Intellivision hatred!

[angusjake]

I clearly recall arguing with other kids in 82/83 about Atari vs. Intv. You have to think back to those days, as it was definitely an 'either you are with us or against us' mentality (sound familar?). Parents could generally afford only one system (my brother and I had to buy our own with paper route money!) and we really wanted to believe our system was the best. I remember feeling sick when Atari's early games (Slot Racers etc.) were compared against the new Intv games. Just when I saw hope with the 5200 I got news it was not going to be distributed in Canada (not a good sign). Then it got worse, Colecovision arrived and a friend got one - I seriously thought it would crush Atari and Intellivision, it seemed so good. Then my friend brought a 5200 back from the U.S. - joy of joys it was the ultimate! The the Coleco Adam came out and we kept saying what the hell is Atari doing - where is our 2600 Graduate keyboard? In the end Coleco and Intv seemed to die off suddenly - I recall the shock. Then I saw the NES and instead bought the 7800 - I am almost over my NES sentiments... time heals all wounds they say.

[mos6507]

The only time I "hated" another console was in the late 80's when I owned a Commodore=Amiga 500, and nearly everyone else was buying the sound-deficient 4-color IBM PC.  I couldn't believe people would buy such a piece of crap as an IBM.

 

Amen. I actually missed out on the Amiga until really late (93 or so when I picked up a used A1200). I had stuck through my Atari 130XE through college partly because I was so disgusted with the PC with its CGA graphics, mono-speaker sound, and DOS.

 

There was a period in time when the PC was replacing mainframes in the workplace, so the main consumers of PCs were NOT home users, as was previously the case with the 8-bit home computers, but rather an older, stodgier generation of business managers with some backwards notions of what computers should be.

 

To those people, graphics and sound were equated with game machines, toys, so the idea of a monochrome or 16-color text-only display and no sound capabilities actually appealed to them.

 

It was much later when the multimedia capabilities of computers would be appreciated, first for game, and now for media playback (MP3, video files, etc...).

 

In retrospect it's really amazing that we had to go through that dark ages when the older 1mhz 8-bit machines had better graphics and sound than the 80286-386 era PCs.

 

And the Mac wasn't much better either with its greyscale display. Great for DTP and little else. At least it had a GUI.

 

It's no surprise that in the mid 80s, 8-bit machines hung on for quite some time with teenagers.

 

They were just much more exciting (albeit less expandable for the most part) architectures.

[mos6507]

 

If I recall its how they display images....2600 does it scanline by scanline, while the intellivision refreshes the entire screen at once, or something like that. As a result poorly done INTV games can look very choppy, and even the best ones aren't as smooth as a 2600 game.

 

There are some people who judge a game machine based on a static screenshot.

 

This misses a lot of the finer points of what a console has to do.

 

The approach that the 2600 designers chose emphasizes animation fuidity and color choice above background graphics.

 

The approach of most other early consoles was towards a dumber bitmap display with CPU or coprocessor muscle that was rarely fast enough to update to maintain fluid animation.

 

A lot of old systems use a card or character approach towards graphics which, if you don't have enough characters, results in coarse animation.

 

If you don't have a true separation between hardware sprites and background you get into all sorts of problems when sprites cross.

 

Then you have the design mistake of opting for a fixed (usually 16) color palette.

 

The Intellivision, Colecovision, Apple II, Astrocade, and C=64 all suffer from one or more of these sins.

 

The 2600 may not have a lot of sprites and almost no background, but because it is only scanline-based, the kernel can make any change to any register at any time even in mid scanline let alone scanline to scanline.

 

This is incredibly powerful and most other consoles provide no facility for this, and even if they did, if they had a fixed color palette like the INTV, it's not going to gain you that much.

[gavv]

 

If I recall its how they display images....2600 does it scanline by scanline, while the intellivision refreshes the entire screen at once, or something like that. As a result poorly done INTV games can look very choppy, and even the best ones aren't as smooth as a 2600 game.

 

There are some people who judge a game machine based on a static screenshot.

 

This misses a lot of the finer points of what a console has to do.

 

The approach that the 2600 designers chose emphasizes animation fuidity and color choice above background graphics.

 

The approach of most other early consoles was towards a dumber bitmap display with CPU or coprocessor muscle that was rarely fast enough to update to maintain fluid animation.

 

the *only* reason the TIA chip and the cpu in the VCS was done like it

was was for one reason, to save money in the size of the chips. It had the advantage of being flexible in certain ways, but that was mostly an unforseen byproduct at the time it was created, so sayeth david crane ^^

[bcostin]

For a while the only console in my neighborhood was the 2600, except for a guy down the street with a decidedly non-threatening Odyssey2, so I never really took a side in the first round of the console wars.

 

A few years later I was drooling over Electronic Games and wishing my parents would buy me a Colecovision or a 5200, and I remember some vague brand loyalty for the 7800 when it finally came out, but by then I was spending my gaming budget on my C64 and it was kind of a moot point.

 

Computers, though, were another story. One year I got a VIC-20. and the next year my best friend got an Atari 800. That was a source of much debate over many games of Jupiter Lander and Missile Command. In retrospect I was definitely on the losing side in that argument, but I never would have admitted it back then.

[raindog]

The biggest complaint about the INTV I have is that the official site (run by the actual programmers) is way to self serving, and actually lists the system as the longest running console, when we all know the 2600 is (unless you count the Game Boy, which is actually a handheld).

 

I think the Game Boy actually still has another year to go before it runs as long as the 2600. And considering the Game Boy Advance compared to the Game Boy is sort of like what the next generation after the 7800 would have been to the 2600, you might as well say the 2600's still "running" since nearly everyone owns some device nowadays that'll play Atari 2600 games

[Witchfynde]

I think the Game Boy actually still has another year to go before it runs as long as the 2600.  And considering the Game Boy Advance compared to the Game Boy is sort of like what the next generation after the 7800 would have been to the 2600, you might as well say the 2600's still "running" since nearly everyone owns some device nowadays that'll play Atari 2600 games

 

Yeah, but the 2600 was dead for several years though, the Game Boy has yet to have the ax fall on it. I know what you mean, though. Long "live" Atari!

[mos6507]

the *only* reason the TIA chip and the cpu in the VCS was done like it

was was for one reason, to save money in the size of the chips.  It had the advantage of being flexible in certain ways, but that was mostly an unforseen byproduct at the time it was created, so sayeth david crane

 

That's not entirely true.

 

The Atari 2600 is an evolution of Atari's earlier coin-op hardware (which typically ran without even a true CPU). Atari's approach to graphics was always more sprite-oriented vs. background oriented.

 

Atari's hardware was rarely ever overdesigned. It did the most with the least all the way back to Computer Space (Computer Space did a lot with just TTL that was previously only possible with minicomputer-grade hardware).

 

Atari had prior experience in the coinop domain and they knew that gameplay required animation over fancy backgrounds.

 

Just compare the arcade hardware of Atari's mid 70s games vs. Midway's, for instance.

 

Atari's hardware tended to have smoother animation and Midway's 8080-based Mass-RAM system was more flickery and jerky.

 

If there were any questions about any of this, the design of the 400/800 would put that to rest.

 

With the 400/800, Atari chose to maintain a lot of what the 2600 did, including, at its core, a scanline-based kernel not so different from the 2600. Only instead of the 2600, the ANTIC chip could drive the GTIA rather than the program. But you could turn ANTIC off and drive GTIA directly if you wanted to.

 

So even though they were working with enough RAM to support a full bitmap and completely abstract away the chores of building a display, they chose to carry over some of what you call the "economy" features of the 2600.

 

They did this specifically because it provides efficiency, flexibility, and speed.

 

Also remember that from the 2600 to the Amiga, the engineers worked closely with programmers. In fact there was a fine line between the hardware and the software engineering in general (Joe Decuir designed the hardware AND wrote Video Olympics, for instance).

 

So there was a synergy between the hardware design and the programming model. That was not the case with other designs (including the Intellivision). Consoles tended to be designed by engineers who had no game programming sensibilities, and they made some bad judgement calls.

 

Even though the 2600 is generally regarded as the most difficult console to write for, it is also the most responsive platform to meticulous programming, and the software developers at that time were nothing if not meticulous!

 

So maybe it wasn't in the official requirements document, but I think Jay Miner in the back of his mind put in that flexibility with the understanding that it might come in handy. If it was an accident he certainly learned to repeat it by following a consistent design evolution through the 400/800 and the Amiga.

[mos6507]

==

Yeah, but the 2600 was dead for several years though, the Game Boy has yet to have the ax fall on it. I know what you mean, though. Long "live" Atari!

==

 

When you judge the relative success of the 2600 vs. newer machines you have to take into account the change in the industry as a whole.

 

When the 2600 took off the industry didn't even really exist beyond a blip on the radar.

 

It was the 2600, and Space Invaders for the 2600 in particular, in 1980, that basically created the modern home gaming industry for all intents and purposes.

 

When you consider that, comparing the length of time the Gameboy has been on the market vs. the 2600 is really no comparison.

 

But then you also have to look at it as complete apple and oranges.

 

The Gameboy also never had to really live up to the same sense of technological urgency to progress that consoles do. They still sell simple LCD games not that different from 20 years ago. Recreations of Mattel handhelds are on store shelves right now. The portable market is a different market.

 

I also don't think there was as much of a difference in game quality between the first generation and last generation titles with the original Gameboy hardware vs. the 2600.

 

Did the Gameboy ever have the equivalent of a Solaris in its waning years that made you wonder how the machine pulled it off? I don't think so.

 

That's the whole reason Nintendo had to come out with the GBColor and GBA.

[Flojomojo]

I loved the Intellivision. I wanted one as soon as I saw the graphics for Star Strike. Truth to tell, I wanted all the game systems, especially Colecovision. The 5200 never really appealed because of the controllers though.

 

Tooling around on my bike, I found a closeout Intellivision Master Component for sale at the local drugstore (I think it was Hi-Lo at the time, probably a CVS now) for just $40. I also found Microsurgeon, D&D, Venture, and Popeye, all games that fascinated me at the time. I was a happy, happy kid. This thing was so much better than my lame old Odyssey 2 machine. I spent the next few years gradually amassing a nice collection of 30+ games. I played Sub Hunt, Space Battle, and Treasure of Tarmin to death. At some point, I threw away all the boxes. INTV Corp came along and I really liked Tower of Doom. I hung onto the INTV setup for a while longer, then sacrificed it to r.v.g.c. for something like $75 shipped. I found it very amusing to put the Intellivision box side by side with the Sega Saturn box (my system of choice at the time) and noticed that not only were they almost exactly the same size, the screenshot marketing techniques haven't changed a bit.

 

I guess I should miss it, but to be perfectly honest, emulation is good enough for me. Those controllers were nasty. The scrounging, hoarding, and eventual purging behaviors have stayed with me to this day.

[MegaManFan]

Did the Gameboy ever have the equivalent of a Solaris in its waning years that made you wonder how the machine pulled it off?  I don't think so.

 

Actually, I'd say the Wario Land and Kirby games really impressed me as to how much a classic gameboy could do. I also think Mega Man V is really damn good, but hey :shrugs:

[ZylonBane]

I find it curious that the Intellivision is sometimes characterized as more complex yet somehow "slower" than the 2600 for arcade game purposes.  How can that be?  Isn't more processing power more processing power?  Is the intellivision actually "slower" in some sense than the 2600?

To save precious (at the time) ROM space, the Intellivision was equipped with a simple BIOS called the EXEC. It included common math routines, handled sound, and also handled the sprites. Unfortunately, it only updated the sprites at 1/20th second. The Intellivision was fully capable of doing sprite multiplexing, but because of the flicker marketting forbid it.

[Flojomojo]

I find it curious that the Intellivision is sometimes characterized as more complex yet somehow "slower" than the 2600 for arcade game purposes.  How can that be?  Isn't more processing power more processing power?  Is the intellivision actually "slower" in some sense than the 2600?

To save precious (at the time) ROM space, the Intellivision was equipped with a simple BIOS called the EXEC. It included common math routines, handled sound, and also handled the sprites. Unfortunately, it only updated the sprites at 1/20th second. The Intellivision was fully capable of doing sprite multiplexing, but because of the flicker marketting forbid it.

That's brilliant (no sarcasm intended). So that's why Intellivision graphics were always so rock-steady?

 

Reminds me of Microsoft enforcing voice chat in XBOX Live. It *seems* dictatorial, but it's really for the best to have a unified look and feel. All IMHO of course.

[Big Player]

I find it curious that the Intellivision is sometimes characterized as more complex yet somehow "slower" than the 2600 for arcade game purposes.  How can that be?  Isn't more processing power more processing power?  Is the intellivision actually "slower" in some sense than the 2600?

To save precious (at the time) ROM space, the Intellivision was equipped with a simple BIOS called the EXEC. It included common math routines, handled sound, and also handled the sprites. Unfortunately, it only updated the sprites at 1/20th second. The Intellivision was fully capable of doing sprite multiplexing, but because of the flicker marketting forbid it.

 

I thought I read somewhere that the Imagic designers bypassed the EXEC so they could get more out of the Intellivision.

 

I've also read that according to game designers, an operating system like the EXEC is about the last thing you need for games.

[chrisbid]

i thought third parties were forbidden from using the EXEC, since it was copyrighted software.

[raindog]

Did the Gameboy ever have the equivalent of a Solaris in its waning years that made you wonder how the machine pulled it off?  I don't think so.

 

Maybe not Solaris per se, but Faceball 2000 impressed me a lot.

 

http://www.mobygames.com/game/shots/gameId,5388/

[+Andrew Davie]

Scan the custom label I made for you and use that as your avatar.  

 

I'm saving that for when I can put it on an actual cartridge and take a digital photo of the cart. Too bad adavie scrapped his image cart production.

 

I've scrapped it?! Actually, far from it. I'm just not going to do all your work for you. Watch for GreetingCart on AA, soon