Comparing the NES and 7800 on a technical level

[+DrVenkman]

 

Yes - i own the book. And of course there was interest or they wouldn't have done extensive meetings, due dilegence, technical comparisons etc. Both companies invested a fair bit in the process at a time when Atari was also going through massive changes.

 

Saying Atari "wasn't interested" or "turned Nintendo down" is a gross over-simplification of what actually happened.

 

Of course it's a simplification; that's why I referred interested readers to the book. But the reality is, after all the discussions, the deal fell apart because neither Warner corporate nor Atari, Inc. management was interested in the kind of deal and terms proposed. That's what happens in many proposed contractual arrangements.

 

There were absolutely pros and cons to the deal. Though, I always say - deals like this are hard to put together. I think many people don't realize how truly hard they are even under normal circumstances when things are going well (ie. by the time all the lawyers are done arguing about who indemnifies who in what circumstance and agree on language in the deal) unless they've been involved in a deal like this. Let alone when a company is constantly having layoffs, changes, new personnel and other distracting problems like Atari had at the time.

 

 

As it happens, I spent the majority of calendar year 2017 doing corporate legal due diligence work and contract analysis for a series of deals totaling in the nine figure-plus range. I know exactly how much effort is involved.

 

But for a causal discussion among videogame enthusiasts, talking obscure nuances of corporate deal-making about something that happened decades ago is beyond the scope of a forum thread; hence, again, referring to well-researched secondary sources like Curt & Marty's book.

 

EDIT: Upon reflection, I need to add that I'm not looking for a typical forum nerd-fight here, so please don't think I'm arguing for the sake of argument. And of course, none of this is personal. The more information shed on these lesser-known bits of gaming history the better, though I still think the exhauastive details are probably best left to someplace other than a brief post. At any rate, we are all fortunate to live in a time when the 7800 is finally getting some love in the form of games - and hopefully Curt's XM Module someday will help! - that show off the system architecture's potential had history gone differently.

Edited July 5, 2018 by DrVenkman

[DracIsBack]

All good. We're on the same page. There's so much misinfo out there regarding the 7800, NES deal, Jack's view on video games etc that I'm a bit hyper sensitive when I see what I think is one of those usual suspects rearing its head.

[high voltage]

Truth is, SMS got a shitload of good titles, and 7800 not, so NES wasn't really the problem.

[DracIsBack]

Truth is, SMS got a shitload of good titles, and 7800 not, so NES wasn't really the problem.

 

In Europe especially. North America got a bit shortchanged in this dept for the SMS. Sega basically pulled the plug on it before most games came out here. <sigh>

[+SmittyB]

Speaking of Europe I personally think the 7800 and it's library is more comparable to the various microcomputers around at the time such as the C64, ZX Spectrum, and BBC Micro.

Other than the C64 these aren't exactly known for their sound quality so even the TIA sound would have been perfectly acceptable, and graphically the 7800 could easily handle a lot of the games made for these.

 

If the cost of cartridges could have been brought down to compete with cassette storage, and if some form of keyboard interface was added as was planned, then it could have very well held its own in Europe through to the 90s.

[kiwilove]

Sega didn't get off with a good start in the home market - look at the Sega SG-1000 - around 1983? Pretty much a dull start - but they (companies) have to start somewhere - look at the 2600.

I was pretty much underwhelmed by all these systems - and it was the Atari 400/800 etc line that got me interested in a home system worth buying - and playing - because the graphics capabilities was there.

 

I wanted something thatcould come close to what was in the arcades at the time 1982 to 1983 and didn't want to wait another 2 years for something to come along...

 

I was not interested in the TRS-80 - as this was too much like the 2600 - ie. blocky graphics.

 

Harvey

[christo930]

 

There are a few reasons that have been tossed around throughout the years.

 

1. It absolutely, positively 100% was a design goal to make the 7800 backward compatible with the 2600 because the 5200 had taken heat for not having been. The TIA was used in the 7800's design for backwards compatibility with the 2600.

 

2. GCC always intended for the 7800 to be able to include sound chips in the cartridge to go over and above what the TIA could offer. This wasn't an afterthought of "Oh crap, it's behind, let's just do something". The idea was always there and Ballblazer (an intended launch title) was the proof of concept to show it. However, the cartridge design was not limited to POKEY and the plan was to create a low cost POKEY successor (GUMBY) that could be commonly used. If anything, POKEY was the proof of concept but GUMBY was was the expected execution of the vision.

 

It's discussed at length here, in the 7800's history, in the MP3

 

http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/7800/7800-20th/

 

 

3. There was definitely some speculation as to whether POKEY was excluded because of cost/space reasons and also it was speculated that GCC would "sell" Atari chips, but not sure what their royalty agreements were surrounding this. Definitely makes sense from GCCs perspective.

 

Regardless, the 7800 got released, GCC got paid off and the vision that the 7800 realized under the Tramiels was very different than the vision dreamed up by GCC.

 

I got a chance to check out that talk.

Normally, you have to give leeway for people who lived in 1982 who don't have the benefit of being in 2018 and knowing what we know. But as I suspected, the disaster of the 5200 was well known at the time and they did it anyway. They did focus groups and knew what consumers wanted and they promptly ignored them and said 'consumers don't actually know what they want to buy, so we will just tell them what they want'. This was likely the case with the 2600, but that is only because consumers didn't know they wanted home video game systems, but this was no longer true 5 years later in 82.

 

The GUMBY chip was kind of an oversight and they planned to downgrade it even more. You have to wonder why they didn't just put an actual POKEY in there in the first place. They didn't do a sound chip because there wasn't time to do one, but the POKEY was already done and in production and had been for many years at that point.

 

The real tragedies though are the management thing and Trameil becoming involved. The 7800 is what they needed when the 5200 launched. The 5200 should have been the 7800, but of course the 7800 was made in response to how bad the 5200 was. Still, I think the head start of launching the 7800 on time with the full support of Warner and Atari would have been enough to change history. If nothing else, Nintendo would not have had the leverage to lock the 3rd party developers into exclusive contracts.

[Mord]

The GUMBY chip was kind of an oversight and they planned to downgrade it even more. You have to wonder why they didn't just put an actual POKEY in there in the first place. They didn't do a sound chip because there wasn't time to do one, but the POKEY was already done and in production and had been for many years at that point.

 

 

The main reason one of the GCC guys gave for that in an audio presentation/narrative at one event was because with the addition of a TIA on the motherboard there wasn't really enough room to add an actual pokey. Whether that's true or they simply saw more profit in making a unique sound chip to sell to Atari in bulk we'll never know. The link to the audio in question can be found with the search function on this site.

[King Atari]

Truth is, SMS got a shitload of good titles, and 7800 not, so NES wasn't really the problem.

 

BINGO. You can't say the SMS did everything right, but compared to Atari's general handling of the 7800, they kinda did. Locked up some big name licenses, created games similar to what was popular on the NES, had some unique arcade ports, and even the 3-D games & glasses. And while it was nowhere near what Nintendo was doing, Sega had a higher presence via TV commercials, as well. Add in the superior graphic capabilities, and the SMS should have done way better than it did. (My only real complaint? I wish the FM unit was built-in like the Japanese Master System!)

 

Of course it still failed to put a dent in the NES juggernaut in North America, but it's not like Sega didn't try.

 

 

In Europe especially. North America got a bit shortchanged in this dept for the SMS. Sega basically pulled the plug on it before most games came out here. <sigh>

 

I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure I'd really say they "pulled the plug." It was alive in wide-release for, roughly, as long as the 7800 was - except it was far, far better supported. By the time those uber-NES-like games were coming out overseas, there was just no real market for the SMS in North America. "Sega" essentially meant "Genesis" by then. But again, it's not like Sega didn't try; a revised console, an adapter for the Genesis, and even *some* of those later-games - it's just that, relatively speaking, no one was buying. If the SMS hadn't been a success here before, it certainly wasn't going to become one when the 16-bit era had already dawned. I mean, I certainly wish the SMS ports of Forgotten Worlds and Batman Returns had reached these shores, but Sega tried over and over to make the SMS 'go' here, and it clearly wasn't going to happen. The US version of SMS Sonic the Hedgehog fell totally flat, and if that wasn't going to move copies, nothing was.

 

Yes, there were some instances where North America got genuinely shortchanged in comparison to Europe (the butchered Captain Silver, for example), but the differences between the two libraries can basically be chalked up to the NES/SMS situation as basically being a flip. Over there, SMS was the runaway success and the NES did comparatively little, and as such, it was supported well after it had been superseded by technically-superior consoles - just like the NES in North America.

Edited July 10, 2018 by King Atari

[christo930]

 

BINGO. You can't say the SMS did everything right, but compared to Atari's general handling of the 7800, they kinda did. Locked up some big name licenses, created games similar to what was popular on the NES, had some unique arcade ports, and even the 3-D games & glasses. And while it was nowhere near what Nintendo was doing, Sega had a higher presence via TV commercials, as well. Add in the superior graphic capabilities, and the SMS should have done way better than it did. (My only real complaint? I wish the FM unit was built-in like the Japanese Master System!)

 

Of course it still failed to put a dent in the NES juggernaut in North America, but it's not like Sega didn't try.

 

 

I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure I'd really say they "pulled the plug." It was alive in wide-release for, roughly, as long as the 7800 was - except it was far, far better supported. By the time those uber-NES-like games were coming out overseas, there was just no real market for the SMS in North America. "Sega" essentially meant "Genesis" by then. But again, it's not like Sega didn't try; a revised console, an adapter for the Genesis, and even *some* of those later-games - it's just that, relatively speaking, no one was buying. If the SMS hadn't been a success here before, it certainly wasn't going to become one when the 16-bit era had already dawned. I mean, I certainly wish the SMS ports of Forgotten Worlds and Batman Returns had reached these shores, but Sega tried over and over to make the SMS 'go' here, and it clearly wasn't going to happen. The US version of SMS Sonic the Hedgehog fell totally flat, and if that wasn't going to move copies, nothing was.

 

Yes, there were some instances where North America got genuinely shortchanged in comparison to Europe (the butchered Captain Silver, for example), but the differences between the two libraries can basically be chalked up to the NES/SMS situation as basically being a flip. Over there, SMS was the runaway success and the NES did comparatively little, and as such, it was supported well after it had been superseded by technically-superior consoles - just like the NES in North America.

 

Sega was not Atari and the SMS did not get released until late1986. Sega (and Nintendo) were unknown in America other than the arcade machines and even then most people had no idea who these were. Everyone in America knew who and what Atari was. Had the 7800 been fully launched and supported on time in 1984, I think at bare minimum, Nintendo would not have been able to tie up all of the developers early on the way they did.

Better hardware (I don't really know if the NES actually has better hardware) doesn't always mean winning. It's difficult (impossible really) to know what would have happened in some alternate timeline where X happened, but it is also not written in stone that NES was going to win just because SMS was unable to defeat the NES despite doing a lot of things right and having better hardware.

 

In many ways, I think a lot of this stuff is dumb luck because of natural monopolies. The computer market is a great example. The computer market could never have matured with dozens of incompatible architectures in the market all with comparable market share, that couldn't even do such basic things as read each other's disks. Some standard was going to win this and in many ways, it was dumb luck that caused MS/Intel to become the standard. The PC was a terrible design and absolutely did not win on merit alone. It was stupidly slow and configured in a really dumb way that haunted PC makers for a very long time. MS certainly lucked its way into becoming the OS for an IBM product. Had IBM signed with Digital Research, DR might be sitting where MS is today and DR's founder whose name I don't recall at the moment might have died (or not have died) a billionaire like Gates. I think his anniversary kept his from meeting with IBM!

 

Sometimes it's easy to look back and see purposefully driven events that lead to today, but in reality was a bunch of disconnected fortunes or misfortunes that just happen to make the actors look like geniuses.

[mbd30]

 

Sega was not Atari and the SMS did not get released until late1986. Sega (and Nintendo) were unknown in America other than the arcade machines and even then most people had no idea who these were. Everyone in America knew who and what Atari was. Had the 7800 been fully launched and supported on time in 1984, I think at bare minimum, Nintendo would not have been able to tie up all of the developers early on the way they did.

Better hardware (I don't really know if the NES actually has better hardware) doesn't always mean winning. It's difficult (impossible really) to know what would have happened in some alternate timeline where X happened, but it is also not written in stone that NES was going to win just because SMS was unable to defeat the NES despite doing a lot of things right and having better hardware.

 

In many ways, I think a lot of this stuff is dumb luck because of natural monopolies. The computer market is a great example. The computer market could never have matured with dozens of incompatible architectures in the market all with comparable market share, that couldn't even do such basic things as read each other's disks. Some standard was going to win this and in many ways, it was dumb luck that caused MS/Intel to become the standard. The PC was a terrible design and absolutely did not win on merit alone. It was stupidly slow and configured in a really dumb way that haunted PC makers for a very long time. MS certainly lucked its way into becoming the OS for an IBM product. Had IBM signed with Digital Research, DR might be sitting where MS is today and DR's founder whose name I don't recall at the moment might have died (or not have died) a billionaire like Gates. I think his anniversary kept his from meeting with IBM!

 

Sometimes it's easy to look back and see purposefully driven events that lead to today, but in reality was a bunch of disconnected fortunes or misfortunes that just happen to make the actors look like geniuses.

 

Huh? How was the PC "stupidly slow"? It was competitive in terms of CPU and amount of RAM, but it sucked in terms of graphics and sound until around the early/mid 90s.

[pacman000]

Gary Kilgal, I think, founded DR.

 

Edit: It was Gary Kildall. Passed away in 1994.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

Edited July 10, 2018 by pacman000

[King Atari]

 

Sega was not Atari and the SMS did not get released until late1986.

Precisely why I said it was supported roughly as long as the 7800 was.

 

 

Sega (and Nintendo) were unknown in America other than the arcade machines and even then most people had no idea who these were. Everyone in America knew who and what Atari was. Had the 7800 been fully launched and supported on time in 1984, I think at bare minimum, Nintendo would not have been able to tie up all of the developers early on the way they did.

Well, I was speaking of the support given to the console(s) in the late-1980s, and how they stacked up against the de facto winner of the era. Sure, despite some tarnishing with the retailers, the name-recognition probably helped the 7800 outsell the SMS, but that's neither here nor there regarding this point; in the late-80s, the NES was in charge in North America, and I was merely saying Sega did a far better job of matching it in terms of library/peripherals/etc., and thus the success of the NES didn't automatically preclude a competing console from having good, "current" games, as High Voltage correctly pointed out. By and large, the 7800, for as much as I love it, didn't stay "up to date" in nearly the same way.

 

And while I agree it would have been better had Atari Inc. released the 7800 in 1984 instead of Atari Corp. in 1986, it's all guesswork as to how it would have all played out. Remember, the crash was still in effect in 1984.

 

 

Better hardware (I don't really know if the NES actually has better hardware) doesn't always mean winning. It's difficult (impossible really) to know what would have happened in some alternate timeline where X happened, but it is also not written in stone that NES was going to win just because SMS was unable to defeat the NES despite doing a lot of things right and having better hardware.

I never said the better hardware wins (in fact, the opposite is usually true). Nor did I say the NES won because the SMS couldn't top it. What I did say was that the SMS, given the library and abilities, should have had more success here than it did. The truth is, unless Sega and Atari had been insanely aggressive right out of the gate upon their respective nationwide launches, I doubt either was going to beat Nintendo, and maybe not even then; Mario, the marketing, the peripherals, the 3rd party policies, the word-of-mouth, and so on and so forth all turned the NES into an absolute phenomenon. I'd imagine by 1988 there was no possible way either Atari or Sega could catch up to it in sales, but that's merely a guess on my part.

 

Sometimes it's easy to look back and see purposefully driven events that lead to today, but in reality was a bunch of disconnected fortunes or misfortunes that just happen to make the actors look like geniuses.

Well, yeah, but again, my main point was that Sega's Master System kept current with the times, as essentially dictated by the NES, and Atari's 7800, by and large, did not. And it wasn't by some unlucky happenstance that they didn't either; once it became apparent the direction(s) gaming was heading, Atari themselves failed to keep up - until it was far too late to be a serious contender in the market at-large, anyway.

Edited July 10, 2018 by King Atari

[christo930]

 

Precisely why I said it was supported roughly as long as the 7800 was.

 

 

Well, I was speaking of the support given to the console(s) in the late-1980s, and how they stacked up against the de facto winner of the era. Sure, despite some tarnishing with the retailers, the name-recognition probably helped the 7800 outsell the SMS, but that's neither here nor there regarding this point; in the late-80s, the NES was in charge in North America, and I was merely saying Sega did a far better job of matching it in terms of library/peripherals/etc., and thus the success of the NES didn't automatically preclude a competing console from having good, "current" games, as High Voltage correctly pointed out. By and large, the 7800, for as much as I love it, didn't stay "up to date" in nearly the same way.

 

And while I agree it would have been better had Atari Inc. released the 7800 in 1984 instead of Atari Corp. in 1986, it's all guesswork as to how it would have all played out. Remember, the crash was still in effect in 1984.

 

 

I never said the better hardware wins (in fact, the opposite is usually true). Nor did I say the NES won because the SMS couldn't top it. What I did say was that the SMS, given the library and abilities, should have had more success here than it did. The truth is, unless Sega and Atari had been insanely aggressive right out of the gate upon their respective nationwide launches, I doubt either was going to beat Nintendo, and maybe not even then; Mario, the marketing, the peripherals, the 3rd party policies, the word-of-mouth, and so on and so forth all turned the NES into an absolute phenomenon. I'd imagine by 1988 there was no possible way either Atari or Sega could catch up to it in sales, but that's merely a guess on my part.

 

Well, yeah, but again, my main point was that Sega's Master System kept current with the times, as essentially dictated by the NES, and Atari's 7800, by and large, did not. And it wasn't by some unlucky happenstance that they didn't either; once it became apparent the direction(s) gaming was heading, Atari themselves failed to keep up - until it was far too late to be a serious contender in the market at-large, anyway.

I think there might be some misunderstandings here.

 

Most of what I was saying is contingent on the 7800 getting released in late 84 or early 85 with the full weight of Atari (and Warner) behind it. I totally agree that once that opportunity was missed, there is no way Atari was going to dethrone Nintendo, especially under management that fundamentally did not see Atari as a video game company, but rather a computer company that just happened to be sitting on a warehouse full of already built 7800s and games to sell. You do have to give credit to Jack for re-releasing the 2600 as the Jr.

 

I wasn't trying to say that you were saying the best hardware wins. I was trying to say that had the 7800 been released on time well before Nintendo with its brand recognition and Atari basically being a synonym for video games, that Atari, whether or not NES's hardware is better or worse, at a bare minimum would likely have kept Nintendo in check. Also, that Sega was largely walking into a mess that Atari would not have faced had the planned release happened. There were many observers at the time who saw what we call the crash as a shakeout and according to that talk I listened to (referenced earlier), Warner saw it that way as well. How that ended up with Atari being sold, I don't know. Perhaps it had to do with what was going on in Atari with the management change. Certainly many people saw it as an end to a fad, but many, many understood that video games would continue to grow.

 

We have to remember that Nintendo walked into a wide open market without any competition. Atari, Coleco and Mattel (plus all the small players) were no longer in the video game console business at all. The 3rd party people may as well have signed the contracts... They usually didn't include disks and outside of computers, there really was no other console to develop for. Had Atari already had the 7800 out and well supported with a decent installed base, these offers would not have looked so good. Unlike the earlier consoles, they were locked out of just making a game and releasing it and this was also the case with the 7800.

 

Sega and Atari were unable to break the grip Nintendo had on the American market that was mostly a result of good fortune for Nintendo with there being no competition and all when they reintroduced the video game console to America. I agree they did things way better than Atari did later on.

[DracIsBack]

 

I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure I'd really say they "pulled the plug." It was alive in wide-release for, roughly, as long as the 7800 was - except it was far, far better supported.

 

I don't know if i'd say "far better supported", especially in North America. I say this as someone who bought and owned the Sega Master System 2 (with Alex Kidd as the installed game) in North America. Yes, I'm one of those rare guys.

 

Were there more games than the 7800? Sure ... a few dozen more I guess. If I remember right it was a library of like 80 games to a library of like 60 games. I agree that Sega made games that were more NES like than Atari typically did. They certainly had some bigger licenses too. Third party support was still pretty nil.

 

And the reality was that once the Genesis came along, Sega threw out the Master System II for about a year and then dropped the whole platform like a hot potato. I remember looking far and wide for Sonic and Spider-Man and could find them absolutely nowhere.

 

But then my local magazine started getting European gaming magazines like ACE. Every month, those mags were showing some batch of new SMS games that were out in Europe that I couldn't buy here. In the end, hundreds more games got released in Europe that never came out in North America. Many more third party games were released in Europe by companies that never released them here. I ended up buying an SMS later because it was fun to essentially rediscover the European library that I never got to try.

 

But as a North American SMS owner, it felt like North America got "the shaft".

[King Atari]

I think there might be some misunderstandings here.

 

Most of what I was saying is contingent on the 7800 getting released in late 84 or early 85 with the full weight of Atari (and Warner) behind it. I totally agree that once that opportunity was missed, there is no way Atari was going to dethrone Nintendo, especially under management that fundamentally did not see Atari as a video game company, but rather a computer company that just happened to be sitting on a warehouse full of already built 7800s and games to sell. You do have to give credit to Jack for re-releasing the 2600 as the Jr.

 

I wasn't trying to say that you were saying the best hardware wins. I was trying to say that had the 7800 been released on time well before Nintendo with its brand recognition and Atari basically being a synonym for video games, that Atari, whether or not NES's hardware is better or worse, at a bare minimum would likely have kept Nintendo in check. Also, that Sega was largely walking into a mess that Atari would not have faced had the planned release happened. There were many observers at the time who saw what we call the crash as a shakeout and according to that talk I listened to (referenced earlier), Warner saw it that way as well. How that ended up with Atari being sold, I don't know. Perhaps it had to do with what was going on in Atari with the management change. Certainly many people saw it as an end to a fad, but many, many understood that video games would continue to grow.

 

We have to remember that Nintendo walked into a wide open market without any competition. Atari, Coleco and Mattel (plus all the small players) were no longer in the video game console business at all. The 3rd party people may as well have signed the contracts... They usually didn't include disks and outside of computers, there really was no other console to develop for. Had Atari already had the 7800 out and well supported with a decent installed base, these offers would not have looked so good. Unlike the earlier consoles, they were locked out of just making a game and releasing it and this was also the case with the 7800.

 

Sega and Atari were unable to break the grip Nintendo had on the American market that was mostly a result of good fortune for Nintendo with there being no competition and all when they reintroduced the video game console to America. I agree they did things way better than Atari did later on.

 

Ah, I gotcha. No worries, our wires just crossed a bit!

 

 

 

I don't know if i'd say "far better supported", especially in North America. I say this as someone who bought and owned the Sega Master System 2 (with Alex Kidd as the installed game) in North America. Yes, I'm one of those rare guys.

 

Were there more games than the 7800? Sure ... a few dozen more I guess. If I remember right it was a library of like 80 games to a library of like 60 games. I agree that Sega made games that were more NES like than Atari typically did. They certainly had some bigger licenses too. Third party support was still pretty nil.

 

And the reality was that once the Genesis came along, Sega threw out the Master System II for about a year and then dropped the whole platform like a hot potato. I remember looking far and wide for Sonic and Spider-Man and could find them absolutely nowhere.

 

But then my local magazine started getting European gaming magazines like ACE. Every month, those mags were showing some batch of new SMS games that were out in Europe that I couldn't buy here. In the end, hundreds more games got released in Europe that never came out in North America. Many more third party games were released in Europe by companies that never released them here. I ended up buying an SMS later because it was fun to essentially rediscover the European library that I never got to try.

 

But as a North American SMS owner, it felt like North America got "the shaft".

 

 

There were apparently 114 North American SMS games, close to double what the 7800 ultimately garnered. (Unless of course you count the 2600 compatibility, which I don't.) Not much when compared to the NES library, but it certainly mirrored it on a smaller scale, and respectable enough when taken on its own. Furthermore, add in the ahead-of-its-time 3-D glasses/games and the more-engaging television commercials (eventually including Stephen Dorff pitching the likes of Thunder Blade and in a "teenage gamer" setting that really spoke to the gaming sensibilities of the time), and while I maybe shouldn't have said "far, far better" supported, it was still certainly better than Atari's efforts with the 7800, and at least attempted to ape what Nintendo was doing with the NES. (I can think of three specific 7800 TV commercials off the top of my head not including Toys-R-Us "specialty spots," and while they were decent, that clearly wasn't going to be enough, especially by 1988/1989. Indeed, the best promotion, IMO, Atari ever gave the 7800 was the "Pick a Fight After School" print ads around that time period; they really should have been a series of accompanying television commercials too - unless they were and just totally slipped under my radar, anyway.)

 

The SMS game releases abroad were amazing, some of them even appearing 16-bit at first glance, and I can certainly see how someone on this continent reading about them would feel like we got short-shrift. Technically, we did, but a large number of those titles were released in 1992 on up, whereas the final ones here trickled out in, what, 1991? I guess what I'm getting at is that if these overseas games were released exclusively over there but concurrently with the titles we got instead, yeah, North American SMS owners absolutely would have gotten the shaft. But, for the most part these titles were coming out after it was glaringly apparent the console was just never going to do much here and was sadly-but-understandably dead.

 

This is sort of getting into 20/20 hindsight territory though; to a kid back then, all they'd know is they were missing out on some pretty cool stuff. I can understand that, and hey, had I been an SMS kid with access to info on the European exclusives, I would have absolutely been chomping at the bit for Batman Returns, and all I would have cared about was that I couldn't get it, not that it didn't make financial sense for Sega to release it here.

[Lost Dragon]

Reading this very old thread, the issues the 7800 presented are so similar to the Jaguar!

The 7800 is indeed a very interesting system, but from a Jag-homebrew view, even more.

I love both systems, and both could have benefited from a bit of extra hardware in the box,

and more generous cartridge sizes. Jaguar is a better name though than "Atari 15600". :-)

 

Recently i have been thinking along similar lines

 

Atari took the Jaguar, a console designed to capture market share from the aging SNES and Genesis and compete with the 3DO for that market share, into battle with likes of the Playstation and Saturn and had developers like Teque etc texture map games as Atari felt they had to be seen to be able to compete, even though the hardware wasn't cut out for it.

 

And the impression i get with the 7800 is that the hardware was designed to be a Colecovision beater, that Atari had fighting the NES and Master System.

 

 

ST was designed as a Mac beater (and here in the UK, a Sinclair QL beater) but ended up going to war with the Amiga..

 

I've seen Leonard Tramiel and the coder of 7800 Jinks, basically present the 7800 hardware as the 2600 with a Maria chip bolted on as it were..

[DracIsBack]

I've seen Leonard Tramiel and the coder of 7800 Jinks, basically present the 7800 hardware as the 2600 with a Maria chip bolted on as it were..

 

I've seen that example and honestly, it doesn't make much more sense to me than saying the NES is a 2600 with a MARIA chip bolted on.

 

The 2600 has 128 bytes of RAM and accesses data in cartridges 4K at a time

 

The 7800 has 4K RAM and accesses data in cartridges 48K at a time (Not dissimilar to the NES)

 

The 2600 has a cut down 6507 processor, the 7800 6502 (not dissimilar to the NES)

The TIA graphics and MARIA graphics architectures are nothing alike. (Just as the NES PPU architecture is quite different). This is actually a massive point, that's made out to be little in the example above.

 

The 7800 does use TIA for sound, but GCC also intended for it to use sound chips in cartridges. Something the Tramiels were too cheap to do. Still, when they did, look at COMMANDO - using TIA and POKEY simultaniously. (Sound in this circumstance, was not dissimilar to the NES onboard sound)

 

Or said in a different way, whenever I showed the 7800 to friends who knew the NES, their first response when they saw a 7800 (not turned on), they'd say "Oh Atari - that's so old".

 

Then I'd turn it on running Alien Brigade, or Scrapyard Dog or Commando or something and they'd say, "Oh - was this Atari's competitor to the Nintendo?"

 

 

I get that the 7800 still uses RIOT for IO and TIA for sound, but come on. MARIA is completely and utterly different than TIA for graphics and there are other hardware improvements.

Edited November 23, 2018 by DracIsBack

[Lost Dragon]

I'm used to seeing Leonard make curious claims about Atari hardware, it's a normal day at the office for him, but it was the first time i had seen an actual games coder on the system refer to it in the same way.

 

I've not actually seen many interviews with 7800 coders over the years.

 

Read interview with Graphics Chip designer in RetroGamer magazine many years ago, had a brief email exchange with 7800 Paperboy coder myself, seem to remember the Ninja Golf coder getting a very brief interview for a feature on the game again in RetroGamer magazine some time ago..but that's about it.

 

The system had such a minimal impact here in the UK, it hasn't had the exposure the 2600 has had.

[Lost Dragon]

Peter's quote in context:

 

The 7800 was designed from the outset to be 2600 compatible, and as such is, in essence, a 2600 with a MARIA chip bolted on.

 

 

Since the unit therefore contains a TIA chip it made (business) sense to use the sound capabilities of TIA rather than incur the extra cost of adding a POKEY to the unit - which would have pushed the retail cost of the machine up by a non-trivial amount.

 

While it's quite surprising just what you can do with TIA's sound functions I do feel that, taking the broad view, not including POKEY (or something better)was a bit of a blunder. While it was available as a "bolt on" option in cartridges very few games used it since this was actively discouraged by

Atari....after all it pushed production costs up and ate significantly intoAtari's profit margin! I received several stiff talkings to about the number of

ROM banks "Jinks" used - SHEESH!

[Lost Dragon]

And he had this to say about the Maria chip itself:

 

MARIA combines the functions of ANTIC & GTIA in a single chip.

 

It's superior in a number of respects, not least in that you can easily get it to display up to 226 colours on the screen in USABLE modes.

 

The main advantage however was the introduction of the concept of display list lists.

 

 

Rather than having a single display list you had an overall "display

list list" which pointed to a series of "sub" display lists which together defined the contents of each "region" of the screen (each region could be as small as a single scanline).

 

The concept sounds more complicated than it actually was and gave you pretty much total control over what went where on the screen. In fact it was so flexible a system that you didn't need hardware sprites at all; to display a sprite you just added the appropriate display list entries and the size of your "sprite" was limited only in the horizontal by the amount of available DMA time.

 

So i don't think he was knocking the 7800 hardware in anyway.

[Classic Pac]

What about F18 Hornet 7800 it is the most amazing game on the 7800 period and nothing like it ever appeared on the NES

[Lynxpro]

Back-in-the-day, when Leonard [Tramiel] would make those claims about the 7800 basically being a "2600 with a MARIA" or a "souped-up 2600", it used to cheese me off because it seemed like he was diminishing the hardware and its capabilities and it kinda felt like a slap-in-the-face to stuff designed by Atari Inc, or designed for Atari Inc. In retrospect, I think he was just trying to be "economical" about the hardware's description and capabilities and/or trying to express it in how he considered it would sound like in laymen's terms. It just really seemed odd back then especially when folks at Electronic Gaming Monthly and others claimed the MARIA was insanely powerful but that Atari Corp wouldn't spend the money to get spectacular results out of it. I don't recall the [North American] gaming press publishing his comments but they'd make their way to GEnie and Compuserve and then would end up repeated on Atari themed BBSes and Atari computer users group publications of the times.

 

Leonard is brilliant, IMHO. I don't know if that carried over into graphics chip development and programming but he knows his stuff about operating systems. He's given high praise to the Atari AMY in recent times on Facebook and lamented how it didn't get fixed and released, mostly due to Sight+Sound's shenanigans [which is a view Curt Vendel shares]. Although in old interviews, Sam Tramiel also said similarly, and even stated the AMY was about the only thing he was impressed with in terms of ongoing projects Atari inc was involved with when TTL bought the assets of Atari inc's Consumer Division and renamed it all "Atari Corporation". Maybe the MindLink project really distorted their perceptions of their former competitor [Atari inc] and how "foolish" they were in how they "wasted" their fortunes. [the inference being how well the Tramiels could've used those mountains of cash back at Commodore].

 

To me, the 7800 is its own system that throws in the TIA - and RIOT - for backwards-compatibility. Something that the Atari 8-bits and the 5200 could've also done before had Atari Inc's/Warner's execs had been concerned with the subject...

[DracIsBack]

And he had this to say about the Maria chip itself:

 

MARIA combines the functions of ANTIC & GTIA in a single chip.

 

It's superior in a number of respects, not least in that you can easily get it to display up to 226 colours on the screen in USABLE modes.

 

The main advantage however was the introduction of the concept of display list lists.

 

 

Rather than having a single display list you had an overall "display

list list" which pointed to a series of "sub" display lists which together defined the contents of each "region" of the screen (each region could be as small as a single scanline).

 

The concept sounds more complicated than it actually was and gave you pretty much total control over what went where on the screen. In fact it was so flexible a system that you didn't need hardware sprites at all; to display a sprite you just added the appropriate display list entries and the size of your "sprite" was limited only in the horizontal by the amount of available DMA time.

 

So i don't think he was knocking the 7800 hardware in anyway.

 

The Antic + GTIA reference is weird. The graphics architectures of the 7800 and the A8 are quite different

[DracIsBack]

Back-in-the-day, when Leonard [Tramiel] would make those claims about the 7800 basically being a "2600 with a MARIA" or a "souped-up 2600", it used to cheese me off because it seemed like he was diminishing the hardware and its capabilities and it kinda felt like a slap-in-the-face to stuff designed by Atari Inc, or designed for Atari Inc. In retrospect, I think he was just trying to be "economical" about the hardware's description and capabilities and/or trying to express it in how he considered it would sound like in laymen's terms.

 

The laymen's term is possible. Could also be a case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, which I find sometimes happens in orgs. The "I didn't build it, so it sucks" mentality does happen a lot in tech companies. It varies from place to place, but it does happen (a lot). In my nearly 20 years in tech, I've still yet to hear a software developer say, "This piece of code I inherited is *AMAZING*". Usually it 'sucks', 'has to be completely refactored' etc. Doesn't matter if it was from an acquired company, an outsourced firm, or another person or team in the same company.