Why did Atari ditch the 5200?

[Atari Joe]

Money.

[atariksi]

Money.

 

You sure? Perhaps, you meant competition where competitors were offering inferior systems at cheaper prices and taking over the market.

[svenski]

I think one of Atari's biggest problems was always marketing. Great products but a lack of willingness to spend the marketing buck.

 

I'm going to give examples from the UK at the time:

 

I ended up with an Atari 800XL because my parents , who had recently divorced, clubbed together to buy me a computer. All my friends had Spectrums (Speccies) or C64s. I took one look at the ZX81 and thought "wow, is that it" and decided I didn't want one. The Amstrad CPC was expensive and came with one of those green monitors which I didn't like the idea of. The C64 , at the time, was being bundled with a musical keyboard which put it out of their (my parents) price range.

 

The choice was either a C16 I think it was or an Atari... the Atari nobody had ever heard of and this was the time that Dixons in the UK were box shifting thousands of them. For One Hundred Pounds you could get a decent computer, tape unit, games and joystick... so I ended up with the Atari.

 

I can't remember ever seeing much in the way of advertising for the 8-bit range and it didn't take long to realise the 800XL wasn't the best choice as far as range of games was concerned... You'd enter a high street store, see shelves and shelves of Spectrum and C64 games and there might have been, if you were lucky, three or four 8-bit titles.

 

Moving on, when the XE Games System launched Atari UK did at first sell them as quickly as they could get them but, again, marketing was very limited. They seemed to stick to advertising in Atari User, sort of preaching to the already converted. Atari did make some effort with new titles but there was no real sense of them pushing the system.

 

Moving on a bit and I'm now manager of a computer store. We sell Commodore and Atari as well as consoles and the yuk yuk teachers favourite the Archimedes. We also get to sell the Lynx.

 

Atari had a small head start over Commodore when they launched the ST, but when the Amiga started gaining ground this seemed to be when Atari gave up advertising. Commodore really pushed their machine whilst Atari seemed to take a step back.

 

One Christmas I literally had a whole floor stacked to the ceiling with Commodore A500s. We would sell 30 Amigas to every ST. Every so often a young guy from Atari would pop in to give is point of sale material but not much else. We never sold Nintendo as Nintendo had one exclusive distributor in the UK at the time and you had to commit to a certain minimum order and then I think every order had to be a minimum 500 Pounds in value.

 

Anyway.... the Lynx was a fantastic product. I can't comment on GameBoy sales as we never touched them but the Lynx was also competing against the Game Gear. If people actually had the time and a bit of extra cash, and wanted to see both in action before buying they'd end up going with the Lynx... but most just saw SEGA and went for the GG.

 

Atari 8-bit owners in the UK had two choices, one was to become very loyal, dedicated die-hard fans or the other was to sell up quick and buy something else.

 

As for Commodore.... we can moan and bitch about Atari and wonder what might have been but look at Commodore... they outsold the ST at every turn but they ended up the same way, in fact I think Commodore went tits up before Atari melted away into nothingness.

 

From being at the sharp end of retail Commodore dabbled just like Atari had done. I remember seeing the CD32 and thinking "Wow"... think we sold three. The A600 was for them, I think, a disaster. People just didn't like the look of it... a bit like me some years before with the ZX81. The A1200 was a good machine but compatibility problems (Atari 1200XL anyone?) were an issue. I loved my A1200 but ended up selling it to buy a PC.

 

Once Commodore moved away from the A500+ we never had hundreds of Amigas stacked up to sell.

 

I remember hating all things SEGA. I thought the Master Drive was a bag of croc, and I never liked the Megadrive (Genesis). I could never see the point in them you could have a decent home computer that played great games and did everything else...

 

Personally I'm glad I ended up with the 800XL, and if I ended up back in 1984 again I'd probably still ask for the Atari... and just do as many paper rounds as a could so I could buy a 1050 real quick.

 

Anyway... end of rant.

[OldAtarian]

1. Atari kept the VCS in production WAY past it's expiration date which cut into the sales of Atari's future consoles. There should have been a reasonable overlap during the 5200 period but we shouldn't have seen VCS consoles still on store shelves in 1992. Atari should have been encouraging customers to buy it's new machines, not it's old one. It's called planned obsolescence and businesses have been doing it for a hundred years or more but that was apparently lost on Atari.

 

2. Atari, apparently, didn't spend enough time actually playtesting the controllers. When complaints started rolling in a new controller should have been put out to replace the defective ones immediately instead of them trying to tiptoe around the issue. The spectre of the rotten controllers haunts the 5200 to this day.

 

3. Atari didn't spend any money obtaining new licenses and kept rehashing their old VCS games to death on every new console they released. The Jaguar was the only system that wasn't dominated by 5-10 year old arcade titles.

 

4. When Colecovision hit the market Atari had a strong competitor with good, and more importantly, fresh games that they hadn't counted on. The 5200 was intended to better the specs of the Intellivision which itself was already getting old. Colecovision wasn't even on Atari's radar until it was too late.

 

5. Too many consoles, too many games. There were too many companies competing for a slice of the pie which led to the big crash of 83. Choice is good, but when you have too many choices the pie is divided up into too many pieces and nobody makes any money. The poor quality of some games during that time period also spooked a lot of people from buying games and retailers from carrying them. Anyone with a computer and an EPROM burner could make a game cart, leading to the market being flooded with crap. After the crash they probably felt it wasn't worth keeping the 5200 around (but apparently they felt the outdated VCS was worth keeping around, for another 9 years, ironically since it was the deluge of crap games being dumped onto the market for it that was a major contributor to the crash. Tsk.)

 

6. Home computers were stealing the limelight from dedicated game consoles. Prices were falling and home computers could do more than play games. They had more memory and better graphics than the consoles of the day so manufacturers switched their focus to them leading to all the many different home computers that came out of the 80's, some were pretty good and others were a disaster. Atari stood to make more focusing on it's computer line than it's game consoles. Most 5200 games had 400/800 equivalents that looked and played just as well anyway so I guess it was thought that ditching the 5200 and pushing the A8 in it's place made more sense than keeping it around.

Edited September 27, 2010 by OldAtarian

[atariksi]

1. Atari kept the VCS in production WAY past it's expiration date which cut into the sales of Atari's future consoles. There should have been a reasonable overlap during the 5200 period but we shouldn't have seen VCS consoles still on store shelves in 1992. Atari should have been encouraging customers to buy it's new machines, not it's old one. It's called planned obsolescence and businesses have been doing it for a hundred years or more but that was apparently lost on Atari.

 

Nah, the better approach was to make the newer consoles backward compatible. It's a money making scheme to trash older systems and build a new incompatible system. PC thrived on keeping everything backward compatible until today when they also stunk things up by makign 64-bit OSes incompatible with 16-bit software. You can't trash old stuff and start from scratch everytime. Many old things are gold. There was nothing wrong with keeping VCS compatibility rather than build some adapter later which was far too late and really just another console tacked-on onto the cartridge port. Only the Atari 8-bit computer line kept backward compatibility in their series from Atari 400 up to 130XE.

[CRTGAMER]

This guy, the Jack Attack marketing genius who once owned the home computer market with the Commodore 64.

 

 

Killed Atari video game console production. Tried to do the same with the Atari ST, held off the 7800, reacted too late over NES. 7800 never had a chance when finally released with year old library and technology.

Edited September 28, 2010 by CRTGAMER

[OldAtarian]

This guy, the Jack Attack marketing genius who once owned the home computer market with the Commodore 64.

 

 

Killed Atari video game console production. Tried to do the same with the Atari ST, held off the 7800, reacted too late over NES. 7800 never had a chance when finally released with year old library and technology.

 

 

I never thought JT was ever really serious about running Atari successfully. My theory has always been that he only bought it to use as a club to bludgeon Commodore to death with after him and his family were ousted from the company.

[Retro Rogue]

This guy, the Jack Attack marketing genius who once owned the home computer market with the Commodore 64.

 

 

Killed Atari video game console production. Tried to do the same with the Atari ST, held off the 7800, reacted too late over NES.

 

 

No, no, and no. Never killed it off, did not hold off the 7800 and did not release it in response to the NES. All myths that have already been disproven and well discussed in these forums.

[CRTGAMER]

This guy, the Jack Attack marketing genius who once owned the home computer market with the Commodore 64.

 

 

Killed Atari video game console production. Tried to do the same with the Atari ST, held off the 7800, reacted too late over NES.

 

No, no, and no. Never killed it off, did not hold off the 7800 and did not release it in response to the NES. All myths that have already been disproven and well discussed in these forums.

Actually I think Jack was pushing the ST, holding off production of dedicated game consoles. The same thinking the way Commodore took over in the earlier Video Game market. Advertising push at the time was: "Why buy a video game when you can get a computer instead." 7800 with more then year old development released to respond to NES.

 

The Wiki entry.

 

One month later, Warner Communications sold Atari's Consumer Division to Jack Tramiel. All projects were halted during an initial evaluation period. The Atari 7800 languished on warehouse shelves until it was re-introduced in January 1986 after strong 2600 sales the previous Christmas. Atari's launch of the 7800 under Tramiel was far more subdued than Warner had planned for the system in 1984 with a marketing budget of just $300,000. Additionally, the keyboard and high score cartridge were canceled, the expansion port was removed from later production runs of the system and, in lieu of new titles, the system was launched with titles intended for the 7800's debut in 1984.

 

A good read, with good reference sources. Ultimate History of Video Games.

 

Edited September 29, 2010 by CRTGAMER

[Retro Rogue]

No, no, and no. Never killed it off, did not hold off the 7800 and did not release it in response to the NES. All myths that have already been disproven and well discussed in these forums.

Actually I think Jack was pushing the ST, holding off production of dedicated game consoles.

 

No, he did not hold it off. We have the memos showing Jack starting the 2600 jr up again that August of '84. And the 7800 was locked up in negotiations.

 

7800 with more then year old development released to respond to NES.

 

The Wiki entry.

 

No, it was not released in response to the NES and as stated it has been more than well discussed here. An unreferenced claim on a Wikipedia page is a completely unreliable source of information.

 

A good read, with good reference sources. Ultimate History of Video Games.

 

A frustrating read actually, lots of great quotes surrounded by lots of infactual information. For example, Atari Coin and Consumer were not in connected buildings as he claims, they were in completely seperate buildings down the street from each other. The "storm troopers" comment happened when Leonard Tramiel and another employee drove over to coin.

[Retro Rogue]

1. Atari kept the VCS in production WAY past it's expiration date which cut into the sales of Atari's future consoles. There should have been a reasonable overlap during the 5200 period but we shouldn't have seen VCS consoles still on store shelves in 1992. Atari should have been encouraging customers to buy it's new machines, not it's old one. It's called planned obsolescence and businesses have been doing it for a hundred years or more but that was apparently lost on Atari.

 

Not sure what you're talking about, at the release of 5200 the 2600 was repositioned as Atari's low-end console offering with the 5200 as the high end, with a continual price drop to match. As Curt's released US sales figures show, if the 2600 was still on store shelves until 1992, it's a testement to it being a still in demand low end gaming console. They did not encourage one over the other, that's the way the market went because of price.

 

3. Atari didn't spend any money obtaining new licenses and kept rehashing their old VCS games to death on every new console they released. The Jaguar was the only system that wasn't dominated by 5-10 year old arcade titles.

 

With regards to the 7800, that's only true of the initial '84 test marketing. By the 1986 launch, they had no choice other than to rely on their older arcade licenses because Nintendo had already locked out the newer ones. That's why Katz had to go and strike up licensing deals with older computer game titles to port to the 7800.

 

After the crash they probably felt it wasn't worth keeping the 5200 around (but apparently they felt the outdated VCS was worth keeping around, for another 9 years, ironically since it was the deluge of crap games being dumped onto the market for it that was a major contributor to the crash. Tsk.)

 

5200 production stopped in Feb '84 to make room for Atari's new high end console offering to be the 7800. Well before the conclusion of "the crash". And the market crash was due to a much more complex set of factors than "crap games on the market", that's a hypothesis put out there by someone years ago that simply has not been backed up by the facts. A deluge of competitors to Atari playing a part in overstocked warehouses and confusion in consumer choice, yes. Crap games being a major part of the cause, no. I've heard that statement (along with E.T. being the cause) regurgitated on so many website and by so many people, it's simply ridiculous.

Edited September 29, 2010 by wgungfu

[Innovative Leisure]

I think the main reason Atari canceled the 5200 was the same reason they canceled the 1200XL: it was an enhanced 400/800 that sacrificed compatibility for new, yet unnecessary features.

 

Had the 5100 (5200jr) been released, it might have impressed current 5200 owners but there were still a lot of 2600 owners looking for a worthy successor. Enter the 7800.

[Retro Rogue]

it was an enhanced 400/800 that sacrificed compatibility for new, yet unnecessary features.

 

Once System X moved to the 5200 format, 2600 compatability via an attachment was planned from the beginning and actually announced during it's unveiling at the June '82 Summer CES in Chicago. It's in the press releases and kits.

Edited September 29, 2010 by wgungfu

[CRTGAMER]

Everyone has their own opinion as evidenced by that older thread too. All falls down on the CEO and board's decisions on why the 5200 was dropped.

 

I'm still happy, I own the 4 port * unit.

[Retro Rogue]

Everyone has their own opinion as evidenced by that older thread too. All falls down on the CEO and board's decisions on why the 5200 was dropped.

 

I'm still happy, I own the 4 port * unit.

 

I hope that's not referring to our exchange. Nothing I posted was "opinion", they were all verifiable facts from the people involved, direct documents, etc. The 7800 was not held off, it was not released in response to Nintendo, the 2600 Jr was started up right away, the 5200 *was* dropped to make room for the 7800, etc., etc.

Opinion is whether or not you like the 5200, or whether you thought it was better than Colecovision or not. These other things are not opinion.

Edited September 30, 2010 by wgungfu

[jetset]

Everyone has their own opinion as evidenced by that older thread too. All falls down on the CEO and board's decisions on why the 5200 was dropped.

 

I'm still happy, I own the 4 port * unit.

 

I hope that's not referring to our exchange. Nothing I posted was "opinion", they were all verifiable facts from the people involved, direct documents, etc. The 7800 was not held off, it was not released in response to Nintendo, the 2600 Jr was started up right away, the 5200 *was* dropped to make room for the 7800, etc., etc.

Opinion is whether or not you like the 5200, or whether you thought it was better than Colecovision or not. These other things are not opinion.

 

I was thinking the "*" after "4 port" was referring to the compatible with the 2600 adapter version.

[0078265317]

Good question. The 5200 was easily the best system of its era, (behind the 2600 of course) yet Atari really didn't put enough into it. Really, they doomed it with the pack in game...All they had to do was include PacMan, and the competing Colecovision would never have had the jump start it did on sales. I still though get a kick about the controllers. I don't believe there was near as much angst as people nowadays make out. I actually never heard of any problems whatsoever in regards to the controlers not cerntering back in the day. I think that was just made up by haters and fanboys years later. The reliability of the controllers though....that was a different problem unfortunately.

Seems like the "crash" helped pull the plug, since by the end of its run it was starting to overtake the CV in sales, and the quality of the games was second to none. I think were it not for the "crash" and the fact the 5200 was doomed to a slow start they may not have pulled the plug when they did.

 

Funny thing was we had a 4 port 5200 and we never has super breakout (I read here somewhere that was the pack in game). I remember it comming with pacman. I don't remember it comming with breakout.

 

As for the controllers pacman was a pain. The centrering thing was not made up. I remember once I yelled because pac went to the right and I meant left or something like that. And the stick was flimsy. Plus the buttons always stopped working after a while. Jungle hunt won't let me swing vines anymore. And I was so frustated becaue missle command never worked even at my moms brothers house. Missle command never worked. I thought it was broken till in emulation (KAT5200) it finally worked proving the red buttons on the sides never worked. But emulation is slow and buggy. So I reordered another 5200 off ebay after all these years. Will see when it comes.

 

But even back then it had issues. They were not made up.

[atariksi]

Good question. The 5200 was easily the best system of its era, (behind the 2600 of course) yet Atari really didn't put enough into it. Really, they doomed it with the pack in game...All they had to do was include PacMan, and the competing Colecovision would never have had the jump start it did on sales. I still though get a kick about the controllers. I don't believe there was near as much angst as people nowadays make out. I actually never heard of any problems whatsoever in regards to the controlers not cerntering back in the day. I think that was just made up by haters and fanboys years later. The reliability of the controllers though....that was a different problem unfortunately.

Seems like the "crash" helped pull the plug, since by the end of its run it was starting to overtake the CV in sales, and the quality of the games was second to none. I think were it not for the "crash" and the fact the 5200 was doomed to a slow start they may not have pulled the plug when they did.

 

Funny thing was we had a 4 port 5200 and we never has super breakout (I read here somewhere that was the pack in game). I remember it comming with pacman. I don't remember it comming with breakout.

 

As for the controllers pacman was a pain. The centrering thing was not made up. I remember once I yelled because pac went to the right and I meant left or something like that. And the stick was flimsy. Plus the buttons always stopped working after a while. Jungle hunt won't let me swing vines anymore. And I was so frustated becaue missle command never worked even at my moms brothers house. Missle command never worked. I thought it was broken till in emulation (KAT5200) it finally worked proving the red buttons on the sides never worked. But emulation is slow and buggy. So I reordered another 5200 off ebay after all these years. Will see when it comes.

 

But even back then it had issues. They were not made up.

 

Trackball works good for Missile Command, Galaxian, Space Invaders, and Super Breakout. For pac-man, use an 8-bit computer.

[5200Fanatic]

I'm talking very generally, but there are some similarities between Atari in the 80's and Sega in the 90's. Both the 2600 and Genesis were strong players in the face of good competition. The 5200 was similar to the Sega Saturn - neither were anywhere as popular as their predecessors. Then the 7800 was similar to the Dreamcast, where both companies finally got it right, but too little too late and the competition was too tough.

[Rik]

Well it's no secret the Tramiel family used Atari's company money as their own personal bank accounts.

Edited February 6, 2011 by Rik

[Inky]

 

 

Funny thing was we had a 4 port 5200 and we never has super breakout (I read here somewhere that was the pack in game). I remember it comming with pacman. I don't remember it comming with breakout.

 

Pac-Man was included later, as I understand it, as a direct response to the Colecovision using Donkey Kong as a pack-in

[DracIsBack]

Well it's no secret the Tramiel family used Atari's company money as their own personal bank accounts.

 

According to who???

 

That's kind of like saying, "I heard from someone, who heard from someone, who knows someone, who says that Rik likes to dress up in women's clothing and run around downtown Palm Beach singing No Doubt's 'I'm Just A Girl"." Clearly it must be true!

 

Seriously, Atari Corp was publicly traded and answered to the stockholders, subject to the laws of traded companies and requiring independent auditors to review their financial numbers.

[Lynxpro]

Well it's no secret the Tramiel family used Atari's company money as their own personal bank accounts.

 

According to who???

 

That's kind of like saying, "I heard from someone, who heard from someone, who knows someone, who says that Rik likes to dress up in women's clothing and run around downtown Palm Beach singing No Doubt's 'I'm Just A Girl"." Clearly it must be true!

 

Seriously, Atari Corp was publicly traded and answered to the stockholders, subject to the laws of traded companies and requiring independent auditors to review their financial numbers.

 

 

The stock broker that I bought my Atari stock from said the very same thing; that the Tramiels actively traded the stock all the time...pumping and dumping. But my infinitely small amount of stock was meant just so I could attend the shareholder's meeting and pester the board with questions... And you gotta remember that Atari Corp alleged stock manipulation was rather small potatoes versus what Ray Kassar was accused of at the near height of Atari Inc's success...

 

I wish I could get my friend - a former Atari dealer - to jump online and share his story about the latter days of Atari Corp. and getting hit up by Sam to sell his buddy a Playstation for wholesale...

Edited February 10, 2011 by Lynxpro

[kool kitty89]

I think one of Atari's biggest problems was always marketing. Great products but a lack of willingness to spend the marketing buck.

 

I'm going to give examples from the UK at the time:

 

I ended up with an Atari 800XL because my parents , who had recently divorced, clubbed together to buy me a computer. All my friends had Spectrums (Speccies) or C64s. I took one look at the ZX81 and thought "wow, is that it" and decided I didn't want one. The Amstrad CPC was expensive and came with one of those green monitors which I didn't like the idea of. The C64 , at the time, was being bundled with a musical keyboard which put it out of their (my parents) price range.

 

The choice was either a C16 I think it was or an Atari... the Atari nobody had ever heard of and this was the time that Dixons in the UK were box shifting thousands of them. For One Hundred Pounds you could get a decent computer, tape unit, games and joystick... so I ended up with the Atari.

 

I can't remember ever seeing much in the way of advertising for the 8-bit range and it didn't take long to realise the 800XL wasn't the best choice as far as range of games was concerned... You'd enter a high street store, see shelves and shelves of Spectrum and C64 games and there might have been, if you were lucky, three or four 8-bit titles.

 

Moving on, when the XE Games System launched Atari UK did at first sell them as quickly as they could get them but, again, marketing was very limited. They seemed to stick to advertising in Atari User, sort of preaching to the already converted. Atari did make some effort with new titles but there was no real sense of them pushing the system.

 

Moving on a bit and I'm now manager of a computer store. We sell Commodore and Atari as well as consoles and the yuk yuk teachers favourite the Archimedes. We also get to sell the Lynx.

 

Atari had a small head start over Commodore when they launched the ST, but when the Amiga started gaining ground this seemed to be when Atari gave up advertising. Commodore really pushed their machine whilst Atari seemed to take a step back.

 

One Christmas I literally had a whole floor stacked to the ceiling with Commodore A500s. We would sell 30 Amigas to every ST. Every so often a young guy from Atari would pop in to give is point of sale material but not much else. We never sold Nintendo as Nintendo had one exclusive distributor in the UK at the time and you had to commit to a certain minimum order and then I think every order had to be a minimum 500 Pounds in value.

 

Anyway.... the Lynx was a fantastic product. I can't comment on GameBoy sales as we never touched them but the Lynx was also competing against the Game Gear. If people actually had the time and a bit of extra cash, and wanted to see both in action before buying they'd end up going with the Lynx... but most just saw SEGA and went for the GG.

 

Atari 8-bit owners in the UK had two choices, one was to become very loyal, dedicated die-hard fans or the other was to sell up quick and buy something else.

 

As for Commodore.... we can moan and bitch about Atari and wonder what might have been but look at Commodore... they outsold the ST at every turn but they ended up the same way, in fact I think Commodore went tits up before Atari melted away into nothingness.

 

From being at the sharp end of retail Commodore dabbled just like Atari had done. I remember seeing the CD32 and thinking "Wow"... think we sold three. The A600 was for them, I think, a disaster. People just didn't like the look of it... a bit like me some years before with the ZX81. The A1200 was a good machine but compatibility problems (Atari 1200XL anyone?) were an issue. I loved my A1200 but ended up selling it to buy a PC.

 

Once Commodore moved away from the A500+ we never had hundreds of Amigas stacked up to sell.

 

I remember hating all things SEGA. I thought the Master Drive was a bag of croc, and I never liked the Megadrive (Genesis). I could never see the point in them you could have a decent home computer that played great games and did everything else...

 

Personally I'm glad I ended up with the 800XL, and if I ended up back in 1984 again I'd probably still ask for the Atari... and just do as many paper rounds as a could so I could buy a 1050 real quick.

 

Anyway... end of rant.

Wow, that's really interesting, I missed this earlier, but these anecdotes really point toward some issues I hadn't heard before with the marketing issues in Europe/UK. (especially in regards to the Atari Inc years with the 8-bits -unless you were too young to remember ads from ~'81-84)

 

I knew Warner/AInc did a poor job of really catering to the EU/UK market (from cost/form factor to supporting tape media, to 3rd party/home software development support, etc), but hadn't realized they were also lacking in advertizing. (though the advertising issues would be even more substantial in the US where the market is even more integrated with advertising and without the same potential for viral marketing as in much of Europe)

[kool kitty89]

I think the main reason Atari canceled the 5200 was the same reason they canceled the 1200XL: it was an enhanced 400/800 that sacrificed compatibility for new, yet unnecessary features.

 

Had the 5100 (5200jr) been released, it might have impressed current 5200 owners but there were still a lot of 2600 owners looking for a worthy successor. Enter the 7800.

The lack of compatibility can often be well worth the sacrifice if it truly allows substantially higher performance and cost effectiveness. (the 7800 architecture was not only limited by development time and low cost constraints, but by being tied down to VCS compatibility -you could have a significantly more capable machine in mid '84 at similar cost if they didn't have to worry about compatibility) OTOH, you can also have an extremely tight design with direct evolution of older hardware allowing highly efficient compatibility along with enhancements. (the 1980/81 3200 design seems to be in that range with the evolved STIA -and later consolidation should have merged STIA and FRANTIC a la CGIA)

 

The 5200 in general specs and feature set could have been very cost effective and should have been cheaper to produce and sell than the A8 or Colecovision, but for whatever reasons, it ended up a mess on a motherboard larger than the 1200XL, massive heavy plastic case that made it heavier than the 400 (with its considerable aluminum castings and multi-board 1979 design) and have a larger footprint than the 800 even.

 

A lean and clean design based on Sally(6502c)+ANTIC+GTIA+POKEY+16k DRAM for 1982 could have been very cost effective and should have launched at or possibly below $199 SRP.

 

-The motherboard should have been more compact and consolidated than the Atari 600 prototype (no BASIC or OS ROM, no PIA, no PBI, no MMU) and given the A8 was dropping to 2 controller ports, they probably should have kept to 2 ports as well (in that layout, they could actually have enough I/O lines from GTIA and POKEY -key and pot lines which could be hacked as I/O lines- to allow fairly conventional 8-way digital controllers with added buttons -possibly even using the VCS type pinout with analog modes supporting the same VCS paddles as well as allong the VCS joyticks to be used if you wanted).

 

-8k DRAM chips were still a little more expensive than 2k ones, but the added consolidation should have been worth it even in '82 (and would pay off dividends as RAM prices dropped) so just 2 8k 4-bit DRAM chips vs 8 2k 1-bit chips. (there's a reason the C64 and 1200XL opted for 8k DRAMs)

 

-The expansion port should have been removed, but added expansion signals should have been added to the cart slot, not only support for RAM expansion and sound input, but perhaps better general provisions for the VCS module to be simpler and cheaper. (the composite video input line obviously, but maybe they could even have had expansion lines to directly interface the 5200 controller ports -which would now be pin compatible with the VCS- to the cart slot and to RIOT and TIA onboard the VCS module -you'd need 14 added lines to connect the necessary I/O and analog lines for such, but it should have been worth it in general, plus you could move those expansion pins to outboard connections like the 7800 or SNES to keep the cost of normal games down, that and/or have logic that remapped existing cart signals for the VCS module mode -or have a cart slot with expansion limited to RAM and sound support and add an expansion port again, but have it cost optimized and oritented at providing VCS interfacing for I/O, sound, and video, maybe even allow the SALLY CPU to act as the VCS CPU with an external clock source and cut the VCS unit down to just RIOT and TIA and a bit of added logic -and in any case, have the 5200 power supply and 5V line on the cart/expansion port strong enough to power the VCS module)

 

-Cutting the cart slot back to ~32 pins with 7800 type expansion support (RAM and sound, IRQ would be nice) and adding a compact, dedicated expansion port (probably a cheap PCB connector) aimed mainly for the VCS adapter would have made a lot of sense and also allowed a form factor for the adapter module such that you wouldn't need to remove it to play 5200 games. (more like the CV but more compact and cheaper since the expansion port would be allowing the use if the 5200 controller port connectors and CPU -and later VCS modules could use the JAN ASIC instead of RIOT+TIA, or a specific version for the 5200 with the 6507 cut out of the die and fewer pins to reduce cost -around the same time, you'd have CGIA also allowing further consolidation of the 5200's internal chipset)

 

That's actually probably what Sega should have done for the MD rather than sacrificing cost/performance with the far from ideal internal compatibiltiy: especially since they required an external (mostly passive) adapter on top of that. (ie cut out the Z80+RAM and SMS VDP block from the main VDP die to allow more internal features and consolidation -more color, RAM, sound hardware, etc- and build up the cart slot with the necessary lines to allow piggybacking of the MD's I/O and RGB encoder -audio input is already on the cart slot- as well as the power supply strong enough to mesh with an embedded SMS on the adapter module -or cut out some expansion from the cart slot and move all that stuff over to the side expansion port, though it could have been more efficient to remove that port in favor of the cart slot having all expansion -as it is, the side port offers nothing over the cart slot and is actually weaker as it lacks much of the address space or analog genlock support)

 

 

In any case, the 5200 didn't do anything close to that and was an inefficient mess, the controllers mirror that too: odd corner cutting in some areas, but added cost in others. :daze:

 

 

 

OTOH, a better "quick fix" solution to the situation of the 3200 taking longer than they felt acceptable could be to just tack on TIA and GTIA rather than building STIA, so very much like the 7800 except using ANTIC+GTIA instead of MARIA. (they could either stick to the planned SRAM of the 3200 -2 kB 8-bit SRAM chip, 1/2 of what the 7800 has- or move over to DRAM like the 5200/400 -added logic, but cheaper RAM costs and could pay off in the long run by far with further price drops and integrated circuitry replacing the logic used to interface the DRAM initially- plus, they could have enabled RIOT interrupts in 3200/5200 mode for some neat added effects, especially use for doing modulations and high res square waves with TIA -or 4-bit PCM samples for that matter- as well as making better use of the 1-bit GTIA channel for an additional square/pulse wave channel at fixed volume -so you could have 2 normal TIA channels and a RIOT+CPU modulated GTIA channel, so better onboard sound than the 7800 -plus they could invest in designing some low cost embedded sound chips to put on cart for some later games, perhaps using POKEY as a starting point and cutting that back to just the audio block and shrinking the die to fit into perhaps a 20-pin skinny DIP, maybe 18 pins if you cut IRQ and made the registers write only, or maybe even 16 pins if you allowed it to run off a single clock input -not sure if GCC ever considered that route for GUMBY, but I'd think that would be the obvious choice given their partnership with Warner -get the schematics for POKEY and maybe some engineering assistance from Atari to accelerate development of a low-cost sound chip rather than starting from the ground up, especially since it would have the same features as POKEY sans the external timer/interrupt functions and could thus allow more faithful ports of A8 games as well as new games using TIA as well; I don't think GCC actually did that though, and I wonder why since it looks like a very good option on the surface)

Edited February 11, 2011 by kool kitty89