NES vs 7800

[Underball]

All of that^^^

 

The jump from the 2600 to 7800 to SMS to Genesis felt like a natural progression. By the time the NES and SMS were duking it out, I was into better arcade games like After Burner, Outrun, Paperboy, and Shinobi. Just comparing the NES ports of those to the SMS there was absolutely no contest. SMS won, hands down, every single time. But then the SMS also brought more sophisticated adventure games like Zillion, computer ports like Kings Quest, much better light gun games, and the best 3D games on any home system until this year. The NES had a bunch of graphically challenged, crippled ports of these games, no good light gun titles besides the pack-in Duck Hunt, and a few feeble attempts at 3D with those terrible paper glasses.

 

And then came the Genesis. End of story. My Mortal Kombat wasn't edited for mature content by Nuntendo.

Edited January 4, 2011 by Underball

[Tubular Gearhead]

Well, to get back on track, this topic is "7800 vs. NES" so flicker is never an issue, at least not for the 7800...

 

I disagree. If you use up your MARIA bandwidth you'll see flickering. By that I mean sprites will no longer be drawn. If you get to that point in development you have to redesign the game.

 

Understood. Of all people you would know... I kind of meant this as a tongue-in-cheek friendly poke in the side to the NES fans anyway.

I just don't like seeing the underdog take so many punches without throwing one out as well. As this discussion is getting more "splitting hairs" technical I will try to keep my comments back to opinions and observations and leave the in-depth technical stuff to the experts...

 

That said, the 7800 is still better.

 

This thread is sort of similar to Honda fans commenting on a Harley Davidson (or Ducati, or pick your brand...) website and piling on the evidence of how the Honda is technically "superior" to the Harley. It may be true, but in the end it isn't a Harley so it really doesn't matter.

 

BTW- I have owned several Hondas (still do) and I am also a big Harley fan- they are both good machines.

Edited January 4, 2011 by Tubular Gearhead

[DracIsBack]

The NES also had a broader color palette over the 7800, though overall they were pretty competitive (256 unique colors/shades on the 7800 vs ~448 unique colors/shades on the NES though only 1 56 color/shade set

 

You sure about that? I always read that the NES had 52 colors vs. the 7800 (and SMS's) 256.

 

It was obvious for me in Ballblazer when the Lucasfilm logo was shown. The 7800 version had 16 shades of gold. The NES version made heavy use of dithering.

 

but I think you can see most of what I play are adventure games, and the 7800 really didn't have any. If they did, I sure missed them.

 

I felt the same way back in the day. For the first couple of years of life, the Tramiels were either updating old arcade games or quickly porting computer titles. They didn't seem to want to invest in the costs of adventure games from either a development or storage perspective. I remember getting frustrated that you had stuff like SUPER MARIO on the NES and Choplifer! on the 7800.

 

They did start to change their ways later in the 7800s lifecycle, with stuff like COMMANDO, DARK CHAMBERS, SCRAPYARD DOG and MIDNIGHT MUTANTS. By that point though, the 7800 wasn't as widely distributed and the games weren't as well known.

 

On my YouTube video, I've even encountered people who think the 7800 is technically incapable of playing a longer game.

Edited January 4, 2011 by DracIsBack

[yell0w_lantern]

Personally, I never had a 7800 and never knew anyone who had one. I had one friend who owned a SMS and he was upset about it because everyone else had a NES.

 

So I find the actual discussion portions of this thread rather insightful.

 

I've even considered getting a 7800 to AV mod and get that Pokey sound thingy but unless there are some really good homebrews that come out I doubt I will since I have my AV modded 2600, Retron 3 and MCC-216.

[Phredreeke]

The NES also had a broader color palette over the 7800, though overall they were pretty competitive (256 unique colors/shades on the 7800 vs ~448 unique colors/shades on the NES though only 1 56 color/shade set

 

You sure about that? I always read that the NES had 52 colors vs. the 7800 (and SMS's) 256.

 

It was obvious for me in Ballblazer when the Lucasfilm logo was shown. The 7800 version had 16 shades of gold. The NES version made heavy use of dithering.

 

Sort of, the NES has a 64 color palette, of which many entries are black. However, there are three flags which attenuate red, green and blue colors, and could such be used to achieve different colors. These flags are applied to all every color register though. I guess you could say the NES has 8 different 52 color palette, only one which can be used at a given time.

 

I'm not exactly sure of how the Atari 7800 works, but the NES can only display one out of 4 palettes (each with 3 colors plus a shared background color) for each set of 2x2 tiles (in other words 16x16 pixels)

[The Usotsuki]

With Mortal Kombat, Probe's Genesis port crushed Sculptured's SNES port.

 

Nintendo of America didn't let the same thing happen to 2 that happened to 1. They let Acclaim release it uncensored - and Sculptured's SNES port totally Kintaro-stomped all over Probe's Genesis port (imho).

[Rex Dart]

With Mortal Kombat, Probe's Genesis port crushed Sculptured's SNES port.

 

Nintendo of America didn't let the same thing happen to 2 that happened to 1. They let Acclaim release it uncensored - and Sculptured's SNES port totally Kintaro-stomped all over Probe's Genesis port (imho).

 

 

Yeah I'm not sure Kintaro-stomps were what our lord and saviour had in mind when he talked about humility

[kool kitty89]

With Mortal Kombat, Probe's Genesis port crushed Sculptured's SNES port.

 

Nintendo of America didn't let the same thing happen to 2 that happened to 1. They let Acclaim release it uncensored - and Sculptured's SNES port totally Kintaro-stomped all over Probe's Genesis port (imho).

That wasn't because of sales... it was because of Sega's push for a rating system, and after the litigation came out in Sega's favor, Nintendo finally started pushing towards ratings as every other major playing in the market had agreed to with Sega's previous push for standardization. (initially a number of different standards including Sega's VRC all supplanted by the establishment of the ESRB)

So it was largely because of Sega, but not because of the popularity of MK on the Genesis, but the industry wide adoption of ratings for video games finally putting pressure (and given an alternative option) on Nintendo's censorship in the US and Europe. (In Japan, censorship was extremely limited and not really enforced by the hardware companies at all, though non-censorship alterations were often made to western games going to Japan just as the opposite was true for several Japanese games in the west)

 

Interestingly, in spite of generally being considered a better conversion and uncensored on the SNES, the Genesis version of MKII still outsold the SNES version by a substantial margin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of that^^^

 

The jump from the 2600 to 7800 to SMS to Genesis felt like a natural progression. By the time the NES and SMS were duking it out, I was into better arcade games like After Burner, Outrun, Paperboy, and Shinobi. Just comparing the NES ports of those to the SMS there was absolutely no contest. SMS won, hands down, every single time. But then the SMS also brought more sophisticated adventure games like Zillion, computer ports like Kings Quest, much better light gun games, and the best 3D games on any home system until this year. The NES had a bunch of graphically challenged, crippled ports of these games, no good light gun titles besides the pack-in Duck Hunt, and a few feeble attempts at 3D with those terrible paper glasses.

 

And then came the Genesis. End of story. My Mortal Kombat wasn't edited for mature content by Nuntendo.

This is getting old and off topic with the whole SMS thing... the NES had way more software (good and bad), and arcade ports were only a very small part of what drove the market... at least in the US. The NES was better promoted, better supported (especially due to the virtual monopoly on Japanese 3rd parties -and similar for US 3rd parties for a time), among other things like superior audio hardware. (disregarding Japanese add-ons)

It's a bit like comparing the 2600 to the Colecovision except also with better sound hardware. (though technically, TIA could do some things better than the simple SN PSG, but for music it was much weaker -if you had a POKEY+TIA that would be a better comparison to the NES against the SN chip)

 

It was the exclusive games that really pushed it along with the management/marketing and general market edge. Technically speaking they had no real head start in the US market, but they had a 2 year lead in Japan (with the SG-1000 being pretty weak and the Mk.III/SMS going nowhere fast and was quickly dropped with the release of the MD in '88 -the MD did OK considering the competition it faced with both Nintendo and NEC). However, it should be noted that Nintendo DID have a critical head start in North America over Sega: not on the market, but attempting to get into the market for some 2-3 years prior to the mid 1986 launch, and I believe they gained a lot of experience in the nature of the market from that... something Sega severely lacked with the SMS and Atari Corp had (mainly with Mike Katz) but lacked the funds to pull off. (plus the lockout of Nintendo on pretty much all arcade licenses hurt it too -and of course, most of the few remaining were Sega games which were not open for license on consoles... so Atari was blocked from most arcade ports and heavily limited in 3rd party support as well as funds to commission games -Katz opted to tap the computer developers instead, but they still got almost no 3rd party interest and had to make do with 1st part licensed/commissioned stuff -ie almost all 7800 games ended up Atari published)

 

The SMS had some good games for sure, and in 1986 Sega really had a chance to break into the US market, but they screwed themselves over with poor marketing/management that only got better years later with Tonka (better, but not great), and finally really shifted with katz at the helm (followed by Kalinske).

In Europe it was another story, Nintnedo didn't put nearly the work in marketing and securing good distributors as well as being out of touch with the demands of the EU market. Sega wasn't perfect, but they did much better especially compared to Nintendo's weak and slow EU response (especially in a few regions like the UK -Nintendo being pretty strong in Germany and some others, but AFIK Sega had a lead overall in the continent), the competition from computers also hepled even things out whereas computer gaming dropped back to niche when consoles came back in full force in '86/87 and that didn't change until PCs got big for gaming in the mid/late 90s. (somewhat like Japan's niche computer game market)

 

 

1986 and 1987 was the main chance Sega had to get into the US market with the SMS, but they failed at marketing it properly from the commercials and print ads to the box art and packaging to the pack-in games and I even think pricing was less competitive than in Europe. (one problem was that they didn't have the killer apps needed to really push against Nintendo in 1986, and the '86 holiday sales season was the first boon for Nintendo... '87 was Sega's last chance to cut in and they did get a good amount of games -Alex Kidd had potential as a pack-in- but they screwed it up with continued poor management and after that the NES already had a monopoly on the market to rival Atari's in the early 80s and Sega was well behind Atari in market share -the 7800 and 2600 were selling better about 2:1 from figures I've seen, though it's also improtant to note that the often quoted 2 million SMS sales figure seems off in that regard given the approximate total of late 80s Atari sales and it would seem likely that Sega sold at least 4 million systems in the US)

 

 

 

So Nintendo had the image and publicity and the killer apps needed (mainly the exclusives -both 1st and 3rd party, both original games and ports), a strong library of competitive software, and weak competition from a marketing standpoint and even a content standpoint as time went on. (much more so than in Europe too, as Nintendo games tended to have much greater delays in EU releases -and North American releases had a pretty hefty gap from JP releases most of the time compared to what Sega often managed) And even if Sega had gotten a foothold in '86, Nintendo would still have had a virtual monopoly in Japan with similar amounts of those critical exclusives. (but they'd have been less able to pull the restrictive exclusivity contracts on western developers -or the few cases of Japanese developers wanting to publish on other western platforms)

 

The Publicity and brand recognition really was very much like Atari in the early 80s... Nintendo was (and is) a household name synonymous with video games... let's play Nintendo" became the new "lets play Atari", something Sega only came close to establishing for themselves in the mid 90s (ie they were very popular and widespread, but had only been big for a single generation, so didn't have quite the penetration to the layman as something that had been on the market longer -like the many average people who knew Atari for video games in '87/88, but not Nintendo)

 

 

 

The NES also had a broader color palette over the 7800, though overall they were pretty competitive (256 unique colors/shades on the 7800 vs ~448 unique colors/shades on the NES though only 1 56 color/shade set

 

You sure about that? I always read that the NES had 52 colors vs. the 7800 (and SMS's) 256.

Yes, positive, but it was effectively 56 colors with 8 additional hue/chomra/luma adjustments and only one of those 56 color/shade sets could be used per scanline (or per screen if no interrupts were used to change the display between lines)

 

Also the SMS has a far, far more limited palette than the 7800 (or even 2600), it's only 6-bit RGB, probably a good bit worse than even the default 56 colors/shades on the NES. (the 7800 has 256 colos, or 16 hues with 16 luminance levels each like GTIA, double the luminance levels of TIA/CTIA) Customized YCbCr palettes tend to be far more useful than RGB per given selection of colors (there's been arguments over whether 9-bit RGB is inferior to the Y/C palette of GTIA/MARIA -9-bit RGB is the 512 colors used by the ST, Genesis, PC Engine/TG-16 and a few others). For comparison, EGA and the Tandy CoCo 3 used 6-bit RGB too... for some cases, RGB colors are better (especially for bright, high contrast, primary color stuff), but for better shading, earth tones, etc, it's poorer. (RGB offers very few shades per total colors... and even with the larger on-screen color count/palette on the SMS, the ballblazer screen would necessarily have a lot of dithering or off colors used)

 

Technically the NES has 64 colors/shades for the default palette (or any single shifted palette), but several are nearly identical dark blacks/grays, some claim 52 unique colors/shades, but 56 is a more practical interpretation. (I can personally make out 56 unique colors/shades easily)

 

For comparison here's prosystem's palette:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/156100-new-final-prosystem-ntsc-palette-file/

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=149032

 

The full NES palette (showing groupings of all the shifted possibilities)

http://ahefner.livejournal.com/11670.html

http://vintage-digital.com/hefner/hacks/nes/misc/full-palette.png

 

and here's common 6-bit RGB as the SMS used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monochrome_and_RGB_palettes#6-bit_RGB

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/RGB_6bits_palette.png

 

For an approximate comparison of the NES default palette, TIA palette (1/2 the shades of the 7800), and 6-bit RGB, there's these color charts/examples from wiki as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monochrome_and_RGB_palettes#6-bit_RGB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#NES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#Atari_2600

 

Also note that that parrot carters a bit heavily to RGB colors in general, so some other examples would be more extreme.

 

For comparison, here's the C64 in the same chart/example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_palettes#C-64

 

 

 

However, then there's the difference from master palette, and practical on-screen use of sub-palettes (indexed colors) which differs greatly between the SMS, NES, and 7800... and I'm a bit shaky on the 7800's color capabilities in general, and then you have tricks (like raster interrupts -not possible on the SMS iirc, but could be simulated through rather laborious software timed code) to work around those limits as well. (many VCS and A8/5200 games made substantial use of raster effects for more colors and several other platforms as well -Amiga even did it in hardware with COPPER)

But in general, without raster interrupts, the NES uses 8 2-bit palettes indexed from the ~56 color master palette (each with 3 colors plus transparent and split as 4 sprite and 4 background palettes plus one common far BG color for a possible maximum of 25 colors on-screen without other tricks), the SMS uses 2 4-bit palettes

from 6-bit RGB (64 colors) each with 15 colors (both applicable to the BG, only 1 usable for sprites) plus a solid BG color for a possible maximum of 31 colors on-screen (in both cases you'd have common cases of less than that due to practical limits of separate palettes, probably more so with the NES). Then there's the limits on how those colors are aplied to the tilemap and sprites: for the SMS you could have a fixed 15 color palette for sprites and the ability to select between the 2 palettes for each 8x8 BG tile while the NES has 4 of the 3 color palettes selectable for sprites (any sprite and choose any of the 4 palettes -and objects made with multiple sprites could use different colors in different segments as such) while you're limited to 16x16 cells (groups of 4 8x8 tiles) for the BG colors with any 1 of the 4 BG palettes used. (one of the most significant mapper functions was to allow any palette to be used per 8x8 cell -the MMC5 did that iirc, and some others)

 

 

It was obvious for me in Ballblazer when the Lucasfilm logo was shown. The 7800 version had 16 shades of gold. The NES version made heavy use of dithering.

Yes, very few Nintendo games bothered with those capabilities, or raster effects in general, I'm not sure why since it used a similar CPU and had hblank interrupts, maybe it was a stylistic thing.

 

The NES used indexed colors, somewhat like the C64 and many other character/tile based systems (most 2D arcade systems and later consoles), and as such it had limits on a tile by tile basis and some other things... but raster interrupts should have been feasible as with other platforms. (the SMS had no hblank interrupts iirc, but the MD did and used it in several notable cases like water effects in some Sonic games -unfortunately the MD is buggy when using palette reloading and displays garbled random pixels every 16 pixels on the line immediately following the palette swap, hence why sprites normally cover the water line -some othe rplatforms have bugs too, but most have it hidden in overscan -that's the case for the PCE and SNES)

 

 

I felt the same way back in the day. For the first couple of years of life, the Tramiels were either updating old arcade games or quickly porting computer titles. They didn't seem to want to invest in the costs of adventure games from either a development or storage perspective. I remember getting frustrated that you had stuff like SUPER MARIO on the NES and Choplifer! on the 7800.

You have to remember that their funding was very limited and 3rd party licensees were virtually nonexistent... on top of that Nitendo and Sega had locked out almost all the newer arcade licenses, so Michael Katz decided to push for computer games... though I'm not sure how much they pushed for 3rd party support. (in the extreme, they could have offered free licensing to any interested 3rd parties with no licensing fee or royalties -so basically like the 2600 except also selling development tools to 3rd parties)

And they'd lost all in-house game developers (only hired the computer programmers from Atari Inc -and the Aracde developers all went to Atari Games or left)... but the transition to Atari Corp is another discussion. (I agree that Atari Inc under James Morgan had a lot of potential... but blaming Tramiel's management is hardly the prime issue either, it was far more tied to Warner's excessively sloppy handling of the sale and transition from Atari Inc when it was abruptly liquidated in mid '84 -they should have notified a possible sale/split several weeks if not months in advance -James Morgan himself wasn't notified until minutes before the deal went through- and the transition should have been much more gradual to make things as smooth and cost effective as possible -perhaps retain James morgan and some AInc upper management for a good part of the transition)

 

They did start to change their ways later in the 7800s lifecycle, with stuff like COMMANDO, DARK CHAMBERS, SCRAPYARD DOG and MIDNIGHT MUTANTS. By that point though, the 7800 wasn't as widely distributed and the games weren't as well known.

They also had a good bit more money by then too (especially after they were completely out of debt from the successful ST/2600/7800 sales), and the 7800 was at or just past its peak when those games were being developed. (7800 sales were strongest by FAR in 1987 and 1988 when they sold roughly 3 million units in the US of the ~3.77 million total sold from '86 through 1990 -sales dropped sharply in 1989 and in 1990 were below 100k units)

 

 

On my YouTube video, I've even encountered people who think the 7800 is technically incapable of playing a longer game.

LoL, it's mainly a matter of ROM size used... though the same sort of claims were going around for 16-bit consoles early on. (Sega and NEC promoting "advantages" over the older systems including "larger games" "longer games" when that was largely tied to ROM size and game design -animation is also largely tied to ROM size)

 

Hell, there's a lot of areas the NES was never pushed historically, and ROM size is only one of those (few games above 256 kB, even fewer beyond 512k), then there's use of the DPCM channel (also far more potential with enough ROM to hold big/long samples), among other things with or without mappers or RAM expansion. (of course the 7800 has a couple cases of pretty hefty 16 kB SRAM expansion with Summer and Winter Games)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The NES also had a broader color palette over the 7800, though overall they were pretty competitive (256 unique colors/shades on the 7800 vs ~448 unique colors/shades on the NES though only 1 56 color/shade set

 

You sure about that? I always read that the NES had 52 colors vs. the 7800 (and SMS's) 256.

 

It was obvious for me in Ballblazer when the Lucasfilm logo was shown. The 7800 version had 16 shades of gold. The NES version made heavy use of dithering.

 

Sort of, the NES has a 64 color palette, of which many entries are black. However, there are three flags which attenuate red, green and blue colors, and could such be used to achieve different colors. These flags are applied to all every color register though. I guess you could say the NES has 8 different 52 color palette, only one which can be used at a given time.

 

I'm not exactly sure of how the Atari 7800 works, but the NES can only display one out of 4 palettes (each with 3 colors plus a shared background color) for each set of 2x2 tiles (in other words 16x16 pixels)

Yes, I described most of that above (not just in this post, but in my one on the previous page) and you forgot to mention the 4 separate palettes for sprites, though what was used in Ballblazer is not optimized at all anyway. (and as for the 7800 it uses a very different mechanism from building display lists with a lot of inherent flexibility on a per scanline basis, but I'm sketchy on the details -I know it can mange more colors per scanline than GTIA in 160 wide res or 320 wide, but I'm not sure overall how it compares)

Like many other systems, raster interrupts should have been possible to use to re-load colors (or change the RGB flags) on a per line basis, so color limits would only apply per scanline. (and for a BG title screen not using sprites, that would be a max of 13 colors per line and 4 colors per 16 pixels) For in-game use, raster interrupts would be used more sparingly to avoid CPU overhead, but for a title screen it would hardly matter. And on the 7800, Ballblazer seems to easily conform to those limits of the NES (actually seems to be no more than 4 colors per line) and there's a decent number of gold/orange/brownish shades to choose from on the NES, especially with different RGB flags set on different lines.

OTOH, mimicking the A8/5200 GTIA mode intro would be tougher... or really more like impossible to do without some detracting.

 

In any case, you'd be a hell of a lot closer than the SMS's 6-bit RGB... sure it can do 16 colors for any pixel on-screen without any tricks, but there's very few shades of any color... and even if you combined all useful yellowish/orange-ish/brownish shades, you'd probably only manage 6 or 7 colors and even then they'd look a bit off. (games that look best on the SMS tend to be stylized heavily for RGB colors)

 

Ballblazer on the NES is a pretty sloppy port in any case (not just the graphics/gameplay, but also the music is weaker than it should be).

Edited January 5, 2011 by kool kitty89

[Underball]

That is the longest list of excuses fir why the NES was "better" I've ever seen.

 

Popularity isn't a measure of good quality.

 

I don't like the NES or it's games. I'm not going to start liking them because you tell me how popular they were or how Nintendo strong armed every 3rd party developer into being exclusive.

 

To me, the type of games that I like look and play markedly better on both the SMS and the 7800.

 

What is tired is these 4 page long apologies for the NES. It's beginning to sound like the pathetic guy at the end of the bar who still talks about how popular he was because he threw that one touchdown to win the big game when he was 17. The NES popularity in 1987 means absolutely nothing in 2011.

[toptenmaterial]

That is the longest list of excuses fir why the NES was "better" I've ever seen.

 

Popularity isn't a measure of good quality.

 

I don't like the NES or it's games. I'm not going to start liking them because you tell me how popular they were or how Nintendo strong armed every 3rd party developer into being exclusive.

 

To me, the type of games that I like look and play markedly better on both the SMS and the 7800.

 

What is tired is these 4 page long apologies for the NES. It's beginning to sound like the pathetic guy at the end of the bar who still talks about how popular he was because he threw that one touchdown to win the big game when he was 17. The NES popularity in 1987 means absolutely nothing in 2011.

yes, but the same could be said for the 7800! nobody is apologetic, we revere this video game generation because it was awesome across the board.

[toptenmaterial]

One wonders how games on both systems could look color-wise on the 7800 if programmed properly.

nightsprinter what do you mean? like some ports were lousy?

[kool kitty89]

I never claimed the NES was inherantly "better", just that it was good... and a worthwhile system for the vast majority of people of the time. (or now, for those with retro interest)

 

None of those were excuses, there was a mix of explanation/history of the success as well as practical advantages (technical and software appeal) wise.

 

Thinking on it again, NES vs SMS is very much like VCS vs ColecoVision overall. (graphics for the CV is a bit more extreme and it has a sound advantage that the SMS lacks -without FM at least- but overall pretty comparable -more so than N64 vs PSX... maybe more like Dreamcast vs PSX) But really more like the VCS vs CV given the Famicom in Japan was pretty much what the VCS was in the US except without the later mismanagement and crash to blow it apart. (albeit Nintendo declined pretty severely on the console market -not handheld- from the late 90s until the Wii and if it hadn't been for Warner's continual screw-ups, Atari Inc could have probably turned around too, but Warner opted to liquidate the company rather than letting Morgan's reorganization come to fruition with a new, streamlined, "lean and mean" Atari corp)

Sega's SG-1000 in 1983 (released the same day as the Famicom) would have been a bit like the RCA Studio 2 or Channel F compared to the VCS in '77/78.

 

Intellivision would be closer in some respects, but less so in others. (timing is more comparable, graphics comparison is as well, but sound is further off -the IV's AY being superior to the SMS/CV/etc SN PSG)

Edited January 5, 2011 by kool kitty89

[Rex Dart]

The NES popularity in 1987 means absolutely nothing in 2011.

 

 

You sure about that? I think 1987 might have a liiittle bit to do with one of these systems' current popularity over the other.

[Underball]

The NES popularity in 1987 means absolutely nothing in 2011.

 

 

You sure about that? I think 1987 might have a liiittle bit to do with one of these systems' current popularity over the other.

I dunno.

 

Atariage.com and it's forums is a huge resource, with thousands of users.

 

There's nothing like it even close for NES fans on the intenet.

 

AA:

 

Total Posts

2,170,149

Total Members

23,176

Online At Once Record

1,941

Mon Nov 13, 2006 9:43 PM

 

 

NintendoAge:

 

Logged in users: 55 (view) | Registered users: 5900 (view)

 

Both of these sites cover all products made by their respective companies.

 

Seems to me Atari fandom has it all over the NES.

[Tempest]

Total Members

23,176

To be fair at least 3,000 of those accounts are trolls created by various people we've banned over the years.

 

Tempest

[ApolloBoy]

The NES popularity in 1987 means absolutely nothing in 2011.

 

 

You sure about that? I think 1987 might have a liiittle bit to do with one of these systems' current popularity over the other.

I dunno.

 

Atariage.com and it's forums is a huge resource, with thousands of users.

 

There's nothing like it even close for NES fans on the intenet.

 

AA:

 

Total Posts

2,170,149

Total Members

23,176

Online At Once Record

1,941

Mon Nov 13, 2006 9:43 PM

 

 

NintendoAge:

 

Logged in users: 55 (view) | Registered users: 5900 (view)

 

Both of these sites cover all products made by their respective companies.

 

Seems to me Atari fandom has it all over the NES.

I think that's because AA has been around for twice as long than NA. AA's been here since 2001 while NA got started only five years ago.

[The_Laird]

How many Nintendo homebrews get released each year compared to Atari ones?

Edited January 5, 2011 by The_Laird

[Rex Dart]

Atariage.com and it's forums is a huge resource, with thousands of users.

There's nothing like it even close for NES fans on the intenet.

 

AA:

Total Members: 23,176

 

NintendoAge:

Registered users: 5900 (view)

 

Both of these sites cover all products made by their respective companies.

Seems to me Atari fandom has it all over the NES.

 

That's a teensy bit skewed, since atariage covers pretty much any game system, classic computer, emulator, and arcade game ever.

 

At any rate, I'm a big fan of the NES and I've never really even heard of NintendoAge. I don't have an account there and likely will never sign up, because I don't have a need to find Nintendo fans online when they're all over the place outside of the internet.

 

 

To The_Laird: If both Atari and Nintendo were to each release a new home console this year, which would sell more?

 

And that's all I want to say about system popularity; I don't think popularity was the point of this thread.

Edited January 5, 2011 by Rex Dart

[The_Laird]

If both Atari and Nintendo were to each release a new home console this year, which would sell more?

 

What does that have to do with RETRO gaming? Unless you mean a new retro console?

[Reinhardt]

Both consoles vary in their abilities and both have their strengths as well as weaknesses. At the end of the day, both are good systems and both have good games as well as bad games. In some ways, the NES has advantages over the 7800, and in some ways, the 7800 has advantages over the NES. But they both play certain games very well, especially if the game is optimized to take advantage of the systems hardware and is coded properly. Even if both systems have the same games ported to it, the one that that ends up being the better of the two isn't necessarily the system with the better technical specs, but the one that was programmed better and takes advantage of the strengths of the systems hardware. If you play the good games, you will have a satisfying gaming experience with both systems. If you play the not-so-good games, your experience won't be as satisfying. Anyway, I can name some games on both systems that I love to play and I can also name some that don't care for.

Edited January 5, 2011 by Reinhardt

[Rex Dart]

If both Atari and Nintendo were to each release a new home console this year, which would sell more?

 

What does that have to do with RETRO gaming? Unless you mean a new retro console?

 

Sorry, you didn't specify RETRO gaming. I was going with Underball's "popularity in 2011" vibe.

[The_Laird]

And he was reffering to the popularity of the RETRO consoles, I think that was pretty obvious really seen as Atari havn't made a new console since 1993

[Underball]

If both Atari and Nintendo were to each release a new home console this year, which would sell more?

 

What does that have to do with RETRO gaming? Unless you mean a new retro console?

 

Sorry, you didn't specify RETRO gaming. I was going with Underball's "popularity in 2011" vibe.

We're still talking abotu the NES and 7800 - right?

[Underball]

The NES popularity in 1987 means absolutely nothing in 2011.

 

 

You sure about that? I think 1987 might have a liiittle bit to do with one of these systems' current popularity over the other.

I dunno.

 

Atariage.com and it's forums is a huge resource, with thousands of users.

 

There's nothing like it even close for NES fans on the intenet.

 

AA:

 

Total Posts

2,170,149

Total Members

23,176

Online At Once Record

1,941

Mon Nov 13, 2006 9:43 PM

 

 

NintendoAge:

 

Logged in users: 55 (view) | Registered users: 5900 (view)

 

Both of these sites cover all products made by their respective companies.

 

Seems to me Atari fandom has it all over the NES.

I think that's because AA has been around for twice as long than NA. AA's been here since 2001 while NA got started only five years ago.

5 years on the internet is 3 lifetimes. Look at Facebook.

[kool kitty89]

I think that's because AA has been around for twice as long than NA. AA's been here since 2001 while NA got started only five years ago.

Not to mention there's many, many, many more Nintendo related sites to go to... the problem is that way too many are Nintendo fanboyish sites, unlike Atariage or Sega-16 (or some others) where they may be oriented at a specific company (or even console), but tend to be supportive of a wide breadth of different platforms/games/discussions in general.

 

If Atariage was nothing but an Atari fan site, I wouldn't have ever bothered to join it... or Sega-16 for that matter. It was the atmosphere of a fair amount of general retro computer/console (etc) enthusiasts that interested me on top of the focus on Atari/Sega.

 

And one absolutely critical thing about both Atari and Sega is that both failed on the market in one way or another and fell from their once great mass market heights (or disappeared altogether -Atari Inc then Corp then Games died -and it's just a name now, on the mass market, while Sega is a shadow of what they once were -a little like Atari Games/Tengen compared to Atari Inc -given they're arcade/3rd party only).

As such, you've got a far more exclusively retro community with more hardcore enthusiasts in general and strong ties to retro gaming/computing in general (or general interest in tech history) that is not restricted to such for currently active mass market companies like Nintendo:

 

The very fact that Nintendo is still a major player on the mass market muddies the waters for retro, or rather it creates new fans (often ignorant) based on the current gen stuff that is non-existent for Atari, Sega, or some others, so the context is totally different.

Likewise, with all the new Nintendo fans, retro fans will tend to pool far less selectively, or avoid Nintendo sites in general due to the annoying fans (my major turn off to most Nintendo Sites -though Nintendoage has potential)... I've seen some poorer Sega based fan sites too (sega16bit isn't very promising), and Atariage itself (and Sega-16) have their exceptions at balanced and open-minded discussion/oppinions. (very much including Atari systems thenselves as I mentioned earlier -ie many internal conflict just looking at the different Atari Inc/Corp platforms and some hefty flame wars of such from VCSvsA8vsSTvs7800vsLynxvsJaguar and then others with divided loyalty to the C64 or Amiga in different combinations or others, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, etc -the SMS is obviously a major catch against the NES in this very topic )

 

 

 

 

 

That's a teensy bit skewed, since atariage covers pretty much any game system, classic computer, emulator, and arcade game ever.

 

At any rate, I'm a big fan of the NES and I've never really even heard of NintendoAge. I don't have an account there and likely will never sign up, because I don't have a need to find Nintendo fans online when they're all over the place outside of the internet.

It's not NES specific, but a breadth site catering to Nintendo stuff (especially older consoles) and it's probably the best site as such, though It's still a bit biased for my taste... it's got potential though and if it ever evolves into something as comprehensive as AA or Sega-16 (or a few others), I might join it.

As it is though, I'd rather discuss Nintendo related things on more balanced boards (including AA or Sega-16, or others like racketboy for true generalized retro).

 

Nintendo fans (or those with Nintendo experience -good, bad, or neutral) are indeed everywhere, especially in North America, so no matter where you go, you're likely to find them online or in RL.

 

And he was reffering to the popularity of the RETRO consoles, I think that was pretty obvious really seen as Atari havn't made a new console since 1993

And obviously Nintendo (or even the NES alone) outstrips that by far (probably more than an order of magnitude compared to Sega or Atari retro fans), not only due to the masses who played old Nintendo consoles in years gone by, but new Nintendo users who take interest in old Nintendo stuff almost exclusively because of brand recognition.

 

Retro popularity (or historical popularity -though the 2 are fairly strongly related, Nintendo boosted by retained market recognition relative to Atari or Sega) was not my argument or counter argument though (that was a side topic)... my only claim was that the NES was/is a good and worthwhile platform with its own merits as such. (and then we went back off onto a technical discussion related to some previous stuff in the thread but bringing in the SMS in that context -one definitive commonality of the SMS and 7800 is the weak stock audio compared to the NES -especially for music)

 

Nintendo retro stuff was/is more popular worldwide and that's not likely to ever change as such relative to other retro platforms (likewise you've got some regions -like the UK- that are exceptions to the NES's popularity, though also with regional exceptions to other things -like home computers that were never very popular in the US or Japan or popular long after consoles and PCs had wiped them back off the map of mass market gaming -as with the C64)

 

The one thing that's been avoided so far is a super long list of games to compare... (especially with the off topic sms vs nes thing since it's obvious that the historical nes library easily kills the 7800's overall -IMO it's not that far off for the SMS either, but at least it's got better competition against the NES)

On that note though, one interesting comparison on the NES and SMS would be Afterburner... or rather ABII on the NES vs AB on the SMS (Sunsoft's game is a fair bit better than Tengen's -a modified/enhanced derivative of Tengen's actually, but only released in Japan...) with the added animation, content. voice samples, better music/sound in general of the NES version (actually some content that's missing in the Genesis version, like the landing sequences) vs the larger character graphics and more onscreen color of the SMS game. (the SMS game suffers from choppy movement much of the time due to the decision to push for very few sprites and mostly render to the tiled BG as with Space Harrier except a bit more extreme, gameplay would be a separate issue than technical quality though... the sound really does it for me though, even compared to the FM rendition -which seems to be a basic arrangement based on the limited PSG version and not taking advantage of the 9 FM channels- the NES sounds better by a good margin IMO -in spite of the SMS using the cooler melodic renditions from the modified arcade version that the 32x and Genesis also lack but PCE and some others got)

At times the NES version actually seems a good bit more colorful an detailed oddly enough.

Edited January 5, 2011 by kool kitty89