fflip wrote:The Speccy is better because, truth be told, it was slightly less powerful than the C64 in most areas, therefore the (100% true) fact that it is actually better, is all the more stupendous.
Didn't the Speccy have a 3.5MHz Z80A, as opposed to the C64's 0.985 MHz 6510? (In fact, this link says 14MHz ).
So - it's got over 3 times the grunt, yet the games were 100% qualitatively shitter. What a win for the Speccy.
3 times the grunt? fuck off!
I've just coded a little spectrum demo and found it to be slow as shit.
The c64 video chip does most of its memory accesses when the CPU isn't hogging the bus so for the most part (7/8 of the lines on screen) the processor runs at full whack.
the z80 in the speccy is always being interrupted by the ULA if you access the 'contended' memory (i.e the first 16k, which includes the screen memory) so writing to the screen is bitch-slow. if your code and graphics are also in that block of memory then everything slows to an absolute nightmarish crawl.
and with no support hardware you really do need to hammer that screen memory as fast as possible.
this, combined with the fact that all spectrum owners are incontinent misanthropes, explains why the c64 reigns supreme.
sack wrote:even if the techie stuff didn't convince you surely my point about spectrum owners being miserable creatures who smell of piss carries some weight?
Sigh.
It was Amstrad owners who smelled of piss, C64 owners who cried as they wanked, and Spectrum owners who could lasso angry bison with their cocks.
moobaa wrote:So - if the C64's technical superiority has nothing to do with its excellence as a gaming machine
No, no, a billion times - no. "Technical superiority" has nothing to do with it. It's the quality of the games that counts and I genuinely believe that the Spectrum beats the C64 easily in that area (forget fucking attribute clash or SID chips or whatever - I'm talking about how good the games actually *are*). You give me a so-called classic exclusive-to-C64 game and I'll give you a much better exclusive-to-Spectrum game.
moobaa wrote:So - if the C64's technical superiority has nothing to do with its excellence as a gaming machine
No, no, a billion times - no. "Technical superiority" has nothing to do with it. It's the quality of the games that counts and I genuinely believe that the Spectrum beats the C64 easily in that area (forget fucking attribute clash or SID chips or whatever - I'm talking about how good the games actually *are*). You give me a so-called classic exclusive-to-C64 game and I'll give you a much better exclusive-to-Spectrum game.
moobaa wrote:So - if the C64's technical superiority has nothing to do with its excellence as a gaming machine
No, no, a billion times - no. "Technical superiority" has nothing to do with it. It's the quality of the games that counts and I genuinely believe that the Spectrum beats the C64 easily in that area (forget fucking attribute clash or SID chips or whatever - I'm talking about how good the games actually *are*). You give me a so-called classic exclusive-to-C64 game and I'll give you a much better exclusive-to-Spectrum game.
Go on. I dare ya...
Now will you give equivalents/comparables that are better than said C64 game? Because it's hard to compare. For instance, Knight Lore is a tremendous Speccy game, and there's nothing you can really compare it to on the C64, other than Head Over Heels which was also on the Speccy. On the other hand, most Commodore owners will say Paradroid is a classic C64 exclusive (I know you don't agree), and there's not much comparable on the Speccy, barring Quazatron which was not as good.
I think they excelled in different ways, and exclusive games coded specifically for that platform show that.
This doesn't make me much use in the "which is better" argument, does it?
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moobaa wrote:So - if the C64's technical superiority has nothing to do with its excellence as a gaming machine
No, no, a billion times - no. "Technical superiority" has nothing to do with it. It's the quality of the games that counts and I genuinely believe that the Spectrum beats the C64 easily in that area (forget fucking attribute clash or SID chips or whatever - I'm talking about how good the games actually *are*).
So then we're talking about game versus game, not platform versus platform. So what's stopping a Speccy-versus-NES challenge, then?
Sickboy wrote:You give me a so-called classic exclusive-to-C64 game and I'll give you a much better exclusive-to-Spectrum game.
What was that Speccy game in the Lleague a while back... JetPak? Lordy, if that was a "classic", I weep for the Speccy....
Though I understand, of course, you maintain the same attitude towards Paradroid.
The speccy got some right rough arcade conversions too - fucking awful in many cases.
and with all the will in the world you can't keep shovelling 10p coins into the game du jour, so you're going to have to make do with the home version.
sack wrote:The speccy got some right rough arcade conversions too - fucking awful in many cases.
and with all the will in the world you can't keep shovelling 10p coins into the game du jour, so you're going to have to make do with the home version.
and that, my friend, would have to be on the c64.
See, I love the C64, but we got shafted with some conversions too. Bomb Jack, Commando and Chase HQ were all much better on the Speccy.
I still prefer the C64 to the Speccy by miles though. I'm off to play Gribbly's Day Out.
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