I never had an 800, but I had a VIC-20, C-64 and multiple Amigas. This is actually starting to interest me in the Atari 800 as the technical forerunner of the Amiga...
The game design was great. You could win by screwing the other players over but you would be master of a doomed colony that was going to suffer and fail. You had to help players while also staying on top to really win the game with a successful colony. My family and extended family spent many hours playing MULE and every one of us knows this music by heart.
"I thought the sound chips on the market, including those in the Atari computers, were primitive and obviously had been designed by people who knew nothing about music." - Bob Yannes, God
Of course, it only sounded that bad on Atari... The Pokey was never really intended for music, just sounds... as a result, there is no proper way to get real pitches, just close .. almost...
The POKEY I've always found to be Primitive but powerful. I've heard some examples of it acting like a SID...though you always know it's a POKEY because it never can get the tones quite right and its waveforms are always messy(deliciously so I might add)
I have 3 Atari 800s and one 400 just for this game. Have 4 buddies that found old 800s just to have a real 4 player mule computer. The Atari version is still the best. Even better than the online versions.
@@sonomabob9043 Yea IRATA!!! Best 4 player game (same room) in video game history. Was always ranked top 5 of all games till like 2000. Trouble is you had to have 400 (moded to 48k) or a 800 to play with 4 joysticks. They combined 2 joystick ports to get 64K for the XL models which to me was a mistake.
@satancouldkillyounow Yea I've played Planet Mule. Not too happy with what they have done. They go out beg to be the guys to make the game worthy of the programmer. They get the families permission to make it. Then they start to change things without ever playing the original. Sort of like reiventing the wheel. Then you get newbs that think the ideas are better. Guess what? They all underestimated just how good the original programmer was. The timing is all off its not MULE
This is the original Atari 8-bit version, with four voices. The C64 port had only 3 voices because the C64 SID sound chip only had 3 voices. The big down-side to the Atari's sound chip was that it could only play in tune by combining pairs of voices (only two voices). With all four voices, they'd be out of tune. As a result, this M.U.L.E. theme has a janky off-key sound common to Atari 8-bits.
I have sick and dying parents so things like this cheer me up as I've come to realize if God was either real or not mean he would heal people who are hurt very bad. God doesn't seem to care or is not real. I hope it's the latter.
Мирослав Ушаков 4 channel, 4 melodic channel, 3 melodic channel with 1 noise channel, or 2 16-bit channel with 1 noise channel. CMIIW. Can also be stereo with 8 channels.
You're bonkers. This is the original version. The crummy down-mixed 3-channel C64 version came later and the C64 couldn't reproduce this version. Note "Planet Irata" - M.U.L.E. was also a four-player game, only on the Atari 800. That being said, this song is a real challenge for emulators to get right, but this is pretty darn close to how you'd hear it on a real Atari. The C64 was quite a bit more primitive than the Atari 8bits.
