If Atari had done this, they might still be in business

[mos6507]

What people do forget sometimes when they talk about the 5200 is that while yes, it was a 3 year old chipset, that chipset was part of home computers which were sold at a much higher pricepoint.

 

By the early 80s there were plenty of new technologies out there. It's one thing to be state of the art. It's another to be able to market a piece of affordable consumer electronics.

 

The 68000 had come out already. But bleeding edge technology was truly insanely expensive at first. Remember how much Apple charged for the Apple Lisa??

 

It really wasn't until the C=64 came out that home computers began to be sold at pricepoints close enough for them to be sold as consoles. This was a big reason for the videogame crash in general, as gamers were doing just that, buying home computers AS game machines since they got more bang for the buck.

 

So while the Atari engineers would have liked the 400/800 to have debuted as a game machine, it would have been very difficult to have done this in 1979 without reaching a Neo Geo pricepoint.

 

The big change in those few years was RAM pricing.

 

Most 1st generation home computers like the TRS-80 shipped with very little RAM in the mid 70s, like around 4K or so. And even then, they were expensive.

 

The 2600 shipped with 128 bytes of RAM in 1977, which was quite economical.

 

But to release a console in 1979 with 8K of RAM, let alone 16K, would put it into the Neo Geo style pricepoint, not to mention the fact that the original Atari 8-bit designs had 5 chips, 3 of them custom, and a lot of board space, daughtercards and the like.

 

Remember that even though it was 3 years later, they dropped the 8-bit's PIA chip when they did the 5200 to get the price down, which is one reason why it has analog controllers. The PIA supplies the digital joystick signals to the Atari 8-bit. The 5200 compensates for this by somehow routing the keypad and triggers to the POKEY in a way that makes it work like the keyboard, and the sticks are read like two paddles.

 

That's really the only thing about the 5200 that you could say justifies it being incompatible with the 8-bit software.

 

But from a long-term standpoint it was a mistake. They should have maybe tried to cost-reduce the chipset somehow to reduce silicon rather than making the 5200 incompatible.

 

The 5200 really should have been an expandable entre into the existing 8-bit universe instead of a watered down 8-bit that required 3rd parties to re-port their 8-bit software to it.

 

I remember at the time I was getting Atari Age magazines I was very keen on getting an Atari home computer but that was when the Atari 800 was still $800. It wasn't until Atari started to liquidate their 1200XL edsels that you could get an Atari 8-bit for less than $300. I think my 1200XL was around $200 or something.

 

It would have been great if a year earlier, like in 1981 or so, you could get an Atari 5200 for $150 that was functionally an Atari 400 without a keyboard that you could build up over time into a full 48K system with SIO peripherals et. al.

 

But how expensive were those Atari 400 membrane keyboards anyway? Just look at the O^2 that shipped with a keyboard and that was a real budget machine. I think by 1982 they were definitely charging too much for the 8-bits and competition from C= was what got Atari to lower prices.