Things the Amiga didn't get right from Day 1

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

True, in the same way that the cli commands and many essential tools and libraries etc. were not built-in. But this is how the Amiga was designed. The system disks (including Extras:AmigaBASIC) are effectively a part of the machine. It 'knows' what files are needed and where to find them, so you can have some tool or system stuff on another disk and it will ask you to insert it when necessary.

That was the point, I was trying to make ....

'Technically' you are correct, but this was only a temporary solution to avoid having to produce new ROMs for OS updates at a time when Flash ROM was not a thing. In operation the WCS (once loaded) was identical to an actual ROM-based OS.

And it really wasn't a big deal. The kickstart didn't take long to load, and only had to be done once provided you didn't switch the machine off. Those of us who owned A1000s appreciated being able to update the OS without having to purchases and install new ROMs, and some of us even took advantage of it to patch the OS for things like recoverable RAM disks or autobooting hard drives.

It is not only not a big deal, but it is cool.
I love that feature in my A3000.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

That's not totally true. The only thing it really missed was a file requester, but then other BASICs generally didn't have one either, and the OS at that time had no built-in file requester (a serious oversight, but they had so much to do and so little time...).
....
The only good thing AREXX did was provide a standard for intercommunication between programs. Apart from that it's pretty sucky.

A file requester would have been nice - an overall better file handling.
Some system libraries were supported, but not in a generic way ...
An of course some GUI builder would have been great.

But I was talking more about the missing DOS integration ... (even AREXX is missing out on some things here) - BASIC in the CLI or in Shell-Scripts like you can do with AREXX would have been nice.

And some way to do it the other way round: invoke some command-line programs within you BASIC script ...
Or use PIPE to transfer output between the two realms.

Also support for Amiga message ports.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

the C64 palette is actually very good, from a colour theory point of view. it covers a wide range of the gamut, for only 16 colours, with lots of possible gradients &c, so in practice you can create some nice looking graphics.

Ummm... not really sure.
In my eyes that palette is not very pleasant. Imho, not even most popular games looked good enough (Giana Sisters, for example), and could use a better palette.
The only game I can think of, and looks astonishing is Creatures 2.
And I owned C64 for many years, and played countless number of games.

Now, don't get me wrong, C64 is very capable gaming machine, and it's place is at very top of 8-bits systems, it's just that I wish they made a little bit different palette.

It seems to me that Nes have a better palette. and especially Amstrad CPC.
Now imagine C64 games with Amstrad palette... you'l be half Amiga already

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Ummm... not really sure.
In my eyes that palette is not very pleasant. Imho, not even most popular games looked good enough (Giana Sisters, for example), and could use a better palette.
The only game I can think of, and looks astonishing is Creatures 2.
And I owned C64 for many years, and played countless number of games.

Now, don't get me wrong, C64 is very capable gaming machine, and it's place is at very top of 8-bits systems, it's just that I wish they made a little bit different palette.

It seems to me that Nes have a better palette. and especially Amstrad CPC.
Now imagine C64 games with Amstrad palette... you'l be half Amiga already

The problem with the C64 palette is non-existent in NTSC territories, as the circuitry behind the colour palette was DESIGNED with NTSC in mind, and the colours on TV screens there looked very good. The problems started when the C64 was exported and sold in PAL territories, and since the colours on-screen were determined by a set of resistors set to certain values in a particular colour space, they should've changed them for the PAL territories, but of course, Commodore under Tramiel being so cheap, they DIDN'T. So as a result, the start screen of the C64 (as everyone in Europe knows) looks purplish rather than blue, as it should.

This is how the C64 looks on an NTSC display:



Better than what we get in Europe, huh?

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Now, don't get me wrong, C64 is very capable gaming machine, and it's place is at very top of 8-bits systems, it's just that I wish they made a little bit different palette.

Not a different palette, but an adjustable palette. Just look at the competing Atari 8 bits: 9 color registers, but selectable from 128 colors. I wonder why the C64 had a fixed palette.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Not a different palette, but an adjustable palette. Just look at the competing Atari 8 bits: 9 color registers, but selectable from 128 colors. I wonder why the C64 had a fixed palette.

Tramiel being CHEAP, as was everything he ever did.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Not a different palette, but an adjustable palette. Just look at the competing Atari 8 bits: 9 color registers, but selectable from 128 colors. I wonder why the C64 had a fixed palette.

Well.. even better.
But how much would that add to the cost of c64?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

It seems to me that Nes have a better palette. and especially Amstrad CPC.
Now imagine C64 games with Amstrad palette... you'l be half Amiga already

Neither of these were 16 colour fixed palette. Try designing one of those that can be used in a general way and you'll see the challenge.



Compare it please, to ZX Spectrum.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Neither of these were 16 colour fixed palette.

Maybe those suck? Jay Miner never saw the need to use them, he thought outside the box.

[NorthWay]

I never thought the C= 64 palette was bad, and I never thought of the default display as anything but blue.
There are two different revisions of the VIC-II chip with different colours though: Turn down the colour gradient of your screen until everything is black and white and then one shows 5(IIRC) and the other 9(?) shades of gray if you look at all 16 colours.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Well.. even better.
But how much would that add to the cost of c64?

I doubt anyone can tell. All I can say that its competitors had it, before the C64, so it was a step back and I find that a bit strange. Colors in GTIA (the Atari chip responsible for it) were created by a (configurable) phase delay in the chip, and the luminance levels by a 5-resistor ladder outside of it. Thus, not exactly high-tech or unknown terrain.

[chb]

It's a bit of a hyberbole that the C64's competitors had selectable palettes before; afaik the only one were the Atari 8-bitters. Sinclair Spectrum, TI 99, Apple II, IBM CGA and a bunch of others had all fixed palettes (some could switch between a number of them), and most of them were much uglier than the C64's. So that feature was hardly standard at that time.

[Foebane]

The Atari 8-Bits are seen as an early prototype of the Amiga computers, and it's true: the principles behind both are very similar in sprites, copper effects (VBIs on Atari) and of course, the palette.

However, the Atari 8-Bits never did very well compared to the other 8-bit machines available in the UK at the time, probably because while the Atari could choose up to 128 colours in most cases, the actual number of numbers on screen (sans any VBIs) was only five.

Of course, some games would use the VBIs to create lots of "rainbow" colour effects on title screens, etc, and that made the Ataris look pretty, but I think the arcade conversion programmers of the British computer industry preferred machines that had fixed palettes, so they could reproduce the arcade games on the cheap.

The Atari ruled this industry initially, but the C64 took over and fixed palettes became dominant...

...until the Amiga line came out with the same basic palette principle as the Atari 8-Bits and offered up to 32 colours out of a palette of 4096 at higher resolutions, wiping out any advantage that the 8-bits might've had.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Foebane

The Atari ruled this industry initially, but the C64 took over and fixed palettes became dominant...

...until the Amiga line came out with the same basic palette principle as the Atari 8-Bits and offered up to 32 colours out of a palette of 4096 at higher resolutions

Not entirely true. The C64 may have been 'dominant' in sales, but there was at least one popular 8 bit machine with programmable palette - the Amstrad CPC, which could display up to 16 colors out of a 27 color palette. I had the CPC664, which was officially released only a few months before the A1000 but in practice was 2 years ahead of the Amiga. It was the first machine I had with a built-in floppy drive.

In some ways the CPC was more similar to the Amiga than most 8 bitters. It had a full function keyboard with cursor keys and numeric keypad, and stereo sound. Resolutions included 640x200, 320x200 and 160x200, but the CRTC could also be programmed to do non-standard sizes. Interrupts ran at 300Hz, so you could have a split screen with several different resolutions and colors with low CPU overhead. The color palette was loaded at the beginning of each frame just like the Copper does on the Amiga. It also had a proper OS with comprehensive documented system calls.

The CPC Plus range added sprites (16 per line, each 16x16 pixels with 15 colors - more than the Amiga!), a 4096 color palette, and loading the sound synthesizer chip via DMA, but these machines were less popular because by this time (1990) the Amiga had taken the lead.

The Amstrad's clean and reliable hardware design, built-in high performance (compared to the C64) 3" disk drive, high resolution display and RGB output made it much more attractive to me than the C64. Locomotive BASIC was a refreshing change from Microsoft variants, with its graphic functions and extendible commands that could be loaded from disk or added via 3rd party ROMs (up to 252 ROMs automatically logged on by the system).

I used my CPC664 to cross-assemble code for the Sega SC3000 and custom-built commercial gambling machines, a role that typically required a PC. I also played a lot of games on it! When I got the A1000 in 1987 it wasn't hard to make the transition to programming the Amiga because I was familiar with some concepts such as programmable palettes and using system functions rather than poking the hardware.

[Foebane]

I wasn't sure about the Amstrad CPC and how the palette worked, but I knew it was 16 colours out of 27, spread evenly across an RGB colour space, but which meant ultimately black, grey and white out of even RGB amounts.

But the CPC audio sucked, it was the same as the Speccy. C64 blew the CPC out of the water because of SID.

Give me an 8-bit computer with the colour capabilities of the CPC and the sound of the C64, and I'll- we'll all be happy! Oh wait, we did get it and more, in 16 bits at least: the Amiga!

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Neither of these were 16 colour fixed palette. Try designing one of those that can be used in a general way and you'll see the challenge.

I fully agreed, and I know what you're talking about.
Creating a single 16 color palette that could fit so many different game types, must be a hell of a challenge.
Yet, as mentioned, the C64 had some grayish purple brownish, palette that was never very pleasant to my eyes.

I googled now quickly C64 palette:



Then I googled something like "best universal 16 color palette".
And I got this:



Maybe, what I am trying to tell, that C64 had a correct palette in terms of hue's (colors itself), but I think they could do a better (de)saturation and lightness values of each of the color.

I think in C64 palette is pretty difficult to achieve, what in theory is called "color harmony".
Yet, in this second palette I googled, it seems that colors are way more "compatible" with each other combination, and would generally give better colors for that games.

And yeah, I am aware that Commodore, back in the day, probably didn't had many months to research on that, or try various colors combinations.

Good thig is, that in these retro days, C64 palette looks very unique, and you can tell it's C64 game, just by looking at colors.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

I never thought the C= 64 palette was bad, and I never thought of the default display as anything but blue.

The C64 had some nice colors compared to the 'primary' palettes in the ZX Spectrum, BBC micro, IBM CGA etc. But the choice of light blue text on a dark blue background seems a bit peculiar considering that eg. white on black or black on grey would produce sharper text. So why did they choose those colours?

The C64's video signal suffered from 'jail bars' caused by digital signals interfering with the sensitive analog video signals inside the VIC chip. There was no external fix for this, so they simply chose colors that minimized the visual effect. That turned out to be blue because the eye has lower resolution at this colour and the composite signal blurs blue more than other colours.

Another problem with the VIC chip was variations in luminance output between individual chips. A trimmer was put on the board to adjust the level at the factory, but sometimes it wasn't set right. This could result in very low contrast which made it hard to read text on the screen. But low contrast also means... less obvious 'jail bars'!

They may have fixed the interference in later chip revisions, but the blue on blue colour scheme remained and C64 users thought it was normal. For the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 they changed it to black on grey.

The C64 had a lot of design flaws and quality control issues, as well as hardware limitations and compatibility issues that reduced performance. Much of this was due to the rush to market before fixing bugs, which then got 'baked into' the design. But getting to market quickly was what ensured the C64's success despite its flaws.

In comparison the Amiga models were much less buggy when released, but took longer to develop. Should Commodore have just thrown a minimal OS into the A1000 in 1985 rather including the expensive WCS board? Would the A1200 have been more of a success if released in 1989 with a buggy and incomplete AA chipset? I for one am glad they spent the extra time and effort to produce reliable machines that weren't compromised by releasing them before ironing the bugs out.

[Foebane]

Here's an in-depth analysis of the C64 colour palette:

http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/misc/vic656x/colors/

I'm particularly interested in Robert Yannes' email at the end:

I was involved with the development of the VIC-II, however the actual implementation of the design, including the Color Palette, was done by someone else. I have forwarded your message to him, but it is up to him if he wants to respond.

Typical.

I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color.

So it WAS all done on the cheap, as usual. At least the other 8-bit machines used established RGB and HSV colour spaces, but noooo, not the C64.

I believe that Commodore actually got a patent on this technique. It was certainly superior to the Apple or Atari approach at the time, as they ended up with whatever colors that came out--ours allowed the designer to freely select Hue, Saturation and Luminance.

I call bullshit on the "superior" claim, and it was only because "Never The Same Color" is such an inferior TV technology compared to PAL, where those Apple and Atari approaches were more consistent in colour reproduction. I mean, I remember having a CRT in the UK that could support easily NTSC, but I thought that the "tint" colour control was somewhat silly, as PAL TVs just do not have that sort of thing.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Then I googled something like "best universal 16 color palette".
And I got this:



Maybe, what I am trying to tell, that C64 had a correct palette in terms of hue's (colors itself), but I think they could do a better (de)saturation and lightness values of each of the color.

I think in C64 palette is pretty difficult to achieve, what in theory is called "color harmony".
Yet, in this second palette I googled, it seems that colors are way more "compatible" with each other combination, and would generally give better colors for that games

One early fixed 16 colour palette that will always have a special place in my heard is that of the Mattel Intellivision. It has some characteristics of the above palette in fact..

tbh i think having another shade of grey at the expense of a shade of green might have been a better choice, then again a lot of the early games were sports games so i guess they thought they'd need a lot of grass/outdoors colours.

One of my favourite modern 16-colour palettes is DB16:

It's got some in common with C64 i think, especially since it's all a little bit pastel. But i think that's not so bad, in fact. In reality most things are not bright primary colours, A lot of modern pixel artists use this palette to good effect, you can search for examples..

[Mrs Beanbag]

Incidentally, here is the palette from first levels of Mr Beanbag, for comparison:

(Note there are only 15 colours here because colour 0 is transparent)