I can relate to the story of saving up the money. I saved for my Atari 130XE and disk drive for what seemed like a few years. I saved some of my allowance, and any gift checks I got from relatives. At some point, my mom got a donation from my grandparents, just for it. I think she chipped in a little, as well. We got it when I graduated from high school. Ataris were only available from mom and pop stores, and mail order, then. We ordered from a local dealer. There was some trouble, because they shafted us. They gave me the disk drive, but went out of business before giving me the computer, and left the state. :( We went to an Atari dealer in another town, where I got the computer (so we paid for it twice!). At the time, both the computer and disk drive cost between $150-$200 each.
I loved "Compute!"! I discovered it when I was in Jr. high school, in the school library. I subscribed from 1983 to '88.
Most of the time I spent with 8-bits was in school, or at my local library, where they allowed patrons to sign up for time. Schools had the Apple II. The library had an Atari 400, and 800, and an Apple II. They later added an Apple Mac.
I programmed in nothing but Basic, until I got into high school, where I learned Apple Pascal.
The experience I got from this inspired me to get a computer science degree, and I became a software engineer for several years, working on business IT applications and servers.
Thanks so much for sharing (I loved your guest post here, too)! I have to tell you, I was super close to buying the Atari 400, but the membrane keyboard turned me off and as I recall, the 800 was too expensive. Jack Tramiel just brought the price down of the C64 so much so fast that it was the logical choice for our very tight wallets.
There was a time when I subscribed to both Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette. I still have some old issues!
I have all my old issues, plus some of Antic Magazine, Atari Explorer, and Current Notes.
When I look back at what prices where for the 800, I feel almost like I could've gotten one of those sooner, since its price came down so much. I didn't understand re. how the differences between it and the XL/XE line could've been overcome with a couple hardware upgrades. To me, the computers were package deals. I wanted the latest, but at a bargain price. What worked in my favor was I got my 130XE after it had been out for a few years. So, the price had come down. I could see that not only type-ins, but also commercial software were being written for the XL/XEs, and I thought that's what I needed. Though, I think getting an 800 would've made things more difficult, since I relied a lot on AtariWriter Plus to write my papers in college, and it only worked if you had 128K of memory. Maybe I would've just gotten a different word processor. I could've expanded the memory of an 800 to 128K or more, but it's one more thing I would've had to add.
At one of my jobs, I worked with a guy who had a C-64 for a while, and then an Amiga, and he told me about a famous game in Compute!'s Gazette (I guess among Commodore users) for the 64 called "Crossroads," which I hadn't heard of at all. The unique thing about it was that you not only fought baddies, but you could get the baddies to fight each other. :) Some years ago, I tried it out in VICE.
The famous Compute! game I heard about was "Laser Chess." It came about because of a contest Compute! held in its Compute!'s Atari ST and Disk Magazine. The author, Mike Duppong (sp?), won several thousand dollars. He wrote the game in Modula-2. Compute!'s editors decided to port it to the other computers they supported: Atari 8-bit, C-64, Amiga, and IBM PC; all in Basic. They published it in their main magazine.
Thinking of this game always gets me thinking of this scene from "The Big Bang Theory", "Secret agent laser obstacle chess." :D
I did some research in the 2000s on Laser Chess, and found out there were online versions of the game around (using modern tech)! There was even a board game version. I was floored!
I guess you're talking about the Ricoh 5A22. That was a version of the 65816 (8/16-bit). It ran between 1.79 and 3.58 Mhz. The Atari ran its 6502 at 1.79 Mhz. Other computers like the Apple II and the C-64 (with the 6510) ran at 1 Mhz. I've heard the reason Atari ran it at this speed was to make the computer's processing sync with the 60 Hz refresh rate of TVs. It seemed like it was able to run graphics stuff faster than on other computers, but that may have been due to the Antic and GTIA chips.
I found out in the last few years that running the display made the Atari run slower than its full speed. The reason is not that the CPU was driving the display, since the Atari had custom chips for that. There was a bottleneck, though: The CPU and the display chips used the same bus. So, there had to be some multiplexing. If the display chips were going to access memory to draw the screen, the CPU had to be put to sleep. So, while the display was being drawn, no instructions were being executed (unless you triggered a display list interrupt, in which case you could get a little CPU time for each scan line). Likewise, while instructions were being executed, the screen was not being drawn (ie. during vertical blank interrupts). This explained why when I ran CPU-intensive stuff on my Atari, it was often recommended to allow the software to turn the display (display chips) off. This sped up processing by 30%. That was nice, but all you'd see was a black screen.
The finagling required to program well with these 8-bit machines is mind boggling. We have so much leeway now with our overpowered hardware that you can get get away with terrible code!
I meant to say re. VBIs and multitasking, a game that dazzled me, and was my favorite on the Atari, was Ballblazer from Lucasfilm Games. The disk version had this startup sequence that I thought was amazing, because you booted the computer, and it would come up with this nice "Lucasfilm Games" logo, and sound effect, and then it launched into this animation routine where you see a guy inside a rotofoil moving around the screen, catching and launching a plasmorb, *while the game is loading*. The animated graphics took up almost the whole the screen, and were very smooth, didn't seem to be affected by the game load at all. I sat there wondering how the heck they did that! My guess now is that whole animation routine was run inside a VBI.
You could get a primitive form of multitasking on the Atari by putting code in a VBI. This way, it would execute automatically every 60th of a second. I used a VBI in the last year, along with a custom display list, as part of a demo to split the screen between the Atari's hi-res mode (Graphics 8) and normal text mode (Graphics 0), while running the Basic interpreter. So, I could demonstrate some simple graphics designs, with the graphics on the screen, while I programmed. I used a VBI to control the cursor, since I didn't want it wandering off where the user couldn't see it, if they cursored above the text area, or wrapped the cursor around to the top, by going off the bottom. It took me MONTHS to figure out how to do this, because I thought I had to control the cursor's movement all the time. I later figured out I could just let the operating system run the cursor most of the time, and just "nudge" it when it got into certain vertical positions. Much simpler.
I know what you mean, though. I didn't learn until about ten years ago, through some digitized versions of videos Atari released way back when to developers, about tricks re. how to get more objects on the screen than what the Atari could normally display. The main method was multiplexing using display list interrupts, where you could move an object around in display or sprite memory, before each scan line was drawn, making the object show up multiple times. This only really worked, though, where you could reposition an object vertically, and/or where most of the game motion was lateral, side to side. Otherwise, you had to do what they did on the VCS, where you literally were "racing the beam," timing your code to put a color in display memory, or change a color register, at just the right moment when the display hardware was looking at it for a specific pixel (this is where you get into what's termed "color clocks"). I haven't gone there, and really don't want to!
A lot of times, as I've come to see, games used redefined character sets, and sometimes dynamic updating of a display list, to create what Atari termed "bobs," game characters you could move around. And you could have just about as many of them as you wanted. I haven't gotten into that, either. It's felt easier just to use sprites, and limiting the objects on the screen. (I'm not into writing games, though.)
Re. modern systems - Yeah. There's so much speed, storage, and memory now that it feels pointless to do any of this stuff. And to think that the hardware in a smartphone is more powerful than a Cray supercomputer was, BITD. I think I read recently that the Cray-1 ran at 57 Mhz, something like that. Semiconductor CPUs were running faster than that by the early 1990s.
These are excellent memories to read about. I had similar memories from those earlier years—the Commodore 64 and its slow, expensive disk drive, which were even more expensive in Portugal. I sold it to help buy a C128, and later did the same for the Amiga 500. However, in this century, I bought a C64 again (along with other old 8-bit computers), but in their original, primitive versions.
My first job was also as a programmer, for an American IT company, using the C language. Curiously, during the job interview, I presented a small country economic model to show my programming skills (just the programming "flow" that I wrote on paper was allowed). The idea came from my memories of coding a similar simulation on the C64 years prior, from a PET program listing in a computer magazine.
Thanks so much for sharing your own memories here! I remember typing those programs in myself (mostly from Compute!'s Gazette). Some were BASIC but then some were machine language, and those were just a nightmare to type as they were all nonsensical characters.
Speaking of programming, in case you've never heard of lft/Linus Åkesson, take a look at his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/lftkryo It blows my mind what he does with the C64.
Your story hit home. As a 10th grader, I saved my money for an Atari 400. I wanted to make video games. My dad was supposed to pick it up after work. He surprised me by upgrading it to an Atari 800.
I enjoyed playing games. I made friends with other Atari users at school. The computer followed me to college to entertain me, to write papers and to connect to the school's computer. I never ended up coding any video games but I have been a COBOL programmer for over 35 years. Funny how things worked out.
Oh man, what a great gift your dad gave you. The only game I ever wanted to create were the Infocom text adventures, which is still the plan at some point in the future.
You are a COBOL cowboy! I'm fairly certain my company still has plenty of code in COBOL, like so many other massive institutions. Hey, if it works...why mess with it? :)
Ah the memories this brings back, not only of the C64, but also Toys 'R Us, programming, BBSing, and the mall of course. Now I'm living where you were born!
I am American, but I was lucky as a young man to be traveling in SEA with access to the Golden Arcade in HK, where one could acquire an Apple II clone for about the same price as a C64, but I knew many people that started on the C64 and the SX-64 because of their affordability.
I can relate to the story of saving up the money. I saved for my Atari 130XE and disk drive for what seemed like a few years. I saved some of my allowance, and any gift checks I got from relatives. At some point, my mom got a donation from my grandparents, just for it. I think she chipped in a little, as well. We got it when I graduated from high school. Ataris were only available from mom and pop stores, and mail order, then. We ordered from a local dealer. There was some trouble, because they shafted us. They gave me the disk drive, but went out of business before giving me the computer, and left the state. :( We went to an Atari dealer in another town, where I got the computer (so we paid for it twice!). At the time, both the computer and disk drive cost between $150-$200 each.
I loved "Compute!"! I discovered it when I was in Jr. high school, in the school library. I subscribed from 1983 to '88.
Most of the time I spent with 8-bits was in school, or at my local library, where they allowed patrons to sign up for time. Schools had the Apple II. The library had an Atari 400, and 800, and an Apple II. They later added an Apple Mac.
I programmed in nothing but Basic, until I got into high school, where I learned Apple Pascal.
The experience I got from this inspired me to get a computer science degree, and I became a software engineer for several years, working on business IT applications and servers.
Thanks so much for sharing (I loved your guest post here, too)! I have to tell you, I was super close to buying the Atari 400, but the membrane keyboard turned me off and as I recall, the 800 was too expensive. Jack Tramiel just brought the price down of the C64 so much so fast that it was the logical choice for our very tight wallets.
There was a time when I subscribed to both Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette. I still have some old issues!
I have all my old issues, plus some of Antic Magazine, Atari Explorer, and Current Notes.
When I look back at what prices where for the 800, I feel almost like I could've gotten one of those sooner, since its price came down so much. I didn't understand re. how the differences between it and the XL/XE line could've been overcome with a couple hardware upgrades. To me, the computers were package deals. I wanted the latest, but at a bargain price. What worked in my favor was I got my 130XE after it had been out for a few years. So, the price had come down. I could see that not only type-ins, but also commercial software were being written for the XL/XEs, and I thought that's what I needed. Though, I think getting an 800 would've made things more difficult, since I relied a lot on AtariWriter Plus to write my papers in college, and it only worked if you had 128K of memory. Maybe I would've just gotten a different word processor. I could've expanded the memory of an 800 to 128K or more, but it's one more thing I would've had to add.
At one of my jobs, I worked with a guy who had a C-64 for a while, and then an Amiga, and he told me about a famous game in Compute!'s Gazette (I guess among Commodore users) for the 64 called "Crossroads," which I hadn't heard of at all. The unique thing about it was that you not only fought baddies, but you could get the baddies to fight each other. :) Some years ago, I tried it out in VICE.
The famous Compute! game I heard about was "Laser Chess." It came about because of a contest Compute! held in its Compute!'s Atari ST and Disk Magazine. The author, Mike Duppong (sp?), won several thousand dollars. He wrote the game in Modula-2. Compute!'s editors decided to port it to the other computers they supported: Atari 8-bit, C-64, Amiga, and IBM PC; all in Basic. They published it in their main magazine.
Thinking of this game always gets me thinking of this scene from "The Big Bang Theory", "Secret agent laser obstacle chess." :D
https://youtu.be/3cqF0x9s-_U
I did some research in the 2000s on Laser Chess, and found out there were online versions of the game around (using modern tech)! There was even a board game version. I was floored!
I'm currently listening to the Nintendo episodes on the Acquired podcast, and they mentioned that Nintendo didn't want to pay licensing fees to MOS for the CPU, so they had Ricoh build it (and left out some features to subvert copyright issues). They mentioned it ran at 1.77 MHz, and I see the Atari also ran at that exact speed. Lots of discussion here: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2828/6510-clock-rate-of-c64-why-was-it-considerably-slower-than-the-6502-of-the-atar
I guess you're talking about the Ricoh 5A22. That was a version of the 65816 (8/16-bit). It ran between 1.79 and 3.58 Mhz. The Atari ran its 6502 at 1.79 Mhz. Other computers like the Apple II and the C-64 (with the 6510) ran at 1 Mhz. I've heard the reason Atari ran it at this speed was to make the computer's processing sync with the 60 Hz refresh rate of TVs. It seemed like it was able to run graphics stuff faster than on other computers, but that may have been due to the Antic and GTIA chips.
I found out in the last few years that running the display made the Atari run slower than its full speed. The reason is not that the CPU was driving the display, since the Atari had custom chips for that. There was a bottleneck, though: The CPU and the display chips used the same bus. So, there had to be some multiplexing. If the display chips were going to access memory to draw the screen, the CPU had to be put to sleep. So, while the display was being drawn, no instructions were being executed (unless you triggered a display list interrupt, in which case you could get a little CPU time for each scan line). Likewise, while instructions were being executed, the screen was not being drawn (ie. during vertical blank interrupts). This explained why when I ran CPU-intensive stuff on my Atari, it was often recommended to allow the software to turn the display (display chips) off. This sped up processing by 30%. That was nice, but all you'd see was a black screen.
The finagling required to program well with these 8-bit machines is mind boggling. We have so much leeway now with our overpowered hardware that you can get get away with terrible code!
I meant to say re. VBIs and multitasking, a game that dazzled me, and was my favorite on the Atari, was Ballblazer from Lucasfilm Games. The disk version had this startup sequence that I thought was amazing, because you booted the computer, and it would come up with this nice "Lucasfilm Games" logo, and sound effect, and then it launched into this animation routine where you see a guy inside a rotofoil moving around the screen, catching and launching a plasmorb, *while the game is loading*. The animated graphics took up almost the whole the screen, and were very smooth, didn't seem to be affected by the game load at all. I sat there wondering how the heck they did that! My guess now is that whole animation routine was run inside a VBI.
You could get a primitive form of multitasking on the Atari by putting code in a VBI. This way, it would execute automatically every 60th of a second. I used a VBI in the last year, along with a custom display list, as part of a demo to split the screen between the Atari's hi-res mode (Graphics 8) and normal text mode (Graphics 0), while running the Basic interpreter. So, I could demonstrate some simple graphics designs, with the graphics on the screen, while I programmed. I used a VBI to control the cursor, since I didn't want it wandering off where the user couldn't see it, if they cursored above the text area, or wrapped the cursor around to the top, by going off the bottom. It took me MONTHS to figure out how to do this, because I thought I had to control the cursor's movement all the time. I later figured out I could just let the operating system run the cursor most of the time, and just "nudge" it when it got into certain vertical positions. Much simpler.
I know what you mean, though. I didn't learn until about ten years ago, through some digitized versions of videos Atari released way back when to developers, about tricks re. how to get more objects on the screen than what the Atari could normally display. The main method was multiplexing using display list interrupts, where you could move an object around in display or sprite memory, before each scan line was drawn, making the object show up multiple times. This only really worked, though, where you could reposition an object vertically, and/or where most of the game motion was lateral, side to side. Otherwise, you had to do what they did on the VCS, where you literally were "racing the beam," timing your code to put a color in display memory, or change a color register, at just the right moment when the display hardware was looking at it for a specific pixel (this is where you get into what's termed "color clocks"). I haven't gone there, and really don't want to!
A lot of times, as I've come to see, games used redefined character sets, and sometimes dynamic updating of a display list, to create what Atari termed "bobs," game characters you could move around. And you could have just about as many of them as you wanted. I haven't gotten into that, either. It's felt easier just to use sprites, and limiting the objects on the screen. (I'm not into writing games, though.)
Re. modern systems - Yeah. There's so much speed, storage, and memory now that it feels pointless to do any of this stuff. And to think that the hardware in a smartphone is more powerful than a Cray supercomputer was, BITD. I think I read recently that the Cray-1 ran at 57 Mhz, something like that. Semiconductor CPUs were running faster than that by the early 1990s.
These are excellent memories to read about. I had similar memories from those earlier years—the Commodore 64 and its slow, expensive disk drive, which were even more expensive in Portugal. I sold it to help buy a C128, and later did the same for the Amiga 500. However, in this century, I bought a C64 again (along with other old 8-bit computers), but in their original, primitive versions.
My first job was also as a programmer, for an American IT company, using the C language. Curiously, during the job interview, I presented a small country economic model to show my programming skills (just the programming "flow" that I wrote on paper was allowed). The idea came from my memories of coding a similar simulation on the C64 years prior, from a PET program listing in a computer magazine.
Good old years 🙂
Thanks so much for sharing your own memories here! I remember typing those programs in myself (mostly from Compute!'s Gazette). Some were BASIC but then some were machine language, and those were just a nightmare to type as they were all nonsensical characters.
Speaking of programming, in case you've never heard of lft/Linus Åkesson, take a look at his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/lftkryo It blows my mind what he does with the C64.
Your story hit home. As a 10th grader, I saved my money for an Atari 400. I wanted to make video games. My dad was supposed to pick it up after work. He surprised me by upgrading it to an Atari 800.
I enjoyed playing games. I made friends with other Atari users at school. The computer followed me to college to entertain me, to write papers and to connect to the school's computer. I never ended up coding any video games but I have been a COBOL programmer for over 35 years. Funny how things worked out.
Oh man, what a great gift your dad gave you. The only game I ever wanted to create were the Infocom text adventures, which is still the plan at some point in the future.
You are a COBOL cowboy! I'm fairly certain my company still has plenty of code in COBOL, like so many other massive institutions. Hey, if it works...why mess with it? :)
Ah the memories this brings back, not only of the C64, but also Toys 'R Us, programming, BBSing, and the mall of course. Now I'm living where you were born!
Oh my goodness, Rich!! Yes, the memories do come flooding back, don't they? The Magic Bag. The Generic BBS. That's wild you're in Seoul!!
I am American, but I was lucky as a young man to be traveling in SEA with access to the Golden Arcade in HK, where one could acquire an Apple II clone for about the same price as a C64, but I knew many people that started on the C64 and the SX-64 because of their affordability.
The Apple was totally out of my price range. Funny thing, it's STILL out of my price range! Which is why I still own Android phones. :)