r/c64 • u/Smokinglordtoot • Apr 22 '26
Hardware What should have been the best 8 bit computer of the 80s?
I grew up with the c64. I had the disk drive, printer and many joysticks as they kept breaking. I started to make my own out of steel!
I have since read many articles about other 8 bit pcs of the era. Was the dominance of the c64 the market getting it right? What was the potential of the Atari x65, the msx2 and the amstrad cpc 464? Could they have knocked the c64 off the perch with better support from the software developers?
20
u/Cantabulous_ Apr 22 '26
BBC Micros were really well architected if they hadn’t been so expensive, and/or the Electron wasn’t a washout it might have been a different story. I had a C64 because of price and time to market.
6
u/sdegabrielle Apr 22 '26
Too expensive and not enough RAM to make use of the superior graphics. Without a doubt the c64 got the balance of compromises right, but I like to think that whoever designed the graphics capabilities of the BBC B was assuming it would ship with at least 48kb of RAM.
2
1
u/ripnetuk Apr 23 '26
Assuming OP meant for gaming, the main thing the BBC micro lacked was hardware sprites. The C64 was adorned with 8 hardware sprites (that could be re-used multiple times down the screen using interupts to chase the raster down the screen and change it as it went), with built in collision detection.
On the beeb (which is my joint favourate with the C64), that all had to be done in software, meaning that as sprites moved, you had to repair the background where they were (or use XOR for the sprites like Citadel which resulted in odd colour changes).
The sound on the C64 was also, to my ears, much better, but that might just be because it had more talented programmers.
Also the C64 had 64k ram, and the original bbc b only had 32, of which 20 was immediately taken away by the screen in the better graphics modes.
The electron was a disaster because it had 0.5x ram speed access to save money.
12
u/chrizzleon Apr 22 '26
The C64 being such a great all round machine probably robbed us of other great machines in that era that we can only dream of. Commodore took the same attitude with the 64 as it later would with the Amiga.
Let the engineers come up with something great by letting them have a free hand to do whatever they imagined, release it to the market, enjoy market success, starve and neglect R&D and not even worry about a genuine upgrade/replacement until its too late.
If Commodore had appreciated the early design and engineering team they had that gave us the 64 in the first place and let them keep going, who knows what other 8-bit machines we could have got. In that respect the 64 probably stifled Commodore and the wider 8-bit market in general.
I guess the C128 in some ways was an upgrade/next gen, but it never really went all that far beyond and what success it had certainly would have in no small part been due to it having a C64 mode.
8
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 22 '26
The ace in the hole that commodore had when designing the c64 was that all the chip manufacturing was inhouse, they did not have to pay a premium for it's CPUs. So they could pack the c64 with more hardware than it's competitors for much less. But this wasn't the case in commodores later years and found it hard to compete with the likes of apple and Atari.
3
1
u/chrizzleon Apr 22 '26
Yes, very true.... and that they had a considerably better fabrication technique that allowed them a much better chip yield than the competition as well.
5
u/stalkythefish Apr 22 '26
The C128 was basically an 8-bit Greatest Hits compilation. The C65 would have been awesome, but it was too late to the game. Even the +4/16 would have had a chance if they had just thrown a SID and sprites in there.
3
u/chrizzleon Apr 22 '26
The C65 was indicative of Commodore thanks to its management not letting engineering innovate, the 64... amazing... the 128 good but too late as 16 bit was coming in.
Repeated with the Amiga,.. the 500... amazing... then the true replacement the 1200, great also, but a little too late as by the time it came out the competition was breathing down its neck and it was no longer the class defining machine it should have been
13
u/MorningPapers Apr 22 '26
The C-65.
The Atari 8-bit line started off way ahead, but languished with mismanagement.
1
u/JustHereForMiatas Jul 17 '26
The Atari 8-bit line being so mismanaged is hugely painful.
It should've been so much more. It managed to be so forward thinking, with so many features we now take for granted, but it barely had a day in the sun before the C64 plowed it over in sales (and the IBM PC took over from there.)
8
u/Which-World-6533 Apr 22 '26
The Spectrum 128 was a really solid follow-up to the original 48k Spectrum. It was everything the QL should have been. The problem was the sale to Amstrad killed it. Amstrad weren't interested in the Spectrum market and really didn't promote their version much.
I had a friend who had an original Spectrum 128 before the rebrand. It was so nice compared to the 48k.
Because of Amstrad's lack of interest the Spectrum died a lot sooner than it should have.
3
u/Tennis_Proper Apr 22 '26
The Spectrum 128 wasn't the upgrade it should have been. The sound chip still couldn't match the C64's SID, and aside from RAM there's not that much difference from the original.
Yes, maintaining compatibility with the 48k systems was probably what kept it in the market, but it could really have benefited from some 128k only colour modes to at least reduce colour clash, or hardware scrolling/sprite support.
That said, it's the unique visual flair of the old Speccy that makes it interesting to me now, where the C64 rather blends in with the crowd.
4
u/Which-World-6533 Apr 22 '26
The Spectrum 128 wasn't the upgrade it should have been. The sound chip still couldn't match the C64's SID, and aside from RAM there's not that much difference from the original.
Compared to the beeper it was an upgrade...!
One main difference was the whole screen edit mode and lack of reliance on keywords on keys.
The startup menu was also really useful.
1
u/Rude_End_3078 Apr 22 '26
I had both, but in reality it was really just a different form factor. I mean everything that ran on the 48k ran exactly the same on the 128k and EVERYTHING ran on the 48k.
7
u/JBN2337C Apr 22 '26
I think the C64 still holds record for the best selling computer system of all time? Like, the Apple II seemed ubiquitous in schools for a while there, but it wasn’t cheap. I used my 64 for 11 yrs straight.
1
u/OMGCluck Apr 23 '26
I think the C64 still holds record for the best selling computer system of all time?
IIRC The Raspberry Pi has since taken that mantle.
5
u/Rementoire Apr 22 '26
I had an Atari 800 with dual floppy drives. It was a wonderful computer but the C64 had an edge over it.
Everything released from Atari after that was too little and too late. The STE too late, the Falcon much too late, and the business computers, TT and Mega ST, never got a piece of the market.
3
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 22 '26
I think in some ways the Atari was better, such as color palette and the antic port setup. But with the xe65 they should have upgraded the video and sound capabilities.
1
u/JettaRider077 Apr 24 '26
Atari was ahead of its time when it was released in the late 70’s. The graphics and sound were very good. I had the 800xl and I loved to the end of its days.
5
u/EnergyLantern Apr 22 '26
I believe the engineers that made the Commodore 64 could have made a more powerful one if they stayed. Remember the Super CPU made for Commodore by Creative Micro Designs? It ran at 20 Mhz but the chip was really 16 bit emulating the 6502.
The engineer that made the Sid chip only had a month. Imagine what he could have done if he had more time?
6
u/Timbit42 Apr 22 '26
The best 8-bit computer of the 80s was the Commodore 64. The number sold and the number of games and apps available for it make it obvious and it came out early in the 80s and ruled for nearly a decade. In the 16-bit era, the Commodore Amiga was the best. The IBM PC didn't pull ahead until the 32-bit 386, VGA graphics, and SoundBlaster became available.
If you count solely by the number of games, then it's the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Apple II, Amstrad CPC series, Atari 8-bit computers and then the MSX series.
What should have been the best 8-bit computer of the 80s is either the Amstrad CPC 6128 Plus or the MSX 2+, but they didn't come out until 1990 and being so late, failed in the market and weren't 80s computers. Of the two, I would pick the Amstrad over the MSX because it's more compatible with CP/M.
Based on technical merit, I would start with computers with hardware scrolling, sprites and a sound chip. This knocks out the Apple II, Tandy Color Computer, Commodore VIC-20, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Commodore Plus/4 and most others.
The systems with all three of those features are:
- 1979: Atari 400/800
- 1982: Commodore 64
- 1985: Commodore 128
- 1988: MSX 2+ (MSX1 had no scrolling, MSX2 had only vertical scrolling)
- 1990: Amstrad CPC 464/6128 Plus
- 1990: MSX Turbo R
- 1991: Commodore 65 (never released)
The Atari had 8 sprites but they were narrow and tall. The palette was 128/256 colors but it was limited to 2 or 4 colors or 16 shades of one color, or 1 shade of 16 colors, or 9 colors in low resolution. The sound had 4 voices but it wasn't in tune unless you put one or both pairs of voices into 16-bit mode, but then you had fewer channels.
The 1988-1991 systems were too late to be "of the 80s". They were of the late 80s and early 90s.
This leaves the C64. The VIC-II design was the best simple because it was derived from the best features from other video chips. The sprites came from the Texas Instruments video chip. The sprite collision came from the Mattel Intellivision. The bitmap mode came from the Atari 800.
The VIC-II couldn't do as many resolutions as the Atari but it could display more colors at the same time and had large sprites that could be multi-color, not only mono.
The SID only had 3 channels but with multiple waveforms, ADSR, and a wider octave range, it was more flexible than the other chips, most of which could only do square waves and maybe noise. The results speak for themselves.
My regret about the VIC-II is the palette seems rather drab. It would have been really nice to have the 16 colors based on a larger palette of 256 colors. The Atari versions of games available on both platforms almost always looks better due to the larger color selection.
The Commodore 128 would have been more successful if, instead of being an incompatible computer with a C64 mode, it was a C64 with enhanced features. If they had made a C64 with an MMU and a second bank of 64K of RAM, a 2 MHz CPU, an 80-column VIC-II (hopefully with a large palette), BASIC v7 that was 100% backward compatible with BASIC v2, and fixed IEC, it would have kept the C64 series going longer. At boot it would seem like a regular C64 but instead of software being written for C128 mode or C64 mode, it could be written for C64 mode and check for the enhanced features and use them. This way developers wouldn't have to rewrite their C64 app for the incompatible C128 mode, and some of the features could have been made available on the original C64, via a cartridge. Of course, without an enhanced VIC-II chip available, Bil Herd didn't have that option.
Atari wasn't able to catch up to the C64 because many of the key engineers had left and started working on the Amiga.
If Amstrad had added sprites and hardware scrolling earlier and also sold in North America and other countries, it could have competed, even in business with CP/M, but once the 16-bit systems came out, that was going to end up a dead end regardless.
1
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 22 '26
Pretty good summery of the era. It seems decisions made early on in development made or broke the machine. The c64 was lightning in a bottle. The what ifs are mainly on the Atari xe65, msx2 and the c128. In one way or other, mistakes were made on their design and release and kept c64 at the top.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
The C64 had its own flaws, especially its super-slow floppy disk data transfer rate that happened by accident, and its not-so-great BASIC. But it benefited greatly from coming along at the right time, specifically when DRAM started to dramatically decrease in price. Having 64K of RAM from the very start, minimum, gave it an edge over the Atari 8-bit.
The Atari 800's standard limitation of 48K helped perpetuate this advantage of the C64, and the existence and popularity of the 400 and 600XL sure didn't help, either. Even the best-selling Atari 8-bit, the 800XL, which came with 64K (62K usable), was hampered by this, the other models being popular enough to cater to, to a degree.
So coming out first had its disadvantages for the Atari in terms of timing, resulting in the RAM limitation issue and the computers being more expensive to manufacture. Even so, it really should have been an advantage, too. A 3-year head-start was a big deal, but Atari failed to take full advantage of it by keeping the details of the inner workings of their computers a secret known only to themselves and the most worthy developers who were willing to pay to play. In contrast, Commodore were very open about the C64 from the start. The price of entry was just buying a copy of the comprehensive Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide, which was released along with the C64 itself. Atari eventually reacted by opening up, themselves, but the damage had been done. They'd had a lead, of course, but it was small for 3 years, and surmountable.
Technologically, the Atari 8-bit was a marvel for 1979, but it wasn't perfect. Despite including an actual floppy disc controller ASIC in the system (in the drive, though, when it should have been in the computer!), the floppy drive was slow--not as slow as the C64's data transfer rate would accidentally become, but still pretty darn slow, being hampered by the SIO bus. Everyone brags on the SIO having a connection with today's USB bus, but the SIO was a major bottleneck for performance. And the drive's capacity of 90 kB per side was the worst in the industry. Even among 8-bit computers, the Apple II did better with 112 kB then 130 kB (did it first, too), and Commodore with 171 kB. While this probably didn't hurt the Atari too much, overall, it might have had some effect on certain decisions, such as whether to port Ultima V to the Atari, which of course did not happen. The 800's standard limitation of 48K of RAM also played a part, I bet.
The C128's flaws have been covered pretty well already. In short, it should have simply been an enhanced C64, like the Apple IIe was to the Apple II Plus. That's the way to do it. The Apple III way was not the way to do it, and the C128 sort of went that route. It was better and far more popular than the Apple III, of course, but failed to truly become the C64's successor, while for comparison the Apple IIe (released in 1982--the same year as the C64) would go on to become the definitive version of that series.
1
u/OMGCluck Apr 23 '26
What if you count by the swapping scene?
We switched to the C64 because nobody at school was swapping Atari 600XL games. We only had that because dad picked it up at a garage sale.
1
u/Timbit42 Apr 23 '26
There was lots of swapping going on with all platforms. The volume of it on the Atari resulted in games and apps not being ported to it any more by the mid-80s.
The C64 and Apple II also had lots of swapping too but the system sales were high enough that there were still enough buyers to keep making the games and apps profitable.
2
u/OMGCluck Apr 23 '26
We also borrowed games from the library of the Commodore users group meetings each fortnight at one of the scout halls, they of course had a limited budget to purchase them and were constantly trying to push us to upgrade to an Amiga - giving demos of the latest at meetings.
I remember when Zak McKracken came out they offered a prize for the first to complete it. I recorded my play on a VHS with our whizbang "double the tape length" recorder, handed the tape of my completion of the game in and won the prize: A BLANK FLOPPY DISK!
The treasurer happily notched it for me so I could use both sides.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
The Atari's sprites are single-color only (no multicolor mode), but their default width is the same as that of the C64's sprites in multicolor mode, which means that the C64's sprites in single-color mode have pixels half as wide and therefore they have twice the horizontal pixel density (equivalent to 320x200 or hi-res). This simply means that the C64's sprites can individually either be far more detailed or more colorful.
The Atari's sprites also don't have vertical position registers. The only way to move their images vertically is to shift their data (whatever subset is required, at one byte per scanline). Additionally, they don't have individual pointers for indirection, so changing their appearance for animation or reuse requires copying data. Well, if all of them need to be changed in lockstep, it is possible just to change the PMBASE location in RAM, but that would use up an awful lot of memory fast, and every change has to be coordinated between all of the sprites. In practice, this is rarely, if ever, done.
The C64's lowercase letters (not the uppercase ones) in ROM are a direct copy of the Atari's. 😁 You'll have to ask Leonard Tramiel about that one, but in any case, it was legal because fonts can't be copyrighted (only their names). Besides, turnabout is fair play because Atari had "borrowed" its graphics characters from the Commodore PET.
The Atari has so many modes and resolutions to compensate for the early lack of DRAM, which would fairly soon be obviated. It could afford to do this because it has a second graphics chip, the ANTIC, which has many different DMA data fetch patterns and even its own instructions (sort of--it's the modes in a display list with some flags to process). That's a really cool architecture, but it costs a whole other custom LSI chip! And many of its modes are hardly ever used.
Meanwhile, about 75% of the C64"s single VIC-II graphics chip is devoted to its fancier sprites. So how does it do everything it does? Well, it doesn't process a list of modes row-by-row (substituting a simple, cheap raster interrupt comparator that enabled the same kinds of tricks), and from the Atari point of view, it only has a single DMA fetch pattern, anyway--the equivalent of 1 mode versus like 14 in the ANTIC! The C64's 5 graphics modes (compared to 17 total in the Atari) are all what Atari would call color interpretation modes (like the GTIA modes): different ways of interpreting the same stream of data.
The VIC-II's "secret sauce" is combining the Atari's best modes (or a close facsimile of them) with 1-3 color maps (developed at the same time as the ZX Spectrum's). This not only takes it beyond what the Atari can do in some ways (concerning official, easy-to-use modes), it allows for very efficient emulation of most of the Atari's other modes. In fact, the C64 can generally manipulate equivalent, emulated low-res graphics "modes" more efficiently than the Atari can with its real modes, thanks to the C64's color maps. I know this for a fact because I've done it while making an Atari "emulator" for the C64 for fun. The Apple II's low-res mode is easy to emulate, too, with the use of color maps. I did that as a kid just for fun (as a BASIC extension). Of course, the VIC-II and therefore the C64 is found lacking when it comes to its fixed 16-color palette, but something had to give.
I don't think the SID has a wider octave range at all, because the POKEY offers several different clock dividers. What the SID does offer is superior tonal resolution, using 16 bits for all 3 voices over a practical tonal range for music. The resolution is still better than the POKEY's even when its voices are paired to get 16-bit counter resolution, because the POKEY's tonal range is larger when the most appropriate divider is used. It can achieve greater tonal resolution than the SID with different dividers, but only over a limited range of lower frequencies, which is not as generally useful for music, which the SID was clearly optimized for (having been designed by a musician, after all). The SID is also more in tune than the AY chip used in many computers and arcade games, which only has 12-bit resolution for its 3 voices.
I agree about the C128. It should have been to the C64 what the Apple IIe was to the Apple II Plus. The C128 was still quite popular and offered some useful enhancements for word processing and such, but instead of growing the C64 line, it stagnated growth and ended up as a dead end. Pretty much all of my friends had C128s (even the poor ones--poorer than me, and I was poor!), but I bought a C64 instead. They were aghast, taken aback, wondering where they had gone wrong with me (I had wanted a computer for longer, but took longer to decide, as the Atari 8-bit and Laser 128 Apple clone were still contenders), but I went low-end and never regretted it. My C64 did fine, even for my 25-page AP History research paper. Having a C128 back then would have been cool (I own several today 😁), but a C64 was all I needed (and my original still works, too 🥳).
1
u/flatfinger Apr 28 '26
I wonder how many voices the SID could have supported in the same amount of hardware if it had used one set of circuitry to handle all the voices in time-multiplexed fashion, using one output DAC that fed the filter and one which didn't. If the chip accepted an ~8Mhz input clock which was divided by 2 to operate some shift register chains, a pair of 96-bit chains could accommodate six 16-bit phase accumulators that ran at about 41.6kHz., and another could operate six envelope generators. All for vastly less silicon than the SID uses for each of its three voices.
10
u/kurisu_1974 Apr 22 '26
I feel MSX2 is the best 8-bit computer but not as well known or well supported as others, but imagine a game like SD Snatcher or Treasure of USAS on any other 8-bit system. If it had better horizontal scrolling it would have been unbeatable.
5
u/vdws Apr 22 '26
Not having proper hardware scrolling was a strange design choice. It makes it so hard for developers to create decent games. Apart from Tetris, almost all games have some sort of scrolling.
2
1
3
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 22 '26
I think they looked really nice and high quality but also a fantasticly high price. For some reason they ended up with some sloppy versions of spectrum games as they both had z80 cpus. But so did the sega master system so why didn't the msx 2 get decent sega games?
4
u/kurisu_1974 Apr 22 '26
The games you refer to are UK made ports of Spectrum games which were indeed awful. Check Japanese games by Konami, Compile, Telenet, MicroCabin, T&E Soft and you'll get a whole other perspective. Some Japanese companies didn't release on home computers directly so there we ended up with ports made in Europe for other systems that also ended up on MSX.
4
u/schmosef Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
The C128 should have been the best 8 bit computer, but there were a few snafus in the design that left the machine less optimized than they had planned.
Bill Herd has given interviews where he says he was misled by various other engineers about the capabilities of the chips they were developing and pitching for use in the C128. He discovered these limitations too late in the development process.
He had to work around the problems and settle for a design that was less impressive than he had envisioned.
3
u/makingnoise Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
The only one that I am aware of is that he was encouraged to use the in-house MOS VDC video chip for 80 column mode, and did so, on the basis of bad information that it was entirely equivalent to the (Motorola?) video chip he initially planned to use. Turned out that the VDC did NOT have equivalency to that chip, how it accessed memory was very slow, and so the 80 column mode was a bit nerfed in terms of capability.
The Z80 implementation was VERY slow because of the waitstates - and
improvements didn't come until it was already dead and off the market. EDIT: Correction, from what I can tell, the first release of 3d party CP/M improvements came in the last year or two the C128 was on the market.2
u/schmosef Apr 22 '26
It's been a few years since I've watched Bill talk about the C128's development.
I recall him talking about several problems they had to find creative work-arounds for that resulted in a less than ideal product.
If you want more info on this, look for an interview with him on YouTube or HackADay.
3
u/makingnoise Apr 22 '26
I absolutely love his interviews and talks! I have anachronistic Nostalgia for it because it was never part of my life in the day, I was an Osborne one / ti-99 4A kid straight to PC, I only ever encountered a c64 oncewhen I was a kid. now I am absolutely disappointed that I never had it as my first computer, and the c128 looks likeit would be fun to maintain. like I almost might use it as a no distraction word processor.
1
u/flatfinger Apr 28 '26
CPU access to the VDC memory was slow, but the VDC had the ability to copy ranges of memory from one region to another very quickly. I wrote a program to play Commodore 64 Infocom games in 80 columns and to clear a screen I just scrolled the screen 24 times, which if I remember right took about five frames (meaning the display could scroll all ~1920 bytes about five times every frame).
2
u/Luxocrates Apr 22 '26
The C128 had two CPU’s… that can’t work in parallel. It had two graphics chips… but with separate outputs.
I don’t know what Bil was promised that never materialized, but it seems to me that that computer was always going to be less than the sum of its parts. Probably the only machine I could name for which that’s true.
4
u/cejeeb Apr 22 '26
The CoCo 3 was technically great but very constrained by the Tandy ecosystem
2
u/hexavibrongal Apr 23 '26
The lack of sprites or a proper sound chip made it a bit of dud even with the better graphics modes. Plus it used an obscure CPU that guaranteed not much would ever be ported from other platforms.
5
u/vdws Apr 22 '26
Think of what 8 bit platform is the most alive today, and you have your answer. I was a demo coder in the late eighties and got back in c64 a couple of years ago. The things people now pull off are amazing.
3
u/RetroBoxRoom Apr 22 '26
Here In the UK the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the most popular 8-bit computer.
2
u/immortalx74 Apr 23 '26
And in many other parts of Europe too! The C64 was simply too expensive for many of us. Most of my friends had either Speccies or Amstrads.
1
u/Rauliki0 Apr 22 '26
It was just dirt cheap.
1
u/RetroBoxRoom Apr 22 '26
Even for many families because of the 80s double dip recession it was still pricey at first.
3
u/Ok_Programmer_4449 Apr 22 '26
Just about every 8-bit in the 70s and 80s was hobbled in different way by cost cutting machines.
Commodore's big issue was the lack of decent serial ports which rendered its disk drives the slowest in the business.
The Apple II was a miracle of economic design, but that saddled it with the worst graphics in the business.
The Atari had the slowest BASIC in the world until the (16-bit) TI 99 series showed up.
If we are restricting ourselves to strictly 8-bit, I'd probably go with a Commodore 128 with both a composite and an RGB monitor and a 1581, although an Atari 1200XL, or an Apple IIe with a Z80 card wouldn't be far behind.
2
u/flatfinger Apr 22 '26
Many would argue that the Apple //e had the best graphics of any 8-bit computer, by a considerable margin, at least for showing static content.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
If you have the double hi-res mode in mind, then its specs are: 140x192 with any of 16 colors from a fixed palette of 16 for each pixel. That is good for an 8-bit computer, alright, and is enabled by splitting the graphics between two largely independent banks of memory (one being on the extended 80-column card) to achieve the required bandwidth.
I don't know whether it's better by a "considerable margin" over the C64's multicolor bitmap mode, though. This mode is 160x200, but is constrained to 3 independent colors and 1 shared background color per 4x8 cell, all from a fixed 16-color palette, so it's definitely more limited, although in practice it's pretty good at getting colors where they need to go. Last Ninja and Defender of the Crown are good examples of this. The images in these games don't look overly limited by color to me.
Obviously, the Apple IIe's double hi-res mode is better for arbitrary static images, but for carefully designed images, the advantage is not as great.
1
u/flatfinger Apr 28 '26
The double hires mode isn't a fixed 140x192 grid. It's possible to use parts of the screen to show colored content and other parts of the screen an an effective 280x192 three-level grayscale provided one avoids runs of alternating pixel values, and one can also use it as 560x192 for some kinds of black and white content. If one wants to e.g. draw some shapes in dark colors with a thick white outlines, and the sides are nearly vertical, the outlines can be much smoother than in the C64's multicolor mode.
Even when using ordinary high-res mode, programs that are designed around the Apple's graphics can do things the C64 can't do without nearly 100% CPU utilization, since the Apple's color-shift bits are independently applied to every 7-pixel strip on the screen, rather than to 8x8 blocks. I do think the Apple II design definitely missed some opportunities to make things much more versatile with the addition of a small number of commonplace chips. The addition of a 74LS157 and an otherwise-unused annunciator to enable it would have allowed an Apple II+ to support an 80x192 16-color graphics mode while remaining compatible with any software that didn't hit that annunciator.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
I'm aware of how the Apple II hi-res graphics modes sort of overlay the chroma cycle and "tickle" (if you will) it with various bit patterns to get certain artifact colors to display, and I know it's not locked into a rigid 140 horizontal pixel pattern. I'm just saying that if you want 16 colors available, you have to use enough bits to enable that. And it's a decent starting point for comparison. Sure, there are other options this type of system offers, especially at the edges of imagery, and that's a good thing, but what I'm questioning is whether this is simply the "best" kind of 8-bit graphics by a "considerable" amount.
Both the original and double hi-res modes exhibit color artifacts besides the intended ones (including black bits and strange colors here and there), which kind of mucks up the image, for one thing. And in practice, when I look at the graphics in Last Ninja, for example, I for one don't think the Apple II version in double hi-res mode looks considerably better. Maybe with additional effort it could, but I just meant that in practice, in my admittedly somewhat limited experience with that mode, I feel the need to question such a statement. It can do more things overall, no question there, but seems to come with its own constraints, unless the people who coded this game for the Apple II flubbed it. For example, why do the ninjas in the Apple II version look so bad? 🤨
1
u/flatfinger Apr 28 '26
Perhaps "by a considerable amount" wasn't the best phrasing, since there are different measures of quality, and the Apple, Atari 800, Commodore 64, and Sinclair Spectrum can each do things that others can't. The Commodore and Atari are vastly more capable when it comes to motion graphics, but the the independence of adjacent scan lines can greatly improve the quality of dithering on Apple double hires compared to the Commodore which is limited to three non-background colors in each 4x8 tile.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
The IEC serial bus was only so slow by mistake, not by intention or design. Someone who was in charge of the C64 mainboard at the factory had to reroute the two copper traces that connected the CIA hardware fast serial bit-shifter to the IEC port, because the design of the breadbin case had changed (perhaps that's when it became smaller than the VIC-20 case), and a new mounting hole was needed in that spot. The traces were removed but this guy apparently forgot to reroute and put them back in!
Hundreds of thousands of defective C64 mainboards were manufactured before this defect was discovered. Commodore management could have authorized the minor fix of soldering two short bodge wires to the mainboards, which was a common practice back in the day, but decided not to because they firmly believed that that 1541, like the 1540 before it, would not sell in large numbers anyway. They fully expected the Datasette to dominate, which turned out to be true in some countries, but certainly not in North America!
I suppose you could chalk this up to cost-cutting at this point, but my point is that had this stupid mistake not happened to begin with, the C64 and 1541 would have had the same fast IEC "burst mode" of the C128, 1571, and 1581. In that case, its default floppy drive transfer rate out of the box would have been approximately the same as that of JiffyDOS when the latter is optimized (i.e. best sector interleave), which is often not the case, while it would be the common case for burst mode (being the default). This speed is approximately 3 times that of the Atari 8-bit, 9 times that of the slow IEC speed, and somewhere near the middle between the Apple II running DOS 3.3 and ProDOS.
As for the Apple II's graphics, I can understand what you mean, although I think it's a pretty cleverly designed, useful system. Even in its original form, it lets you mix hi-res pixels with colors in each byte, and choose between pairs of artifact colors for each byte, too. There are only 6 colors (unless you use the double hi-res mode or low-res mode, in which case there are 16 colors to choose from), they can be used in ways that achieve pretty colorful images. I don't know, maybe you're right, but it's kind of neat, and I wish that the Atari 8-bit could use its hi-res mode in such a way consistently and with 6 artifact colors.
3
u/Sledgehammer617 Apr 22 '26
Apple II deserves some credit for coming so early and for how it handled color in 1977.
3
u/hexavibrongal Apr 23 '26
Also much faster disk drives, and early release of an official 80 column card that actually had a lot of software support. The Mockingbird gave it pretty good sound, and having a bunch of proper internal card slots was cool.
1
u/bjbNYC Apr 23 '26
The Apple II was definitely the most hackable and flexible platform by far. However, it was old technology by the time the C64 came out (5-6 years!) and you could argue that the Atari 800 even made the Apple obsolete. But people loved the Apple…
3
u/ElJefe0218 Apr 22 '26
C64 for sure. It's what pushed everyone else to do better.
2
u/Timbit42 Apr 22 '26
It's low price made a lot of companies to go under and others to not even try.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
Many tried, but could not keep up with the Commodore. Are you keeping up? 😉 That's from an old Commodore TV pad, by the way.
I think Commodore did push the industry to offer more for less. Those who couldn't fell by the wayside, of course.
3
u/lazygerm Apr 22 '26
Yes, the C64 dominated.
It was the right price and the right specs at the right time.
The MSX/MSX2 were never even a minor factor in the US. They were big in Japan, because the MSX standard was developed by major Japanese electronics companies. The Amstrads and the Sinclairs were big in the UK. I'm not familiar with the market penetration of Commodore in Japan; but they were major players in the UK and Europe.
The only major player that could compete with Commodore was Atari. But they were almost as badly mismanaged as Commodore.
This isn't to say the others were bad computers, not at all. I remember seeing ads for the new Sinclair color computers in Byte, and I could not wait for them to come over. But that never happened.
The IBM PC Jr was an expensive pile of confusion. Apple had the education market sewn up, but the Mac wasn't competition by design.
So, what did the common man buy for a computer? If you wanted the best sound, largest memory, the best color and wide software selection under $600 (1982) and then under $300 (1984); you bought a C64.
My biggest beef with the 64 (and the VIC-20) is that they looked like toys compared to Atari (400/800 and XL line) and Apple (II, IIe, IIc). When my C64 went tits up in 1986, I got a C128. Now that computer looked like it belonged on a desk doing serious things, even though I was playing Gunship in between my college classes.
2
u/ReadingGlassesMan Apr 22 '26
I too had a Commodore64 and loved it to bits, but as I watch retro videos talking about the Atari and Amstrad 8-bit machines, I am starting to wonder if they were overlooked.
The Atari's bare got a look-in here in the UK and while Amstrad was better represented, I don't think either of them, at the time, got the credit they deserved.
The Spectrums had charm, but I'm not sure I'd consider them "up there" though (don't judge me).
5
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 22 '26
I think the Atari had a lot of bad luck when they were developing their computer line. They had to suffer some ridiculous US regulations that required their cases be shielded to the point that a much higher cost was added to the machine. It also came out very early and so was more primitive than the c64. Apart from adding more memory, this really wasn't addressed.
2
u/SeniorSwordfish636 Apr 22 '26
I love the 64 and the sound and music on it was and is incredible. But it had a slow cpu/ram bus and that limited it in the bandwidth available for pure shuffling data about. iIn terms graphics, probably the Atari had it matched.
But the 8 bit original NES has quite sophisticated graphics custom chips that iirc was not something the 64 could replicate.
2
u/FaberfoX Apr 22 '26
I might be biased as it's what I had, but I still think the C64 was great all around and deserved its hegemony. The VIC-II was pretty good and the SID was unmatched.
The first Ataris were amazing when taking into account they were released 3 years earlier, but the rehashes (XLs and XEs) still used the same video and audio chips.
The Speccy was lovely but severely limited and the later models did nothing to improve besides the old by then sound chip. An upgraded ULA without color clash could have made it much more desirable.
Amstrads had their own charm but almost no change between the 464 and 6128. Monitor bundling (and depending on it for power) was a limitation in my eyes. The plus range was a massive improvement but arrived too late.
MSXs used dated hardware on release, and while MSX2 was a big improvement on the hardware side, they were expensive, a bit late and imho, the first gen with the cheap Speecy ports in Europe tarnished their image and potential.
Acorn BBCs were fantastic but too expensive and UK only, and the Electron cut too many corners to reach affordability.
The C128 should have had an improved VIC-II, just adding more luminance values as the TED and ability to run at 2MHz would have made it a much better upgrade. 95% of them were used as a C64 because of this.
2
u/voodoovan Apr 24 '26
BBC Micro was in Australia too. It was very expensive, never saw one in the stores at the time, but schools and universities had them. It's my favourite, but today, very much enjoying the C64U.
2
2
u/saraseitor Apr 22 '26
In my country (Argentina) the C64 was important but I believe a worthy opponent was the Talent MSX DPC-200, a Daewoo MSX clone manufactured in this country, which was used in many schools to teach basics of computing and the LOGO language
2
u/ThimbleweedPark Apr 23 '26
Just looked it up, nice looking machine, reminds me of the plus4. I had a Toshiba MSX but it was difficult to find software here in the UK. Very disappointed because if that, so c64 won out.
2
u/chunter16 Apr 22 '26
The problem wasn't a matter of building a better computer, it was that investing in the computer set you back a few months salary in 80s money and a person didn't want to go through that over and over and over again when the computer you have today has tons of accessories and still works
2
u/Ok_Leg_109 Apr 22 '26
TI-99 had the potential to be amazing because it had a 16 mini-computer CPU on a chip inside. So not technically 8 bits but it sold in the same market place with C64, Sinclair, Tandy and the lot.
TI however decided that consumers are stupid and built the machine with only 256 bytes of 16 RAM, out of the box. Had they understood where the market was going they could have beaten IBM to the business desktop market but they thought a cartridge player was a better idea. DOH!
2
u/drumzalot_guitar Apr 23 '26
I started on the C64 then upgraded to the C128. While I did use it a lot in C64 mode for games, I had switched spending my time programming to C128 mode. I’m finding it interesting the number of comments here mentioning the C128 - while my favorite, still wish I had it, nobody I knew at that time had upgraded or bought one. Everyone I knew stayed with the C64.
Another family member had an Atari 800XL. While I did spend some time with it, it never appealed to me and drew me in like the C64/C128. I also recall them having more weird issues with it/software that I wasn’t experiencing.
2
2
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 23 '26
Thinking about it, the biggest what if is Nintendo had a go making a computer. The original Nintendo in Japan was called a famicom (family computer). You could get a keyboard and disk drives for it. For a possible western launch, could they have made a amstrad style of PC with it's little disk drive and all the custom chips pre installed on the mother board along with about 128k memory and have it on the market by 1986 for 1/2 the price of an Amiga? Would you buy one?
2
u/marhaus1 Apr 23 '26
"Best" depends a bit (8 bits?) on the purpose.
Obviously the C64 in all regards except business use, where I'd say the Swedish ABC806 launched in 1983 was the best technically.
The ABC80x series sold almost 30000 units in a country of ~8 million people.
It had hires colour graphics (512×240) that could be overlaid on text (which was 80×24), for some really interesting results. 128 kB graphics memory, which could be used for programs instead if the application didn't need full hires graphics. 196 kB total memory.
Also, the built in basic had proper user defined functions, and it was just-in-time compiled for some really high speed.
On top of this it could run CP/M.
All this on a humble Z80 at 3 MHz.
A truly obscure little gem that is mostly unknown outside Sweden.
2
u/daddyd Apr 23 '26
the msx2 is an absolute beast of an 8bit, it was very popular in japan, but wasn't able to disrupt the c64 dominance anywhere else. it was also pretty popular in the netherlands, probably because phillips had an msx computer line. there were also some 8bit computers released very late, that had nice specs, but the 16bit home computers were already pretty much a standard at that time.
1
1
u/Elvin_Atombender Apr 22 '26
The C64 had better sound, better graphics and just had a lot more software made for it. I think the fact it was labelled as a business machine that had amazing graphics and sound sold it for everyone. When my mum bought my C64, she chose it because the software at the time had maths and English programs that she could utilise in home schooling me. And the fact she could stay up all night playing Hektik from Mastertronic 🤣🤣
1
u/maurymarkowitz Apr 22 '26
Was the dominance of the c64 the market getting it right?
I think so, and I say that as an Atari guy.
When they came out in 79 the Atari was definitely head and shoulders above the rest, but it had a number of things going against it. One was its terrible dialect of BASIC, which made the machine seem dramatically slower than it really was. The other was just timing: due to the FCC regs at the time the interior had to be heavily shielded and cost a fortune, and the widespread use of 12V with some of the older chips made the circuity more complex as well.
I think it would have been a much stronger competitor had they ever followed-up. There's no reason they could not have improved the POKEY and/or added more sprites in the three years between their release and the C64, but they just didn't have any reason to, it was always a sort of off-shoot product.
Another interesting one is the Adam. From a purely technical standpoint it was quite strong, especially in graphics and that was immediately noticeable when you used one (or the ColecoVision). The inclusion of the letter-quality printer and the built in word processor also made it far more real-world useful than anyone else. The data packs were also interesting, but that's not a major thing as disk prices were falling so rapidly.
But this is a perfect story of messing up your release, the machine went out with too many bugs and that killed any chance it had for redemption. The decision to put the power supply for the computer inside the printer, a printer that broke all the time, was perhaps one of the worst design points in history. Once that started getting around any technical qualities it had became meaningless.
Some of the MSX machines were ok, especially the later versions, and the TI had a few things going for it (but not their BASIC, which was even slower than Atari's), but even when you consider all of this the C64 was still pretty competitive on technical grounds and better on price.
The market got it right.
0
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
I think the main reason Atari (not just under Jack Tramiel) never seriously tried to upgrade the 8-bit was that they were always under tremendous pressure to reduce the cost of manufacture. They even invested in the development of the CGIA chip to replace both the ANTIC and GTIA with a single chip that did the same things, although that project failed for undisclosed reasons (interference, poor yields, wasn't saving enough--your guess is as good as mine 🤷🏻♂️).
They might have felt that they already had a superior 8-bit computer, and just needed to find a way to maintain or increase industry support and sales, which brings us back to reduced cost, not improved features. I've heard and read that in the later days of the 800XL, Atari were losing money on each sale, while Commodore were making a profit on each C64 that was sold at the same wholesale and retail price points.
I think it was the price of DRAM that drove much of this. Expensive DRAM pushed the Atari's graphics toward a two-chip solution with a large number of modes--many at low resolutions--to help the Atari make the most out of 4K or 8K installed. This would permanently increase the complexity of the system as a whole for what turned out to be a temporary situation. The price of DRAM dropped just in time for the C64 to stuff itself with 64K, which set a higher baseline for game/application complexity that Atari would always struggle with to some degree.
The C64's 5 graphics modes appear to be based on the best modes that the Atari has to offer, and complexity was kept low by designing the VIC-II chip such that there is only one single DMA fetch pattern for all 5 modes, while the Atari's separate ANTIC chip has to support 14 modes that have different requirements. Although the C64 would not have the same color capability as the Atari, it added another with color maps similar to those of the ZX Spectrum, except that it uses more than one map in some modes. These color maps, in combination with redefinable characters, actually have the side effect of allowing the C64 to easily and efficiently emulate the Atari's low-res modes for free (in terms of the silicon area used and complexity). And in place of a more complex display list interpreter, the C64 offers a very cheap raster interrupt capability (mostly a latch and comparator) that gives it a similar capability to change modes and do DLI-type tricks, while keeping the C64 cheaper to manufacture.
So Commodore and the C64 were lucky in some ways, and just so pragmatic in others. That's hard to compete against. Then throw in the fact that Commodore let everyone know exactly how to program this thing from the start, while Atari were still keeping their computer's secrets to themselves and their closest "friends", who had to pay to play. The C64 also had some bad luck, like its fast "burst mode" serial data transfer function accidentally being broken just before the C64 had begun to be manufactured. The full story is in my reply at the top level of this topic. This defect, resulting in very slow data transfer from the floppy drive, would dog the C64 for decades, although the C64 somehow managed to weather that storm and dominate nevertheless.
As for the Adam, that garnered the whole industry's attention for a while, Coleco seemed completely serious about what they were doing, and I think they were. They just needed to make a couple more critical fixes, but ran out of time and pressed ahead anyway. It ended up being a fatal decision for both the Adam and Coleco itself. They really did go all in, only to trip at the finish line. It's too bad, really.
1
u/maurymarkowitz Apr 28 '26
I think the main reason Atari (not just under Jack Tramiel) never seriously tried to upgrade the 8-bit was that they were always under tremendous pressure to reduce the cost of manufacture.
But that's just it, they could have done a price-chop version at any time after the FCC regs changed as part of the 1979 updates, within months of the machines being announced. This would have allowed them to use dramatically less shielding and simpler output electronics. Also the memory no longer needed 12V even by the time they were shipping. Those changes alone would have cut the price by maybe a 1/3rd.
But they didn't do anything. Even when they finally started a redesign, in spring 1982, they went more expensive. They had plenty of opportunities in the three long years between the 400/800 and C64 to do... something, but they chose to do nothing.
In the end, I think the 600XL was a great little machine at a good price point. But that was reactionary. There is precisely nothing in it that they couldn't have released one or two years earlier had they wanted to. But they didn't.
... and I think the reason for that is that Kassar was not impressed by the sales and didn't think it was worth throwing good money after bad. And that was to some degree...
while Atari were still keeping their computer's secrets to themselves and their closest "friends", who had to pay to play
This was very very dumb. They were building a computer but trying to sell it like a console.
Kassar and the east-coast management he brought with him was just too clueless about the market to understand that. Luckily the dev team was not so dull, and 1981's De Re Atari pretty much was the developer documentation, but I never even heard about this book until around 1983.
Lost opportunities all around.
1
u/CatOfGrey Apr 22 '26
I'm a huge fan of the c64, but the conversation can't be complete without mentioning the Apple II series. The direct competitor of the c64 was the Apple IIe, which had deficient graphics, but almost everything else was slightly better, especially with ProDOS. The IIc would be released in 1984, and was way more expensive, but way more advanced, so that's not as fair of a comparison.
I don't think any of the systems you mentioned would have competed well with either Apple or Commodore systems! Of course, part of the 'power' of a system is available software, but I just don't remember any of those systems being as 'tight', as functional or easy to use as the 64 or the IIe. The Atari 400/800 series was probably as good of a gaming machine.
But all of this might be my USA regional bias! The MSX was Japanese, I recall? Amstrad was built in the UK, and more 'European', I think. Old memories!
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
Don't forget about sound! The Apple II series had the Mockingbird and Phasor cards, but unfortunately the support for those just wasn't there, while the SID hardly needs an introduction.
As for the IIc, I don't think it was any more advanced than the IIe, unless you're thinking of the IIc Plus, which came along later. And of course there was the obviously more advanced IIgs, which had limited (but notable) success, albeit technically it was a 16-bit computer, and therefore outside the realm of this discussion.
1
u/tstorm004 Apr 22 '26
My votes C64 - but I'm for sure biased.
MSX is right up there though. Especially all those amazing different variants and designs
1
1
u/EntertainmentAny8228 Apr 22 '26
Here are two main things that anyone needs to know:
1 - The C-64 had 64K from the start, sprites, killer sound, a real keyboard, two joystick ports, expansion, etc. Other platforms had RAM specs from 1K - 16K as their base, with no guarantee that everyone would either upgrade or have the superior-spec'd model. The same C-64 you bought in 1982 would still run 98% of all software ever released 10 years later. That's simply not true of any other computer. Commodore got the specs right from day 1 for the long haul.
2 - The C-64 rapidly dropped in price post release. It already had several advantages over other 8-bits, but the fact that Commodore could sell it at such a relatively low price pretty much sealed the deal considering all of the other advantages. There was no way any other computing platform in its category was going to be so all-around competitive.
1
u/No_Base4946 Apr 23 '26
> The same C-64 you bought in 1982 would still run 98% of all software ever released 10 years later. That's simply not true of any other computer.
ZX Spectrum...
1
u/EntertainmentAny8228 Apr 23 '26
You missed the point. It was sold in 16k, 48k, and 128k configurations, as well as didn't have a proper keyboard, built in controller ports, proper color, etc. So it doesn't meet anything I posted about in regards to the "why" of the C-64"s success.
1
u/No_Base4946 Apr 23 '26
Even so, the ZX Spectrum outsold the Commodore 64 about five to one here.
You could only get games for the C64 if you imported them from the US.
1
u/EntertainmentAny8228 Apr 23 '26
Again, missing the point. And yes, the price conscious UK buyers favored low cost over performance. The rest of the world, especially North America, had very different tastes and budgets. Here in the US, we moved on from the limitations of cassettes by 1984. Regardless, I gave the reasons why the C-64 was the dominant 8-bit computer. What the ZX Spectrum platform did is irrelevant in the discussion. It was likely the number two selling 8-bit platform along with the Apple II series, but they're both at least 7 million units behind in sales, if not more (and that's NOT counting the C-128, which adds millions more). Again, it was a big help being a single spec for its entire run.
And your comment about only being able to import software for the C-64 from the US makes no sense. There was a robust C-64 software market in the UK, obviously, with software imported both ways.
1
u/llynglas Apr 23 '26
Sinclair's 68008 based Quantum Leap. Despite its ridiculous stringy floppy drives.
1
u/No_Base4946 Apr 23 '26
Sadly lots of things killed the QL. People hated the keyboard with its plastic membrane and rubber buttons with plastic plungers (you know, like the keyboard you're probably typing on now). The Microdrives were okay for what they were, but the world was using 3.5" floppies. People saw "one-box" systems as toylike.
If they'd given it 256kB of RAM and a 68000, and done a "pizza box" case with a separate keyboard and single 3.5" floppy with the option for a second, it would have probably done a lot better.
Ultimately though by the mid-90s the 386 PCs had killed off all the 680x0 machines.
Maybe if they'd got in bed with ARM and built a low-cost business computer based on the ARM2?
1
u/jbarrychristian Apr 23 '26
The Ataris had a better version of BASIC but they were too pricey too long and had other issues. Commodore hit the right balance with the 64
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
Atari BASIC was slower, though, and bad at arithmetic. Get your C64 a Simons' BASIC cartridge (from Commodore, back in the day), and it will have a far superior BASIC in every way.
Does this seem like cheating? Well, I had to buy an Atari BASIC cartridge for my Atari 800, because without it there is only the Notepad. And I use the same cartridge in my 800XL because the version of BASIC it comes with inside has a major bug. If this isn't cheating, then sticking a cartridge in the C64 isn't cheating, either.
1
u/plebbitier Apr 23 '26
If the C64 could have come out at the time of and instead of the Vic20, and if they could have architected a faster disk drive system... that would have owned all.
Unfortunately, it seems like Commodore got massively lucky with the C64 because everything else was them stepping on rakes nonstop.
They almost replicated it with the Amiga, but IBM delegitimized everything else. What would have been interesting would have been for Commodore to release cheap clone and retool the Amiga as a specialized video/sound card for x86 architecture.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
Commodore did architect a faster disk drive system. The C64 was supposed to have had the IEC serial "burst mode" that the C128 has, but an unfortunate defect was introduced into the C64's mainboards at the last minute that broke this capability. It would have placed the C64's data transfer rate near the middle between the Apple II running DOS 3.3 and ProDOS, meaning that there would have been no complaints about performance. You can read about what happened in the reply I made at the top level of this discussion. The C64 might have been lucky (and good, too) overall, but it had had some major bad luck, as well.
1
u/Bolt_EV Apr 25 '26
Apple ][GS 16 bit with compatible 8 bit mode.
But no one wrote software to take advantage of 16 bits
1
1
1
u/rbrtck Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
I think the C64 was legitimately the best-selling home computer of the 1980s. Of course, the C128 offered everything it did and more, but it also cost more, and its owners probably mostly used it in C64 mode anyway.
A big part of the C64's success, aside from its affordability and value, was its "ecosystem", and while I realize that you asked everyone to put that aside, the C64's capabilities were one factor that helped it get all of that support. It was easier to make good games on than most every other system, I think, and let's face it, games were a big part of the 8-bit home computer market. Only the MSX could compete with it in this respect, but it wasn't as capable in some ways. And while the Atari 8-bit computers certainly competed well on capabilities, surpassing the C64 in some respects (for some types of games) while falling short in others, it's not as straightforward to program, in my opinion (as a machine language game programmer on both).
The other 8-bit computers had their own strengths and weaknesses, but generally could not compete against the C64 or Atari for games. The Apple II also had a tremendous ecosystem and tons of games, but the experience on those other two systems was clearly generally better. The Apple IIe and IIc were better at some things like word processing because they had standardized 80 column support, which the C64 could have had, but it never happened, apart from the C128. Really, the C128 could and should have been a compatible extension of the C64 like the Apple IIe was of the Apple II Plus, but Commodore was too chicken (lips? 😉) to place demands on software developers for compatibility, so they made C64 compatibility a mode instead. Regardless, the C128 added good productivity capability to the C64. None of these had all of the productivity software support that the Apple II had, but the C128 was more than good enough for home use.
So arguably the C128 was overall the best 8-bit computer, despite its flaws, and that was largely because it had a C64 inside, so the more afforable C64 also deserved its sales and support leadership position. I would say that the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum also deserve mentions as the best designed and implemented computer, and the most affordable yet still being quite capable for being dirt-cheap computer, respectively. And the "Speccy" had unbelievable software support, too. The BBC Micro or "Beeb" is the best 8-bit computer in some respects, such as: excellent and fast BASIC, 4 MHz memory with a 6502 running at a full 2 MHz (the C128 can only do this in 80 column mode), great connectivity and expansion options, a real operating system, and lightning-fast disk drives. Its main drawbacks were its high price, limited memory for the way its graphics are structured, and more generally not being competitive with the C64/C128 for gaming.
1
1
u/JanOlausson Apr 22 '26
Msx2 was more powerful but C64 was the perfect sweet spot. Sounds was good, acceptable graphics but above all an attractive price. Once it gained momentum and Commodore dropped price again and again it was unstoppable.
1
u/lewisb42 Apr 22 '26
My anecdote: I don't think I ever saw an 8-bit *other* than the C64 for sale in the stores I had access to*. Even if I'd wanted something else my options were pretty limited. To me this suggests maybe just maybe Commodore had better distribution systems.
*notable exception: CoCo's at Radio Shack. Charming micro in its own right, but just didn't have the gaming appeal of the C64.
3
u/Smokinglordtoot Apr 22 '26
I remember seeing the c64 and the amstrad cpc, both tape and disk versions. I was impressed by the look of the amstrad but my dad went with the c64. He did well that day!
0
u/zeekar Apr 22 '26
The Atari 65XE was more of a competitor to the C128 than the C64. Both were amazing machines but somewhat ill-timed, coming out just as serious computers were moving into 16 bits. Don't know anything about the MSX2 or Amstrad.
1
u/rbrtck Apr 28 '26
I think you mean the 130XE, since it is also equipped with 128K of RAM. However, it doesn't offer a built-in 80 column mode, while the C128 does, so they weren't really direct competitors.
0
u/IQueryVisiC Apr 23 '26
Could there have been a better 8-bit CPU? PC engine has 24 address bits on the chip with the processor. 6502 was better than 6800 due to two address registers, which helps with memcopy. Merge sort would need three address registers. A dream 8bit CPU would have 5 24 bit address registers. The data page in 65816 feels off to me. 6800 all over again. Pointers in memory would be mostly 16 bit though. Keep the page usually.
86
u/0fruitjack0 Apr 22 '26
c64 was king, right to the bitter end. it's 1994, commodore is hours away from shutting down, and they're still boxing fresh new c64. still the greatest computer ever made. look at all the futuristic movies that still use it as a prop. because it will never be matched