Computer What-If, Jack Tramiel Has A Clue:

As I have no access to appropriate software, I am now commissioning photochops from other people. Any interested parties please PM me for details. I promise to give full credit to all contributions.
 
I have come to a crossroads.

Should I have Jack release the 1400/1450XL as a stopgap until the ST is ready, or just go with a version of the XE? The computer is basically an upclocked 800XL with more memory, better memory management, and the HARVEY voice synthesis chip, but as the Apple III was a flop, and even the CBM Number Series are on the way out, it looks like the age of the 8-bit business machine has already passed Atari by.
 
I have come to a crossroads.

Should I have Jack release the 1400/1450XL as a stopgap until the ST is ready, or just go with a version of the XE? The computer is basically an upclocked 800XL with more memory, better memory management, and the HARVEY voice synthesis chip, but as the Apple III was a flop, and even the CBM Number Series are on the way out, it looks like the age of the 8-bit business machine has already passed Atari by.
Wait for the XE/ST, of course there risk and benefit but better not overstrech before time.
 
Chapter 2: The Audit
Let’s see, I thought to myself, exactly what did my golden parachute buy out from Warner Brothers? I know, when the intercom blared “Imperial Stormtroopers have entered the base,” I was about to fire almost everyone there who didn’t immediately swear loyalty to me personally. I had been in a concentration camp in my teenage years, I had thought, how dare they compare me to the Nazis! But I calmed down when someone explained that that wit had simply been referencing Star Wars. Still, at the first company-wide meeting, I made it a priority to lay down the law.

Anyway, I decided to start with individual chips, and then move on to actual console and computer projects. I would prioritize everything already taped out and ready to send to the fabs, with stuff merely in the pipeline evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

First up were the graphics chips. We had ANTIC, Atari’s CRT control chip, to be mated either to TIA, the Atari 2600’s graphics and sound controller, CTIA or GTIA, the current Atari 8-bit graphics chip(and the 5200), or VTIA, a newly developed graphics chip meant for what would have been the upcoming Atari 1400XL/1450XLD. VTIA doubled the available player and missile sprites available on-screen, as well as offering a total color palette of 1024 with 256 on-screen at once, plus sprite CLUTs. It was not half bad.

The Atari Semiconductor Group was almost finished on a project called ANITA, a consolidation of ANTIC and TIA to be put into a cost-reduced future version of the 2600, as well as the upcoming Atari 7800. I’ll get to that later.

Next up, we had MARIA, which Atari had designed for the successor to the Atari 5200, the imaginatively named Atari 7800. This one was mildly interesting. Much like VIC II, it handled sprite generation via a display list system, limited only by the available CPU Power, Video Memory, and system bus bandwidth and latency. In theory, it could generate up to 128 sprites, with a maximum of 32 on any given scanline, with a size of up to 128x256 pixels and a maximum CLUT size of four colors. In practice, with the 6502-based SALLY clocked at 1.79 Mhz., and only 2 KB of video RAM, performance was rather tamer, managing maybe 96 sprites at 12x12 pixels each with two-color CLUTs before everything dropped to something like 12 frames a second. The maximum resolution was 320x256 (320x288 in PAL/SECAM markets, presumably), but without more than the 4 KB total system RAM, it was only usable with 16 colors and no sprites. To put this in perspective, the full 256-color palette was available in the 160x256 and 256x192 resolution modes perfectly fine. Oh, and the engineers who worked on it originally called the chip PIA MARIA, as it incorporated peripheral control logic licensed from Commodore’s MOS Technology PIA, obviating the need for RIOT, and, along with ANITA for CRT interface, providing backward compatibility with Atari 2600 software while reducing the motherboard footprint. If it had any other weaknesses, they were a lack of support for tiles that VIC II had had and were becoming industry standard, and absolutely no hardware provision for scrolling. I know, scrolling isn’t necessary to translate Tempest, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Frenzy, QIX, or even Joust or Robotron 2084 to the home screen, but my grandsons were arcade regulars. From what they told me, the likes of Pac-Land, 1942, Ghosts n’ Goblins, and Gladiator were the wave of the future.

In the sound chip department, there were several interesting developments. The main workhorse, dating to 1979 and the original Atari 400 and 800, was POKEY. By 1984, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Atari Semiconductor Group on behalf of the arcade division, it had become its own lineup, with the additions of StereoPOKEY (Twice the sound channels) and QuadPOKEY (Four times the channels). The original chip featured four channels of geometry synthesis each with a range of three and a half octaves. As most of you readers know, while it lacked most of SID’s filtering options, it was possible to group two of them together or even all four to produce even richer tones and timbres. POKEY was originally a portmanteau of Pot (as in sound pot) and Key, as Jay Miner engineered it to pull extra service as the keyboard interface and I/O controller.

The rest of the lineup was in a somewhat lesser state of development. The chips most ready for prime time were HARVEY A and HARVEY B, speech synthesis chips which Atari had developed in partnership with General Instruments, as a counter to various Texas Instruments and Ricoh chips used in such products as the Speak ‘n Spell by Texas Instruments. The differences between the two HARVEYs were primarily motherboard, port, and bus interface, due to the differences in configuration between the 1400XL and 1450XLD.

Next up came GUMBY. A variant of POKEY (hearty har, hearty har har) the Atari Semiconductor group created when they removed POKEY’s I/O circuitry to add an extra two POKEY sound channels, and then split their output for Stereo Sound (on a mono television, this capability went to waste). At that moment, GUMBY’s latest, possibly production stepping was “still at the fabs,” which, after I took a look at actual hardware projects, later learned was a euphemism much bandied about after Warner Brothers’ beancounters had swooped down, tightening belts so much.

AMY (yes, that AMY) was the one sound chip that looked to have the greatest promise. It was an eight-channel additive synthesizer, featuring 8-bit sampling rates of up to 22KHz. AMY had an amazingly low transistor count, and could be fabbed on HMOS without overheating. Its promise came most from the fact that an actual keyboard company had come aboard as a development partner, specifically Sight and Sound, of Milwaukee. Aren’t all of you out in userspace glad I decided to keep those folks on board?

Moving on, among various miscellaneous chips were FREDDIE, a memory management unit/direct memory access chip developed specifically for the 6502 and pin compatibilities. Using a six-bit bankswitching scheme, any 6502, 65C02, 65402, or 65802 could address up to four megabytes of RAM, total, with only a single memory access cycle for delay! Combined with SALLY’s interrupt instructions, FREDDIE permitted VTIA to access memory address space separately from whatever SALLY was working with at the moment, meaning that VTIA was no longer confined to the 16K memory map Atari’s 8-Bit OS memory map had carved out for it. That wasn’t all. Thanks to the settlement I had negotiated with Motorola back then, MOS Technology and Motorola had agreed to standardize on the same data and I/O bus signals for CPUs, an agreement that would not expire until the original patents did as well. This meant that, with only a minor reworking, a hypothetical FREDDIE II could help a Motorola 68000 address one full gigabyte!

Of course, it’s never quite that simple when it comes to computers. FREDDIE, or any other such bankswitching chip, would have to run at least at the same clock rate as the memory it was helping to address. Compared to memory directly available to a CPU, there would always be access latency, code overhead, and timing issues with other elements the computer system, such as, or instance, graphics or sound hardware. Then you could get into stuff like DRAM refresh cycles, expansion bus overhead, and possibly cache writeback issues.

Those were the main chips whose workings I managed to look at up front. The rest were mainly stuff like power regulation, motherboard lane switchers, and voltage stepping, things completely invisible to any software a given machine might run.

As for complete new or upcoming products to ship to wholesalers, I saw quite a few those, too. The projects most ready to ship were the Atari 1400/1450XL. Fraternal twins, the main differences between the two were that the 1450 would have shipped with two 5.25” floppy drives built into the case hardwired into the motherboard and 64 more KB of RAM compared with the 1400, oh, and the differing pinouts and motherboard slots for the HARVEY variants. Atari 1400XL users would have had to make due with either a Parallel Floppy Interface cartridge plugged into an evolution of the Atari 800’s “Big Cartridge” slot, or else use the legacy Serial I/O port, and ether way buy the floppy discs separately.

As much as I wanted to dash them out as soon as possible, the driver for HARVEY was still half-baked. In theory, this wasn’t too much of a problem. I could simply publish all of HARVEY’s registers, instructions, and filters. In practice, it would make future backward compatibility trickier when (hopefully) the Atari Semiconductor Group came up with something even better. I wasn’t certain if anyone back at Commodore was working on anything better, or whether or not the rest of the competition was vetting Texas Instruments speech synthesis chips for their upcoming home computer offerings (I’d say no, but I wasn’t about to bet my grandchildren’s college education on it), so I would be nervously pacing my office for six months over it.

The next projects I saw were projects SIERRA and GAZA, featuring the “Gold and Silver” chipset. Both featured the Motorola 68000 as their main CPU (GAZA in fact used two of them), and at least 1 MB of total RAM each. GAZA also added a Texas Instruments TMS 320000 series DSP for added graphical prowess. When I saw an early gameplay demo of Return of the Jedi recreating the assault on the second Death Star, my jaw dropped. I honestly had to search the unit for a laserdisc drive. “I want this out the door and in Computer Shopper yesterday,” I demanded. That was when the folks at accounting dropped a few bombshells.

The first was AMY. At current rates of development, it would take the Atari Semiconductor Group and Sight And Sound another eight months to get her fully ready. I know, I could have simply dropped in QuadPOKEY and a Yamaha YM2143 or General Instruments AY-3-8310 or 8330, called it a day, and offered AMY on a sound card and subsequent models, but my son Sam talked me out of it. He heard it through the grapevine that Steve Wozniak was going to put a thirty-two channel sound chip on the computer that would become the Apple IIgs designed by an ex-Commodore employee, specifically the guy who had designed SID!

This would push SIERRA and GAZA’s full introductions back until the 1985 Computex, or even Summer CES, but, hopefully, that would be merely fashionably late, and it would give us the time to prime the channel for a mass rollout. With any luck, and developer systems in hand at Microsoft, WordPerfect, Borland, and Broderbund, combined with in-house ports of Atari Writer and ProCalc, we could have an excellent productivity stack available in time for back-to-school. This was to say nothing of the graphics capability in the hands of almost any game company out there. That was when my accounting people came to me with the second bombshell.

They had come to discover that “still at the fabs,” was code for “Warner Brothers at least partially stiffed the foundries,” and “the payments the foundries did get were in Warner Brothers’ main corporate name, not Atari’s.” Even if I were somehow to get my hands on the cash to pay the rest of the mask and wafer costs when no one on Wall Street would give me the time of day, I would still have to talk to The Rabbit about their half of chipset equity. Yep, that Wascally Wabbit had screwed me five ways from Sunday!

“Tell me some good computer news,” I insisted to my accountants. Well, it turned out that Roy Kassar had made a deal of his own, buried in the balance sheet, in Atari’s own name. Early in 1981, Jay Miner and some of his handpicked team had left the company to found Hi-Toro Labs. Roy had given his blessing on the enterprise, and they worked out a deal in which Jay and his team would develop a Motorola 68000-based chipset as the successor to the Atari 5200 and XL computers about to enter production. They came out with something actually pretty nifty. It was not quite as good as “Silver and Gold,” but it and its successors were a pretty good reason why Commodore gave us such a run for our money during the 16-32 -bit era of desktop computing.

You know all the chips already: DENISE the CRT Controller and Video Adapter, AGNES the sprite generator, video image processor, blitter, and video memory manager, PAULA the keyboard interface, disc drive controller, and PCM sound generator, and GARY the I/O controller. What you might not know is the reason the computer that gave world the term “Graphics Processing Unit” bore the name of Commodore Amiga and not Atari 1600-1850 XR. Like Warner Brothers’ deals with Rockwell Semiconductor, IBM, and Texas Instruments, Ray Kassar and Jay Miner had come up with a half up-front and half when it’s ready payment schedule. Now, the balloon payment was officially due.

The problem was, that payment was for $500,000. That was almost affordable. In fact, if I had only purchased the consumer electronics side the way Warner Brothers had been expecting me to, I’m certain the company I had founded would have folded up like origami. Alas, it was not to be. If had gotten a home equity loan on my house, and Sam’s too, I could have swung the rest of Jay’s asking price, but that was too much of a gamble even for me. Oh, there were several other ways I could have gotten my hands on that full chipset. I could have offered him a royalty percentage on each Atari computer and console sold that included one of his chips or its successors until the patents ran out. I could have hired him on and made him vice president in charge of R&D. But no, there had been too much upheaval at Atari already.

The loss of Gold and Silver had been bitter, and the loss of “Project Mickey” would be even worse, but I still had the computer the team I brought with me was working on, so we weren’t doomed yet. Shaking my head and sighing, I turned my attention to the console situation.

My first impression of that engineering sample CV9000 was “man, what a marvel of engineering!” It was the smallest and most elegant working motherboard for a piece of working television-interfacing electronics I had seen since the Japanese team showed me the VIC-20 prototype. Steve Wozniak would have been proud.

My second impression was rather less salutary. “Um, where does the sound come from? Where’s the expansion slot? If that’s MARIA, how can SALLY keep up at just 1.79 MHz?”

I didn’t like the answers. The original console had been designed by a company called GCC. No, not Richard Stallman and company; the initials stood for General Computer Corporation. Apparently, they created a couple of arcade titles using Atari arcade hardware without any license to do so. Rather be crushed by Warner Brothers’ threatened lawsuit, they volunteered to engineer the successor to the Short-lived Atari 5200. They received three specific directives:

1: Make it cheap. At the time of its creation, the Atari 5200 retailed for $225 and it still barely made any money.

2: Make it backward compatible with the 2600.

3: Make it simple and

4: Use only off-the-shelf chips, or else In-house Atari chips.

In the name of the first three, GCC, as implicitly ordered by Warner Brothers’ accounting staff, did not add in any sound chip beyond the use of TIA’s sound channels from the 2600. If better sound was called for, cartridges could include a POKEY variant, or GUMBY when it.

“Okay now,” I asked the former corporate liaison to GCC and current lead engineer now that GCC had handed the console off to Atari, how many POKEY chips do we have in inventory?”

He answered me. I punched the numbers into the adding machine on his desk.

“So, basically, this system can only handle about four hits at current inventories at the level of Pac-Man or Space Invaders?” My eyebrows were raising as I pronounced that question.

“You’re preaching to the choir.” He sounded just as frustrated as me.

I then took a look at Ray Kassar’s “Plan B.” That was a little more interesting. Apparently, Nintendo had just introduced a new console in Japan, called the Famicom. Not counting the memory, it had only two chips. I took a look at the specs, and my eyes wandered back to CX9000, and then those for the planned Atari 1400XL…

“I need to make a few phone calls,” I said to him as I turned to walk back to my office. “In the meantime, see these things I’ve circled? Think you could do something with them?

Abort? Retry? Ignore? Fail?

Special Thanks to Curt Vendel and the Atari History Museum.
 
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So, two installments from now, would you rather see:

Atari's Fall COMDEX booth?

Other Companies' reactions

Inquiring minds want to know
oh, and the audit is finished.

I'm going to need the first few of my photochops. Any volunteers please reply to this thread or PM me.
 
Chapter 3: Some Phone Calls
“Yamauchi-san?” I hoped he heard me. The connection with Nintendo’s main headquarters in Japan was rather scratchy in the first place. Combine that with the way this had become a conference call on the other end (because the president and chairman of the board didn’t speak English) and it’s a miracle anyone understood anyone else.

“Yes? Mr. Tramiel?” I think that was the interpreter.

“I just bought Atari from Warner Brothers. I just found the contract.” There was a pause while the interpreter relayed my message to his boss.

“He says ‘I thought you guys weren’t interested. We were going to go with Worlds of Wonder’s deal instead.’”

“Tell him ‘I want to make him a counteroffer.’ What’s your fax number?”

He gave it, and I wrote it down, making certain he repeated himself twice just to make sure.

I very carefully put the Nintendo people on hold, and called the development lead on the 7800 project into the office.

“You called?” Holding some papers, he was flushed from the jog.

“Yes I did. Did you bring what I asked you?”

“Yeah. Are you sure this will work?”

“You let me worry about that.” He handed me the papers. I fed them into the fax machine.

Miracle of miracles, they were still holding. I brought them back on line.

“Sorry it took so long. Are you getting the fax?”

“We are. He says, ‘this is the same deal we sent to your company last year. Times have changed. Worlds of Wonder is offering us a much better deal with control and rights.’”

“No, isn’t. Reread it carefully. It says we assume all financial risk for distribution, too. Also, we’re paying you ¥250 for each machine we sell to paying customers.’” Not suppliers or retailers, mind you, people out there buying it to actually play it, at least in theory. “Also, reread that last section.”

“Rights to new chips? What are you talking about? Oh, here come the next two pages.”

There was a pause of about ten to fifteen seconds.

“He says, ‘the Famicom’s chipset is perfect as it is.’”

“I’ll admit it’s scrolling hardware is excellent, but can you truly have too much resolution, too many hardware sprites or too wide of a palette? Also, with SYLVIA’s interrupt instructions and clock speed, it can take full advantage of both the Picture Processor element and the MARIA element.’”

“He says ‘We already have about two million Famicoms out in Japan right now.”

“Well then, put the new chips on some upgrade device next year, and then breadboard them to a new console model the year after that. Besides, the brains behind Worlds of Wonder might have founded Atari in the first place, but the reason he had to sell out to Warner Brothers in the first place is that used the company as his personal piggy bank. He squandered corporate funds on restaurants and even tried to mass-produce a robot servant more expensive than a family car with a 6502 for a CPU! Could you at least send someone to see our booth at the Las Vegas COMDEX in a couple of months?”

They were willing to give me a chance. I hung up and let off a sigh of relief. That was when my secretary buzzed me. Bill Gates was on line two.

“Hey Jack.” Bill was sounding chipper. That somehow put me on edge.

“Steve (Ballmer) caught a wild rumor,” he continued. “He heard you’re about to produce a new Motorola 68000 machine to go up against the Macintosh. It just so happens that I have this new piece of software in the pipeline called ‘Project Manager.’”

“Not Interested.” And as I moved to hang up, he said:

“Hey, hey hey! I heard about how you are planning to go with Digital Research. I promise Manager is much more feature-packed. Come by the Microsoft booth at COMDEX on the even P.M. hours for a preliminary demonstration. Then you can make up your mind. But that isn’t even really why I called.”

“Oh?” If he was promising to port his entire office suite to Project Phoenix, I would be all ears.

“Well, if you’re really planning to do a completely new computer, it stands to reason you’re going to need a high-level language for people to program it with who can’t handle an assembler terminal.”

I smiled like an alligator. “I already bought a Tangerine Basic license from you in perpetuity, if you’ll remember.”

“I don’t know about your copy of the contract, but your signature on mine has below it ‘Chairman, CEO, and President, Commodore Business Machines.’ As recall, you took the company public about six months before you signed that deal. Now, considering your antics there for the next three years, which interpretation of your part in the deal do you suppose the Commodore board will endorse if this goes to court?”

In other words, Bill had me over a barrel, too. I couldn’t afford to make an enemy of Microsoft. If I couldn’t cover the costs of helping to shoulder the burden of U.C. Berkley Vs. AT&T when it was clear Ma Bell had no case so that I could use BSD, how could I face Redmond when there was a genuine dispute over interpretations I could lose?

“What about Apple?” I was stalling for time, looking for anything that might help.

“You know, you’re right. I think I’ll call Xerox tomorrow morning. If Steve Jobs or John Scully try reaching for their lawyers, they might be in for a nasty shock!”

I just had to jinx it, didn’t I? “Listen, I’ll take a look, but if I don’t like what I see, I’m going with GEM.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Bye,” and the phone went dead.

I hung up, and then picked up again. I didn’t want Basic any more. Something told me I was going to need something better to stand out.

“I need the number for OCS…”

Abort? Retry? Ignore? Fail?

The next part will involve the 1984 Las Vegas COMDEX. I can't proceed further without photochops. Hulkster'01 or anyone else, I need your help. Please PM me and I'll tell you what I have in mind.

Oh, and have I gotten Bill Gates' voice right?
 
Oh, and have I gotten Bill Gates' voice right?
And he Sounded like the sterotypical used car salesman aka i'm not scamming you this is the real deal...yeah that was prime gates.

Umm, japanese microcomputers were a mess.. can atari make one can properly support Kanji and they already have one can sold it in japan pretty easily..ummm
 
Chapter 4: COMDEX 1984
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.
 
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Just use the famicom controller you cowards, is simple and very well done.

Seriously this was the most unexpected Revival, still i think Atari is ruining the nes
 
I approve of the Atari ST hardware spec for this timeline. Not so sure about Microsoft involvement, but if anyone can reign in future tendencies to bloatware, it would be Jack T.
 
Chapter four's now complete. I'm outlining chapter five, but until I can get a new computer, I can only say to expect it when it arrives.
 
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