Definitive 8-bit Comparison? who wins?
Baron Samedi
Spectrum vs. BBC Micro vs. Amstrad CPC. But is there any website/document that
lists the merits and deficencies of these machines side-by-side? I don't mean
things like quantity of software available or upgradeabiliy - just the merits
or otherwise of the machines themselves?
Maybe somebody has a table like below, only that it goes into more detail as to
why one machine is better than another in one category. etc.
C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
--- ----------- --------- ---
CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
Graphics 1 4 3 2
Screen Size 2 4 1 2
Video Effects 1 4 2 2
Operating System 4 2 1 3
BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
Personally, I've given what I think are the merits for those computers in the
table above. Ignoring the BASIC & OS categories, it's clear why the C64 was the
best machine for games. The BBC machine's main problem was a lack of memory -
it would have been much better had it have more memory. The Amstrad CPC was a
very balanced design - it did nothing poorly. The Spectrum was quite lacking
from a hardware perspective - I suppose 'cos it was so cheap that it succeeded
so well.
What do you think?
Richard Wilson
as to
> why one machine is better than another in one category. etc.
>
> C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
> CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
> Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
> Graphics 1 4 3 2
> Screen Size 2 4 1 2
> Video Effects 1 4 2 2
> Operating System 4 2 1 3
> BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
> RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
Personally, I'd rate the CPC graphics capabilities ahead of the C64 since it
has the capability to provide resolutions of up to about 768x256 in 2
colours, 384x256 in 4 colours and 192x256 in 16 colours.
I think I'd put the OS well ahead of the Spectrum also, and possibly the
BBC.
BBC BASIC and Locomotive BASIC are a bit hard to compare, one has
procedures, which is great, but it was rather lacking in IO functionality,
requiring numerous VDU commands, and remembering PLOT numbers etc to write
anything decent, whereas Locomotive had commands such as INK, PEN, PAPER,
BORDER, DRAW,MOVE etc.
I totally agree, the C64 BASIC was the pits, everything had to be done with
POKE or remembering character codes for printing.
What's the Screen Size bit on the BBC? Most BBC's I saw had resolutions of
up to 640x256 on small modified TV tuners.
If you put an extra column on the end for the CPC Plus, you can rate it as
follows:
CPU Speed 1 (same as CPC)
Sound Effects 1.5 (same as CPC, but with DMA capability)
Graphics 1 (4096 colour palette, hardware sprites)
Screen Size 2 (or maybe 1, depending what this means)
Video Effects 1 (lots of CRTC effects, hardware scroll, split
etc)
Operating System 1 (better documentation and API than the BBC)
BASIC Language 2 (maybe 1, I thinks it's as good all-round as BBC)
RAM Capacity 1 (576K is pretty reasonable with standard add-ons +
1024K cartridge)
Richard
Lone Lobster
Jason
>Maybe somebody has a table like below, only that it goes into more detail as to
>why one machine is better than another in one category. etc.
Okay, off the bat i think this is flame bait but i'm willing to play
"seriously" if everyone else is...? Oh, for a sense of perspective i'm
posting from the C64 camp.
> C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
>CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
The Speccy is marginally faster than the CPC if memory serves...? Given
what was worked out the c.s.cbm/c.s.s flamewar before last, i believe
the BBC should be equivalent to the Speccy too; it was worked out that
the C64 was half the speed, the BBC is about 1.7MHz... or was that the
Atari 8bit...?
>Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
Later Speccys have the AY and some miraculous stuff was done by
hammering the beeper, should be a shared 2 i think...
>Graphics 1 4 3 2
i've have given the CPC a 1 here as well, the former has a higher
resolution mode, although it doesn't have as many colours available in
320x200 mode (the C64 is 320x200 with all 16 colours in 8x8 attributes
compared to the same res with four colours from a palette - anybody in
the CPC camp want to confirm/correct my memory...?)
>Screen Size 2 4 1 2
The CPC can play with it's screen size quite a bit, should be a joint 1
i think...?
At a push and using a "feature" of the VIC-II, the C64 can knock out
it's borders and put sprites there - maximum visible size (on average)
tends to be around 368 x 200 or if the upper and lower are disabled up
to 300 (best examples are "Deus Ex Machina" by Crest, which puts an
interlaced picture through the majority of all four borders, and "Royal
Arte" by Booze Design, which scrolls a horizontally extended picture up
over two thirds of the standard screen height - both grab-able from
http://www.c64.ch/ =-)
>Video Effects 1 4 2 2
From hardware or software? If software counts, i've seen some *scary*
(as in incredible) stuff done with a Speccy - again, joint 2. i'd
personally knock the BBC down to a 3, compared to what the others have
had done to their video hardware by creative programmers, there's a lot
less "wow" factor to BBC programs.
>Operating System 4 2 1 3
Hmm, looks about right at least from the C64 perspective - although i'd
have put the Speccy lower 'cos the other two have DOS commands as
stock...? Considering the arcane nature of the C64 DOS, it still
deserves a 4. =-)
>BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
Again, the BASIC sucks to high heaven on the C64 - from memory of the
others, looks about right.
>RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
Give the C64 a 2 here - 39K to BASIC and 65K to a good machine code
programmer... i'm assuming we're comparing original models here, so if
the BBC is 32K and the Amstrad 64K, shouldn't the Spectrum be 16K...?
>Personally, I've given what I think are the merits for those computers in the
>table above.
i've considered building a little site to the same ends for the next
flamewar but it's a bugger to remain subjective and *very* few people
have the kind of in-depth knowledge of all the machines to do a thorough
comparison. For example, i know a lot of the nooks and crannies of the
C64 and what can and can't be done, but i've only a gamers knowledge of
the other three machines (and a bit more experience with the BBC,
because i was doing my GCSE course with one and a Link 480Z).
i'd have included the Atari 8bit into the mix as well, another machine
limited somewhat by it's video hardware (but it is older than all of the
above by a considerable amount) but one that's been pushed well past
it's official limits - and very successful in the US, even if it died a
death here in the UK.
>Ignoring the BASIC & OS categories, it's clear why the C64 was the
>best machine for games.
[Shakes head] depends on the games - the C64 was never really used
properly for 3D games (there are ways that the demo coders worked out of
reconfiguring the screen that would improve how games like Elite worked
considerably) whilst the Speccy could almost have had it's screen layout
designed for 3D stuff in comparison.
But if we're talking scrolling games, then the C64 and especially the
VIC-II come into their own and a lowly 0.98MHz processor suddenly slings
a full screen of graphics, 24 hardware and close to 100 software sprites
around at 50 frames per second whilst the others are left standing...
(The game described above is "Armalyte" by Cyberdyne Systems for
Thalamus.)
>The BBC machine's main problem was a lack of memory - it would have
>been much better had it have more memory. The Amstrad CPC was a very
>balanced design - it did nothing poorly.
From what i remember from other flamewars, the CPC tended to struggle a
bit at action games, especially scrolling the screen - in it's lowest
resolution the screen RAM is vast and takes a *lot* of hammering to
scroll.
>The Spectrum was quite lacking from a hardware perspective - I suppose
>'cos it was so cheap that it succeeded so well.
Partly that, but more due to some seriously talented programmers and the
sheer inertia of success - people tended to go out and buy machines more
on the grounds of what their friends had and what they therefore had
seen. The same effect can be seen in the USA, the Spectrum was a
relative latecomer to the market (as well as having less of a price
advantage, i hasten to add) and was subsequently snowed under by the
already dominant Apple, Atari and Commodore machines.
--
Jason =-)
_______________________________________________________________________
TMR / / / / / / / /\
/ /__/ / / /__/ / / / /__/ Email: t...@c64.org / /
/ /\_/ / /__ / / / / __// TMR_C0S on IRC / /
/ /__/ / / / / / / / / / http://www.tmr.cosine.org.uk / /
/_____/_____/_____/__/__/__/_____/_____________________________________/ /
\_____\_____\_____\__\__\__\_____\_____________________________________\/
The Starglider
Samedi <fear...@yahoo.co.uk> writes
>Most everyone here has seen rambling threads about the merits of the C64 vs.
>Spectrum vs. BBC Micro vs. Amstrad CPC. But is there any website/document that
>lists the merits and deficencies of these machines side-by-side? I don't mean
>things like quantity of software available or upgradeabiliy - just the merits
>or otherwise of the machines themselves?
>
>Maybe somebody has a table like below, only that it goes into more detail as to
>why one machine is better than another in one category. etc.
>
> C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
>CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
>Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
>Graphics 1 4 3 2
>Screen Size 2 4 1 2
>Video Effects 1 4 2 2
>Operating System 4 2 1 3
>BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
>RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
>
if so, I would certainly add a couple of points on the speccy side for
RAM capacity and sound effects.
--
****************The Starglider***************** Change d.c.u to
* Web site:http://www.starglider.co.uk * demon.co.uk
* ADE VS. THE SPACESHIP: AN ONGOING SAGA! * TO REPLY.
* AT:www.starglider.co.uk * _WW_
* "FANTASTIC! MARVELLOUS!" - David Darling * /_ _\
*********************************************** | O O |
___________________________________________________________oOO_\/_OOo__________
Chris Cowley
[Snip - some very reasoned points, most of which I agree with entirely]
>Give the C64 a 2 here - 39K to BASIC and 65K to a good machine code
>programmer... i'm assuming we're comparing original models here, so if
>the BBC is 32K and the Amstrad 64K, shouldn't the Spectrum be 16K...?
The 16K and 48K Spectrums where launched at the same time. The 16K model
at 125 UKP was 50 quid cheaper that the 48K model and aimed, obviously,
at people who simply couldn't afford the higher spec machine. Very few
people bought the 16K machines (in Ebay speak, they are L@@K R@RE!!!!).
Nice to see some well-reasoned debate in an 8-bit crosspost for a
change. It won't last, of course!
--
Chris Cowley
vbSpec and vb81
Spectrum and ZX81 emulators in native VB (with source)
http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/
James Coupe
writes:
>>CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
>
>The Speccy is marginally faster than the CPC if memory serves...?
It was running a Z80B (6 MHz) whereas the CPC runs a Z80A (4 MHz) as I
recall.
--
James Coupe but I lust after the raw pow0r of c.
PGP 0x5D623D5D together with the humping great
EBD690ECD7A1FB457CA2 elephant arse of gnome.
13D7E668C3695D623D5D - Vashti
James Coupe
Chris Cowley <cco...@grok.co.uk> writes:
>Nice to see some well-reasoned debate in an 8-bit crosspost for a
>change. It won't last, of course!
God, all you Spectrum users can do is whine, whine, whine.
I remember back in the days of <insert alternative computing platform
here> when we....
*fades to black*
Bill Bertram
"James Coupe" <ja...@zephyr.org.uk> wrote in message
news:ZBzi7W9Q...@gratiano.zephyr.org.uk...
> >The Speccy is marginally faster than the CPC if memory serves...?
>
> It was running a Z80B (6 MHz) whereas the CPC runs a Z80A (4 MHz) as I
> recall.
I don't think the CPC had a Z80B, pretty sure it's a Z80A @ 4MHz. The Sam
Coupe has Z80B though..
-Bill.
Chris Cowley
wrote:
>In message <sFj9kSA5...@cosine.demon.co.uk>, Jason <t...@c64.org>
>writes:
>>>CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
>>
>>The Speccy is marginally faster than the CPC if memory serves...?
>
>It was running a Z80B (6 MHz) whereas the CPC runs a Z80A (4 MHz) as I
>recall.
The original 16/48K machines are clocked at 3.5MHz, and the 128K ran
marginally faster at 3.5469MHz. So it looks like the CPC (about which I
know next to bugger-all) wins in the CPU-speed stakes.
Mike Wynne has build a Speccy clone that I think will run at 7MHz, and I
think there are some mass-produced Russian clones (again I know nothing
about them) that run even faster (14MHz, or maybe 24MHz -- not too
sure).
Andrew Owen
old ground.
> C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
> CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
CPU speed isn't the be-all and end-all. Although the Z80 in the CPU was
clocked at 4Mhz, as opposed to the Spectrum's 3.5Mhz, there was no
noticeable difference in performance. Likewise, the BBC may have been
clocked slightly higher than the C64 but performance was comperable.
> Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
All of the machines were about the same when it came to sound effects. I
believe you're talking about music in which case you have to distinguish
between the Spectrum 128 and the Spectrum 48. The 128 had the same chip as
the CPC. The BBC had a similar chip. While the SID is technically more
powerful than the AY, Rob Hubbard is quoted as stating that the AY was
superior, although harder to program. I'd have to agree that while the SID
is more flexible, the output quality is higher from the AY.
> Graphics 1 4 3 2
Very subjective. For a start the CPC had the best graphics modes, not the
C64. But you also have to look at how effective the modes were. The BBC's
colour mode took heaps of memory to use while the Spectrum's screen was
the best for vector graphics and took only 7K.
> Screen Size 2 4 1 2
The BBC may have had a larger screen size, but most programs didn't use
it. The CPC had a higher resolution than the C64, and while the Spectrum
may have only had 256x192, that was adequate for a whole range of
computers including the MSX.
> Video Effects 1 4 2 2
The C64 may have had built in sprites, but the Spectrum had a Z80 which
could shift data around very quickly, and with a monochrome screen, the
Spectrum was much better at vector graphics than the other machines. It's
also important to note that the most BBC and C64 games used horrible
blocky screen modes in order to get more colours, while the CPC and
Spectrum went the hi-res graphics route.
> Operating System 4 2 1 3
I'd agree in this case, although if Sinclair hadn't crippled the Spectrum
BASIC with the IF1, it's system of channels and streams would place it
ahead of the BBC.
> BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
I think the CPC BASIC was probably better than the Sinclair BASIC, but
only because Sinclair rushed the Spectrum out before it was finished.
> RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
I'd put the Spectrum first, because while it had 16K less than the C64 and
CPC, you actually had more memory available to do things with because of
the screen size.
> it's clear why the C64 was the best machine for games.
The Spectrum was the best machine for games because there were more games
for it. The C64 versions might have been better in some cases, but there
were more games available for the Spectrum and they cost less which is why
it was more popular than the C64 in the UK.
> The BBC machine's main problem was a lack of memory
And the fact it cost too much.
> The Amstrad CPC was a very balanced design - it did nothing poorly.
It was based on the Spectrum. It was what the Spectrum would have been
like if Sinclair hadn't been trying to minimise the cost.
> The Spectrum was quite lacking from a hardware perspective
What it lacked in hardware it made up for in price. And because it was
such a simple machine to program it spawned a generation of games
programmers who went on to write some great games on other platforms.
Sadly, most CPC games were ports from the Spectrum. The BBC was never
really considered a viable games machine, despite being the development
platform for Elite, and the C64 was a brute to program. It's popularity is
probably down to the fact that it was the cheapest in the US market,
making it successful for the same reasons as the Spectrum was in the UK.
--
I'm leaving CSS again soon. I will be away from
my machine for about six months from the end of
February. You can still email if you want, just
don't expect a quick response.
Jason
>CPU speed isn't the be-all and end-all. Although the Z80 in the CPU was
>clocked at 4Mhz, as opposed to the Spectrum's 3.5Mhz, there was no
>noticeable difference in performance. Likewise, the BBC may have been
>clocked slightly higher than the C64 but performance was comperable.
i believe the BBC is close to double the C64 (the Atari 8bit is) - but
any visible difference, such as screen scrolling, goes out the window
because the C64 has the VIC-II helping out.
>All of the machines were about the same when it came to sound effects. I
>believe you're talking about music in which case you have to distinguish
>between the Spectrum 128 and the Spectrum 48. The 128 had the same chip as
>the CPC. The BBC had a similar chip. While the SID is technically more
>powerful than the AY, Rob Hubbard is quoted as stating that the AY was
>superior, although harder to program.
Are you *sure* about this quote and could i have a source please...?
It's not one i'm aware of and we interviewed Rob for Commodore Zone in
issue 10. Hubbard *did* consider the Yamaha MSX as an option to the C64
when he first started out (from an interview in Commodore Horizons,
circa 1984/5 from memory), but i believe that wasn't an AY chip in there
but a fairly hefty piece of synth hardware.
As a counter-quote, Tim Follin was interviewed for Commodore Zone and
stated that the only tune of his from his 8bit days he even vaguely
liked was the titles tune for "Ghouls 'n' Ghosts" from the C64.
>I'd have to agree that while the SID is more flexible, the output
>quality is higher from the AY.
Most people would disagree, the AY merely has a subset of what the SID
is capable of and, if the user wishes, it's possible to strip back
functions to make the SID sound like an AY. Check my demo "Spectral",
Matt Simmonds managed to get some fairly AY-esque sounds out of the
Dutch USA Team "Music Assembler" for the soundtrack on that...
http://www.cosine.org.uk/demos_spectral.html
But personal taste and all that... i will, however, point to the
popularity of the HardSID card, the SIDStation MIDI device and to
http://www.c64audio.com/ and their "Back In Time Live" events, featuring
remixed SID tunes (normally featuring some of the original track) in
nightclubs - is there an equivalent for any of those for the AY...? =-)
>Very subjective. For a start the CPC had the best graphics modes, not the
>C64. But you also have to look at how effective the modes were. The BBC's
>colour mode took heaps of memory to use while the Spectrum's screen was
>the best for vector graphics and took only 7K.
And the C64 boots, as default, to a 2K character based screen that can
be scrolled at just about any speed at full framerate; with the majority
of 8bit games being 2D scrolling jobbies that gives the C64 a *major*
advantage in that department and, as i said elsewhere, the C64's
attempts at 3D have more often than not been let down by the programmers
rather than purely by the hardware.
Games like "Elite" and even "Mercenary" are ports, from the BBC and
Atari 8bit respectively, both of which have a faster processor - the C64
could do "Elite" far better if it was using chunks of character based
screen and redefining the characters rather than using a bitmap.
>The C64 may have had built in sprites, but the Spectrum had a Z80 which
>could shift data around very quickly, and with a monochrome screen, the
>Spectrum was much better at vector graphics than the other machines. It's
>also important to note that the most BBC and C64 games used horrible
>blocky screen modes in order to get more colours, while the CPC and
>Spectrum went the hi-res graphics route.
The C64, CPC and BBC could do either/or and it was probably a consumer
lead choice that put the majority of C64 games into multicolour mode -
the cry of "Spectrum port!" was, after all, an insult to C64 users...
And CPC users have, in the past, bemoaned the use of Spectrum graphics
on their machine too.
Again, the C64 also has the speed advantage from the text screen mode
being a fraction of the size of the Spectrum's in memory.
>I'd put the Spectrum first, because while it had 16K less than the C64 and
>CPC, you actually had more memory available to do things with because of
>the screen size.
The C64 requires 1K for it's screen, the colour map is shadowed away on
it's own 1K of RAM sat next to the VIC-II and the actual RAM under that
space can be used again. The C64 powers up with 39K available to BASIC
and a good machine code programmer can use 65K (the colour RAM being the
extra 1K) as well as having the ROMs shadowed over the RAM to keep them
out of the way.
>The Spectrum was the best machine for games because there were more games
>for it.
Not overall, only in the UK. =-)
>The C64 versions might have been better in some cases, but there were
>more games available for the Spectrum and they cost less which is why
>it was more popular than the C64 in the UK.
C64 games tended to be a pound more expensive, except for budget titles.
Most C64 users i've spoken to over the years considered the difference
in sound and graphics quality (yes, the blockier resolution was, and
indeed is, considered better because it's more flexible and colourful)
enough to warrant that price difference.
The games companies seemed to view things in the same way, hence the
price difference and (since they made their monmey) i assume the
majority of C64 games players felt the same.
On the availability front, i always seem to remember seeing more C64
titles on the shelves of software shops than any other format.
>> The Spectrum was quite lacking from a hardware perspective
>
>What it lacked in hardware it made up for in price. And because it was
>such a simple machine to program it spawned a generation of games
>programmers who went on to write some great games on other platforms.
The same is true of the C64, but in these days of team-developed games
it's possible to lose track of people a lot easier; C64 legends like
Andrew Braybrook, Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Bob Stephenson, Robin
Levy, Dan Phillips, Gary Liddon, Paul Docherty, John and Steve Rowlands,
Manfred Trenz and so forth are *all* still out there doing games work,
just as parts of teams now.
>Sadly, most CPC games were ports from the Spectrum. The BBC was never
>really considered a viable games machine, despite being the development
>platform for Elite, and the C64 was a brute to program.
Hmm, i'd have to disagree with *that* one! Unless we're talking about
BASIC, in which case i must admit to not really using BASIC after the
first dabblings, more because the commercial games i aspired to write
when i first started out needed scrolling so machine code was a must.
Putting a few sprites up, syncing to the rasterscan and running a simple
little machine code game is an incredibly simple job for the C64, both
on a programming level and the sheer amount of processor time required -
i don't think the same could be claimed of the Spectrum, CPC or BBC - at
the very least the sprite handling requires a good, efficient piece of
code i'd have thought...?
>It's popularity is probably down to the fact that it was the cheapest
>in the US market, making it successful for the same reasons as the
>Spectrum was in the UK.
From memory, it wasn't the cheapest - certainly a C64 with disk drive
(the common system almost everywhere *apart* from the UK) cost more than
the majority of the competition, but it still manages to have that
Guinness Book Of Records entry stating 30 million units shifted... =-)
ronald....@boeing.com
Baron Samedi wrote:
I'll avoid the flamewars, especially since I know nothing about the CPC and BBC.
But why aren't the Atari 800, Apple II, Tandy CoCo, and Texas Inst TI-99/4 (OK,
technically it's a 16-bitter) machines included? They've all got strengths and
weaknesses and all sold well here in the US. Or was this a UK-only thing?
-Ron
Andrew Owen
> >All of the machines were about the same when it came to sound effects. I
> >believe you're talking about music in which case you have to distinguish
> >between the Spectrum 128 and the Spectrum 48. The 128 had the same chip as
> >the CPC. The BBC had a similar chip. While the SID is technically more
> >powerful than the AY, Rob Hubbard is quoted as stating that the AY was
> >superior, although harder to program.
>
> Are you *sure* about this quote and could i have a source please...?
Yes I am *sure* about the quote. The source is a webpage dedicated to Rob
Hubbard for which I don't have the URL handy. I found it via Google while
searching for info on the Goldrunner theme if that's any help. It's on a
C64-centric site, so I'm reasonably sure it's reliable. It was in response
to a question about programming music on the Atari ST to which he replied
he'd already got some experience working on the CPC and that the gains
over the SID were small for the amount of effort involved, but that still
suggests he thought it superior.
> It's not one i'm aware of and we interviewed Rob for Commodore Zone in
> issue 10. Hubbard *did* consider the Yamaha MSX as an option to the C64
> when he first started out (from an interview in Commodore Horizons,
> circa 1984/5 from memory), but i believe that wasn't an AY chip in there
> but a fairly hefty piece of synth hardware.
I think a better chip is the later YM2203 which is AY compatible but has
most of the features of the SID. I don't understand why despite being used
in a series of arcade boards it never made it into a home micro.
> As a counter-quote, Tim Follin was interviewed for Commodore Zone and
> stated that the only tune of his from his 8bit days he even vaguely
> liked was the titles tune for "Ghouls 'n' Ghosts" from the C64.
I like his beeper tunes on the Spectrum, but I have to admit, I'd rather
hear them without all the distortion.
> >I'd have to agree that while the SID is more flexible, the output
> >quality is higher from the AY.
>
> Most people would disagree, the AY merely has a subset of what the SID
> is capable of and, if the user wishes, it's possible to strip back
> functions to make the SID sound like an AY. Check my demo "Spectral",
> Matt Simmonds managed to get some fairly AY-esque sounds out of the
> Dutch USA Team "Music Assembler" for the soundtrack on that...
>
> http://www.cosine.org.uk/demos_spectral.html
I would do but I've just updated to MacOS X and I haven't got my SID
player sorted yet. I'll take your word for it, but from recollection the
SID always sounded like it was outputing at a lower frequency than the AY.
I'm quite happy to be corrected if I'm wrong on this point though.
> But personal taste and all that... i will, however, point to the
> popularity of the HardSID card, the SIDStation MIDI device and to
> http://www.c64audio.com/ and their "Back In Time Live" events, featuring
> remixed SID tunes (normally featuring some of the original track) in
> nightclubs - is there an equivalent for any of those for the AY...? =-)
I'm not knocking the SID. It's a great chip. But it was never used in any
arcade machines, while derivatives of the AY were, so it's six of one and
half a dozen of the other if you ask me. :)
> >Very subjective. For a start the CPC had the best graphics modes, not the
> >C64. But you also have to look at how effective the modes were. The BBC's
> >colour mode took heaps of memory to use while the Spectrum's screen was
> >the best for vector graphics and took only 7K.
>
> And the C64 boots, as default, to a 2K character based screen that can
> be scrolled at just about any speed at full framerate; with the majority
> of 8bit games being 2D scrolling jobbies that gives the C64 a *major*
> advantage in that department and, as i said elsewhere, the C64's
> attempts at 3D have more often than not been let down by the programmers
> rather than purely by the hardware.
I quite agree, although as someone else pointed out, the Spectrum display
could almost have been designed for vector graphics. One of the things
about Spectrum games is that they were written by innovative UK and
Spanish (mainly) programmers, while the C64 titles were churned out by
American software houses. Demo coders have shown what a C64 can really do,
but it didn't matter back in the '80s.
> >also important to note that the most BBC and C64 games used horrible
> >blocky screen modes in order to get more colours, while the CPC and
> >Spectrum went the hi-res graphics route.
>
> The C64, CPC and BBC could do either/or and it was probably a consumer
> lead choice that put the majority of C64 games into multicolour mode -
> the cry of "Spectrum port!" was, after all, an insult to C64 users...
> And CPC users have, in the past, bemoaned the use of Spectrum graphics
> on their machine too.
However, the Ultima series used the hi-res mode on the C64 and they are
some of my favourite C64 games of all time. In fact they were the main
reason I got a C64 emulator, since these titles never appeared on the
Spectrum.
> Again, the C64 also has the speed advantage from the text screen mode
> being a fraction of the size of the Spectrum's in memory.
You just said it was 2K. Well the Spectrum screen is just under 7K so I
think you may be over-emphasising the benefits.
> >I'd put the Spectrum first, because while it had 16K less than the C64 and
> >CPC, you actually had more memory available to do things with because of
> >the screen size.
> The C64 requires 1K for it's screen, the colour map is shadowed away on
> it's own 1K of RAM sat next to the VIC-II and the actual RAM under that
> space can be used again. The C64 powers up with 39K available to BASIC
> and a good machine code programmer can use 65K (the colour RAM being the
> extra 1K) as well as having the ROMs shadowed over the RAM to keep them
> out of the way.
That's fair enough, but all the graphics data had to be stored somewhere
and the Spectrum format would generally take up less memory, so it's not
just the active screen area you have to consider.
> >The Spectrum was the best machine for games because there were more games
> >for it.
>
> Not overall, only in the UK. =-)
That was a bit biased of me wasn't it. Probably a reaction to the original
post which was rather biased towards the C64. It wasn't just the UK where
the Spectrum out-sold the C64 though, it was also a number of European
countries, and it was also the most popular machine to make illegal copies
of in the former Eastern-Bloc, so I'd argue there were more Spectrum
compatible machines in existence than C64s, although on paper the C64
outsold the Spectrum.
> >The C64 versions might have been better in some cases, but there were
> >more games available for the Spectrum and they cost less which is why
> >it was more popular than the C64 in the UK.
>
> C64 games tended to be a pound more expensive, except for budget titles.
> Most C64 users i've spoken to over the years considered the difference
> in sound and graphics quality (yes, the blockier resolution was, and
> indeed is, considered better because it's more flexible and colourful)
> enough to warrant that price difference.
But if you bought 100 games over 10 years, it cost you an extra £100. And
I've always hated blocky graphics. Look at Outrun on the C64 and compare
the Spectrum version. I accept that more C64 titles had decent sound,
because the Spectrum 128 wasn't launched until 1985, but really I think it
comes down to individual taste rather than one being better than the
other.
> The games companies seemed to view things in the same way, hence the
> price difference and (since they made their monmey) i assume the
> majority of C64 games players felt the same.
>
> On the availability front, i always seem to remember seeing more C64
> titles on the shelves of software shops than any other format.
And I remember it the other way, but then I'm biased and I admit it.
However, point me to the C64 equivalent of Planet Sinclair and the World
of Spectrum and I'll consider eating my hat. :)
> >Sadly, most CPC games were ports from the Spectrum. The BBC was never
> >really considered a viable games machine, despite being the development
> >platform for Elite, and the C64 was a brute to program.
>
> Hmm, i'd have to disagree with *that* one!
My main complaint is with the CPU rather than the C64. I guess I just like
the flexibility of 16-bit registers.
> Putting a few sprites up, syncing to the rasterscan and running a simple
> little machine code game is an incredibly simple job for the C64, both
> on a programming level and the sheer amount of processor time required -
> i don't think the same could be claimed of the Spectrum, CPC or BBC - at
> the very least the sprite handling requires a good, efficient piece of
> code i'd have thought...?
Sprite handling's really not that difficult on the Speccy, and not having
hardware sprites means you can set them up how you want. Which in some
cases was great, and in others was not so good.
> >It's popularity is probably down to the fact that it was the cheapest
> >in the US market, making it successful for the same reasons as the
> >Spectrum was in the UK.
>
> From memory, it wasn't the cheapest - certainly a C64 with disk drive
> (the common system almost everywhere *apart* from the UK) cost more than
> the majority of the competition, but it still manages to have that
> Guinness Book Of Records entry stating 30 million units shifted... =-)
My memory is uncertain on this one but I'm fairly sure it was cheaper than
the Apple II, and I think it had more support than the nearest Atari
equivalent.
Andrew Owen
> I'll avoid the flamewars, especially since I know nothing about the CPC and
> BBC. But why aren't the Atari 800, Apple II, Tandy CoCo, and
> Texas Inst TI-99/4 (OK, technically it's a 16-bitter) machines included?
> They've all got strengths and weaknesses and all sold well here in the US.
> Or was this a UK-only thing?
I have no idea, since I didn't post the original message. But for what
it's worth I don't think there can ever be a best machine. I use a whole
series of emulators for different tasks. Mainly I use a Spectrum emulator
because that's the machine I grew up with and know how to program. I use a
BBC emulator to play Elite, I use a C64 emulator to play the Ultima games,
I use a CPC emulator to play JSW II, and I use one or two other emulators
for other games. I know more about the Spectrum than the other machines so
it's easier for me to program it, otherwise I'd probably opt for the CPC,
since it is more powerful. I don't know 6502 assembly language, and I
think I'd find the lack of some of the Z80s functions to difficult to work
around, but I really enjoyed playing the port of Little Batty. I think we
all have more in common than we have differences, and I for one think it's
time to put the "my computer's better than your's" arguments to bed
forever. Having said that, I see no harm in a comparisson of abilites, but
I'd suggest 1986 as the year of reckoning, since the 8-bits were fully
developed and the 16-bits had just been launched. And if I had to pick a
winner, I'd vote for the Macintosh. But that's just an opinion, and I'm
sure others will disagree, which is fine by me. :)
Anders Carlsson
> (the colour RAM being the extra 1K)
But it's only four bits wide? Could it be used for *code*?
--
Anders Carlsson
Eder
Colin Woodcock
Andrew Owen wrote:
> I think we
> all have more in common than we have differences, and I for one think it's
> time to put the "my computer's better than your's" arguments to bed
> forever.
Well said that man.
John Kavanagh
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
> CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
> Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
> Graphics 1 4 3 2
> Screen Size 2 4 1 2
> Video Effects 1 4 2 2
> Operating System 4 2 1 3
> BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
> RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
I was gonig to write alot about this until I realised, I was looking at hte
chart wrongly, just like the way so amny others did. I think the rating of 1
is better then the rating of 4, is this correct? Surely, cause that way it
makes sense. Take graphics for example, 4 for spectrum meaning that they not
great, which is true and 2 for the CPC which is not as good as the C64 1.
Which is kinda wrong since I fee lthe CPC had better graphics but was let
down with lazy programmers who just used speccy graphics in the CPC version
of their games.
Ya, ok, bye, John
Geoffrey Oltmans
"Baron Samedi" <fear...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:61f781b8.02020...@posting.google.com...
<stuff deleted>
I suppose you think that you have done everyone a great service by
crossposting this message, but I for one (and I imagine quite a few people
in comp.sys.cbm and the sinclair groups) don't appreciate it one little bit.
These always start out as a quasi-serious discussion and rapidly deteriorate
into a pissing contest.
PLEASE! Think about the repercussions of posting a brand a vs. brand b
discussion and then crossposting it!!! And to everyone else, please let
sleeping dogs lie.
*Geoff!*
Geoffrey Oltmans
<stuff deleted>
Sorry if my last post sounded a bit grating. It's just that I finally
resubscribed to this group after leaving due to the last sinclair vs. c64
flame war, and come to find that someone started up another one. Nothing
against you personally. :)
*Geoff!*
Ivan Ruiz Etxabe
>
>I think a better chip is the later YM2203 which is AY compatible but has
>most of the features of the SID. I don't understand why despite being used
>in a series of arcade boards it never made it into a home micro.
>
I have an hypothesis about this. I don't know if I'm even a bit right.
In Hardware tems, little hardware improvement involves no so little
economic costs, and since the aim of home micros was a massive
presence at homes, and thus many machines must be made, that
costs would be multiplied.
I say this because when a practice in the first year of uni I made a
circuit
and told the teacher : "It's done, it works". And he replied "but you
use
3 resistances more than required, and that's money if I wanted to
build thousands of this".
Ivan
Biggo
> resubscribed to this group after leaving due to the last sinclair vs. c64
> flame war, and come to find that someone started up another one.
Pah! *Our* flame wars are longer than yours!
--
Biggo. <mailto:big...@dplanet.ch> (remove the hyphen-spambusters @ work)
listen to aaria (two and a Mac): http://www.mp3.com/aaria
*** I vecchi computer fanno ognuno qualcosa di diverso;
quelli nuovi fanno tutti le stesse cose. (Leonardo)
Richard Wilson
> >
> > It was running a Z80B (6 MHz) whereas the CPC runs a Z80A (4 MHz) as I
> > recall.
>
> I don't think the CPC had a Z80B, pretty sure it's a Z80A @ 4MHz. The Sam
> Coupe has Z80B though..
You're right! Just as James said before you!
Richard
Richard Wilson
> think I'd find the lack of some of the Z80s functions to difficult to work
> around, but I really enjoyed playing the port of Little Batty.
The Z80 has a lack of functions? Compared to the 6502?
Richard Fairhurst
> From what i remember from other flamewars, the CPC tended to struggle a
> bit at action games, especially scrolling the screen - in it's lowest
> resolution the screen RAM is vast and takes a *lot* of hammering to
> scroll.
That's a fair point. The screen RAM's 16k (in any mode).
You can, however, scroll it in hardware - i.e. you just change the base
address - which quite a few games did. A _couple_ even displayed two
screens on the monitor at once (two different base addresses), allowing
one part to scroll and the other not. But this is mostly a demo trick.
That said, didn't the BBC have near-direct equivalents to the Amstrad's
three screen modes, and several more besides?
--
| Richard Fairhurst www.systemeD.net
| The point is not to put poetry at the disposal of the revolution,
| but to put the revolution at the disposal of poetry.
Richard Fairhurst
> The original 16/48K machines are clocked at 3.5MHz, and the 128K ran
> marginally faster at 3.5469MHz. So it looks like the CPC (about which I
> know next to bugger-all) wins in the CPU-speed stakes.
The CPC runs at 3.3MHz, though it's a 4MHz chip.
The Starglider
<bit...@iname.com> writes
The Starglider
<oltmansg@nosp.?.knology.net.invalid> writes
May?
Mike Wynne
"Chris Cowley" <cco...@grok.co.uk> wrote in message
news:r7h56ucdoipchn1la...@hobgoblin.grok.co.uk...
> Mike Wynne has build a Speccy clone that I think will run at 7MHz, and I
> think there are some mass-produced Russian clones (again I know nothing
> about them) that run even faster (14MHz, or maybe 24MHz -- not too
> sure).
SpeccyBob is capable of running upto 21MHz, however the only Z80s I've got
at the moment are the bog standard Z80A versions. So in fact when I run
them at 7MHz it's a 3MHz overclock - whoooor! that's a 75% O/C - beat that
PC guys!
BTW, the Speccybob site should be back up sometime this week.
MikeW
Andrew Owen
<bit...@iname.com> wrote:
No, in my haste I missed an apostrophe, I meant the 6502 lacks 16-bit
registers and block movement instructions, and a few others, and while I
know they aren't essential, I rather like using them.
Andrew Owen
(Benjamin Fall) wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2002 18:11:49 -0600, "Geoffrey Oltmans"
> <oltmansg@nosp@m.knology.net> wrote:
>
> >PLEASE! Think about the repercussions of posting a brand a vs. brand b
> >discussion and then crossposting it!!! And to everyone else, please let
> >sleeping dogs lie.
>
> I think it was bait, and y'know, some people still bite.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. But I think we've nipped it in the bud this time.
MagerValp
MW> SpeccyBob is capable of running upto 21MHz, however the only Z80s I've got
MW> at the moment are the bog standard Z80A versions. So in fact when I run
MW> them at 7MHz it's a 3MHz overclock - whoooor! that's a 75% O/C - beat that
MW> PC guys!
486 SX25 overclocked to 247 MHz:
http://totl.net/Eunuch/index.html
:)
--
___ . . . . . + . . o
_|___|_ + . + . + . . Per Olofsson, konstnär
o-o . . . o + Mage...@cling.gu.se
- + + . http://www.cling.gu.se/~cl3polof/
Tayles
"John Kavanagh" <jo...@irishtourism.com> wrote in message news:<FGE88.3039$D6....@news.iol.ie>...
Assuming that 1 is the highest, the Speccy's rating for graphics is
simply not fair. Admittedly, the C64's sprite hardware made it an
accomplished arcade machine, but it also encouraged programmers to
rely on this strength, resulting in a rather formulaic games
catalogue. The Spectrum, on the other hand, may have suffered from
attribute troubles and a limited colour pallette, but its graphics
possessed a crispness and clarity that the Commodore sorely lacked.
Even the most die-hard C64 fan cannot deny that their machine's
graphics possessed a blockiness that the Spectrum managed to avoid,
even if we did have to sacrafice a few colours to do so. When it came
to the two-tone delights of many isometric 3D games of the age, the
Speccy won hands down.
The Spectrum's limitations certainly drove programmers to find
increasingly ingenious means of producing quality graphics and
undoubtedly the 'improvement curve' of Speccy games was much steeper
and longer than the Commodore's, which contented itself with the same
tired, generic ideas for much of its life. That said, the C64 was
undoubtedly a technically advanced machine for its time and had it
been produced by Sinclair I have no doubt that its games would have
been very different.
As for the Amstrad, I agree that it was a very good machine, but it
was released too late. Although 1984 was the heyday of the Speccy and
C64, 16-bit technology was just around the corner and a new system
would have had to offer a better level of technology to really put a
dent in the Sinclair/Commodore monopoly of the market. It had some
good graphics, decent sound, a built in tape deck and natty cursor
keys, but for me it really fell down on two points. Firstly, it
needed a monitor, which meant an unwanted extra expense (although I
seem to remember Amstrad saying that using micros on a TV eventually
knackered it and also tried to sell its monitor on the idea that it
stopped junior from taking over the telly in the lounge). Secondly, it
relied too heavily on just converting old games from other formats
rather than developing new titles for itself. Who is going to buy a
new computer when its games are six months old?
As for the BBC, sure, it was a relatively advanced system, but Acorn
hadn't a clue about popularism and shot themselves in the foot by
producing the Beeb in the first place. If they'd had any sense they
would have filled the niche taken by Apple in the States and produced
computers for the more 'serious' end of the market, rather than
falling into a grey middle ground. The least said about the Electron,
the better.
Russ.
Thomas Harte
>> Coupe has Z80B though..
>
>You're right! Just as James said before you!
I think he meant 'I don't think the Spectrum had a Z80B . . .', which is
true.
Notice however that the the SAM Coupé (I have one!) has the worst memory
contention of any 8bit machine, and you still get less than about 270 useful
cycles per scanline while the display is switched on. Also, the display is
very inflexible, and I have never seen any demo able to produce a full
screen scroll - the sort of thing that obviously Amstrad and BBC owners
consider trivial.
-Thomas
Thomas Harte
>three screen modes, and several more besides?
Both the BBC and Amstrad share the most important display component - the
CRTC6845. However, the video ULA on the BBC (which takes the address output
from the CRTC) can only produce the 8 distinct colours you'd expect in the
TTL world, and the CRTC is wired up in the intended manner giving non-linear
addresswise scanlines. Which is really annoying for programmers. Finally,
all BBCs produced by Acorn including '64kb' and '128kb' models have, I
think, only a maximum 32kb RAM usable for display purposes. The same
quantities of bit packing (1bpp, 2bpp, 4bpp) are offered in both machines.
In layman's terms - the BBC can produce exactly the same pixel quantities
and layouts as the Amstrad, but the pixels are sourced less conveniently for
anything but text manipulation, are limited to 8 colours, and not all parts
of the display will be unique if the required screen memory is larger than
32kb.
-Thomas
Jason
<starg...@thespian.d.c.u> writes
>Christ, what are you going to do when the next annual war starts up in
>May?
You mean this isn't just the annual war starting early? Oh dear...!
--
Jason =-)
_______________________________________________________________________
TMR / / / / / / / /\
/ /__/ / / /__/ / / / /__/ Email: t...@c64.org / /
/ /\_/ / /__ / / / / __// TMR_C0S on IRC / /
/ /__/ / / / / / / / / / http://www.tmr.cosine.org.uk / /
/_____/_____/_____/__/__/__/_____/_____________________________________/ /
\_____\_____\_____\__\__\__\_____\_____________________________________\/
Jason
<aoweninoz-070...@host213-122-253-37.dial.btopenworld.com>,
Andrew Owen <aowe...@mail.yahoo.com.au> writes
>In article <njcfdZDH...@cosine.demon.co.uk>, Jason <t...@c64.org> wrote:
>> Are you *sure* about this quote and could i have a source please...?
>
>Yes I am *sure* about the quote. The source is a webpage dedicated to Rob
>Hubbard for which I don't have the URL handy. I found it via Google while
>searching for info on the Goldrunner theme if that's any help. It's on a
>C64-centric site, so I'm reasonably sure it's reliable. It was in response
>to a question about programming music on the Atari ST to which he replied
>he'd already got some experience working on the CPC and that the gains
>over the SID were small for the amount of effort involved, but that still
>suggests he thought it superior.
i'll have to go looking, although i'm unaware of Hubbard ever making
such a comment and (from the information i've got to hand or at least to
memory) he's always stated a preference to the SID over the AY.
>> As a counter-quote, Tim Follin was interviewed for Commodore Zone and
>> stated that the only tune of his from his 8bit days he even vaguely
>> liked was the titles tune for "Ghouls 'n' Ghosts" from the C64.
>
>I like his beeper tunes on the Spectrum, but I have to admit, I'd rather
>hear them without all the distortion.
Follin once described the beeper driver as sounding like "a hoover with
nails stuck in it"... =-)
>> http://www.cosine.org.uk/demos_spectral.html
>
>I would do but I've just updated to MacOS X and I haven't got my SID
>player sorted yet. I'll take your word for it, but from recollection the
>SID always sounded like it was outputing at a lower frequency than the AY.
>I'm quite happy to be corrected if I'm wrong on this point though.
That link is to the actual demo's page on my site, containing a link to
a zipped D64 file - so you'll need a C64 emulator. For the Mac, either
VICE or Power64 are reasonable, the former tends to be more accurate and
"Spectral" uses a VSP routine during one of the parts so cycle accurate
VIC-II emulation'll be needed.
Matt's SID tunes for "Spectral" are in the High Voltage SID Collection
(over at http://hvsc.c64.org/) under VARIOUS/A-F/4-Mat/ (they're all
listed by the original Spectrum demo or game's name - the Ping Pong mix
is an exception, it's based on the beeper tune and made to sound like
Galway's C64 driver).
>I'm not knocking the SID. It's a great chip. But it was never used in any
>arcade machines, while derivatives of the AY were, so it's six of one and
>half a dozen of the other if you ask me. :)
The SID is proprietary (MOS Technologies, who made the 6581 SID, was
owned by Commodore by that point, if memory serves) so nobody would have
the rights to use it in an arcade machine. Doesn't mean they didn't
*want* to, just that Commodore wouldn't have let 'em if they did! =-)
>I quite agree, although as someone else pointed out, the Spectrum display
>could almost have been designed for vector graphics.
(That was me, i think... =-)
>One of the things about Spectrum games is that they were written by
>innovative UK and Spanish (mainly) programmers, while the C64 titles
>were churned out by American software houses. Demo coders have shown
>what a C64 can really do, but it didn't matter back in the '80s.
[Shakes head]
The majority of software we saw in the UK was *written* in the UK and
Europe, most of the people i reeled off in a list previously are based
here. American software was primarily large multi-loading disk epic
stuff, we saw *very* little of that over here because bludgeoning it
down to tape was nearly impossible.
Companies like Thalamus, System 3, US Gold, Ocean, Rainbow Arts, the big
names in the UK in fact, were UK or European.
>> Again, the C64 also has the speed advantage from the text screen mode
>> being a fraction of the size of the Spectrum's in memory.
>
>You just said it was 2K. Well the Spectrum screen is just under 7K so I
>think you may be over-emphasising the benefits.
Most games "wash" the colour map and use just the 1K screen, they don't
have to move all 2K to scroll. That's 1/7th of the RAM - apologies for
not explaining that a little more clearly. Another thing i forgot to
mention is that the VIC-II can change where it's looking for the screen,
allowing easy double buffering.
So, on a game scrolling 1 pixel a frame, the hardware smooth scroll
ticks over for eight frames doing the shifts whilst the new screen is
prepared in the background - it takes about six characters of rastertime
to scroll the entire screen this way, *more* than enough to handle
complex sprite routines, music players, control systems or even a
single-buffered colour scroll.
>> The C64 requires 1K for it's screen, the colour map is shadowed away on
>> it's own 1K of RAM sat next to the VIC-II and the actual RAM under that
>> space can be used again. The C64 powers up with 39K available to BASIC
>> and a good machine code programmer can use 65K (the colour RAM being the
>> extra 1K) as well as having the ROMs shadowed over the RAM to keep them
>> out of the way.
>
>That's fair enough, but all the graphics data had to be stored somewhere
>and the Spectrum format would generally take up less memory, so it's not
>just the active screen area you have to consider.
[shakes head]
Fonts are stored in the same way - except that you don't write them to
the bitmap so no data is repeated, the C64 needs a *total* of 4K to
display a screen if you include everything, 1K of actual screen data, 1K
of colour map and 2K of character set data. Where this is located is
flexible and, for machine code programmers, there's no reason why it
can't all be dumped under the BASIC or Kernel ROMs either.
With a 7K screen and 2K for a font, that makes the Spectrum's screen
requirements 9K compared to just 4K - add in the double buffering if
you're trying to scroll or move that (1K overhead per buffer) and
hardware sprites for objects mapped over the top; the speed advantage
becomes *very* obvious.
>It wasn't just the UK where the Spectrum out-sold the C64 though, it
>was also a number of European countries, and it was also the most
>popular machine to make illegal copies of in the former Eastern-Bloc,
>so I'd argue there were more Spectrum compatible machines in existence
>than C64s, although on paper the C64 outsold the Spectrum.
The C64 out-sold the Spectrum in more and larger markets, from memory.
Certainly the American market accounts for a *very* large slice of the
pie in the 1980's and we all know how little a dent the Spectrum made
there. The C64 also had a few years more shelf life to consider as
well, clones are all very well but i doubt they account for the same as
Commodore actually pushing the machine to shops and (doing their version
of) marketing it...
>But if you bought 100 games over 10 years, it cost you an extra £100. And
>I've always hated blocky graphics. Look at Outrun on the C64 and compare
>the Spectrum version. I accept that more C64 titles had decent sound,
>because the Spectrum 128 wasn't launched until 1985, but really I think it
>comes down to individual taste rather than one being better than the
>other.
"Outrun" on the C64 was just rubbish, it was a terrible conversion. Have
a look at "Outrun Europa" or "Turbocharge" to see how it *should* have
been done.
As for buying games, are you going to tell me that you paid for every
game you owned...? =-)
>> On the availability front, i always seem to remember seeing more C64
>> titles on the shelves of software shops than any other format.
>
>And I remember it the other way, but then I'm biased and I admit it.
So am i, but i worked in a software shop so i'd like to think my
recollection is quite accurate since i was selling titles for all three
8bit formats. And indeed the hardware, we were still stocking and
selling C64's well after the CPC and Spectrum had been discontinued.
>However, point me to the C64 equivalent of Planet Sinclair and the World
>of Spectrum and I'll consider eating my hat. :)
(Stand back, kids!)
http://www.lemon64.com/ (vast games archive)
http://cia.c64.org/ (another big games archive)
http://www.c64.org/ (yet more games...)
http://www.zzap64.co.uk/ (project to scan and upload Zzap! 64)
http://www.c64.ch/ (demo archive, still being added to constantly)
http://www.c64.sk/ (C64 scene portal, for active C64 people)
http://www.c64scene.info/ (C64 Scene Database, again for active sceners)
ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/ (Arnold FTP)
ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/ (Digital Dungeon FTP)
ftp://c64.rulez.org/pub/c64/ (Gangsta's Paradise FTP)
There's a *few* from memory, but for some more (and check COCOS, the
Commodore Computer Sitelist for far more links than i have) have a look
under "resources" on my site at...
http://www.cosine.org.uk/links.html
>Sprite handling's really not that difficult on the Speccy, and not having
>hardware sprites means you can set them up how you want. Which in some
>cases was great, and in others was not so good.
On a sheer ease level though, it's *nowhere* near as easy to write your
own sprite handler as it is to write to a few video registers,
remembering that the exact same video writes are what the C64 manual
teaches when you learn BASIC from it.
Turn on a sprite and position it:
lda #$01
sta $d015
lda #$ac
sta $d000
lda #$84
sta $d001
Set it's colour and where it gets it's data from:
lda #$0e
sta $d027
lda #$80
sta $07f8
Move it one pixel up:
dec $d001
Now, remembering that A) the sprite isn't "damaging" the background, B)
that all deletions and replots are taken care of by the hardware and C)
if you raster time it, it's totally smooth - how much code would the
Spectrum, CPC or BBC need to do the equivalent...?
>> From memory, it wasn't the cheapest - certainly a C64 with disk drive
>> (the common system almost everywhere *apart* from the UK) cost more than
>> the majority of the competition, but it still manages to have that
>> Guinness Book Of Records entry stating 30 million units shifted... =-)
>
>My memory is uncertain on this one but I'm fairly sure it was cheaper than
>the Apple II, and I think it had more support than the nearest Atari
>equivalent.
From what i gather, Atari did a *bloody* good job of marketing for a
while and Apple were a known, look at how little the C64 gets mentioned
in the "how things used to be" documentaries compared to Apple...
And if the C64 and drive were cheaper than an Apple II and drive or
Atari and drive i'll be *very* surprised! It's all this "intelligent"
device stuff, the drive's got it's own 6502 and 2K of RAM y'know... =-)
Jason
Fairhurst <ric...@systemeD.not> writes
>That's a fair point. The screen RAM's 16k (in any mode).
>
>You can, however, scroll it in hardware - i.e. you just change the base
>address - which quite a few games did. A _couple_ even displayed two
>screens on the monitor at once (two different base addresses), allowing
>one part to scroll and the other not. But this is mostly a demo trick.
Shaky memory time here, but doesn't that mean you get the scrolling
stepped in blocks of eight pixels or similar...?
>That said, didn't the BBC have near-direct equivalents to the Amstrad's
>three screen modes, and several more besides?
From a *very* shaky memory and a bit of delving i did a while back with
an emulator, it has three modes like the CPC with about the same colour
depths and can change the base address as well - that allowed for
vertical smooth scrolling i think. Horizontal smooth scrolling was a
processor hammering job, from what i understand.
Jason
<anders....@mds.mdh.se> writes
>Jason <t...@c64.org> writes:
>
>> (the colour RAM being the extra 1K)
>
>But it's only four bits wide? Could it be used for *code*?
No, but i said it was available RAM - not available for code
specifically. =-)
Thomas Harte
>any visible difference, such as screen scrolling, goes out the window
>because the C64 has the VIC-II helping out.
The BBC has a 2Mhz 6502 clocked at a constant 2Mhz. RAM is clocked at 4Mhz
and every other cycle is given to the video circuits, hence avoiding any of
the complicated timing issues of, e.g., the ZX Spectrum or Acorn Electron.
This is a good design because the grade of RAM required is no higher than
the z80 machines, but most people consider a 2Mhz 6502 to be roughly
equivalent to a 4Mhz z80 for most purposes - certainly for games which tend
to be the things highly concerned with speed.
-Thomas
Andrew Owen
<Thoma...@DELETE.lycos.co.SPAM.uk> wrote:
That's ridiculous. I can even get a decent full screen vertical scroll on
my Timex TC2048 in hi-res mode with no attirbute clash.
Thomas Harte
>>address -
>Shaky memory time here, but doesn't that mean you get the scrolling
>stepped in blocks of eight pixels or similar...?
If you use the trick that causes video memory address to reload early you
can scroll in one byte increments in any direction - which always translates
to a one scanline vertical scroll, and in 1bpp gives an 8 pixel horizontal
scroll, 2bpp a 4 pixel horizontal scroll and 4bpp 2 pixels, although an
observer might point out that this is the same physical quantity of
movement, its just that 4bpp pixels are larger.
> From a *very* shaky memory and a bit of delving i did a while back with
>an emulator, it has three modes like the CPC with about the same colour
>depths and can change the base address as well - that allowed for
>vertical smooth scrolling i think. Horizontal smooth scrolling was a
>processor hammering job, from what i understand.
The same tricks as were used on the CPC apply, its just that by the time
they were starting to become well known the BBC market had already died.
-Thomas
Andrew Owen
> i'll have to go looking, although i'm unaware of Hubbard ever making
> such a comment and (from the information i've got to hand or at least to
> memory) he's always stated a preference to the SID over the AY.
He does prefer the SID. It was easier for him to program.
> >I like his beeper tunes on the Spectrum, but I have to admit, I'd rather
> >hear them without all the distortion.
>
> Follin once described the beeper driver as sounding like "a hoover with
> nails stuck in it"... =-)
However, it is possible to do interrupt driven pseudo-three channel sound
on nothing but the beeper and I have the code to prove it. I'll admit it's
not a patch on the SID, but it's just not fair to say the original
Spectrum couldn't have had decent in-game tunes, it's just that no-one
bothered.
> >> http://www.cosine.org.uk/demos_spectral.html
> >
> >I would do but I've just updated to MacOS X and I haven't got my SID
> >player sorted yet. I'll take your word for it, but from recollection the
> >SID always sounded like it was outputing at a lower frequency than the AY.
> >I'm quite happy to be corrected if I'm wrong on this point though.
>
> That link is to the actual demo's page on my site, containing a link to
> a zipped D64 file - so you'll need a C64 emulator. For the Mac, either
> VICE or Power64 are reasonable, the former tends to be more accurate and
> "Spectral" uses a VSP routine during one of the parts so cycle accurate
> VIC-II emulation'll be needed.
Are they carbonized for MacOS X? I've only got a 400Mhz G3 and anything
that runs in the classic environment is deadly slow, and booting to MacOS
9 is not an option since I only have the minimal install required to run
my legacy apps.
> >I'm not knocking the SID. It's a great chip. But it was never used in any
> >arcade machines, while derivatives of the AY were, so it's six of one and
> >half a dozen of the other if you ask me. :)
>
> The SID is proprietary (MOS Technologies, who made the 6581 SID, was
> owned by Commodore by that point, if memory serves) so nobody would have
> the rights to use it in an arcade machine. Doesn't mean they didn't
> *want* to, just that Commodore wouldn't have let 'em if they did! =-)
Don't be silly. I'm sure Commodore would have been quite happy to flog
some SID chips for a heap of cash, unless there were manufacturing
problems which limited their output.
> Most games "wash" the colour map and use just the 1K screen, they don't
> have to move all 2K to scroll. That's 1/7th of the RAM - apologies for
> not explaining that a little more clearly. Another thing i forgot to
> mention is that the VIC-II can change where it's looking for the screen,
> allowing easy double buffering.
The Spectrum 128 can do that as well, although I don't think any games
actually used that feature.
> With a 7K screen and 2K for a font, that makes the Spectrum's screen
> requirements 9K compared to just 4K - add in the double buffering if
> you're trying to scroll or move that (1K overhead per buffer) and
> hardware sprites for objects mapped over the top; the speed advantage
> becomes *very* obvious.
But Spectrum sprites aren't generally any slower than C64 ones. And I
don't know where you get your 2K figure for the font. The Speccy font is
768 bytes and there's one in the ROM which is used by many games. Many
games with custom fonts only defined the characters they needed so that
would take up about 384 bytes. And if you're not updating the attributes,
the screen takes up 6K, not 7K. Even with the attributes it's 6.75K.
> >It wasn't just the UK where the Spectrum out-sold the C64 though, it
> >was also a number of European countries, and it was also the most
> >popular machine to make illegal copies of in the former Eastern-Bloc,
> >so I'd argue there were more Spectrum compatible machines in existence
> >than C64s, although on paper the C64 outsold the Spectrum.
>
> The C64 out-sold the Spectrum in more and larger markets, from memory.
> Certainly the American market accounts for a *very* large slice of the
> pie in the 1980's and we all know how little a dent the Spectrum made
> there.
Mainly because Timex was late entering the market. The Spectrum outsold
the C64 in the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. And clones of it were the
defacto standard across the USSR and Easten Europe, and South America,
which counts for more machines than the whole North American market.
> The C64 also had a few years more shelf life to consider as
> well, clones are all very well but i doubt they account for the same as
> Commodore actually pushing the machine to shops and (doing their version
> of) marketing it...
I'm not sure the C64 did have a longer shelf life. The Spectrum officially
sold in one form or another for 11 years. The last direct clone, the
Didaktik Gama, has only just gone out of production, and you can still buy
the Sprinter, a Spectrum compatible clocked at 21Mhz.
> >But if you bought 100 games over 10 years, it cost you an extra £100. And
> >I've always hated blocky graphics. Look at Outrun on the C64 and compare
> >the Spectrum version. I accept that more C64 titles had decent sound,
> >because the Spectrum 128 wasn't launched until 1985, but really I think it
> >comes down to individual taste rather than one being better than the
> >other.
>
> "Outrun" on the C64 was just rubbish, it was a terrible conversion. Have
> a look at "Outrun Europa" or "Turbocharge" to see how it *should* have
> been done.
Ok. When I have some free time.
> As for buying games, are you going to tell me that you paid for every
> game you owned...? =-)
Yes. I continued to pay for games when I got my Atari ST. I still pay for
games. I'm a writer so I take copyright very seriously.
> >> On the availability front, i always seem to remember seeing more C64
> >> titles on the shelves of software shops than any other format.
> >
> >And I remember it the other way, but then I'm biased and I admit it.
>
> So am i, but i worked in a software shop so i'd like to think my
> recollection is quite accurate since i was selling titles for all three
> 8bit formats. And indeed the hardware, we were still stocking and
> selling C64's well after the CPC and Spectrum had been discontinued.
You were selling C64s in 1993? By the way, did you know Amstrad has just
launched a new machine which will play Spectrum games?
> >However, point me to the C64 equivalent of Planet Sinclair and the World
> >of Spectrum and I'll consider eating my hat. :)
>
> (Stand back, kids!)
With the exception of http://www.c64.sk/, they don't seem to have the same
scope. But maybe the C64 scene is just less centrally organised.
> >Sprite handling's really not that difficult on the Speccy, and not having
> >hardware sprites means you can set them up how you want. Which in some
> >cases was great, and in others was not so good.
>
> On a sheer ease level though, it's *nowhere* near as easy to write your
> own sprite handler as it is to write to a few video registers,
> remembering that the exact same video writes are what the C64 manual
> teaches when you learn BASIC from it.
There were plenty of sprite routines printed in books and magazines for
the Speccy. And the less said about C64 BASIC the better.
> >> From memory, it wasn't the cheapest - certainly a C64 with disk drive
> >> (the common system almost everywhere *apart* from the UK) cost more than
> >> the majority of the competition, but it still manages to have that
> >> Guinness Book Of Records entry stating 30 million units shifted... =-)
> >
> >My memory is uncertain on this one but I'm fairly sure it was cheaper than
> >the Apple II, and I think it had more support than the nearest Atari
> >equivalent.
>
> From what i gather, Atari did a *bloody* good job of marketing for a
> while and Apple were a known, look at how little the C64 gets mentioned
> in the "how things used to be" documentaries compared to Apple...
Possibly because CBM went bust, while Atari still has a visible presence
(even if it is the part of the company that had nothing to do with home
computers).
> And if the C64 and drive were cheaper than an Apple II and drive or
> Atari and drive i'll be *very* surprised! It's all this "intelligent"
> device stuff, the drive's got it's own 6502 and 2K of RAM y'know... =-)
Well, maybe you're right. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned what a
terrific machine the C128 was though. Now that's a piece of kit I'm very
interested in.
Thomas Harte
>the better.
The Electron was not as unpopular as people think. Although crippled by RAM
restrictions (specifically having only 32kb of 2Mhz RAM, which was shared
with the video circuits so that CPU RAM accesses were reduced to 1Mhz in the
'low resolution' modes and had to wait for the next bit of border in 'high
resolution' modes), there were well over 300 games and most of them can be
found today at http://www.stairwaytohell.com . Several of them are Electron
exclusive. One (Firetrack) even manages a hardware scroll of the screen.
However, it is hard to escape the fact that there is only one Electron
emulator, and I had to write it myself!
Of course, compare and contrast this popularity with the SAM Coupé or any of
those funny Dragon or Oric things . . .
-Thomas
Richard Wilson
> stepped in blocks of eight pixels or similar...?
It is possible using slightly trickier (but not very tricky) hardware
techniques using CRTC register 5 to scroll the screen vertically on the CPC
by a single scan at a time, although I know of only one game on the CPC
which did it (Mission Genocide).
It is also possible to use register 8 to scroll the screen horizontally by
half a character. With a bit of extra software to blank/populate the
scrolled sections, this can give a reasonably smooth horizontal scroll. I
know of no games that have ever used this technique. Another way (although
it consumes more memory) is to have 2 copies of the screen, offset by half a
character and switch between them, most demos use this effect to provide
smooth scrolling text with large fonts.
On a CPC Plus, pixel hardware scrolling is very easy to do.
Since you can set the width and height of the display, it is possible to
reduce the display size, improving software based scrolling.
> From a *very* shaky memory and a bit of delving i did a while back with
> an emulator, it has three modes like the CPC with about the same colour
> depths and can change the base address as well - that allowed for
> vertical smooth scrolling i think. Horizontal smooth scrolling was a
> processor hammering job, from what i understand.
The BBC's graphics mode address layout is even less useful than that of the
CPC, and it is limited to 8 fixed colours, plus 8 combination flashing
colours, whereas the CPC has a standard palette of 27 colours with a maximum
of 16 in any standard mode. The CPC Plus has a 4096 colour palette, and it
is possible to display all 4096 on the screen at once.
IIRC the BBC graphics format counted the bytes down for the 8 scans of each
hi-res character, so consecutive bytes on the display were in fact 8 bytes
apart in memory.
Thomas Harte
>actually used that feature.
For some reason my memory is telling me that Pang! does . . .
-Thomas
Andy Cadley
On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Andrew Owen wrote:
> CPU speed isn't the be-all and end-all. Although the Z80 in the CPU was
> clocked at 4Mhz, as opposed to the Spectrum's 3.5Mhz, there was no
> noticeable difference in performance. Likewise, the BBC may have been
> clocked slightly higher than the C64 but performance was comperable.
Memory contention was more severe on the CPC, although it was also much
more predictable. The CPC's clock rate effectively floats somewhere
between 3 and 4Mhz, so it's pretty much on a level with the Speccy.
> > BASIC Language 4 2 1 2
>
> I think the CPC BASIC was probably better than the Sinclair BASIC, but
> only because Sinclair rushed the Spectrum out before it was finished.
The CPC's Basic was way ahead of Sinclair/C64 Basic and probably roughly
on a par with BBC Basic.
> > RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
>
> I'd put the Spectrum first, because while it had 16K less than the C64 and
> CPC, you actually had more memory available to do things with because of
> the screen size.
Er, no. The CPC has the largest usable amount of memory (in BASIC),
despite having the largest screen display because of the C64's odd
arrangement (although there are ways of using the inaccessible memory for
sprites and such). In machine code, the C64 creeps slighlty ahead because
it's screen display is less memory hungry than the CPC (assuming you
don't resize/disable the display).
> > The Amstrad CPC was a very balanced design - it did nothing poorly.
>
> It was based on the Spectrum. It was what the Spectrum would have been
> like if Sinclair hadn't been trying to minimise the cost.
Nonsense. The CPC design had absolutely nothing to do with the Spectrum.
AndyC
Richard Wilson
> recollection is quite accurate since i was selling titles for all three
> 8bit formats. And indeed the hardware, we were still stocking and
> selling C64's well after the CPC and Spectrum had been discontinued.
So did I. I sold software and hardware for both the CPC and C64, but not the
Spectrum, which was no where near as popular in Australia. Out of all the
CPC's I sold (around 50 I think), not one of them was returned. C64's had
about a 20% return rate, seem to remember lots of power supply problems. The
worst of the lot was the Amiga 500. Think the return rate for that was well
above 60%, usually with a fault where they would only display a green screen
when turned on.
> Now, remembering that A) the sprite isn't "damaging" the background, B)
> that all deletions and replots are taken care of by the hardware and C)
> if you raster time it, it's totally smooth - how much code would the
> Spectrum, CPC or BBC need to do the equivalent...?
Some example CPC+ code.
ld a,#05
ld (#6004),a ;Turn sprite on and set its magnification
ld hl,300
ld (#6000),hl ;Set the X coordinate
ld hl,100
ld (#6002),hl ;Set the Y coordinate
;Move it one pixel up
ld hl,(#6002)
dec hl
ld (#6002),hl
> And if the C64 and drive were cheaper than an Apple II and drive or
> Atari and drive i'll be *very* surprised! It's all this "intelligent"
> device stuff, the drive's got it's own 6502 and 2K of RAM y'know... =-)
Didn't seem to do it much good. Besides being completely incompatible with
every other disc format, I don't remember them being much faster than a tape
drive. I can even remember the loaders had the flashing colours in the
background, just like tape loaders.
Richard
Richard Wilson
> > > think I'd find the lack of some of the Z80s functions to difficult to
work
> > > around, but I really enjoyed playing the port of Little Batty.
> >
> > The Z80 has a lack of functions? Compared to the 6502?
>
> No, in my haste I missed an apostrophe, I meant the 6502 lacks 16-bit
> registers and block movement instructions, and a few others, and while I
> know they aren't essential, I rather like using them.
Sorry Andrew, I misread it. Bit pissed last night.
Richard
Adam D. Moss
> > Most games "wash" the colour map and use just the 1K screen, they don't
> > have to move all 2K to scroll. That's 1/7th of the RAM - apologies for
> > not explaining that a little more clearly. Another thing i forgot to
> > mention is that the VIC-II can change where it's looking for the screen,
> > allowing easy double buffering.
>
> The Spectrum 128 can do that as well, although I don't think any games
> actually used that feature.
I didn't want to contribute to this thread but I'm flabberghasted
if games didn't pick up on this feature. It's the feature new
to the 128K models that screamed 'games!' at me at least as
much as any other (including the AY38912 and expanded memory).
Baron Samedi
> Baron Samedi <fear...@yahoo.co.uk>:
> >Maybe somebody has a table like below, only that it goes into more detail as to
> >why one machine is better than another in one category. etc.
>
> Okay, off the bat i think this is flame bait but i'm willing to play
> "seriously" if everyone else is...? Oh, for a sense of perspective i'm
> posting from the C64 camp.
Not trying to be flame-bait, but maybe the topic is intrinsically so. I think
the follow-up posts have been mostly reasonable so far.
So nobody can point to some definitive resource (URL?) on the merits of the
machines here (and of course other machines - CoCo/Dragon/Atari400)?
So is there a concensus that the Spectrum was not as good technically as the
C64/BBC/others, but made up for it by virtue of clever programmers/innovative
games?
And that the C64 is generally regarded as one of the best 'on paper', but
somewhat let down by the quality of some of it's games, given the number of
games that were produced for it?
Also, that the BBC was an impressive and fast design, but lacked about 32K
of ram to be a real competitor to the C64 et al? Also the fact that Acorn
Computers Ltd. were far worse marketers than CBM in terms of making the
machine attractive to ordinary kids/casual gamers?
And finally, that the CPC was somewhat overlooked, as it was just slightly
too late into the 8bit market to make it an outright winner system? In other
words, that it got more ports from the C64 and the Spectrum, than dedictated
games for it?
David Dahle
news:u665uh3...@corp.supernews.com...
>
> I suppose you think that you have done everyone a great service by
> crossposting this message, but I for one (and I imagine quite a few people
> in comp.sys.cbm and the sinclair groups) don't appreciate it one little
bit.
> These always start out as a quasi-serious discussion and rapidly
deteriorate
> into a pissing contest.
>
> PLEASE! Think about the repercussions of posting a brand a vs. brand b
> discussion and then crossposting it!!! And to everyone else, please let
> sleeping dogs lie.
>
EXACTLY. Note the lack of further commentary by the OP...
Dave
James Coupe
, Andy Cadley <a...@sys.uea.ac.uk> writes:
>Memory contention was more severe on the CPC, although it was also much
>more predictable. The CPC's clock rate effectively floats somewhere
>between 3 and 4Mhz, so it's pretty much on a level with the Speccy.
I had various bits replaced in my CPC by Nigel Calcutt (I think - the
guy wot lived in Melton Mowbray) when I started to get the memory chips
leaking (random bits of pixel-rubbish on the monitor, especially in mode
2, being the symptom it was diagnosed from).
One of his diagnostic bits of hardware he routinely ran on any such bits
clocked the machine as running at something like 4.2 MHz. Which is
impressive, to say the least.
--
James Coupe but I lust after the raw pow0r of c.
PGP 0x5D623D5D together with the humping great
EBD690ECD7A1FB457CA2 elephant arse of gnome.
13D7E668C3695D623D5D - Vashti
James Coupe
g...@dplanet.ch> writes:
>> resubscribed to this group after leaving due to the last sinclair vs. c64
>> flame war, and come to find that someone started up another one.
>
>Pah! *Our* flame wars are longer than yours!
You call this a flame-war?
I remember on the CPC, way back in days of yore, when Emma Broadley was
writing for AA and received death threats and everything.
Your flimsy excuse for a platform couldn't even light a match by
comparison.
(For the hard of thinking: The above is not meant seriously.)
Andrew Owen
Andy Cadley <a...@sys.uea.ac.uk> wrote:
> The CPC's Basic was way ahead of Sinclair/C64 Basic and probably roughly
> on a par with BBC Basic.
Only Sinclair BASIC had channels and streams, but they were crippled by
the IF1. The BASIC was also unfinished when the machine was released which
is why there is about 1K of empty space at the end of the ROM.
> > > RAM Capacity
> > I'd put the Spectrum first, because while it had 16K less than the C64 and
> > CPC, you actually had more memory available to do things with because of
> > the screen size.
>
> Er, no. The CPC has the largest usable amount of memory (in BASIC),
Really? You get about 41K on the Spectrum. But you have to store graphics
in the memory as well, so in machine code you end up with slightly more
room for code on a Speccy.
> > > The Amstrad CPC was a very balanced design - it did nothing poorly.
> >
> > It was based on the Spectrum. It was what the Spectrum would have been
> > like if Sinclair hadn't been trying to minimise the cost.
>
> Nonsense. The CPC design had absolutely nothing to do with the Spectrum.
Well I heard that the people that designed it took a long hard look at the
Spectrum, which was the most popular UK machine at the time, and basically
said, how can we improve on this to capture the Spectrum's market. I could
be misinformed of course.
Jason
<aoweninoz-080...@host213-123-61-184.in-addr.btopenworld.com>,
Andrew Owen <aowe...@mail.yahoo.com.au> writes
>In article <fQahxEJd...@cosine.demon.co.uk>, Jason <t...@c64.org> wrote:
>
>> i'll have to go looking, although i'm unaware of Hubbard ever making
>> such a comment and (from the information i've got to hand or at least to
>> memory) he's always stated a preference to the SID over the AY.
>
>He does prefer the SID. It was easier for him to program.
Hmm, i've played with the SID a bit and it's an utter *git* to work with
sometimes, especially if trying to do complex sounds - how bad is the AY
to work with...?
>However, it is possible to do interrupt driven pseudo-three channel sound
>on nothing but the beeper and I have the code to prove it. I'll admit it's
>not a patch on the SID, but it's just not fair to say the original
>Spectrum couldn't have had decent in-game tunes, it's just that no-one
>bothered.
Okay, be totally honest here Andrew - how much of a load would that kind
of driver put on the CPU and would anything decent be run-able in the
background? Considering Follin's code tended to stop the machine dead
to play the music, even three channel tunes are going to take a fair
whack of CPU time, right?
An average C64 music driver is about 32 pixels of rastertime - easy to
integrate into a game.
>> That link is to the actual demo's page on my site, containing a link to
>> a zipped D64 file - so you'll need a C64 emulator. For the Mac, either
>> VICE or Power64 are reasonable, the former tends to be more accurate and
>> "Spectral" uses a VSP routine during one of the parts so cycle accurate
>> VIC-II emulation'll be needed.
>
>Are they carbonized for MacOS X? I've only got a 400Mhz G3 and anything
>that runs in the classic environment is deadly slow, and booting to MacOS
>9 is not an option since I only have the minimal install required to run
>my legacy apps.
Ah, possibly not - i'm using a very battered Powerbook 5300CS running
System 7 so i have no idea, i'm afraid. =-(
>> The SID is proprietary (MOS Technologies, who made the 6581 SID, was
>> owned by Commodore by that point, if memory serves) so nobody would have
>> the rights to use it in an arcade machine. Doesn't mean they didn't
>> *want* to, just that Commodore wouldn't have let 'em if they did! =-)
>
>Don't be silly. I'm sure Commodore would have been quite happy to flog
>some SID chips for a heap of cash, unless there were manufacturing
>problems which limited their output.
[Shakes head]
Trying to get parts out of Commodore in bulk for *repair* work was a
bastard, they preferred to have *any* job involving the custom chips in
house, i believe they were scared of clone C64s being made and the lack
of the chips made that harder.
They had the services of MOS to churn the chips out, an independent
semiconductor manufacturer that Commodore purchased outright via (if the
stories are true) some slightly sneaky means to make sure they had their
supply.
>> With a 7K screen and 2K for a font, that makes the Spectrum's screen
>> requirements 9K compared to just 4K - add in the double buffering if
>> you're trying to scroll or move that (1K overhead per buffer) and
>> hardware sprites for objects mapped over the top; the speed advantage
>> becomes *very* obvious.
>
>But Spectrum sprites aren't generally any slower than C64 ones.
Please demonstrate this with code fragments. 8 sprites, all moving up
the screen at different speeds can be done in (if the loop is unrolled)
a few scanlines. Can you honestly tell me you can do all the reading,
masking and writing required to even maintain a single 8x8 pixel
character sprite at one pixel a frame in the same time, with clipping
for the edges of the screen?
One thing that always seems to be forgotten is that when C64 people talk
about moving sprites or scrolling, we're normally talking at 50FPS. The
sprite handlers for a simple game can be done before the raster
interrupt has left the top border of the screen. As an example, "Little
Batty" needs about 16 rasterlines to move everything and a few more to
handle collisions - the 6510 is idling for most of the rest of the
frame.
>And I don't know where you get your 2K figure for the font. The Speccy
>font is 768 bytes and there's one in the ROM which is used by many
>games. Many games with custom fonts only defined the characters they
>needed so that would take up about 384 bytes. And if you're not
>updating the attributes, the screen takes up 6K, not 7K. Even with the
>attributes it's 6.75K.
2K is the length of a 256 character font with 8 bytes a character. My
apologies, i assumed that there would be 256 characters that could be
redefined like with the C64. Of course, the C64 can quite happily use
fractions of a font to whatever degree is required (similarly, multiple
fonts can be employed via raster splitting. And shadows of the ROM font
(512 characters, two possible states) exist in video banks 0 and 2 and
take nothing away from the memory, apart from being places that user
fonts, sprite data or screens can't be stored.
>> The C64 out-sold the Spectrum in more and larger markets, from memory.
>> Certainly the American market accounts for a *very* large slice of the
>> pie in the 1980's and we all know how little a dent the Spectrum made
>> there.
>
>Mainly because Timex was late entering the market. The Spectrum outsold
>the C64 in the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. And clones of it were the
>defacto standard across the USSR and Easten Europe, and South America,
>which counts for more machines than the whole North American market.
Add in Europe, the C64 was a massive seller in most of it barring France
and Poland was another place with a large amount of C64 activity. You
just have to look at the sheer number of C64 software houses that we've
never even *heard* of over here to see that. And Australia was, i
believe, heavily C64 too.
Certainly i wouldn't call the UK or Ireland a large proportion of the
market, Spain also has a muted C64 contingent and i can't comment about
Portugal or the USSR, suffice to say there are a few C64 guys on IRC who
are based there now so the status quo may have changed a bit recently.
>I'm not sure the C64 did have a longer shelf life. The Spectrum officially
>sold in one form or another for 11 years.
The Spectrum was discontinued by Amstrad a few years before the C64 was
wound down. The Guinness Book gives the C64 as being 1982 to 1993 so
that's eleven years. i remember Amstrad winding the Speccy down in late
1991, but that's just my memory and i don't trust it on the actual date.
>The last direct clone, the Didaktik Gama, has only just gone out of
>production, and you can still buy the Sprinter, a Spectrum compatible
>clocked at 21Mhz.
And the Commodore One is just about to go *into* production. And do we
count clones? Is it even *fair* to when one machine has a highly
specialised and difficult to copy chipset?
>> As for buying games, are you going to tell me that you paid for every
>> game you owned...? =-)
>
>Yes. I continued to pay for games when I got my Atari ST. I still pay for
>games. I'm a writer so I take copyright very seriously.
i'm a game coder, at least i tried to be during the 1980's and 90's.
Having seen a lot of good friends get shafted by the software industry,
i tend to have a slightly more liberal view on copyright - i know that
the companies didn't pay everybody involved. And anyway, i've always
considered it a sort of try before you buy system, if i liked a game i
went out and got an original - then carried on playing the copy because
it was on disk rather than tape.
i no longer do this, of course. i don't play games on the PC (apart
from under emulation) and own originals for my PlayStation.
>> So am i, but i worked in a software shop so i'd like to think my
>> recollection is quite accurate since i was selling titles for all three
>> 8bit formats. And indeed the hardware, we were still stocking and
>> selling C64's well after the CPC and Spectrum had been discontinued.
>
>You were selling C64s in 1993? By the way, did you know Amstrad has just
>launched a new machine which will play Spectrum games?
Yes, we still had "Terminator 2" packs in 1993. i think i had the last
one out of the shop, as a backup machine.
i hadn't heard about the new machine, is it another "Web.it" or an
actual compatible...?
>With the exception of http://www.c64.sk/, they don't seem to have the same
>scope. But maybe the C64 scene is just less centrally organised.
It does tend to be a little more spread out, but there's more to cover.
COCOS gives a reasonably detailed map of the C64 world in general.
>> On a sheer ease level though, it's *nowhere* near as easy to write your
>> own sprite handler as it is to write to a few video registers,
>> remembering that the exact same video writes are what the C64 manual
>> teaches when you learn BASIC from it.
>
>There were plenty of sprite routines printed in books and magazines for
>the Speccy. And the less said about C64 BASIC the better.
[Shrugs]
i *thank* Commodore for the crap BASIC, it taught me where the video
registers were and forced me to learn machine code to get anything done.
Not a deliberate plan, but still very much to my advantage.
And again, even a routine in a book is still going to be harder to
implement than a couple of writes to a video register.
>> From what i gather, Atari did a *bloody* good job of marketing for a
>> while and Apple were a known, look at how little the C64 gets mentioned
>> in the "how things used to be" documentaries compared to Apple...
>
>Possibly because CBM went bust, while Atari still has a visible presence
>(even if it is the part of the company that had nothing to do with home
>computers).
Partly, but i'd still be surprised if every single historian could
overlook the role the C64 played unless Apple's market dominance wasn't
a lot more noticeable.
>> And if the C64 and drive were cheaper than an Apple II and drive or
>> Atari and drive i'll be *very* surprised! It's all this "intelligent"
>> device stuff, the drive's got it's own 6502 and 2K of RAM y'know... =-)
>
>Well, maybe you're right. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned what a
>terrific machine the C128 was though. Now that's a piece of kit I'm very
>interested in.
The C128 doesn't really add a lot to the C64, apart from the 80 column
mode and the Z80 for CPM. Actually, i own a C128D. i only found out
recently that it's C128 mode doesn't boot up, i never use it... =-)
Jason
<bit...@iname.com> writes
>> So am i, but i worked in a software shop so i'd like to think my
>> recollection is quite accurate since i was selling titles for all three
>> 8bit formats. And indeed the hardware, we were still stocking and
>> selling C64's well after the CPC and Spectrum had been discontinued.
>
>So did I. I sold software and hardware for both the CPC and C64, but not the
>Spectrum, which was no where near as popular in Australia. Out of all the
>CPC's I sold (around 50 I think), not one of them was returned. C64's had
>about a 20% return rate, seem to remember lots of power supply problems.
Depends on the model of PSU, the sealed brick jobs were a joke and not a
particularly funny one... More common problems were with tape deck
alignment, we'd charge 'em a fiver a time for me to realign the deck and
they always went away happy.
>The worst of the lot was the Amiga 500. Think the return rate for that
>was well above 60%, usually with a fault where they would only display
>a green screen when turned on.
Ah, wasn't green a keyboard failure...? Official Commodore solution to
that was to lift the machine up a few inches and drop it - knocked the
keyboard processor back into it's socket and the machine would normally
power up afterwards.
>> Now, remembering that A) the sprite isn't "damaging" the background, B)
>> that all deletions and replots are taken care of by the hardware and C)
>> if you raster time it, it's totally smooth - how much code would the
>> Spectrum, CPC or BBC need to do the equivalent...?
>
>Some example CPC+ code.
[Notices the *sneaky* introduction of a + in there... =-]
>ld a,#05
>ld (#6004),a ;Turn sprite on and set its magnification
>ld hl,300
>ld (#6000),hl ;Set the X coordinate
>ld hl,100
>ld (#6002),hl ;Set the Y coordinate
>
>;Move it one pixel up
>ld hl,(#6002)
>dec hl
>ld (#6002),hl
Well, the point of the code fragment was to compare software to hardware
sprites but... how many cycles does the movement routine take? The C64
one was six.
>> And if the C64 and drive were cheaper than an Apple II and drive or
>> Atari and drive i'll be *very* surprised! It's all this "intelligent"
>> device stuff, the drive's got it's own 6502 and 2K of RAM y'know... =-)
>
>Didn't seem to do it much good. Besides being completely incompatible with
>every other disc format, I don't remember them being much faster than a tape
>drive.
Erm, that wasn't how i meant that statement - i'm perfectly aware of the
deficiencies of the 1541, it was supposed to be a joke about the cost of
the unit. But it did have it's advantages, drop a bit of specialised
code into the drive RAM and you could talk to it whilst the C64 was
doing something else - have a game playing whilst the next level
loads...
> I can even remember the loaders had the flashing colours in the
>background, just like tape loaders.
That's not always the case, but depends on the loaders. A good
diskspeeder can crank the transfer rate up by about 25 times, but the
protection systems on the games tended to yank it back down again. They
were significantly faster than tape on a good bit of software, and the
main selling point was random access.
Jason
>So nobody can point to some definitive resource (URL?) on the merits of the
>machines here (and of course other machines - CoCo/Dragon/Atari400)?
There are sites that cover each machine (certainly, i know a few C64
sites that go into very great detail) but nothing i'm aware of that
compares them in any manner that could be considered useful or even
unbiased...
>So is there a concensus that the Spectrum was not as good technically as the
>C64/BBC/others, but made up for it by virtue of clever programmers/innovative
>games?
i'd have said so, yes.
>And that the C64 is generally regarded as one of the best 'on paper', but
>somewhat let down by the quality of some of it's games, given the number of
>games that were produced for it?
Depends on how you describe "quality" - even bad C64 games tend to be
technically adept, it's actually quite hard to program most things on a
C64 at under 50FPS unless you're trying to do 3D. The C64 tended to
suffer from ported routines, Z80 code that was converted command for
command to 6502 and didn't take advantage of any tricks available to
speed it up again.
>Also, that the BBC was an impressive and fast design, but lacked about 32K
>of ram to be a real competitor to the C64 et al? Also the fact that Acorn
>Computers Ltd. were far worse marketers than CBM in terms of making the
>machine attractive to ordinary kids/casual gamers?
i think it was mainly the educational image and the sheer bloody *cost*
for most... i never considered the BBC an impressive design personally,
it's main selling points were the expandability and that educational
market...
>And finally, that the CPC was somewhat overlooked, as it was just slightly
>too late into the 8bit market to make it an outright winner system? In other
>words, that it got more ports from the C64 and the Spectrum, than dedictated
>games for it?
i'm not sure the CPC would have done better if it'd arrived at the same
time as the Speccy or Breadbin, it's the cost factor again. The C64 was
only a muted success in the UK because it cost more than the Spectrum, a
base CPC464 came with a monitor and was more expensive again...
Jason
<news....@ecuador.com> writes
>Even the most die-hard C64 fan cannot deny that their machine's
>graphics possessed a blockiness that the Spectrum managed to avoid,
>even if we did have to sacrafice a few colours to do so.
We never have said that, just pointed out that the C64 has a matching
mode with more colours and a higher resolution. It's just that people
tend to *prefer* the multicolour mode. =-)
>When it came to the two-tone delights of many isometric 3D games of the
>age, the Speccy won hands down.
And when it came to horizontally scrolling shoot-em-ups, the C64 won.
Since both sold, but the latter tended to be the more prolific on both
formats, that's one in the C64's favour i think.
>The Spectrum's limitations certainly drove programmers to find
>increasingly ingenious means of producing quality graphics and
>undoubtedly the 'improvement curve' of Speccy games was much steeper
>and longer than the Commodore's, which contented itself with the same
>tired, generic ideas for much of its life.
Not entirely true, the C64's limitations also pushed the programmers -
attempting to scroll the screen and run more than eight sprites with a
multiplex (sorting system based way of reusing sprites) isn't all that
easy, not all games got it right. Watch "Commando" loose the odd man
here or there and "Ghosts 'n' Goblins" do the floating trousers trick!
It's just that the C64 coders had a market that wanted a certain type of
game, as did the Spectrum coders - so they advanced their art in that
direction.
>That said, the C64 was undoubtedly a technically advanced machine for
>its time and had it been produced by Sinclair I have no doubt that its
>games would have been very different.
Okay, this puzzles me - why? Sinclair had nothing to do with the games,
they were all produced elsewhere. The C64 has the games it has because
it's strengths lie in the 2D action/shooting/platform genres, in the
same way the Speccy has it's niche of the 3D game because it lends
itself better to that style. Both try to do each others speciality, but
neither really has the poke (excuse the pun) to do so, the C64 lacks the
processor belt and the Speccy the video assistance.
Andrew Owen
That's why the designers put it there, but I honestly believe few if any
games used it, because for the most part 128K games were based on 48K
versions and using the extra screen would have required rewriting the game
engine. There may be a few games that used it but I'm not aware of them.
The Timex Spectrum compatibles had this feature from 1983, and better
video modes, but hardly any software used those either. If you want to see
what I'm talking about, pop along to
http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/vbspec/timex.html
Andrew Owen
> >> i'll have to go looking, although i'm unaware of Hubbard ever making
> >> such a comment and (from the information i've got to hand or at least to
> >> memory) he's always stated a preference to the SID over the AY.
> >
> >He does prefer the SID. It was easier for him to program.
>
> Hmm, i've played with the SID a bit and it's an utter *git* to work with
> sometimes, especially if trying to do complex sounds - how bad is the AY
> to work with...?
I have no idea. I don't program it. I am far to hardcore for that, and do
all my music coding on the beeper. :)
> >However, it is possible to do interrupt driven pseudo-three channel sound
> >on nothing but the beeper and I have the code to prove it. I'll admit it's
> >not a patch on the SID, but it's just not fair to say the original
> >Spectrum couldn't have had decent in-game tunes, it's just that no-one
> >bothered.
>
> Okay, be totally honest here Andrew - how much of a load would that kind
> of driver put on the CPU and would anything decent be run-able in the
> background? Considering Follin's code tended to stop the machine dead
> to play the music, even three channel tunes are going to take a fair
> whack of CPU time, right?
Surprisingly not. Follin's code ate all the CPU time because precise
timing was the only way to get it to work at all, but my code doesn't care
so much. I think ultra-fast scrolling action games are probably out of
the question, but platformers should still be ok. One of these days I'll
write a game using this system just to prove it can be done.
> An average C64 music driver is about 32 pixels of rastertime - easy to
> integrate into a game.
I'm not sure exactly how much time my code uses, but it's still possible
to use BASIC at a reasonable speed with it running in the background. I'll
have to set up a test to find out exactly how much time it takes.
> >Are they carbonized for MacOS X? I've only got a 400Mhz G3 and anything
> >that runs in the classic environment is deadly slow, and booting to MacOS
> >9 is not an option since I only have the minimal install required to run
> >my legacy apps.
>
> Ah, possibly not - i'm using a very battered Powerbook 5300CS running
> System 7 so i have no idea, i'm afraid. =-(
Well, I'll just have to wait until they get updated/or use MacFrodo.
> >> With a 7K screen and 2K for a font, that makes the Spectrum's screen
> >> requirements 9K compared to just 4K - add in the double buffering if
> >> you're trying to scroll or move that (1K overhead per buffer) and
> >> hardware sprites for objects mapped over the top; the speed advantage
> >> becomes *very* obvious.
> >
> >But Spectrum sprites aren't generally any slower than C64 ones.
>
> Please demonstrate this with code fragments. 8 sprites, all moving up
> the screen at different speeds can be done in (if the loop is unrolled)
> a few scanlines. Can you honestly tell me you can do all the reading,
> masking and writing required to even maintain a single 8x8 pixel
> character sprite at one pixel a frame in the same time, with clipping
> for the edges of the screen?
Take a look at the Speccy version of R-Type.
> >> The C64 out-sold the Spectrum in more and larger markets, from memory.
> >> Certainly the American market accounts for a *very* large slice of the
> >> pie in the 1980's and we all know how little a dent the Spectrum made
> >> there.
> >
> >Mainly because Timex was late entering the market. The Spectrum outsold
> >the C64 in the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. And clones of it were the
> >defacto standard across the USSR and Easten Europe, and South America,
> >which counts for more machines than the whole North American market.
>
> Add in Europe, the C64 was a massive seller in most of it barring France
> and Poland was another place with a large amount of C64 activity. You
> just have to look at the sheer number of C64 software houses that we've
> never even *heard* of over here to see that. And Australia was, i
> believe, heavily C64 too.
That's true, but Poland was mainly Timex (Spectrum compatible) and Atari
from what my Polish friends tell me.
> Certainly i wouldn't call the UK or Ireland a large proportion of the
> market, Spain also has a muted C64 contingent and i can't comment about
> Portugal or the USSR, suffice to say there are a few C64 guys on IRC who
> are based there now so the status quo may have changed a bit recently.
There are more Spectrum clones than anyone has managed to catalogue in the
USSR. During the 80s if people had a computer in the home it was 99.9%
likely to be a Spectrum clone. Of course they later moved on to Amigas.
The C64 was impossible to clone because you couldn't get SID chips, and it
was too expensive, costing about 2 year's average salary.
> >I'm not sure the C64 did have a longer shelf life. The Spectrum officially
> >sold in one form or another for 11 years.
>
> The Spectrum was discontinued by Amstrad a few years before the C64 was
> wound down. The Guinness Book gives the C64 as being 1982 to 1993 so
> that's eleven years. i remember Amstrad winding the Speccy down in late
> 1991, but that's just my memory and i don't trust it on the actual date.
The Speccy sold during the same period. Manufacturing may have ceased a
little earlier but I'm not sure about that. The last model being sold was
the +2B.
> >The last direct clone, the Didaktik Gama, has only just gone out of
> >production, and you can still buy the Sprinter, a Spectrum compatible
> >clocked at 21Mhz.
>
> And the Commodore One is just about to go *into* production. And do we
> count clones? Is it even *fair* to when one machine has a highly
> specialised and difficult to copy chipset?
In terms of user base it's fair. Tell me more about the Commodore One.
> i hadn't heard about the new machine, is it another "Web.it" or an
> actual compatible...?
It's a telephone with web/email and a buit-in emulator. They're using it
as a selling point. Speccy enthusiasts aren't sure what to make of it as
they're charging for games which are currently available free (because
distribution is allowed by te copytright owner).
> >Well, maybe you're right. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned what a
> >terrific machine the C128 was though. Now that's a piece of kit I'm very
> >interested in.
>
> The C128 doesn't really add a lot to the C64, apart from the 80 column
> mode and the Z80 for CPM. Actually, i own a C128D. i only found out
> recently that it's C128 mode doesn't boot up, i never use it... =-)
Well, CP/M knocks spots of the normal C64 OS, and you had all the Infocom
titles, and I'm interested in it because it appears you can control the
whole machine from the Z80, which means I'd be able to program it.
James Coupe
addr.btopenworld.com>, Andrew Owen <aowe...@mail.yahoo.com.au> writes:
>> Er, no. The CPC has the largest usable amount of memory (in BASIC),
>
>Really? You get about 41K on the Spectrum. But you have to store graphics
>in the memory as well, so in machine code you end up with slightly more
>room for code on a Speccy.
Which is approximately what you had available on the Amstrad, less a
little for ROMs.
It's not a *huge* amount either way in BASIC.
Of course, if you're willing to re-write various bits of the firmware
using machine code et al, you could fiddle around a lot and give
yourself a smaller screen (a la the Dizzy ports to CPC from the
Spectrum), thus freeing up some of that memory for nefarious processes
as well as overwriting the firmware.
Fraser Ross
Electron has contention? You think a 2Mhz 6502 is equal to a 4Mhz Z80. I
think it is about a 3.5Mhz Z80. The BBC is the fastest of the four being
compared.
Fraser Ross.
Andrew Owen
<fra...@bun.com> wrote:
Don't get me wrong, ideologically I'm a sixer rather than an eighter, but
I think you'll find the Z80 is faster at executing instructions than a
similarly clocked 6502. It also benefits from having 16-bit registers, and
more of them, including two index registers, and the LDIR, LDDR commands.
I'll take 680x0 over x86 any day of the week, but at this point in chip
evolution (1982), I'd have to say the Z80 wins hands down. The main reason
the 6502 was so popular is that it was dirt cheap.
Chris Young
wibbled on for an age:
> >Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
>
> Later Speccys have the AY and some miraculous stuff was done by
> hammering the beeper, should be a shared 2 i think...
> >Operating System 4 2 1 3
>
> Hmm, looks about right at least from the C64 perspective - although i'd
> have put the Speccy lower 'cos the other two have DOS commands as
> stock...?
So does the +3 (a modified version of CPC DOS I think), so I'd put the
CPC up to a joint 2 with the Speccy in that respect.
> >RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
>
> Give the C64 a 2 here - 39K to BASIC and 65K to a good machine code
> programmer... i'm assuming we're comparing original models here, so if
> the BBC is 32K and the Amstrad 64K, shouldn't the Spectrum be 16K...?
Considering that you mentioned the AY up there ^^^, which was only
present (as standard) in 128K Speccies, then we should be putting the
Spectrum up to 1st place on this comparison...
Chris
--
+-------------------------------------------+
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| Your Sinclair: A Celebration |
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Andrew Owen
<unsatis...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> > Hmm, looks about right at least from the C64 perspective - although i'd
> > have put the Speccy lower 'cos the other two have DOS commands as
> > stock...?
>
> So does the +3 (a modified version of CPC DOS I think), so I'd put the
> CPC up to a joint 2 with the Speccy in that respect.
Modified version of PCW-DOS. And the original Spectrum had DOS commands
'as stock' but the ROM was unfinished so they didn't do anything.
> > >RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
> >
> > Give the C64 a 2 here - 39K to BASIC and 65K to a good machine code
> > programmer... i'm assuming we're comparing original models here, so if
> > the BBC is 32K and the Amstrad 64K, shouldn't the Spectrum be 16K...?
>
> Considering that you mentioned the AY up there ^^^, which was only
> present (as standard) in 128K Speccies, then we should be putting the
> Spectrum up to 1st place on this comparison...
I'm sorry, did that make sense to anyone else?
The Starglider
writes
>In article <9+NvHoBc...@thespian.d.c.u>, The Starglider
><starg...@thespian.d.c.u> writes
>>Christ, what are you going to do when the next annual war starts up in
>>May?
>
>You mean this isn't just the annual war starting early? Oh dear...!
No! This is something a little more civilised and serious. The proper
one starts later on this year.
--
****************The Starglider***************** Change d.c.u to
* Web site:http://www.starglider.co.uk * demon.co.uk
* ADE VS. THE SPACESHIP: AN ONGOING SAGA! * TO REPLY.
* AT:www.starglider.co.uk * _WW_
* "FANTASTIC! MARVELLOUS!" - David Darling * /_ _\
*********************************************** | O O |
___________________________________________________________oOO_\/_OOo__________
Herman Dullink
vs.
>Spectrum vs. BBC Micro vs. Amstrad CPC. But is there any website/document
that
>lists the merits and deficencies of these machines side-by-side?
Should we add the IBM PC to this list? It has been released about the same
time,
and it's an 8-bit computer.
H
Richard Wilson
> >Some example CPC+ code.
>
> [Notices the *sneaky* introduction of a + in there... =-]
Well, it is a CPC, just a bit more powerful version, still falls well into
the 8-bit category for comparison I'd say.
> >;Move it one pixel up
> >ld hl,(#6002)
> >dec hl
> >ld (#6002),hl
>
> Well, the point of the code fragment was to compare software to hardware
> sprites but... how many cycles does the movement routine take? The C64
> one was six.
Six cycles at 2MHz (is that 3 microseconds?)
A more efficient version for the CPC+ (since the display is normally not 256
scan lines tall) is to only modify the bottom 8 bits, so:
ld hl,#6002
dec (hl)
will do the job. This routine takes 6 microseconds on a CPC.
> >Didn't seem to do it much good. Besides being completely incompatible
with
> >every other disc format, I don't remember them being much faster than a
tape
> >drive.
>
> Erm, that wasn't how i meant that statement - i'm perfectly aware of the
> deficiencies of the 1541, it was supposed to be a joke about the cost of
> the unit. But it did have it's advantages, drop a bit of specialised
> code into the drive RAM and you could talk to it whilst the C64 was
> doing something else - have a game playing whilst the next level
> loads...
Sounds like a neat trick. I did write a musical disc loader for the CPC
once, not exactly an easy task that.
Richard
Andrew Owen
<dul...@castel.nl> wrote:
It was only 8-bit externally. But then again, the 68000 based systems were
really 32-bit computers with 16-bit busses. The IBM was therefore the only
16-bit computer I can think of. It was still crap though.
Tayles
Jason wrote in message ...
>In article <8f293dab.02020...@posting.google.com>, Tayles
><news....@ecuador.com> writes
>>When it came to the two-tone delights of many isometric 3D games of the
>>age, the Speccy won hands down.
>
>And when it came to horizontally scrolling shoot-em-ups, the C64 won.
>Since both sold, but the latter tended to be the more prolific on both
>formats, that's one in the C64's favour i think.
>>The Spectrum's limitations certainly drove programmers to find
>>increasingly ingenious means of producing quality graphics and
>>undoubtedly the 'improvement curve' of Speccy games was much steeper
>>and longer than the Commodore's, which contented itself with the same
>>tired, generic ideas for much of its life.
>
>Not entirely true, the C64's limitations also pushed the programmers -
>attempting to scroll the screen and run more than eight sprites with a
>multiplex (sorting system based way of reusing sprites) isn't all that
>easy, not all games got it right. Watch "Commando" loose the odd man
>here or there and "Ghosts 'n' Goblins" do the floating trousers trick!
>It's just that the C64 coders had a market that wanted a certain type of
>game, as did the Spectrum coders - so they advanced their art in that
>direction.
>
Ok, I agree with most of what you said, but my point is that the very
strength of the C64 - its sprite & sound chips - tended to narrow the vision
of the programmer, meaning that there was a hell of a lot of deritative
games produced for it. Sure, the Spectrum had its fair slice of samey
arcade-style crap, but it is generally accepted that the more involving,
imaginative titles were produced for the Spectrum.
>>That said, the C64 was undoubtedly a technically advanced machine for
>>its time and had it been produced by Sinclair I have no doubt that its
>>games would have been very different.
>
>Okay, this puzzles me - why? Sinclair had nothing to do with the games,
>they were all produced elsewhere. The C64 has the games it has because
>it's strengths lie in the 2D action/shooting/platform genres, in the
>same way the Speccy has it's niche of the 3D game because it lends
>itself better to that style. Both try to do each others speciality, but
>neither really has the poke (excuse the pun) to do so, the C64 lacks the
>processor belt and the Speccy the video assistance.
Well to start with you had the lack of American influence, which was
undoubtedly still suffering a hangover from the console days, when formulaic
trash was rife. Getting away from the 3D argument, which was only one
aspect of the gaming landscape, the Spectrum had games which not only
possessed a charming, quirky Britishness (how bad was JSW on the C64?), but
weren't simply what I would call 'joystick games'. That is games which
considerably greater depth than its C64 couterparts enjoyed. I mean, hey,
each to his own, but I'm of the opinion that most people got the machine
they deserved. The British programming scene was traditionally noted for
its degree of imagination, for it experimentation. With the dedicated
support of the UK programming scene, I'm sure the Commodore, had it been
British, would have produced games of the same quality and ingenuity as it
did on the Spectrum.
Russ.
Andrew Owen
<tayle...@yahoo.nospam.com> wrote:
> Well to start with you had the lack of American influence, which was
> undoubtedly still suffering a hangover from the console days, when formulaic
> trash was rife. Getting away from the 3D argument, which was only one
> aspect of the gaming landscape, the Spectrum had games which not only
> possessed a charming, quirky Britishness (how bad was JSW on the C64?), but
> weren't simply what I would call 'joystick games'. That is games which
> considerably greater depth than its C64 couterparts enjoyed. I mean, hey,
> each to his own, but I'm of the opinion that most people got the machine
> they deserved. The British programming scene was traditionally noted for
> its degree of imagination, for it experimentation. With the dedicated
> support of the UK programming scene, I'm sure the Commodore, had it been
> British, would have produced games of the same quality and ingenuity as it
> did on the Spectrum.
But as Jason has already pointed out, some of the best C64 titles were
also by British programmers. Spectrum games just didn't port to the C64
very well.
Chris Young
wibbled on for an age:
> In article <3C641A28.MD-1.4....@bigfoot.com>, "Chris Young"
> <unsatis...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>
> > > Hmm, looks about right at least from the C64 perspective - although i'd
> > > have put the Speccy lower 'cos the other two have DOS commands as
> > > stock...?
> >
> > So does the +3 (a modified version of CPC DOS I think), so I'd put the
> > CPC up to a joint 2 with the Speccy in that respect.
>
> Modified version of PCW-DOS. And the original Spectrum had DOS commands
> 'as stock' but the ROM was unfinished so they didn't do anything.
Ah, I knew it was from some other Amstrad machine.
>
> > > >RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
> > >
> > > Give the C64 a 2 here - 39K to BASIC and 65K to a good machine code
> > > programmer... i'm assuming we're comparing original models here, so if
> > > the BBC is 32K and the Amstrad 64K, shouldn't the Spectrum be 16K...?
> >
> > Considering that you mentioned the AY up there ^^^, which was only
> > present (as standard) in 128K Speccies, then we should be putting the
> > Spectrum up to 1st place on this comparison...
>
> I'm sorry, did that make sense to anyone else?
Probably not.
Thomas Harte
>sometimes, especially if trying to do complex sounds - how bad is the AY
>to work with...?
Super-easy. You have three tone channels (square waves) + one noise
(pseudo-random two state wave). You can set the volume (16 levels) or
completely enable/disable channels via register writes. Similarly you just
write to registers a clock divide for each channel to set the frequency.
Also, the mixing algorithm is well known and may be contorted to produce a
single level wave, and then a 4bit sample may be played by affecting the
volume.
That said, I may be getting confused with the SN thingy in the BBC Micro.
Either its as I just described, or else there isn't a seperate noise channel
and noise may be enabled rather than tone on any of the three other
channels. One of these describes the SN, one the AY.
-Thomas
Andrew Owen
<Thoma...@DELETE.lycos.co.SPAM.uk> wrote:
The AY has a separate noise channel. The SN, used in the BBC and Sega
Master System, is about equivalent to the AY. There's even a Spectrum
program by Andrew Toone that allows you to do interrupt driven sound in
BASIC using DATA commands with the equivalent of the BBC's SOUND and
ENVELOPE commands.
Thomas Harte
>> Electron has contention?
Yes, the memory chips are only intended to run at 2Mhz, which would be too
slow for the BBC, Amstrad or Spectrum. Finally, there is a secondary issue
to contention on the Electron - the 6502 accesses memory _every single
cycle_ regardless of whether it does anything useful with the access, so
contention stops being a clever circuit that raises the CPU halt line
momentarily when it detects a clash in memory access and starts being a case
of actually adjusting the clock downward for all the time the CPU is within
the RAM area.
>Don't get me wrong, ideologically I'm a sixer rather than an eighter, but
>I think you'll find the Z80 is faster at executing instructions than a
>similarly clocked 6502.
At actually executing instructions, this is not so. Any operation (including
logical and arithmetic) which only does a single read or write to any hard
coded address in memory on the 6502 is 3 cycles. If you want
read/modify/write then you're looking at 5 cycles. If you can optimise your
code to use the zero page efficiently you can reduce this to 2 and 3 cycles.
I believe the useful z80 instructions start at around the 7 mark and go up
to 21-ish when you use those on the harder to reach instruction pages?
>It also benefits from having 16-bit registers, and
>more of them, including two index registers, and the LDIR, LDDR commands.
Of course, the 6502 'makes up for this' by supporting a much wider range of
addressing modes, and more quickly to boot. For example, to do any operation
with only a single read or write from a base address stored in the zero page
with an offset from one of the registers is at most 7 cycles.
>I'll take 680x0 over x86 any day of the week,
ARM, ARM, ARM, ARM . . .
-Thomas
ammo...@cc.full.stop.helsinki.fi
>>>That said, the C64 was undoubtedly a technically advanced machine for
>>>its time and had it been produced by Sinclair I have no doubt that its
>>>games would have been very different.
>>Okay, this puzzles me - why?
> Well to start with you had the lack of American influence, which was
> undoubtedly still suffering a hangover from the console days, when formulaic
> trash was rife.
On the contrary, I'd say that many, if not most of the real classics on
the C64 came from America. A typical British game was a shoot-em-up with
a gazillion sprites moving at lightning speed, designed to be played
from tape. Maybe technically brilliant, but not too original.
Simulators, adventures etc. mostly came from America, from companies
like Electronic Arts (remember when they still saw further than the next
installment of NHL/FIFA/whatever?), Activision, Microprose and so on.
-a
Matthew Westcott
<aoweninoz-080...@host62-7-22-247.in-addr.btopenworld.com>:
>In article <a41cb8$ns$1...@paris.btinternet.com>, "Thomas Harte"
><Thoma...@DELETE.lycos.co.SPAM.uk> wrote:
>
>> That said, I may be getting confused with the SN thingy in the BBC
>> Micro. Either its as I just described, or else there isn't a seperate
>> noise channel and noise may be enabled rather than tone on any of the
>> three other channels. One of these describes the SN, one the AY.
>
>The AY has a separate noise channel.
No it hasn't. It has a noise generator which can be mixed with any of the
three channels - you can't get three tone channels plus noise.
--
Matthew Westcott - CSSfiance to Nattie
http://www.zxdemo.org/ - the home of the Spectrum demo scene
"there's a breach in security, a disturbance in the chuntey"
Andrew Owen
gas...@raww.org.RemoveThisBit.invalid (Matthew Westcott) wrote:
> aowe...@yahoo.com.au (Andrew Owen) wrote in
> <aoweninoz-080...@host62-7-22-247.in-addr.btopenworld.com>:
>
> >In article <a41cb8$ns$1...@paris.btinternet.com>, "Thomas Harte"
> ><Thoma...@DELETE.lycos.co.SPAM.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> That said, I may be getting confused with the SN thingy in the BBC
> >> Micro. Either its as I just described, or else there isn't a seperate
> >> noise channel and noise may be enabled rather than tone on any of the
> >> three other channels. One of these describes the SN, one the AY.
> >
> >The AY has a separate noise channel.
>
> No it hasn't. It has a noise generator which can be mixed with any of the
> three channels - you can't get three tone channels plus noise.
I stand corrected. I knew you couldn't get three channels plus noise, but
I thought you could substitute noise for one sound channel, not mix it. Of
course on the Spectrum 128 you could have three tone channels and do your
noise via the beeper. Very strange that Tim Follin took the opposite
approach with Agent X II.
Chuck North
> Jason <t...@c64.org> wrote in message news:<sFj9kSA5...@cosine.demon.co.uk>...
> So is there a concensus that the Spectrum was not as good technically as the
> C64/BBC/others, but made up for it by virtue of clever programmers/innovative
> games?
Yes it was under-spec'ed (excuse the pun) relative to the others, but it
certainly had a significant collection of classic games. And in retrospect,
that counts for a lot.
> And that the C64 is generally regarded as one of the best 'on paper', but
> somewhat let down by the quality of some of it's games, given the number of
> games that were produced for it?
C64 was great for games. The only thing extra I wanted to see was a proper
320 by 256 display, like in the acorn. I know you could overscan and put
stuff in the borders and such, but a proper mode would have been good for
games with a large playing area.
> Also, that the BBC was an impressive and fast design, but lacked about 32K
> of ram to be a real competitor to the C64 et al? Also the fact that Acorn
> Computers Ltd. were far worse marketers than CBM in terms of making the
> machine attractive to ordinary kids/casual gamers?
A 64K bbc would have been ideal. Some proper 8-color-mode games could have
been done then. I think such a machine was eventually made, but too late to
make an impression. It should have come out in '83 to have any success.
> And finally, that the CPC was somewhat overlooked, as it was just slightly
> too late into the 8bit market to make it an outright winner system? In other
> words, that it got more ports from the C64 and the Spectrum, than dedictated
> games for it?
I agree, although it too had dedicated games for it that totally rocked. I
remember some games by Titus that stand out (even if they were as tough as
nails to beat!! :-)
From these discussions, I think the 'ideal' 8bitter would have had
the following traits of the real computers mentioned here :-
CPU Speed 2Mhz 6502A (BBC Micro)
Sound Effects SID (Commodore 64)
Graphics 6845crtc (CPC)
Screen Size 160*256x16(from 27) (CPC)
Video Effects VIC II sprites (Commodore 64)
Operating System Acorn OS (BBC Micro)
BASIC Language BBC BASIC (BBC Micro)
RAM Capacity 64K (CPC/C64)
Marketed by Sinclair Research.
Looking similar to the Elan Enterprise.
Built by Acorn Computers.
...with the games tally of the C64 and Spectrum combined...
Obviously, you could take features from later micros to enhance
the specifications of that fictional system (i.e. 128K, CPC+ crtc),
but I think it takes the best aspects of the 'classic' systems
that we're talking about here.
Eder
> it's strengths lie in the 2D action/shooting/platform genres, in the
> same way the Speccy has it's niche of the 3D game because it lends
> itself better to that style. Both try to do each others speciality, but
> neither really has the poke (excuse the pun) to do so, the C64 lacks the
> processor belt and the Speccy the video assistance.
> --
> Jason =-)
I always here this about the C64 being better at 2D action shooting
games, but when I played some of my favourite spectrum games in this
genre on a C64 emulator I found they were all inferior. The games I
played were Rolling Thunder, Dan Dare, Target Renegade and Cobra among
others. I know that there must be loads of others that were better on
the C64, but I haven't found one yet.
Clockmeister
"Mike Wynne" <mike...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:a4059j$1bffl7$1...@ID-97241.news.dfncis.de...
>
> "Chris Cowley" <cco...@grok.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:r7h56ucdoipchn1la...@hobgoblin.grok.co.uk...
> > Mike Wynne has build a Speccy clone that I think will run at 7MHz, and I
> > think there are some mass-produced Russian clones (again I know nothing
> > about them) that run even faster (14MHz, or maybe 24MHz -- not too
> > sure).
>
> SpeccyBob is capable of running upto 21MHz, however the only Z80s I've got
> at the moment are the bog standard Z80A versions. So in fact when I run
> them at 7MHz it's a 3MHz overclock - whoooor! that's a 75% O/C - beat that
> PC guys!
>
Easy. My old 386DX20 CPU was overclocked to 40Mhz and ran Win95 no probs at
all ;-)
Regards,
Clockmeister.
MagerValp
>> >Are they carbonized for MacOS X? I've only got a 400Mhz G3 and anything
>> >that runs in the classic environment is deadly slow, and booting to MacOS
>> >9 is not an option since I only have the minimal install required to run
>> >my legacy apps.
>>
>> Ah, possibly not - i'm using a very battered Powerbook 5300CS running
>> System 7 so i have no idea, i'm afraid. =-(
AO> Well, I'll just have to wait until they get updated/or use MacFrodo.
Ever tried this thingie called google? Power64 is carbonized, and
performs quite well.
--
___ . . . . . + . . o
_|___|_ + . + . + . . Per Olofsson, konstnär
o-o . . . o + Mage...@cling.gu.se
- + + . http://www.cling.gu.se/~cl3polof/
Andrew Owen
<cl3p...@cling.gu.se> wrote:
> AO> Well, I'll just have to wait until they get updated/or use MacFrodo.
>
> Ever tried this thingie called google? Power64 is carbonized, and
> performs quite well.
Normally I go straight to emulation.net, but I've been a bit busy lately.
I've got no excuse now so I'll download it when I get a bit of spare
bandwidth.
Julian Cassin
> C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
> CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
> Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
You obviiously haven't seen the Photo quality images from the CPC I have on
my website (http://members.optushome.com.au/zhulien/)
my C64 can't even come close!
Julian
Ross Simpson
"Baron Samedi" <fear...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message...
> Most everyone here has seen rambling threads about the merits of the C64
vs.
> Spectrum vs. BBC Micro vs. Amstrad CPC. But is there any website/document
that
mean
> things like quantity of software available or upgradeabiliy - just the
merits
> or otherwise of the machines themselves?
>
> Maybe somebody has a table like below, only that it goes into more detail
as to
> why one machine is better than another in one category. etc.
>
> C64 ZX Spectrum BBC Micro CPC
> --- ----------- --------- ---
>
> CPU Speed 4 2 3 1
> Sound Effects 1 4 2 2
> Graphics 1 4 3 2
> Video Effects 1 4 2 2
> Operating System 4 2 1 3
> RAM Capacity 1 3 4 1
>
>
the
> table above. Ignoring the BASIC & OS categories, it's clear why the C64
was the
> best machine for games. The BBC machine's main problem was a lack of
memory -
> it would have been much better had it have more memory. The Amstrad CPC
was a
> very balanced design - it did nothing poorly. The Spectrum was quite
lacking
> from a hardware perspective - I suppose 'cos it was so cheap that it
succeeded
> so well.
>
> What do you think?
I think depends on the way you look at it.
1 - Excellent.
2 - Good.
3 - Average.
4 - Poor.
In that case it looks like the Ams. has the wood
over all those other machines. In terms of RAM
Capacity I heard the Ams. can have up to 512Kb
(don't think C64 comes even close).
Best C64 game I ever played was 'Giana Sisters'
(or something along those lines) which was a
direct Mario rip-off. 'Nuff Said.
Hello to all my C64 (who probably have Amigas / fast
IBM's by now) friends! ;-)
Ross.
White Flame (aka David Holz)
message news:3c646e62$0$2595$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
> You obviiously haven't seen the Photo quality images from the CPC I have
on
> my website (http://members.optushome.com.au/zhulien/)
> my C64 can't even come close!
*yawn* I presume those images use a garble of colors so that when you turn
it into mono you get more intensities than normal? Been there, done that.
BTW, a collection of some of the best C64 graphics are stored
http://www.studiostyle.sk/dmagic/ (under the "Best Of" and "Legends"
sections) and are usually in full-color.
Looking at the blocky color pics at the bottom of your site, I wonder why
people harp on the C64's 2-pixel-wide multicolor mode as being "blocky" when
most 8-bit machines of the time lose horizontal resolution when going into
color mode as well.
--
White Flame (aka David Holz)
http://fly.to/theflame
(spamblock in effect)
Andrew Owen
Cassin" <ninjaturtle..REMOVETHIS..@optushome.com.au> wrote:
> You obviiously haven't seen the Photo quality images from the CPC I have on
> my website (http://members.optushome.com.au/zhulien/)
> my C64 can't even come close!
I think that's stretching the phrase 'photo-quality'. I can get almost as
good greyscale from my Timex TC2048, and I can get better colour from it.
Still, at least in Kylie's case, green is appropriate [see Moulin Rouge].
Andrew Owen
<rosssimpson@my_spammers_address(optusnet).com.au> wrote:
> I think depends on the way you look at it.
>
> 1 - Excellent.
> 2 - Good.
> 3 - Average.
> 4 - Poor.
>
> In that case it looks like the Ams. has the wood
> over all those other machines. In terms of RAM
> Capacity I heard the Ams. can have up to 512Kb
> (don't think C64 comes even close).
I know of a way of upgrading the Spectrum to 1MB. I'd guess some clever
C64 enthusiast has probably figured out how to increase the memory on that
machine as well.
> Best C64 game I ever played was 'Giana Sisters'
> (or something along those lines) which was a
> direct Mario rip-off. 'Nuff Said.
Except that we'll never know if the Spectrum version was better because
the game was withdrawn before it hit the shelves.
White Flame (aka David Holz)
message news:3c6472ec$0$2594$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
> In that case it looks like the Ams. has the wood
> over all those other machines. In terms of RAM
> Capacity I heard the Ams. can have up to 512Kb
> (don't think C64 comes even close).
Commodore put out a memory expander for the C64 that went up to 512KB (but
can be easily made to support 2MB, 16MB if you're truly adventurous). This
is DMA'd in & out of main memory kind of like XMS on PCs, so it's very
flexible and can do things like hardware video blits if programmed right.
As far as 3rd party goes, the GeoRAM was a 512KB 3rd party expander that
used banking, and the SuperCPU cartridge (20MHz 65816) accepts up to a 16MB
SIMM in as well.
Andrew Owen
Holz\)" <whitef...@y.a.h.o.o.com> wrote:
> "Julian Cassin" <ninjaturtle..REMOVETHIS..@optushome.com.au> wrote in
> message news:3c646e62$0$2595$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
> > You obviiously haven't seen the Photo quality images from the CPC I have
> on
> > my website (http://members.optushome.com.au/zhulien/)
> > my C64 can't even come close!
>
> *yawn* I presume those images use a garble of colors so that when you turn
> it into mono you get more intensities than normal? Been there, done that.
Can be done in software on the Spectrum as well, use the different colours
as grey levels and get 15 shades of grey by turning the colour down on the
TV-set. If you have a pic that's half the normal width you can even get
two colours per 8x1 pixel cell, but the Timex had this mode in hardware
and has the best looking graphics of an 8-bit I've seen so far. Of course
no software used it, so it's probably not relevant to this discussion.
> BTW, a collection of some of the best C64 graphics are stored
> http://www.studiostyle.sk/dmagic/ (under the "Best Of" and "Legends"
> sections) and are usually in full-color.
Everyone must have gone to look because I can't connect. Any mirrors of
this site?
> Looking at the blocky color pics at the bottom of your site, I wonder why
> people harp on the C64's 2-pixel-wide multicolor mode as being "blocky" when
> most 8-bit machines of the time lose horizontal resolution when going into
> color mode as well.
The ones that didn't tend to use the two colours per 8x1 pixel mode of the
Timex. It's fine for still screens, but it's not as good for animated
ones. The Spectrum on the other hand only had one screen resolution.
Ross Simpson
> > In that case it looks like the Ams. has the wood
> > over all those other machines. In terms of RAM
> > Capacity I heard the Ams. can have up to 512Kb
> > (don't think C64 comes even close).
>
> Commodore put out a memory expander for the C64 that went up to 512KB (but
> can be easily made to support 2MB, 16MB if you're truly adventurous).
This
> is DMA'd in & out of main memory kind of like XMS on PCs, so it's very
> flexible and can do things like hardware video blits if programmed right.
Arh ha. Is there any samples (programs, documents etc if nec.) on the net
which
use this sort of hardware on a C64?
I'd certainly be interested to see if there's any, because if there isn't
it's all just
hardware stats.
Like wise the only program I familiar with on the Ams. which uses up to that
512Kb
is the Future OS at
http://cip8.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de/user/makra/futureos/fos.html
. However I not one who goes in for all this Flashy Technology (unless I
need it for
something like that), because one of my few beliefs (in computing) is that
every
machine was brought out for a reason & if the Base Line of that machine was
like
that then so be it. What I mean by that is when the Ams, C64, Spectrum etc
etc
were at the prime (for commercial software) it was written in such a way so
it would
support the machine with the minimum specs. Of course occasionally on the
Amstrad there were games written to handle things like the 128Kb in the
6128,
however if you could see how many programs it produced then those sorts of
games were in the minority.
> As far as 3rd party goes, the GeoRAM was a 512KB 3rd party expander that
> used banking, and the SuperCPU cartridge (20MHz 65816) accepts up to a
16MB
> SIMM in as well.
That sounds like something that an Amiga would use & yes I can believe that
an
Amiga would run @ that pace & have that sort of memory. The reason being is
truly becuase of your SuperCPU cartridge with an 65xxx which exceeds the 4
digit boundrys. It'd be like saying the Ams. has an upgradable kit to a
Z8000 for
16-Bit applications. However if I mistaken then where are the games,
applications
, documents for this hardware?. Surely with a place like the internet there
would
be lots of C64 based sites with this super-dooper software that would beat
even
your average Windozers software on the IBM & If even if such a SuperCPU
cartridge would exist running @ 20Mhz why would people think for a second a
C64
needs to run that fast? Doesn't it run fast enough? And why not an Amiga
which
can run at that speed & use a 16Bit processor? If I were a C64 fanatic
(unfortunately I not, sorry!) I would rather be spending more time writing
programs
which would enable every-one with an average C64 (64Kb Ram, 3.xxx Mhz
Processor)
could run & not something which 10 guys can run with their SuperDooper CPU.
But Hell that would probably be just me :-)
Ross.
Julian Cassin
Andrew Owen <aowe...@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:aoweninoz-090...@host62-7-63-146.in-addr.btopenworld.com...
> In article <3c646e62$0$2595$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au>, "Julian
> Cassin" <ninjaturtle..REMOVETHIS..@optushome.com.au> wrote:
>
> > You obviiously haven't seen the Photo quality images from the CPC I have
on
> > my website (http://members.optushome.com.au/zhulien/)
> > my C64 can't even come close!
>
> I think that's stretching the phrase 'photo-quality'. I can get almost as
> good greyscale from my Timex TC2048, and I can get better colour from it.
> Still, at least in Kylie's case, green is appropriate [see Moulin Rouge].
Considering EPSON advertised my Inkjet Printer as Photo Quality, that is how
I justified calling the CPC pictures Photo Quality :)
My EPSON printer prints total CRAP by the way! (EPSON Stylus 740 -
definitely *not* recommended, even if you use photo paper)
Julian
Julian Cassin
Richard Fairhurst <ric...@systemeD.not> wrote in message
news:200202080...@du-021-0052.claranet.co.uk...
> Chris Cowley <cco...@grok.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > The original 16/48K machines are clocked at 3.5MHz, and the 128K ran
> > marginally faster at 3.5469MHz. So it looks like the CPC (about which I
> > know next to bugger-all) wins in the CPU-speed stakes.
>
> The CPC runs at 3.3MHz, though it's a 4MHz chip.
From what I can tell, the CPC runs at 4Mhz, but all instructions are
stretched to multiples of 4 cycles - so if you average out the instructions
you *could* say that there is an effective 3.3MHz, but it is also just as
true if you use only instructions that already are multiples of 4 cycles,
then the CPU runs at the full speed.
Am I wrong?
Julian
>
> --
> | Richard Fairhurst www.systemeD.net
> | The point is not to put poetry at the disposal of the revolution,
> | but to put the revolution at the disposal of poetry.
Julian Cassin
Richard Wilson <bit...@iname.com> wrote in message
news:a40nmf$9cm$1...@paris.btinternet.com...
> > Shaky memory time here, but doesn't that mean you get the scrolling
> > stepped in blocks of eight pixels or similar...?
>
> It is possible using slightly trickier (but not very tricky) hardware
> techniques using CRTC register 5 to scroll the screen vertically on the
CPC
> by a single scan at a time, although I know of only one game on the CPC
> which did it (Mission Genocide).
ZTB also does it, that is commercial!
Julian
>
> It is also possible to use register 8 to scroll the screen horizontally by
> half a character. With a bit of extra software to blank/populate the
> scrolled sections, this can give a reasonably smooth horizontal scroll. I
> know of no games that have ever used this technique. Another way (although
> it consumes more memory) is to have 2 copies of the screen, offset by half
a
> character and switch between them, most demos use this effect to provide
> smooth scrolling text with large fonts.
>
> On a CPC Plus, pixel hardware scrolling is very easy to do.
>
> Since you can set the width and height of the display, it is possible to
> reduce the display size, improving software based scrolling.
>
> > From a *very* shaky memory and a bit of delving i did a while back with
> > an emulator, it has three modes like the CPC with about the same colour
> > depths and can change the base address as well - that allowed for
> > vertical smooth scrolling i think. Horizontal smooth scrolling was a
> > processor hammering job, from what i understand.
>
> The BBC's graphics mode address layout is even less useful than that of
the
> CPC, and it is limited to 8 fixed colours, plus 8 combination flashing
> colours, whereas the CPC has a standard palette of 27 colours with a
maximum
> of 16 in any standard mode. The CPC Plus has a 4096 colour palette, and it
> is possible to display all 4096 on the screen at once.
>
> IIRC the BBC graphics format counted the bytes down for the 8 scans of
each
> hi-res character, so consecutive bytes on the display were in fact 8 bytes
> apart in memory.
>
> > --
> > Jason =-)
> >
> _______________________________________________________________________
> > TMR / / / / / / /
> /\
> > / /__/ / / /__/ / / / /__/ Email: t...@c64.org
> / /
> > / /\_/ / /__ / / / / __// TMR_C0S on IRC
> / /
> > / /__/ / / / / / / / / / http://www.tmr.cosine.org.uk
/
> /
> > /_____/_____/_____/__/__/__/_____/_____________________________________/
/
> >
\_____\_____\_____\__\__\__\_____\_____________________________________\/
>
>
Tayles
So what we're saying then is that the C64 encouraged lazy thinking in
its programmers and designers? This certainly seems to be the case
with many console titles today too. Witness the endless march of
driving/fighting games...
Julian Cassin
> In that case it looks like the Ams. has the wood
> over all those other machines. In terms of RAM
> Capacity I heard the Ams. can have up to 512Kb
> (don't think C64 comes even close).
My CPC has 576Kb Dk'Tronics RAM which is
a common brand. I believe that Vortex made a 1Mb
RAM expansion for CPC also which apparently can
co-exist with the Dk'Tronics RAM but this is not as
common and was not used often.
Actually, in addition to the 576Kb Dk'Tronics RAM,
I also have 64Kb of RAMROM (RAM that pretends
to be a ROM as far as the CPC addressing goes).
It also has it's 8Kb RAM inside the Multiface 2.
This means my CPC has 648Kb RAM.
If I were to find a VIDI anywhere, that apparently has
another 16Kb RAM in it!
Julian
Julian Cassin
Ross Simpson <rosssimpson@my_spammers_address(optusnet).com.au> wrote in
> "White Flame (aka David Holz)" wrote in message...
>
> > > In that case it looks like the Ams. has the wood
> > > over all those other machines. In terms of RAM
> > > Capacity I heard the Ams. can have up to 512Kb
> > > (don't think C64 comes even close).
> >
> > Commodore put out a memory expander for the C64 that went up to 512KB
(but
> > can be easily made to support 2MB, 16MB if you're truly adventurous).
> This
> > is DMA'd in & out of main memory kind of like XMS on PCs, so it's very
> > flexible and can do things like hardware video blits if programmed
right.
>
> Arh ha. Is there any samples (programs, documents etc if nec.) on the net
> which
> use this sort of hardware on a C64?
> I'd certainly be interested to see if there's any, because if there isn't
> it's all just
> hardware stats.
If you visit http://come.to/supercpu there is plenty of info on the
currently available
SuperCPU with 16mb RAM expansion, Harddisk etc for C64 with quite a few
DEMO programs and other software to make use of it.
> Like wise the only program I familiar with on the Ams. which uses up to
that
> 512Kb
I guess you have never used CP/M+ with it's 448Kb RAMdisc?
or downloaded my Alyssa Database (http://members.optushome.com.au/zhulien/)
which also makes use of 576Kb RAM.
Discology6 uses 320Kb RAM (sadly not 576Kb) to allow a single disc side to
be copied with a single swap.
I am sure if I dig around, there are more programs that do so...
Julian