You might notice that some scenes show more colors onscreen than contemporaries like the C64 - this is all because of the display list interrupt techniques Crawford talks about, combined with clever overlaying of the player/missile sprite system. (The weird term for these hardware sprites is because it's built on the legacy of the 2600's system, which itself was built around the needs of the pack-in games: two players, two projectiles, one ball.)
The A8 series was limited in lifespan in the USA for a number of reasons: poor documentation, platform fragmentation, and price competition. It shipped with very little documentation on how it worked, leaving developers starved for resources for several years(Chris Crawford himself contributed to the unofficial bible, "De Re Atari"). There were the original 8k-upgradeable-to-48k 400/800 models and the newer XL/XE models, which shipped with 64k standard, and additionally, a change partway through the 400 and 800's life to an upgraded graphics chip; although most old software would run on the new machines, the C64 was more straightforward to target and to program, and it led the way in price-cutting the home computer market, which gave it a huge lead in market share. The later life of the A8 was entirely in European markets.
In terms of what the two machines can do when pushed to the limit, though, there's plenty of room for comparison.
If you want to check out an amazing example of what was being done by some Atari 8-bit programmers at the time, check out "Alternate Reality: The City", a Datasoft game by Philip Price released in 1985. He used some really novel techniques to create a game that was visually and musically impressive for the time and architecture. Some of the techniques he employed (from an interview on Atariage.com a couple years ago)
>1. Knowledge of the names of registers was from magazine articles. I was self-taught for the most part. On the tricks with the hardware, that was just me thinking up what cool things I could do with the functionality of the hardware. Cycle counting to determine the position of the television electron beam, using a sliding window and emitting to the front and back of the current visual screen, using interrupts to change the color registers on each scan-line (combined with cycle counting and moving the player missiles to be at two places at once on the scan line),the 3D stuff, security, encryption, texture mapping, music driver, all self taught (no books).
> You might notice that some scenes show more colors onscreen than contemporaries like the C64 - this is all because of the display list interrupt techniques Crawford talks about, combined with clever overlaying of the player/missile sprite system.
Similar techniques are heavily used on the C64 too. See e.g.
Like for many of these platforms, it's almost impossible to extract graphics from "newer" games or demos accurately without actually running them in a cycle accurate emulator and in many cases you have to capture at least two frames and interpolate...
One of the most impressive things I saw for the 8-bit Atari is Chris Hutt's 2011 conversion of Space Harrier. It's probably the best home conversion of the game this side of the Sharp X68000.
Also, the graphics chips in the Atari 2600 and 800 were designed by Jay Miner, famous as the "father of the Amiga". I'm no Atari expert, but I wonder if there is an evolutionary link between the display list techniques of the Atari 800 and the Amiga's Copper Lists? Long ago I read an interview with Archer Maclean, where he described the '800 as a "little Amiga". I wonder if anyone could expand on that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY_YsoR11d8
You might notice that some scenes show more colors onscreen than contemporaries like the C64 - this is all because of the display list interrupt techniques Crawford talks about, combined with clever overlaying of the player/missile sprite system. (The weird term for these hardware sprites is because it's built on the legacy of the 2600's system, which itself was built around the needs of the pack-in games: two players, two projectiles, one ball.)
The A8 series was limited in lifespan in the USA for a number of reasons: poor documentation, platform fragmentation, and price competition. It shipped with very little documentation on how it worked, leaving developers starved for resources for several years(Chris Crawford himself contributed to the unofficial bible, "De Re Atari"). There were the original 8k-upgradeable-to-48k 400/800 models and the newer XL/XE models, which shipped with 64k standard, and additionally, a change partway through the 400 and 800's life to an upgraded graphics chip; although most old software would run on the new machines, the C64 was more straightforward to target and to program, and it led the way in price-cutting the home computer market, which gave it a huge lead in market share. The later life of the A8 was entirely in European markets.
In terms of what the two machines can do when pushed to the limit, though, there's plenty of room for comparison.