
Atari 800 vs. Commodore 64 – The Brief Tale of Two 8-Bit Home Computers - indigodaddy
https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/30/atari-800-vs-commodore-64-the-brief-tale-of-two-8-bit-home-computers/
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flohofwoe
A bit disappointing that the article doesn't go more into the technical
details of the hardware and how the two designs differed, and how the Atari
design influenced the 16-bit Commodore machines (the Amiga).

IMHO the 8-bit Ataris were a lot more innovative than the Commodore 8-bitters
(including the C64), despite being a couple years earlier to market.

For instance the Atari display chip ANTIC was an actual co-processor, running
a sequence of simple instruction via DMA to produce the display (very similar
to the Amiga's copper).

The C64 (and other 8-bit machines) could only reprogram the display chip mid-
frame by directly writing hardware registers with the CPU at the right time
(often controlled by a raster interrupt).

The 8-bit Ataris were the actual predecessor to the Commodore Amiga (not
surprising, because the same people who designed the Atari later designed the
Amiga).

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0815test
> IMHO the 8-bit Ataris were a lot more innovative than the Commodore
> 8-bitters (including the C64), despite being a couple years earlier to
> market. ... The 8-bit Ataris were the actual predecessor to the Commodore
> Amiga (not surprising, because the same people who designed the Atari later
> designed the Amiga).

Indeed. While the closest thing to a true successor to the Commodore 64 and
128 (ignoring the unreleased "Commodore 65") in the "16-bit" era was the Atari
ST, which like the C64 was optimized for low cost.

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bluGill
Alan Tramiel, CEO of Commodore in the C64 days was CEO of Atari at the time of
the ST.

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danmaz74
I think it was Jack Tramiel? But the reference about him being the CEO in
those two situations is interesting.

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bluGill
You are probably right. My memory of the 1980s is not perfect.

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danmaz74
I only remembered because I read a book about Commodore a couple of years ago.
At the time I had a C64, but had no idea who Jack Tramiel was :)

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RickSanchez2600
I had a Commodore 64 because the Atari 2600 promised a keyboard option to turn
it into a computer. It never came to market. So I switched to Commodore who
had a video game console with a keyboard and BASIC.

The Atari 800 was nice I heard, but there was a war between Commodore and
Atari users on the BBSES.

The Atari 800 had more colors than the Commodore 64, but the SID chip on the
Commodore 64 had better sounds, which attracted musicians to it.

Oddly enough management of Atari and Commodore switched and the Atari ST was
the successor of the Commodore 64, but I had the Commodore Amiga 1000 that was
designed by Jay Miner and other Atari engineers.

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krige
The story of how Jay Miner and the rest of very talented engineer crew
actually ended up under Commodore is a whole essay and a half - needless to
say, that wasn't what they had in mind when they started out at all! There's a
fantastic series of articles on the subject:
[https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-
amiga/](https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

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mhd
Here in Germany I knew basically no one who had an 8-bit Atari, it only became
popular enough with the ST. And even then it led a bit of a pariah existence
behind the Amiga, just like the Midgard RPG was behind the Dark Eye RPG (to
keep with the 80s/90s nostalgia mood).

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sundvor
In Norway the Amiga vs ST wars felt quite real. :) The Former was by far the
best, except for Midi of course - and as such it raged on. (I had the Vic20,
C64, then Amigas).

For me it being in my mid 40s now it was the original religious tech war. Now
we have Android Vs iPhone etc.

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NeedMoreTea
It was in the UK too - the worst part of which was the games that developed
for ST, as the most limited platform, then ported to Amiga. So many Amiga
versions were no better than the ST because of that, as it was obviously
cheaper than supporting both platforms properly.

The two most impressive things about the ST were the late addition of midi,
and that it was designed and launched in some absurdly short time - six months
or less?? - which explains many of the compromises, and it getting Gem.

Having had Amiga snatched from under him, Jack Tramiel wanted a fast response
to spoil their party. Tramiel who'd only left Commodore the previous year.

There's so many what-ifs to play with this timeline.

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zantana
Well Atari and Commodore enthusiasts were already used to crippled ports
through their experiences with Apple II ports with that awful aliased color
palette. :)

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drewg123
I spent a week at a computer camp when I was 10 or so, and was exposed to the
Atari 800 (and 400). To 10-year old me, they seemed far superior to my
neighbors' C64 machines. My only clear memory is being blown away playing some
kind of Star Wars based first-person game. For the day, the graphics seemed
incredible.

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jshaqaw
Probably Star Raiders which was awesome for its time

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drewg123
Just looked that up -- I think you are right. It seems primitive now, but it
was mind-blowing in 1980 or so..

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royjacobs
The Atari is referred to as "being built like a tank" due to the shielding,
but when did this stop being an issue? Did the FCC relax its requirements, or
did RF interference simply become less of a problem now that people aren't as
reliant on antennas anymore?

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dfox
It never stopped to be an issue, only today there are better ways to solve it,
mainly multilayer boards with internal ground and power planes and generally
better understanding of EMC.

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karmakaze
Anecdotally in Canada the hackers who actually discovered how to code for the
machines tended to be on Atari and C64 owners tended to be more consumer
oriented. I started out thinking I'd get the ZX81 kit with my own money which
got vetoed by my parents saying that was a toy and pitched in for an Atari 400
(with no storage). I'd alternate between writing a game playing it for a day
or two, reset to the Asteroids cartridge, repeat.

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timbit42
It would be nice if this website didn't block access from VPNs.

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cr0sh
On a side note, not related to the article...

...but during the same period Radio Shack attempted to compete with the C64
and Atari 8-bit machines with their TRS-80 Color Computer line; specifically
the Color Computer 2 (the Color Computer 3 was a more worthy competitor, but
since it had 128K and came into being at the tail end of the 1980s when things
were transitioning to the PC and the 8-bit machines were "dying out" \- it
doesn't really figure here).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer)

The thing about the Color Computer 2 (this applied as well to a great extent
with the 3), is that it was mostly a reference design by Motorola, and
subsequently virtually all of the main component ICs were Motorola parts.

In this case, the CPU was the 8-bit 6809 (clocked at roughly 1 MHz - though
there were ways to double this speed), and the "display chip" was the MC6847:

[http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/6847](http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/6847)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6847](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6847)

As you can tell from the wikipedia article, it's capabilities were nowhere
near that of the machines it was competing with. There was a way to get some
weird modes called "semigraphics" via messing with another chip in the machine
called the "SAM" chip, but they were rarely used.

In short - for everything the Color Computer 2 did, it relied almost entirely
upon the speed and capabilities of the CPU itself! Graphics blitting, sound
generation (there was no "sound chip" \- merely a 6-bit DAC - which was shared
with other parts of the system as well), keyboard/joystick input - all went
through the CPU.

It has been argued that the Motorola 6809 is a far superior CPU (in design and
capabilities) than the CPUs used in the Atari or Commodore 8-bit machines (or
the Apple IIe); in fact, many arcade and gambling machines of the era also
used the 6809 (generally in multiples) over other offerings.

Where it fell down, though, was it's price. It was easily several times more
expensive than other offerings from other manufacturers, which the other
machines used (mainly variants of the MOS 6502).

I've often wondered what/why Tandy/Radio Shack took this route? Now
originally, the Color Computer (well, the 6809 and 6847 combo) grew out of a
"videotext" style terminal that was originally marketed toward farmers, with
the idea of receiving up-to-date "almanac" and planning information via phone
lines and the terminal. This was during the late 1970s/early 1980s. I can't
recall what this device was called, but I recall it had a blue case, but
looked identical to the Color Computer otherwise; it can be found in old Radio
Shack catalogs now online, if you care to look.

Did Tandy/Radio Shack have some kind of exclusive license deal with Motorola,
to only use Motorola or Tandy-designed parts for the machines? I don't think
the SAM was a Motorola component (?); and later with the Color Computer 3 it
had it's own custom chip (the GIME) too - but everything else was Motorola...

The price point of the CPU prevented them from putting multiple CPUs in the
machine (I often wonder how things might have been different had there been a
second 6809 CPU in the Color Computer to handle sound and/or graphics); but
what prevented them from putting in a cheaper CPU (like the 6502?) or a sound
chip (there were a few cheap ones out there made by TI and others)?

Instead - for additional sound capabilities, you had to purchase cartridge
expansion - either third-party or from Radio Shack (the Speech/Sound Pak, or
the Orchestra-90 Pak), as well as an expansion device (the Multi-Pak
interface), especially if you already had a floppy disk system and/or
modem/rs-232 pak. That upped the price considerably, and as a result, few did
it, and so those sound options were not well supported in games or other
applications.

Instead, the built-in sound was exploited as far as things could take it at
the time (and more recently, even further). Later, to improve the graphics of
the system with the release of the Color Computer 3, Tandy added the GIME
chip, which basically took over the duties of the SAM chip and 6847, but only
partially (semigraphics modes were not available - all other modes were,
though); but it was a seemingly in-house designed chip, and they also had to
have a third-party update the BASIC (that was originally provided by
Microsoft) to support the new resolutions and colors enabled by that chip.

The company that did this was Microware, who had long supplied a multi-user
multi-tasking OS for the 6809 called "OS-9"; they later produced a version for
the Color Computer 3 called "OS-9 Level II" \- not that this should not be
confused with OS9 for the Mac (totally different products).

Microware essentially hacked the BASIC. The original code was from Microsoft,
but they had moved on and didn't want to do the updates to the code, so what
Microware did was kinda ingenious - they had their ROM of "patches", and on
bootup, they would copy the ROM code for the MS BASIC over into RAM, then
overlay hooks to their ROM routines in the RAM copy, then run the modified RAM
copy of the BASIC interpreter; this was called "all-RAM mode", and it was
something that was long possible to do with the CoCo 2 (and was used in a
similar manner by third-parties to extend commands in BASIC for their own
products and extensions). Microware's only changes were being able to do it at
boot time. Anyhow, they extended it and it worked (mostly) well enough.

But even at that late date (circa-1986) - Tandy had to go with a custom chip,
and not anything third-party outside of Motorola (from what I recall, Motorola
didn't have any display chips of a better spec for the 8-bit line; they had
mainly moved on to their 16 bit 68K lineup). So what was preventing them? I
honestly don't know...

Interestingly, some time in the early 2000s it came to light that Microware
had probably the only (maybe outside of Tandy itself) "prototype" of the Color
Computer 3 - it was a giant wire-wrapped board; it's most curious feature
being that it lacks a GIME chip! This is especially important as there is no
documentation/datasheet or internal information about how the GIME chip
worked, outside of what was provided to programmers. In short, the GIME chip
is an "unobtainable" component (there are two versions - one from 1986, the
other from 1987, with minor "bug fixes"). It is hoped that this rare board
might provide clues as to how the GIME chip was designed, but right now the
board is a curiosity (I can't recall who it was given to, but it was given to
that person by employees of Microware, which was still in business at the
time, and may still be (?), who found it in a back closet or something like
that).

