Yeah, Food Fight is a god-tier game!

Xevious for the 7800 was my favourite game since Adventure. At the time of course.

Yeah the 7800 was pretty decent with sprites. A display list rather than tilemaps, but with powerful sprite functions on top. Much more versatile and powerful. If you'd done it as a sprite on the NES, it'd flicker to the point where only a quarter would be visible on screen at once, the whole things flickering like they were testing some sort of prototype cloaking device. Also there wouldn't be any other ships. Including the player.

@@greenaum that's quite interesting. Wasn't there an NES port? I haven't played it myself. It was always the Atari version when I was young.

@@Slightly_Sadistic I didn't have a NES (got a NES Mini now though, hackety-hack-hack!), but yes there was a Xevious for it as the top post in this thread mentions. The sprite flicker I mention is something that comes up in NES games, you could only have a few sprites on a scanline at once, after that they just weren't drawn. So you'd alternate their order which at least gave them all a chance, but since they were taking turns to be drawn, they flickered, drawn one frame, not drawn the next. So imagine how many 8x16 sprites you'd need to draw the mothership.

@@greenaum cool nice to know. I didn't have one until about 1993 and only had a few games for it like The Guardian Legend and SMB3 and like another one or something. Never tried out NES Xevious. But, I have thought about getting the Mini. I have the SNES, Genesis and Genesis 2 Minis. Hopefully Gen 2 will be hackable soon. It's got a lot of storage.

Jack was terrible for Atari, 7800 could have been released years sooner if he had paid the wages owed. Released at an earlier time, the Atari 7800 hardware choices would have been understandable. Saying that, the Pokey chip should have been inside the 7800 from the start.

​@@AFourEyedGeek Pokey was far too big to include on the board. There really wasn't room for any other sound chip either. Gumby/Minnie was the proposed cart-based chip. Cancelling it was just one of the many ways Tramiel kneecapped the 7800. Pokey was simply their fallback solution, but it was still too expensive. There might have been more competitive 3rd party sound chips, I don't know. A slimmed down Pokey without all of the leftover cruft from their early 8-bit computers could have been a solution, but Tramiel had no interest investing any more money into it.

"Jack Tramiel Ruins Atari by Being a Skinflint: Part 78."

thats really sad so it suffered what sega of usa did during the tail end of genesis days and saturn... with a bafoon in charge of operations. i always had a respect for atari. even tho im a nintendo fan. also sad they never learned their lession n kept with the shady tactics even to the jag days. which i wish was indeed a true 64bit system. like n64. sad they went out like that in hardware. like sega.

@@ssppeeaarr Technically, the Jaguar can make a legitimate claim to 64 bit, as it can run two 32-bit operations in parallel to create and run a 64-bit instruction. It's got a wide enough databus to allow this, and the blitter (it handles all the Gouraud shading, for example) is true 64-bit. This is also true of the Object Processor. Basically, it is fair to say that the Jaguar's graphics are enhanced by the power of 64-bit...when people actually used that power. (Rarely. It was easier to just write everything to the 68000, since Atari wasn't fond of handing out accurate hardware documentation to third parties.)

But it was significantly more powerful than the SNES and Megadrive, running a very decent version of Doom on stock hardware, with shadows that are even better than the PC version.

@@fungo6631 i was referring to how games were usually just 68k ports and not using the hardware due to how difficult it was to program like the 7800.

But the jaguar was a rushed, half finished console with buggy chips and architecture that could use some improvements. It needed like another year in the oven. The 7800 and Lynx are very much mature systems with fully realised capabilities, by the system makers themselves at least. Also the Jaguar had no chance at 3D against the PS1 and N64 to begin with due to its lack of a dedicated geometry processor ASIC. The 7800 and Lynx however were a lot more capable than their contemporaries. The Lynx actually beat the SNES at many things while also being the older, less expensive, and much more power efficient system. Even with the expensive colour LCD it had it still managed to be cheaper than the SNES. All of Atari's systems after the 2600 would thrive incredibly well had they weren't forced to suffer from the company's utter mismanagement, but the gaming industry in the US from the 80s all the way through the 00s was in shambles so they had to stick with Atari's idiocy.

Not really. I code for it and sure it’s not super easy but it’s not that hard once you figure out how the DLs work. It’s really not. Give the 7800 a chance.

​@@aboriginalmangJaguar needed a further 2 hardware revisions to fix the bugs according to Rob Nicholson of Handmade Software.

I guess they didn't have the space for an extra sound chip, and the 2600 sound chip is merged with the video chip (the TIA), which was needed for backwards compatibility. If only they didn't insist on backwards compatibility

@@vincenzomottola7778 Tramiel was so cheap he refused to pay the guys who made the 7800 for 2 years. He had the space, he was a notorious cheapass

@@Zellio2011 I've often wondered if he'd made a bet with someone that he could drive Atari into the ground in under a decade.

@@video-luver769 It might seem that way, but what it really is, is a cautionary tale about revenge. Taking revenge on your opponent (in this case Commodore), might feel good at the time, but Tramiel made some TERRIBLE business decisions. It also didn't help that very few understood what video games were, how they had progressed, what the kids expected from the next generation. For one thing, most of Atari's games were quarter-based play with time or 'life' limitations. That worked in the arcade, where start of the art ruled, but at home, players were discovering a new kind of extended and in-depth play: On computers. The problem was the crash. Once video games crashed, taking many game companies with them, to older folks, it seemed like a fad - like Hula Hoops. Parents, investors, store chains, were all understandably reluctant to buy consoles and games due to quality issues. Overall though, gaming thrived on the computer systems that survived - especially the Commodore 64. In my opinion, Tramiel did not understand the whole gaming thing. Perhaps he saw console gaming as a fad, as he cancelled the 7800 altogether, only bringing it back two years later when he realized Atari missed the boat. Could it have been successful? Probably not. ROM-based games weren't dead, but the kids wanted more in-depth gaming - games Atari didn't have and didn't specialize in. And when Atari's divisions were divided, with the arcade division becoming its own company, "Atari Games", there was no love between them - even if it made sense for Tramiel's Atari to develop those games. Even the console's joystick controllers seemed out of step - and this was especially true when the NES showed up! And don't forget, the initial group of games for the 7800 were incredibly dated only 2 years later. It took time for developers to create new games, and many of them were already out on computer. It's easy to look back on the 7800's library of games and think, 'That's not terrible...' But it WAS terrible on launch and for some time afterward.

Nintendo was constantly releasing new and great games, as where Atari just didn't keep up. The sound chip is an overall small issue, as certain games would have it included in the cart. Graphics, and gameplay alone with more new games could have made it a contender. NES had Super Mario 3 while 7800 had Scrapyard Dog.. But to be extra fair, 7800 sound was slightly better than 2600. The TIA runs at a faster clock speed while in 7800 mode. That as well as programmers getting better with TIA in general. Galaga and Ms Pacman sound competes with the NES versions well enough. Xevious too. Sadly Atari just didn't give 7800 the support.. those games I mentioned were actually made by GC in 84, imagen if they had came out then.

Sprite Dropout is what happens when there are too many sprites on the line. Flickering is what happens when the sprite order is changed to make a different sprite drop out every frame.

Yes I totally glossed over the details on this one!

That doesn't really sound like a correction. The flickering happens because there are too many sprites on a line -and- the programmer put forth a little effort to make it look a little bad instead of completely awful. It's still because the NES can't handle that many sprites on a line.

I used to use a similar trick on the Amiga. If a game had semi-slow homing bullets and you wanted 18 on screen, I'd save blitter time by drawing them in batches. If you draw the bullet art to look like electricity or plasma, it would look like they were intended to flicker. The saved blitter time could be spent elsewhere (extra enemies etc). As only the bullets flickered, it looked like an intended animation choice.

Given the success & longevity of the NES isn't it surprising Nintendo didn't build a chip with better sprites to put in cartridges? Or was that not possible?

That's really cool.

Well done to your Dad

What a cruel father. 😂

@@turrican4d599 Can't complain too much, but I swear he bought me things just to avoid buying a NES.

I was lucky enough to have a dad that liked video games, so we had this golden era where we could choose between TI-99, Atari 7800 and NES + a computer with DOS.

@@desktorp Oh, that reminds me, he also bought me an Atari PC/Console hybrid INSTEAD of a NES. It was nice, because IIRC it used Atari 400 cartridges. Gotta check which one it was, it had like 4 pastel colored big buttons.

I was right there with ya, bro! The thing is, I don't regret it at all. I wasn't that into games anyway, and the fact that I didn't have a NES and none of my closest friends did either kept us all out in the real world, riding our bikes, wrestling around, and climbing trees. Meanwhile, the "lucky" kids who got the NES were sitting on their couches munching on Doritos and staring at the CRT. I bought a Sega Master System on clearance with my own money at one point and returned it the next day for some reason. Sometimes when I see how great of a system the SMS was, I kick myself for doing that. But, honestly, I'm glad I didn't keep it. I was perfectly fine with my 7800.

ikr. this system reminds me of the lynx… probably the most advanced console of its category at the time if you were willing to excuse its nonexistent resolution

Does their low resolutions systems including Atari 5200, both 4-port (with auto switch box) and 2-port?

I love the resolution of those systems! That chunkopixel look is my favorite thing in the world!

With 8-bits, you have to make compromises somewhere. You couldn't have great resolution AND great color, and you have to remember the times - memory was EXPENSIVE - especially in the 1970's! Jay Miner, the designer of graphics for the 2600, Atari 8-bits, and the Amiga, chose a different path then most - more color. NTSC TV resolution sucked with only 260ish lines available per field, BUT, it could represent over 1000 colors per field. 2 fields combined would give you over 500 lines and 1000X1000 colors, but due to the nature of NTSC, sharp contrasting lines caused a lot of interlace flicker. You have to remember the times in which the 2600 was developed. HDTV was a LONG way off. Most people were still using an 'Antenna' split wire hook up on their TVs, and most people hooked up their 2600's to those TV's (my first gaming TV was in black and white!) The trade off was that you got GREAT color (or B/W shading), at the cost of big sprites and/or resolutions. The 2600 had 128 colors at a time when most competing systems had 16 (Intellivision, Colecovision, Odyssey 2, etc.) The first games didn't use the fancy tricks the later ones did, but the 'Atari Rainbow' effect existed because only their machines could do it. A lot of Atari games used this to great effect. For instance, Many Activision games used it to produce sunrise/sunset effects like in Barnstorming, Frostbite, Keystone Kapers, H.E.R.O., Enduro, Pitfall II and Robot Tank, and they also used it in their colorful logo at the bottom of every one of their games. I like Jay's choices better - if not only because of the times, but because the Atari could do things NO ONE else could do. It was only until the Age of Sprites and the NES that the clear advantages of a dedicated sprite system overcame the idea of more color. Besides, the NES had 64 colors as well, and that was good enough when combined with the awesome power of the PPU in the NES. THAT SAID... Atari's early games showed a LOT of creativity. When you have a fixed system of sprites and resolution, you are limited to games that favor that system. However, the Atari was essentially an open book with the CPU doing pretty much everything, and your code had to 'race the beam' to get executed. A GREAT programmer could do Ms. Pac-Man or Pitfall II, or Solaris - any of which were excellent, comparable to any competing system of their day.

@@Chordonblue This would be a really great comment on a video about the 2600, but this is about the 7800 which released 9 years later. Even had it released in '84 as originally intended, they made some odd choices for output resolution and sound.

Possibly the greatest "what if" of my gaming life pertaining to the Master System, Lynx, Dreamcast, Jaguar, Xbox, etc. I just wanted to see a game of theirs in the majors.

@@samfrito master system, dreamcast, and xbox sold pretty well and got a significant amount of hardware pushing titles. The Lynx had tons of untapped potential, it would do much better as a home console in my opinion.

@@aboriginalmang agreed. Playing Electrocop, Turbo Sub or Todd's Slime World really show a 16 bit console that nothing at the time could touch. I think Lynx should get a "mini" handheld collection (console) next. "What If" number 2 for Atari in my book.

The OG Xbox lived past 5 years though.

@@ViciousAlienKlown still alive to me.

At 3-13-1, the Texans had a better season than the Chicago Bears this year. XD

I can't find that Mario Bros homebrew game anywhere. Do you have a link to it?

@@Bubba__Sawyer It hasn't yet been released. But check out the episode of ZPH featuring the game and interview of the author. (edited to put in working link) watch?v=Af7yqllOl9Q&

@@tarstarkusz That link goes to a video titled, ' A cheap turntable with a twist - Gemini TT-900.'

@@Halbared this one should go to the 7800 Mario Bros homebrew watch?v=Af7yqllOl9Q&

Are you trying to refer to resolution?

I'll be more specific.. the "NES" didn't "smooth out some of the chunk"... the developers who were making games for NES took more time and made more detailed graphics, because they were going to a massive market. There's nothing intrinsic about the NES that "smoothed some of the chunk", the developers just put more time in.

Yes, they remind me of 64 games, which had that low-res look.

It's a fabulous game and great for playing cooperatively. My 10yo likes to play it with me. It's a sad that Penguinet won't do anything more with it. I wanted to buy a 7800 cart, but they sold out just before I could order (back in November of 2020 iirc). They won't make any more carts or license it to anyone else to do so. I'd love to see it on an Evercade cart. I don't know if Blaze is interested, but I do know that Penguinet has stated that they will not be licensing the game for release on any other platforms in any case. So even if Blaze wanted to pick it up, they won't do it. I'm sure that Penguinet has good reason for not making it more widely available, but it's a shame, considering how phenomenal the game is.

It also didn't help that it only had the sound chip from the 2600...making the developers pay for the pokey chip. Only 2 that I know of did this (Ball Blazer and Commando).

@@Sinn0100 Just to complete the story on that for passersby: Although it was stuck with the 2600's audio chip, it didn't have the same harsh and bizarre limitations when it came to *using* said chip. On the 2600, ultimately you could only play certain tones with the chip, and those tones weren't in any way coordinated to be music-friendly, leading to the phenomenon that attempts at music on the 2600 were extremely rare. 7800 developers, on the other hand, had basically the same freedom with the chip that NES developers had with the 2A03.

@@Sinn0100 That wasn't the plan though. There was supposed to be a chip called "Gumby" (IIRC) available at very low cost to be developed by GCC (which is who developed the 7800) to be put on cartridge, GCC and Atari were connected at the hips in the 80s. GCC created Ms Pac Man for the arcades. They also developed a bunch of 2600 games, like Ms Pac Man for the 2600. Also, the cartridge slot for the 7800 allows a lot natively, like extra RAM and other hardware plus the audio chips.

The 7800 didn't offer much more flexibility with TIA audio than the 2600 did: the same hardware restrictions on waveforms, frequencies, and attenuation were all still there, plus it was still only a 2-channel chip. The main advantage the 7800 could offer was to update the registers more often, for example once per scanline instead of once per frame, which made finer control of musical parameters possible. It's why the Atari ST gets a better result from the AY chip than, say, the Spectrum ZX does, and a hardware-assisted version of this technique is responsible for the exception soundtrack in 2600 Pitfall II.

@@tarstarkusz Gumby? Don't you mean Pokey?

Thats not always the case. The Texas Instruments graphics chipset used by Colecovision, MSX and most Sega 2D consoles was sprite and tile based. The C64 and Amiga are also sprite based system, although they did it differently from Japanese consoles by making use of segmented unified RAM that nearly give them the speed and simplicity of tilemap systems as well as the flexibility of bitmap systems. I feel like the C64 architecture should've been the winner in the 80s, but nintendo was just too big and commodore was just too incompetent for that to happen. The 7800 used a display list within a display list, it wasn't bitmap the same way ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC were, but it certainly was faster and more cycle efficient than those two. It was designed by GCC, an old player in the Atari arcade business, and certainly took inspirations from their arcade systems of the past. None of these systems really "brute forced" the CPU, they all had display chips that aided the process, but yes having limitations such as 2 or 4 colours per tile and segmented memory mapping reduced the burden of the system.

@@aboriginalmang THIS!

@@aboriginalmang sadly there are some systems that don't have a blitter to help em, like the MS-DOS era computers or the 32x

@@dan_loup the 32X had smaller color palate and screen resolution than the Jaguar, and also no z buffering or goraurd shading, it didnt need one

@@aboriginalmang The lack of a blitter crippled most of it's games because it couldn't do 2D at 60 fps in full screen so a bunch just used the mega drive graphics for background, or cut the frame rate in half

Having the (already half a decade old) sound chip from its predecessor built in wouldn't have hurt either.

@@matthewkeeling886 Yeah the 7800 advertised itself as 2600 compatible, as if that was any sort of selling point in 1987! "Play shitty old games from the Stone Age, we're Atari, we've done nothing since 1982!". Doing that meant putting in a TIA chip, the one that the 2600 used, and switching between that and the real graphics chip ("Maria") depending on the presence of a couple of extra pins on 7800 carts. Actually, TIA, RIOT, and the 6507 CPU, are all the 2600 was! Three big chips and a few bits and pieces here and there. The expense and bother though meant they could save a bit of cash by not including a decent sound chip and relying on the 2600's TIA instead. It had a sound output you could use even if you weren't using it for video. It was just shit though, was the problem. So 7800 carts often included POKEY ("potentiometers and keys"), a chip from Atari's 8-bit computer range, and the 5200, that read paddles and the keyboard, and also had a sound generator onboard. So again, Atari ignored the stuff it was invented for and just used it's sound function. Which was also pretty poor. Me, I'd have created a custom chip that was compatible with the 2600 but had more functions. But then they wouldn't have been able to use the big stock of TIAs they had laying around for free. Yeah it was a mess, and the Tramiel family's famous cheapskatedness didn't help. They also, like most CEOs back then, didn't play games themselves, so didn't understand or care what they were selling. Saving a few cents made their eyes light up, looking and sounding shit went right over their heads. It annoys me when they put extra chips in carts. Like the Super FX, a powerful CPU because Nintendo chose a useless, 8-bit CPU (the 65816) for their "16-bit" console. The 65816 was the same 6502 the NES had, but with a few extensions for some extra bits here and there. It was still really an 8-bit chip. But most of it's job was to make simple decisions and feed data to their excellent graphics and sound chips. The 65816 is back-compatible, Nintendo were considering having the SNES play NES games, so made a crippling decision early on, then stuck with it. So every game where anything complex happened, you need a CPU on board the cart. And you couldn't just install it once, on the expansion slot or whatever. Every game that used it, had to include a separate Super FX in the cart. The Megadrive used a sensible, extremely popular, fairly powerful 68000 chip instead. 16 / 32-bit rather than 8 / 16-bit. A 16-bit chip with some 32-bit extensions. Or maybe a 32-bit chip cut in half to save money. Later versions of the family, the 68020 and 68030 etc were fully 32-bit all the way through, and would run the same code. So Megadrive games could be complex to start with, even a bit of 3D graphics is possible. And the maze in Toy Story! It's practically Wolfenstein 3D! All running on normal Megadrive hardware. SNES games are much more about the CPU instructing the graphics chip to shift huge amounts of scenery. Nice filters and effects and stuff but imagine if it had a real grown-up CPU!

@@greenaum I was, in fact, talking about POKEY, which first entered the market in 1979, 5 years before the 7800 was intended to hit store shelves before the infamous delay caused by the takeover. That chip was already in production for multiple systems (computers and arcade games) and could be easily integrated but the outside design bureau that created the hardware didn't include it as it isn't needed for backward compatibility and you get "adequate" sound for 1982/83 from the older hardware. As far as the processors are concerned the 65816 is actually a true 16 bit CPU with an 8 bit compatibility mode (not the other way around) and the 68000 is internally a true 32 bit from the first version onward that was strangled by a 16 bit data bus and a massive number of neigh-useless minicomputer commands hard coded into the chip that shot transistor counts through the stratosphere (for the late 1970s) in the early versions. A similar clock speed 65816 usually outperforms a "16 bit" 68000 in real world applications, just look at the true Apple II GS programs vs. their counterparts on the contemporary Mac for a direct comparison. They blow them out of the water and that chip is clocked much slower in a fundamentally similar architecture. As far as the Super FX chip is concerned it is more akin to a modern computer graphics card's 3D accelerator in function than it is a true processor as applied in the SNES. The early plans for what became the 32x expansion for the Genesis/Mega Drive were for general use of a similar in-cart chip, the Virtua Processor used in Virtua Racing, as the internal hardware simply couldn't keep up any more. This was an extremely common way of allowing for more complex games than aging base hardware was capable of handling in the age of ROM Carts; almost all the best NES titles had used the same trick (the base hardware is only marginally superior to the ColecoVision and 5200) and the PC Engine also did similar (though it switched to CDs AND installed an expansion card in the ROM Card slot). Various other systems were using similar techniques to a greater or lesser extent, even the 2600 used bank switching hardware in carts that it was never designed to use. The reason this was so common is simple: the cartridge slot is functionally the same as a PC's expansion busses and not like a modern card reader, which is functionally equivalent to a floppy drive on old hardware.

@@matthewkeeling886 No, the 65816 really is the other-way round. It has 16 bit registers, but only an 8-bit ALU, so 16-bit operations have to go through it twice. The same way the 68000 puts 32-bit operations twice through it's 16-bit ALU.The 65816 also has an 8-bit data bus, so reads RAM and accesses peripherals in 8-bit chunks, and RAM speed has long been a limiting factor for computers, CPUs have usually been ahead of RAM. It's one reason Pentiums used 64-bit RAM on 32-bit chips, or indeed the Jaguar, to quote some Atari engineer I've forgotten, was "64-bit" just to get speed out of commodity DRAM (pssst! it wasn't really 64 bit!). The SNES needed the Super FX for anything that needed any sort of CPU power, it had a weak CPU with some very good graphics hardware. The MARIO chip really was a CPU, it couldn't access the SNES's hardware through the cartridge bus so the 65816 spent a lot of time pulling in bytes from it. My point is, the Megadrive could do much more versatile types of games than the SNES could, with its stock CPU. The Virtua chip came at the end of the Megadrive's life, and let it play 3D games before the Saturn was ready. The MARIO chip was used from early on because the SNES needed it. If it weren't for the abandoned NES compatibility, they would surely have chosen a much better CPU. Incidentally although Nintendo didn't release a NES module, a few Hong Kong companies did. I see your point, but bank switching didn't give the 2600 more processing, just bigger ROM (and sometimes RAM) than it's initial design as a machine to play Pong and Tank. Just a couple of logic gates. MARIO was an entire CPU that dwarfed the 65816.

@@greenaum And the Z80 is unarguably an 8-bit chip but has a 4 bit ALU. Register width, not ALU width or data bus width, is what is used to determine processor width and it is only a rough indicator of performance. The biggest problem with the processor on the SNES was the clock speed, 10MHz versions of the chip were already available but they chose to limit the chip to 3.58MHz (in NTSC regions). That is where the issues with CPU power come into play, not the specific chip architecture. This situation is shown by the SA-1 chip (by far the most common SNES enhancement chip), which is a much faster 65816 with some add-ons rather than a totally new processor. The Mega Drive actually has similar; every Sega CD game uses the faster 68000 built into the unit along with enhancement chips for both sound and graphics. Implementation is only different due to the different storage media used for the games. This was hardly the first, or last, time a very powerful full fledged processor (with special add-ons for graphics in the instruction set and chip layout) had been used for graphics, the 8-bit Atari computers had done a similar thing with their graphics system (particularly ANTIC) a decade earlier and EVERY modern graphics card has a minimum of one powerful processor for graphics generation.

It kinda exists already if you consider reverse emulation, once you put whatever in the cartridge it becomes difficult to draw the line between enhancing the nes or just using the NES as a raspberry pi zero dock. Or [insert some other system] in the place of RPi zero. Reverse emulation does count as running snes games on the NES, but also doesnt. I do think theres some stuff possible tho, like, using an extra 6502 chip and dedicate it to run even more calculations on the NES, maybe make games that look as good as a NEC PC98 game. Im just typing out of my heart here, aint no expert, but typing this just made me trip balls on what could be done man, imagine a FFVII port for SNES using a revamped FFV engine and an improved romchip to fit LOTS of content plus another soundchip and just a straight up early 90s jrpg wet dream LMAO, all ppl have to do is an FFV romhack and then someone put the cart together using pcbway or smth lol Edit: yes im aware the game's code would have to be edited to take advantage of the cartridge's hardware.

The backwards compatibility partially led to its downfall actually. The console developers were restricted to Atari 2600 sound chip and cartridge size, and I believe they wanted to give it a bigger RAM as well, with a DRAM controller it could have something like 32K of RAM without hurting its retail price but backward compatibility with the 2600 couldn't let that happen. Not to say there's anything wrong with that, and Atari would probably sell even less units without it, but without those restrictions it could've been a much more technically impressive console. No easier to develop for of course, but objectively more powerful.

@@aboriginalmang Mu gut tells me that it wasn't really any harder to develop for, and I don't even believe the lack of an on board sound chip was the killer. You could add a Pokey to the cart and those carts with Pokeys didn't cost much more than NES carts. I think it failed because of Atari management. The lack of a newer onboard sound chip (which would have required a bit of a board design, but could have been done) and those terrible original controllers were just signs of Atari mistakes/mishandling. I think if they started with the Europads and had a Pokey onboard (of Gumby), Atari still would have mishandled it. But that's me. Still love the system nowadays tho. ;-)

I bet it would be a good platform for 3d games and full motion video due to all the colors and low res.

Let's keep those ol' CRTs safe and in good working order so future generations can experience these games the way they were designed to be played.

Odd, I don't really remember Mario having dithering

Wonderful explanation man, they must've been using lookup tables a lot.

Stun Runner uses sprite rings to mimic the look of the Polygon tunnels of the Arcade, that way it retains the feeling of speed, versions which used polygons, for example the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, lack. Those 2 versions had terrible frame rates.

Homebrews are becoming more common thankfully.

⬜

The best thing Atari could have done was actually pay GCC so that the system could have been released on time, and not have been 4 years out-of-date at launch.

@@Dwedit System was 100% ready to go in 1984, even got a test release. Paying GCC wasn't the problem, Jack Tramiel just arbitrarily hated video games even though he bought a video games company.

Best thing Atari could have done is to not have had THREE home gaming systems -- the 2600 Jr, the 7800, and the XEGS -- all on the market at the same time. Competing not just with more popular consoles from Nintendo and Sega, but also with each other.

@@espfusion he made the vic-20 and c64 which were both the best selling gaming computers of their respective eras though. I think he just mismanaged the already struggling company, although he probably wasnt wrong, focusing on atari st was proven to be a good decision. Also he alienated a lot of business partners, he certainly wasnt aiming for a sustainable long term strategy, but only for capturing the market at the very moment.

🗨️❓

Can you explain more about that?

No it was mostly a side effect of the 2600 backwards compatibility. The 5200 was heavily criticised for not having that, so Atari felt compelled to include it in the 7800. It was designed and had a limited released before Tramiel took over the company, contrary to many myths.

@@aboriginalmang How is the backwards compatibility a problem if modern homebrew games can show games playing and looking great? EDIT Since the hardware can work with external sound chips, they could have worked internally too, so they could have included the POKEY chip on the 7800. Which would have made the hardware more desirable.

@@AFourEyedGeek to be fair, warner planned expansion modules for the 7800, including a RAM cartridge to save high score and game progress (presumably would also include the pokey chip) and a keyboard. If you want to blame tramiel for something, it should be for canceling those modules.

The lack of a dedicated sound chip really hampered this console and made many cartridges needlessly costly when they included the sound chip in the cartridge. Also, management delayed the release of the finished console for two years. It was two years obsolete when it was finally released!

Yup, true. The 7800 does not use true tiles for graphics, it uses sprites in place of tiles. On the 7800, you would only want to use tile mode to save on memory, as it acts like compression. In order to maximize the 7800s capabilities, you would want to use bitmaps for the background, which are far superior, and offer better performance at the cost of needing more RAM.

The 7800 is a beast compared to the two, but small carts (for the era) and the low resolution really hold it back. Plus bad faith efforts like Karateka, which is actually far better on the weaker hardware. That said, compare Mario Bros, Xevious, Joust, etc, and the weaknesses of the older technology are difficult to ignore - it was invented in the 70's and it shows. Still, there's ways to hide that weakness. Just look at Air Ball...or better yet, modern homebrew like Albert.

Yeah, visually the 7800 is noticeably significantly ahead of the 5200/8-bit computers. Acoustically, though, it's the other way around.

Retrogamerboyz on ebay sells a controller for the 7800 very much like what you are describing for use with Robotron 2084. It plugs into both ports. I don't think it includes buttons for the right-hand side controller, though--just a d-pad. So it does fall short of what you are describing in that regard.

Im not an assembly programmer thuse ive never figured how these systems work in a detailed way, but i somewhat understand why the 7800's display list within display list was limited compared to other systems of the time. Theres no vertical position register, only horizontal and width. The NES was easier to grasp. but i wouldnt consider it superior. The 7800 could render way more objects at the same time and without flickering, and for me thats more important than a game having backgrounds or graphical fidelity because those matter less to gameplay. They were just consoles made for different purposes, atari could've hired another company to copy the colecovision or C64 if they wanted a console that functioned like the NES instead of something that runs robotron and centipide. Someone could make star raiders for it too, something with realistic 3D space that star luster could only wish of emulating without looking so flat. To me, someone whos not a fan of ninja gaiden, super mario, castlevania, and whatnot, the 7800 was better in so many areas than the NES.

🔋

The only other examples I can think of are the Dualshock 2, the PS2 controller that works with the PS1, and the Xbox Series controller that works with the Xbox One. The SNES controller WOULD work on the NES if the plug was shaped the same, but it sadly isn't. But at least it's super easy to make an adapter to fit it together, which I tried myself once.

Didn't ColecoVision do the same thing using its Texas Instruments video chip?

That and Nintendo's monopolistic practices, and and touch of Jack Tramiel being a spendthrift.

And also you can add your own sound too.