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Games Entertainment

Old Atari Design Docs Online 97

Posted by Hemos from the what-the-hell dept.
gribbly writes "Forget emulation -- now you can read classic Atari design docs!" It's all documents from the early 1980s, I think, and looks totally...I dunno. It's like taking a journey into the past.
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Old Atari Design Docs Online More

Old Atari Design Docs Online

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  • I thought he meant the amiga, which has all the "computer" features.

  • The controls... (Score:3)

    by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @01:33AM (#846250) Homepage
    Ah, gotta love the controls specifications:
    1. 1 Player start switch/LED
    2. 2 Player start switch/LED
    3. fire switch (2 if cocktail)
    4. superzapper switch (2 if cocktail)
    5. whirly gig (2 if cocktail)
    The coolest are of course the last two... Words like "superzapper" and "whirly gig" rule! Just to make it better, the last one has "rotation control" scribbled next to it in what looks like ball pen ink. Ah, that really clears it up for me. Aplogies to all old hard-core players who alwayss called it a "whirly gig" and never thought twice about it, of course...;^)
  • yeah, a rusty old second hand 520 (or 1024) st for 30 quid, keeps *much* better time in cubase than a amd k62-300 pc using soundblaster platinum.
  • Heh

    I Remember once around the Uni. there someone had ripped a pay'n display meter out of the ground and used it to hammer about 10 more into small bent piles of metal. How we laughed :)

    troc
  • Interestingly enough, Atari used VMS for their internal systems:

    [MOORE.PACKRAT]shi.mem

    (It was something close to that. It was in the pink book in a mention of cartridge specifications.)

    And having used VMS software that came out of that era, I have to say it was probably a good move. Honestly, I've seen more people with problems trying to use Win32 OSs and software than back in the days of DEC when we just told the lusers what their logins were and set up their accounts to pull up a simple menu.

    But then, we also had to make sure that people went to class(es) to learn how to use the software effectively, gave them complete paper instruction manuals, keyboard templates with key combos, etc.

    DEC was a fun place to co-op. *sniffle*

    Chris
  • A few of em are still at Atari/Midway West.
  • I think it was when Dragon's Lair (1983) came out that the 50 credit started to appear. With Dragon's Lair, it was obvious that this was no ordinary arcade game: Laser discs (bleeding edge back then) and true animation. It was not very difficult to justify, in the gamer's mind at least, that this was a more expensive machine. Heck, I remember that many arcades used to even have additional monitors on top of the machine so that all the observers could get a good view of what was going on.

    Somewhere in the late 80s the trend started to spread out a bit. If it wasn't the fact that the video games were designed to eat your quarters faster than the change machine could produce them (read: Heavy Gear or something similar), then it was the brand new pinball machines that were demanding 50 for one play or 75 for two games.

    Nowadays all the games are 50 and most of them suck. The only ones I like playing are the driving games, but at $1.00 a pop it makes no sense.

    Anyhoots..
    --

  • "The lynx was not American. It was made in Japan and Taiwan. The Jaguar was US-made."

    Sorry, i meant designed. *Everything* is made in the far east, from the American flag (Roll Bill Hicks jokes) to the Simpsons.
  • Man, looking through this guy's site really depresses me. It takes me back to my happiest days, spent plugging quarters into the old arcade, Gizmo's (long since turned into one shit-shop after another) in downtown Omaha.

    Emulation really doesn't do it for me. Sure, I get the satisfaction of PLAYING the game, but I don't get the "Arcade" feeling. I like plugging quarters (1, not 4!), and playing a simple game like Galaga, or Gyruss, Missile Command, Super Zaxxon... I go to an arcade today, and get a headache from the lack of good "clean fun" type games, and the $1 or greater per-play price.

    I really wish I had the money, time & patience to get into this hobby of collecting old Arcade consoles. If anyone has any pointers on how to get started in this hobby, post a reply. I'd really like to get my hands on a Good Condition Gyruss box for under $300 :)
  • Sideways scrolling was made easy on the Amiga because of the ability to have a 0 -> 15 pixel shift value, and you could change the bitplane addressed to get word accuracy, voila smooth scrolling. But you needed to blit the new blocks, say, on the right off the screen. If you wanted to overscan the display you`d need to make it wider still, so say goodbye to 2 sprites.

    (That left you enough sprites for the player character (if you want 16 colours anyway). So you`d have to use blitter objects for all the other bad guys, scores etc. Which meant that slow cookie-cut blits with 4 sources were needed.)

    On the megadrive you had the mapped blocks, and all the objects (player, bad guys, bullets, scores) were done with sprites, which are free (as in processor time).

    So although there were loads of scrollers (more after the megadrive came out and pushed standards up), the vast majority of them were pretty shallow (now many characters on screen at once), and not very fast (maybe 10% of games were in 50 frames a second, practically the megadrive games were)

    If by chunky graphics you mean chunky pixel mode - where one byte = 8 * 1 bitplanes - then i`m afraid they didnt become a necessity for 3d games for the simple reason that that mode didnt exist on the amiga - at least, not until the cd32 came out. And even then it was extremely limited. The Amiga 500/600/1000/1200 was purely planer.


  • MAME handles Tempest quite nicely -- If you can manage to find the ROMs. Lucky for you, there's a copy of the original 1980 Tempest ROM set on PROPAGANDA [tilez.org] for your retro-pleasure. Its listed as "Tempest ROMs" under the "Other Resources" category. Enjoy.

    Bowie J. Poag
  • wow! you have a C compiler for the 800? now there is something i'd be interested in.

    i admit it - i still love my 800. i only called it glorified b/c all the kids in my neighborhood used it for games - while i at least did a 'little' programming.

    yeah - my dad bought the whole thing b/c it ran VisiCalc, which was the first computer program i ever had interaction with.

    for fun, check out Ebay [ebay.com] for old 800 stuff. how cheap!!

  • Hey, i was agreeing with you! That wasnt sarcasm, cubase on the pc sucks.
  • There was also a really nasty software
    hack that could be done on the original
    ST that sort of enabled hardware scrolling.

    With this hack you could place the place
    the start address of the framebuffer
    anywhere, so you could do vertical scrolling
    to a pixel, and horizontal scrolling
    to 16 pixels.

    Unfortunately, the STE came along which
    had this kind of thing officially supported,
    but wasn't entirely backwards compatible.

    RoboSmurf
    (who used to be an ST demo coder...)
  • (read: Heavy Gear or something similar)

    I believe you're thinking of Heavy Barrel, not Heavy Gear. (Heavy Gear was a series of computer games from Activision.)

  • The original name for PacMan was "Puckman" !

    They changed it at the last minute for fear that kids
    would change the "P" to "F" and get.........well you get it !

    The 80's were great.
    Bring back the games like Tempest !



    - Save The Whales ,Collect the whole set !
  • "Jack Tramiel saved Atari?"

    I know well what I am talking about. Yes, Jack made Commodore. He also destoyed it. The C-64 was not the model T, nor was my beloved Atari. The Apple was the Model T. Sorry.

    Jack did NOTHING to help with mutltmedia; the Amiga was designed outside Commodore by Jay Miner who had left Atari to form his own company. Atari had a share in the company, and was to license the "Lorraine" (as the Amiga was then called) chipset for their new computer.

    But when Jack Tramiel took over Atari, he decided to refuse Amiga Systems any more funding, knowing that they would go out of business and the computer would default to Atari, as majority stockholder; he would just steal it.

    But Amiga sold the computer to Tramiel's old company, Commodore. In the lawsuit that followed, Tramiel got rights to some of the technology, but nothing to do with the Amiga was designed during his reign at either company; it was designed at Atari during the Warner days, then at Amiga Systems, then sold to Commodore after Jack bought Atari. Commodore did not steal it, Amiga sold it to them rather than face bankruptcy. They were ex-Atari guys; they wanted to sell it to Atari. But they did not want to sell it for Jack's price, .10 on the dollar.

    Was Atari going down under the reign of Ray Kassar and Warner? You bet it was. But Jack's solution was to kill everything. He did not care about beauty or quality, just price.

    In the late 1980s, Atari employees asked permission to hold a Christmas party--an Atari tradition since 1972. Jack responded that he would not help pay for it, and if they wanted one they would have to pay for it themselves. The employees passed the hat around, and finally threw their own party.

    Jack and his sons came. They ate the employees food, drank their wines, and gave a speech about how important the employees were at Atari. The next day they fired most of them.

    If you want to really know Jack Tramiel, spend a few days with his ex-employees. Then you may feel different.

    So, let's see: "Model T"...well the Commodore was just a cheap copy of the Atari, which was alreay four years old by the time the C-64 came out. The Atari was a 6502-based design like the Apple, but with a bunch of value-added features. Sorry, the Apple II wins the price for the "Model T" computer. The Atari was the luxury machine, "the Duseldorf", and the Commodore was just a knockoff. Since Jack had nothing to do with the development of the Amiga, and Atari's refusal (under Jack) to provide the final third-level funding for the Amiga so he could get it cheap instead of paying what was owed destroyed the company and probably contributed to Jay Miners early death. So he gets an "F" on the Multimedia claim. The Jaguar was designed in England by Flair, and while Jack had people working on it he fired the Falcon development staff to do it, so that is not too much credit for him.....

    Buy you are right on the MIDI ports. Jack did do that. But he destroyed Atari to do it.

  • "the PSX had a lead start"

    Well, yeah, but as you just pointed out indirectly, that didnt help the DC... :)
  • If you're in the Bay Area, check out http://www.caextreme.org [caextreme.org] (CA Extreme)

    They've hooked up with VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) and will be putting on a show of classic arcade games in San Jose towards the end of September.

  • I can't handle this much nostalgia.

    Blue elf needs reality check, badly.

  • "
    Computers:
    - framebuffer
    - hardware support for scrolling of the pixels
    - blitters
    - hblank interrupt for effects
    "

    Atari ST scores 1/4
    But the ST was a home computer was it not?

    "
    Arcade games:
    - n planes of tile oriented video (i.e, the screen is divided into 8x8 elements selected by number)
    - sprites generator (usually a plane of its own)
    - priority manager
    - hardware support for global scrolling of the tile planes
    - horizontal and vertical line scrolling
    - vblank interrupt only
    "

    Commodore 64 scores roughly 4/6.
    But the commodore 64 was not an arcade machine.

    Your memory seems to be not quite as clear as it could be.

    FatPhil
  • Well, tile-based graphic modes are nice for action games, but not that nice for aventure games with non-tiled graphics, not nice for showing how the kid can easily draw a circle with a simple basic command, and definitively a pain for any windowing system (look at the gem and/or workbench, compare to the pc text-mode interfaces of the time).

    Once you have implemented (in hardware) a framebuffer, which is a simple linear memory read + color palette lookup + DAC, you'd rather spend time and money accelerating its use thru blitters, coppers and equivalents (Amiga) or not accelerate anything at all and reduce the costs (Atari) rather than having to add a tile-based display system.

    OG.
  • Yeah, they suck
  • Well, the original poster was talking about the atari st, so I placed myself in that time frame. The ST hardware was definitively of the "framebuffer" category. You'll notice that the STE added hardware scrolling and a blitter.

    BTW, the ST has an hblank (on both timer B or maybe C, I'm not completely sure, and irq level 2).

    Older home computers were inheriting from the arcade games/text console era. The VIC20, C64, ZX81... had a tile based architecture. The evolution started with the Spectrum and the Oric, which had an intermediate representation between tiles and framebuffer. The Amstrad is one of the first widely used pure framebuffer implementations.

    OG.

  • The Gauntlet specs are attributed to -

    P. Brosnan
    M. O'rourke

    and summink else I can't remember...

    Brown Out

  • Yeah, Atari had some PC. Designed by a guy called Jay Miner. Ever hear of him?

    Another company made a cheap clone of it without all the custom ASICs four years later and sold it with the worst disk drive ever made.

  • Aha, now i know how they pulled the spiffy scrolling map off =:-) I've been wondering about that for years... Of course they have basicly a character generator (sorta like the old NES) to deal with the background and then a "motion object" (sprite generator) to deal with the foreground.... Cool =:-)
  • I like the name, as long as nobody confuses it with the Pink Shirt Book.

  • When Atari sold one of their VAXes after they were bought out by Jack save-a-dollar-kill-a-product Tramiel, they lost the original design details for many of their custom ICs.

    I can only hope that it is on a TK50 somewhere...

  • Actually, MAME's run all the games described here for years - you can get all the tech info here right out of the source.
  • was, I think, Dragon's Lair that was $.50 a play.

    However, there were some others that were that much as well. The game Firefox [coinop.org] was that much to play, and so was another of the laserdisc games that was out (it was one where you were on a futuristic motorcycle and the track was displayed to you as video from the LD. I had a lot of fun with that one!).

    I do remember that Electronic Games magazine way back then had lots of questions about "when will we all start paying $.50?" If you think about it, finding a $.25 game is worth it any more. Hell, it hasn't changed since Pong!

    But, last time I went to the arcade they were $.50 minimum to play, and most were either $1 or some even $2. So, I just wander around the place and find the $.25 games. They are more fun anyway.

  • You know why they want you to enter part of your registration number on the machine, bloody weird! Is that in case someone nicks your reciept?, or in order to stop you from giving it away to someone else? tsk, tsk, tsk

  • I wonder if we can improve the current Atari arcade emulators with these documents? Any one noticed how the voices in Gauntlet arcade games suck? :(
  • maybe, maybe not, but an *awful* lot of studio engineers are/were so used to the ST version, they took a long time to switch.
  • Hmm, when did I get my ST... 1989, I think. In 1989 more UK companies were using Atari STs for desk top publishing than Apple Macs. It's a slightly misleading statistic, because the big companies were using Macs, and several of them, but the ST was an enabling technology - every little company could afford a #300 Atari ST to do their in-house DTP. My Mac-fan mates (including Wombat - hi there!) happily informed me that the Mac market was worth far more, and prefered to use that statistic, but I would always counter with a comment that that was because they cost more! FatPhil
  • heh, why do you think I've still got my TT030? This was Atari fastest production machine, a whopping 68030 @ 32MHz. Cubase timing is damn tight on this box, except the friggin program freezes up in the arrangement window sometimes.

    Also, Atari released a version of System V for the TT030. I don't know anything about it, except that is supposedly exists in some back closet somewhere. I've got an old version of NetBSD on mine. Rock solid.

  • DISCLAIMER: Some info on this page assumes you are from the Omaha, NE area. I apologize.......


    I just got into arcade collecting/building myself, so I'll try to lend a few pointers (though most of this info will be totally region-centric)


    You mention Omaha, so I'm assuming you are from the area. I usually check out the old used arcade cabinets from Central Distrubting. They are located off 108th street in the Old Mill area, right next to Old Mill Toyota (by the hotel over there). I picked up my SF 2 cabinet there (not exactly a classic, but it's Jamma based with lotsa buttons, more on that later) and they were pretty cool. They'll deliver it to you for a small fee I think (I lived too far away for them to deliever). Anyway, the salesman there you want to talk to is Joe. He'll let you come in and look around. Most of the stuff is in pretty bad shape, but occasionally you'll find some nice gems. Another place to check out (and I forget the name) is the ammusement place close to 84th and 'F' (next to Skateland). A friend of mine went there, said they had good deals. Also check out the arcade places at Westroads/Crossroads/and Oakview. Especially Oakview, they tend to sell a lot of cabinets from time to time (but most of their's are newer machines). And I'm not sure, but Family Fun Center might be willing to part with some older ones (they have a really cool retro arcade there, if you manage to dodge the bullets :)

    As for what kind of cabinet you want, I recommend sticking to Jamma based cabinets (most are, but the really old ones aren't). Basically, the Jamma harness provides a uniform interface to the monitor/buttons/etc, so swapping out PCB's are pretty easy. I like old Capcom games (Strider, SF 2, Final Fight), and you can find tons of them on Ebay or perhaps purchase them from a place like Central Distributing. For the really really old ones that used dedicated hardware, there are a few sites on the net that show you how to make a Jamma harness yourself, but you'd be better off buying the whole thing in a lot of cases (if you are interested in coverting a non-jamma to jamma, check out This link [gamearchive.com].

    You will also want to check the condition of the monitor. It's pretty much a given that older games will have some burn in. You'll have to watch out for that. The good news is, if you have to settle for a monitor with burn in, Happ Controls [happcontrols.com] has a good selection of monitors to choose from, if you need to replace it.


    Personally, I like to pick up my cabinets from local outlets (like that place Central Distributing). Usually, they are more than happy to let you mess around with it and make sure all the controls work and the monitor looks sharp and the sound works, etc. In other words, you know what you are buying. :)


    Once you find yourself a decent cabinet, you can start buying just the PCB's and swap them in an out (nice thing about the Jamma harness, it makes this painless, for the most part). Like I said earlier though, older games ( Pac-Man, Gyruss era) might require a bit more work.


    While I realize you don't like emulation, there is a neat cabinet from Hanaho called the ArcadePC [arcadepc.com]. It gives you more of the arcade "feel", while running the games from a PC under MAME or something. Sometimes, this may be your only choice :(


    Here is a list of some of my favorite sites (all can be found by searching Google with the keyword 'jamma' or 'jamma pcb' or something like that


    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/vide oarcade/faq/ [faqs.org]


    http://nexus.nanospace.com/~spo onman/neogeo/faq.htm [nanospace.com]


    http://www.ntrnet.net/~braze/ arcade/tech/repair.shtml [ntrnet.net]


    http:/ /directory.google.com/alpha/Top/Games/Coin-Op/Arca de_Games/Collectors/ [google.com] (TONS of links)


    http://www.tir.com/~devilman/index.html [tir.com]

    http://members.xoom.com/organian/ [xoom.com]



    If you need more info or anything, feel free to email me (remove the NOSPAM) and discuss!


  • Aw c'mon... You know better than that... You don't buy beer, you rent it.


    --Fesh
    "Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy

  • sure, the Deep Blue C compiler . . . not sure of the exact location (deep in the dark recesses of a closet in the spare room, with a sign that says "Beware the Leopard" no doubt) but if you want to email me at this ID @ cavtel.net, when I locate it, I'll let you know.

    --
  • Who`d have guessed that sonys inferior psx would trump the n64 and kill the saturn...

    The PSX had a lead start, resulting in more units and more games in the market at the N64's introduction. Also, the N64 uses Nintendo's cartridge system and is way more controlled with respect to what games can be made for it, which leads to fewer and more expensive titles.

    Judging by reports on IGN's FGN site, the N64 and DC are also both dying re support, since everyone and their grandmother are focusing on the P2X and/or XBox.

    What was suprising was that Sony went for that market at all, despite Sega and Nintendo's dominance.

  • What I found frightening with some of the docs was the stolid rigidity in designing the games. The design for Tempest, for example, seemed more like putting together a washing machine than designing a game.

    Where is the concept artwork, world ideas and sketches like artists do for today's games? It seems like games of yesteryear were created only by comp sci people, with little creativity. :(

  • ... if they printed this from their Commodore 64.....

    (..or was it the Pet?)

  • With these doc's I will build my own out of date machine, make millions and put Nintendo, Sega and Sony out of busniess!
  • Do they really think that people are going to buy these machines?

    No, the design documents where released to allow creation home made do-it-yourself machines able to play Atari games.

  • Anything about the Lynx? (Score:3)

    by pallex ( 126468 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @12:04AM (#846293)
    "Hey, lets sell the Lynx at about twice the cost of the Gameboy!"

    "Surely we should be competitive and launch it at a similar price, you know, like we`ve promised?"

    "No - besides, ours is colour, and American goddamnit. Whos going to buy a black and white Japanese version?"

  • This will never catch on (Score:4)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @11:56PM (#846294) Journal
    What do this "Atari company" think is going to happen? Do they really think that people are going to buy these machines? Even if they do, are people really going to be putting coins in again and again with no chance of a financial reward?

    This is a ridiculous idea and its never going to catch on.
  • Look here [emux.com]. I wonder how existing ROMs can be put on catridges...
  • ...can the Atari 2600 no longer run DeCSS?
  • Tempest evidentally had an option for a Two-Game minimum [u-net.com](it's mentioned at the bottom). Interesting "feature". It would be neat to see the history of a credit. When did it become acceptable to have $.50 games. Some games now cost more than a dollar. How common was the two-game minimum? Being 6 in 83, I don't remember it all that much ;-)

    anyone ever compiled this sort of thing? would anyone other than me care?
  • We will see someone create some games from these specs. It will run on linux and someone else would want to port it the other Unixes and win NT
  • I notice that there is emphasis on the hardware scrolling feature in the hardware spec.
    I had an ST, my mate had an Amiga, he had hardware scrolling, I didn't.
    Funny that the feature should be deprioritiesed when it came to the home machine.
    I guess they wanted to bite into the Mac DTP market, which they did _very_ sucessfully, more than they wanted to compete as a games oriented machine with the Amiga.
    Bugger, I've gone off topic.
    (Oh, and I'm _not_ saying that the Amiga was only good for games, far from it.)

    FatPhil
  • Atari in the mid-late 80's was a very different company than when these documents were written. Ironically, the late-80's Atari was run by Jack Tramiel, former boss of Commodore, and Nolan Bushnell, Atari's founder, went to work for Commodore (in the CDTV days, I think). Tramiel was extremely pissed that he failed to win the Amiga and had his design team rustle up an off-the-shelf 68000 based machine. His main priority was to beat the Amiga to market, not to really beat it (The Amiga had had a few years of R&D before the ST was even conceptualised).

    I don't think that they got very far with the DTP, although the ST didn't have bad programs for it. I remember the ST's display being a dog to lay out in ASM tho. What kept the ST in sales was the one thing it had that the Mac, PC and Amiga didn't, and that was the in-built MIDI ports. I think that the ST's designers knew that the YM2149 chip used was sub-standard, and they were hedging on cheap MIDI add-ons later, which didn't materialise. However, most recording studios I've worked in still have, behind their new-fangled Mac and PC systems, their (t)rusty old ST, to whip out when the BSOD strikes.

  • I`d say that the power of a console/piece of consumer electronics never has, and never will have, anything to do with its success. Who`d have guessed that sonys inferior psx would trump the n64 and kill the saturn... vhs would devour betamax...
    Its always cost, with some marketing thrown in...

  • And, of course, Jay Miner (father of the Amiga) was involved with it too, IIRC. It had some incredibly nifty features for the time (Flip the screen and controls for lefties, proper backlit screen, better sound than the ST :)

    Unfortunately, Nintendo was really flying around that time, and the Lynx seriously lacked games, so these days the Lynx is little more than a curio :(

  • yeap - the ATARI 400 and 800. i still have my 800 in working condition with two 5 1/4 external floppy drives (one has a cool chip in it that allows you to surpass copyright protection - even back then games wanted to be free) and a whopping 32k of RAM. of course, it was a glorified 2600, but i learned BASIC on it, so it means something to me.

  • Neither actually, the Commodore 64 and Pet were both produced by a company called.... Commodore. The guy who used to run Commodore (Jack Tramiel) did take over at Atari after he was booted out of Commodore for nearly bankrupting them.

    Atari did have some sort of home PC which us Commie owners looked down on with contempt (this was before the ST).

  • The Atari Video Computer System model 2600 could never run something as large as, say, DeCSS. It only had 128 bytes of RAM. No, really. (Of course it doesn't run NetBSD!)
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • Isn't it great to see all this confidential material released. At one time the company's assets depended on the security of these documents. Now anyone in the world (or with a /., everyone) can see the prized information. Interesting the way business changes.

    Even the samurai
    have teddy bears,
    and even the teddy bears

  • It was really easy to do graphics this way, and was really ultra fast too.

    I don't know how Commodore or Apple or anyone else did it (I can only assume they did the same thing) but it was a very simple matter of copying the character set in memory then changing all the characters to help make your image. Then just toss them up on the screen and viola! Instant image! Then by doing VBIs, you could make some really nice scrolling images. It was quite easy to do.

    Of course there were problems - only 4 colors at a time (later to be 128, but still only 4 colors max on a line) and in high res mode you only had 2 colors but by changing the pixel's location you could use moire patterns to get 4.

  • One link for secondary market game resources is here [wms.com]. (Note that many of the vendors sell more than just pinball machines.)

    I'm still debating what my first one will be. Probably Star Castle or Pong, while they're still available.

  • I don't see why a planar graphics mode should make scrolling easier.

    I always assumed the poor scrolling on the PC was because it had a fixed video memory pointer position.

  • The lynx was not American. It was made in Japan and Taiwan. The Jaguar was US-made.

    I was there at CES90 when the Lynx was introduced and I have one of the prototypes. It is a neat box. Full-color, stereo sound, beats the pants off of even the new Gameboy.

    But is was destroyed by Jack Tramiel. Some of the other Tramiels were okay, but Jack was out to "beat Commodore" at any price during those days, even if he had to destroy Atari to prove it. After all, he had already nearly ruined his own company...what's one more?

    The Lynx should have been sold for a lower price, but with few titles at the time of release it would have been two hard to make up the sales price with game sales...most people bought it for California Games, the included title. Atari was not making a lot of money on the Lynx; they could not even afford a real booth at CES.

    Jack Tramiel's Buy American advertising campaign for the Jaguar was pretty ironic. Suddenly he was pushing US-made and quality, while when he was at Commodore he had lead the charge for the cheaply-built foreign-assembled home PC that lead Warner to destroy the Atari 800 series. When he took over Atari, he did the same thing...his goal was to make 'em cheaper, who cares about anything else.

    "If it looks good, steal the best bits and make an inferior version...cheaper at all costs." Beating on price is what the Commodore 64 did, and what he tried to do with the Atari 130XE in 1985. Making a still-cheaper version of the Atari 800XL, with some extra RAM thrown in to sell to existing owners.

    Actually, he did pretty well with them considering the chipset was already seven years old...heck, it was four years old when his old company copied the Atari 800 for the Commodore 64 back in 1982! The only "advantage" the Commodore had over the Atari was a better cassette interface and the ability to produce better pure tones (Commodore's generic sound chip was also much easier to program than Atari's custom POKEY chip that was used in Tempest and Missile Command as well as the Atari 800). In all other ways the Commodore was inferior. But Jack cut the sales and (most important) production prices down until he took over the market...at the cost of nearly ruining the company. But he sold it for less!

    I was hoping with the Lynx he would not try the same tact; the Atari 2600 was actually sold for more on purpose to suggest its higher quality than the (mostly) cruddy game systems on the market in 1977.

    But Jack did not use any of that money for marketing, and it died, as usual.

  • Tempest is fairly rigid and simple, but if you get good at it, you'll realize that it's one of the best games ever made. For it's day, it was also extremely creative. My advice to you is to look closer next time you play it. Chris.
  • Tempest had only 24 KB of ROM and 2 KB of main CPURAM. Even Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo was bigger (40 KB ROM + 2 KB RAM).
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • Any one noticed how the voices in Gauntlet arcade games suck? :(

    You have to be kidding! What rules more than:
    "Blue elf has destroyed the food."

    I got hit a lot when I did that.


    "Blue Elf shot the food!"

  • I'd say the 800 was a little more than a "glorified 2600." IIRC, the 2600 was only a 4 bit computer. The 800 could be maxed out with 48K or RAM; the OS was contained on a 10K ROM. I forget where the other 6K went.

    My decision to purchase an 800 (as opposed to a C64, or even that odd newcomer the IBM "Personal Computer") was based on the 10 part series about the internals of the Atari, published in Byte (basically, it was De Re Atari, serialized). And they (Atari, that is) published the OS (hmmm, open source in 1981?). Hell, I've even got a C compiler for my 800.

    Maybe I should scan all those old docs and put them up on a website somewhere . . .

    --
  • "...some sort of home PC..."?

    Hmmm... I kinda liked the old atari 800 (not that silly 400 with the chicklet kbd). There were 3 or 4 or 5 OS's for it, had a very nice macro assembler, a decent C compiler, the alternate cartridge slot (there were two slots) could be configured as a reader/burner, you weren't forced to have basic anywhere near the machine, the full bus was easily accessable, roms were easily swapped... All in all, it was a cute little machine.

    Back in 81, choices in 6502 machines were pretty much limited to apple and atari. I had been looking at an apple II+, but couldn't justify the price tag, and settled on the atari... I was rather glad that I did. The only sad point wrt atari was that, in the US, atari was synonymous with game (arcade and console), and as such many non-atari owners considered the 6502 computer line as a glorified game console.

    ... come to think of it, a lot of us atari owners looked down upon the commodore64 with laughter... ;)


    -dean
    -----------------------
  • yes, i know this... twas a little joke there... the commodores having been used a bit more commonly for word processing in that day and age than the atari's were...(despite trying to read 80 columns of text on that *@#$@#$ NTSC screen!) the atari docs reminded me of everything i ever word processed on mine...

    VIC 20 anyone? :-)

  • 128KB, not 128B :) Small difference, not that it changes anything of course.
  • Do I here 25 cents ??

    Sunnyvale golf land if you are in the valley and they have a bunch of classics like pacman to galaga.
  • I meant in the emulators. The voices in the true arcade cabinet kicked butt! :) Sorry to say that incorrectly. :(

  • Wow. I haven't seen hardware that simple for a long, long time... It's kinda odd to think of the guys sweating blood trying to get just 8 more MOBs per scan line, or justify the cost of an additional 2K of RAM.

    Imagine having to build half of your display engine in hardware, just 'cause the processor couldn't keep up (of course, we're back to that again, but it's different somehow).

    Rose colored glasses, anyone? They're free...
  • I dumped a lot of quarters into Tempest machines all over town, and I never saw one that had a 2-game minimum.

    Tempest blew my mind, because it was a vector-graphic tube but it was in color. I'd never seen that before. Woohoo!

  • There are still plenty of real-time embedded applications which have the same kind of time and space constraints. I remember working to a 48K RAM limit and 7%CPU of an Hitachi H8 processor only 18 months ago, and that was to impliment a GUI!
    I'm a better programmer for the experience, certainly.

    FatPhil
  • The lynx was clearly a much more powerful console. At the time nobody knew exactly what the public wanted in terms of handheld consoles. It turned out that Nintendo got it right - affordable cost, some form of battery life, and Tetris. But it was a guessing game from both sides.

  • The History of Packman (Score:3)

    by kb9vcr ( 127764 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @12:22AM (#846324)
    Much to my astonishment it seems that Ms. Packman was actually created FIRST. According to the design doc I just read, the marketing department felt that people really liked the idea of a chomping circle moving around and eating other, smaller circles, but just couldn't relate to the fast, in-your-face action that Ms. Packman's bow would present to gamers. Because of this, Packman was born. Later, after people began to except Packman's greedy circle eating attitude and began wondering what Packman's family life was like, Ms. Packman was released to the public.
  • Hey, anyone know where I can find these guys working today? I think it would be so cool to have one of them working for my company. These were the visionaries who brought you the video game revolution!

    A good engineer is hard to find.

    Bring back the 80's baby!

  • Re:The History of Packman (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What kind of drugs are you on? Gimme some of that...
  • This kind of info can be very valuable to the Emu scene. First, it provides some info. But it may also be used as an help for those who want to try themself to Emu... And an old-atari machine may be a stepping-stone before working on greater projects.

    It would have been beter however if Atari has released that info himself as it could have been a step toward Emulation/Old game preservation.
  • Apparently, whoever came up with parking meters had a similar idea... how is it that they're so "popular"?

    The time for the GameBoy Parking Meter has come! Let's put those fancy new displays to good use.

  • Probably after March 16, 1981. According to the Status Meeting minutes, several hundred Asteroids Deluxe units "were boxed with the coin mode set at 50 [cents] play. These units will be opened and reset." [emphasis added]

    The same document contains a mention of a game called "Cat Box." As a cat owner who dreads the kitty litter ritual, I really shudder to think what that's all about.

    --
  • Some games now cost more than a dollar.

    :-) I can't recall the last time arcade games were that cheap here in the UK. Most seem to be £1 a go, but I've seen some at up to £3 a go (that's around $5 US). Sadly, all the new arcade games are crap anyway, so there's little incentive to pay the high prices. There is, however, a growing trend towards having retro machines in arcades, and they're typically priced at 10-20p (that's about 16-32) per game. I was playing an original space invaders machine not too long ago (although sadly t had lost its tinted screen overlay). It brought back some wonderful memories...

  • IIRC Atari was split in two before the ST was produced. Midway got the name for arcade use, and Jack Tramiel (sp?) got the home computer part.

  • This document shalt be referenced to as the Atari Pink Book [u-net.com]

  • yeah, which games ARENT crap. They all look like psx racing games, or driver, or tekken. Ok, slightly better resolution but similar frame rates (either 25 or 50 frames a second). So why bother?
  • Yeah, the megadrive trumped the amiga simply because sonic (and all the other sidescrolling platform games that all look the same to me) couldnt be done. Well,not at that frame rate and that colourfully, and with that many rings on screen etc. A real shame.
    Chunky pixel mode wouldnt have hurt either, that only came out on the cd32, about 5 years too late (and in appallingly slow software on the 1200)
  • I wonder how existing ROMs can be put on catridges...

    With an EPROM. (flash cart)

    Ever hear of Okie-Dokie?
  • According to the design specs, Tempest fit into 30K. Nowadays three times that much is used rendering Lara Croft's left boob. 30 years later, I still play Tempest for hours, long after I've conquered and forgotten most modern games.

    The descriptions doesn't do the games justice. It's like describing the Mona Lisa as "pretty girl, hands on lap, unusual smile". These games had a Zen-like simplicity that is timeless. "Concept artwork, world ideas and sketches" would be wasted on these games. They don't need them, they are perfect on their own.
  • Like he said: "No, Really".

    128KB was an obscene amount of memory in the late 1970s for a personal device. (For example, the Atari 800 computer had a maximum of 48KB and usually shipped with less in the early years.)

    But thanks anyway for your attempt as wiseassery.


    --
  • ...would be trying to get people to shell out upwards of $50 to buy *just the software* to play a game *on their own hardware*, in their own homes, again with no financial reward possible. Wow, these guys really started a racket =).
  • ahh..Tempest..I think I'm gettin a woody..
    But anyway I use to play it alot and I don't think I ever saw the two-game minimum either.But that reminds me of the greatest feature that Tempest had.Now I can't remember the "exact" sequence but if you got to a score in a range like 160 to 180 thousand then got your score to end in an odd number??or something like that..then died with that score you would then see the credits inflate to an incredible 80 free games and you could start at any level.The only thing that comes close was the realization that at our local arcade the tokens they used could be counterfieted by smashing on nickels with a hammer until they were flattened out a bit.My brother and I spent many an afternoon hammering nickels in our garage.That trick only worked on Atari games but they had the best shit anyway...oh the memories

  • And, of course, Jay Miner (father of the Amiga) was involved with it too, IIRC.

    Not quite. Jay Miner wasn't involved with the Handy/Lynx, but Dave Haynie [thule.no], a 'protege' of Jay, and R J Mical, who was involved in creating the Amiga, both were. Many of the the Lynx's features were extensions of Jay's work with the Atari VS, Atari 400/800, and the Amiga.

  • Re:If you want to play the ROMs (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you can figure out how to make the bankswitching work, it shouldn't be that hard.
    See Here [inetsolve.com] for details.

    Failing that you could always use a Starpath Supercharger [home.com] to run 2/4k images.

    Oh, yes and I am also in the progress of writing an Atari 2600 emulator for MESS [emuverse.com] a multiple machine emulator based on MAME, but emulating gaming consoles and computers and anything else with a CPU really ;)

    As a side note, why hasn't this emulator had an editorial. MAME seems to have had a few Editorials on slashdot, but I would have thought that MESS would have been right up slashdot's street, emulating some truly geeky machines and all that ;)

    Now, I do know that there are one or two MESS'ers who will probably read this, so how's about submitting an editorial or two eh? (I'm looking at you Spirilis amongst others ;)

    ---
    lpopman posting as AC because he can't get to his account right now
  • Someones going to build one.
    Then port Linux to it.

    Thad

  • Re:Feature priorities askew? (Score:5)

    by Olivier Galibert ( 774 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @01:00AM (#846344)
    The video subsystems were completely different for computers than for arcade machines at this time[1].

    Computers:
    - framebuffer
    - hardware support for scrolling of the pixels
    - blitters
    - hblank interrupt for effects

    Arcade games:
    - n planes of tile oriented video (i.e, the screen is divided into 8x8 elements selected by number)
    - sprites generator (usually a plane of its own)
    - priority manager
    - hardware support for global scrolling of the tile planes
    - horizontal and vertical line scrolling
    - vblank interrupt only

    There were numerous variants, of course, and some games used a framebuffer (williams games, mostly), but this is the usual architecture. It trades off genericity (you can't really draw a line in a no-framebuffer, tile-based system) for efficiency (zero-cpu-cost layers, independant busses for the graphic roms which are directly connected to the tile/sprites ICs, etc....). That's mostly what made them so impressive compared to the quite feeble CPUs they were using.

    OG, mamedev

    [1] Now everything has been unified under a common 3d-oriented architecture.
  • The arcade games details seem to be the same sort of design as a C64. A very efficient design for scrolling shooters and platformers, so it's surprising that the Amiga and ST disn't have a grphics mode similar to this.

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