/retro/ thread

as a kid I used to flick the power switch repeatedly and bang my 1541

Look out, dude. XEs are a Q/C disaster and there's a good chance yours will have Micron 4264 RAM chips in it which have a 250% failure rate. This was after Captain Jack took over Atari and made everything as cheap as humanly possible.

>not waiting 10 seconds between power cycles
why is that a a bad thing?

They did the same thing as Texas Instruments, which was refuse to give out technical information so you couldn't program the things except in BASIC. Although Atari didn't take it as far as TI and literally try to lock out third parties from writing software.

> the C64 was a commodity machine sold in retail outlets like Sears and K-Mart, and a lot of normies who knew nothing about computers bought one.

Heh. My parents got a coupon for one, redeemable at Toys'R'Us when they bought a used car. We drove the new car over and picked it up that night. They were made and marketed for normies, in hopes that either the committed would go mainstream, or that the normies would lean enough to go hardcore geek.

It puts more stress on the components in the machine and is also more likely to cause glitches because DRAM takes a couple of seconds after power-off to shut down--the chips contain capacitors which don't immediately discharge.

youtube.com/watch?v=RvQlp7RC13c

1:53 for what happens when you power cycle too fast.

oh that's a shame. I may as well get an xl

An 800XL will run about 90% of Atari 8-bit software. The XEs have the best video quality, but the Q/C and reliability of them was awful. Not only shitty components but the PCB traces were very thin and easily damaged. The keyboard also sucks and hardly anything can use the 128k of RAM in the 130XE, so you're not missing much by not having one.

A few 400/800 programs require the translator disk to run on the 800XL and a tiny handful of things just won't work at all except on a real 400/800, but an 800XL is definitely your best best. Just beware if it has the "ingot" power supply as those are analogous to the Commodore black brick of death. Also 800XLs can have the Micron RAM chips in them, although it's easier to replace them than on the XE's crap-tier PCB.

Apple also used a lot of those Micron 4264s. They suck, they really, really suck.

Among other things, the C64 had full color text. That was a really big deal in 1982 and not much else at the time had that capability (unless you paid $4000 for an IBM PC with a CGA card).

A lot of the C64's reliability issues came from trying to do everything in as few ICs as possible. The Atari 8-bit has two chips to handle video output and everything in the machine runs at 3.5Mhz, exactly matching the NTSC color burst. The VIC-II has to do everything by itself and internally runs at 8Mhz, and NMOS chips do throw off more heat than more modern processes do.

The Plus/4 had it vastly worse with a single IC to handle sound, video, RAM refresh, and I/O.

thanks user. honestly the only reason I wanted an xe is because it looked like a mini ST but hearing about those shitty ram chips and all around low quality is just unacceptable.

The build quality of the original 800 utterly btfo the C64. That is a solid, thick metal casting enclosing the motherboard, done for FCC compliance originally (similar to the "heavy sixer" 2600).

Attached: Atari-800-Motherboard.jpg (1600x1200, 536K)

That thing cost almost $1000 (closer to $2000 in 2018 dollars). It had better be put together well.

The only way to erase the contents of DRAM is to power it off for at least 7 seconds.

The 800 price, in 1979/80 bucks, is impressive. I can imagine a rich kid with one back in the day blowing minds with the arcade quality Donkey Kong (pie factory and all), when others had 2600s.

Beep beep

Attached: IMG_20180918_184822_DRO.jpg (1920x1080, 498K)

Apple IIs were pricier than that at $1200. That was a rich man's computer.

The Atari I think had better application software than the C64, for example Visicalc. Neither of course beat the Apple II for getting work accomplished.

Well the Apple II painfully sucked at gaming. You had like 3 colors and sfx like crickets chirping, plus you could only attach one joystick to them (so much for two player games).

One reason for that was the FCC imposing really fucking strict RF regulations that came into effect in 1980--this resulted in the TRS-80 Model I being discontinued. Commodore lobbied for and succeeded in getting FCC regs reduced by the time the C64 came it.

Note that these regs applied only to _home_ computers, not business ones for which RF requirements were more lax. Apple did not get their machines certified for home use, so they could get away with stuff like the Disk II's exposed ribbon cables while Atari and Commodore had to use serial disk interfaces that were shielded better.

As much as Commodorefags love to jerk off the SID, it's a chip whose aesthetic never did anything for me. SID music always feels sluggish and you never have the nice, fast rocker tunes you have on NES games (take for example any Capcom title).

The build quality on the C64 was never the best. C128s are a lot better, but it was also a more expensive machine. On the downside, the video quality isn't as good--C128s always have jailbars which you don't see on a C64.

It was sad that the Atari 8-bit market died in the mid-80s and it never got a lot of later stuff like Maniac Mansion, Pirates!, SSI Gold Box games, etc since many of those should have been possible on the hardware.

The SID was more accessible especially to musicians. POKEY is more limited on the surface, but you can make it do some cool stuff if you experiment.

FWIW Commodore just installed whichever parts they had at hand, and that assembly might depend on which factory, which person, which phase of the Moon was present when it was assembled. Perhaps that is part of what gives Commodore a bad reputation on build quality, the uneven supply of parts, sockets, that barely two computers manufactured the same week would be identical. It could also be a reason why they were able to cut costs, less quality assurance.

It's why my dad's lasted 10 trouble free years and his one co-worker had one that died soon after he bought it.

The VIC-II's color text was a great feature not found in any other home computer at the time and it's too bad the Ataris didn't have that--it would have been fairly trivial to implement.

The Atari chipset was designed to bridge the gap between a game console and a computer terminal. For games, it would use 160x hardware based on the video generation methods used in the 2600, but with a dedicated DMA engine (Antic). For applications, it would also have a basic 320 mode with minimal features. This was considered sufficient in the late 70s. The real tragedy is that Atari spent millions on various projects that never saw the light of day, but the development of their graphics capabilities ended with GTIA (and the subsequent chasing off of their best engineers). That was the beginning of the end.

I tried the A8 first and struggled with it so the C64 seemed easier to me personally, and for the kind of things i prefer coding the C64 is easier overall. But mileage varies depending on what you want to write, really.

To me the C64 always seemed simpler and more logical, except the SID has always bewildered me and I've never been able to figure out how to make it do anything.

Both machines are cake if you're just writing a text adventure or some application package like a word processor. When you try to write a complex game with music and lots of stuff moving around, that's when things get hairy.

A lot of us have a love/hate relationship with the C64. The Atari's Q/C was miles better (at least pre-XE) and the 400/800 especially are very sturdy machines with elegant, thoughtful expansion and a simple, logical, menu-driven DOS (as opposed to typing OPEN,15,8,15:PRINT#"S:FILE":CLOSE15 to delete a file). Atari put a lot of TLC into the 400/800 and wanted to make them usable by non-neckbeards.

Attirra is a far better emulator than VICE, which I'm not a fan of.

I've used VICE for years and never had any major complaints.

Eh...it's not bad, but C64+1541 emulation is more advanced than other stuff and PAL emulation is better than NTSC emulation.

By the way, Bil Herd has outright denied that he or any other engineers at Commodore deliberately set out to make shoddy products (what engineer would?) He said all such considerations were due to management wanting to make things as cheap as they could.

t was a cheap computer, it was bowlfuls of fun. Its sound was not for everyone. It was unreliable for all but a few people I've met. I repaired a lot of them. The power supply was evil and killed more than just stuff on the board in the breadbox... It had heat problems, the chips are delicate and easy to kill. I don't think you will find an intellectually honest person who won't admit to most of what has been stated.

My cousin said he never had a C64 outright die on him, but his Atari 800XL crapped out soon after he got it due to the Micron RAM chips going south. He got a replacement PCB which lasted a few years before experiencing another RAM failure.

Funny, my dad worked at an electronics repair center and he said busted C64s were a routine occurrence--blown ICs, blown PSUs. He said he could count on his fingers the number of times they had to fix an Apple II or an Atari. Atari had several PSUs and word quickly got around that the ingot was bad news and to avoid it.

Bil Herd said he suggested they attach some diodes to test equipment because it was shorting out machines on the assembly line. Supposedly removing a speed bump outside the factory that trucks taking out a shipment drove over helped improve reliability of C64s as well. He said they also developed a beryllium lead frame to remove trapped heat from chip dies and reduce the chance of them overheating and self-destructing.

Somewhere in my basement lie buried my childhood Atari 800XL and 65XE that haven't been used in at least 20 years. AFAIR the 65XE is fucked (goes straight to Self Test on power on for whatever reason). One of these days I'm gonna get a CRT TV and have a nostalgia trip.