Retro thread...go!

>lcd
>retro

I loves me some of that Yuro shovelware.

the reason why people still like retro in general and Amiga in particular is because software and hardware really went to shit. no one cares about quality anymore, and it's primarily the brain dead normie users fault. we've peaked in terms of productivity applications and it's downward spiral from there. Amiga reminds us what could have been. instead we are stuck with crapple, spergdroid and MOUNTAINS of shovelware crap that is literally unusable

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This is just a problem of Jow Forums not writing enough good software (or any software for the matter). I'm serious if Jow Forums would just put down the shitposting for a day, put their heads together and start a repository of something. Anything. There could be good software made that could even resemble the retro software aesthetics everyone likes.

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What's the name of this software?

Tardsuite

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Atari could have ruled the home computer market if they'd:

1. Set their sights on the casual hobbyist rather than Apple's high-end customers. The 800 wasn't really that easy to internally expand anyway (except for RAM).

2. Built a low cost single board model like the 800XL from the start. Of course there were serious problems with this since the FCC had not yet relaxed RF emission standards. The 400 was still more complex than it needed to be, though.

3. Given away all the documentation from the start. Get people coding and you end up with a loyal user base and a solid software library.

it's right there in the screenshot, dummy

The Atari 8-bits have some cool features and Rescue on Fractalus bit the big one when they tried to get it on the C64, but the C64 is overall simpler and easier to just get up there and bang out a game on.

Yeah and once they had their share of the market and a steady base to expand on, you could have been so much more.

I liked the Amstrad CPC if only it wasn't so dogshit slow.

Having to move around a 16k video buffer was too much to ask of an 8-bit CPU.

What about the ZX Spectrum? What were its graphics like? I seem to recall the graphics memory was also static?

Instead of the ST they would have had the Amiga and also no Trammell while Commodore would have had nothing.
What a great timeline.

It has only a single video mode, which is 280x192 bitmap graphics (there's no text mode). It occupies 6k of RAM starting at $57FF and yes, it is fixed and cannot be moved from that location, so page flipping and double buffering are not possible.

most games were just spectrum ports with paint over them. the cpc can preform well when coded properly but that was almost never the case until it was literally dead
youtube.com/watch?v=HVv-oBN6AWA

I'm an Apple II guy, so I have no horse in this race. When it comes down to it, it's quality versus quantity. The Atari 8 bits were quality hardware, and had quality software. The C64s were low priced budget computers designed to bring home computers to the masses. Although you could buy both Atari's and Commodores at the toy store, I never saw an Atari computer at Toys'R'Us, unlike the Commodores, and Texas Instruments.

I always took for granted inserting a disk into my Apple and turning it on (and having it boot). On the C64, you had to go into basic and type some weird-ass commands to start a C64 disk, and then wait for an eternity.

You turned the C64 on and you had everything right there. BASIC and basic disk utilities.
You turned the Apple II on, you got a screen that told you to insert a floppy and couldn't even get into BASIC (that didn't even support floppy drives) without knowing a key combo. Couldn't even format a disk without having to boot another disk before that.

>thinking marketing a computer on several fronts was a bad thing
No wonder the C64 was the most sold computer of all time.

The Apple II, you say? The computer that cost over $1000 and didn't display lowercase text for the longest time? The computer with no color text? The computer with an incredibly twisted graphics mode (7 bits per pixel and everything is reversed in memory versus how it appears on the screen)? The computer that can't display the color red? (orange apparently is close enough). The computer with clicking noises for sound unless you bought a separate sound card that about 10 programs could use?

Yeah, it's so fucked up that you start a program on a C64 by typing LOAD"*",8,1. It's not as if the Apple II didn't have such friendly commands like PR#3 and CALL-151. And it was all carried forward until the IIgs which finally had a decent graphics memory map in the new modes and added decent sound... too bad they didn't bother adding sprites or a CPU fast enough to keep up with anything else of the day... but hey... it still cost more.

Oh and how could I possibly forget the Apple III which gets hot and spits out its chips! If it stops working... DROP IT!!!!!!
You mean that kind of quality?

>You turned the Apple II on, you got a screen that told you to insert a floppy and couldn't even get into BASIC (that didn't even support floppy drives) without knowing a key combo
Because it's that difficult to press Ctrl+Reset, no?

Ok yeah, the disk commands on the C64 weren't that intuitive. They weren't intuitive on the Apple II either, not like the Atari or TRS-80's nice menu-driven DOS.

Apple IIs don't actually produce any color, it's all made from NTSC bleed.

The Apple II came out in 1977 though? The C64 was newer by half a decade. That's a long time and technology advanced a lot.

Is all the same pool of late 70s parts though, no?

Not at all. The VIC-II and SID were designed during 1980-81 when the Apple II was already several years old.

To be honest, I think it's a little easier to code on the Z80. You don't have to do zero page gymnastics to do the same type of things. However, as a result, I think 6502 coders wrote more optimal code out of necessity from the beginning where you could write downright slow code on the Z80 and get away with it.

But then on the Speccy forums I've seen really good Z80 coders cut half the clock cycles out of what looks like a pretty efficient routine and it's magazines published some pretty optimal routines for many things back in the day so even beginning programmers could start out with some optimal routines supporting their code. Even if their game logic wasn't optimal they could still push graphics to the display pretty fast.

How convenient, I just so happen to be installing System 7.5.5 over the network on my LC.

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youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI

One thing that amazed to me at the time, is that most US C64 game releases are not compressed. The very first thing you'll try to implement with something as slow as the tape is compression. And you don't need the ultimate packers we have today, even a simpler RLE compression is useful most of the time (that can easily decompress on the fly).

Indeed I always found it amusing that C64 pirate groups always did way better versions of the games than the companies themselves. For example, Katakis comes on 2 disk sides as an original, but the cracked version has only 1 disk side. Same for Hawkeye, Knight Games and a number of other games. And of course the large amount of games which came on multiple uncompressed files as original even though the game would perfectly make a single load game. Crackers also added high score save routines, fixed bugs and fixed for the different video standards (NTSC/PAL). There have been cases where US companies took the cracked version of a game and made an original from it for the European market.

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here is a denoisyfied version

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Atari made a huge blunder by keeping some hardware details of the 400/800 a secret for the first year or so. They would only give out hardware manuals to devs if they signed a nondisclosure agreement. This particularly caused them bad relations with Sierra because Ken Williams couldn't understand this degree of secrecy when he was used to the Apple II where all details about the hardware down to the signal level were published.

To be fair, they weren't alone in this. The Apple II was an open architecture but Apple actively sued clone manufacturers. IBM did not officially acknowledge the existence of PC clones until the PS/2 line came out.

Yeah it was. Both Atari and TI fucked up by trying to keep the hardware a secret.

Apple sued clone manufacturers because the Apple II's OS ROMs weren't vectored, they used absolute jump addresses so you couldn't really clone the ROMs without essentially duplicating their copyrighted code. What made PC clones possible was because the IBM PC BIOS used vectored addresses so you could have BIOS function calls jump anywhere you liked and a clone BIOS could be done without lifting any of IBM's code.

IBM didn't like it and they wouldn't acknowledge PC clones until the PS/2 era, but they couldn't do anything to stop it.

Dog bless those famous 6502 illegal opcodes.

That broke many a program on the C64 during its days. They must have had like over a dozen revisions of the thing, each worst then the last.

The first VIC-IIs with the ceramic shells had 64 color cycles per line while it's 65 on all later revisions. The enhanced Apple IIe and IIc also had the CMOS 65C02 which didn't have the illegal opcodes and broke some stuff (especially copy protections). But the C64's CPU was always NMOS, I'm sure they always had illegal opcodes.

Really now, how often did you ever see commercial software use illegal opcodes?

Very little. Probably no more than 2% of Atari 8-bit software uses them. It's a bit more common on the C64 and Apple II, especially in copy protection schemes.

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I'd say it's definitely more than that. In fact it was highly common to put illegal opcodes in copy protections and I know in particular that all later Synapse games use them. I recall some European games did as well.

The figure for the C64 is probably similar or higher just because it has more software and lasted longer.

Using illegal opcodes on a C64 was fine because they worked on every machine. On the Apple II, yeah, the introduction of the CMOS-based 65C02 on the //e and IIc did cause problems.

I put it down to saving on components. The 6502 was explicitly aimed at electronics hobbyists and sold for $25. Intel and Motorola aimed for enterprise customers and sold their CPUs for 3x as much money.

And I forgot about those Synapse protections. Their games usually had checksums which had to match up. Tape releases would refuse to run if a disk drive was present and disk releases wouldn't run if a tape drive was present.

IDK but if you compare lots of games which have releases on both machines, the C64 version is usually better than the Atari.

youtube.com/watch?v=VV6jZ-wDU-U

youtube.com/watch?v=ph87Lftez5w

By the time Ghostbusters came out, the C64 was the target platform for most game developers and games were designed primarily around its hardware and got only watered down ports.

that's cute

To be fair the Atari version is nicer in some ways particularly in not having a giant screen border, although it does have some compromised features because Activision like the majority of stupid developers insisted on the game being compatible with the 48k Atari 800 over two years after it had been discontinued.

My first computer. It was never meant for games but I played the shit out of some dos games on this thing.

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A lot of those later games like Maniac Mansion wouldn't have been possible on the Atari at all because it didn't have enough sprites to get the job done. The C64 actually uses a single sprite for each character and a multiplexer is used to double the size of them. The Atari's player sprites can span the entire height of the screen so raster interrupts wouldn't be needed but they're also only 8 pixels wide and monochrome. You'd need to stack sprites but since there's only four actual player sprites, you don't really have enough for that.

In fact for a lot of games particularly when you started to get into the NES era of side scrollers, the Atari's sprite limits would have created problems.

Side scrolling is easier to pull off on the C64 because its video modes always use the same amount of memory (character mode always 1k and bitmap mode always 8k) while the Atari's modes use variable amounts of memory.

I read an article not too long ago that talked abnout how, even though computers have gotten technically faster since the 1980s, we now have to operate through so many layers that the latency of a single keypress to register on the screen of a modern PC is longer than that of computers that ran at less than 1MHz, 35 years ago.

Somebody above mentioned something about how the C64 could put 16 colors seamlessly on the screen. That person has never programmed a C64 or he would know that the VIC-II breaks the screen up into regions that can display only 4 out of the sixteen available colors

i like those prints, where do they come from?

youtube.com/watch?v=1ai9jtJHYow

You're not getting Windows 10 to boot up in three seconds. Modern OSes are like some twisted Rube Goldberg contraption where you have to execute thousands of lines of code each time a key is pressed. Pressing a key on a TRS-80 is literally just like flicking a switch. Press it and it puts the scan code in a memory location from which it can be read. That's all.

jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/

Fuck user, so many good days I had with an A1200. Programming and rave music.
Fucking god-tier computer with no equal, no equal ever.

>be me
>work in a charity shop
>looked in the bins
>sorting room had chucked away a C64
>mfw

Also a ZX81 with PSU and a 16k ram pack came in the other week, grabbed it.

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I rescued a Coco 2 from a thrift shop a couple weeks ago. You power it on, there's a click from a relay inside the case and bam, it's ready to go. Really satisfying.

very nice, thanks

>Minitel
Based and frogpilled

CoCo 2s are found on Ebay in abundance, they're really pretty worthless particularly if they have just Color BASIC or

The CPU in the Apple II is actually only clocked at 1.2Mhz, but the hardware is extremely simple and has minimal latency so in practice it's quite a bit faster than it seems on paper.

nerd station is growing

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Wouldn't have a VIC-20 without a RAM expander though. 5k is pretty fucking tiny. It can support up to 32k (28k from BASIC) but only with third party expanders (Commodore's didn't go above 16k).

i personally like seeing what i can do with the limits of the machine at stock, its why i didnt go for a c64, the vic 20 was really basic (ba dum tiss) but its interesting to see what was done on it and the games made for it with only 3.5k of ram available for programs to use
i might get some more acessories, but for the time being a few tape and cartridge games are all im really doing, im waiting on some stuff for ham morse and SSTV

Reminder that CRTs are still superior

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archive.org/details/Compute_056_January_1985_U/page/n71

Try this. I couldn't get it to work on VICE. It would exit back out to BASIC when your parachute guy touched the landing pads.

You probably made a mistake somewhere.

yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about

Not since a while, user.
Superior for low res content only though? Sure.

danluu.com/input-lag/

I would think VIC-20 software that needs 32k is pretty rare, although the best thing you can would be a RAM cartridge that lets you remap the memory anywhere since this will let you run cartridge images (load the image into $A000 and type SYS (PEEK(65532)+256*PEEK(65533)) to reboot).

They were too good for this world.

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> widescreen

Yikes.

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>someone posts amiga pic
>hurr furry kys die in hell

the absolute state of 4channel

Mutts have a passionate and illogical hate against the platform.

>tfw shipping on these

>I work out at the library

>tfw having your garage filled to the brim with high end and professional CRTs

>tfw very good at oral and sex and willing to trade

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