On Monday, November 13 1984, as I was supervising the loading of the trucks for COMDEX, I realized that I had forgotten the most recent prototypes for the Atari 7800 and 1400/1450 XL. I rushed over to the laboratory, where I almost had a heart attack.
“Get back to work,” I barked as I saw them engrossed in a session of
Missile Command, completely ignoring their duties or so I thought.
The lead engineer turned his head, and looked at me with surprise. “Uh, guys, it’s the boss. Hey, want to join in?”
“What the?^(# is going on? You’re supposed to be making consoles, not playing them, and why the hell are all you using those 5200 joysticks?”
“Uh, Boss, It’s not a 5200 joystick,” said the one closest to the console prototype. “See this right here,” he continued, pulling the plug out of the jack and showing it to me. “There are only nine pins. The Atari 5200 used fifteen pins.”
He was telling the truth. Another difference was the red ball on top of the stick, and now that I got a better look at it…
“You moved Start, Pause, and Select down to the bottom, making them do double duty as Star, Zero, and Pound.”
“Kinda sorta. We actually made Start, Pause, and Select two pushes of those buttons in rapid succession, as far as the control logic sees it. See, we’ve been digging deeper into the Nintendo Picture Processor, to see what all we could learn, and what we could afford to strip out, for the final merger with MARIA. Whoever came up with the controller interface is a mad genius. In the original Nintendo Famicom hardware, those directional cross things are hardwired to the console, and there are only seven wires for eight button presses. The jacks off to the side of the console are for players three and four, or stuff like arcade sticks, that light gun Nintendo is calling the Zapper, keyboards, or mice. We took a look at look at those wires and compared them to the CX-9 jacks introduced in the 2600 and also used in our computers, and pretty much everyone else’s except maybe Apple and IBM and clones. You see, the 2600’s has two analog pins, for the sports paddles, ground, and neutral, and the rest of the pins…”
“Cover the cardinal directions and the action button,” I interrupted. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Well, obviously, there are no analog lines on any of the Famicom controller pots, and the ground and neutral wires won’t have any action in them either. The magic happens in the remaining five. These wires are a clock wire, strobe wire, and inputs one, two, and three. Input 3 seems to be reserved for stuff like the light gun and keyboard, but, by using preprogrammed timings through the clock and strobe wires and the first two input wires…”
“They managed to get eight possible button inputs?” I guessed.
“Sixteen, actually, by using the full strobe cycle. Add in input three, and that grows to thirty-two. Quadruple that cycle, and you’re looking at one hundred and twenty-eight keypresses, or more than enough for a business-sized keyboard, if you can chord shift.”
“Mind you,” Said the developer lead, “for digital input, it’s the sort of simple genius Jay (Miner) or Steve (Wozniak) would have loved. For analog input, it’s Rube Goldbergian.”
“Oh?” I inquired, “Tell me more.”
“We poured through the developer manual.” The Lead Developer continued. “They were planning on creating a keyboard to plug into port three and a mouse to plug into port four. The proposed mouse interface was, well, messy.”
“What he means to say,” put in the first guy, “is that there were a total thirty two inputs needed to simulate mouse direction and speed, and only one mouse button. At that level, for navigating a GUI like on a Macintosh, the results would be clumsy, jerky, and next to useless.”
“We tried to use that system attached to a trackball for a prototype port of
Crystal Castles. “ The Lead Developer resumed. “The results were not good. So, we added the analogue pins back in from the original CX-9 layout, and everything works like a charm.”
“Tell me about any other downsides,” I ordered.
“Well, you can’t use this joystick to play 2600 games; that uses the original pin configuration. If an original 2600 cartridge is plugged in, it won’t understand the inputs, so you’ll still need an old-fashioned CX-10 or CX-40 joystick. We’re toying with adding an additional Famicom-style digital input mode, for when this controller is overkill, but that would mean sticking a microcontroller into both the intermediate controller, and this one, too, since pin polling would be insufficient to tell them apart. That would add about two bucks to the price of materials for each of both types of controllers, but we figure that that’s above our paygrade.”
“What about the self-centering problem?” I remembered the fiasco that was the 5200’s DX-15 analog joystick and keypad. It was the biggest reason why the Commodore Plus/4, 116, and 128 never upgraded to it using it or the jack it plugged into.
“What self-centering problem? This joystick is in fact a clean sheet design, with a rubber bushing and spiral springs to keep the stick centered. That tacks on about 65¢ to the materials cost, but it’s better to have something that works…”
“…Than something that doesn’t,” I finished, “I know the drill.”
“Oh, Boss, you might want to take a look at this one, too.” The Lead Developer pointed to a bare motherboard.
“Is that the most recent board design,” I asked.
“Well, it’s special, see, that new chip, GIANT? Instead of a consolidation of ANTIC and TIA, like ANITA, this is a consolidation of ANTIC and GTIA, only we’ve made sure that it can do 2600 games, too.”
“We figured that with three times the clock speed, we could get three times the picture processing in, especially with SYLVIA Having SALLY’s interrupt instructions. Also, from when you saw those comparisons of
Ms. Pac Man for the Atari 8-bit and GX9000, well, they don’t make quite the same colors, so technically that would double total color palette to 512, and its player and missile output would add thirty-two more sprites for programmers to play around with.”
“This also means that we can get it to play Atari 5200 games, but you’d need a cartridge adapter and, if you were using 5200 joysticks, you’d have to add a use a special dongle. Those are the prototypes right there. We used those before the new and improved analog stick design was ready.”
“But if we put that on the 7800’s motherboard, why would anyone ever get a 1400 series?”
“No AMY or HARVEY, except in an expansion module. Only 24K RAM total. No disc drive or keyboard, except as
another expansion module. No monitor interface, no separate speaker out, no light pen functionality, VTIA’s color output is still double…”
“Okay, I get it. There’s enough there that people would still be willing to pay more for a 1400 series. I’m going to have to think long and hard about this.”
“Better you than me. Oh, that cartridge over there is the latest build of
Pac Land. It only uses PICABO, and we decided to end the game at eight trips rather than start looping them with faster ghosts, but I’d say it’s just about arcade perfect.”
***
"So, as you can see, Project Manager is smoother than Digital Research GEM, and more colorful than what's on the Macintosh. And it's even multitasking, well, technically anyway. So, any questions?" Bill Gates seemed to smile as he delivered his case for Microsoft's all new point and click GUI. However, anyone looking with a more practiced eye would notice the smile never quite reached his eyes.
"What about Apple," came a question from the press corps.
"What about Apple?" This was from Steve Balmer. "If you're talking about prospective lawsuits, that is what our legal department is for."
"Is it strictly for IBM clones, or are you willing to market it for, say, things like Pacific Computers or the SAGE IV?"
"We're trying to keep all of our options open at the moment," Gates reported.
Ding went the windup kitchen timer.
"And that wraps it up. Remember, the embargo on pictures and hard numbers lasts until Winter CES." Bill Gates' voice echoed through most of the press corps' collective ears as they exited the covered dressing room of the Microsoft booth back onto the COMDEX show floor, leaving only one man left in the room not a high-ranking Microsoft Employee.
"Jack, good to see you again! Thought you wouldn't make it." Bill Gates extended his hand for a shake.
"You can cut the small talk." Jack Tramiel was all business. "But I will say that that demo was impressive on just CGA."
"Glad you enjoyed it." Gates recovered quickly. He snapped his fingers, and Steve Balmer went over to the cabinet, pulled out a key that looked like a rifle bolt, and used it to unlock the drawer from the top of the filing cabinet. He opened the drawer, pulled out a binder, and handed it to Tramiel.
"What's this?" Jack's question hung in the air as he took ahold of it.
"That's the specification for our new
BASIC. I figure it's much better than the one you got Commodore a license for in perpetuity, and the least I could do for putting a stick through your spokes like that. The compiler's a separate executable with garbage collection, so you won't be tying up more memory than you absolutely have to. We were originally planning to debut it at COMUPTEX or Summer CES for MS-DOS, but..."
"...Okay, I'll take a look. If I don't like what I see, well, OCS hasn't steered me wrong yet."
"Tell you what. My deals with IBM and the cloners are simple. $120 for DOS and BASIC per machine in a package deal. I'm willing to go down to eighty bucks for the next three years with you, and I'll throw in the new BASIC, too, in ROM, but finding space on the motherboard for everything is
your business."
Jack Tramiel's eyes twitched almost imperceptibly, almost. "I'm not saying 'yes,' but, hypothetically, if I'm going to walk away from sweetheart deals from Digital Research and OCS, I want a few ground rules. Number one: I want access to all twenty-four address pins the 68000 has to offer; A full sixteen megs to the memory map for any sort of MS-DOS 68K. None of that six hundred forty K regular system memory and the rest hast to be Extended RAM."
"That's Doable."
"Number two, I want full support for 640x400 resolution in the onboard video drivers with an eye to forward compatibility, so that while people can bang the hardware if they really want to, they don't
have to. I've watched two differed killer chipsets slip through my fingers since I bought Atari; I swear it will not happen a third time in a row. If I go with you guys, and in the future the successor rolls out, but I there are a bunch of unusable screen artifacts because they followed the programming guide I put in there, they'll blame me, and I'll blame you."
"I'll see what we can do. Just remember you can't get water from a stone."
"Number three, I want at least a descent sound stack. You've heard rumors about what my former company's cooking up with Jay Miner?"
"Yeah."
"Well, on the sound front at least, you can take what they got, and multiply it by three for us, and I'm going to put MIDI ports on it, but you didn't hear it from me."
"We can't know for sure until we actually have hardware in hand, but we'll do our best."
"Last but not least, I want flexibility. If I want them on a hard drive, and I have the hard drives to put them on, I can get them on hard drives. If I want them on ROM, and I can fab the chips..."
"You pirate our stuff, and we'll take you to court so fast it'll make your head spin!"
"Of course. If this deal happens, I'll be completely transparent. Just you don't take advantage of it either, understand?"
***
From the December 31 1984 issue of
Electronics Journal,
The Atari Booth featured three major new pieces of hardware.
The Atari 7800 ProSystem was in a late beta phase. Featuring double the color output of the previous 2600 and 5200 consoles, three times the clock speed of the latter, and a much improved version of the 5200’s analog joystick, number pad, and four action buttons that this time was actually self-centering. Midway’s
Pac Land, the latest instalment of the eleven games and counting
Pac Man video game franchise that has spawned its own top 40 rock hit and even a Saturday morning cartoon show, looks to be the pack-in game. If you’ve played it in the arcades, you know what to expect, with one exception. Instead of two sets of steering buttons,
Asteroids style, the game makes full use of the analog joystick to vary the yellow fat guy’s running and jumping speed. Other games showing off the system and its controller included
Crystal Castles, making almost perfect use of the analog stick to allow fine control of Bentley Bear in his gem collecting actions, and
Spy Hunter, offering excellent steering through the analogue stick, up and down gearshift, gas, and brake pedals through the number pad, and one button access to each of the car’s weapons.
The Atari 1400/1450 XL series of home computers is basically the home computer version of the 7800, but with even more colors, a 95 key business typewriter keyboard, up to 256K of RAM, two extra sound chips, and full backward compatibility with all previous Atari 8 bit computers (yes, even the 1200XL) and even the 2600. While a new version of Atari BASIC will be available when the system goes on sale, the new built-in language appears to be an upgrade of OCS’ Action! This new version allows access to all the new video modes of the computer, complete with sprite and tile editors for them, and help in stacking all new available playing fields.
One of the featured chips, HARVEY, the voice synthesizer, was on display in a demo of Williams’
Sinistar. While the sound effects of the gun firing and asteroids breaking apart were arcade clear, “Beware I Live” and “Run Coward Run” sounded like they came straight from a Speak and Spell. Still, it’s the only port I’ve seen anywhere to even make the effort.
Finally, the Atari ST is Atari’s planned heavy hitter for business. Offering up to a full megabyte of RAM, and powered by the Motorola 68000 also used by the Apple Macintosh, it can display 64 colors out of a palette of 512 and a 640x480 maximum resolution for only $999.95 in that level of trim…
***
It was probably the third most stressful moment of my life, the most stressful moments being the birth of my children, and the liberation of that concentration camp.
""He says: well, I'm kind to need to study the docs more and spend some time with the hardware itself, but this looks like a solid upgrade for the Famicom." The interpreter was translating for a guy named Miyamoto Shigeru. While his resume at the time hadn't been nearly as long as it would become, he was already known as the Father of Mario and Donkey Kong.
"Glad you approve," I said.
"From what I gather, Tramiel-san, the key elements to getting the Picture Processor element, the Sprite Engine element, and the 8-Bit Computer element working together are that interrupt instruction in the CPU, and this MMU, which you call FREDDIE." That came from the other representative of Nintendo at the booth. "But what I don't understand is why you went with that joystick and number pad controller. The directional cross on the Famicom is cheaper to make, and much harder to break."
I turned to him and said, "Yokoi-san, that style of flat directional control was tried before, on a console called the Mattel Intellivision. It was so hard to use, it doomed the system to obscurity long before the Great Crash."
"He says" we promise this will be different," said Miyamoto-san's interpreter, "he says if it fails, we, no,
I will will personally buy all the rest of the remaining first batch of systems you sell here in the U.S. and Canada."
"But what about backward compatibility with the 2600," I asked.
"Don't worry," Yokoi Gumpei answered, "one of us will stay at Sunnyvale for a while to help with that, too, Tramiel-san, even if we have to settle which one of us it is with a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors."
I folded my arms and narrowed my gaze. "I refuse to be the one to handle the work visa paperwork."
The two engineers and game designers from Nintendo just grinned.
***
From the Rumor Central column of November 25, 1984 issue of
PC Week, by Spencer F. Katt.
This Kitty’s back from COMDEX, and boy does he have some juicy stuff for all of you! Tramiel has managed to hit the ground running with Atari, coming out with a console and two new computer models (Well, three if you count the 1400 and 1450 separately, like yours truly). The real news the Furball has learned is that Microsoft already has inked a deal with them to develop their new point and Click GUI, codenamed Manager, for Atari’s new flagship ST Model, along with MS-DOS version 3.0 to run it on. What? Has the Feline gone soft in the head? Doesn’t the ST use the Motorola 68000 instead of Intel x86? Maybe, he has and maybe he has not. After all, in Japan, Microsoft has recompiled MS-DOS for the Zilog Z80…
Special thanks go to the Atari Age technical forums, who have supplied numerous wonderful ideas while I have been lurking there, David Murray, aka The 8-Bit Guy, for his explanations of game controller input on various consoles, and Evan Amos, author of
The Game Console, and its incredible photographs of the motherboards of almost every piece of hardware covered by the book. Run, don't walk to get it if you are at all serious about retro console gaming.