Thread 11918997

The Atari 7800 is one of my favorite consoles from the 3rd generation but I cannot help but wonder what went wrong. It was more powerful then the NES in many ways yet still flopped only selling 4 million units during the 5 years it was on the market.

>>11918997 (OP)
Compared to the NES the graphics weren't so great and the name "Atari" still left a sour taste in people's mouths after the 5200.

The SNK ports were pretty great, however.

>>11918997 (OP)
It was expected to launch in 1984 to kill ColecoVision, but it got stuck in warehouses when Atari got split between Warner and Jack Tramiel. Those3 two parties could not agree on who was owed money to people who actually developed 7800, so its release was delayed until 1986, by when NES was starting to make its moves to take over America.

>>11918997 (OP)
Delayed release.
Same sound as the 2600.
Stigma of the crash.
Those damn joysticks.

I know the 7800 had that dreadful sound problem but that could've been solved with the Pokey chip which 2 games used. It gave the games advanced sound capability which put it on par with the NES in terms of sound.

The question is why didn't they use them for the majority of the games? Was it possibly to expensive to mass produce?

>>11919036
Jack Tramiel was literally an oven dodging kike who kept manufacturing costs as low as possible. If you've ever used a Tramiel era C64, it showed.

Using a chip from the 70s for sound surely didn't help

>>11918997 (OP)
>The Atari 7800 is one of my favorite consoles from the 3rd generation
Based but the fact is this board is a safe space for nintendoi trolls so you won't get any decent conversation here, just lies and cancer about the garbage that was nintendo 1990-2010. Donlt forget the NES was the ONLY gaming system that existed (even though it was frankly a bit shit even in its own lifespan and for the non techy retarded spoilt kids)

>>11919036
>>11919038
I upvoted your nintendo discord posts
in this subreddit you googled something very well! Updots!

>>11919047
getting ready for bed auster?

>always thought I grew up with a 2600
>dug it out of storage
>it was a 7800
my entire childhood was a lie

>>11919052
Upvoted for Mario, based fellow traveler

Bing Bing!

Who's turn to spam another few Zelda threads?

I thought it was Luigiellas but Xi is busy dilating

>>11919008
>NES was starting to make its moves to take over America.
Funny how they had zero impact in Europe.

>>11919064
You clearly haven't heard of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles NES bundle which sold gangbusters in Europe.

>>11919072
>ayyyy ninjas are racist

>>11919056
That's one hell of a awakening, at least you got to experience some of its 8 bit titles (asuming you had any 7800 games) in my opinion most early 2600 games are just garbage. Later on in the 2600's had higher quality 3rd party games and 1st party ones.

>>11918998
>Compared to the NES the graphics weren't so great
The graphics were perfectly fine. Some games even have NES style scrolling. Hardware capability wise, it's actually better than the NES because it could do software sprite scaling and render 100 sprites on screen. Robotron 2084 renders 40+ enemies on screen without slowing down or flickering at all. Ballblazer and F18 Hornet boasted impressive sprite scaling.

The problem with 7800's graphics is it's not as easy to work with as the NES. It uses line buffers instead of sprite display list. More similar to an arcade machine than the usual home console.

>>11919038
It was designed and produced before Jack Tramiel's time. Jack Ross commissioned the machine. Tramiel was a computer nutter and would have wanted the hardware to be more cutting edge while staying low cost. Just look at Atari Lynx. Color LCD, hardware sprite scaling, and PCM sound chip on a handheld cheaper than SNES and Genesis.

>>11919056
7800 has hardware level backwards compatibility with 2600. It's the reason they decided to stick with the crappy sound chip from 2600.

>>11919085
After most Atari programmers left the company for Activision and Imagic, Atari got people from GCC to program their first party 2600 games, which coincided with a massive improvement of Atari's overall game quality. GCC was also responsible for designing the hardware of 7800 and programming all pre-1987 games.

>>11919089
Yeah I was explaining why the POKEY was only used in like 2 games. 7800 could have done mapper chips to compete, Tramiel was just cheap.

>>11919098
They should've made the console with both sound chips and use them depending if a 2600 or 7800 games is inserted. But considering they, moved to silver labels later in the 7800's life to save money.

I doubt they would've done anything different like that in terms of sound.

>>11919120
7800 console has 2 video chips: a new Maria chip and an archaic TIA chip form 2600. The latter was added to ensure backwards compatibility, but it ended up doing double duty as a sound chip in both operation modes.
People from GCC gave several interviews over the years and they have always mentioned that 7800 lacked a proper sound hardware only because they ran out of time before the console was supposed to be released in 1984, so they just sighed and used TIA which was already on the motherboard to produce sound. Tramiel and his cost cutting were not a factor back then. Afterwards, when he bought Atari's assets, he had completed consoles already packed in boxes, it would be too expensive to get them all out and replace motherboards with new designs.

>>11919136
That makes a lot of sense now thank you for the clarity!
I knew that it was supposed to be released in 1984 but got delayed due to the video game crash of 1983. I thought the cost cutting had something to do with the 7800's sound capability.

>>11918997 (OP)
Play Ninja Golf NOW

>>11919038
>it showed.
not really. became the best selling micro of all time.

>>11919113
>Tramiel was just cheap.
tramiel inherited the 7800. it was already in development by 1983. tramiel bought atari in 1984.
> mapper chips
at the expense of the game developer. not that it mattered anyway. atari's name was dirt in the console by its release in 1986. nobody wanted to deal with jack tramiel either since he was a bastard to deal with when he ran commodore.

>>11919089
Bloody Jack, on the Atari ST they took out the blitter chip that would have allowed smooth scrolling and other things and instead it has a really expensive gate array and a chip to allow hard drives to connect using a sort of early SCSI but just after the computer was released the SCSI standard was updated so the computer ended up not really being compatible with most hard drives. Gaming was only supposed to be a small thing out of 10 things it did. Obsessed with being a serious computer to beat IBM and then VGA comes out and then gaming becomes a big selling point for pc's.

They basically tried to make the Atari 2600 again, literally. Same sound hardware, a controller that was initially made for the 2600 and only has two buttons when current consoles tended to have 4, native backwards compatibility with the 2600.

Atari kind of always was terrible at making console hardware. They only got lucky with the 2600 by mostly being first, and still botched that so badly they went down in history as causing a gaming crash. Nothing they made after the 2600 which they were handed a victory on a silver platter and still dropped it was successful. 5200, 7800, Jaguar. Even the Lynx. Hell, with the Jaguar it feels like they forgot it was no longer 1978 and tossed a freaking numberpad in their controller for a 1993 console!

There was not a single thing that went RIGHT with the 7800, except maybe that you could use it as a 2600.

>>11918997 (OP)
Lack of third party support for one.

>>11918997 (OP)
It was the sleekest console design ever at the time, and for me it still is... what went wrong with it? Oh, everything else pretty much.

>7800 thread where people are actually being nice about it
Its backwards compatibility was a game changer for poverty frens back then. I feel like a lot of people had a similar experience with the PS2.

Atari's magazine published this letter in 1989. Real or fake?

>>11919074
Violent*
It had to do with banned weaponry, even Soul Blade got censored in Europe because of outlawed weapons.

>>11920919
hard to say. could be real. i've had friends send in letters to editor and have parts of it published so i guess they weren't all fake but you come across this once and awhile and i automatically think:
> yeah, that's a little suspicious.
you'd had to be more cautious back then since some gaming mags wouldn't never dare shit where they eat because their advertisers, sources to new software, hardware and contacts would dry up.