/vr/ - Retro Games

Coleco

Bottom left
Fuck controllers with numerical keypads

>>5069572
a VCR desu

>>5069572

Atari 2600. I want a real joystick, not a knob and not a little dwarf joystick, thank you mom!

>>5069572
Probably the 2600. I actually have one CIB along with like 2 dozen games that I stumbled upon in my grandparents' house a while ago. Apparently someone bought it for my mother back then and it's pretty much sat in prestine condition ever since. However heat damage from being in the attic apparently took its toll. I can't get games to start and a ton of them have their labels falling off from the glue degrading.

>tfw you had both a coleco AND atari, and also some clunker Tandy PC from radio-shack
fucking poorfags

If it was 82 I probably would have chosen the 5200, not knowing that is library would prove to be quite limited. The Colecovision is probably the best choice from the provided options but in 82 the wisest machine to start playing on would have been an Atari 8-bit computer or a Commodore 64

>>5069575
This.
Most capable hardware by far https://youtu.be/DTLnYo68IGg

Atari. Collecting for it will be super cheap in just 2 years.

>>5069572
I choose a zx spectrum. Jetpack Willy here I come.

>>5069572
MSX

>>5069662
Are you 50?

2600. Games that are STILL great today.

>>5069879
Didn't exist yet.

Atari's 82 Christmas season sales were well below expectations which was the first warning sign that the edifice was about to come down.

Coleco. With these controllers. They were dope, had them as a kid. I don't get why they don't get more love.

5200 for Star Raiders

>>5069910
When the crash happened, you could get tons of games for pennies. The amount of new releases coming out slowed to a trickle and tons of games advertised in magazines never materialized. Prices of games also fell dramatically. Gaming magazines were talking about the falling sales, companies closing down, downsizing, and laying people off, magazines themselves shut down or went to bi-monthly.

>>5069935
My family got a whole milk crate full of 2600 carts sometime around 1984. I don't even remember where it came from; I think someone just gave it to us. Went from having a dozen games to like two hundred.

>>5069935
The market became horribly oversaturated with terrible quality games. A lot of these were from fly-by-night developers and some companies like Quaker Oats who had no real clue what they were doing, but wanted a piece of the pie. Many of the good developers also made garbage they should have been above. Cheap, shitty games made by companies like Data Age also undercut pricier titles made by A-list devs.

There were also too many mediocre clones of existing games, for example the Atari 2600 Alien was just a slightly touched up Pac-Man clone. Some developers tried more ambitious stuff, but the aging 2600 was not able to pull it off. Games like Indiana Jones and E.T. were well-meaning attempts that were asking too much of a console with 4k of ROM and 128 bytes of work RAM. It wasn't until the NES that console hardware had enough memory to handle sprawling adventures like Zelda, even then, a lot of those still had design and gameplay limitations caused by the NES's 2k of work RAM.

Pfft. I had an Apple IIe back then and games like Karateka and Hardball which had better, higher resolution graphics than the blocky shit on the Atari 2600 and would even let you save your progress. Plus you could pirate and get tons of games for free. Later on my sister got a NES and I didn't find much to get my attention, the games seemed too cartoonish compared to the stuff on the Apple II and aimed at children.

>>5069967
I dunno about you, but my neighborhood growing up was pretty blue collar and most families had consoles, they couldn't afford a computer. Me, I had a TRS-80 CoCo but it was a pretty fucking limited machine. I knew some people with Macs and found them kind of cool, but that was out of my family's price range. The NES looked almost revolutionary when it came out.

One thing that I recall really made made me realize shit was about to hit the fan was getting the game Sssnake which was utter garbage, and the Atari 5200 I got for Christmas which had fire buttons so stiff you could hardly press them. Any company who delivered a product like that deserved to go under.

1982?

I chose you, Commodore 64!

>>5069990
The C64 didn't really take off until summer 83 with the price cut from $600 to $300. For its first 6-7 months on the market, software was scarce, the 1541 disk drives were scarce, expensive, and horribly unreliable, and early C64s had video output so bad it was like you had Vasoline smeared on the TV screen.

>>5069990
computers don't count.

>>5069989
>and the Atari 5200 I got for Christmas which had fire buttons so stiff you could hardly press them. Any company who delivered a product like that deserved to go under

That's not any worse than all the Xboxes that malfunctioned out of the box. Microsoft however were responsible enough of a company to acknowledge and fix the problems, and actively supported and advertised the system, while Atari just let the 5200 fizzle out.

Shit, the very first Famicoms in 83 had a huge failure rate and Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to recall them and miss out on the highly profitable Christmas season rather than peddle shoddy goods.

Honestly, by the time the crash happened, the Atari 2600 was getting very long in the tooth. It was a six year old system at the time and couldn't keep up with the latest in gaming design.

>>5069572
Coleco obviously because they can play 2600.

>>5069594
here's ur controller bro

>>5069998
The first PS1s had problems too especially with the laser lens on the CD drive. But again, Sony admitted that the hardware had unforeseen design flaws and fixed it. Some early PS2s also had problems with the eject mechanism sticking and burning out the CD drive motor, and same thing. Sony quickly moved to fix it and suffered no loss of sales or reputation.

>>5069572
Knowing what I know now, I'd probably still go with the 2600. The library just dwarfs the others, even with the colossal amount of shovelware, the VCS still has more good games than the competitors. Not to mention a usable controller.

>>5070007
>>5069998
>Micro$haft
>responsible
LOLno. They had shipped millions of Xboxes before admitting that the hard disks were prone to overheating and failure, and when they did finally acknowledge what was happening, their "solution" was simply to ship a new power cord that would shut the hard disk off every 10 minutes to prevent it from overheating. Brand-new hardware is usually always buggy, as was the case with the first Famicoms and PS1s, but when a company acts like they didn't know the whole time what was happening, they should go screw.

5200
only people with no friends disagree

The crash just made everyone shift to home computers instead.

>>5070023
Did it though? Advertisements suggested a whole lot of fanciful things you could do with a computer that didn't quite correspond to reality. I don't think a lot of the things they promised of computers became realistic until the mid to late 90s.

So what did you do with a home computer exactly? Sit around and type silly BASIC programs to fill the screen with a pattern of asterisks or the word "fuck"?

"Crash" is a harsh term if you ask me.

There was shovelware, a lot of it. Some brilliant games like Pitfall and tons of utter garbage like Warplock. Pac-Man and E.T. didn't necessarily kill Atari, but they reflected the general cynicism of that time where people had gotten to assume any video game release at all equaled $$$. Game rentals were not yet a thing in the early 80s and you could easily spend $30-$50 on something that was totally unplayable.

My parents were still underage in 82.

The crash may have not been so immediately obvious to the consumer at the time, but business and trade magazines showed it in graphic detail. Like someone else said, Atari's Christmas 82 sales were below expectations, then in June 83 they reported a $283 million loss. Then they lost half a billion dollars. That's getting into some pretty serious money. Even so, Atari didn't split off their home and arcade divisions until late 84. They had enough money to survive several quarters of continuous losses, but that doesn't mean it wasn't going on.

>>5069572
>1982
I'd choose a C64 instead of those pieces of shit.

One thing baffles me, I heard stories that Jack Tramiel was very interested in video games, as he wanted the Atari 7800 straight when taking over Atari.

>>5069594
coleco has several controller options such as the superior Action Joystick

and remember, you can play Atari 2600 on Colleco, but you can't play Colleco on Atari 2600

>>5069672
all those consoles games became super cheap in the crash

>>5070016
They extended the warranty for 360s for 3 years and replaced people's units. Also the later revisions had less hardware issues

>>5069915
only way to play Rocky and Baseball. I remember to run bases you had to spin that wheel which was like a mouse scroll wheel before they existed

>>5070031
Word processing, printers, and modems for BBS's were a thing at least; my family used those things on our Atari 800. I used to chat with people about Robotech on Fidonet groups.
My father had a Compuserve account but that charged by the hour so we didn't use it all that much.

>>5070056
Don't think so. My understanding was that JT didn't really care about gaming at all. His primary reason for buying Atari was to dominate the low end computer market and get revenge on Commodore. He wanted to show the world that they were wrong for firing him, just like Steve Jobs tried to show the world with the NeXT that Apple were wrong to fire him.

After the Tramiel buyout, the Atari ST was the big focus. Atari's console division still existed, but the Tramiels didn't seem to have much interest in it and they got the minimum of investment and promotion. And as far as the ST was concerned, nobody at Atari thought of it as a gaming machine. None of the advertisements mentioned it as a gaming platform, or the software being developed for it.

>>5070075
It's a bit of a shame that neither Jobs or Tramiel understood or cared about gaming when it generated a huge amount of sales.

how did Atari last as long as they did? they literally had one successful console followed by 7 complete failures in a row.

>>5070075
>>5070079
I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't more games available for the iPhone products than the total sum of all games ever made for all other game consoles. Or that total time spent playing games on iPhones isn't 10, 20, maybe 100 times more than time currently spent on consoles today. My bet is the iPhone is the most successful game platform of all time and Jobs wasn't even trying.

>>5070085
That was a good 20 years too late. Aside from eduware, the Mac has never been a gaming platform. Steve Jobs never cared that much about gaming because he considered it a frivolous activity.

>>5069993
>The C64 didn't really take off until summer 83 with the price cut from $600 to $300. For its first 6-7 months on the market, software was scarce, the 1541 disk drives were scarce, expensive, and horribly unreliable, and early C64s had video output so bad it was like you had Vasoline smeared on the TV screen.

Interesting. I was born in 1981, so I have no idea what the actual landscape was like back then.

>>5069994
>computers don't count.

The C64 was always borderline classified as a console. It was one of the most capable of the 8-bit home computers for gaming. Though the Atari 8-bit line of hone computers are generally quite good too.

If home computers are out, then I choose the Vectrex :P Which was released like a month before Christmas 1982.

>>5070016
what the fuck are you talking about

>being born in the 20th century

>>5069572
Colecovision.
Fucking amazing system.

>>5069915
>25% of /vr/ even plays 2nd gen
>25% of them play Colecovision
>25% of those play on real hardware
>25% of that be ever used those pistol controllers
But yes, that type of stick was the best at the time and might even convince some people to play right handed

>>5069584
This, a microwave or suicide by traditional gas oven.

>>5069662
>and also some clunker Tandy PC
Standard TRaSh 80 or CoCo?

INTELLIVISION DOES WHAT ATARIDONT

Had an Atari back then but IV was so much better

Anyone know a good place to go for 2600 troubleshooting? I recently found one but I can't get games running, and I'm trying to figure out if it's a power problem, cart connection problem, CPU problem, RF modulator problem, etc.

>>5070163

atari was far better friend
c64 fags are delusional

>>5070285
>Anyone know a good place to go for 2600 troubleshooting?
AtariAge.com

>>5070316
The Atari 8-bit was a better all-around computer and certainly much better built and more reliable, at least until the XE line which came out when certain parties took control of Atari. However, it had a lot of different models and configurations which inevitably resulted in software supporting the lowest common denominator setup. That 128k in the 130XE was sure very useful for running all those 16k games designed for the Atari 400. Atari's disk drives were also skimpy, only 90k of storage on the 810 and 130k on the 1050, and of course lowest common denominator came into play again meaning software on 1050 disks was uncommon.

>>5070090
>>5070085
You mean to say Apple should have started a gaming division in the mid-80s? Trust me, if they did, Apple would no longer be with us. Doing what you suggested required money and lots of it, which Apple did not have. They had to pitch a product to investors who would then fund it. One can only imagine how well pitching yet another game console would have gone over in the mid-80s. Gaming at that time was nothing like the megabucks industry it is today; a successful hardware company had to target the productivity market.

Apple in the mid-80s were doing decently enough, but they could not have conceivably afforded to start a gaming division at that time. Even basic development systems and documentation were a major effort. Writing a word processor for the Mac was a huge undertaking. Getting the Apple IIgs up and running was tough because the Mac team wanted it dead so they could conserve as many company resources as possible to keep the Mac alive. Apple were desperate to prove their computers were everything but toys, and a game console would have been the kiss of death. No desktop publishing market, no LaserWriter, etc, etc.

Microsoft scarcely gave a thought to gaming until Windows 95, and then the Xbox followed several years after that, but that was at a much later date when gaming was big business.

The arcade market in the early 80s was also very oversaturated. Arcade games were _everywhere_, and people who had no business even having arcade machines were getting into the act. All the doctors' offices, supermarkets, pizza restaurants, gas stations, and hair salons buying or leasing arcade machines couldn't hope to break even on the things, let alone profit from them.

Arcades revived in the NES era and during the early 90s, got really big again when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat were at their peak and some arcades had multiple machines of the two to keep up with demand. But even then, the arcade market never reached the levels of excess it got to in the early 80s.

>>5070046
>The crash may have not been so immediately obvious to the consumer at the time, but business and trade magazines showed it in graphic detail
You mean it wasn't obvious to people who were kids at the time. 10 year olds were not reading the Wall Street Journal or sitting at Mattel's shareholder meetings. Anyone who closely followed the industry knew about the massive cash losses Atari and others suffered, all the companies that went under or downsized, the large-scale layoffs, the amount of new game releases drying up, games that once sold for $40 now selling for $10, the lack of any new console hardware until the NES showed up, etc, etc.

>>5070031
They mostly promised them as a way for your kids to have fun and learn computing at the same time, which is a thing that demonstrably happened.

>>5070083
Because the console market wasn't the focus. Atari's arcade games division was still wildly profitable up until the 90s.

>>5070285
had some trouble with my first atari. the screen was a blocky mess of ugly colors and sound was a ear shattering static mess. turns out my console was in 100% working condition and that's just what atari games are like

>>5069902
Atari 400/800 or Vectrex than.

>>5070523
>atariage.com
Looked through the site and forums, but there was an absolute lack of any troubleshooting info

After much fiddling and testing with various RCA cables and RF switches, I'm able to get a black screen with a vertical purple line on the left and vertical green line on the right when I turn the thing on, so that's a start. This holds true whether or not a game is inserted, or no matter what game I try (I've gone tried 23 games, all the same)

I've tried cleaning the cartridges and cartridge slot as best I can, and doesn't change anything. I also don't see any obvious signs of dry joints on the board.

>>5070897
Is it that difficult to, oh, I don't know, make a post on the forum explaining the problem?

>>5070568
This whole mess reminds one of the disco bubble just a couple of years earlier which also crashed and burned when everyone and their mother was trying to get into disco.

What exactly was it in the water supply of America in the late 70s-early 80s that made people overinvest in cheesy fads that were doomed to implode in about 2-3 years?

Trying to pin the video game crash down to any 1-2 causes is oversimplifying. It was a lot of complicated factors that all came together. The industry was still in its infancy, effectively a Wild West kind of thing, and tons of people assumed they could cynically milk a quick buck from it. For every competent dev like iMagic who made quality product, there were tons of Data Ages and Mystiques who made horrifying garbage.

>>5071326
Oversaturation. The amount of games and consoles on the market by 1983 was too much--Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, Bally Astrocade, Arcadia, Odyssey, Vectrex, even Atari competing with itself with the 5200 and the 7800 planned for release soon.

The amount of bad games was too much and they were expensive purchases. Too many people got burned on garbage. Atari also treated programmers and engineers poorly, did not credit them for their work, and soon lost most of their talent.

>>5071331
David Crane said it was mostly amateurs who didn't know what they were doing trying to get into the business. I wouldn't rule out the C64 taking a lot of the gaming market over as well.

I was still in nappies then and my parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. No Christmas for me. : (

>>5071332
Yes, indeed computer gaming was a factor. The huge amount of shovelware however was a very real thing. One other factor was probably the economic recovery in the US that started in 1983. People had money to spend on other recreational pursuits so interest in video games declined.

>>5071336
I get the part about shovelware, still, I'm not sure those games mattered as much as you think. One would think that if you were looking to buy a game for your Atari 2600 and you found stuff made by some literally who company you've never heard of, chances are it's probably pretty bad. I'm not exactly buying into the idea that Froggo caused the the video game crash.

>>5071336
That as well. The recession of the early 80s ironically was a boomtime for video games because usually in times of a down economy, people seek relatively cost-effective forms of entertainment. With the recovery that began in summer 83, people lost interest in gaming.

Arcades and home consoles are two separate things first and foremost. The arcade industry was soaring from 1979 to 82 and this of course led to tons of people getting into it when they shouldn't have, and so you had all the doctors' offices, hair salons, and pizza restaurants with arcade machines when there was no way they could ever profit from them. When the crash happened, lots of arcade manufacturers went under or exited the business.

The home console crash was a catastrophic event that caused dozens of companies to quit or fold up. Atari execs as early as 1981 were warned of the danger of market oversaturation and video games becoming a bubble that could burst at any moment, but they were too busy lighting $100 bills with cigars to care. By summer 82, Atari's warehouses were already full of unsellable goods and management covered it all up to not scare off investors and shareholders. They also manipulated their earnings reports to make things look better than they were. When Christmas sales proved much lower than expected, layoffs began in January 83. This sent a ripple effect through the industry. Upstart companies began exiting the business and most of the bigger players followed by 84.

And no, Pac-Man alone did not cause the crash. Yes, it was a bad port but the Atari 2600 was a _very_ limited system, so asking for an arcade-perfect port was too much.

>>5071381
Except that's not true. Some people made a homebrew port of Pac-Man that was way better and more arcade-accurate than the official one. What went wrong is that the game was a rush job. Atari execs would not give the programmer the 8k ROM he asked for, and they also imposed an excessively tight deadline to have the thing shipped for the 81 Christmas season. Because they were idiots, and cynical idiots too who believed quality was irrelevant and the game would sell no matter what just because of its name.

Do you know what the bigger irony is? The fact that all those horrible Atari 2600 shovelware games are now some of the most collectible and sought-after cartridges.

>>5071390
They were often produced in pretty small quantities because the developers didn't have the resources of the big guys and of course not a lot of copies were sold. It used to be easier to find games like Beat'Em and Eat'Em and Kool-Aid Man at flea markets and garbage sales until the Internet happened.

>>5071332
Take a game like Laser Blast. It's pretty repetitive, but still likable in its own way. Even with a genre that was already overdone and boring by 1982, Activision always managed to bring out some interesting new twist. The numerous shitty game devs simply wanted to make a quick buck from garbage.

And even Atari's more notorious games like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. manage to be interesting. At least they tried something novel and different. I can't say the same of something like Challenge or Zoo Fun.

>>5071353
Regarding the state of the economy. Things bottomed out in the winter of 1982-83 when unemployment in the US reached 9%. That also could have affected Christmas sales.

Opinion is divided over whether or not the Tramiels were white knights riding in to Atari's rescue or if they hammered the nails into Atari's coffin.

The 800XL was voted computer of the year for 1983, Atari sold tens of thousands of the things and it was getting some great recognition but then it seemed that their focus switched more or less completely to the ST and the 8-bit line, among others, seemed to get sidelined.

Atari under the Tramiels, did bring us the 65XE, the 130XE, the XEGS and the fantastic XF551 but retailers at the time were complaining they could have sold as much as they could have got their hands on but there just wasn't the amount of product reaching the market.

You can say Atari did great things with the ST. It was a sales success, at least in Europe, and Atari outlasted Commodore.

If Warner had held on and hadn't sold Atari's home divisions would things have been different?

>>5071501
Warner didn't understand computers, it was that simple. This is born out by their idiotic refusal to publish technical info for the A8s during their first year and a half on the market, which retarded sales and kept them from getting established.

I would argue that Jack Tramiel did a commendable job digging Atari out of the hole for the second half of the 80s, until he decided to retire in 89 and hand the reigns over to his Deputy Droopalong son, who crashed and burned the company to the ground with no survivors.

>>5071508
>>5071501
I think Atari marketed the A8s all wrong. They wanted to go after Apple and engineers wanted expansion slots like the Apple II had, but marketing pushed for more of an appliance computer like the PET with no slots (ironic given Steve Jobs's well-established hatred of expansion slots and his belief in plug-and-play appliance computers). There were even sillier ideas like offering the computers in different colored cases like you could select the paint scheme on a car, with stuff like pink and lavender to appeal to women.

>>5071532
They didn't have vision, it was that simple. It's one thing to simply react to immediate market forces and make a product for the next year or two, it's quite another to see the long-term picture and imagine 5-10 years down the road the way Steve Jobs did. The Tramiels weren't really computer people, they were shrewd, pirate businessmen. They revived Atari for a couple more years, but couldn't sustain the company in the long run. That was where Apple succeeded and Atari did not--Apple simply had a bigger, more expansive vision as a company than simply trying to maximize sales for the upcoming Christmas season.

Atari and Commodore didn't get a foothold in the educational, government, or corporate sectors. Both companies relied too much on the home/consumer market which was fickle and had low profit margins. Apple for instance dominated education and later on the desktop publishing market. Atari's main cash cow was console games, which dried up in the video game crash.

>>5071543
For the record, I'd also argue (from what people who were there have told me) that the Tramiels were not especially well-liked by their own employees either. The C64's high out-of-the-box failure rate, especially in its first two years, is well known because Jack Tramiel imposed numerous cost-cutting measures that resulted in hardware malfunctions. The engineers who developed the C64's hardware like Bob Yannes were good guys and tried their best (what engineer wants to put out a shoddy product?) but the orders from above were to take various design shortcuts in the interest of keeping prices as low as possible.

As for Atari, the Warner management had already alienated a lot of staff for the reasons mentioned earlier in here, and that combined with the video game crash meant that morale was low by the time the Tramiels took over. Their arrival was not well-received by Atari employees, not in the least because their first action was to lay off about half the workforce, although this painful measure was necessary to save the company from complete collapse.

Vendors did not like them either since Atari (like Commodore) went after retail chains like Toys'R'Us and Sears rather than dedicated computer dealers. Atari never benefited the way companies like Gateway later would. Not that it would have made a difference anyway once the PC compatible juggernaut was in full swing.

But the record still stands that the Tramiels made a lot of enemies from their employees to their dealers to their investors. Despite it all, they did get Atari out of the hole and kept it alive into the early 90s, when the company likely would have folded by 1986 had Warner still had it. All things said, they didn't do too bad given the circumstances.

>>5071532
One might say the Atari 400/800 were over-engineered with a huge metal shield to meet RFI regulations, four joystick ports (not necessary) and two cartridge slots on the 800 (not really necessary either).

>>5071561
>As for Atari, the Warner management had already alienated a lot of staff for the reasons mentioned earlier in here, and that combined with the video game crash meant that morale was low by the time the Tramiels took over. Their arrival was not well-received by Atari employees, not in the least because their first action was to lay off about half the workforce, although this painful measure was necessary to save the company from complete collapse.

It was. Leonard Tramiel has been on record as saying that he didn't want to cut all those employees loose and it was difficult to do, but there was no other choice. They just could not afford to keep everyone. Atari were in the bottom of a financial pit at the time with huge debts and it's remarkable that the Tramiels by late 86 got things completely turned around and got the ST and XE lines line up and going.

>>5071572
Eh? The XE line was practically free except for the new case design. The ST however was quite a feat.

>>5071575
>The ST however was quite a feat
Huh? In what way? There was nothing special about the ST, it was built completely from off-the-shelf parts and had no custom hardware in it. It was basically a Mac with color graphics and industry-standard floppy drives.

>>5071581
Yeah if you compare the ST to the Amiga, it's a letdown. Just dumb frame buffer graphics and NES-level sound.

>>5071587
To be fair, Atari had plans on the table for next-generation 16-bit computers that never materialized. For whatever reason (cost, whatever) Jack Tramiel didn't consider them a viable idea. Either too expensive to produce or they couldn't get to market fast enough.

I was told by a former Atari employee, "Anyone who doesn't use the words 'Jack Tramiel' and 'scumbag' in the same sentence clearly never worked for the man."

>>5071594
Neat. Did he have anything else about JT to say?

>>5071590
I mean, he was probably right. By the time they could've gotten it out the door, the writing was on the wall for anything that wasn't an IBM clone.

>>5071596
Paraphrasing a bit. "I hated them for their laziness, greed, incompetence, and outdated ways of running a tech business like this. Recycling old-as-the-hills hardware was a self-defeating move. Since Jack Tramiel had had access to an in-house chip fab at Commodore, this wasn't as easily doable there."

Anyway, it was clearly insulting to the consumer's intelligence to peddle stuff like the XEGS as if it was new, current generation hardware. The Atari ST wasn't even all that successful in North America, let alone rebranded late 70s hardware. Towards the end, and especially after Jack retired, you could tell their hearts weren't in it anymore.

The Atari ST did carve out a successful market niche in the late 80s, at least in Europe, and offered a lot of the Mac's capabilities for half the price. It was doomed to die eventually because there was no viable upgrade path, but from 85 to 88 it was the right computer for the time.

I thought the 8-bit market was practically already lost to the C64. They couldn't have the Amiga. I think they did quite well with what they had (nothing) to come up with the ST when they did. Really, who still gave a shit about 8-bit computers in 1985?

>>5071634
As I understand it, 8-bit machines were still selling strongly in 1985 (after all, PCs and Macs cost $$$) and 86 was really the year when 16-bit machines decisively took over and you couldn't give away 8-bit hardware.

>>5071620
For what it's worth, Commodore's downfall happened after the Tramiels left. And Jack's sons weren't that involved with the business until the late 80s. Also Leonard was not involved in the management side of things. Jack retired in 89 and handed it over to Sam, who proved to be completely in over his head and eventually caused Atari to fall apart all over again and be sold to Hasbro in the mid-90s.

>>5071651
Ironic because one of the reasons Commodore's board of directors decided to evict JT was that he had planned for Sam to take over the company when he retired, but the BOD (correctly) divined that Sam was an incompetent and not fit for the job. Of course then they just appointed Irving Gould as CEO who was just as bad and incompetent.

>>5071620
>Anyway, it was clearly insulting to the consumer's intelligence to peddle stuff like the XEGS as if it was new, current generation hardware

The Tramiel-led Atari developed nothing new hardware-wise. All they did was repackage moldering old shit like the A8 computers and the Atari 2600. The Atari ST was just built out of off-the-shelf components, while the Lynx, Jaguar, and 7800 were developed by outside firms under contract. In reality it's not any different than what Hasbro/Infogrames did with the Atari brand name.

>>5071665
It's not the same thing at all. Hasbro/Infogrames simply rehash the Atari name for nostalgia/retro kitsch.

>>5071668
That may be true, but the facts still stand that Atari never tried to upgrade the A8s a single iota beyond adding more memory. They didn't add more colors, they didn't add stereo sound (although Atari's arcade machines had multiple POKEYs for stereo sound), no 80 column text, nothing. Nor did they improve the BASIC interpreter, it was still the same old 8k BASIC from 1979.

Also, there was the sad reality that Atari didn't develop any new game consoles in-house after the 70s. Everything was a retread of existing hardware or designed by outside firms under contract. Atari's R&D labs had some groundbreaking stuff going on in the early 80s like hologram research and advanced 16-bit computers, none of which ever saw the light of day. A lot of people who think they were a non-serious company who just made children's toys don't realize just how much advanced technology research they had going on at one point. Some of the Atari R&D people were straight from Doug Englebart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI.

If you saw Blade Runner, Atari was presented as this futuristic force for a reason. They had some of the best engineering minds in America. Nobody in 1982 could have imagined what was coming very shortly.

>>5071620
Although my opinion of the Tramiels is not as harsh as some, I won't deny that they were cheap skinflints who cut costs wherever they could. It was obvious in the XE line being flimsy as fuck. It was obvious in slapping the Atari ST together on the cheap from off-the-shelf parts and giving it a weak sound chip and single sided floppies. It was obvious in how they rereleased tons of ancient-ass games for the XEGS and 7800 without developing new titles that could compete with Nintendo. Jack Tramiel was always a guy who believed in cheap. Sometimes, like with the C64, it worked, most of the time it didn't. Even if Nintendo had not been monopolistic jackasses who walled out competing products, even if the 7800 had had state-of-the-art hardware beyond what Nintendo offered, it wouldn't have mattered a lick because Jack was just too cheap to fund a Zelda or a Mega Man.

>>5071683
>That may be true, but the facts still stand that Atari never tried to upgrade the A8s a single iota beyond adding more memory. They didn't add more colors, they didn't add stereo sound (although Atari's arcade machines had multiple POKEYs for stereo sound), no 80 column text, nothing. Nor did they improve the BASIC interpreter, it was still the same old 8k BASIC from 1979.
That's not at all true. Like you yourself said, the Atari skunk works had tons of projects going, most of which Warner pulled the plug on. Some of these projects may have been viable for a mass-market product, others perhaps weren't or were too far ahead of their time.

Tramiel-led Atari, while more conservative, did turn things around with the ST line and IIRC their profits hit a peak in 88-89. At that point, Jack Tramiel retired and Sam Tramiel, a much less capable guy, took over. Also Mike Katz left to join Sega.

Also, of all those projects going on at Atari in the early 80s, did any actually involve an effort to improve the A8 chipset? They did have plans for expansion modules, 3.5" floppies, and stuff like that, but I'm talking in terms of actually trying to extend the core ANTIC/POKEY chipset.

>>5071683
>or designed by outside firms under contract
That's not fair because tons of companies do that. Nintendo have never manufactured their consoles' chipsets in-house, they've always been contracted out to someone else (Ricoh built the NES/SNES chipset, SGI the N64 chipset, the GameCube used IBM hardware, etc). Sony outsourced certain aspects of the PS1's design and even more of the PS2.

>>5071726
The Atari ST did well for several years thanks to strong European sales. In 1989, things started to take a turn for the worse.

1. Jack Tramiel retired and passed the baton to Sam, who was far less competent
2. Michael Katz, the head of Atari's entertainment products division, left to join Sega. Among his successors was one Bernie Stolar, and we well know his later history in the video game industry.

Under Sam Tramiel, Atari's fortunes rapidly diminished to the point where by 1994, they had nothing left but the console division. The Jaguar had enough hype to allow Atari to win a couple lawsuits, including against Sega, although the Jag never earned back its R&D and marketing costs (reportedly they had shortages of Jaguar components in Europe where Atari had a stronger market presence).

So anyway, they pulled the plug on the computer division in 92-93 and had nothing really left except the Jaguar, and were overall in pretty bad shape, although the Jag benefited from some hype and the money generated from suing Sega, but even those earnings started to be eaten into soon enough. Overcome by stress, Sam had a heart attack in 95 and Jack came out of retirement to set the company's finances straight and prepare them for liquidation and the sale to Hasbro.

>>5069572
What am I choosing it for? To keep my little brother from bothering me while I play good games on my Apple ][, C=64 and Vectrex?

>>5069673
why do bongs gush over that glorified calculator so much?

Sadly this was 2 years before I was born. But this gentleman here >>5070059 has a compelling argument in favor of the Coleco.

But to be honest it doesn't feel like I was missing much by never experiencing these consoles.

>>5071572
I don't think anyone at Atari had any clue what had happened because of how Warner handled it. There was no warning, no announcement to the employees, nothing. They came into work one day assuming it was business as usual and not knowing that the Tramiels owned the company now. Warner also more-or-less just dropped the company into Jack's lap with no prior explanations. He had to spend the entire month of July 1984 going over Atari's assets and properties and finding out just what they had (they had to inventory all company property down to the refrigerators in the break room). The first few days until Jack started locking down all the consumer buildings (including warehouses) were madness, people were driving up and loading up U-Hauls and vans full of stuff. Likewise a number of people started wiping out their directories on the mainframe.

Ideally there should have been some form of normal transition - where all assets are mapped out, employees are explained the situation so they have time to start looking for jobs elsewhere, and a clear explanation of how the Inc. assets are being split. As it was because of how Warner did it, Atari Corp and Atari Games were in litigation for years after arguing who owned what patents and such.

Atari was doomed to crash and burn from the moment Nolan Bushnell left and handed the reigns over to Warner. Ray Kassar was from a non-technology background, he'd spent most of his career in the garment industry. He was approaching Atari from the perspective of a retail manufacturer and trying to sell video games the way you'd sell a package of Haynes underwear. Kassar and the boardroom also lived like robber barons with private jets and cushy executive lunchrooms with personal chefs serving them.

All that amazing R&D stuff Atari engineers were up to was passed over because Ray and friends wanted to milk the Atari 2600 cash cow for all it was worth. In interviews, Kassar claims E.T. killed them, which is an easy target since he had nothing to do with that game, but the seeds of destruction had been sown with the lack of vision, the 5200 debacle and loss of engineering talent under his watch.

>>5071910
Kassar came from a very oldskool, Rust Belt, gray flannel suit kind of world and supposedly he was taken aback at the California culture that shaped Atari. The story goes that he ran into Nolan Bushnell wearing sandals and a T-shirt that said "I like to fuck" on it. Atari definitely needed professional management since it was run by a bunch of long-haired kids who were stoned half the time.

>>5069665
Fair point, but assume that you're a little kid and your parents won't buy you a computer.

Personally, I'd go for the Intellivision, but then I'd ask for the System Changer for my next birthday. Assuming of course that I had access to some games of substance in the meantime.

>>5071778
It's what they had and the games were often trivially inexpensive.

and to be fair, some things on it are still cool even in the age of easy emulation of far more advanced hardware.

>>5071917
Yeah...he was very much like Jack Tramiel in that sense where he only thought in terms of next Christmas season's sales without any long term vision, and of course making as much personal profit as he could before the company crashed to the ground. Not everyone is Steve Jobs unfortunately.

Everything I've read about Atari during the glory years of 79-82 suggests that the executives really had no clue. They were flying around in private jets and sitting in a Jacuzzi with strippers going "Hey, look. We're making money!" without any understanding that it wasn't going to stay that way for very long if they continued to run the company on autopilot.

Kassar was also an asshole by all accounts--he wouldn't let them publish tech info for the computer line, he wouldn't credit programmers, he forced 2600 Pac-Man to be shoved into a 4k ROM. Need I go on?

>>5071778
Same reason many Americans gush over the TRS80, same reason we gush over the amiga - many of us learned to code on that those systems and as such they had exciting homebrew scenes.

The programmer of the Atari 8-bit Donkey Kong wrote some fantastic recollections of his time there and just how dumb that management actually was. People came and went like a revolving door. Executives thought a chip was a thing you put on a cookie and a byte was what you did with the cookies that your personal chef made for you in the executive lunch room. Anyway, he was one of those who survived the chopping block after the Tramiel buyout and said that engineers were allowed to go to a warehouse full of executive furniture and take anything they wanted. Clearly they were spending more on furniture for the executive lounge and personal chefs than technical talent.

I would have chosen the Astrocade because I make bad decisions.

>>5070212
man, the days when game dev companies would put out their own controller. Pretty much only fighting game companies with a pedigree do that now.

>>5071317
I'm glad it happened though, disco music is the shit

>>5071386
there's even both 4k and 8k versions of that homebrew

>>5071768
Now I understand why Atari properties got throwback followups in the 90s, Hasbro was just turning a quick buck off of their new acquisition.

>>5071929
The guy would never understand 4K and 8K beyond a chip cost. Though I guess I should respect the departed, apparently he died just last December. Old bastard.

>>5069572
vic-20

>>5071923
>Not everyone is Steve Jobs unfortunately

Do we honestly forget all the retardation Jobs did like his vendetta against the Apple II, his refusal to put fans in computers, his refusal to put a hard disk or a usable amount of RAM in the first Mac? After he got kicked out, the much-maligned John Sculley (the "sugar water" man as Jobs called him) got the Mac going as a viable machine.

>>5072003
John Sculley would be remembered more kindly if he'd stepped down from Apple after 5 years like he was originally supposed to, instead he way overstayed his welcome. He finally ended up driving Apple to near-destruction by overstretching their product line, having way too many overlapping, competing products, and allowing Q/C to reach absolute rock bottom. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

>>5072004
Should add--Sculley has said that Steve Jobs never forgave him for showing him the door in 1985 and held a grudge until he died. Jobs had wanted to be CEO himself, but he was only in his 20s and the board of directors thought he was too young and inexperienced, so they suggested bringing in an outsider.

At that time, the only profitable product line Apple had was the Apple II. The Apple /// and Lisa had bombed and Apple II revenues were needed to keep the company afloat while the Mac was in development. John Sculley and Steve Jobs had spent a couple months getting to know each other and the two became very close, Sculley was like a big brother or uncle to him.

As mentioned above, Jobs was 27 at the time, he was still pretty much a kid and he didn't understand a lot of stuff or why you can't do things a certain way (for instance, not putting a case fan in a computer). In 85, Jobs introduced the Macintosh Office, a complete packaged system including a Mac, laser printer, and Adobe fonts. It bombed.

Jobs blamed it on Sculley. He said they set the price of the Mac too high--it was $2500 when he wanted a price tag around $2000. Sculley replied that they needed to charge the extra money to pay for the obscenely expensive advertising campaign (including the Super Bowl commercial) that accompanied the Mac's rollout. Jobs asked to cut the price down to $2000 and shift most company advertising over to the Mac. Sculley said they would lose money doing that. He also assured Jobs that the Mac's design rather than its price was the real reason it wasn't selling.

>>5072032
Also, Jobs was never actually fired. Sculley told him to step down from the Mac division because he was being "a disruptive influence" but he wasn't canned, instead he merely took a sabbatical for a few months before leaving the company. He did however get sued by Apple for taking several key managers with him, but he made the decision to leave the company himself.

And John Sculley by his own admission was a typical CEO like Ray Kassar in that he was primarily concerned with the business and profits side of things and he didn't really understand products or having a creative vision like Steve Jobs did. He said his appreciation for the creative side of a company didn't develop until later and he feels awful about giving one of Apple's founders the boot.

>>5071706
To Jack Tramiel's credit:

*The ST line was a resounding success for about 5 years
*He bought the Handy from Epyx and gave us the Lynx
*He birthed the first 64-bit game system

But that's just Jack, not his Deputy Droopalong sons. They lived in a dream world thinking they were the CEO of Disney or General Motors when they were just there to help their dad along with his new project like helping your father paint the garage.

Gary Tramiel was the worst. He'd spend all of two hours a day in the office and all the rest at a spa getting expensive makeovers (seriously). Leonard went around saying video games were harmful to children and developers shouldn't waste time with them. The three were always squabbling, morale among employees was low, and Jack wanted to only spend the absolute minimum on R&D and advertising while his sons were snorting cocaine off of mirrors in the boardroom.

Anyone who ever knew or worked for Jack Tramiel will tell you what a douchebag, cheapskate, and all-around gangster he was. At Commodore, there was a workout room for executives to, and Jack had a designated two hours a day where he would be alone in there with any female employee he wanted. Still, his ruthlessness was admirable in a way.

>>5071706
To Jack Tramiel's credit:

*The ST line was a resounding success for about 5 years
*He bought the Handy from Epyx and gave us the Lynx
*He birthed the first 64-bit game system

But that's just Jack, not his Deputy Droopalong sons. They lived in a dream world thinking they were the CEO of Disney or General Motors when they were just there to help their dad along with his new project like helping your father paint the garage.

Gary Tramiel was the worst. He'd spend all of two hours a day in the office and all the rest at a spa getting expensive makeovers (seriously). Leonard went around saying video games were harmful to children and developers shouldn't waste time with them. The three were always squabbling, morale among employees was low, and Jack wanted to only spend the absolute minimum on R&D and advertising while his sons were snorting cocaine off of mirrors in the boardroom.

Anyone who ever knew or worked for Jack Tramiel will tell you what a douchebag, cheapskate, and all-around gangster he was. At Commodore, there was a workout room for executives to, and Jack had a designated two hours a day where he would be alone in there with any female employee he wanted. Still, his ruthlessness was admirable in a way.

So thanks for everything, Jack. Thanks for those 12 glorious years before Atari got bought up by Hasbro and became a meaningless brand name. Thanks for bringing joy to millions of people's childhoods with the computers and video game consoles you made possible, and doing everything you could to promote them. Your leadership was like a beacon sending out a shining light of hope to all those who believed in Atari. You are the Milli Vanilli of the business world, you ass.

>>5071929
Yes, Kassar was a douchebag and the main reason why Activision happened. I won't deny that Nolan Bushnell was a flawed man in a lot of ways and likely couldn't have kept Atari going in the long run, but he did have vision, something Kassar did not.

That doesn't absolve Jack Tramiel of his sins though. Jack always kept changing game plans halfway through the game. The plan from summer 84 onward was to relaunch Atari as a home computer company ala Commodore, and all efforts were thrown behind the ST. Jack knocked the 7800 to the floor and called it garbage when he took over, and wanted nothing to do with video games. Two years later the ST is getting no promotion whatsoever, and Jack is trying to capitalize again on the home game market by re-issuing the 7800 and 2600 two or three years to late. That would be like Sega popping back up saying "oh yeah hey, Dreamcast is back!" It doesn't work like that.

Then they had to redesign the Lynx. Then it was the Panther. Then it was the Jag. Then it was JagVR which he was unwilling to take a risk on (could have saved the Jag). Then they were going to do Jag Duo and Jag 2. Then instead of supporting these systems they refocused back to home computers again. Then they sold out. That’s just fucked up.

Warner were clueless at selling computers. 'Nuff said.

>>5072148
Like someone else said, they never updated the chipset in the A8s, they never updated BASIC, they never updated anything even thought the 68000 workstations they had planned would have made the Amiga look like a VIC-20.

As for the Atari ST, it seems more like the 16-bit sequel to the Commodore PET than anything. It wasn't bad as a cheaper alternative to the Mac, but as a gaming machine that 8Mhz CPU struggles to move the frame buffer graphics around. A jump in RAM prices in the late 80s combined with Amiga price cuts during 1989 helped shift things decisively in the latter's favor. Yes, tons of Amiga games were garbage because they were inept ST ports, but word of mouth and HAM scans of Playboy models got everyone wanting Amigas.

>>5072158
The Amiga 1000 (the first Amiga sold) was a bomb due to its price and because it was an incomplete and buggy machine. After refining it into the cheaper A500, it at last found success.

>>5069572
Whichever provides the best experience playing Mario Bros.

>>5072158
You could argue a lot of things like how Atari missed both the high and low end markets, then got squeezed out of the middle. Warner/Kassar failed to grasp a lot of stuff, like the attempt to market the A8 as an appliance computer, not understanding the European market and failing to properly tap into it, and countless other things.

The 400/800 were expensive to build because the FCC RFI regulations that came into effect in 1980 forced a multiboard computer with a metal shield inside it.

Point 1: The RFI regulations the 400/800's design was supposed to address were very short-lived since Commodore lobbied for and got them reduced, and they were a complete non-factor in Europe (for example, Britain had absolutely no RFI regs).
Point 2: The 400's membrane keys sucked harder than a very large vacuum.

Jaguar killed Atari, just as CD32 killed Commodore. Had either of those companies invested in a usable £400-500 alternative in 1993 to the rubbish £1000 286 PCs being shoved in our faces AND embraced the Internet and CD-ROM drives with open arms it would be Apple that died with their overpriced underpowered wank of the mid 90s

>>5072180
Jag didn't kill Atari and CD32 didn't kill CBM, they both got killed by prolonged internal management problems and related external issues from marketing to a myriad of other things for CBM starting in the mid 80s and for Atari Corp starting about the time Jack stepped down in late 88 (already transitioning out starting in 87).

It was up to poor business decisions on all accounts. The Amiga console idea wasn't bad, but the CD32 was a rather unfortunate implementation (as was the CDTV, a shame CBM hadn't pushed a stripped down cart-based Amiga derivative instead of the C64GS -and not made it Amiga compatible, but used the typical razor and blade licensed console market model -A C64 game system might have worked too, but would have needed to be out by '86 and probably more like a consolidated MAX machine in a console form factor).

You could say that Sam Tramiel killed Atari Corp, but the Jaguar argument falls apart as that too falls back to how Sam managed it and the very situation he contributed to putting Atari in by the time Jaguar was released in the first place. (and odd decisions like canceling the Lynx as well as the computers -the former made even less sense in terms of moving back to video games exclusively)

That's a scapegoat, just like the 5200, ET, or Pac Man are for Atari Inc/the 83 crash, problems with those were symptoms of an underlying management issue and a much bigger issue in general (internal management as well as the horribly distorted/inflated demand figures from their broken distribution network -something not unique to Atari either, but regardless of that Atari held over 70% of the market share so when they started spiraling down, so did the market as a whole)

>>5071683
What a mess. I have a newfound respect for Jack. Amazing he was able to pull it off. Dealing with all that, putting in your own cash, most of it from what you mention. That really is putting your money where you mouth is. A concept few other than business owners can relate to. Even sadder though that Warner was so inept and killed a great thing. Very sad indeed.

Atari should have been a permanent corporate icon like Coca Cola or Disney, instead Warner was too squeamish to put it on the line. Typical of companies that have been taken over. Look what happened at General Motors and others, great when there are assets and making money but run for the hills when the result of being mismanaged arrive.

>>5072164
Well, the only options are the 2600 and the 5200. The 5200 port is more faithful, but you have to put up with its controller.

Not that you'd even be aware of that game since it came out in 1983.

>>5069575
Based

>>5072198
Again, nobody is mentioning the reason why Warner was trying to get Atari off the books. It was solely due to Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover attempts that fueled the need to part with the majority of Atari quickly. Steve Ross didn't want to get rid of the company. That was evident in the biographies written of the man. He was the master of the deal and the architect of Time Warner Inc. which his replacements (Levin, in particular) - per his untimely death - screwed up. After all, Warner's point man on Atari, Manny Gerard, has done very well for himself in the video game industry since then. Basically, Atari in its diminished state was still not a screw-up acquisition on Warner's part like Knickerbocker was.

Also one should never forget that Jack bought Atari for the sole purpose of revenge on Commodore for expelling him. While some guys like Gates and Jobs had a vision and imagined a computer in every home, Jack's "vision" was "The Christmas season is coming, how can we make money off of it?"

>>5071790
In fact the Atari 800XL did pretty well during the 84 Christmas season. It wasn't a massive moneymaker, but it did bring in some badly needed revenue and also stole Commodore sales at a time when Commodore themselves were suffering from several bad mistakes such as the Plus/4 fiasco and the collapse of the low end market they'd caused. And if Atari had doubled back down on consoles, Nintendo would never have taken 80% of the US market. It would have certainly been a smarter move than the niche market the Atari ST achieved.

>>5072217
Wait, how was the Atari ST niche or a mistake? It was a major seller from 85-88 and their main source of revenue.

>>5072218
Let's not kid ourselves here. The NES practically printed money and Nintendo by 1989 were where Atari was at in 82 with executives lighting $100 bills with cigars. The Atari ST never had more than probably 4-5% of the total computer market. It was a non-factor, such that by 89 most production was shifted to the European market and away from the US, and it was a cheap, low profit machine.

Apple's sales were not only way higher, but so were their profit margins. In 1987, Apple reported revenues of $2.6 billion and profits of almost $220 million and that was entirely off of computer sales. Atari's total revenues for all of the Tramiel era (1984-96) reached (IIRC) $500 million at most and a substantial portion of that was from video game sales. The Atari ST was on the market for 7 years, during which time a total of 4 million units were shipped. Apple sold 1 million Macs just in 87 alone, and on significantly higher profit margins.

>>5072235
Really? The ST was the best selling computer in the UK and Europe for many years and made Atari A LOT of money so I would hardly call that insignificant

>>5072207
I forgot if it was 83 or 82, guess it's 2600 then.

>>5072238
Maybe so, and it was popular for MIDI, but that was nowhere near the market for desktop publishing. The money Atari made off of musicians versus what Apple made off of desktop publishing was insignificant.

Personally, I've never liked the Atari ST all that much and find it a very uninteresting machine. It had no real design philosophy, it was just something slapped together from off-the-shelf parts.

>>5072158
>Like someone else said, they never updated the chipset in the A8s, they never updated BASIC, they never updated anything even thought the 68000 workstations they had planned would have made the Amiga look like a VIC-20

According to Landon Dyer (the Donkey Kong programmer), those systems were nowhere close to primetime and of course they would have cost some serious $$$. One of the things would have featured twin 68000s. Apollo workstations had a similar setup and they cost as much as a mid-priced car.

>>5072260
Right, they were pricey and aimed at the professional market which Atari were just then planning to move into. Reportedly one Warner exec killed one of the projects off by saying "You can't play games on that!"

>>5072218
My cousin bought a Mac for college at the campus bookstore. It was a vastly better investment than an Atari ST could have been. He had a friend with an Atari ST and didn't like it at all. The keyboard was painful and it lacked the important software he needed for college.

What exactly was the ST? A home or a small business computer? Advertisement couldn't seem to decide. Certainly the Atari name wasn't going to appeal to corporate America and the awful keyboard also didn't help.

I bought a used ST some years ago with a couple boxes of game disks. Most of the games were completely unplayable. So it wasn't even good at that.

>>5072283
Really. Because let's be honest. What did the Mac do that the ST didn't at half the price? And it also had color.

>>5072291
The ST did not have the software my cousin needed for college and where would he even buy one when all the college bookstores had Macs. Not to mention the awful keyboard.

>>5072295
While I agree that the ST didn't have the best keyboard in the world, it's relatively decent once you get used to it. I mean, come on. The early Macs didn't even have cursor control keys or a numeric keypad.

>>5072302
>>5072283
Ok but he also got a school discount on his Mac. Without that, you were looking at over $2000 for the thing while $1000 bought you an ST with a color monitor, and you could then run Mac software with Spectre GCR. It was also the first sub-$1000 machine to offer 1MB of memory.

>>5072283
>Certainly the Atari name wasn't going to appeal to corporate America
Sure, maybe not in America but in plenty of other countries the ST was a business computer.

>>5072313
Call it what you like, but regardless of whatever Europeans associated the Atari name with, to Americans it was 101% about video games. Apple had real software on the Mac that a college student needed. The Mac made its mark on product design and higher education. One of its biggest assets were square pixels.

I've read several books about Apple's history and I never recall any mention of the Atari ST. For all the marketing that Atari did to compare it to the Mac at a lower price, it seemed not to affect Mac sales.

The ST was colour and the Mac was B&W. The ST had a monochrome monitor with higher res than the Mac. The ST was faster than the Mac. The ST had better sound than the Mac. The ST had MIDI built in. The ST was also about half the price as the Mac. If you used a Mac emulator on the ST, it ran faster than a regular Mac. The STacy was the best "Mac" laptop on the market when it debuted.

The only thing that the Mac excelled at over the ST - besides being far more expensive - was that it had system fonts built into the OS [unlike the ST and the often delayed GDOS]... So what was your point?

IMO MB should have stayed with video games
>first Handheld game system
>first console that could use 3D
>first (and only) vector display game system

What always seemed puzzling to me was Apple's near-complete lack of interest in the low-end market. The Apple II was simple enough that a Spectrum-style version on a single board with rubber keys could have been produced and sold, but for some reason it never occurred to them to do that.

>>5072326
I did not like the early Mac OS. I disliked the postage stamp-sized monochrome screen. I disliked the castrated keyboard and one-button mouse. I disliked the floppy with no eject button. I disliked the price. It was awful at gaming. Would I buy one? No. The ST bested it in almost every category, at a fraction of the price. And here's the difference between you and I: Do I think the original Mac was a "horrible" computer? Fuck no. It was pretty good at what it was used for, and I did use it for that, at school. The only problem is that it wasn't my choice, but that didn't make it horrible. Just because some faggot doesn't like something, doesn't make it horrible. What kind of self-centered swagger is that, I ask you?

>>5072235
What? 1987/88 was more or less the peak of the ST, and any apparent decline in the US was probably more due to the surge in European demand taking precedence. And they were moving millions a year.

>>5073148
>What? 1987/88 was more or less the peak of the ST
That is true, and even at their peak they were a niche player selling less than a million units a year. The C64 moved 3-4 million units in just 1983 alone. The Tramiels didn't spend any significant amount of money on the ST because they figured they'd never get back their investment. This was annoying to ST users, but made sense in retrospect. The ST wasn't an expandable machine, rushed to market, and the OS and hardware were not modular the way the Mac was. You couldn't upgrade or change anything much without breaking compatibility. It would be very costly to upgrade the ST and ultimately pointless when PC clones were getting steadily cheaper.
>And they were moving millions a year
No they weren't. The total number of STs sold for all 7 years on the market was 4 million (compared against that many C64s in a single year) and the most they ever sold in a single year was probably about 500,000 units. Also the 520ST probably accounted for 60-70% of that.

As for the Mac, yes, it was expensive but also way more profitable. What it did have and the ST didn't was productivity software made by A-list developers, a way better OS, way better hardware, better retail support, and infinitely better tech support from the manufacturer. The screen was small, but so was the ST's for that matter--the monitor was 12" but you had huge black borders around the desktop (even if the screen resolution was higher). The ST did have color and the Mac didn't but at a lower resolution and requiring a separate monitor.

The Mac Plus also showed up a couple months after the ST's debut and it had an SCSI hard disk and doubled sided floppies. The build quality was also way better and the keyboard, although still lacking cursor keys and a numeric keypad, was much better quality as well than the ST's.

The ST smacked of cheap and the Atari badge didn't help its marketability. It was seen more as a roided out TRS-80 CoCo than a poor man's Mac. The early STs felt cheap and by the time the improved Mega came out in 87, it was hopelessly behind Apple in almost every measurable category. By that time, Apple also had out the Mac SE which could have an internal hard disk and finally got a numeric keypad. PCs were improving as well, and Apple also had the impressive (but very costly) Mac II. Plus the Amiga 500 came out and offered a superior product in the low end market.

So what Jack Tramiel, the god of cheap, discovered was the unfortunate reality that customers were willing to pay more for a Mac in exchange for getting more with it. Also he found to his dismay that people weren't so interested in a computer that felt like a bigger CoCo rather than a Mac at half the Mac's price. If you just wanted some basic home computer to play Might & Magic or Hardball on, you could get a C64 at Kay-Bee Toys, schools kept buying Apple IIs, the corporate world bought PCs, universities and people in creative fields bought Macs. Where did that leave the Atari ST? With nothing much but the teensy MIDI musician market.

As for Europe, the truth is, even over there PC clones were taking over the productivity/office market in the late 80s. The ST did do way better in Europe than the US, especially in Germany, but it was really only a going concern for three years (86-88) after which Commodore cut Amiga 500 prices and systematically blew them out of the low end market. They never expanded much beyond the original 1985-vintage 520ST, because it wasn't a system that lent itself to being upgraded easily, and sales were never big enough to justify the investment in it.

>>5069572
Is that even a question? Coleco. It made the intellivision and 2600 look outdated, had an adapter to play 2600 games, and the 5200 was shit with its awful non centering control stick. Also
>muh crash
How many times do we have to tell you niggers the "crash" was basically a recession confined to America?

>>5073234
>As for Europe, the truth is, even over there PC clones were taking over the productivity/office market in the late 80s
Rubbish. PC clones weren't really a thing in Europe until the 90s and what do you mean there was no third party support. You could find infinitely more Amiga and ST software here than you could Mac stuff. Mac owners were sort of like Acorn Archimedes owners, sitting in a corner complaining that they had no software.

>>5073241
Not at all. Microsoft Excel was on the Mac before it was on the PC. At least as far as the US market was concerned, the Mac was very well supported. The ST wasn't.

>>5073245
I'm saying it's total rubbish to claim the ST was lacking in software and it was the Mac owners who complained they didn't have anything. In Europe, this was very much the case where Amiga and ST software was vastly more abundant than Mac stuff.

>>5073249
Whatever the situation in Europe might have been, from the standpoint of things in the US, the ST was less than nothing unless you were a MIDI musician (a very niche market). Try going into a print shop in 1988 with an ST floppy and see what kind of reaction you got.

>>5073245
What does Excel coming out first on the Mac prove? It doesn't really prove anything does it, as you know.

>>5073259
It proves that the Mac got proper support with A-list software because people took them seriously and they didn't take the ST seriously. I agree there was a point in time where Apple had trouble with developers creating software for the Mac, but by the time that happened the ST was long gone in the US.

>>5073253
>Try going into a print shop in 1988 with an ST floppy and see what kind of reaction you got

Ah yes, it's the usual "Because I didn't see it happen, it didn't happen" fallacy. A friend of mine did work for a printing company back then and used, guess what, an Atari ST with a hard disk, laser printer, and Calamus DTP to perform design work. The local Atari ST dealership sold a shitton of the things for business use.

>>5073269
Again, you do not seem to get it into your skull that the US =/= Europe. Over here, the ST was nearly irrelevant and you'd struggle to even find a store that sold the things. After Atari shifted most emphasis to Europe in 89, it got even harder.

>>5073271
I'm saying the problem is when people make very generalised statements like how the ST was rubbish, irrelevant, seen as a toy and just because you personally didn't know anyone who did work on the things doesn't mean many, many other people did. The ST is far from my favourite retro computer and I don't believe I would have bought one at the time, but I'm not going to claim it was irrelevant shite.

Perhaps you may come to realise that there is a whole great big world out there beyond America. You shouldn't judge the success of a product globally based on the experience of your one particular market.

While the Mac line did overtake the ST later on, when the ST first came out in 85, there was no contest as to what was the superior machine and it wasn't the Mac's incomplete keyboard, tiny screen with no colour graphics, much higher price tag, and lower resolution display.

>>5073282
A lot of people thought the ST was better than the Mac. A lot of people thought the Mac was better than the ST. However, one of the two companies is still with us today and it isn't Atari. Atari came to an end in the mid-90s. In fact some would say Atari came to an end on July 4, 1984.

You mean to say the ST didn't have _any_ productivity software? Not even in the US? I'm sure there's some scanned Atari magazines online from the late 80s you can look at and see what was available in terms of ST software in the US market.

>>5069572
Intellivision would be my choice

>>5073282
that's why the desktop publishing industry still relies on the DPI standard developed directly from the Mac's 'low-resolution, non-color' display right?

I think trying to paint them one way or the other doesn't show the entire picture. They were late enough in Atari's life that they couldn't undo a lot of damage that had already been done. Trying to follow the same sales model as the C64 didn't help, although to be fair post-Tramiel Commodore did the same thing.

The Mac was mainstream in the US and the ST wasn't, there's no questioning that. The ST didn't make much impact on this side of the Atlantic, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily an inferior machine hardware-wise. As previously covered, the ST had:

>640x400 graphics when the Mac's resolution was 512x384
>color graphics
>better sound than the Mac
>a full keyboard with cursor keys and a numeric keypad
>sold for half the price
>a faster CPU than the Mac
>two button mice
>could run Mac software with an emulator
>better designed OS

>>5073241
>PC clones weren't really a thing in Europe until the 90s
Which isn't true either. PC clones were getting gradually more and more common in Europe during the late 80s and were widely used in the business world and at universities (along with a much smaller number of Macs). They were not affordable at the consumer level until the 90s however. The Atari ST had all of three years when it was really hot before fading.
>You could find infinitely more Amiga and ST software here than you could Mac stuff. Mac owners were sort of like Acorn Archimedes owners, sitting in a corner complaining that they had no software
You mean to tell me that Microsoft Word, Excel, Aldus PageMaker, and Adobe Print Shop didn't exist? Most of that stuff wasn't even available on the ST (it did get a watered down Word under the name "Microsoft Write", which was never updated, and a port of WordPerfect). To cap it off, the first version of PhotoShop in 1990 cemented the Mac's role as a multimedia machine.

The nearest the ST ever got to a killer app was Dungeon Master, which wasn't quite the same thing as PhotoShop.

>>5069583
>>5069594

This. 2600 all the way bro, there's a reason it outdid all the others pictured up until the NES/FamiCom.

>>5073873
It was cheaper and had brand recognition. It was inferior to all the others

Suffice to say the ST wasn't strong in the software department. No Excel, no PageMaker, no Print Shop, no PhotoShop, only a crappy "port" of Word, one version of WordPerfect.

How can you have a serious productivity machine with nothing but WordPerfect? It worked for a little while, but in time the lack of A-list productivity software on the ST was a liability. Like anyone was going to get away with putting 1st Word on their resume.

The ST was a passable gaming machine at least until the Amiga's price came down.

>>5073278
>I'm saying the problem is when people make very generalised statements like how the ST was rubbish, irrelevant, seen as a toy and just because you personally didn't know anyone who did work on the things doesn't mean many, many other people did. The ST is far from my favourite retro computer and I don't believe I would have bought one at the time, but I'm not going to claim it was irrelevant shite.
Didn't you just get done saying a few posts ago that the Mac had no software, which is completely ludicrous?

Atari magazines regularly complained about the poor software library on the ST compared against the Mac and it was a criticism often brought up in general interest computer magazines like InfoWorld. There was no real word processor on the ST for its first two years, and the version of WordPerfect it got was not especially great, it got mixed reviews.

The ST had some success in Europe as a productivity machine for a few years, it was after all more capable than an 8-bit machine, but as already mentioned, PC clones were taking over in the European market for business activities. I think the STs could have been more successful as business machines, if Atari had continued seriously development on GEM/TOS and on the hardware, but clearly that never happened and Atari never moved enough units into that community to spark serious developer interest.

>>5073857
All the while, the Mac did have several important advantages, including superior software, a better, more modular OS that was easier to modify and update, decent tech support from the manufacturer, better build quality, and was made by a company that people took more seriously.

It seems rather odd to get this emotional and defensive about the ST a good quarter century after it was discontinued. Unless someone hurt your feelings because you played Dungeon Master on the thing when you were 10 years old.

>>5073857
>but that doesn't mean it was necessarily an inferior machine hardware-wise
Was it a better machine than the Mac in terms of hardware though? The ST looked clumsy. It looked like a bigger TRS-80 CoCo, not a professional computer for the office environment. You had a profusion of cables coming out of three sides in a huge mess. That wasn't the case on the Mac where all the ports except the keyboard were in the back out of sight (on the early models, on the SE they moved the keyboard connector to the back). It looked much cleaner. This was ok on 8-bit home computers, it wasn't ok on a professional product.

The video setup was also not very well thought out. You could either boot up in low-res 200 line color modes or hi-res 400 line monochrome mode, but two different monitors were required and you couldn't switch between low and hi-res modes on the fly, you had to power the computer off, unplug and switch the monitor cables, and power it back on. If you were running the 200 line modes, the GEM desktop looked like shit--icons looked very cheesy and low-resolution and the lime green desktop was hideous.

So what did people see? They saw a computer that resembled a TRS-80 CoCo on steroids, not a cheaper Mac, right down to booting up in the same lovely shade of Nickelodeon Gak green. Neckbeards might like the ST, but normalfags who just wanted to do accounting work on a spreadsheet didn't. They sold well enough for a few years and then sales dwindled.

As for the suggestion Atari all in one design was wrong, you do know Atari did release the Mega, Mega STE, and TT030 line of computers which featured a desktop case, detachable keyboard, and could support a monitor on top.

>>5073935
It did and it was called the Mega ST, sadly it offered precious little over the standard 520ST, just more RAM and a better form factor, wasn't widely distributed, and didn't replace its ugly CoCo-esque predecessors.

>>5073928
I wasn't aware that form factor matter as much as what was under the hood and the facts stand that until the SE/Mac II, the ST was easily the better machine.

>eww yuck, I hate that green GEM desktop so much

Poor Mac users didn't even have colour at all unless they paid 7000 USD for a Mac II. Besides, it was very very easy to go to the desktop settings on GEM and change the background colour to something more eye-pleasing. Just like how on the TRS-80 CoCo, you could type a quick BASIC command to get a background colour other than lime green.

Did I also mention the Mac only had one button on its mouse? From my POV, the early Macs seemed far more toy-like than anything. Little beige boxes with a built in monitor and a dinky keyboard with no numeric keypad or cursor keys. The truth is that Apple subsided entirely on Apple II profits for years until the Mac grew up and became a serious machine.

>>5073940
I don't call it a failure but at the price it came out as, they should offered more. And for your money, you could just buy a Spectre GCR and run all the Mac software you wanted on the ST at half the price.

If you ask me, I think GEM looked better than the Amiga OS. The green color scheme wasn't very nice (although as other people have pointed out, it could be quickly changed in the desktop settings menu) but the Amiga had many deficiencies as well, including loads of viruses (were there any ST viruses ever?), multitasking on a system with less RAM than the ST and was less stable, and the ever-present negative of having Commodore's name on the case.

I also think GEM didn't look as cheap and cartoony as Workbench.

>>5073879
If you want, I can refer you to some scanned UK computer magazines from the late 80s and show you the pages and pages of Amiga and Atari ST software against the much smaller PC compatible section (although it did get steadily bigger with each year) and then the one page of Mac software.

Let's go down the list here, shall we?

1. Print shops. I'm not kidding when I said that you'd struggle to find a print shop in the US that wouldn't give you a deer in the headlights look if you handed them an Atari ST floppy. Perhaps some existed that I'm not aware of.
2. Form factor. The ST's form factor was totally wrong for the business market. It should have had a pizza box configuration with a separate keyboard and all ports in the back. Name a single computer with the ST's form factor that was ever taken seriously in the corporate world. I can't.
3. GEM. Let's be fucking honest here. GUIs need high resolution to work. 640x200 is not enough--menus take like a quarter of the screen. The trash can is huge and green.
4. Color. Keep in mind we're talking the 80s here. This was a time when color was not a priority for business software, high resolution and sharp text was. The ST's monochrome mode was only a little better than the Macs and it required a bulky monitor.
5. Software. Again, the ST was pitifully short of decent software from major devs except WordPerfect, compared by one magazine to "driving a Ferrari to the corner grocery store."

The business world cares about solutions more than price and specs. And Atari was not a name that carried a lot of weight in corporate America. Would you go to your company's IT department and suggest they buy a fleet of computers for the office made by the same company that made the boss's kid's game console and that you were going to run 1st Word on all of them?

>>5073979
>>5073960
Alright, fine. I'll take your argument that the ST was hot shit in Europe. Yet at the end of the day, it and Atari died a merciful death there same as they did here. So what went wrong?

>>5074001
Why did the ST decline here? Well, that's a pretty complicated question to answer. I think the big blow was in 89 when Commodore reduced the price of the Amiga 500. They offered the Ocean Batman game as a pack-in promotional thing for the movie and that caused Amiga's UK sales to skyrocket. Prior to that time, the Amiga was expensive and relatively niche. I will also agree that the green GEM desktop wasn't a very good decision even if it was changed in a few mouse clicks.

The drop in Amiga prices I think was quite hard on ST sales and then Sam Tramiel decided to give up on computers altogether to conserve resources for the Jaguar.

>>5073870
That as well. The Mac's software library was a major factor and mostly because Microsoft hitched their star to the Mac wagon early on. I'm not kidding. Bill Gates instantly fell in love with the Mac when he first saw it at the 83 CES and Microsoft actively and enthusiastically supported the thing from day one. Multiplan was the first spreadsheet to be available for the Mac and then Excel. Gates pressured Apple to adequately document the Mac and provide proper tech support and dev tools for third parties to release software, and he even wrote them a business plan for how to do it. At one point, Microsoft were making something like 60% of their revenues from Mac software.

There were other times like during the Windows 3.x era when Microsoft and Apple's relationship was more distant. During that time, Microsoft tended to release half-assed, buggy Mac software especially Word 6.0, and Gates would later say he regretted this happening. Eventually during the period surrounding Steve Jobs's return, Microsoft rescued Apple from collapse and gave them the promise that they would continue to develop Office for the Mac.

>>5073979
>>5073278
>>5073269
You keep saying this, but all the statistical and other evidence says otherwise. You can look at market share numbers, Atari's financial records during the late 80s and early 90s, units sold numbers for the major platforms of the time, and more. I have yet to see any credible evidence that PC clones were irrelevant in Europe until, like, Windows 95 or something.

From looking at UK computer mags of the 87 to 91 period and reading Atari's annual financial and sales reports, the evidence suggests otherwise. PC clones were well represented in magazines and Atari's reports didn't suggest at all that they ruled Europe unchallenged for 7 straight years (how could they when the ST sold a total of 4 million units for all 7 of those years?) By 1992, the Amiga and ST were finished and PCs were everywhere.

I will grant you that the PC didn't dominate the home and low end market in Europe until after 1990, but then again that market still seemed to be dominated by the 8-bitters like the C64 and Spectrum. There were roughly three years when the ST and Amiga were really hot (for the ST, this was 86-88 and the Amiga 88-90) before they both faded to black.

>>5074039
And I quote.

>In the spring of 1990, Atari introduced its Portfolio palmtop personal computer. Early the following year, the company came out with a revamped, color Lynx product, and several months later it introduced new notebook computers. Despite these advances, however, Atari was in trouble. Sales of its home computers in Europe began to flag as the company faced increased competition, and in 1991 foreign sales collapsed. In the video games field, Atari's efforts to challenge Nintendo through legal means had been rebuffed, and the company was unable to regain significant market share from its Japanese competitors. By the first quarter of 1992, losses over a three-month period had reached $14 million.

>As Atari began to ship its Falcon030 system to stores in small numbers in early 1993, the company's fate was unclear. Decidedly, it was experiencing another severe downturn, which by the summer had snowballed into what the San Jose Mercury News called a full-fledged financial meltdown: between the second quarters of 1992 and 1993 Atari's sales plummeted 76% to only $5.7 million.

>>5074042
Atari hit its post-Warner peak in 87, on the back of the 520 and 1040STs and, more importantly I think, residual sales of the 2600, 7800 and 8-bit computer lines and accompanying software and peripherals, which by this point had to cost them pennies to manufacture. Which is why I've thought for some years now that Atari would have been far better off ignoring the 16-bit computer market entirely and focusing their efforts on video games. Nintendo did just that, and it made them a colossus.

>>5074039
I don't know the exact point where the PC really took off in Europe, but all the anecdotal evidence I have suggests that Spectrums, C64s, Amigas, STs, etc pretty much ruled up until 1990 or so. At some point everyone switched to PCs, but I can't say definitively when that was. I hear tell that Amiga 1200 orders were backlogged when Commodore went bankrupt and those orders went unfilled. It seems to me that the Amiga was a going concern up to at least 92-93.

This is an easy choice.

>>5073960
In the end, what really mattered above all else was software and presentation, neither of which the ST had. So the CPU was a few ticks faster than the Mac's. That didn't mean much without the software to run on it.

As for presentation, the first thing people saw on the ST was the low-resolution GEM desktop and its Nickelodeon Gak color scheme. Apple understood presentation. They were geniuses at it going all the way back to when Steve Jobs insisted on a molded plastic case for the Apple II instead of a generic wood or metal box. Atari and Commodore didn't understand this crucial point.

The Amiga was little better. Workbench looked terrible. All blue and orange with an awful font.

And yes, in the early years of the Mac, Apple still relied on the Apple II for profits but towards the end of the 80s, the Mac became self-supporting while the ST never did.

More CPU cycles? The Mac held a huge advantage over the PC for years in that regard - didn't make any difference. The PC still walked off with 90% of the market.

Form factor? The ST's sucked. Amiga, Mac, PCs...they all left Atari in the dust.

Interfaces? I'd say the STs held a slight advantage here in number, although the Mac's standard SCSI interface was likely a lot more useful for most folks.

Keyboard? The Macs had a great keyboard. The ST? Not so much.

Display? Well, the Macs had square pixels. The STs sported a slightly higher resolution. The STs were obviously better for games with their color monitor. For professional work in monochrome? I'd say there's little difference.

>>5074062
>Interfaces? I'd say the STs held a slight advantage here in number, although the Mac's standard SCSI interface was likely a lot more useful for most folks.
How much did the Mac Plus cost? Also it had pitifully slow RS-422.
>Keyboard? The Macs had a great keyboard. The ST? Not so much.
Yes, I love the lack of cursor or function keys or a numeric keypad.
>Display? Well, the Macs had square pixels. The STs sported a slightly higher resolution. The STs were obviously better for games with their color monitor. For professional work in monochrome? I'd say there's little difference.
I'm sorry, but no one would claim a 22 cm monitor at 512x384 was better than the ST's hi-res mode.

>>5070056
Tramiel threw the then-stalled 7800 onto the market only when the NES proved to be a big hit and commissioned the XEGS to get a few extra miles out of the aging 8-bit computer line.

>>5073998
>>5073928
Rubbish. If anything, the ST520's form factor was a plus. Instead of boring beige boxes, you get a pleasant futuristic looking case. It's different. That is one thing that attracts people to anything.

I'm not saying the look of the case is the only selling point, but it certainly provides a good first impression. The cables argument is rubbish. I highly doubt that people cared about all the extra cables since they can easily be hidden. It's not hard to figure out.

The reasons why the ST died are already explained - marketing, not the system form factor.

>>5070554
I heard that Jobs personally discouraged game development for the iMac because he was deathly afraid of people seeing them as toys since the cases were so colorful and cheerful.

Complaining about the Amiga or ST's keyboard is like complaining if the Pope has erectile dysfunction. He's not exactly going to use it anyway, so what's the problem?

Since based on my experience, most people with Spectrums, C64s, Amigas, STs, and whatnot couldn't care less about the keyboard since the things were seen as a game console that just happened to have a keyboard attached.

>>5073173
>No they weren't. The total number of STs sold for all 7 years on the market was 4 million (compared against that many C64s in a single year) and the most they ever sold in a single year was probably about 500,000 units. Also the 520ST probably accounted for 60-70% of that.
Rubbish. I believe the peak of ST sales in the US was about 700,000 in one year and for Europe, there were a couple million sold every year for several years.

>>5073870
>PC clones were getting gradually more and more common in Europe during the late 80s and were widely used in the business world and at universities (along with a much smaller number of Macs)
Nonsense. The European market was nothing like that and PCs were niche pre-90s. Amstrad pushed them in the late 80s, but the spike in DRAM prices at that time killed those.

Before Commodore bought Amiga, they were working on their own 16-bit computer, the 900. So instead of the ST vs. Amiga "computer war", by 1986 we probably would have had: Atari and Amiga's versions of the Lorraine, the 900 and a non-Atari version of the ST by TTL.

>>5074090
>Before Commodore bought Amiga, they were working on their own 16-bit computer, the 900
I just looked that up. Ugh, who on Earth thought a Z8000-based machine was a good idea?

Nothing at all like the ST as far as I can tell. The 900 sounds like it would have been an even worse idea than the Plus/4.

Remembah goyim, computers are for de masses, not de classes!

>>5071910
>Ray Kassar was from a non-technology background, he'd spent most of his career in the garment industry. He was approaching Atari from the perspective of a retail manufacturer and trying to sell video games the way you'd sell a package of Haynes underwear.

Most of this is true, but I don't recall that Kassar actually had experience in the consumer side of the garment industry and his experience was more with managing textile mills rather than marketing finished products like a shirt or a pair of socks, but I could be wrong.

To be fair, the video game industry was at that time less than 10 years old and effectively Wild West territory, still, it might have been smarter to bring in someone with experience in consumer entertainment products, possibly even from Warner's record division.

James Morgan wasn't from a tech background either, but he did at least have experience with handling consumer products.

>>5074108
Kassar wasn't a complete fuck-up. He did have the good sense to license Space Invaders which sent Atari 2600 sales through the roof and also to push the A8 computer line, even if he then committed various retardations like withholding tech info on them.

>>5070003
The 2600's release date was September 11, 1977. Atari expected it to last about three years and shortly after it came out, work began on a chipset for a successor system, which ultimately came to be the computer line.

Suffice to say that by the time the crash happened in 83, the 2600 was getting very outdated indeed. It was pretty fucking ridiculous for Warner to think they could pad their Cayman Islands bank accounts off of 2600 sales forever.

The 5200 doesn't count for a variety of reasons, namely because it was just a modified A8 computer and offered nothing new hardware-wise.

How about a goddamn Vectrex?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jagJAWKLV0I

I'd say

1. atari 2600 since it would be supported with good games into the 80s such as solaris and hero

2. intellivision had a good library but wasn't supported long

3. 5200 had a small library, confused which of the good ones were on the 8 bit computer

4. coleco was dropped pretty soon, the 1 color sprites and pallet look crap

>>5069572
>It's Christmas of 1982. You may choose only one.
I love you guys (no homo). I was over at my mothers for dinner with the family the other night, and I decided to go get my Atarii out of the attic. ONLY because of this thread.

Pic related.

I put it back in the attic lol. I can't remember how to hook it up to the TV, and it only has one speaker jack coming out the back of it. I didn't plug it in, and assume it still works. It hasn't been used since 85'.

>>5074281
>I can't remember how to hook it up to the TV
Are you on drugs, dude? Is it that hard to figure out that, oh I dunno, one hooks the RF switchbox to the coax on the back of the TV? Derpity derp.

>>5069572

Coleco no question. Best arcade ports by far, and it has an addon that can play 2600 carts anyway.

I’d ask for a bike because I wasn’t a little dweeb.

>>5074289
You're replying to a guy who referred to the RF out as a speaker jack. I'm not sure how much one can expect from him.

>>5074078
there are videos from the 80s where people say they don't want to switch from the ibm pc to the mac because they think it looks like a toy. Seems weird to me, the original mac looks the opposite of what a toy would look like.

>>5069572
Coleco. With the coleco you can play Atari 2600 games.

>>5069572
A PC....

>>5074853
Why? It had just 4 colors, terrible resolution and no good games.

>>5074853
In 1982 you'd have to be retarded to buy a PC rather than a C64 as a home user.

>>5074872
And cost a lot more too

>>5072129
>JagVR
>(could have saved the Jag)

Uh, what? By 1995 nobody was giving a shit about the Jaguar, and the VR fad was on its last legs, releasing that headseat would have done absolutely nothing to help.

>>5074853
8801?

>>5075047
Would also be a poor choice. They had very limited gaming capabilities until the mkII SR, released in 1985.

>>5069572
Frankly would rather have legos or nerf or a toy. I never liked that generation

>>5074280

fwiw 70% of all 2600 games were released in 82 and 83, so you wouldn't have to wait long for new ones.

>>5075067
There's enough decent V1 content. Biggest loss is sound.

>>5074872
What PC do you mean? An Apple II, an Atari, a C64? That's pretty vague.

>>5075076
And 70% of that 70% was unplayable shovelware.

>>5070163
I've really been wanting a Vectrex but I don't think I'm handy enough to keep it in working order

>>5075139
The thing that was called "PC" in 1982, you spergy pedant

>>5075260
If the CRT is bad, it would be real hard to find a replacement tube too.

>>5075696
I think it's a pretty standard 12" monochrome tube placed on its side. AFAIK vector monitors are a function of the deflection yoke rather than the tube itself. So most likely, you'd just need to swap the yokes and you're good to go.

>>5075017
I'm pretty sure 94 was the peak of the Jaguar's sales/relevance.

>>5071778

unlike retro consoles, the 8-bit computers receive hundreds of homebrew titles a year, some being crazy impressive (R-Type 128k on Amstrad, Mighty Final Fight on Speccy)

The msx seems to get the best original games though, probably since the hardware is best

>>5075832
They're better documented and already have an established tradition of hacking/homebrew coding. The Atari 2600 is really the only console with a significant homebrew scene.

>>5075832
It's too bad the Apple II doesn't have much of a homebrew scene considering stuff like the Spectrum is about on the same level of crudity as far gaming abilities.

>>5075832
It's too bad the Apple II doesn't have much of a homebrew scene considering stuff like the Spectrum is about on the same level of crudity as far as gaming abilities.

>>5069575

Only good choice.

>>5069575
Or just use an MSX which is the same hardware and has a keyboard.

>>5075963
Unfortunately not a very viable option for Americans. The only US-model MSX ever sold was part of a Yamaha keyboard.

>>5075963
And was released in 1983.

>>5069915
Looks like a mix of Playstation Move and... futuristic kitchen appliance from 1970s.
I had Colecovision too and I fucking loved it. Was 5 years old initially maybe too young to understand but I think the low-fi graphics were good for imagination back then. It was a beast console at the time.

>>5070212
I had a few of that stick. They were awesome but had a tendency for the stick to get caught between the microswitches when you rolled from one direction through the diagonal.

At least they didn't break in 5 mins like the quickshot 2.

Colecovision

Cause I can play atari 2600 on it too!

>>5070282
*INTV

>>5070056
Warner-era Atari hired GCC to develop the 7800, but didn't pay them for the console and software righte before selling themselves off. Then Tramiel Tech and Warner debated for a couple of years about who has to pay them.

Nintendo Entertainment System, coming up!!!

>>5079795
The same guys that made the Vecrtex?

>>5079817
The same guys that made Ms. Pac Man, and the first Hard Disk add-on for the Macintosh 512k.

>>5069915
I had those, the trackball, and the steering wheel. Also, Intellivision.

Magnavox Odyssey 2, it has K.C. Munchkin.

>>5079815
Thank you
Games weren't good until the NES

>>5075139
An IBM PC, the ones you just listed are mircocomputers.

>>5080719
Until the IBM PC came along, it was a generic term for any computer intended for use by individuals, as opposed to mainframes and time-share computers.

>>5074305
Macs were always meant to be like appliances you would find in a kitchen, something a technophobic dad could figure out in less than a day. I could definitely see somebody used to the brutalist aesthetic of IBM compatibles looking at a Mac and seeing one of those "learning computers" meant for toddlers.

>>5080424
*SNES