So did you ever have an atari computer?

[JimS]

I had a 800, 800XL, and a 400 for a while, with all the external drives and stuff. I even started & ran a user group for years. But when the 16 bit machines came out, the Amiga looked better to me so I jumped ship and handed off the group to the ST folk.

There's a lot of similarity between the 8bit Atari machines and the Amiga, more than just the hardware - designed by the same folks.

[JimS]

A cousin of mine had an Atari 800XL and while it was not much different to a C64 it always felt like a cheap "me too"-product to me - made for people who mainly wanted to play games. In fact I don´t know of any serious application or programming package even today, but I guess this is just my ignorance.

The 8 bit machines did have some serious software... at least as much as I can remember that far back... ;-) The usual word processing stuff... if you can imagine writing on a 40 column screen. Koala pad for drawing... Printshop for signs & banners... there was even a 3d animator, but i don't recall the name of that one... I even wrote a label maker that got some play among user groups.
As for languages, well Basic came with it, either as a cart, or built into it. There was a 6502 assembler - in a cart no less! and a unique language called Action! that was sort of a cross between C and assembly. Those were just the ones I used.
Hardware wise the cpu was 70% faster than the 64 and it's serial peripheral bus was much faster. I always considered the 64 to be the 8 bit version of the ST. ;-) But then after making the original decision back in 1980 or so to go Atari, I never paid much attention to doings in the Commodore camp until the Amiga made the scene.

[JimS]

@JimS

How can we forget "Computer Eyes" for the 8bit?

#6

Actually, I did forget it. Until you mentioned it. ;-) How about the speech synth that used a TI chip interfaced to the joystick ports? Built one of those.... Or how about trying to do color printing by using multiple passes with 4 different ribbons on a dot matrix printer...
... the bad ole days.....

[JimS]

Okidata?

And before Yosemite evaluation board SAM, we had S.A.M. (software automated mouth) for the software end of audio.

Ah...and there was an 80 column screen through XEP80, that late hardware addition. Sadly s/w support was coming to an end for all things Atari at that point, and they never exploited it fully.

#6

Yep, there were a lot of things never fully exploited... it was a lot like the Amiga in that respect. Plus it got stuck with the 'game machine' stigma like Amiga.

I remember looking at the schematics for the 800 and seeing i/o decodes with the same addresses as the Apple ][... I always wondered if they planned an Apple IO card expansion unit for the 800.  The parallel bus on the XL never did see much use either. Although I think the ATR80 plugged in there, but that was after I moved on to Amiga.

[JimS]

Comment #6 about 256 simultaneous colors on screen through use of display list interrupts would be similar to what we saw as "Dynamic HighRes" on the Amiga. This pretty much froze all other operations on Atari, and I recall even mouse movement on Amiga destroyed the display.

Comment #8 would indicate some early bit manipulation to extend the color palette in exchange for a speed penalty...sounds a bit like what occurred with HAM modes on Amiga.
What do you think?
 
#6

It's been a long time since I looked at the Atari display... but I think you could use display list interrupts to change the color palette on each scan line... kinda like dynamic hires. I did something like it in that label printing program I mentioned. It used a hi res wysiwyg display of the label as you worked on it...but it was wider than the screen. So the custom display list changed screen mode from text to graphic mode and handled scrolling the label if needed. A little snipped of 6502 code changed the palette for the label area. If you tried that on every line, things would slow down quite a bit...