7800 Sound?

[Atari Scorpio]

Both Xevious and Food Fight sound just fine on the 7800. Why does everyone bash the 7800 sound when there is proof the the 2600 sound was just fine?

[Rybags]

2600 sound was "fine" in it's day because about all there was to compare it to was the bleeps and boops that came out of those generic Pong TV units, or the clicks and beeps of the Apple II.

 

I suppose you could also say it's fine compared to the Vic 20, but that's about as far as it goes.

 

 

7800 was underdone in a number of areas, probably the most glaring being the crap onboard sound of the TIA and the lack of RAM built in.

 

If the Tramiels had included Pokey and increased the onboard RAM, the unit cost would have gone up by maybe $20-$30. I think that would have been tolerable, especially since it would have meant much better games.

[+Allan]

I think there are two things to consider with the TIA on the 7800.

 

One is that some programmers didn't put in the time to better mimic the arcade sounds of the game they were working on.

 

And two is that some arcade game sounds were easier to mimic on the TIA. Games like Xevious, Food Fight, and the sounds for Zoo Keeper for the 2600 that were discovered sound great. Where other games like Donkey Kong, suck. I think in the case of Donkey Kong, the TIA just can't mimic the arcade very good.

 

Allan

[DracIsBack]

I think there are two things to consider with the TIA on the 7800.

 

One area where I found that programmers didn't always do a good job with TIA was in the volume (too loud) and high notes (too shrill).

 

I think there are some 7800 games that have passable music (Midnight Mutants, Dark Chambers) given the sound chip. Others have surprisingly good sound effects (Jinks, Scrapyard Dog), IMO.

 

But then there are games that I think sound *REALLY* obnoxious. Tower Toppler comes to mind with the shrill music and the obnoxious ball bouncing.

[The_Laird]

The music on Double Dragon is simply amazing considering thats the Tia chip.

[DracIsBack]

The music on Double Dragon is simply amazing considering thats the Tia chip.

 

Yeah, the boss music is surprisingly similar to what's on the Master System version.

[joeybastard]

But then there are games that I think sound *REALLY* obnoxious. Tower Toppler comes to mind with the shrill music and the obnoxious ball bouncing.

 

I was playing that last night. I hadn't played it in like a year so I forgot how awful the sound is on that game. I like the game and I like that I can choose what level to start at but man that music is like chewing on tinfoil.

[kool kitty89]

2600 sound was "fine" in it's day because about all there was to compare it to was the bleeps and boops that came out of those generic Pong TV units, or the clicks and beeps of the Apple II.

 

I suppose you could also say it's fine compared to the Vic 20, but that's about as far as it goes.

 

I think the VIC-20's chip was fairly similar to the PSGs used in the ColecoVision, Master System (and SG-1000), plus several others using the common TI SN76489 (3 square wave plus 1 white noise channel), and others using the somewhat similar AY-3-8910 (or copy, like the YM2149), like the Intelivision, Vectrex, Atari ST, MSX, etc.

 

They all certainly had more channels than TIA though. (It's my understanding that TIA, as well as POKEY were capable of more varied waveforms than the simple Square/Rectangle wave of many Simple PSGs -the NES's sound hardware and C64's SID not fitting this category of course)

 

 

7800 games seem to have significantly better sounding music generated by TIA than with the 2600, it this due to better programming, more CPU resources availble, lack of having to sync the CPU to the display ("riding the beam"), what? (It's my understanding the 6502C CPU in the 7800 had to drop down to 1.19 MHz when accessing the 2600 hardware -TIA or RIOT, so that would at least be the same for both)

Edited July 3, 2009 by kool kitty89

[gdement]

7800 games seem to have significantly better sounding music generated by TIA than with the 2600, it this due to better programming, more CPU resources availble, lack of having to sync the CPU to the display ("riding the beam"), what? (It's my understanding the 6502C CPU in the 7800 had to drop down to 1.19 MHz when accessing the 2600 hardware -TIA or RIOT, so that would at least be the same for both)

As you said 7800 has much more processor time available. This would make it more practical to walk the TIA through more complex sounds. There probably isn't much time to fiddle with sound registers in a 2600 game.