Vintage Design Flaws

[IntvGene]

We all know that the Vintage computing history was nothing like the consoles. For the PC especially, there wasn't a single company pushing the innovations so much, especially for gaming. But, looking back, you have to laugh and wonder about a couple of things..

- "swapping Joysticks" on the C64
... I couldn't stand this. Couldn't they get a standard on which single port to use?

- making a Fastload cart pretty much essential for a C64
... Yes, the C64 was that slow, and it made me wonder why it took Epyx, not Commodore to actually do something about it.

- putting the Atari 1040STE joystick ports on the BOTTOM of the machine
... that's just a brillant place to put it. Now I have to lift up and balance my entire machine with one hand, while inserting a joystick or removing the mouse.

- Joystick woes for the early PC days
... how long did it take for a good digital joystick to come out? My friend actually had an analog joystick in about 1982, of course, we would have much rather had our good old 2600 joystick instead.

Any other nominations?

[Ze_ro]

- "swapping Joysticks" on the C64

What really bothered me about this was the fact that between this, and the fact that the power switch is right next to the joystick ports, it's amazingly easy to accidentally give the system a static shock and fry one of the chips. I've burned out at least three C-64's that way (and maybe a VIC). Great design there guys!

This probably also plagues the Amiga. Luckily, most games understand that you should have a mouse in port 1, but it was annoying enough that my brother bought a switch box to swap ports with a single toggle button. It doesn't help that the Amiga's joystick ports were moved to the back of the computer.


Yes, the C64 was that slow, and it made me wonder why it took Epyx, not Commodore to actually do something about it.

I guess Commodore was more worried about compatibility... that's the whole reason the 1541 is so bloody slow in the first place (There was a bug in the VIC-20's serial port that limited it to a slow speed, and they purposely limited the C-64 and 1541 because of it). The C-128's double-sided 1571 finally fixes this bug, but the drive still isn't terribly fast... and I don't think you can use it's burst mode with commercial stuff in C-64 mode anyways.

Commodore sort of limited the C-64 in other ways too, like making the tape drive the default target for LOAD and SAVE operations (Although I guess this was a legitimate decision considering the price and user base of disk drives at the time). At least they had the insight to stick a second joystick port on it (the VIC only has one!), and put in (much) better video and audio chips.

Perhaps when Commodore saw Epyx fastload cartridges, they didn't think they could compete against them?


- Joystick woes for the early PC days
... how long did it take for a good digital joystick to come out?

It's pretty sad to think that for a long time, Gravis had the best PC controllers on the market. Why on earth did every company feel they had to make a flight stick out of their joysticks?? Flight sticks are just about useless for anything other than flight simulators.

The Coleco ADAM had one of the most boneheaded power supply designs ever, what with it being inside the printer and all.

IBM PC's were plagued by limitations due to maintaining backwards compatibility with the likes of the 8088. The fact that we had to deal with "conventional", "expanded", and "extended" RAM for so long was ridiculous... keeping binary support for 8088 programs on a 486 always seemed like a waste of time to me.

And I still don't understand why Windows gained as much popularity as it did. Does anyone else remember using Windows 3.1? You had to load it on top of Dos, everything ran significantly slower, most normal tasks (like unzipping files) actually ended up being MORE complicated, and the whole interface was rather terrible really. If it wasn't for the fact that there was no Netscape for DOS, I never would have bothered with Windows at all.

--Zero

[Ze_ro]

Oh, and who can forget Commodore's mangled character set on the VIC-20 and C-64? Anyone else remember downloading files from BBS's that lOOKED lIKE tHIS aND yOU hAD tO cONVERT tHEM? Who's idea was it to have everything in upper case by default?

Ironically, I've adopted a style of writing where I use upper case letters for everything, and just use bigger upper case letters for stuff that's really supposed to be upper case. I can probably blame that one on Commodore.

--Zero

[oesiii]

- putting the Atari 1040STE joystick ports on the BOTTOM of the machine
... that's just a brillant place to put it. Now I have to lift up and balance my entire machine with one hand, while inserting a joystick or removing the mouse.




when I saw the thread topic I was already to rant about this one but you did a great job :)

The Atari 130XE had the cartridge port all the way in the back, very annoying because all the other cables plugged in back there, you couldn't see what you were doing without lifting up the machine, and you lost a lot of desk space because you have to leave room to put in carts in the back.

[anagrama]

It doesn't help that the Amiga's joystick ports were moved to the back of the computer.


Yeah, that's the one I was going to mention. At least they moved them to the side on the A600.

[Jorpho]

And I still don't understand why Windows gained as much popularity as it did. Does anyone else remember using Windows 3.1? You had to load it on top of Dos, everything ran significantly slower, most normal tasks (like unzipping files) actually ended up being MORE complicated, and the whole interface was rather terrible really. If it wasn't for the fact that there was no Netscape for DOS, I never would have bothered with Windows at all.

Don't forget how it crashed more often, too. I couldn't even stand using Netscape myself. The TrueType font support and WYSIWYG word processors were kind of handy, though.

[calthaer]

Windows also had streamlined drivers for printers, sound cards, etc. - it was no DirectX, but it was certainly a step forward in terms of making it easy for the game-makers (for those games that ran in Windows, that is - I can only think of Myst, not sure which other ones did too). Funny, though, how making it easier doesn't seem to have really helped the quality of games on the PC...ever since DirectX the quality has gone steadily downhill.

[Ze_ro]

The Atari 130XE had the cartridge port all the way in the back, very annoying because all the other cables plugged in back there

Commodore did the same thing with the C-64 and VIC-20... it wasn't that big a deal with the C-64, but the VIC-20 had an awfully tight cartridge slot, and the cartridges were so wide that it was essentially impossible to get them out without lifting the machine so you could actually grab hold of them.

--Zero

[Flack]

Here are three I can think of:

C64 Shift Lock Key
You can easily tell any C64 keyboard that's been opened or worked on. The Shift Lock key doesn't work anymore. Inside the keyboard, two hard wires were soldered to the Shift Lock key. To remove the bottom board you had to snip those wires. Unless someone soldered those back together (which was rare), the Shift Lock key wouldn't work. What's better is those wires held the key in place, so with a pencil you can easily pop the entire key out.

PC/Apple Centering Joysticks
What was up with those little sliders on every joystick back then that you would always have to calibrate? Didn't you just put them in the middle? Why didn't they just hard set them in the middle?

IBM PC Dos Memory Managers
When I worked at Best Buy, we would have people drag their home PC's in daily to have me configure their autoexec.bat and config.sys files to try and squeeze a few extra K of RAM out of that precious 640k available. You had QEMM and Memmaker, plus just doing it all manually. Then you had EMS, EMM, NOEMS, XMS?, and some other kind. After a while most people had choice autoexec's depending on what they were doing. Surely they could have agreed on a standard somewhere down the line?

[Jorpho]

Why agree on a standard when Microsoft can just force you to do things the wrong way?

[Ze_ro]

Inside the keyboard, two hard wires were soldered to the Shift Lock key. To remove the bottom board you had to snip those wires.

Which also means that cleaning the keyboard is a crazy adventure. I don't look forward to trying to clean up that dusty old VIC-20 sitting in the basement (Argh, I just realized that I've had a C-64 dust cover covering a broken C-64 when it could have been preventing a lot of that dust from getting in the VIC to begin with... now I feel stupid.)


What was up with those little sliders on every joystick back then that you would always have to calibrate?

I never really understood those either. I can't imagine a reason that you'd want to move them off-center. The part I always found annoying was that they put those sliders right next to the stick in places where you were almost guaranteed to accidentally nudge them while you were playing, thus throwing off your control until you realized what you had done.

--Zero

[IntvGene]

IBM PC Dos Memory Managers
When I worked at Best Buy, we would have people drag their home PC's in daily to have me configure their autoexec.bat and config.sys files to try and squeeze a few extra K of RAM out of that precious 640k available. You had QEMM and Memmaker, plus just doing it all manually. Then you had EMS, EMM, NOEMS, XMS?, and some other kind. After a while most people had choice autoexec's depending on what they were doing. Surely they could have agreed on a standard somewhere down the line?

I loved this. A bunch of my friends and I were like auto-mechanics, trying to tune our autoexec to slim it down to get every last byte of memory out of it. If I remember correctly, I think I had 614k conventional memory free at one time.

Hey, did anyone ever have a "portable" computer? That was another great joke. Hey, it's portable, and only weighs 30 lbs? SOLD!
That being said, I'd still definitely must own a SX-64 in my lifetime. :o

[Kid Ice]

How about the proprietary controllers for the Commodore 16 and the Plus-4 (not sure I got the names right). Whose idea was that?