Atari 7800 Designers Talk Atari, 7800, GCC

TheAlchemist writes "Applefritter.com has posted recordings of the talks that took place at the Vintage Computer Festival held at Sun's Boston campus July 16th and 17th. One of the talks revolved around the Atari 7800's 20th Anniversary, and was presented by Curt Vendel of Atarimuseum.com and Steve Golson, one of the original designers of the Atari 7800, the successor to the Atari 5200 that has more in common with the 2600 than the 5200. The presentation and accompanying slide show covered the history of GCC (the company that designed the 7800 for Atari, as well as many 7800 games), Atari, and the 7800. Sitting in the front row of the audience were 10 former GCC employees, who provided additional insight during the presentation. You can listen to the full Atari 7800 session here, and can find more talks from the Vintage Computer Festival here."

Voice recognition

[vasqzr]

Anyone care to post a transcript of the interview?

The Damage to My Desk

[Jason Scott]

I am stunned with myself; I had this date on a calendar on my wall, ready to go to it. After all, it took place 10 miles from my house. And here I read about it now, on Slashdot, 10 days afterwards. That's a heartbreaker.

I'm glad I got to go the Philly Classic show, and hang out with Curt and some of the other fine folks, but I definitely would have enjoyed this one too. I'm sorry, Curt! Next time.

I'm really glad to hear these talks are going up where people like myself can hear them. Well, guess I better go to the west coast one this year, instead.

I hope we have more of these soon.

classics are good

[shaitand]

I suppose everyone has their classic favorites, something they cuddled up to in the beginning.

I actually had and used several of the old "classics" I hear about, and none compared with C64/128. Those things were hackable in ways never before dreamed of... kind of like the Amiga, which I would now call vintage if there weren't people still selling the things for a few thousand.

Re:classics are good

[Lisandro]

The C64 is one of the best personal computers in history, no doubt about it. The things that people managed to do with it are mind-boggling, specially when you consider the machine limitations - 64kb of *total* memory, so RAM was less than that, 1MHz clock, very limited resolution and color palette, and a very basic sound synthetizer chip (even when most of it was top-notch hardware back then). Check http://www.lemmon64.com/ [lemmon64.com] for all your C64 need, there's a lot of gems laying arround. I recently fired

Re:classics are good

[Lisandro]

Sorry, make that http://www.lemon64.com/ [lemon64.com]!

Re:classics are good

[sammaffei]

Hey idiot, some people are poor. You know.

I had an Atari 1200XL with 1050 Floppy drive. It was all my folks could afford and I loved it. Best computer keyboard at the time.

Re:classics are good

[twalk]

The C64 was cheap, but it wasn't a piece of crap. Apples were *much* more expensive, and pretty much the least capable of the "big 3" of the time (Apple/Atari/C64). Ataris had a lot more capabilities than either of those, but they were 2X the price of a C64. However the real thing that damned Apple & Atari (esp. Atari) was not only was the C64 less than 1/2 the price of either, but it also was able to do 90%+ of what people wanted. (The C64 had only about 60% or so of the capabilities of an Atari, b

Re:classics are good

[Tofino]

64kb of *total* memory, so RAM was less than that

Minor nitpick. Lots of the 64k was protected, but it was indeed overwriteable if you did the right POKEs to allow said overwriting. Lots of whacky shenanigans ensue...

Re:classics are good

[Tofino]

Yep, I once hard-soldered a VCR remote control (back when they had wires) into the back port (one of them) on my C64. This was so I could write a Dragon's Lair-style game using Robotech episodes. It worked better than you'd think :). Mom was impressed, all right.

C64?!?

[vrai]

Pah I say! Pah! The greatest computer of the 80's was clearly the Sinclair ZX Spectrum [old-computers.com]. How could anything compete with it's classic design, surreal colour system and the awesome 'dead flesh' keyboard. The C64 had a full sized space bar - just like computers made in the Soviet Union! Solid proof that owning a C64 made you a filthy red!

Now if you don't mind "3D Ant Attack" has just loaded ...

GCC != GCC

[dbirchall]

I had to RTFblurb to realize that no, the GCC compiler hadn't been ported to yet another processor architecture. Pity, that, I was just about to imagine a beo... oh, nevermind.