[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: [CoCo] Atari and Amiga comparison

[James Diffendaffer]

I thought the Atari 8 bit was much more impressive than the ST for
it's day.  Although, I think it would have done better with a strait
16 color bit mapped graphics mode and multi-color sprites.  It had
Player Missile graphics rather than true sprites.  You had to move
sprite data in the P M buffer for vertical movement.  Still, it did
the overlay and collision detection in hardware.

The sound chip they had in the works for the next ones was amazing but
it got scrapped when the ST came along.  They had axed the engineers
than designed it and nobody left could make it work.  At least that
seams to be the story.


-Dan Olson was hear saying -----
I'm sure this subject could be debated forever, but here's my 2 cents
worth. I have a coco1 and coco2, no coco3. Our first computer was an
Atari 1040ST, and I was never overly impressed. I'm more of a hardware
guy, so that's where I'm coming from. I was never impressed with the
console and Atari's weird DIN connectors, compaired to the PCs we were
using at school. Now I've taken an interest in "retro-computing" and have
computers that I never had access to when they were new. I think the 8
bit Ataris are much more impressive than the ST series, even though older,
they're much more easily expanded, and are very impressive when you
consider the design is older than the coco1! The Amiga impresses me
because is has good graphics, gets 880k on an off-the-shelf 3.5" floppy,
and can do quite a bit without many CPU cycles. Also, re the 6809 vs
68000, as a hardware guy I'd say that the extra address and data lines,
not to mention registers, makes the 68k flat out and away the best
processor.

Dan