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Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 1:52 pm
by Gunness
I'm looking for some expert input here as I have to admit that my personal knowledge of the incredible/ridiculous (delete where appropriate) number of 8-bit machines isn't as expertlike as it could have been ;)

In order to avoid having too many platforms with too few games to them, I'd like to lump some of them together - without getting too inaccurate with regards to compability. So please help me out:

Can these platforms be joined together without causing too much inaccuracy?
- Oric / Atmos
- BBC / Electron
- Spectrum 16 / Spectrum 48 / Spectrum 128
- C16 / Plus/4
- Atari 400 / 800 / 600XL / 800 XL / 800 XLF / 65XE / 130XE
- C64 / C128

These platforms are already separated:
- TRS-80 / TRS CoCo

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 2:01 pm
by Mark
C64/C128 can definetly be put together. There is hardly any C128 game that really used that machine's performance, and to play most games, you had to enter the ominous "GO64" command anyway. In fact, for the category of text-based adventures (i.e. for this site), I reckon you could leave out the C128 option altogether, and no one would miss it :-).

edit: I did a bit of quick research, and found out that some Infocom titles, such as "Bureaucracy", actually require the C128... I wasn't aware of that.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 2:08 pm
by Gunness
Yes, so far I've only come up with Bureaucracy and Trinity for the C128 :)

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 2:19 pm
by Mr Creosote
C16/C116/Plus4 can all be joined in my opinion. As with the C128, there is hardly any single game which doesn't run on all models.

In those rare cases ( Bureaucracy), a note in the synopsis would be enough.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 3:01 pm
by Samwise
Most (not all) Acorn Electron games will run on a BBC Micro. However, the reverse is not so true. The Electron was effectively a cut-down version of the beeb for the home market and is missing a number of features - notably the base system lacked the teletext MODE 7, which was often used for beeb text adventures as this was the text MODE which permitted the running program the greatest amount of available user memory.

Whilst they have similarities and a degree of cross-compatibility, I would say that for the majority of titles, trying to run a BBC Micro release on an Acorn Electron wouldn't be very successful without additional work.

Sam.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 7:44 pm
by dave
Samwise wrote:Most (not all) Acorn Electron games will run on a BBC Micro. However, the reverse is not so true. The Electron was effectively a cut-down version of the beeb for the home market and is missing a number of features - notably the base system lacked the teletext MODE 7, which was often used for beeb text adventures as this was the text MODE which permitted the running program the greatest amount of available user memory.
As an old Electron owner I found very few Beeb games that wouldn't work on the Elk. To try and not get into excessive technical details; as Samwise says, the Elk was a cut down cheaper version of the Beeb; but, it was also released a couple of years later so had a later version of the operating system and a slightly better memory map, also other things such as the disc drivers took up around 2Kb less memory.

I'm comfortable with Elk and Beeb games being described as the "platform" as they're very, very similar. I normally play these games with the emulator set to a BBC Master.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 10:08 pm
by Samwise
Without trying to be argumentative, I can think of more than a handful of beeb releases off the top of my head which wouldn't work on an Electron, without a proper conversion ... (Granny's Garden, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings: Game One, Dread Dragon Droom, Flowers of Crystal, L - A Mathemagical Adventure etc.).

If the goal is to find one platform that will run the majority of BBC/Electron releases, then I'd agree that a standard Model B will run most of the titles. However, if you're trying to merge those platforms which are interchangeable, then I still think Electron owners would struggle to get a not-insignificant number of beeb titles to work ...

Sam.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Wed May 26, 2010 1:01 am
by Alastair
Re. BBC / Electron, would having them grouped together be any more inconvenient to Electron users than for Spectrum 16 users having the Spectrum 16 and Spectrum 48 grouped together?

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Wed May 26, 2010 8:23 am
by Gunness
I'm not aiming for complete accuracy with the platforms. I'll leave that to Wikipedia and similar services. We need something that's both manageable and useful for site users.

My assumption is that platforms that are closely related (without necessarily being 100% compatible) will have the same target audience and can reasonably be placed together. It sounds to me as if the Beeb and Electron would fit this description.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Wed May 26, 2010 9:29 pm
by dave
Gunness: that was my thought. The BBC/Elk/Master hardware is close enough for them to be classed the same, just like Spectrum 16/48/128. Not all games will work, but most will without any form of mangulation.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2010 11:56 am
by Gunness
What about all the various mainframes? I can see that on some game sites, mainframes are divided into a plethora of platforms? But for our purposes, isn't it more useful to place them all in one group? I'm not all that familiar with those computers.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:00 pm
by Alastair
Gunness wrote:What about all the various mainframes? I can see that on some game sites, mainframes are divided into a plethora of platforms? But for our purposes, isn't it more useful to place them all in one group? I'm not all that familiar with those computers.
Well you already know my answer to that, but for the benefit of everyone else, I see no reason to subdivide the mainframe section. Adventure games might have started on mainframes and minis but the vast majority of adventure games were released for computers that you would find in the home, so there are likely to be few mainframe adventures (and I would hazard a guess that many mainframe adventures were recompiled to run on other mainframes anyway).


Changing the platform, Jacob, are you intending to keep the "Spectrum 16K" designation alongside the otherwise all encompassing "Spectrum" group?

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:25 pm
by dave
Gunness wrote:What about all the various mainframes? I can see that on some game sites, mainframes are divided into a plethora of platforms? But for our purposes, isn't it more useful to place them all in one group? I'm not all that familiar with those computers.
That's more difficult - "mainframe" is generally assumed to be any big computer system, even though it really refers to a selection of pre-80's machines of various differing hardware and Operating systems. In the 90's "Mainframe" meant either something based on ICL's VME or IBM's OS/390. Now it's pretty much just z/OS (the new name of OS/390).

For the ones currently listed we have 2 for the Alpha PDP-10 (Colossal Cave and Zork) and one for the HP-1000 mini computer (which was lated ported to MPE, which did exist until the 00's as HP MPE/iX)

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2010 9:47 am
by Gunness
Thanks for the the input. The # of mainframe games isn't substantial, but it's there. Still, splitting it into a number of platforms would seem to be going overboard. For instance, Adventureland lists four different PDP models, all more or less with the same games.
Changing the platform, Jacob, are you intending to keep the "Spectrum 16K" designation alongside the otherwise all encompassing "Spectrum" group?
I'm certainly no expert on Spectrum, so I set up the 16K as a separate platform as I was under the impression that it was a completely different range of machines (like the ZX81). But perhaps I'm wrong?

I find it tricky to walk the right line between precision and usefulness when it comes to platforms. For instance, I doubt many people would find it useful to have the few Memotech MTX games split into three platforms (as there were 3 models). On the other hand, I'd like to retain some degree of correctness.

Any suggestions as to some general guidelines? Is the current model acceptable, or does it need adjusting? Generally speaking, merging platforms takes 10 seconds, but as the process is irreversible, I just want to make sure I'm doing the right thing.

Re: Platform distinction

Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2010 10:45 am
by Samwise
Gunness wrote:I'm certainly no expert on Spectrum, so I set up the 16K as a separate platform as I was under the impression that it was a completely different range of machines (like the ZX81). But perhaps I'm wrong?
I'm no Spectrum expert, but the ZX Spectrum Wikipedia article seems to indicate the only difference between the 16K and 48K versions was RAM.

HTH,

Sam.