Interesting that you brought up both Curt (who I was friends with and dearly miss) and Jerry (who may or may not remember me but I've never forgotten meeting him or his kindness to me). Absolutely. I'd love to see a prototype 3200 build in any state of completion, even if it was just an empty shell that was unpopulated with boards or chips of any kind. I'd just love to see what they were thinking in a way that's not just on paper.

Intellivision was 16-bit, the cartridge ROMs were 10 bit because most CP1610 instructions only needed 10 bits to store. The few instructions that needed 16-bits would use up two 10 bit words however overall this was a huge savings on ROM space. The internal RAM and data buss was 16-bit (there was also a small 256 byte 8-bit "scratchpad" RAM for storing things like object positions and scores). It was also had a primitive BIOS, it had an "executive" ROM that contained generic graphics elements and code snippets that would be used by programmers to save ROM space on the cartridges and was called for things like addressing the controllers. Also, while it had 8 sprites per scanline the CPU was powerful enough to generate objects by editing the graphics RAM directly, essentially a primitive sort of blitter. This was why there was little to no flicker in Intellivision games. EDIT: The NES doesn't technically use a 6502 it uses a Ricoh 2A03 which is an unlicensed copy that disables some parts of the die in an attempt to be just different enough that MOS could not sue. Ricoh claimed that it was reverse engineered but decapping shows they literally just copied the die and then disabled parts of it. Nintendo claims Ricoh did this without their knowledge and Ricoh claims Nintendo provided the design and they simply manufactured it, and everyone who was around then is retired and not talking or passed so the truth will likely never be known (though most likely everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing)

One of the biggest reasons for the crash was companies were pushing out shovel ware. Incomplete, rushed games, really bad games, that didn't even have a title screen and just started by throwing the starting game screen up when you plugged in the cart. People stopped buying in large part because of the bad quality and the rate they were releasing. They were in such a hurry to beat the competition to market that quality was an after thought.

Ironically, the beam racing (cost saving) architecture of the VCS allowed it to maintain enough of an edge to shrug off the Intellivision's theoretically superior hardware. The most conspicuous difference between the two software libraries was that almost 100% of the Atari 2600's games ran at 60fps, whereas literally 0% of the Intellivision's library did, and even 30fps was generally a tall order. AD&D ran at an inconsistent framerate of about 15, for example.

Nice overwview and some very nice tunes in the background there. Did I hear a 2600 rendition of Turrican even? 🤩

I strongly believe that the isolation of programmers at Atari and the notion that one programmer did it all led to Atari's biggest problems. Tod Frye's Pac-Man would match every description of the arcade title, but he didn't and couldn't know what elements fans wanted in their home port. Likewise with E.T.. Warshaw had little idea what moviegoers wanted in their game tie-in. The younger demographic of the film fans might've been better served by a Pac-Man clone with Reese's Pieces to collect, as suggested by Spielberg. Warshaw made an exploration title far closer to Raiders than anyone expected, making it the butt of jokes for 40+ years.

If it was basically 4 TIAs, doing quad duty on everything, there wouldn't have been anything quite like it. 320x384, so like the Famicom for horizontal resolution, but far greater vertical resolution than anything we got until, uh, the Super Famicom? And even then, no SNES games actually used that much vertical resolution. I'm going to guess it would have been interlaced. I'm also going to guess that the 8 (!) TIA voices would have been tweaked for better than 5-bit flexibility so they could legitimately be used for music, because otherwise there'd be no point at all in having 8 voices. When talking about the difficulty of programming for the 3200, the thing would still be fundamentally limited to beam racing, i.e. generating the image one scanline at a time. Maybe even one _half_ scanline at a time? If they didn't re-engineer the whole thing to account for this, then the biggest hurdle by far would be in dealing with sprites traveling between the four quadrants of the screen. Yikes.

i've always been fascinated by un-done systems, like this and the Dolphin. I'd love to see an actual working version of the un-done systems.

Very interesting! Great job on this..

That voice synth sounds like Sam on the Atari 400/800 (software automatic mouth). Pretty sure that Sam worked on C64 as well.

As a avid video game fanatic gen-x-er I remember those days well. Summary: Console marketing relied heavily on the popularity of arcades. Arcade industry hell bent on committing suicide. Console manufactures not pushing their consoles forward worried about getting rights to license products from a market committing suicide. An era of savvy consumers, stopped spending money on all of it. There was no John Stossel reporter caused a panic. No mystical ET moment that made everyone burned out. It was purely none of the game industry wanted to provide the customer with what they wanted and instead thought they were going to tell them what they want. Market collapsed from disinterested consumers. The only thing that could have saved any of these companies was to seriously push the graphic performance up which is what everyone REALLY wanted. In the arcades, arcade owners were pushing for more profits and in their greedy little pea brains they thought shortening the play time was the answer. So much so there was games programmed to essentially cheat to ensure the game play didn't go over 5 mins. AKA the "Paperboy Controversy." But to be honest, even kids knew this before that confirmation ever hit. They made it not fun to go play arcade games. The arcade owners killed the arcade games. I was lucky and grew up in an area that had multiple competing arcades that listened to their customers. Keep games on the lowest difficulty and switched to tokens when the era of making games cheat came out so they could give you more then a 4 plays per dollar. As you said the console makers were confronted by hesitant arcade manufactures to license game ports that would "compete" with the arcades. So the console manufactures were willfully holding back doing graphic improvements which was the only thing the consumers wanted. By the ET game did come about the industry had one-two punched itself to the mat already by greed, mismanagement and denying consumers of what they want. So VERY few people of that era even knew of the ET game when it came out. Mandela effect easily slips into their memory. Kids weren't aware of what was happening and gleefully playing with their old games (so no one is lying when they say they played video games even through the crash era.) And adults from that time era just didn't care about any of it mostly... except for the ones who caused the embarrassing situation who have chosen to remember it slanted differently. I was a weirdo kid who bought magazines covering arcade games and game consoles. Most of the subscriptions I had were more on the insider small business info of things. There was a lot of cool material beside "how to get the high score to galaga" crap. Never in a million years would I have thought that I should have kept these for historical reasons because everyone is going to remember it wrong. So this is coming from the memory of an old man now from when he was a kid wadding in on some of the dry material in a magazine. But I swear to you all... kids stopped going to arcades because they were getting completely wiped out in a matter of minutes. Parents stopped buying video game stuff because it just looked like the crap the kid already has. Kids played their old stuff oblivious that it's old and they haven't gotten anything new in YEARS. AND/OR they would get a new game that was actually old that the parents found in a discount bin or 2nd hand store. That is the real story, the best I can remember it.

At first glance I thought this was the Atari XE, which I’m familiar with but an Atari 3200? Gosh, Atari certainly came up with a lot of hardware ideas. 1:54 - You’re going a little fast and I’m getting a little muddled up with the timeline. Had the 5200, the kind of mid-gen upgrade to the 2600, already released or did it come as whilst Sylvia and Stella chip were in the midst of being worked on? From how it sounds, the Sylvia seems to be an alternative to the 7800, similar to how there was two different competing console ideas for the Dreamcast and Xbox. 4:22 - So a chip to enhance the older games. Funny the ideas being thought of back then that would pop up again in more modern times. 6:16 - Given Atari had their computer line of the 400 and 800, you would have thought upgrading their console with a successor would have been easier. I assume the microcomputers were stronger but had to devote rams and processes to working as computers; making a console version would allow the stronger chips and to focus just on the task of games. I’m not a developer though so there’s probably a lot more to it that I don’t understand (Commodore and Amstrad both took the approach of turning their computers into consoles at certain points). 7:56 - Ironically they did not remember this lesson for when the Jaguar would release. 9:56 - I like using the Supercharger as a comparison here. From such a comparison, it seems like it could have potentially accomplished what the later years of the 2600 achieved but with greater ease… but the programming errors and issues made that point mute. Despite it’s flaws, the 7800 comes across more favourably as the 2600 and 5200 successor. 12:57 - They were prepping for Intellivision and were blindsided by Colecovision entering the ring. 14:39 - Yeah, somewhat doubt the 3200 would have been enough. A better approach to the game side of things and either an earlier release of the 7800 or upgrades to it once they saw the NES would have been fair handier.

Cool design, very Bang & Olufsen.

a working 5200 controller.. that's all they needed :)

Good video you got any info on atari 2700?

Awesome thanks

I wonder if 4 TIAs and more RAM in Atari 3200 could have really made a good game console. The VCS2600 is a very surprising machine because it was so minimalistic. It e.g. *has* no interrupt service routines but the entire game basically *is* one single IRQ (in the way its timing is optimized). It is hard to imagine how the 4 TIAs would have communicated and why it crashed. Possibly they did use IRQ to intercept sprite collisions, but when more than 2 sprites overleaped, it would have triggered that IRQ interrupting an already running same IRQ routine and so ran out of stack or made terrible timing nonsense.

Apparently, 1979's Atari 400 was originally intended to replace the Atari 2600. A membrane keyboard was added to it at the 'last minute', pushing it into computer territory.

Looks cool like something from Space 1999 😮

I can't remember if I saw any rumors of this back in the day. The picture looks a little familiar.

What’s the name of the spaceship game at the end of this video?

The extra luma line implies it would have had 256 colours instead of the 2600's 128.

you speak Tia ... Tia means aunt !!!

I doubt the 3200 would have changed the situation, however it is also important to note that the games crash was mostly in America, as here in the U.K., all we knew of it was that games suddenly got a lot cheaper as computer sales and games sales as a result, were ramping up, and this was also the case in Europe and Asia. Commodore especially benefitted from this as they outsold Atari in computers in those markets, so weathered the storm in America far better than Atari did. Having said that, had the 3200 emerged a few years after the 2600, as games were taking off, the inevitable may have been postponed 6 months or so, or if arcade ports became more frequent and better quality, even hastened the crash! Overall though, nice video here, enjoyed it

Where did you get the new Mario Bros game rom?

We definitely would like to see a 3200 prototype, games or specs. Somebody could have it out there, or full documents, an emulator could be made bssed on. As is an 2600 plus Arm chip processor (practcally a super conputer compared to the 2600) carts, look similar in graphical quality to an NES, it's that bad. But, what I also would like to see, is the machine the Flare people had reported on hearing about when they joined Atari. A machine where everything was a sprite with 16 bit 6502 I think, but maybe a different one frkm the 16 bit 6502 machine that gkt scrappedin favour of the first Flare machine tbat then got scrapped in favour of the Jaguar. That all sprite machine was the way to go based on my iwn sumilar design work. One can maximiae performance, by minimising graphics handling to just displaying them. Allowing most of the CPU tume to do gane logic, or 3D like Doom, and run things like war hammer with over 100 sprites on a screen. They should have jept that going in development in the background so when they saw thet were goyinf to have to scrap their flare machine, they could immediately push the 16 bit 6502 out in the market. As long as they out did, or undercut NES in a console version, they could do fine. Otherwise, they should have merged the sprite only technology into their design, and put the technology straight into an upgraded ST. As it is, they managed to kill years worth of work, and years worth of market penetration. The problem has always been management. Chuck Peddle, the 6502 chip designer. Look into what he thought of the talent of a nunber of these lead engineers of various companies, who he had to help solve product design issues at the beginning. Even if he did give us the PET, he had talent. The problem was that the Atari 400, 3200, or 5200 design being better than the Intellvision, was not going to save the day. It's the Commodore 64 they needed to ve better than. Thars what the NES linw did. The first was technically better in some ways, the SNES was better, and ruvaling the Amiga in some ways. The graphics engine technology they had, then went over to the GameBoy series, abd we see the GBA, technically more advanced than the Amiga. Then Amiga failed to do in their graphics architecture upgrade, what they should have done yeara earlier, and failed to have byte block pixel modes to run games like doom. All missed steps. The Atari VCS, shpuld have been designed so the desogn could be expanded with more resolution, color, and sprites in the future, and become a computer model. It requires some thinking and stratrgic planning. But, these sorts of things were deliberately ignored, from here and moe thinking you get in management, which cost them a lot of profit trying to scatch up something to compete afterwards. By then, it was too late. Their profits were already under threat. Where good management is looking at what's coming in future to deal with, and what you can do about it. They could have set up the memory IO and expandable functionality layout rules for future revisions of chips right into the 3D era. Every new profuct line they either reuse the current chip with different memory and external chips, or use an expanded revision of it with full backwards compatibility. So, they have reserved bits in control registers for better resolition, full bit map modes, more sprites. Now. They were paying for a custom chip and teo other chips. They should have got a deal to get all the chips onto one chip with extra memory, better play field resolutions and colours, and more sprites, and draw those sprites and player fields off the cartridge through pointers. Have the main sprite 1, 2 and 4 bits, posdibly player 2 as well, have other sorites 1-2 bits Have resolution support for QVGA built in for future editin with more memory (but even now with the right high-speed cart). Possibility to design 640x240 now, and put on twin atrubute chacter colour for 20, 40, 80 column text mode. Use pallete for sprites general, unique pkayer 1 and two, or all unique. Have support built in for 4 bit modes on all sprite for gigh speed version. Run the external bus fast enough to do this, or at least use the now bigger internal ram, to run routines, to reduce bus contention conflicts with the graphics function. Have bit mapped sprites in block snd continuos (which they did in the home computers). Tiling (characters) is another potential one, from cartridge. Attach sound files sample acquisition to hsync, drawn from cartridge or memory, and lower quality tricks, but better frequency resolution. The TIA usea heaps of transistors, but does not do much. It has enough to do the above design, even with the other chips included if we don't add all the hudden features, buf they are there to produce the next version of the machine, and computer versions, by reusing the chip and adding memory and other control chips redesigning the IC from scratch is a najor expense, and takes time. Expanding an existing design predefined to be easy to expand is simpker and cheaper, but to nor have to redesign at all, but ad memory and some support chips, is cheapest. The computer designed like that, can be the size of a Sinclair ZX81 or Spectrum, but be more poweful personal computer than many. The Atari 8 bit home computer redesign from scratch, becomes unneeded. By building upon the design here to enhance graphics, sound and performance, and adding memory and support chips, the ST design becomes unneeded. You are heading into 16 and 32 bit withn high definition+ resolutions and 65 thousand colors plus by then. You hsve yo do a bit more to best out Amiga, but the ST never had those features intil later, and competed. The all sprite technology they had developed beats Amiga. From the beginning, they would have had a custom chip they could have got MOS technology to sell for them, in a slightly modified form wifh internal fuses blown to deactivate certain features, making it incompatible with their games console version. Just dusabling sprite 1 or every second sprite, would be enough. They then potentially have millions of extra chip sales a year, to more than enough pay to upgrade the chip and offer hobbked versions to others to payy for more upgrades. With a text mode, this mskes ot suitable for 100's of nillions of devices per year, everyslly including TV's, VCR's, Teletext, CD-G, DVD's, computers, cameras. Anything needing a higher grade information display. The 7800 was a way forwards, but they hobbled it with low memory and no computer version. They would have been better off letting those people run the company. They certainly could gave delivered better machines. They could have bought out Acorn computers and let them run the company better. So, many things could have been done. A natural low cost successor to the Atari 2600 and home computers, would be an Atari Lynx console computer in an 2600 case with a few enhancements (sprite rotate and skew and full SD resolution). 2600 and home computer compatabiliry chip built in. The way that thw sprite engine works, it would have been possible to simply upgrstde the graphics resolution to play at full SD resolutions. Aa it was, they went to Nintendo to sell them on the idea of selling the Lynx in partnership. This is like waving the red flag at a bull. They then continued to enhance their 2D engine, wiping out all the Lynx sprite advantages. The form factor, screen quality and resolution, were two issues which held them back. They should have said, we will buy in your texgnology to enhance other products, and put the technology into the home computers, consoles, ST. The options were there, and I imagine were bought, ir could be negotiated.

This would've been a better system than the 5200 if they could've fixed the bugs and released it in 1982. But you are right, that still wouldn't have been good enough to save Atari.

What killed Atari is that it was basically behind its competitors all the time. I wouldn't say the 7800 competed against the NES and the 7800 was released 3 years later than the original NES. The Atari ST was the first system that I think was a match for the machines at the time, it was almost as good as an Amiga, and better than a Mac. What blew everybody out of the water was the PS1, that was be far the best game console for its time.

A Tia do Atari

If 2600 was released with tapes instead of carts in the poorer Europe they could have dominated and been huge here before micros

A GOOD port of Pac Man and ET being playable might have kept Atari going until they figured out the next step. What more do you want from a system which was made to only play PONG-type games?

Major hw bug in STIA. So Jaguar was not alone.

The irony was is that the Atari 5200 was originally created to compete with the then "perceived" superior hardware of the Mattel Intellivision. And while the Intellivision did boast some impressive tech like the Vortrax chip Intellivoice, and the Intellivision 2 added to the mix with an Atari 2600 System Changer and later, the ECS Computer. But it was all sort of a "smoke and mirrors" because most of the advancement came from the Intellivision's "Decle" or 10bit programming (utilizing 10bit word lengths as opposed to the traditional for the time 8bit word length). But while this did result in a slight boost in graphics capability, it also lowered the frame rate to about 15fps max. So more sports and other games that didn't have a lot of moving sprites and objects were utilized. A sort of "cheat". And Atari was WAY ahead in its thinking as an Atari 5200 is nothing more than a slightly altered (for analog joysticks) Atari 400 stock computer, minus keyboard, function keys, and any ability to utilize external peripherals such as tape recorders, disk drives, and printers. Basically the PIO (Peripheral Input/Output) was scaled back and limited to the analog joysticks, it's own 2600 adapter, and the well engineered trackball. As for the Atari 3600, I remember reading about it in a Games magazine that it would incorporate a built in voice synthesizer, be able to support a keyboard and peripherals, and was more advanced with the ANTIC and GTIA chips receiving more video memory and onboard memory up to 64KB. And Atari 5200 only has 16KB internal. But it was abandoned in favor of the Atari 1200XL and 1450XLD Computers. Only the 1200XL made it out before that abomination Jack Tramiel took over.

I hope you realize there are already Atari 2600 games from BITD with 2kB of RAM within the cartridge. Burgertime by M-Network (Mattel) has 2kB of RAM in the cartridge. There are dozens and dozens of games for the 2600 back in the day with expanded RAM. The most common scheme doubled the RAM from 1kb to 2kb for games like Stargate, Dig Dug and Crystal Castles called the Superchip. But there other schemes as well, such as the CBS games version named "RAM Plus"

It’s a shame they didn’t come out with this in 1979 or even 1980 when they came out with the 400/800. They wouldn’t have had an aged 5200 in 1982 that faced the market crash and had backwards compatibility and could have gone with basically the same specs as 5200 but with 4-8kb of ram instead of 16 and been backwards compatible with the 2600. May have had more success than the ill fated 5200.

Hiring in outside engineering electronic engineering was just another sign of poor executive management.

Atari's only hit product was the 2600. Its lowly specs and its market dominance prove it was timing, marketing, and released games that sold consoles, not hardware specs alone. Atari never released anything with the same push as the 2600 nor with the same focus. Throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks is how the rest of their years went. Which got them nowhere.

Poor management for sure. Producing 3x the amount of carts for a new game coming out as they had sold in total number of consoles at that point is just one example.

I think this became system X and then the 5200 the GTIA replaced The CTIA the G chip was an upgrade put in the 5200 so they decided to put it in the 400/800 also .The license lock out verification was added to the CPU verification code was needed to stop unlicensed game makers.

Naaa Totally disagree with you, I had a Atari 2600 back in the day when they first came out, They were excellent compared to B&W TV Tennis, For a few years, Their advertising was awesome, They even had competitions in different city's across north America for free and they would give out excellent prizes. They had the kids hearts 100%!!. But then Coleco came out and the vic-20. The Coleco's graphics were wayyyy better, but Atari kept pumping out new games and loyal customers stuck around for a long time but the killer Graphics and sounds of the Coleco vision and The whole Vic-20 that you could program and play better games on was also pretty cool. By the time the 5200 came out most jumped the ship already. The 3200 could of been a stop gap that could of really changed things.

It would could have been almost as powerful as ps2 but i would haveade it cost about $10,000 at the time and be about the size and weight of a motorcycle

13:05 Atari did not release any version of Donkey Kong for the 2600. Coleco released it and they released it after the Colecovision version. Most Donkey Kong cartridges are white and have the indent on the back of the cartridge. Those are the Coleco releases, the ones that came first. But later, after Atari split into Atari Corporation and Atari Holdings or whatever it was and Tramiel had the home console portion of Atari, Coleco sold them the rights to make Atari branded copies of the game. But they are ALL from the Tramiel era, like 86 and onward.

I don't think the 3200 would have done well, it seems like a stop-gap console that probably would have gotten outclassed by the Colecovision's higher resolution. Intellivision was working on a console called the Intellivision III that used the Motorola 68000 processor, if that had come out then Atari would have needed to catch up to that. Atari needed to jump ahead of the crowd, and the 3200 sounds like it would trail behind everyone else.

This video clearly demonstrates the clusterfunk, directionless, unfocused Atari of the early 80s that led to its demise and fire sale to Tramiel by 1984. 3200, 3600, 5200, 7800, 400, 800, 600xl, 800xl,1200xl, 1450xl... The XL line was a great update of the 8bit computer line, after recovering from the 1200xl mistake. But too little too late. Xl line should have been out by 82, cost reduced by 83. A The 600xl should have been released in place of the 5200, without keyboard to keep costs down a la xegs 5 years later. 5200 should never have existed. 7800 was a good 2600 upgrade if delivered earlier at low cost. Better idea would have been a 600xl keyboardless xegs type system with 2 cart ports, one for 2600 and another for 8bit carts, with add on keyboard and full sio compatibility.

Tia 👀

Too bad the Tia didn't have Aunty aliasing.

Intellivision was 16 bit, not 10 bit.

The Atari 3200?

Wait you speak Portuguese?

The chip names are Spelled Out, Not pronounced like an Acronym! Tee Eye Ay See Tee Eye Ay Jee Tee Eye Ay New bow er

Oh it would have saved them alright. The design of the console alone would have saved them. Smoked acrylic with red LED deep set so they parallax shift. Pure tech porn! Using the 8 bit computers as a console was retarded. They weren’t that impressive and was too complex in some ways. Too few colours on screen at a time and the charming but in practice wonky Pokey. A quadruple 2600 with speech would have been very impressive for 1980-1981. Would have slaughtered the C64 and kept BC. Problem was of course making it programmable. The games would have looked like 7800 games at the very least and sounded much better.

Portugual caralho!!

It could not have saved Atari because Atari did not fail because of bad hardware. Atari failed because it was poorly managed by a larger company that wasn't interested in technology or video games. It was a media company, not a tech company. Coleco and Mattel both have similar reasons for failing. In good times, they were so profitable that it covered up all the mismanagement and bad decisions they were making. No competent well run company would ever have released the 5200 with the controllers and pack in game it chose (super breakout). Both the video game industry and the console industry survived and thrived. Bad management made the main players "weak hands" and they were shook out of the market.

First time in my life I've ever heard anyone referring to the TIA chip as the "tee-uh". Sounds deranged.

O Sylvia tinha o chip SOBRINHA? 🤣

You have brought absolutely nothing new to the table

Atari is and was total gob shite!