[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

Quincy wrote:

Thomas Richter wrote:



It has rarely to do with the hardware capabilities of the systems. The
decision makers rarely had a clue about the hardware in first place, and
other factors are just more important (pricing, discount for education,
long term support,...).



An Atari salesman would have sounded something like this:

   "This 'Apple' company will go bankrupt within a few years,
   Atari is a billion dollar company and will dominate the personal computer
   industry. IBM is too late to the game. Apple will soon be forgotten and
   have no impact on the future of personal computing."

The Atari 800 had terrific support chips for ye olde faithful 6502,
scanline based interrupts, sprites and a sane coloration scheme.

Woz's budget color scheme is best suited for those times when
you are drawing a picture of an ORANGE cat sitting on the
GREEN grass, against a BLUE sky, smelling a
MAGENTA colored flower.


I never really played computer games, so for me it was more
like having a 5-color palette for drawing graphs, plotting
orbits, etc.

It was the first computer to offer hi-res color graphics out
of the box, and that changed the game--and the expectations--
for future designs.

But something always has to give, since more resolution means
more pixels and more colors means more bits per pixel.  DRAM
was expensive in the beginning.  Squeezing 140/280 x 192 pixels
and five colors out of 8KB was quite an accomplishment for
nothing but a few LS TTL parts.

-michael

NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."