The gloves are now well and truly off as Atari and Commodore slug it out in their Wild West showdown. When the dust settles — some time next year — the micro market will look vastly different from its present layout.
The prize they are fighting over is to corner the market in the next generation of home computers based on 16-bit and 32-bit processors.
Atari has drawn first blood by slashing the price of the 800XL micro first to £199.99 and now to £169.99 in an attempt to undermine Christmas sales of the Commodore 64 and generate some cash for its next leap forward.
Sam Tramiel, son of Atari boss Jack Tramiel, has indicated in an interview that Atari will launch a 32-bit micro next April costing under $1,000. Industry observers on the other side of the Atlantic are saying that Atari has an agreement to use Motorola’s 68000 chip and that Tramiel’s intention is to produce a Macintosh-like machine. It will probably feature a 256K memory, dramatic full-colour graphics and impressive sound features.
The formula sounds very similar to the Lorraine, an innovative home micro being developed by an American company called Amiga that has just been bought by Commodore.
The similarity is more than coincidence. Atari had paid Amiga to develop custom sound and graphics chips for its next generation of machines before Tramiel took over Atari. Amiga subsequently returned the money saying that it had been unable to develop the chips. Atari responded by suing Amiga a matter of days before news leaked out that Commodore had bought the company.
The specification of the Amiga Lorraine is certainly impressive and was demonstrated to a selected few at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June. Built around a 68000 chip it features 128K of RAM (expandable internally to 512K), 64K ROM holding Basic and speech software, built-in 320K disk drive, built-in 300 baud modem, parallel and serial interfaces, expansion port and ROM cartridge slot capable of taking second processors. The four-channel sound is said to be every bit as good as that on the Commodore 64. But it is the graphics that are truly impressive. The custom chip in the Lorraine can display a total of 4,096 colours at a resolution of 640 by 200 pixels. It can generate eight, 16-colour sprites as well as windows displaying different graphics modes. A feature described as “frame-buffer animation” allows you to take part of the screen and move it around. The quality of the TV output is said to be so good that it can make an 80-column screen readable on an ordinary TV.
Amiga planned to release the machine with free word processor and spreadsheet software at a highly competitive price of $1,500.
Needless to say, Commodore and Atari in the UK were both unwilling to discuss their plans for next year. But a Commodore spokesman did confirm that the company has acquired Amiga and is currently “doing something very interesting with the Lorraine.”
And how long will UK users have to wait for the goodies? As they say, stay tuned to this channel.
My bet is that come next summer you should be able to walk into a shop, hand over £1,000 (or less) and buy a micro that delivers everything that the Lorraine promises.