One thing: Don't forget the VIC 20. It was actually the first "Home PC" to sell 1 million units (I think the total ended up being 3 to 4 million), it was my first PC and my only PC for 3 years, and plus it had this great or infamous (depending) commercial: ruclips.net/video/UK9VU1aJvTI/видео.html
The first time I ever fixed a computer on my own, was the C64 when I was 13. It stopped working after about a year and I was terrified about telling my parents, because I thought I'd broken it. Turns out it was just the fuse near the power button had blown😁and after I replaced it, it lasted until 1988 when I passed it on and when I got an Amiga A500. Great video👍🏼
Hmm. That might explain what happened to my friend's Commodore. He was going away for the summer, and I asked if I could borrow his C-64 while he was away. He said sure. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time. So, I was kind of thrilled that I'd get to spend a lot of time with this computer, since I'd read about it some, and I was an eager programmer. I figure I'd get good at programming on the 64. Plus, he had some games I could play. I thought that would be fun. I used it the first night I got it, playing some games. I used it the next day, and it worked for maybe the first hour, and then suddenly, it wouldn't turn on. I thought the same thing. I thought I'd done something to break it. I would turn it on, and the screen was just black. It wouldn't come up with the "READY" prompt. I was a bit panicked. I didn't want to have to replace it, because I didn't think I had the money. So, I didn't get to use it much. :( I was bummed about that, too. When he got back, I explained what happened, apologized, explained that I was real careful with it (which I was), and he was great about it. He said not to worry. Now that you mention it, I wonder if the fuse blew, and it just needed to be replaced. My memory is he got it back in working order.
It is interesting thinking about these computers having issues and how simple the problems probably were. Just by judging how simple most of the problems I encounter today with most vintage computers. There are definitely those that are the doozies that are difficult to diagnose and fix, but my experience so far with the majority is that the fixes are mostly pretty simple.@@mmille10
My impression was that was the reason Commodore was able to sell their 8-bit computers for a lower price than the others, because they could get their CPUs for just the cost of manufacturing. Whereas everyone else had to pay a wholesale price for them.
Thanks for the mention. Sorry you could not find the Mic. Great presentation here! I would have gone with the Atari 800 myself if it had not been 3x as much as the VIC-20. I always lived the Ataris, though. I am up to four Atari 8 bits now!
Just a little correction if I may: the 250466 is not the short board, that would be the 250469. Early C64Cs were made with long boards. The short board is different enough to notice once you get the chance. Anyway, good video, interesting to see how someone from the other camp sees the rival machine.
@@powerofvintage9442 Never assume anything when it comes to Commodore :) They are known for have used whatever stock they had, so inconsistencies are possible, one of mine even has a 250425 board from factory.
You're the second Atarian I've seen videos on who's said their first time using an Atari was with the ST. Interesting. If you used 8-bit Ataris, you likely knew about loading programs from tape, at least if you were using them when they came out in 1979, or in the early 1980s. Atari had two different tape drives, the 410 (matching the 400 and 800), and the 1010 (in the "XL" style). Atari's tape drive was the most sophisticated I'd seen on any 8-bit computer, with the exception of the Coleco Adam, because for one thing, it was actually a 2-track system. One of the tracks was an audio channel. Atari released a bunch of educational titles on tape, and usually, they featured an audio track that would play over a TV or monitor speaker while the program was loading, and possibly, while the program ran. The Atari tape drive was also controlled by the computer. It would turn the drive on and off. As I remember, this was controlled by Pokes to memory locations. This was used a lot in Atari's educational titles, since they could time displays on screen with the audio track, and turn the tape drive off (the audio) when the program paused to ask a quiz question. Once you got past that, it would turn the tape (audio) back on. No need for you to "press Play" and "press Stop." All you would do is insert the tape, shut the door on the tape drive, and press the Play button on the drive, and then either turn on the computer while pressing the computer's Start key, to autoboot the tape, or boot into Basic, and type CLOAD to start the tape loading process. The one thing I thought was nice about Commodore's tape loading system was it was possible to name different saved files. So, if a tape contained several programs, you could type something like "LOAD """, and the computer would search through the tape until it found the program called , and it would only load that program. It would take a while, because it wouldn't fast-forward to find it, but this was nice, because I used the tape drives on the Atari, and the only way you could save and load multiple programs on tape was by writing down counter numbers somewhere. The tape drive had a counter on it that would track where you were on the tape. So, if you wanted to load anything but the first program, you could use the FF button on the tape drive to fast-forward to the counter location on the tape, hit Stop, maybe rewind it a bit, type CLOAD, and get the program you wanted. This was not as clean as what Commodore did. The hazard I experienced with Atari's tape drives was that not all of them were created equal. The first 410 drive model they released was the best, IMO. I could give it any size cassette, and it would work. This was not the case with their later 410, and 1010 drives. With those, shorter-duration cassettes were better, because you would get read errors if you tried using 30-minute or longer tapes, since the drive motors were not strong enough to completely take up longer tapes.
My first computer experience was with my two friends on their Atari 800 / Atari 800xl in 1985. Both of them had floppy disk drives for their computers and so of the sample size of 2, my only exposure up to that point was floppy drives for Atari's. A couple years later is when I first encountered a C64 at a single other friend's home and they had a tape drive only. So in my kid's mind was Atari's had floppy disks and Commodores used tape drives.
Here in the UK, its only real rival sales wise was the Sinclair Spectrum, either one was likely selling twice all other platformed combined, so the idea that both were taking something like 30-40% of the market share is totally believable. Certainly if you go by software display space in the shops at the time.
I had an Atari 400 which I upgraded to 64k ram and a real keyboard. Had disk drive, cassette drive, a tv and all sorts of other stuff. Had it until about 1986, then traded for a car. Had a Commodore 64 later on, but was just a novelty. Tech had passed them by with Apples and etc.
The Atari 400 with 64k ram and a real keyboard was the full deal. It was crazy how quickly tech changed during that time and how many various systems came and went.
@@powerofvintage9442 I loved that Atari, to be honest. Learned a lot about computers, with the basic cartridge and etc. was taking basic and doing other things in our high school with a TRS80 about the same time, early 80’s. Also, I played defender for about 4 hours and rolled it over… hehehe. Things haven’t changed much with boys and their video games. Just higher tech.
That's hilarious, I bought 2 bread bins and ended up with the same two motherboard versions that you have, 250425 and 250466. The 466 version is the reduced chip count board and was the one I traded away.
In Canada, Canadian Tire had a significant impact on sales of the Commodore lineup with their, front of house, purpose made kiosks. Me and my brother were playing a game on the store display... and an employee came and started to kick us out of the store.. and the manager came and instructed the employee to LEAVE THEM ALONE! THEY ARE THE BEST ADVERTISEMENT FOR IT AS PEOPLE WALK THROUGH THE FRONT DOORS!
I love and own both machines (atari 130XE and commodore 64) and till this day I have no idea what commodore was thinking when they have choosen base color palette.
@@powerofvintage9442 Perhaps, and I would like your opinion on the output. We don't know yet if it'll have "Fake composite" or anything like it, and what the colour bleeding might look like. I know to many this mini is just a toy, but to me, it's a what I'll use to learn something about computers I never even saw as a kid. I grew up with an Amstrad CPC. And it's just fun to learn about Atari computers from you.
Jack Tramiel sure had a knack for coming up with cheaper machines than the competition (for similar capabilities), as he was one of the first to focus on getting components at the best price. But his drive to always bring the price down led to a showdown with Irving Gould, a major Commodore shareholder who wanted to see higher profits (this resulted in Tramiel having to leave Commodore). Also, Tramiel's ruthless, take-no-prisoner attitude led him to sometimes pursue questionable practices (e.g. he pulled a dirty trick on 6502 maker MOS to buy them for cheap and thus get CPUs at cost). So much that he ended up with a bad reputation in the U.S. When he released the Atari ST, many people in the industry didn't want to have anything to do with him, hurting the ST in the U.S. As far as the Commodore 64 itself, the disk drive had a bug which made it super slow - and you are lucky never to have to save anything on a cassette because they sucked big time. It had more colors than the Atari 800 without consuming too much RAM as there were constraints on how the colors could be used (e.g. 3 colors per 8x8 pixels tile in 160x200)
@@powerofvintage9442 He was better then Gould by a long shot. Gould is almost universally reviled such that I've NEVER seen a defense of Gould by a Commodore insider. The consensus seems to be he wasn't really interested in the company or growing it or anything, he just wanted to milk it for profits - it was a billion dollar company at the time Jack left. Hence after he drove Tramiel out, there was a circus of CEO's - most of whom didn't last long in part because he severely cut their power, and in part because some were downright clowns out of their depths . The only halfway popular or competent one was Thomas Rattigan, a former executive at Pepsi Cola, and he only got two or two and a half years or thereabouts before he was replaced by someone who was basically a stooge willing to go along with anything Gould wanted. Basically, after Tramiel left, the company had no real plans for the future. R&D was constantly gutted (Thus hurting the Amiga's upgrade path or any true backwards compatible successor to the 64), Commodore never got better with advertising (Tramiel hardly ever put money there and Gould continued that), and thanks to the constant turnover at the CEO slot promises both to consumers and wholesellers were broken left and right. Commodores story was a sad one. And for all his faults I still think about even odds Commodore would still be in the PC market in some way, even today had Tramiel never been forced to leave.
@@powerofvintage9442 - Tramiel, in a sort of self-effacing joke, many years later, said that when he was at Commodore, his mission was to destroy Atari. He said, "and I succeeded." :)
I'm an Atari owner that picked up a couple C64s and 1541s later in life. I then traded one of the C64s and floppy drives for an Atari 800 to fill in a hole in the Atari collection. They are interesting computers but I still tend to think the Atari was better designed but Atari dropped the ball in advancing the platform back in the 80's. They could have given us an equivalent of the Apple IIGS with a faster processor and improved graphics but they didn't have the vision or resources at the time and Tramiel didn't care if it wasn't an ST.
As I'm building up some of the content for the C64 vs A-8bit comparison, it is clear from modern developed content that a big part of what I would say is the perceived C64 superiority is software based.
I've always thought my Atari 800 was superior in so many ways to my brother's Commodore 64. He argued that the Commodore 64 was better than my Atari, but he could never explain why. The very first game I bought for my Atari was a cassette game called Galactic Chase which was basically a Galaxian clone. Actually, the Atari cassette system was better than those of other computer systems because rather than trying to write actual digital data onto the audio tapes, the Atari had a modem in the cassette system that converted the outgoing digital data into actual audio tones that the tape was designed to record. This made cassette data storage much more reliable than on other systems.
There are many pro's and con's to both of them. Some of the software differences are simply due to the fact that there were more C64's so more software and more opportunity for amazing software.
@@johnps1670 Yet the Atari had four sound channels, a much more flexible graphics display with graphics and sound commands available directly from Atari BASIC, instead of having to always revert to PEEKs and POKEs.
I don't think it was different in that way. Every cassette system I've heard about on other micros worked the same way, since most of them used just ordinary tape recorders that you could buy at any electronics store, and would save data through the microphone port. They had an AD/DAC that converted digital data to analog (and analog to digital, on reads), so programs/data could be stored on audio tapes. I posted another comment on here explaining how Atari's tape system was special. It used two tracks, instead of just one, enabling simultaneous audio tracking with the data. It was also one of the few systems where the computer controlled the tape drive. The computer told the drive whether to turn on or off. This enabled some interactivity, where a program could pause the tape while it did some Q&A with you.
Exactly. As developers learned what the C64 could do, the software got better and better. It's amazing what folks are able to do today with a ~1mhz CPU and 64kb of RAM.
@@powerofvintage9442 Porting games from other platforms, even arcades, and not using the target's capabilities always plagued the industry. Publishers were not interested to spend even a penny more to get sometimes significantly better results, they just wanted to have it done often with brutal deadlines. This was true also in the later era, when many Amiga games were just lazy ST ports. But sometimes ports were done right, or at least some aspects of them, and they became legendary.
Nope. The Commodore character set is different to that of the Ataris. For example, the Commodore capital letters are 7 pixels in height, whereas the Atari had only 6 pixels (which actually looks better).
@@bierundkippen720 my source for that information is Bil Herd.(so tbh i have not checked how true it was) according to the wikipedia article it was only the C64 lowercase characters that was identical to those of the Atari 800.
One thing: Don't forget the VIC 20. It was actually the first "Home PC" to sell 1 million units (I think the total ended up being 3 to 4 million), it was my first PC and my only PC for 3 years, and plus it had this great or infamous (depending) commercial: ruclips.net/video/UK9VU1aJvTI/видео.html
The first time I ever fixed a computer on my own, was the C64 when I was 13. It stopped working after about a year and I was terrified about telling my parents, because I thought I'd broken it. Turns out it was just the fuse near the power button had blown😁and after I replaced it, it lasted until 1988 when I passed it on and when I got an Amiga A500. Great video👍🏼
The first time fixing anything electronic is definitely an adventure!
Hmm. That might explain what happened to my friend's Commodore. He was going away for the summer, and I asked if I could borrow his C-64 while he was away. He said sure. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time. So, I was kind of thrilled that I'd get to spend a lot of time with this computer, since I'd read about it some, and I was an eager programmer. I figure I'd get good at programming on the 64. Plus, he had some games I could play. I thought that would be fun. I used it the first night I got it, playing some games. I used it the next day, and it worked for maybe the first hour, and then suddenly, it wouldn't turn on. I thought the same thing. I thought I'd done something to break it. I would turn it on, and the screen was just black. It wouldn't come up with the "READY" prompt. I was a bit panicked. I didn't want to have to replace it, because I didn't think I had the money. So, I didn't get to use it much. :( I was bummed about that, too. When he got back, I explained what happened, apologized, explained that I was real careful with it (which I was), and he was great about it. He said not to worry. Now that you mention it, I wonder if the fuse blew, and it just needed to be replaced. My memory is he got it back in working order.
It is interesting thinking about these computers having issues and how simple the problems probably were. Just by judging how simple most of the problems I encounter today with most vintage computers.
There are definitely those that are the doozies that are difficult to diagnose and fix, but my experience so far with the majority is that the fixes are mostly pretty simple.@@mmille10
Commodore actually bought MOS technology which made the 6502 so they were able to make a custom CPU, the 6510.
My impression was that was the reason Commodore was able to sell their 8-bit computers for a lower price than the others, because they could get their CPUs for just the cost of manufacturing. Whereas everyone else had to pay a wholesale price for them.
Thanks for the mention. Sorry you could not find the Mic. Great presentation here! I would have gone with the Atari 800 myself if it had not been 3x as much as the VIC-20. I always lived the Ataris, though. I am up to four Atari 8 bits now!
Now you just need a few more of those amazing ST's!
@@powerofvintage9442 More Atari ST's? I just threw up in my mouth a little bit! ;)
Just a little correction if I may: the 250466 is not the short board, that would be the 250469. Early C64Cs were made with long boards. The short board is different enough to notice once you get the chance.
Anyway, good video, interesting to see how someone from the other camp sees the rival machine.
Thank you for the heads up! I assumed all C64c's were short boarded :)
@@powerofvintage9442 Never assume anything when it comes to Commodore :) They are known for have used whatever stock they had, so inconsistencies are possible, one of mine even has a 250425 board from factory.
The 466 is considered by many to be the best board
@@pb7379-j2k Awesome!
You're the second Atarian I've seen videos on who's said their first time using an Atari was with the ST. Interesting. If you used 8-bit Ataris, you likely knew about loading programs from tape, at least if you were using them when they came out in 1979, or in the early 1980s.
Atari had two different tape drives, the 410 (matching the 400 and 800), and the 1010 (in the "XL" style). Atari's tape drive was the most sophisticated I'd seen on any 8-bit computer, with the exception of the Coleco Adam, because for one thing, it was actually a 2-track system. One of the tracks was an audio channel. Atari released a bunch of educational titles on tape, and usually, they featured an audio track that would play over a TV or monitor speaker while the program was loading, and possibly, while the program ran.
The Atari tape drive was also controlled by the computer. It would turn the drive on and off. As I remember, this was controlled by Pokes to memory locations. This was used a lot in Atari's educational titles, since they could time displays on screen with the audio track, and turn the tape drive off (the audio) when the program paused to ask a quiz question. Once you got past that, it would turn the tape (audio) back on. No need for you to "press Play" and "press Stop."
All you would do is insert the tape, shut the door on the tape drive, and press the Play button on the drive, and then either turn on the computer while pressing the computer's Start key, to autoboot the tape, or boot into Basic, and type CLOAD to start the tape loading process.
The one thing I thought was nice about Commodore's tape loading system was it was possible to name different saved files. So, if a tape contained several programs, you could type something like "LOAD """, and the computer would search through the tape until it found the program called , and it would only load that program. It would take a while, because it wouldn't fast-forward to find it, but this was nice, because I used the tape drives on the Atari, and the only way you could save and load multiple programs on tape was by writing down counter numbers somewhere. The tape drive had a counter on it that would track where you were on the tape. So, if you wanted to load anything but the first program, you could use the FF button on the tape drive to fast-forward to the counter location on the tape, hit Stop, maybe rewind it a bit, type CLOAD, and get the program you wanted. This was not as clean as what Commodore did.
The hazard I experienced with Atari's tape drives was that not all of them were created equal. The first 410 drive model they released was the best, IMO. I could give it any size cassette, and it would work. This was not the case with their later 410, and 1010 drives. With those, shorter-duration cassettes were better, because you would get read errors if you tried using 30-minute or longer tapes, since the drive motors were not strong enough to completely take up longer tapes.
My first computer experience was with my two friends on their Atari 800 / Atari 800xl in 1985. Both of them had floppy disk drives for their computers and so of the sample size of 2, my only exposure up to that point was floppy drives for Atari's.
A couple years later is when I first encountered a C64 at a single other friend's home and they had a tape drive only. So in my kid's mind was Atari's had floppy disks and Commodores used tape drives.
Here in the UK, its only real rival sales wise was the Sinclair Spectrum, either one was likely selling twice all other platformed combined, so the idea that both were taking something like 30-40% of the market share is totally believable. Certainly if you go by software display space in the shops at the time.
The share was definitely quite a bit!
I had an Atari 400 which I upgraded to 64k ram and a real keyboard. Had disk drive, cassette drive, a tv and all sorts of other stuff. Had it until about 1986, then traded for a car. Had a Commodore 64 later on, but was just a novelty. Tech had passed them by with Apples and etc.
The Atari 400 with 64k ram and a real keyboard was the full deal. It was crazy how quickly tech changed during that time and how many various systems came and went.
@@powerofvintage9442 I loved that Atari, to be honest. Learned a lot about computers, with the basic cartridge and etc. was taking basic and doing other things in our high school with a TRS80 about the same time, early 80’s. Also, I played defender for about 4 hours and rolled it over… hehehe. Things haven’t changed much with boys and their video games. Just higher tech.
Nice fair review of the c64, well done.
Glad you enjoyed it
Great presentation of the Commodore 64, one of my favorite retro machines, I own a bunch of them. Good stuff.
That's hilarious, I bought 2 bread bins and ended up with the same two motherboard versions that you have, 250425 and 250466. The 466 version is the reduced chip count board and was the one I traded away.
In Canada, Canadian Tire had a significant impact on sales of the Commodore lineup with their, front of house, purpose made kiosks.
Me and my brother were playing a game on the store display... and an employee came and started to kick us out of the store.. and the manager came and instructed the employee to LEAVE THEM ALONE! THEY ARE THE BEST ADVERTISEMENT FOR IT AS PEOPLE WALK THROUGH THE FRONT DOORS!
That is crazy, selling Commodore 64's in a tire store?
I love and own both machines (atari 130XE and commodore 64) and till this day I have no idea what commodore was thinking when they have choosen base color palette.
True it is a bit 1970's / 1980's
Are you planning on making a video or videos about the upcoming mini version of the Atari 400?
I was thinking about it....and compare it to a real A400 maybe?
@@powerofvintage9442 Perhaps, and I would like your opinion on the output. We don't know yet if it'll have "Fake composite" or anything like it, and what the colour bleeding might look like. I know to many this mini is just a toy, but to me, it's a what I'll use to learn something about computers I never even saw as a kid. I grew up with an Amstrad CPC. And it's just fun to learn about Atari computers from you.
Jack Tramiel sure had a knack for coming up with cheaper machines than the competition (for similar capabilities), as he was one of the first to focus on getting components at the best price. But his drive to always bring the price down led to a showdown with Irving Gould, a major Commodore shareholder who wanted to see higher profits (this resulted in Tramiel having to leave Commodore). Also, Tramiel's ruthless, take-no-prisoner attitude led him to sometimes pursue questionable practices (e.g. he pulled a dirty trick on 6502 maker MOS to buy them for cheap and thus get CPUs at cost). So much that he ended up with a bad reputation in the U.S. When he released the Atari ST, many people in the industry didn't want to have anything to do with him, hurting the ST in the U.S.
As far as the Commodore 64 itself, the disk drive had a bug which made it super slow - and you are lucky never to have to save anything on a cassette because they sucked big time. It had more colors than the Atari 800 without consuming too much RAM as there were constraints on how the colors could be used (e.g. 3 colors per 8x8 pixels tile in 160x200)
In spite of all his faults he really did deliver in many ways at both Commodore and Atari (and hurt them in others)
@@powerofvintage9442 He was better then Gould by a long shot. Gould is almost universally reviled such that I've NEVER seen a defense of Gould by a Commodore insider. The consensus seems to be he wasn't really interested in the company or growing it or anything, he just wanted to milk it for profits - it was a billion dollar company at the time Jack left. Hence after he drove Tramiel out, there was a circus of CEO's - most of whom didn't last long in part because he severely cut their power, and in part because some were downright clowns out of their depths . The only halfway popular or competent one was Thomas Rattigan, a former executive at Pepsi Cola, and he only got two or two and a half years or thereabouts before he was replaced by someone who was basically a stooge willing to go along with anything Gould wanted. Basically, after Tramiel left, the company had no real plans for the future. R&D was constantly gutted (Thus hurting the Amiga's upgrade path or any true backwards compatible successor to the 64), Commodore never got better with advertising (Tramiel hardly ever put money there and Gould continued that), and thanks to the constant turnover at the CEO slot promises both to consumers and wholesellers were broken left and right. Commodores story was a sad one. And for all his faults I still think about even odds Commodore would still be in the PC market in some way, even today had Tramiel never been forced to leave.
@@powerofvintage9442 - Tramiel, in a sort of self-effacing joke, many years later, said that when he was at Commodore, his mission was to destroy Atari. He said, "and I succeeded." :)
I'm an Atari owner that picked up a couple C64s and 1541s later in life. I then traded one of the C64s and floppy drives for an Atari 800 to fill in a hole in the Atari collection. They are interesting computers but I still tend to think the Atari was better designed but Atari dropped the ball in advancing the platform back in the 80's. They could have given us an equivalent of the Apple IIGS with a faster processor and improved graphics but they didn't have the vision or resources at the time and Tramiel didn't care if it wasn't an ST.
That Commodore 1541 was always the very best monitor for the Atari computers.
As I'm building up some of the content for the C64 vs A-8bit comparison, it is clear from modern developed content that a big part of what I would say is the perceived C64 superiority is software based.
@@lorensims4846The 1541 was the disk drive.
@@bierundkippen720 Oops! Yeah, I meant the monitor 17-something.
Those Commodore disk drives were dog slow compared to what I was used to.
@@lorensims4846 They were. However, there were fast loaders like the one on the SuperSnapshot cartridge. With that you could load blazingly fast.
I've always thought my Atari 800 was superior in so many ways to my brother's Commodore 64.
He argued that the Commodore 64 was better than my Atari, but he could never explain why.
The very first game I bought for my Atari was a cassette game called Galactic Chase which was basically a Galaxian clone.
Actually, the Atari cassette system was better than those of other computer systems because rather than trying to write actual digital data onto the audio tapes, the Atari had a modem in the cassette system that converted the outgoing digital data into actual audio tones that the tape was designed to record. This made cassette data storage much more reliable than on other systems.
There are many pro's and con's to both of them. Some of the software differences are simply due to the fact that there were more C64's so more software and more opportunity for amazing software.
Don't forget the Atari was introduced in 1979, C64 1982.
@@johnps1670 nope absolutely not. Amazing that it was so good given when it was developed and released! I did a video on the 800 a few weeks ago :)
@@johnps1670 Yet the Atari had four sound channels, a much more flexible graphics display with graphics and sound commands available directly from Atari BASIC, instead of having to always revert to PEEKs and POKEs.
I don't think it was different in that way. Every cassette system I've heard about on other micros worked the same way, since most of them used just ordinary tape recorders that you could buy at any electronics store, and would save data through the microphone port. They had an AD/DAC that converted digital data to analog (and analog to digital, on reads), so programs/data could be stored on audio tapes.
I posted another comment on here explaining how Atari's tape system was special. It used two tracks, instead of just one, enabling simultaneous audio tracking with the data. It was also one of the few systems where the computer controlled the tape drive. The computer told the drive whether to turn on or off. This enabled some interactivity, where a program could pause the tape while it did some Q&A with you.
What wireless mic are you using?
I ended up with this: www.amazon.com/dp/B0BHW9YSHS?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1 I think it's working well.
Many of the early games would have been ports from the Apple Ii or Atari.
Exactly. As developers learned what the C64 could do, the software got better and better. It's amazing what folks are able to do today with a ~1mhz CPU and 64kb of RAM.
@@powerofvintage9442 Porting games from other platforms, even arcades, and not using the target's capabilities always plagued the industry. Publishers were not interested to spend even a penny more to get sometimes significantly better results, they just wanted to have it done often with brutal deadlines. This was true also in the later era, when many Amiga games were just lazy ST ports. But sometimes ports were done right, or at least some aspects of them, and they became legendary.
fun commodore fact: Commodore made ROM chips for Atari and they copied the character set straight off. sneaky commodore being sneaky.
I figured that there would have been some cross-over.
Nope. The Commodore character set is different to that of the Ataris. For example, the Commodore capital letters are 7 pixels in height, whereas the Atari had only 6 pixels (which actually looks better).
You wouldn’t need to make Roms to copy the data off them
@@pb7379-j2k No but MOS(the commodore chipfab) was one of the manufacturers of ROM chips for Atari.
@@bierundkippen720 my source for that information is Bil Herd.(so tbh i have not checked how true it was) according to the wikipedia article it was only the C64 lowercase characters that was identical to those of the Atari 800.
ATARI better !