issues)
The 7800 version is far more accurate, even the 2600 version in several respects of actual game mechanics. The later remake released for the XE/XEGS is much closer to the arcade:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB3wHgcfF8k

vs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3593Fl0iRs


Otherwise, yeah, lots of very good arcade ports.

[ApolloBoy]

The later remake released for the XE/XEGS is much closer to the arcade

That was the version I was referring to, not the 5200 version. The 5200 version was planned to be ported over to the A8 in 1984, but got canned after the Tramiel switchover. The 1989 XE version was the one that was ultimately released by Atari.

[Thenewguy]

100 MSX Games Youtube video

So yeah, Spectrum games with bad scrolling it is

I kind of wish the Spectrum programmers had carried on with that colourful style they used for the first few years

Spectrum Games 1983-1984



But by the mid 80s the scene moved towards detailed monochrome being the in thing to use (I think a lot of it had to do with lazyness though tbh), whilst the Japanese seemed to have concentrated on improving the colour graphics around the hardware limitations.

I never properly analysed the games compared to Spectrum though, and looking through each clip does show a number of differences, the only games I don't see as do-able in their MSX state on Spectrum would be Ale Hop, American Truck (I'm not sure about that one though, if carefull you might be able to design a game like that around the Spectrum attribute boxes seeing as its quite choppy and squared off), the Track N Field game, Probably Golvellius (mainly due to the fact you'd probably have to use the ill fitting yellow colour in the Spectrum pallet for the ground), the Konami athletics game (Hypersports?) and the wrestling game.

I think the lack of the colours pink and brown probably hurt the Spectrum quite a bit, but the MSX colours seem pretty washed out, the Spectrum pallet looks a bit over the top but the colours dither pretty well together.

But then in trade-off for the better colours you've got the aforementioned crappy scrolling, with the Spectrum often pulling off fairly smooth parallax scrolling as opposed to the MSX having problems scrolling even one layer.

Full colour games had a bit of a resurgence towards the end of the lifespan after the programmers realised they could draw the moving characters around the attribute boxes to avoid clash, and dither the graphics to make more fitting colours (as well as simply being carefull with their colour use which they'd done originally anyway). I put two Turtles screenshots here because I consider that to have the pinacle Spectrum graphics for a platformer (colourful, no clash, smooth-ish movement, parallax scrolling)

Then there's hardware sprites

Oh come on! it looks like its struggling to put more than three sprites on the screen! Gauntlet and R-Type have like half the amounts of enemies onscreen in comparison to the Spectrum and arcade versions so for whatever reason the hardware sprites don't offer much of a feature over the Spectrum anyway, some of those shmups only have two enemies on screen at one time! the sprites tend to look very Spectrum like and transparent, and most of them flicker tons too.

There are some games there which seem to have much better sprites than the others though (Castle Excellent for instance) I take it that some of the games like that are overlaying multiple sprites to make them look better? if this is the case then i'd imagine they'd be pretty limited in what they could do with enemy sprites, possibly use a trick to multiplex the sprites? but then maybe thats why the game moves so slowly and choppy (I'm not a tech guy so I wouldn't know).

Lastly the into the screen racing games look really crude compared to those of the Spectrum, the scaling is worse and everything looks less polished.

This section on Wikipedia seems to imply that with general, quick programming the Spectrum gave better results than the MSX, but with careful programming and use of hardware tricks the MSX had a lot of potential for improvement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX_Video_access_method

and lack of screen tearing.

That's caused by the emulator, real Spectrum's don't do that.

Sound if another thing altogether though, the early speccy (ie not 128k) was extremely limited in sound while contemporaries (A8, MSX, C64, BBC Micro and such were far superior -even the VCS and Electron were superior). The 128k addressed that of course, but rather late.

The MSX was certainly far superior in sound capabilities compared to the 48k Spectrum, the 128k Spectrum was announced 9 months after the British release of the MSX systems (which came to Britain christmas 1984), and reached the shops in January of 1985, 1 year after the MSX1.

The MSX1 release in Britain was closer to the 128k Spectrum than the original, which had been released 2 years prior. If anything was late, it was the MSX itself, and at a price of £279.95 for the 64k version the MSX companies must've been smoking some seriously good crack to be thinking they were going to have an industry standard.

Did any reviewers mention sound?

Yeah some of the reviewers talk about how much better the C64 games sound, funnily enough a lot of them actually moan about the lack of options to turn music off, stating that music in videogames is distracting.

Honestly that's a bigger kicker than the speccy graphics

In game music is more important than smooth scrolling and responsive controls?

[ApolloBoy]

I think the lack of the colours pink and brown probably hurt the Spectrum quite a bit, but the MSX colours seem pretty washed out

MSX emulators have a tendency to do that as I've noticed. The colors are significantly brighter on a real machine as opposed to an emulator.

[Deo]

I really like the starwars game for mac, its black and white and a port of the arcade vector graphics hit, of course with Macintosh it has a STANDARD 68000!! that makes it run like a champ

That game was the shit well until it crashed my Mac Classic everytime I played anyways. You ever play Apache Strike?

[roundwars]

That game was the shit well until it crashed my Mac Classic everytime I played anyways. You ever play Apache Strike?

My favorite of the early Mac games would have to be Crystal Quest. And the less well-known but awesome sequel Crystal Crazy.

[kool kitty89]

That was the version I was referring to, not the 5200 version. The 5200 version was planned to be ported over to the A8 in 1984, but got canned after the Tramiel switchover. The 1989 XE version was the one that was ultimately released by Atari.

Hmm, I thought the 5200 version was a port of the A800 version... (as in that 800XL video I posted)

MSX emulators have a tendency to do that as I've noticed. The colors are significantly brighter on a real machine as opposed to an emulator.

I think it might be because they map the true YCbCr colors to RGB rather than the skewed colors that actually display via composite video. I think dark red is usually used for brown, which looks pretty close to brown without composite artifacting, but sometimes one of the lighter reds is also used where brown should be and it looks wrong when not on composite video. (Pitfall and Frogger on the ColecoVision come to mind)

Still, those more pastel colors look far better for many things than the direct RGB palette of the speccy, unless that too looks different via composite video. (the colors in general are better too, though without composite, the MSX lacks a proper brown -one fo the orange/reds looks brown via composite)
The BBC Micro's palette and similer 3-bit RGB of the PC8801 (in mode 1) are similarly poor -not even the 2 shades of the speccy, but that is largely mitigated by the higher color resolution possible, especially the high resolution of the PC8801... actually that one's probably too high res to really be that practical in many cases. (at least until the 8 MHz and V50 CPU versions came around -640x200x8 colors is pretty high res, and no lower res or lower color modes for the 8801... there were higher color modes on some models and some lower resolution, but all overall higher res still -in terms of memory used per screen, though there was mode 2 which used the same resolution and color depth, but 8 colors selected from 9-bit RGB -512 colors)

The C64's palette looks pretty pastel too, and in some respects more limited than the MSX one, though as you can see in many games, the added capabilities of shading often pays off. (MSX is also at a disadvantage with a 15 color palette due to the transparent entry, the CGA palette is worse in many cases, the Speccy's more so, plain 3-bit RGB more still, with the VIC-20 and Apple II being more debatable and the CoCo's probably being a fiar bit better than 4-bit RGB -plus artifact colors, where CGA really shines too- but, of course, Atari had an excellent palette back in 1977 with the 128 colors of the VCS and subsequent A8 -256 colors for some GTIA modes- though the Astrocade also had a 256 color palette, and the later 7800 did, but that was in '84 and the Famicom preceded that with the very broad selection of colors/shades if the additional luma control was used with ~400+ colors)

The hardware sprites of the MSX really gave it an edge in many cases though, of course some software rendering was trickier due to the character based background compared to the Speccy's bitmap+attribute system. (I think)

That game was the shit well until it crashed my Mac Classic everytime I played anyways. You ever play Apache Strike?

Did the Mac version have any of the voice samples or music?
I know the Amiga and ST versions had color too and some music and samples but cut down or modified compared to the arcade.
I seem to recall that most ports didn't have any in-game music, only in the cutscenes.

Then there's that far more advanced Star Wars wireframe game on the X68000:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqiNyCB9qCo

[Thenewguy]

Still, those more pastel colors look far better for many things than the direct RGB palette of the speccy

Thats your opinion, as far as i'm concerned when used carefully and dithered well the Spectrum has vibrant and colourful graphics, I think the top right picture from the montage I posted has much better colour than most of the games in the MSX video. To be honest, in respects to the colour pallet preference is going to be down to a lot of things such as what you're used to when you were growing up.

The hardware sprites of the MSX really gave it an edge in many cases though, of course some software rendering was trickier due to the character based background compared to the Speccy's bitmap+attribute system.

I don't think you know enough about the architecture's of the two machines to compare them properly, I'm not very good with the tech side, but I've seen many conversations comparing the machines and they tend to say that all said and done they are comparable, with the Spectrum better in some areas and the MSX better in others.

I wish I had a better understanding of the issues, but I'll try to regurgitate some of the information I've heard (hopefully you can make some sence out of it)

The Spectrum doesn't really require hardware sprites or scrolling because it is very efficient at updating the screen, the CPU has direct control over the video memory unlike the MSX, and it doesn't take very much cpu power, because of this you can effectively update the entire screen every other frame, so you pretty much keep drawing enemy characters on the screen until you run out of cpu power.

The MSX does not have direct control over the video memory, the MSX adds one waitcycle to each microcode instruction regardless of address or memory type, because of these factors its not as feasible to do everything in software like the Spectrum does.

The sprite capabilities aren't really that great either, you only get four per line (half the amount of the C64 and NES) and they are 1 colour transparent, so using them normally means you've got characters very comparable to those on the Spectrum, but, you've also got the four character per line stipulation the Spectrum doesn't have, they are also governed by size and shape restrictions which the Spectrum isn't, and there's flickering to worry about too.

If you want better looking sprites than the Spectrum characters (not taking into account using attribute tricks) then you have to overlay the sprites, but then if you want 2 colour sprites you're limited to only two characters on a line, some of the games in that video seem to have two colour sprites for the main character and transparent sprites for the enemies, allowing three characters on a line.

So, as opposed to the sprites putting the MSX far ahead of the Spectrum, they are actually pretty much required for the MSX to keep up with it, in some areas the hardware sprites are certainly better, but this is only in specific gameplay situations.

[kool kitty89]

More or less continuing from some discussions here as well :http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread....+800XL&page=13

Interesting update to this topic with some price comparisons:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic...ge-price-list/

So by late summer of 1983, the UK had the Atari 800 and 600 XL available at £249.99 and £159.99 respectively. (both with quality, full-throw keyboards, a more compact, lightweight -and stylish- form factor, and built-in Atari BASIC -as well as the OS, which was separate, unlike many contemporary machines that used BASIC as the OS)

That's obviously well above the Speccy, but I'm not sure how it compares to the C64 at the time.
OTOH, given the 600XL's price, and RAM costs of the time, it seems like the 800XL could have been reasonably knocked back to £200 and still be sold for a profit. (assuming the 600XL was being sold at a profit) So that seems a bit odd. For that matter, they probably should have bumped the 600 to 32k (and make it use a 32k expansion rather than 64k) given the greater need for RAM in that market even for low-end machines. (and givne RAM prices, that really should have only pushed it to ~£170)

[Thenewguy]

So by late summer of 1983, the UK had the Atari 800 and 600 XL available at £249.99 and £159.99 respectively.

Is the flyer before or after the date? could it have been made available prior to the releases to gear up for the new product line (ie not taking into account possible subsequent delays)?

Either way I've seen very little information about them prior to 1984, so if it is true then Atari either didn't advertise the machines very well early on, or didn't get them into retail very quickly, maybe they were mail-order-only for a while? or maybe the sellers were wary of taking on more Atari stock until they'd cleared away some of the older machines first.

That's obviously well above the Speccy, but I'm not sure how it compares to the C64 at the time.

Well, as we've already established (and I've found more info backing this up since our last conversation in an article about the upcoming MSX machines) nobody here was considering 16k machines anymore by 1983, so that's the 600XL thrown out the window, the 800XL is over £100 more expensive than the Spectrum 48k, and requires a standalone tape player, which I guess is the "Program Recorder" mentioned in the brochure, this brings the total to nearly £300 (which would be a fair amount of money today when taking into account inflation, certainly over £600) making the 800XL effectively £170 more expensive than the Spectrum (~£350 more expensive in todays money)

So I would say the 800XL is out of the price range of mainstream gamers, not only that, but the Spectrum was getting masses of software support by then, and previews and such would've shown many more upcoming releases.

Another stumbling block though is probably still the C64, I can't remember when the price change happened exactly, but I think the official C64 price was £229 by November of 1983 (there's conflicting information), this was also not including tape drive I believe (in fact I think they were still trying to push the disk drive at that stage) but still, even with the tape drive added on I'd imagine the C64 was still £20-£30 cheaper than the Atari 800XL (thats ~£50 in todays money), the C64 was also well into the process of poaching most of the stand-out A8 games, had more momentum, and most definitely had a better retail distribution set-up by then.

given the 600XL's price, and RAM costs of the time, it seems like the 800XL could have been reasonably knocked back to £200 and still be sold for a profit.

I'm not sure, how much were RAM prices in 1983? remember that retail and tax is done in percentages, as the worth of the product goes up both take more money.

they probably should have bumped the 600 to 32k, given the greater need for RAM in that market even for low-end machines. (and given RAM prices, that really should have only pushed it to ~£170)

Yeah, I think we covered a lot of this before, increase RAM to at least 32k, cut back on other aspects like the cartridge ports which were effectively worthless to Europeans at the time.

Could they have used a tape access set-up like the Spectrum whereby any tape player could be used? that might have helped a little too.

BTW, you probably know a lot of this already, being an Atari guy, but I was re-reading Game Over the other day and it talks of one of the final arguments between Nolan Bushnell and the Warner management prior to the A8s release and his leaving the company, where Bushnell was angrily telling the management that their threatening of 3rd party software companies with legal action if they made games for the A8s had been stupid, and that if they weren't trying to court 3rd parties to the A8s they shouldn't bother releasing the computers at all.

Obviously by the time of the actual release Atari were no longer threatening, and soon after they started to provide programming info for those who actively asked them (in the US at least), but maybe their past actions alienated them from a lot of the 3rd parties in general.

My dislike of Atari (the company) has actually subsided a bit since before, I think effectively Atari ended before the 80s even began, by the time Nolan Bushnell left the company in 1978 a hefty amount of the other big players who'd made the company what it was had already gone on to better things, and in 1979 many of the major game designers left to form Activision, whilst others became disillusioned and simply left the company (Atari treated their game designers badly). Bushnell says in Game Over that the people in charge of Atari when he was forced out clearly had no idea what they were actually doing, and didn't understand why the company had become a success in the 1st place.

His last argument, the one that effectively got him thrown out of the company seemed to be focused on these three points -

• Sell the 2600 for cost, make the money on the software
• Court 3rd party developers
• move focus away from Pinball machines

None of which seem like particularly bad advice to me.

[mick_aka]

I was too busy writing games in basic for my Dad's green screen Commodore 8032SK:



A few years ago when I was in a pinch I sold it for £100, biggest regret of anything I've ever sold.

I got my own Commodore 64 soon enough, then later was catapulted into the dungeons of the UKs Amiga scene and never looked back.

[kool kitty89]

I've read some other accounts that the 800XL had a burst in short term popularity around 1984 due to dumped prices to extremely slim profit margins (or even losses to boost short term revenue and curb the mounting dept) after Tramiel formed Atari Corp (or rather rolled Atari Inc's former consumer properties into TTL and renamed it Atari Corp) and that otherwise, the A8 was more expensive to produce than the C64 due to Commodore's vertical integration... and lack of a super low-end Atari model.
Albeit, comparing the 65XE/800XE to the C64 later on would give a more realistic comparison. (as those were all definitely sold for profit -and also designed in a lower cost configuration -including the cheap, ST-like keyboard)


And yes, the 800XL would have been in limited supply in 1983... it certainly was in the US due to the manufacturing freeze at Atari in fall of 1983. (it only lasted a few weeks, but it pretty much killed their holiday sales -and opened the door even wider for Commodore -would have opened the door for video game competition but the crash and shifting trends of competing game console manufacturers -in Coleco's case they'd almost certainly have done better to stay with the Colecovision rather than screw themselves with the Adam... then again that was more to do with not balancing both areas of business and botching the market model of the Adam -as well as some build quality issues)

[Chilly Willy]

I bought my Atari 400 the summer of '81. It was state of the art tech for '79. Atari never changed that other than to reduce the cost and add more ram via bank selecting. I got my A400 with 32KB of ram and a cassette. I later got the Mosaic 64KB expansion ram, and a Percom Double-Density floppy drive.

Some people don't like the looks of the 400/800, but most people thought they were the very definition of "cool" at the time. I certainly did.

There were many great games on the A8 and C64... perhaps my most favorite being Necromancer.

The Spectrum looks cool in a different way, but they were made to be cheap, and that meant they were fairly under-powered compared to the A8 and C64. The Z80 wasn't bad, but the rest of the hardware was severely lacking. I guess you get what you pay for.

[kool kitty89]

[QUOTE=Chilly Willy;328951]I bought my Atari 400 the summer of '81. It was state of the art tech for '79. Atari never changed that other than to reduce the cost and add more ram via bank selecting. I got my A400 with 32KB of ram and a cassette. I later got the Mosaic 64KB expansion ram, and a Percom Double-Density floppy drive.

Some people don't like the looks of the 400/800, but most people thought they were the very definition of "cool" at the time. I certainly did.

There were many great games on the A8 and C64... perhaps my most favorite being Necromancer.

The Spectrum looks cool in a different way, but they were made to be cheap, and that meant they were fairly under-powered compared to the A8 and C64. The Z80 wasn't bad, but the rest of the hardware was severely lacking. I guess you get what you pay for.

At least it did have color indexing on a per cell basis though RGBI is a bit ugly for many things... though that's something the Atari really missed out on (I think there's some limited implementation of indexed colors in the character mode, but most things tended to use 4 colors+sprites as such -there are 9 color registers though, and 5 dedicated to the playfeild... -and DLIs of course). Plus the Speccy had a true framebuffer, so a good chunk of software rendered stuff was more feasible than on the C64 or MSX. (A8 had a framebuffer too of course, and fairly flexible depths/resolutions)
The C64 had that in spades with CRAM, but a far more limited palette. (a shame that nice 128 color/shade palette couldn't be used more freely... then again the VCS had the same palette -and showed it off most commonly with raster bar effects)



Also, do remember that there was one other notable upgrade other than the bank switching logic/RAM additions:
GTIA replacing CTIA in 1980/81 with the added GTIA modes. (namely the 4bpp 80 pixel modes)