1980s / 1990s Computer with the best design and Potential

[PeterJ]

When I was growing up in the 1980s there was a huge range of personal computers available. Reading Your Computer magazine they seemed to be reviewing a new machine every month.

Ignoring the two big players (ZX Spectrum & C64) which 8Bit computer do you feel had the best potential in terms of design, and capabilities (sound & graphics) for the time, regardless of their commercial success.

[Joefish]

Hardly seems a fair contest when 16-bit machines are included. (OK, you just edited them out!)

Of the 8-bits I think the Enterprise was probably the most promising, if one could overlook it being over-priced, badly supported and late to market. It was quite a versatile machine with lots of colour and re-programmable screen modes.

I would go for the MSX if its display had been part of a linear memory map like the Spectrum, but instead accessing it indirectly was slow and ruined any advantage its multiple graphics modes brought.

As for 16-bits, clearly the Amiga had the best design going. It wasn't the huge leap ahead most owners thought as using all those extra graphics features at once caused horrendous bottlenecks that would made MSX and Speccy graphics contention timing look simple. The ST was a lovely clean design. It started out the cheaper option and, like the Spectrum, was ripe for discovering new tricks and effects. But in the end the Amiga could do a lot more straight out of the box for not a lot more of your cash.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Fitst, I must say I'm not an expert so my answer may be silly, but QL & MSX are my choices. The number of games broke the draw in favour of the second one.

QL design was cool, very 80s-ish and the idea of including Microdrive units was an effort to make it a professional computer.

On the other hand, the idea of MSX as an OS standard was a very important step. Sony, Philips, ... different features to choose from but all 100% compatible.

[PeterJ]

Thanks [mention]Joefish[/mention]. I realised my error!

[PeterJ]

My choices would also be the MSX and Enterprise.

The idea of a standard is what interests me about the MSX. Companies working together like that must have been really exciting times. I understand it's still relatively popular in Japan?

The Enterprise seems very well designed and showed a huge amount of promise. Just too late as [mention]Joefish[/mention] says.

[akeley]

I'm neither a coder nor hardware wiz, so my take on this is purely from a l-user point of view.

I'd say CPC was the one which should've done much better. It was like Spectrum on 'roids, with proper sound, sprites, memory, keyboard and all that other jazz, like CPM. And it was still Z80! Imo it should be the real king of the 80's, instead of Commodore, since I think it had enough oomph to handle the "big" games, which made the Commie. C64 is a fine machine of course but I can't get over its blocky "Shades Of Brown" gfx.

Oh, well. These boys over at CPC forums are still well bitter over it, and blame it on Speccy, which is mostly silly of course, but what can you do. I've always wanted to have 6128, it's such a sleek design and is a powerhouse too, and now I have one, plus GX4000 modded to 6128+.

Another one, which is a sort of surprise to me is the ol' Atari 400-XL line. Back in the day we used to laugh at it (without malice thou), not sure why actually, maybe because I've only seen a few simple games on it, but now I see it was a real pioneer. Back in the 1979, to come out with this kind of machine with good fx/gfx (matching C64?), which did not cost the earth, and was capable of running games like Star Raiders was beyond amazing. It's odd that later they could not secure all the "big" games, because the machine itself was capable of running them. It's one of my favourite micros now, I find it quite fascinating.

[Lethargeek]

I can't name a single 8-bit machine as having both best design AND potential. The most notable example is Enterprise being good design but born dead as a platform. Actually, i don't think any 8-bitter had much potential for further development, even the MSX. All of them, good or bad, were temporary and dead-ends.

For 16/32 bit machines it is much easier: best design - Acorn Archimedes range (i regard Amiga as inferior, over-engineered and underpowered despite winning on the software side); best potential (sadly) - the horrible PC, just because it was open and easy to clone.

Aso i don't think QL belongs to this list. Maybe Atari too, being late 1970s tech.
And Sharp X1 (not present here) is much more interesting than Sharp MZ.

[AndyC]

I'd say CPC was the one which should've done much better. It was like Spectrum on 'roids, with proper sound, sprites, memory, keyboard and all that other jazz, like CPM. And it was still Z80! Imo it should be the real king of the 80's, instead of Commodore, since I think it had enough oomph to handle the "big" games, which made the Commie. C64 is a fine machine of course but I can't get over its blocky "Shades Of Brown" gfx.

The CPC didn't have any sprites, but as the "third place" machine it seems most likely it would have been more successful without the Speccy and C64 to contest with (although the ease a of porting from the Spectrum may have helped there)

The Atari 8-bits are interesting machines and probably deserved to do better. The Enterprise is also interesting, though it came far too late to matter and the architecture seems over complicated for an 8-bit machine, you almost have to work within its OS design and that's quite a big hit to take compared to being able to just hit the metal like most other 8-bits.

[Alone Coder]

I don't see anything on Amstrad CPC that couldn't be done on ATM-Turbo. But not vice versa. So despite the gfx chip, the Spectrum line is more powerful than Amstrad line, even if we compare year 1992 directly (by that time, ATM-Turbo even had an IDE controller). Gfx chips in MSX were far more serious. And MSX together with Apple II were the only 8-bit machines to have 16-bit "upgrades". There was such project for Spectrum (by Nemo) but it was not done because of too much software depending on t-states. MSX project was promising, but it died because the community literally abandoned MSX2 and later machines.

[Lethargeek]

I don't see anything on Amstrad CPC that couldn't be done on ATM-Turbo. But not vice versa. So despite the gfx chip, the Spectrum line is more powerful than Amstrad line, even if we compare year 1992 directly (by that time, ATM-Turbo even had an IDE controller).

If you're talking about "lines" then for 1992 you must compare ATM vs GX4000. And for 1993 vs Aleste 520EX.

[akeley]

[/quote]

The CPC didn't have any sprites, but as the "third place" machine it seems most likely it would have been more successful without the Speccy and C64 to contest with (although the ease a of porting from the Spectrum may have helped there)

It didn't? Ouch. Like, I said I'm an ignoramus, only know these things superficially. Though, judging by the CPC people's boasts I thought it of course does. In any case, the "big" games I mentioned earlier, such as Bard's Tale, Pirates!, Manic Mansion et al wasn't really sprite based.

Was it really a 3rd place machine? Maybe in UK. I thought Atari 8 bit did much better, worldwide. It's interesting actually, has anybody got any estimate sales figures for the micro era?

I don't see anything on Amstrad CPC that couldn't be done on ATM-Turbo. But not vice versa. So despite the gfx chip, the Spectrum line is more powerful than Amstrad line, even if we compare year 1992 directly (by that time, ATM-Turbo even had an IDE controller).

'Spectrum line is more powerful"...because of an obscure clone released 7 years after the CPC? Seems fair

[PeterJ]

Aso i don't think QL belongs to this list.

Agreed. My bad.

[+3code]

Hard question. As powerful design, I think: MSX, Enterprise and SAM, but as potential, MSX and Enterprise, SAM came too late.

Edit: I see now the Memotech, that was too interesting

[Vampyre]

I owned an MSX for a brief time in the late 80s. Cracking machine, so that's where my votes gone.

[MatGubbins]

I always saw the Amstrad as the 3rd of the top 3 in the UK (Spectrum, C64, Amstrad) with the BBC on a slow pace behind.
As for the poll, the Enterprise specs really looked promising, just a shame that it was late for the party, heck, it was almost over and kicking out time. Cutting the ram down to 64k was not a good idea either. The design and look of the machine was pants... it looked as if it was cobbled together from the bits box as part of a Blake's 7 prop.
Before I got my Spectrum I recall seeing a Memotech MTX in the window of the local computer shop (Computers Plus) and thinking that.... yes that, is a computer I like the look of.

[Joefish]

Shame Amstrad only gets one entry in the table.

If it hadn't been for the arrival of the ST and Amiga, the Amstrad 6128+ could have become a very serious machine.
With the memory, the screen resolutions and the disk drive the 6128 was a seriously useful machine for home office on a budget, as well as a fair runner-up in the games department. And with the GX4000 console hardware grafted on to the 6128 Plus (supposedly inaccessible except by cartridge, which was a stupid design idea, but easily hacked past) giving it hardware scrolling and colour sprites, it was a much more interesting game platform.

Amstrad owners hated the Spectrum because they got so many cheap ports of games using the Z80 code from the Spectrum but no attempt to tidy up the graphics. But that was their own fault - if they'd bought more machines there'd be more money in doing conversions properly!

[akeley]

Amstrad owners hated the Spectrum because they got so many cheap ports of games using the Z80 code from the Spectrum but no attempt to tidy up the graphics. But that was their own fault - if they'd bought more machines there'd be more money in doing conversions properly!

It's is the same with Amiga->ST hate. It's misguided of course, because if you could really blame anything apart from the market itself it'd be the greedy publishers/lazy devs, not the machines themselves.

The problem is, this silly outlook is still strongly embedded in many people's minds, even though we're not teens anymore but 40+ year olds, who really should know better

[Joefish]

I think on the ST side there wasn't so much hate - or even jelousy - as there was puzzlement; why would anyone want to play games that looked really good but had less playability than something on a ZX81? Which wasn't too far off, as by the time you got all the Amiga's extra graphics functions working together, the bottlenecks on processing actually left it with very little processing time. Much like a modern Spectrum game running so much multicolour effect it's got the practical CPU time of a ZX81.

[PeterJ]

I need to spend time looking at the CPC range more (I called the Amstrad entry Amstrad CPC to include the 464, 664 and 6128 [mention]Joefish[/mention]). Sadly it only has a score of one currently. In hindsight I would have excluded the C128 as it's a C64 with more memory.

My prejudiced view of looking at CPC screens has always been blocky graphics (which I'm sure is unfair), or with higher resolution games 2 colours only. As I said, I need to dig deeper (I know there are some games that use custom fancy modes). It's the same with the Atari 8Bit machines in that I just think of muddy brown displays. I'm not a developer.

[PeterJ]

Removed the QL and duplicate Amstrad entry. Also allowed users to change their vote.

Ohhh shoot. In changing some of the entries it deleted the existing votes. Apologies. Vote again please.

[+3code]

Removed the QL and duplicate Amstrad entry. Also allowed users to change their vote.

Uh, Have all the votes been deleted?

[PeterJ]

Removed the QL and duplicate Amstrad entry. Also allowed users to change their vote.

Uh, Have all the votes been deleted?

Yes, sorry. My fault entirely. Apologies.

[Joefish]

The Amstrad's middle resolution of 320x200 in four colours was rarely used in games; only in those crappy Spectrum ports where of course even the Speccy's palette had to be downgraded. But with a careful selection of colours and maybe slightly more abstract graphics than trying to draw anything realistic, this mode looked really good. Certainly an improvement over all those monochrome Spectrum titles. Look at it's version of Head Over Heels for instance - brilliant stuff.

And with the colour sprites the GX4000 hardware was capable of, this limited range of colours was fine for game backgrounds.

The problem was that in either mode (320x200x4 colours, or 160x200x16 colours) there was more than twice as much screen memory to move around as the Spectrum, using the same processor at roughly the same speed. Static screen games didn't suffer much, but anything with a lot of scrolling was kind of screwed.

[PeterJ]

Thanks for the detailed explanation [mention]Joefish[/mention]. An interesting read.

[akeley]

I think on the ST side there wasn't so much hate - or even jelousy - as there was puzzlement; why would anyone want to play games that looked really good but had less playability than something on a ZX81? Which wasn't too far off, as by the time you got all the Amiga's extra graphics functions working together, the bottlenecks on processing actually left it with very little processing time. Much like a modern Spectrum game running so much multicolour effect it's got the practical CPU time of a ZX81.

The "hate" - or just a case of extreme sour grapes - was - still is! - mostly on the Amiga side, because of these lame ports. I'm not sure I can agree with the playability charge in regard to Amiga. I can only think of maybe Shadow Of The Beast being a good example of that, but even so, I'm sure every ST user would sold their granny to have it on their machine, playability be damned, and two, I think it was more a case of bad game design than hardware bottlenecks.

And once the devs got to grips with Amiga hardware (SotB was a kinda watershed moment) the quality of Amiga games was consistenty much higher than the ST ones. These weren't huge differences, but they were there for sure, and some things just couldn't be done on the ST.

[mention]PeterJ[/mention] I had similar prejudices with the blocky gfx, in regard to C64 or Atari range, Amstrad too to some extent. In fact, it was one of the main reasons I sold my C64 very quickly and begged my folks to get me an Amiga. It's a bit of funny Spectrum conditioning, we had this higher res stuff (or at least it looked higher res) and cleverly coded games that played to our hardware's strengths, but we did miss out on sprites and other stuff, never even mind the music.

I'm exploring all the early CPC / C64/ Atari libraries at the moment and they're chock full of excellent, virtually unknown games. And of course many, many versions which we have loved on Spectrum are actually better on these machines. Just look at Ninja, for example, I've played it side-by-side on Spectrum vs Amstrad vs Atari recently, and the latter version is by far the best one.

And here's live feed from my desk, playing Crazy Cars 2 side by side on Amstrad vs ZX, best not look perhaps

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