Hacker News Reader

Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

> Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks.

It's debatable as it was different in the 8-bit area. A total of ~2 million Atari 8-bit computers [1] were sold as compared to the 12.5 - 17 million figure for the Commodore 64 [2] only. Arguably Atari 800XL was engineered better [3] (faster, better graphics, worse sound).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64

[3] https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-800-vs-commodore-64/

View on HN

You're ignoring the Spectrum and MSX on this side of the pond. There were no Atari on sight during the 8 bit days.

UK and Iberian Penisula were all on the Speccy, Netherlands was big into MSX, France and Germany on the C64, no idea about the others, but surely not Atari.

True. I was replying to a comment that compared Commodore and Atari.

There were 8 bit Ataris in the UK, still have a couple.

I feel like Commodore 64 had better sprites than the Atari 8-bit.

The Commodore 64 also had better sprites than the Amiga. Jay Miner didn't really like hardware sprites. I think he was wrong about this.

On the other hand, you had a lot of flexibility and options both with what you did with the available hardware sprites (e.g. some games drew backgrounds using sprite hardware!) and how you could manage without them (using blitter objects instead).

I'd rather have lots of hardware sprites like the Genesis, in addition to the blitter. I think a lot of Amiga games felt like they ran slow, because it's a lot easier to move a sprite, than to move a blitter object.

There were tradeoffs. The C64's were eight pixels wider, and could also be pixel-doubled but the Amiga's were 3-colour without losing resolution and were not limited in height. The biggest limitation was that both systems supported only eight of them.

The AGA chipset supported sprites up to 64 pixels wide, but I dunno if any game took advantage of this.

Yes, sprites (Player-Missile Graphics) were weird on Atari, probably for historical (i.e. Atari 2600) reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com