I counted the pixles of our livingroom TV, well not all of them . It's a normal aspect 4:3 TV that's about 13 years old. I displayed an all blue image on it and then counted the vertical blue lines. I counted to 100 and then measured how long that was. 100 points was 85mm. The whole visible picture was 480mm. That would give (100p/85mm)*480mm = 564.7 points. Probably 565 points then.
565/8 = 70.625 == 70 columns.
PRG Starter - a VICE helper / Vic Software (Boray Gammon, SD2IEC music player, Vic Disk Menu, Tribbles, Mega Omega, How Many 8K etc.)
I have now read the whole book. I think there was surprisingly little written about the last amigas. And there was also some strange information about them. For example, the best consumer-level Amiga ever built, the Amiga 1200 is just breifly mentioned. In fact the three only mentions of it I can find are these:
"The engineers also created the Amiga 1200, an AGA based system, which would be the Amiga 500's successor. The A1200 was remarkable for including an optional hard drive inside the keyboard. Commodore released the A1200 in October 1992, just in time for Christmas. Sales of the A1200 were strong."
"We had the A1200 and they couldn't make enough of them because they had no chips,"
"In October 1992, after the Amiga 1200 and 4000 began shipping,..."
I wouldn't say the internal harddrive was what made the A1200 remarkable. It was a 32 bit computer with good graphics. The big selection of third party expansion cards that soon came also made it very fast. It could also use a VGA monitor. Not a mention of any of this. And they allready had a consumer model with built in hard disk, the A600. So why would that be remarkable about the A1200? But there is no mention of the A600HD (which most often came with a 40MB internal hard disk). Instead it's said "They wanted new features but the A600 didn't give anybody any new featurs that anybody would consider useful". Btw, the A600 also had a PCMCIA2 port, composite out and rf out I think (like the A1200). The compact design of the A600 returned in the A1200.
Another strange piece of info: "...engineer Jeff Porter merged the AGA chipset with the CDTV to make a dedicated game console. Commodore was going head to head with Sega and Nintendo with a new console, named CD32."
I don't think that is very likely at all. The CD32 is just an A1200 with an added CD-ROM plus an extra chip. Why would someone base it on the CDTV (=A500+CDROM) and design the A1200 architecture all over again?
No mention at all what happened to the amiga after Commodore...
Anyway, even with the shortcomings with some details. I think the book was well worth reading. It was very interesting really. I had no idea of most of the stories. The people flow between Commodore and Atari etc. Commodore and Atari is very connected. And Apple too in some ways.
I think it's amazing how Commodore managed to screw up the diskdrives every time. I'm taking these figures from my head now, so maybe they aren't correct, but I think the Vic-20 diskdrive should have been 4 times faster. Because a bug in a chip they had to do everyting in software and ended up with the slow disk. On the c64, the designers had added extra high-speed lines to the serial port for something like 30 times faster disk access. But the production guys removed them to save space. They didn't know what they were for. But even without those lines, the c64 could have had the intened vic-20 speed (4 times faster) but instead it ended up slower than the vic-20. On the Amiga, there was an external company that was hired to make a file system. And they made this really great system. But when Commodore took over the Amiga (saving it from Commodore's founder Jack Tramiel that now owned Atari), the makers of this file system wanted a lot more money. So instead, Commodore used some slow much worse files system on the amiga originally developed on some university... The main guy behind the Amiga originally came from Atari and Atari backed them with money later on and was supposed to use the chips in some game machine. The Amiga group later designed the Atari Lynx (which they didn't want Atari to have either). And Atari ended up using Commodore-Amiga computers to develop games for the Atari Lynx.
The guys behind the vic chips, sid chip, c64, one of the vic-20 prototypes etc later formed an company called "Ensoniq". I think that's pretty cool, because I have an Ensoniq synthesizer!!! (Ensoiq SQ-1 plus)
As I said, well worth reading if you are into Commodore stuff...
/Anders
PRG Starter - a VICE helper / Vic Software (Boray Gammon, SD2IEC music player, Vic Disk Menu, Tribbles, Mega Omega, How Many 8K etc.)
Here's my personal experience in putting characters on screens with my own circuits and homebrew computers over the years:
When working with older TVs where the only "input" is the antenna connectors on the back (twin screw terminals back when, remember?) I have done from 8 characters per line up to 96.
At 96 characters per line you're guessing what many of the characters are. 80 is readable, but tough on the eyes. I frequently used 72 characters per line for my own circuits, but it took a good connection, low interference levels, and excellent power supply regulation in the TV (as well as a lot of care with the video signal levels.) 64 characters was more readable, and was probably my favorite number of characters per line overall.
40-48 characters, though, reduced the number of aspirin I had to take over long programming sessions. After a while even the characters at this level start to swim in front of your eyes. This number of characters worked far far better than higher numbers when you're using just any old TV set. I should also mention that smaller TVs (<13 inches) are generally better than large TVs (say, 19 inches) for clarity of the character images. I thought I was giving myself an upgrade when I bought a new 19" RCA color TV for use as a computer monitor--it was a set of headaches I bought for myself until I went back to the 10" black and white.
And for myself I saw very little difference in quality between 40 and 48 characters on any TV screen, but 48 characters was far nicer to program with--the extra characters made a big difference. So I was disappointed when the C64 came out with a 40 character screen. I'd hoped they'd at least go to 44 (double the Vic) or better yet all the way to 48 (more power-of-2 friendly.)
For "casual" displays--intended to be read by non-computer people, or anything that was to be viewed at a distance I'd use from 16 to 32 characters per line. When I got the Vic it went on the RCA color TV, and it looked great there. The C-64 was later used on the same TV for a while, but after getting seasick off the display after a couple of late-night programming sessions the C64 got a new 1701 monitor and the Vic got the TV back (I had downgraded it to a 5" black and white TV in the meanwhile. The Vic looked great on that TV, too, even without color.)
I'm looking forward to reading the book myself. I hope the extras on the calculator age come along. My first two calculators were Commodores, and I was working with a guy who was doing some assembly work for Godbout when the keyswitch fiasco occured.
The site is temporarily out of order it says, so I'd suppose the document will be online in one form or another shortly. Unfortunately I haven't kept a local copy.
By the way, the 80 column mode on my BBC is not too bad using composite (monochrome) video output. I connected it to my 1084, and some day I'll look into what it takes to get colour from the RGB port too.
. It's a normal aspect 4:3 TV that's about 13 years old. I displayed an all blue image on it and then counted the vertical blue lines. I counted to 100 and then measured how long that was. 100 points was 85mm. The whole visible picture was 480mm. That would give (100p/85mm)*480mm = 564.7 points. Probably 565 points then.
