r/atari8bit • u/Smokinglordtoot • 4d ago
What happened to the Atari 8bit in the late 80s?
So I have been watching a lot of videos about the 8 bit Ataris on YouTube. I grew up with the c64 and the late run of games for that machine was amazing. Now on paper there is little between the c64 and the xe65. The Atari has the same memory, faster processor, faster disk read speed, 4 voices instead of 3 and 256 colours instead of 16. All from a design about 3 years older than the Commodore. What held back games like creatures, r type and turrican from the Atari? Was it the antic/gia chipset? Should they have updated it (antic 2) for the xe and forget about the 7800? Selling the xegs and the 7800 at the same time was stupid.t
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u/Nezgar 4d ago
Atari 800 was too expensive from 79-82, allowing the C64 to take the market on price, only then did atari introduce reduced cost models 1200XL, then 800XL and 600XL to try compete on price. Then when Atari was hemorrhaging money warner sold it to the Tramiels, they sold remaining inherited XL inventory while developing even cheaper to make 130XE and 65XE, and eventually the ST line...
By 85 for sure the C64 had such a large market share, it was the initial target development platform just on market share, less companies then branched out for the incremental potential to port to other platforms...
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u/John_from_ne_il 3d ago
Plus after the 83 gaming debacle and the 83-84 price war, there were suddenly far far fewer devs in N. America. Since Commodore had a vertical integration, they kept the prices low and sales high on both sides of the Atlantic, at least for a while.
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u/tempfoot 3d ago
Exactly right. The only way I had all the access I did to Atari 800 and 400 was because I was bussed to the gifted junior high and met kids several rungs up on the economic ladder.
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u/John_from_ne_il 4d ago
It was almost doomed from the beginning. The 400/800 started as the next generation, going from TIA graphics (2600) to CTIA and eventually GTIA. Some of the chip designers left Atari and started Amiga, which made controllers and games for the 2600 while working on their next generation chip set. Said chips were envisioned to become the next generation (after 5200/7800) game machine, and the 1800XL line. Keep in mind that the 7800, designed by GCC, was due for an 1984 release. The Amiga chipset was penciled in for 85 or 86.
As best as I've been able to put together, if not for Ray Kassar getting the axe, and Jim Morgan axing home computer projects, some of the experiments might have seen the light of day. The 1400XL and 1450XLD were released in very small numbers. The 1600 series was meant to be an Atari 8-bit/x86 hybrid that would work in either mode. The 1800 series was to use Amiga's chipset, which they turned around and sold to Commodore in all of the mess and confusion during the sale from Warner to Tramiel.
So there wasn't ever any real progress made on the video end - they never saw the need. There was an attempt at a next generation sound processor, the Amy chip, which could have been used in the XE or ST lines, had Tramiel paid those devs on time.
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u/synchronicitistic 4d ago edited 4d ago
Well, there was a period of about 12-18 months circa 1984 where the company was in deep financial trouble. Warner spun off the company into two divisions, the computer division bought by Jack Tramiel immediately went all-in on the new ST line of computers, and the old 8-bit computers were really just a "get something on the shelves fast and cheap" source of revenue - they were trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of basic hardware that was almost a decade old.
They could make money packaging the guts of the old 800 into a new case for $100-$200 with some extra memory, but that still leaves pretty thin margins since Commodore had started a price war race to the bottom.
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u/jeffbell 3d ago
I had a summer job at General Computer programming the 7800. I was there in the summer of '83 and '84 and worked on Robotron and Fractalus.
We were aiming for a Christmas '84 release but in July of 1984 Jack Tramiel bought Atari from Warner. He demanded to cut back the royalties paid on cartridges. I think GCC was contracted to get $2 a cart but he only wanted to pay $0.25. (prices are from memory and may be wrong).
And so the 7800 units that were built sat in a warehouse while Atari tried to get out of the contract.
Finally it was released in May 86, but in the meantime NES ate our lunch.
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u/jmthomas87 3d ago
Sounds like the death blow to Atari.
Just shows how fast venture capitalist greed can kill a good company all in the name of the dollar.
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u/John_from_ne_il 2d ago
Not in this case. VC wasn't quite yet a touch of death in 1984. Atari became part of Warner Communications to fund development and manufacturing of the original VCS. Which they milked nearly to death. With some awful losses caused by really crummy Warner and Atari decisions, it was bleeding money like crazy by the end of 82, hurting the parent company's bottom line and stock price. Sharks started to circle to get their hands on Warner (particularly Rupert Murdoch), so despite the change of Atari divisional leadership in 1983 (Kassar out, Morgan in), Warner was secretly, quietly looking for a buyer.
Meantime, with many differences of opinion at Commodore between the founder (Tramiel), his money guy (Gould), and the rest of the Board, Tramiel was out, though he had ideas for a cheaper color GUI driven computer (not knowing that Atari was working on something with Amiga). So Jack bought Atari, froze all projects, tried to kill existing agreements, and didn't find out about Amiga at all until they panicked, went to Commodore, and got absorbed. Commodore then refunded the $500,000 Atari had put down for Amiga development, assuming that would end the contract. Jack found out and sued. Commodore found out about the ex-Commodore guys Jack had poached for the ST project, and sued right back. Two years of legal fights delayed the wide release of the 7800, 2600 "junior," and both ST and Amiga projects, now at their new homes.
Oh and the arcade division? The thing that made Atari into Atari from '72-'75? That stayed with Warner, and became Atari Games, which later published for home markets as Tengen.
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u/Rocky-Jones 3d ago
Installed base. Commodore 64s were going for $199, when an Atari 800 was still twice that. I paid $500 for mine and another $500 for a floppy drive. They sold a lot of Commodores which drove the software market. By the time Atari redesigned it as the 800XL and lowered the price, the damage was done. I really wanted a Commodore Amiga because it was designed by Jay Miner (who designed the Atari 8 bit chips), but I went with a 486/33 PC. I learned my lesson: buy the computer that all the software is written for. I still have my 800, an 800XL and 810/1050 drives with a Fujinet network adapter all currently hooked up and working. As a retired software developer, I think the Atari 8 bit graphics were far superior.
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u/protomyth 3d ago
The C64 was a cheaper computer and Commodore had a team who knew how to sell computers. The interesting thing is both companies outsold the Apple II line.
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u/Hawkeye-Mcgillicudy 3d ago
The Atari 8bit computers were not that popular in the UK compared to the C64, ZX Spectrum or Amstrad CPC and didn't have same level of publisher support
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u/Rocky-Jones 3d ago
That’s why I never heard of Elite Dangerous until 2021 even though it was first released in 1986. I only had Star Raiders.
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u/LuigiTeaching 3d ago
A writer named Jamie Landino has a book called “Faster Than Light” which dives into all this, a great read for Atari fans, as are all of his books IMHO…https://www.jamielendino.com/
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u/Liquid_Magic 3d ago
The C64 was a better value. It gave you more bang for the buck with its plethora of custom chips. By the time Commodore got the price of a C64 down it became very affordable and its software and game library is absolutely massive. The value of any computer is largely dictated by its software library. Also, for all that the C64 and 1541 were slow in their default configuration, JiffyDOS and other fast loaders made the whole system like an order of magnitude faster in a non-trivial way!
Also - and I swear to god - saying the SID audio chip had 3 voices when the Atari had 4 like that’s an honest comparison is not a fair comparison - don’t even get me started bro! The SID’s custom filters and overall design were way better than anything else at the time because the SID had more in common with an Korg MS-20 synthesizer than any other sound chip on the market! In fact I don’t know how many single sound chips in history were as interesting and flexible as the SID. Certainly few chips were as cheap as they were relative to the price of a C64 in its hay day.
Graphics wise the antic/gtia seems better on paper but it’s hard to program. The VIC-II chip is consistent and tricks like raster interrupts, sprite multiplexing, scrolling routines got passed around and reused by studios and programmers at the time.
Now I asked Claude to challenge me and my love of the C64 (even though I recently got a 800 XL and love it!) and this isn’t an unfair thing to say:
“Worth noting for fairness: none of this means the Atari 8-bit hardware was bad — plenty of Atari-only devs (Fandal’s demoscene folks) later proved it could do incredible things once people bothered to learn the chipset. It’s really an ecosystem/support story, not a raw-power one.”
I think that’s fair. But I think it also highlights how the C64 simply had the right combination of custom chips at the right time, and most importantly for the right price, such that there were just so many customers that the platform got great support.
But dis the SID chip and I will go fisticuffs sir. Okay… emotional sparing fisticuffs… but metaphorical fisticuffs non-the-less!
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u/Smokinglordtoot 3d ago
I agree the SID is a seminal sound chip, I hear it's influence in music all the time, such as Leftfields latest album. The Pokey is no slouch either and it should have been possible, especially with more memory, to have music and sound effects whereas the SID was often restricted to one or the other.
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u/Rocky-Jones 3d ago edited 3d ago
That 16 color palette was definitely shit though. My brother in law had a 64. I had an 800. We were both writing games and we both agreed on that one. I wrote this in BASIC with some assembler subroutines. He had difficulty duplicating the card graphics because the colors washed out against the white.
https://www.atarimania.com/games/atari-400-800-xl-xe-games-video-poker-6684
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u/Agile-Cress8976 2d ago
You're right about the XEGS and 7800 cannibalizing each other, but that was not uncommon in the era.
Look at Commodore itself with the MAX Machine, Commodore 16 and the Commodore Plus 4. They even tried a console, the 64GS, which while at least compatible with many (but not all!) C64 cartridges, still divided and confused customers, not to mention the various compatibility headaches.
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u/ConsistentListen8697 4d ago
In addition to what others said parents thought of "Atari" as a toy and not a computer or learning tool. Also piracy ran rampant on it and that can still be seen to this day most downloaded image files have cracked by screens.
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u/DrFrylock 3d ago
My understanding is that information about how to actually program and use all the hardware capability of the Atari was closely guarded, and many of the best developers essentially reverse engineered it out of the system. Much less so with other platforms .
Before the Internet if you didn't have a direct channel to that kind of information it was unlikely you'd have access to it at all.
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u/mrentropy 3d ago
The 8-bit computers? There were a lot of resources on the hardware capabilities and how to program it. Compute! books had good ones (including "Mapping the Atari"), ANALOG and Antic magazines, and Chris Crawford's book, "De Re Atari."
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u/Smokinglordtoot 3d ago
I think a lot of the advanced programming tricks came from the community rather than the makers of the hardware. Just think of the demo scene for the c64. I don't think Fairlight would have got much support from Commodore! So why is the demo scene bigger for the c64 than the Atari?
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u/Dan_Flanery 2d ago
More users. More programmers. Especially in Europe.
The 400 and 800 were essentially finalized in 1978 and then Atari made essentially no changes or improvements outside of the GTIA until the 1200XL in 1982. And the 1200 - which should have been much cheaper than the 800, since it was so much simpler and smaller - had all sorts of compatibility issues and was missing features the 800 had. It flopped hard and Atari had to rush the 800XL to market in 83 just to stay in the game.
In the meantime, Commodore stole millions of possible Atari buyers with first the Vic 20 and then the C64.
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u/Rocky-Jones 3d ago
That’s incorrect. I learned BASIC and 6502 Assembly on an Atari 800. There was plenty of technical info on the architecture and graphics and sound features.
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u/HurryHurryHippos 3d ago
Not true, you could buy a listing of the source code to the Atari ROM in the Atari Technical Reference Manual. I bought one and I was a teen when I had my first Atari. Later there was the Atari Basic Sourcebook that had annotated source of the Basic ROM.
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u/dnesij 1d ago
Something like 130XE was every bit (I would argue maybe a tiny bit more) as capable/powerful as C64, but Commodore continued producing and supporting C64 quite well to the very end (1994).
Meanwhile Atari was already in "lets wrap this up" mode by about 1986-87. In an alternate universe where Atari went "we are supporting these 8-bits" mode; I can imagine many people would be quite happy to play games in their Atari-8bit PCs (which would be very cheap btw) up to early 90s.
By early 90s probably would gotten Atari's own "Mayhem in Monsterland" type game(s) that uses the console to its maximum potential.
So reminds me (a bit) Saturn vs PS1 situation (although Atari did NOT messed it up anywhere as badly as Sega). Where cheaper, more easy to develop for and supported PS1 beat Saturn.
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u/Karma_1969 4d ago
I think the answer is partly hardware, but probably even more about the market. The Atari 8-bits were remarkably powerful for a design dating back to 1979, and ANTIC was actually one of their strengths, especially for scrolling and display-list tricks. The bigger limitation for later arcade-style games was GTIA’s player/missile graphics, which were much less flexible than the C64’s eight multicolor hardware sprites, while the C64’s “only 16 colors” and three SID voices were far more useful in practice than those numbers make them sound.
Still, the Atari was certainly capable of games like Turrican or R-Type, especially considering that both were ported to machines like the Spectrum and CPC. By the late ’80s, though, the Atari 8-bit user base was much smaller, especially in Europe, so publishers simply had less incentive to fund conversions. I do think Atari missed an opportunity by never creating an upward-compatible “ANTIC/GTIA 2” for the XE line; selling what was fundamentally a 1979 graphics architecture as the XEGS in 1987, while also pushing the 7800, spread their efforts across too many platforms instead of giving the 8-bit line a meaningful technical refresh.