Why does this thing almost feel a generarion behind the nes despite being developed around the same time? It's more like a 5200 pro

>>11783260 (OP)
Because it was literally designed to master single screen arcade games, Atari were not thinking ahead to the next step in game design which was side scrollers and ultimately games with a save feature. They designed a console that could display a ridiculous amount of sprites but was unable to do much beyond that.

>>11783264
Also opted to not include better sound hardware but instead just put said better sound chip on carts of games that need it.

This was the company that routinely produced more carts than they had sold consoles of games that had rushed out hoping the license alone will make it such a mega hit it will sell even more consoles, and put a numberpad on a controller for a 1993 console, they were not smart.

It's closer to 2600 Pro. It was designed on top of 2600 specs with zero input from computers/5200, with the most notable addition being a new video rendering system which actually made sense. Unfortunately it made no upgrades to sound due to slightly rushed development which was supposed to be alleviated by being able to access external sound chips inside game cartridges.
Games can feel more primitive due to smaller screen resolution. 7800 can render 320x240 video, but the vast majority of game use halved resolution of 160x240 for better performance, resulting in chunky pixels. The console also does not use tiled graphics, rendering everything with sprites instead akin to Neo Geo, which opens possibilities for graphical effects not possible on NES without advanced memory mappers. Compare the Atari 7800 version of Ballblazer, a 3D action game, with the Japanese Famicom port of the game. It runs leaps and bounds around the Nintendo version because the latter system was not designed to handle such graphics.

Audio is 50% of the audio visual experience and Atari thought it was a good idea to reuse the 2600's sound chip for their brand new console. Like when you're playing a 7800 game there's nothing wrong with it visually or control-wise, it just sounds like it's 10 years older than it is, because its sound chip literally is.

Atari 7800 also had some unique new ideas. Originally Atari were supposed to release an accessory called High Score Cartridge. It would save your high score to battery in supported games, with each game intended to launch in 1984 having such functionality already programmed in. After the console got delayed by two years, this idea was scrapped, but the High Score Cartridge got revived later by fans and it is easily available in emulators. Many new homebrew games support it as well.

Ballblazer was designed for Atari's scanline-based graphics, it totally did not work on C64 or NES's tile based graphics.

>>11783260 (OP)
It was supposed to launch in spring 1984, but got shelved until 1986 due to the Pac-Man fiasco.

>>11783260 (OP)
It wasn't meant to come out in 1986, they finished it in 1984 and didn't release it because they were retards.

Doesn't the 7800 have some crazy lock-out chip that people still haven't cracked yet? No one can make any homebrew for it or anything.

>>11783778
No

games on this joint str8 dudu man fr

>>11783341
>compatible with Atari XL series accessories

Wonder if people read that and interpreted it as "I can play Star Raiders and Miner 2049er on this!"

>>11783778
>No one can make any homebrew for it or anything.
*Looks at the copy of Rikki & Vikki in his Steam account that also includes a 7800 ROM*

That's false

It has a completely unique design where all graphics objects can be selected as either sprites or background tiles because they wanted to be able to run games like Galaga, but didn't seem to be smart enough to think that side scrollers were the next big thing.

>>11783260 (OP)
Atari got complacent the same way US car manufacturers did around the same time, it was up to Japan to bootyblast them to save consumers.

>>11783260 (OP)
>Atari 7800
Has Ninja Golf
>NES
Doesn't have Ninja Golf.

>>11783260 (OP)
video game crash fucked over many of atari's previous employees and licensees. most of atari's internal talent were heading out the door by the time it was completed in 1983/84 and jack tramiel killed off all this shit when he bought atari because it wasn't profitable.

>>11783856
atari 7600 was capable of scrolling but it was over engineered in a way where such platform games are difficult to program and it takes far more cpu time to handle everything. nes's ppu practically did it for free.

>>11784012
that's kind of like C64 where scrolling is tedious and CPU-intensive unless you use l33t hax0r tricks like VSP scrolling

>>11783260 (OP)
Atari post-gaming crash of 1983 was just a fucking mess.

>>11784017
yeah. similar in cpu usage, maybe worse in some cases. speaking of c64, nes can behave in c64-like ways, such as wait for a given scanline or certain amount of cycles, change video register, wait again, change it etc.etc. except you can scroll massive maps with zero effort and if you get the timing right tyou can create parallax scrolling without any fancy mapper. whoever engineered the nes to support large maps was thinking ahead. not bad for 1983.

>>11784027
On C64 you have to update the graphics buffer every two rows of characters (one row if H scroll). NES lets you move an entire screen width before updating, if you're scrolling in the direction the mirroring is set in. If it's in the non-mirrored direction then you have to update every row and it will also produce graphics artifacts at the edge of the screen. On the other hand it can be more annoying because you cannot touch the PPU registers outside blank or it will glitch while the VIC-II can be written to any time you want. And you also needed an ASIC mapper for stuff like non-fixed mirroring directions or scanline IRQs which C64 could do out of the box.

>>11784040
it is nice that C64 didn't have problems with scroll artifacts, slowdown, or sprite dropout that plagues NES games

It's more like a 32x for the 2600.

>>11784027
the NES chipset was obviously influenced by the latest arcade hardware back then and this was when scrollers like Xevious were just becoming a thing

>>11783260 (OP)

i think alot of posts are also leaving out the part where Atari lost in court and clone 2600s were legal. They were not very hype on hardware after that.

>>11784072
Those clones got away with it by using a different pinout than the "real" TIA so this was considered legal.

>>11784043
>it is nice that C64 didn't have problems with scroll artifacts, slowdown, or sprite dropout that plagues NES games
was pretty great. some programmers on c64 got extremely good at sprite multiplexing. it's been awhile since i've played some nes games but i recall some of those jap programmers for nes just seemed to keep pumping out more sprites on whatever line that's already got maximum number of sprites, which wouldn't have helped.

>>11784062
exactly that. Nintendo figured that a game could either scroll horizontally or vertically and you could solder together pads on the cartridge PCB for whichever direction you wanted. Later on ASIC mappers made soft mirroring selection possible.

>>11784040
the PPU is very annoying to program because you must do things in exactly the correct sequence or it will glitch out. the VIC-II is much more forgiving.

>>11784078
NES sprites are tiny, this is good for bullet hells but you need to use lots of sprites to build large objects and it takes a lot of CPU to move them around plus dropout issues. most C64 shmups use char sprites for the bullets/shots which are very cheap in CPU time.

>>11784094
it can be a bit confusing to beginners because NES has no sprite position registers like C64 does. no X or Y pos registers. instead you have the OAM table which is a grid map that contains each sprite coordinate and you modify it to move them around. the OAM also has to be reloaded at least every 3 frames or the PPU will forget it and your sprites will disappear or glitch.

>>11783451
the famicom came out in 1983

>>11784027
The worst thing about nes is only being able to set the pallete 4 tiles at a time for the background

>>11784062
Nintendo looked at the graphics chip in the Colecovision and Texas instruments computer, the chip was made in the 70's so Atari could have copied it if they wanted to.

>>11783260 (OP)
The whole thing is weird, doesn't blow away the 5200 and worse in some ways worse too. I think maybe the 7800 was cheaper and they thought backwards compatibility would be a big deal.
In theory the 7800 can change the background as its being drawn and has a huge pallete but seems to have trouble tiling the whole screen.

>>11784040
C64 graphics are a little more compact space-wise than NES graphics because bg tiles are 8 bytes a piece instead of 16. That means a complete 256 character tile set is 2k in size while it's 4k on NES. Yes C64 sprites are a lot bigger at 64 bytes each but you also don't need as many of them.

More detail than on NES.

>>11783823
You can tell that whoever made these chars secretly makes obscure fetish porn for a living.

>>11784717
And the Super Cassette Vision came 10 months after both the Family Computer and Sega's SG-1000, despite being inferior to both aside from its then-absurdly high onscreen sprite count.

>>11786882
>You can tell that whoever made these chars secretly makes obscure fetish porn for a living.
That's true for all furry content which is why people hate it so much

>>11783260 (OP)
>Why does this thing almost feel a generarion behind the nes
Because you're retarded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIj3MIzfEBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnShhYCfHws
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_PoKQyYa8s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAyCldQTqjI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAtMphtKH7w

>>11783260 (OP)
>WHY-
No more zoomer garbage threads.

>high quality sound effects

>>11789365
Keeping the same POKEY mono sound chip featured in the old VCS/2800 as the sole board-integrated sfx/music hardware was a beyond retarded decison even from a strict cost-reducing standpoint.

>>11791287
POKEY is the four-channel audio chip used in Atari 400/800/XL/XE computers. You are thinking of TIA, video processor used in VCS/2600 with built-in two channel audio.
AFAIK, it was not a cost-cutting decision, they just ran out of time before the expected 1984 launch, so they used a chip already present on the motherboard.

>>11787190
They all sound like shit, dude.

>>11793162
This is a libel against Ballblazer.

atari was being dragged around by business executives who just wanted to keep focusing on what previously sold

nintendo was deferring decisions to people who actually made video games and focused on enabling the kind of games they wanted to make in the future

>>11787190
that vikki and rikki looks fun.

>>11793393
>nintendo was deferring decisions to people who actually made video games
never happened. everything was ran though president hiroshi yamauchi and the rest of his family before any project idea could proceed. who do you think you're fooling, nintendie?

Didn’t know Atariage full of faggot?

>>11791317
> ran out of time
never bought this story. it's about money. the machine was originally designed in 1984. options in 1984 were limited but i think the reality is that they didn't want to increase costs by including another chip. they could have redesigned the board between its first initial run in 1984 and its eventual public release in 1986 to support another chip without breaking any software already written for it. a couple of games came with a pokey chip, showing it was possible to include better sound. atari console and computer division, once kings, became the poorfags of the computing world.

>>11794770
>Didn’t know Atariage full of faggot?
i did know. thanks for asking. not just any ol' faggots but some of the most insufferable faggots on the planet.

>>11794793
>they could have redesigned the board between its first initial run in 1984 and its eventual public release in 1986 to support another chip without breaking any software already written for it.
"They" were already gone by 1986. 7800 was designed by outside company working directly under Warner Communications, actual Atari staff was completely uninvolved in the project. Later, when Tamriel bought Atari assets from Warner, Atari Corporation had a warehouses of completed product. They'd need to disassemble every console one by one and bodge-wire new components on finished boards, Amstrad CPC 472-style.

>>11783318
It's an even worse version of the Sega Mark III/Master System still using the SG-1000 audio system and sounding arse because of it.
Not to go all "SEGA SHOULD'VE X/Y/Z AND THEY'D HAVE SURVIVED" but the Japanese Master System with the FM module built in really should've been the standard config from the start. Imagine if SMS games sounded like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjV0ntSbvE4

what are the best 2600 and 7800 complete (not a demo) homebrew