[HN Gopher] The Atari 1200XL fiasco
___________________________________________________________________
The Atari 1200XL fiasco
Author : rbanffy
Score : 64 points
Date : 2025-04-17 09:01 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.goto10retro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.goto10retro.com)
| glimshe wrote:
| Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized
| the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons
| had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL.
|
| They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if
| they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for
| it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army
| please help me) in many ways than the C64.
| userbinator wrote:
| MS has unfortunately now fallen greatly from that, and gotten
| onto the same aggressive and hostile trendchasing practices as
| the rest of Big Tech. Only their legacy keeps them from totally
| losing the market at this point.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone that bought into WinRT, saw it as .NET 1.0 done
| right, and went through all the technology reboots between
| Windows 8 and WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, I can only double down on
| that remark.
|
| It was gone so bad that most Windows developers, me included,
| advise focusing on Win32/Windows Forms/WPF, at BUILD 2024 WPF
| got back into the spotlight as official Windows GUI framework
| (WinUI 3.0 keeps being years away from feature parity with
| UWP, let alone WPF), even Office and XBox teams rather reach
| out to React Native than bothering to make XAML C++ in WinUI
| 3.0 work.
|
| Check the agenda for BUILD 2025, hardly anything related
| WinUI 3.0 / WinAppSDK.
|
| And if you want to have some fun, come around into the Github
| discussion issues from all the related repos.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It doesn't seem like Microsoft and Anders Hejlsberg
| understand what they did when they picked Go over any
| dotnet language for the Typescript compiler. Anders and his
| fans insist it was merely picking the right tool for the
| job but when even the father of C# prefers using Go,
| combined with Microsoft's tendency to get old technology
| rot instead of officially cancelling, it sends a very bad
| message about the future of dotnet. No one wants the
| shitshow that has been Microsoft's desktop UI over the past
| decade to spread into the rest of the dotnet ecosystem but
| most are wary of it happening. Anders was the very last
| person in the company who should have been the face of the
| Typescript compiler project using Go.
|
| Many have pointed this out but just get shouted down by
| those haven't had to endure the UI framework pain that the
| company has put developers through over the past ten to
| fifteen years. Microsoft officially is completely behind
| dotnet and is committed to its continued success. Same
| message they've given for all their UI frameworks. The only
| difference being dotnet still gets lots of resources but so
| did all of the frameworks before they were left to rot from
| resource and leadership starvation.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, it is one of my favourite ecosystems, however I
| have always been a generalist, I can't get stuck into
| being a XYZ Developer for too long.
|
| As such I get what it means to be in a Microsoft shop, in
| a UNIX shop, in those that don't care, that use a mix of
| stacks whatver.
|
| The .NET team has made great achievements turning the
| ship around from Windows only into a cross platform
| product.
|
| However occasionally when they complain on social media,
| why despite all this effort, there is still some issues
| getting .NET adoption over Go, Rust, Java, Python,
| nodejs, you name it, they should start inside Redmond
| buildings.
|
| DevDiv nowadays is no long .NET and C++, regardless of
| .NET came to be, Microsoft has seen it needs to be back
| into Java game and even has their own OpenJDK distro.
|
| The initial implementation of VSCode support for Go was
| done by Microsoft, and nowadays they have their own Go
| distro.
|
| While the .NET team makes great developments to ease
| cloud native development, the projects Azure works on and
| contributes to CNCF are a mix of Go and Rust for th most
| part.
|
| As for the UI side, from what I can tell, been part of
| the receiving end, most of the key developers are gone,
| the new blood are all millennials that grew up with
| macOS, Linux and Chromebooks, naturally no background
| experience on Windows developer ecosystem, and strong
| focus on Web development.
|
| Naturally they aren't to blame, they know what they know,
| what apparently is missing is proper managment, resources
| and guidance, so that they can deliver to what used to be
| "Developers, Developers, Developers".
| exceptione wrote:
| The smartest thing Microsoft could do, imho, is cancel
| all their billion UI variants, bless Avalonia and throw
| all the saved millions of dollars to them.
|
| Then in one instant they get a real cross-platform UI
| framework, with a competent team as a free bonus.
|
| It is actually incredibly compelling, the cross-platform
| .NET offering.
|
| If you look at all the Go, Python and Rust UI toolkits,
| none hits the bar. They invariably write their own toy
| framework with 2 components, or they duct tape a leaking
| C++ toolkit on top with bad interop.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Linux distros are rewriting their installers and
| partition tools in web technologies these days. Hard to
| believe but the direction is clear, no one cares about
| local UI toolkits.
| neonsunset wrote:
| FWIW WinRT / WinUI 3 was ported onto NativeAOT (9). There
| is are greater ongoing efforts[0] to make the two play nice
| together from the people working in Windows. But I think
| it's just efforts from specific individuals who care and
| the outcome solely relies on their motivation and continued
| employment, and is not facilitated by the org or its
| culture in any way, if anything, it happens despite it.
|
| [0]: For example
| https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/114024
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, those individuals have been great contributors and
| kudos to them, but it is visible, specially from the last
| community call how things have been going.
| eddie_catflap wrote:
| I love the C64 but the Atari 8-bit line was fine indeed (one of
| my first exposures to home computing was Star Raiders at a
| family friends house - blew me away). Archer Maclean, author of
| Dropzone (and other titles) famously labelled them the 'Porsche
| of home computers'.
|
| Where I think the 64 had the edge was in the incredible SID
| chip and I'd argue the amazing hacks that were found for the
| system over the years that enhanced what the 64 was capable of.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropzone#Development
| rbanffy wrote:
| The big pro of the Ataris was their graphics. Replacing a frame
| buffer with a display list and a dedicated processor that keeps
| banging out pixels based on its "program" is brilliant. It's an
| interesting maximalist counterpoint to the Apple II's
| minimalist approach to color graphics.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's a bit like an early GPU.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Very much. It was a direct ancestor of the Amiga graphics
| architecture, and certainly inspired many other less known
| architectures.
| karmakaze wrote:
| The C64 definitely had better sprites and music, no contest.
| But there's a certain elegance to the way the Atari did their
| graphics in particular. It was so much more with simple
| building blocks where you could immediately see the power of
| it and take a long time extracting value from it.
|
| The SIO of the Atari is also another standout design, which
| flies under the radar. It enabled a much cheaper diskette
| drive than the C64. The designer of the SIO, Joe Decuir went
| on to make USB and credits his work on SIO as the basis of
| USB[0].
|
| Even the use of letters for devices was already ahead of DOS
| with D: being for diskette, but that was shorthand for D1:,
| with D2: being another and any other letter could be an
| installable device with numbered instances. Keyboard/screen
| I/O was addressable as E:.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO
| ndrake wrote:
| Atari 800 XL <3
| atari800xl wrote:
| Thank you. I love you too.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| The Atari line was much better at scrolling, had a much much
| better master palette, supported display lists (nicer than
| setting up interrupts in the C64) and the POKEY had some
| advantages over the SID, not just the extra channel but also in
| doing beefy sound effects.
|
| I don't think any of this is denied by C64 fans.
|
| The C64 on the other hand could push nearly 6x the sprite data
| per line, had Color RAM for more interesting tile work, the SID
| was more capable for music, and it had much much better support
| for high resolution graphics.
|
| For their time they were very comparable but when (ab)used just
| right the C64 can do a neat NES impression. The Atari can't do
| that, but it can do some bonkers 3D using the super low
| resolution modes.
| curiousObject wrote:
| The 6502-based Atari computers had the CPU clock held at 80%
| higher than the C64. That must have been a very significant
| impact at a time when the CPU had to do most of the work.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| It was. Wasn't the Atari's CPU 1.79MHz (3.58Mhz NTSC
| clock/3)? The NTSC C64 was close to 1Mhz. But it's worse:
| The C64's CPU was also slowed down by the VIC-II every 8
| scan lines to fetch video data, and slowed down
| additionally if sprites were enabled.
|
| The PAL C64 was actually slightly under 1Mhz but you had a
| lot more VBlank time to do stuff.
| bluGill wrote:
| Atari's CPU was slower in PAL countries, but I don't
| recall what the speed was. (speed based on something in
| PAL like the NTSC color clock, but I don't recall what it
| was called)
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| The graphics chip on the Atari also steals CPU cycles,
| but if you use the 160x100 mode (instead of 160x200) then
| it can run full speed which means full 1.79MHz no
| questions asked.
|
| The lower resolution also means less time plotting pixels
| so for any sort of software rendered effect the Atari
| machines are miles ahead.
| timbit42 wrote:
| The C64's CPU wasn't slowed down much at all by the
| badlines, less than a few percent. I'm not sure how much
| the sprites slowed it. The Atari was faster but how much
| it was slowed by depended on the video mode. Higher res
| and higher colors slowed it more, leaving the CPU at
| around 1.3 MHz. I also don't know how much the Atari
| player/missile graphics slowed the CPU.
| alexisread wrote:
| Actually, it can do a fair impression as well: Crownland has
| transparent parallax
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5fSp0XGzI
|
| You're right about the bonkers 3D!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwcN9FraNjQ
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KatdrdEVEwY&t=532s
|
| I think the main thing was that Atari (pre83 company)
| abandoned the 8 bit line too early, and didn't make the 5200
| cross-compatible.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Oh yeah, for sure. Atari was horrifically mismanaged.
| mrighele wrote:
| It's not like Commodore was managed much better, in the
| end.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I dunno, Tramiel's Atari Corp kept the 8-bit line going for
| _years_ after the changeover, adding new models. And they
| even had relative success later in places like Poland.
|
| One problem is that these kinds of architectures that
| relied on special custom chips have inevitable obsolescence
| built in. When your "API" for graphics programming is a
| custom chipset at a certain clock rate with certain
| capabilities, it's just not going to scale up past a
| certain point. You get initial superpowers, but then
| Moore's law just makes it pointless.
|
| See also: Amiga.
| bluGill wrote:
| Tramiel arguably mismanaged Atari worse than Warner
| brothers. Sure Tramiel cared about computers, but his
| management style was hostile to getting anything done.
|
| I agree that the custom chips were a dead end. However
| the ST line could have beat the mac if management was any
| good. (as could/should the Amiga, though I was Atari
| locked at the time and so I didn't pay attention to what
| they were doing)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean I agree about Tramiel management. I was an Atari
| ST user from 86? 87? to 92.
|
| But I also think there's just no way Atari Corp could
| have taken on e.g. Apple regardless of management. They
| simply didn't have the capital, market penetration, etc.
| to carve out a segment that big. Apple was already a big
| deal and although the Macintosh was not really a big
| success at that point, there was a giant company behind
| it with top tier talent, and lots of cash.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| This Crownland you have linked is a madness of an excellent
| developer's work, mostly quirks (I guess). According to my
| knowledge such a fast horizontal scrolling and colourful
| background is impossible in standard Atari with standard
| coding.
|
| And it seems those are Polish guys
| (https://www.atari.org.pl/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4520)
|
| -- EDIT --
|
| I found it: only version for Atari 130XE (i.e. 128KB RAM -
| this is not the standard, I guess it could run with
| cartdrige on 65 XL/XE maybe?), year 2006/2007 (fresh :) )
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The C64 had _some_ advantages as you say but its chief one
| was just... price. It was simply much cheaper from the start.
| justin66 wrote:
| > For their time they were very comparable
|
| We can say that now, but it's worth remembering the Atari 8
| bit computers came out over two years before the C64. Not
| such a big gap in computing today, but back then it was a
| lot.
|
| ex-Atari people talking about what they could have done
| better is always an interesting youtube phenomenon. (as with,
| for example, ex-Sun people, you hear a lot of theories but
| you never encounter anyone who says "yeah, I was the guy who
| made the whole thing fail")
| mrandish wrote:
| > ex-Atari people talking about what they could have done
| better
|
| As someone super into retro computing now, who also lived
| through the history getting my first computer in 1981,
| participating in users groups, reading all the zines, going
| to regional and national trade shows for 8-bit home
| computers, etc, this was (and still is) a significant
| recurring theme. Owners of 8-bit and 16-bit computers in
| the 80s/early 90s (and retro hobbyists/collectors today)
| obsess about the mistakes made by their respective
| manufacturers. Often this armchair analysis results in
| frustrated conclusions like "If only
| (Atari/Commodore/Tandy) had done X" the computer would have
| "made it" (ie survived against the PC). I engaged in this
| prevalent pastime myself for years and even today there are
| forums full of questions seeking to post mortem the "the
| fatal mistake(s)".
|
| The fascinating part for me is that my early hobby
| computing led to programming, product-making and tech
| startup entrepreneurship. By the mid and late 90s I'd
| evolved from sneaking into Comdex and CES circa 1983 to now
| launching products in my startup's huge Comdex booth
| literally next to Microsoft's, with our own private
| hospitality suites and VIP parties. I'd somehow gone from
| fanboy to insider. During this era I had multiple private
| business meetings with industry luminaries I'd idolized
| including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove and many
| others. I'd even met, had a meal with or otherwise gotten
| to personally know 8-bit era luminaries including Nolan
| Bushnell, Jay Miner (designer of the Amiga), a couple of
| Tramiels and so many others. I got to ask my fanboy era
| questions directly to the players - and the best part was
| that I was then a peer and the meetings were private. I got
| a lot more color and perspective than the answers they gave
| to the press or even at retro-computing conference panels.
| It was fascinating! But overall I also learned that, aside
| from a couple notable exceptions, there was no single "Big
| Mistake". The reality was far more complicated and kind of
| boring: there were complex business, financial,
| manufacturing and distribution challenges far beyond users
| group hobby analysis. The future was unknowable and they
| were living through the first iteration of what only later
| became obvious patterns - and they were just doing the best
| they could to figure it out enough to survive.
|
| By the late 2000s I'd graduated to selling my third startup
| to a Fortune 500 valley tech giant and became a senior exec
| driving strategy and identifying new opportunities and
| markets, as well as leading large teams of MBAs, bankers
| and lawyers to identify, analyze and negotiate multi-
| billion dollar acquisitions of other tech companies. And
| this perspective is the one that _most_ informed my prior
| obsession with identifying "the fatal mistake" which
| doomed Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Sinclair and so many
| others. Having recently retired early, just for fun I've
| delved into the history and using my post-2000s expertise
| done rigorous strategic analyses.
|
| In every case the answer is the same and, frankly, a little
| disappointing: Nothing they could have done would have
| "saved" them for more than a couple years. While Atari,
| Commodore, Tandy et al did make many mistakes, none of them
| were the root cause of their eventual demise. Even if those
| mistakes had been avoided, it would only have delayed the
| inevitable. In each case, macro factors beyond their
| control that were baked into the market, the technology or
| their own DNA, doomed them. For example, one of the Amiga's
| greatest advantages in 1985 was the brilliant custom
| chipset designed to exploit every quirk of analog video
| timing. And by the early 90s that great advantage was one
| of its biggest weaknesses. Also, the much-beloved 68000
| series processors at the heart of the Amiga and Atari ST
| were ultimately doomed by the combination of being made by
| Motorola and being, perhaps, the ultimate expression of
| CISC architecture (which made them fun to program by hand
| in assembly language). But RISC was ultimately the only way
| forward when Moore's Law scaling kept delivering ever more
| gates into the 90s. But bridging over from CISC to a RISC
| ISA while maintaining backward compatibility was enormously
| complex. Only Intel eventually managed it and very nearly
| died in the attempt. Intel's lead in process fabrication
| helped them over the hump but Motorola was too far behind
| in fab tech because they hadn't invested as deeply. For
| Intel it their lifeblood and, ultimately, existential. For
| Motorola's board of directors, CPUs were just another
| business in their portfolio of businesses. Motorola was a
| decades old conglomerate that made prudent financial
| calculations. Intel was born as a chip startup and would
| either live or die as one. Andy Grove had to bet the
| company and find a way to make it work. Motorola didn't.
| justin66 wrote:
| This is a good comment. I guess I don't attach the same
| weight to the CISC/RISC thing you do, but I agree that
| it's certainly true that the big "the _real_ problem was
| _x_ " pronouncements are insufficient to explain what
| really happened. (but are nevertheless quite interesting
| when they come from the parties involved!)
| simonh wrote:
| Arguably there is one company that did manage to make the
| transition from 8 bit hobby home computing and gaming.
| Apple.
|
| The Apple II was a contemporary, in fact a predecessor of
| all these systems. So, what did they do right, or what
| went right for them, that enabled them to make it? I
| suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into
| education and business that helped make it possible, but
| suppose Steve Jobs had been in charge at Commodore or
| Atari?
| mrandish wrote:
| Excellent question and one I already touched on in a
| sister reply before I saw your post.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43722230
|
| Apple is indeed an extraordinary outlier (as is Jobs). If
| you look into the history of Apple's Gil Amelio days,
| very near-death and Steve's return, it was IMHO, a
| remarkable example of a series of fortunate miracles
| coinciding to allow Steve to brilliantly save the company
| when it had been only weeks away from death. Jobs calling
| Bill Gates and convincing him to quickly loan $400M to
| Apple averted disaster potentially by a matter of days.
| And Gates only did that because MSFT was being sued for
| anti-trust by the Justice Dept and _needed_ Apple to
| survive as an example that Wintel still had some
| competition. Apple 's survival in that period is the
| closest close thing I think the industry has ever seen.
|
| To answer your last question, Jobs was undoubtedly
| incredibly brilliant but it took every ounce of that
| brilliance AND some crazy good luck for Apple to survive.
| Ultimately, it was Jobs _plus_ flukes, so no, just Jobs
| without the flukes wouldn 't have changed anything at
| Atari or Commodore. Even on its death bed Apple had a
| much better brand, distribution, market potential and
| talent than Atari or Commodore ever did. Plus Steve had
| his hand-picked entrepreneurial team from Next with him.
| The situations at Atari and Commodore were just much
| weaker in every way, so I don't think _any_ single super
| hero, no matter how super, could have saved them.
| mrandish wrote:
| > I guess I don't attach the same weight to the CISC/RISC
| thing you do
|
| I certainly didn't appreciate the impact of CISC vs RISC
| architecture at the time. I understood the conceptual
| difference between them at a high level but didn't get
| why that caused Motorola to decide they couldn't keep
| scaling beyond the 68060. As a user and fan of 68030 and
| 040, I just didn't understand why they'd walk away from,
| arguably, the second most popular flagship computer ISA
| at the time. And they actually told computer
| manufacturers that the 68060 would be the end of the 68K
| line more than a year before 68060 even shipped. I was
| like, WTF? They weren't even done with the latest,
| greatest chip when they decided to kill the whole line,
| orphaning all that fantastic software from ever having
| any upgrade path to the future.
|
| Only later did I gain a deeper appreciation for the
| impact. A few key things informed me:
|
| * My high level understanding of CISC vs RISC wasn't
| complete back then. In the late 80s there was a lot of
| debate among CPU ISA designers on the relative merits
| between CISC and RISC - and that even extended to the
| definitions of the terms (which were fuzzy). A good
| example is this legendary Comp.Sci Usenet discusson:
| https://yarchive.net/comp/risc_definition.html. Only when
| I dove into those debates in the last 10 years did I
| really start to get the larger picture.
|
| * The part that mattered most between RISC/CISC wasn't
| that RISC had less instructions than CISC (although it
| usually did), it was that those instructions were much
| less complex AND that the addressing modes were much less
| complex. This meant that, in general, RISC ISAs were
| easier to decode because instruction and operand length
| tended to be more fixed. This also had a bunch of other
| downstream effects generally causing RISC-ish ISAs to be
| easier to pipeline more deeply, easier to branch predict,
| easier to speculatively execute, etc. These are all
| things that enable putting extra gates to work speeding
| up execution.
|
| * I was a huge fan of the 68K's insanely powerful
| addressing modes which let savvy assembly language
| programmers pack huge functionality into fewer
| instructions with addressing modes like indirection on
| both the input and output along with setting a bunch of
| flags and pre/post operations like decrement/increment.
| Programmers not only called 68K addressing modes powerful
| but also things like "orthogonal" and even "elegant." But
| all those varying instruction lengths with up to 14
| different addressing modes plus even more optional flags
| modifying behavior before and/or after also created a
| complexity explosion for CPU architects trying to
| implement the most powerful new optimizations. That's one
| big reason why the 68060 was over a year late coming to
| market. It was only dual pipeline but even doing that was
| triggering unexpected avalanches of design complexity.
|
| * Both Intel and Motorola realized the only way to
| continue increasing performance in the future while
| maintaining software compatibility with their old CISC
| ISA was to (basically) make future processors RISC CPUs
| running an extra hardware layer emulating a CISC ISA. It
| was both hard and costly in terms of gates and
| performance. Intel's lead in fab process helped them hide
| that performance cost and keep showing generational net
| speed increases as they navigated the transition.
| Motorola realized they'd probably have a generation or
| two of CPUs that weren't meaningfully faster until they
| bridged the gap and were on the other side.
|
| There's a lot more but I'm certainly not a domain expert
| in CPU design and already summarizing my non-expert
| understanding of expert debates, so I'll leave it there.
| But it's pretty fascinating stuff. Both Intel and Moto
| realized that pure RISC implementations would probably
| beat them soon. Each company responded differently. Intel
| made the RISC-emulating-CISC approach to ISA
| compatibility (broadly speaking) work well enough to
| survive the transition. Motorola decided it was too risky
| (probably correctly given their fab technology and
| corporate resources), and instead chose to break with the
| past and partner with IBM in moving to Power PC. For
| Atari, Commodore, Apple et al this was a planetary level
| asteroid impact. If developers and customers lose all
| software compatibility with your new products, that makes
| the choice of moving to your next generation not much
| different than moving to another _platform_ entirely.
| Only Apple managed to survive (and even they _almost_
| didn 't). Arguably, they only treaded water with great
| design and marketing until saved by the iPod.
|
| I should also mention there was another huge asteroid for
| vertically integrated non-Wintel computer platforms right
| behind the CISC/RISC asteroid. In the early to mid 90s
| Moore's Law scaling was allowing desktop computers to
| improve rapidly by growing dramatically more complex. It
| was getting to be more than one company could do to win
| on each separate front. On the Wintel side, the market
| solved this complexity by dividing the problem among
| different ecosystems of companies. One ecosystem would
| compete to make the CPU and chipset (Intel, NEC, Cyrix,
| AMD), another would make the OS (Windows/OS/2), another
| ecosystem would compete to make the best graphics and yet
| another would compete on sound (Creative, Yamaha,
| Ensoniq, etc). It would require a truly extraordinary
| company to compete effectively against all that with a
| custom vertically integrated computer. There was no way a
| Commodore or Atari could survive that onslaught. The game
| changed from company vs company to ecosystem vs
| ecosystem. And that next asteroid even wiped out
| stronger, better-capitalized companies that _were_ on
| pure RISC architectures (Sun, SGI, Apollo, etc).
| Suppafly wrote:
| >you never encounter anyone who says "yeah, I was the guy
| who made the whole thing fail"
|
| Because that was usually a business decision and not a
| technical one.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I was able to get an Atari 400 (not XL, sadly) for a firesale
| price. The problem with all the Atari's in my mind was that
| they were not dev-friendly machines.
|
| Commodore machines came with a rather hefty serial bound book
| that introduced you to programming and gave you a memory map of
| the hardware, important PEEKs and POKEs.
|
| Atari's came with trade secrets.
| mst wrote:
| My first Archimedes came with a ring bound user's manual that
| was, IIRC, about 1/3 a guide to using the Risc OS GUI, and
| then 2/3 a programming guide to the version of BBC BASIC that
| shipped with it.
|
| (I remember reading it end to end as a child laid on my
| parents' bed because the light was better in there than in my
| room, shortly followed by developing the programming
| addiction that has stuck with me the rest of my life ;)
|
| It didn't cover arm2 assembly, but my parents bought me an
| extremely good book that did - and described the chip
| architecture itself in detail as well.
|
| I only touched a Commodore at a friend's place to play games
| on it, but it sounds like they also understood hobbyists :D
| plefebvre wrote:
| True, the Atari 8-bits did not come with developer docs and
| in the early years little information was available. This
| certainly hurt its initial adoption.
|
| But starting with De Re Atari by Chris Crawford in 1982, a
| lot of development material became available. Compute! had a
| great line of books, including Mapping the Atari.
|
| It was shame it took so long for that material to appear
| because the Atari 8-bit have a rather elegant OS, especially
| compared to its contemporaries.
| ajross wrote:
| > The problem with all the Atari's in my mind was that they
| were not dev-friendly machines.
|
| That was true in the early days of the 400/800, but by 1982
| when the 1200XL was released (a few months ahead of the C64)
| they'd corrected themselves. The board schematics and
| assembly source for the ROM was a book you could buy at the
| dealer, and sources like _De Re Atari_ and Compute Magazine
| had collated all the relevant details of the handful of ASICs
| such that people could start playing weird tricks.
|
| It wasn't Woz's Red Book (neither was Commodores
| documentation), but it told essentially the whole story of
| the devices down to the MMIO level.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Only a few friends had Atari computers when I was a kid. The
| one thing that stuck out to me was it had a Help key but most
| programs told you to press 'H' or some other key for help
| instead of the Help key, which makes me wonder if knowledge
| of how to detect that key wasn't in the manual? Atari owners
| were passionate about their computers and seemed happy with
| them but at least in my little town, there just weren't very
| many of them.
| bluGill wrote:
| The first 400 and 800 did not have a help key. As such if
| you used the help key you either had to refuse to work with
| the large installed based of those earlier systems, or you
| had to provide an alternative. The alternative won in most
| cases and then it wasn't seen as worth also supporting help
| (remember bytes mattered)
| ilamont wrote:
| _Reports of other software incompatibilities due to the ROM
| changes would start to come out once the 1200XL was actually
| released and got into user's hands, hurting its reputation._
|
| That wasn't as big a deal in the 80s as it is now. Reputation was
| limited to real life friends and maybe a few homegrown
| newsletters or computer clubs.
|
| Very few people were using the Internet to share opinions in the
| early 1980s, so "reputation" could be very effectively managed by
| Atari and other companies through advertising and leaning on
| trade media to suppress negative reviews and angry letters to the
| editor.
|
| That is, unless the problems were too big to ignore and customer
| anger became too great, as was the case with many late era Atari
| 2600 games.
|
| A bigger issue for the 1200XL was price as well as something not
| addressed in the article: competition. By this point there were
| other platforms to consider, often at better price points with
| attractive features and software.
| bluGill wrote:
| BBSes were a thing back then, and while it wasn't the interest
| you did have large discussion. If you could afford compuserve
| (which charged by the minute!) you had a nationwide audience on
| a platform that was bigger than the internet of the time. A few
| people also had access to the internet (via their university),
| or at least usenet (via their work or the internet) and so
| there was discussion that way - but compuserve was where it was
| at.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see the FidoNet echomail traffic about
| the 1200XL as that's likely the most widely available forum
| accessible to people with a modem since any local BBS could
| carry it.
| bluGill wrote:
| I forgot about fidonet, yes that was an option. A few
| others on that line existed as well.
| os2warpman wrote:
| >That wasn't as big a deal in the 80s as it is now.
|
| It was a big deal for me. Software expenses were a huge portion
| of the cost of owning a computer.
|
| Almost always the price of the computer was less than the cost
| of buying software to run on the thing.
|
| Letter Perfect was around $300. If it didn't run on the 1200XL
| I'm not shelling out $800 for the computer and another $300 for
| a compatible word processor.
|
| I am convinced that cross-vendor incompatibility was THE reason
| for CP/M's failure. Not anti-competitive behavior, not
| shenanigans, but the fact that if you spent $495 on the Kaypro
| version of Wordstar and then bought an Osborne, it wouldn't
| work. Same Z80, same CP/M, wouldn't work.
|
| Even today PC manufacturers are only starting to remove the
| BIOS compatibility layers that allow you to boot >30-year-old
| versions of DOS on a modern hardware, and Apple has provided
| binary translators since the 1994 PowerPC transition and
| supported them for years after breaking native compatibility.
| jfultz wrote:
| The 1200XL was my first computer. My family purchased it at a
| department store at a fire sale price (IIRC Montgomery Ward's,
| $199) after Atari stopped manufacturing and began dumping its
| inventory to make way for the 600XL/800XL. I had been researching
| a computer to get for ages, but my family was very careful about
| how we spent money, and it was a big purchase. We had seriously
| considered getting a TI-99/4A when TI exited the business, but we
| were concerned that it was just going to be a dead end. But the
| chance for a cheaper entry into an established ecosystem was
| great (that and me begging my mother to finally, finally get a
| computer!).
|
| Re compatibility, I never came across software that didn't run on
| it. I'd read in magazines that there were issues, but never once
| experienced it. One interesting software change, though (but true
| of other XL computers, too) was that the color "artifacting"
| worked differently on it than it did the 400/800. For example,
| Ultima III used color artifacting, and so playing it on my system
| produced some incorrect colors...most notably the sea was red.
|
| I did come across one hardware issue...a cheap third-party
| parallel interface adapter that didn't work, and that we thought
| at the time was defective, but I now think it's likely to have
| been affected by the incorrect power wiring in the 1200XL's SIO
| adapter. It was cheap enough that we didn't lose too much money
| on it, and I ended up getting the far superior ICD P:R:
| Connection instead.
|
| The Atari community was a super great community to be in. And in
| so many ways, Atari was doing things that wouldn't be seen again
| for years, if not decades. Atari's SIO port is famously a
| predecessor/inspiration of USB. The APX Exchange was basically a
| third-party app store decades before Apple popularized the
| concept. The machine was hackable and moddable (I bought a 256KB
| upgrade kit for mine). When I migrated to PC for college use, it
| hurt to have to fall back to CGA...even EGA was just ugly,
| compared to what my 1200XL was capable of (although the 80 column
| displays were nice compared to Atari's 40-column).
| vaxman wrote:
| RIP Jay Miner
|
| https://youtu.be/mpWe5C58y40
| runjake wrote:
| I had an 800XL and a 520ST, but I don't recall ever seeing or
| hearing about the 1200XL. I feel like I just entered some bizarro
| universe. But wow, I really love it's physical design.
| forinti wrote:
| There was an Apple II clone in Brazil that used the same
| design. It was called TK2000.
|
| I never found out why they copied the design of a completely
| different machine. I guess they just liked it.
| runjake wrote:
| Very neat! Apparently didn't have the top row of function
| buttons.
|
| For those reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_2000
| bentt wrote:
| my best friend's parents bought this and kept it in their bedroom
| for some reason. They allowed us to play with it, but it had no
| storage they didn't buy anything to go with it.
|
| So we would just type programs in from magazines and the worst
| part about it was that sometimes we wouldn't finish and then his
| parents would shut the computer off at night and we'd have to
| start over.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Atari Basketball are two
| additional games that made use of the 400/800's extra joystick
| ports. Ali Baba was turn-based, IIRC, so not as exciting of a use
| case, but playing basketball with three other kids simultaneously
| was a riot. Very special for the time.
| SeenNotHeard wrote:
| Atari's port of Asteroids also supported four joysticks. You
| could play melee, co-op, or team mode, with four players on the
| screen at once. It was a blast.
|
| https://www.atarimania.com/8bit/files/Asteroids_manual.pdf
| glonq wrote:
| I jumped from an 8-bit Atari to a CGA PC/XT clone and it was
| surprising how much forward I jumped in power and capability and
| storage, yet how much -backwards- I jumped in graphics and sound.
| Those were great lil' machines and even got me online (to BBS's
| at 300baud) back in the day.
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