In that regard, I almost feel like a new Atari 800-series would be better.
The C64 had good graphics and excellent sound but so much of it was behind a brick-wall learning curve of poking. Atari's native BASIC at least provided some rudimentary access. You want something where the user can get a win on day 1, or it's getting buried in the closet with the rock tumbler.
Or maybe if they packed in a super-extended BASIC ROM. But pretty quickly you end up wanting something with more modern flow control and structures, maybe closer to "Qbasic with sprite commands" and then you're probably demanding more than what can be reasonably asked of a 6510-class CPU.
>The C64 had good graphics and excellent sound but so much of it was behind a brick-wall learning curve of poking. Atari's native BASIC at least provided some rudimentary access. You want something where the user can get a win on day 1, or it's getting buried in the closet with the rock tumbler.
This was not my experience at all.
I started with an Atari 400 when I was 11, and there was little to no documentation about the machine. I took a BASIC programming class taught on a Vic 20 when I was 10 years old. But then I saved up and got an Atari for my 11th birthday. I cut my teeth on Atari Basic, but it seemed so limited to me. I wanted full access to all of the machine but there was simply no documentation my 11 year old self had available, the internet was not a thing, and there were no books about it at my local library in the early 1980s. The BASIC cartridge didn't really offer much in the way of using the machine to its full capacity.
Then I got a C64 and everything changed. The C64 manual I had included BASIC programming, as well as how to program the sound chip to make simple music and sound effects. There was a complete memory map of the C64 including all the chips, the VIC, the SID, the CIA chips - everything. All the pinouts for all the I/O ports were mapped out.
And in the back of the manual were all the opcodes for the CPU, with detailed information about how they work, A, X, and Y registers, status registers, program counter, address modes, etc, etc... it was absolutely fantastic how much was documented, literally everything about the computer. The book even had a full schematic of the C64 in the very back as a large fold-out poster. Atari had nothing like this.
It was like night and day compared to the very closed Atari platform. I quickly ate up BASIC on the C64 and moved right into assembly language, when I was 14. I got very into the European "demo scene", while being a teenager in America in the mid/late 1980s. Atari 8-bit just seemed like a toy compared to what was going on with the C64 in the world at the time.
The C64 had good graphics and excellent sound but so much of it was behind a brick-wall learning curve of poking. Atari's native BASIC at least provided some rudimentary access. You want something where the user can get a win on day 1, or it's getting buried in the closet with the rock tumbler.
Or maybe if they packed in a super-extended BASIC ROM. But pretty quickly you end up wanting something with more modern flow control and structures, maybe closer to "Qbasic with sprite commands" and then you're probably demanding more than what can be reasonably asked of a 6510-class CPU.