[billygoat]

Ah, my Atari days *swoon*. Learning 6502 assembly on an Atari when I was 14 made me the person I am today. ahahahahah

Atari 8-bit and Commodore machines (and Apple II as well) did share a common 6502 CPU, but the coprocessing chips for graphics and sound are really what separated these machines. Apple's capabilities were far inferior, but it also was released years before the others. (If I remember correctly it was 1977, 1979, and 1982 for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and C64).

Atari developed three specialized chips for these computers; two for graphics and one for sound, building on what they learned from the original VCS/2600 machine. Programming these machines is primarily a matter of mastering these three chips.

Unlike the 2600 game machine, there was indeed a frame buffer on the 8-bits, and Atari engineers did some really neat tricks to make interesting use of display memory, allowing programmers to display things differently in horizonal strips down the screen, trading off memory usage, pixel size, number of colors, and text display. As a kid playing lots of Atari games back then, you quickly noticed patterns in how the screen was always laid out -- scores and status along the top or bottom, fancy graphics in the middle.

Commodore's entry a couple years later was suspiciously similar in capabilities, but in a massively cost-reduced form. A big leap in sound tech, but a step sideways or backwards in graphics. In junior high we sat at different lunch tables, emotions ran pretty hot on our nerdy brains back then.

[skeeter2020]

Jack Tramiel never gave us a shiny, white telephone or mp3 player but he was very much the same conniving, non-technical pitch-man that Jobs was, less the presentation polish and boyish good looks. If you look at Commodore during and after his reign there is a marked difference. They're also both very interesting people who should be respected for what the accomplished and often vilified for how the accomplished it. Neither should be your role model IMO.

[cmrdporcupine]

In some ways though Jobs and Tramiel are polar opposites:

Tramiel was interested "in computers for the masses, not the classes" so it was all about "rock bottom pricing" and undercutting competitors; Jobs especially in his later days was interested in premium products and eventually luxury products.

Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals.

At Atari Corp they did seem to learn a bit more on this front, with a series of models all compatible with each other... but innovation and development on the operating system basically stalled from 1985 until about 1990. TOS 1.04 was really only small incremental improvements and bug fixes over the original (quite fantastic for its time) release and it came out in 1989, 4 years after the initial launch.

And I get the impression that the early 90s push at Atari towards multitasking and major improvements in the OS might have come at the behest of his sons taking over and their attempt to try to get into the workstation and DTP market.

By 1991/92 it was too late. The Atari Falcon was an awesome computer, and the final versions of TOS/MultiTOS were respectable for their time, about equivalent on paper with Apple's MultiFinder and with Windows 3.11. But there wasn't a community of devs or a broad enough audience for the product, and Motorola had marked the 68k line for death.

[sumtechguy]

I remember one of the documentaries he was openly talking about how he locked out competitors when at atari. He did it by buying up fab space in any company that could make something for a competitor.

[JKCalhoun]

"After the 400 and 800 launched, power users awed by Star Raiders proved eager to flex the machine’s advanced capabilities. But Atari, following its closed model with the 2600, had never intended to spill the secrets of the HCS architecture outside of special agreements with contracted developers. Crawford recalls, “There were about half a dozen people I knew who’d been bugging me for that information, and I had told them, ‘No, I can’t tell you anything.'”

Ironic that it was the Atari that seemed like the "closed system" then. I had a 400 with the horrible membrane keyboard (hey, it was cheap) but there was no documentation on how to program it outside of BASIC.

[awful]

"Mapping the Atari"; Ian Chadwick, 1983. A must have, so very sought after.

[GekkePrutser]

I had an 800XL myself <3. Because my parents couldn't afford the more popular commodore 64 here. The commodore had a 6510 by the way but it was almost the same.

The display list interrupt was indeed really cool, combining different strips of video modes. The one thing I did miss was combining different text colours on the same line. The commodore could do this, the Atari couldn't.

[rbanffy]

Better graphics and a faster CPU in exchange for worse sound. Not a bad bargain, IMHO.

My daily driver back then was a II+ clone.

[wiredfool]

The Ataris had Player-Missile graphics, sort of like sprites that were specially/easily handled. I seem to recall that there was one player (16px wide x screen height) and 4 missiles(4 px wide x screen height) that could be cheaply moved back and forth across the screen. There was some collision detection between them and other things that were on the screen.

The Apples had several graphics modes, many of which were strange and somewhat pointless on a green screen (yay for some colors in even columns, some in odd), but nothing special to accelerate games IIRC. On the other hand, they had a lot more memory and they felt about a generation ahead. The 800 seemed like an advanced 2600, but the Apple felt like a real computer.

However, speaking of generations ahead -- the Atari 400 beat the 2016 MBP to the punch in the horrible flat keyboard race.

[rob74]

Ah yes, the player/missile graphics :) Actually there were 4 "players" 8 px wide (although you could of course put several side by side) and 4 "missiles" 2 px wide (the name already gave away that you couldn't draw much more than a bullet with 2 px of width). The width of the "sprites" could also be stretched, but you could only move them horizontally in BASIC - for vertical movement you had to actually move the sprite's bytes in memory, and BASIC was too slow to do that smoothly. I had a 800 XE (the German version of the 130 XE - the same Atari ST lookalike design, but only 64 K) and programmed some games/"demos" in BASIC which I still fondly remember. One of them was a train with a steam engine and 3 carriages (the four "players", the carriages were double-width) which rolled over the screen. Another was a game in which you could bet money on one of four snails (again the four players) - the snails would move a random (small) amount, then pause for a second, then move another random amount, until they all reached the finish line. Nerve-racking action!

[bluGill]

4 players, 4 missiles. The missiles could be combined to a 5th player if you wanted.

The players only had one color and there was a fixed size in pixels. (you could cheat this a bit if you really worked with the display list.)

Edit: as corrected below, each player was (or could be) a different color, but was only allowed one color.

[varispeed]

I had Atari AND Commodore. People had minds blown that you could have both...