Missing Arcade-Classics on the 7800

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

That's a completely different game, it's like a side scrolling race game. Popeye Rush For Spinach, looks okay, a little claustrophobic in graphics scale IE. make the sprites smaller or the screen resolution bigger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ55H7U7_JA

 

Wow, that was shitastic. Seriously, wow...

 

I can't imagine how the creator of arcade classics like Pacman could possibly throw together this magnitude of shovelware...

 

And I thought E.T. for the GBA was bad. Wow...

 

If it's any consolance, the SNES game appears to be a bit better...

[BladeJunker]

Wow, that was shitastic. Seriously, wow...

 

I can't imagine how the creator of arcade classics like Pacman could possibly throw together this magnitude of shovelware...

 

And I thought E.T. for the GBA was bad. Wow...

 

If it's any consolance, the SNES game appears to be a bit better...

Lol I guess my expectations were very low, I expected much worse so I wasn't as disappointed with it. ^_^ It's pretty bad on GBA for licensed characters, people mention the Wii but the GBA was overflowing with licensed character crap. Nothing new though, lots of people's favorite cartoon characters have starred in lots of bad games over the years.

 

Oh I know that E.T. GBA game was so bad, he's never done so well with video game adaptions but they keep making them. The Atari 8-bit one looks nice but the sound is horrible while the PS1 game looks okay but dull. It's hard to make a game about a slow moving pacifist vampire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00qlpNuA9sw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqwI-5u404

 

That sucks about Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki only coming out in Japan, it was 1994 but they didn't think the USA or Europe would like a Popeye game??? Got far worse titles on the SNES that made it to cartridge. T_T

Reminds me about the BTTF SFC game too, the world doesn't want a decent platformer with Marty Mcfly that captures some of the film's charm, they want heart catching, monster hopping, and impossible horse riding, that's the good stuff.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Meh. Lots of good and redeemable tie-in platformers on NES and SNES but devs sure got lazy during the GBA years. Give them a more powerful system and better dev tools and they produce crappier games. Look at the Popeye arcade ports video. Towards the end, the java cell phone implementation could have blown away the arcade with 16 or even 32 bit graphics and sound, but the gameplay is even more lackluster than most of the pre crash era ports with harsh graphics and sound. They had good gameplay but poopy graphics and audio. I'm not trying to shit on pre-crash era consoles. The only one I currently own is the 2600 but Vectrex and 5200 are on my wishlist someday. Back to the VCS, it uses a lot larger range of colors than most of the others, and a ton of programming tricks can be employed by racing the beam, making it endure well past the other late 2nd gen consoles it competed against.

[BladeJunker]

Meh. Lots of good and redeemable tie-in platformers on NES and SNES but devs sure got lazy during the GBA years. Give them a more powerful system and better dev tools and they produce crappier games. Look at the Popeye arcade ports video. Towards the end, the java cell phone implementation could have blown away the arcade with 16 or even 32 bit graphics and sound, but the gameplay is even more lackluster than most of the pre crash era ports with harsh graphics and sound. They had good gameplay but poopy graphics and audio. I'm not trying to shit on pre-crash era consoles. The only one I currently own is the 2600 but Vectrex and 5200 are on my wishlist someday. Back to the VCS, it uses a lot larger range of colors than most of the others, and a ton of programming tricks can be employed by racing the beam, making it endure well past the other late 2nd gen consoles it competed against.

Lots hmm, some cherry titles maybe, I mean there's more bad Superman games than good, Batman has fared better than most but he still has garbage titles.

 

Laziness is definitely part of what went wrong on the GBA and even the GBC but it was also a time of transition for developers. Most of the great developers that were at the best on NES went towards 16-bit hardware never looking back mostly and the new developers of 8-bit games on GBC didn't seem to have any idea how 2D games or 2-bit color worked. That's how things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mortal Kombat 4 could get released despite looking as bad or worse than the 1st generation NES titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXr4__bEmEA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWOEBio6cA0

With the GBA it was more about an over dependence on CGI, yep even CGI can ruin games not just like movies when you have a whopping resolution of 240X160 on a unlit screen. Even when the games weren't 3D in gameplay the tiny screen turn CG prerendered sprites into JPEG postage stamps of pixel mush. When you're low res you have to hand drawn even if only tracing 3D models because with that level of definition every pixel counts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht9qH34vsZE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Vj0zq4qzg

As far as java cell more often than not you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for quality developers, the kind of companies that might last a year or successful ones that pump out crap by the ton. Java cell games are usually so bad I don't even acknowledge they exist because it's a 90% disappointment factor.

 

Pre-crash consoles had there own problems unique to the era like having too much of the same thing mass produced. Since jumping on this subject I've looked at 10 years of arcade titles (1980-1990) and a large chunk of it is blatant copies or reskins of the classics we know and love, the number of games with spaceships at the bottom of the screen shooting descending aliens is as staggering as Pong clones produced in the 70s that caused there own crash with saturation.

I love the 2600 but Atari made way too many of them and for way too long for something that has a limited lifespan like video game technology but even the concept of buying a game system every few years was a new way of doing things as consoles were likened to a refrigerator or toilet by the then adult buyer IE. "I already bought you a vidyo game 5 years ago, go play with that.". Atari pulled out all the bells & whistles for the 5200 but it didn't sell as well as the 2600, to apply a different era that would be like if the NES stuck around forever and fewer bought the SNES which would have been unthinkable from that time frame's perspective.

 

Personally I think the 2600 was a little too spartan when it came to sprites and specifically the number of colors possible horizontally when it's like 3 versus 192 vertical lines of color as that makes it hard to express even basic shapes. While it is extremely impressive what people pulled from the 2600 it was also like pulling teeth in difficulty, pain staking effort and planning. I know the 2600 was cost effective for its time but man did it make programmers work hard, no slack, no easy outs, just a grueling balancing act of assembly and reassembly to add anything new to the mix just when things work.

That's kind of why it was sad the 5200 didn't do better because the graphics and sound output were topnotch for a game console in 1982 as it was much easier to approximate the arcade titles from then. Listening to the '5200 Super Podcast' much of the old press seems to indicate that console was being marketed to an older audience rather than a general one which tends not to work as was the case of the 3DO with its higher price point and limited market.

The 7800 has a pretty low amount of color count vertically compared to the 5200 or 2600 but I think it at least was designed to reach more of a market with the backwards compatibility. I can't even guess what price the 7800 would have costed if it came out when it was supposed to but I have to assume it would be cheaper than the premium 5200. There isn't much on the 5200 but the quality was high at the time compared to 7800 which was struggling with budgetary concerns so in some ways I think it needs more arcade ports to fill the gap left by the crash fallout.

 

Boy that got long. ^_^

[Mister-VCS]

That's kind of why it was sad the 5200 didn't do better because the graphics and sound output were topnotch for a game console in 1982 as it was much easier to approximate the arcade titles from then. Listening to the '5200 Super Podcast' much of the old press seems to indicate that console was being marketed to an older audience rather than a general one which tends not to work as was the case of the 3DO with its higher price point and limited market.

The 7800 has a pretty low amount of color count vertically compared to the 5200 or 2600 but I think it at least was designed to reach more of a market with the backwards compatibility. I can't even guess what price the 7800 would have costed if it came out when it was supposed to but I have to assume it would be cheaper than the premium 5200. There isn't much on the 5200 but the quality was high at the time compared to 7800 which was struggling with budgetary concerns so in some ways I think it needs more arcade ports to fill the gap left by the crash fallout.

 

Boy that got long. ^_^

 

The 5200 is only a re-packed 400 computer-system with new joysticks and without a keyboard - Atari was under pressure - the Intellivision was hot, and Atari

wasn't able to finish the 10-bit "VideoSystemX/5200. They pulled the existing 400 computer in a videogame-system chase and sold it with the innovative new

joysticks for the planned 10-bit VideoSystem X.

 

I like the 7800 much more.

[maxdrive]

Since we now have most of the pac man games on the 7800 do you think there enough of a market for pac and pal or the American version pac man and chomp chomp

Edited February 12, 2016 by maxdrive

[Andromeda Stardust]

Lots hmm, some cherry titles maybe, I mean there's more bad Superman games than good, Batman has fared better than most but he still has garbage titles.

 

Laziness is definitely part of what went wrong on the GBA and even the GBC but it was also a time of transition for developers. Most of the great developers that were at the best on NES went towards 16-bit hardware never looking back mostly and the new developers of 8-bit games on GBC didn't seem to have any idea how 2D games or 2-bit color worked. That's how things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mortal Kombat 4 could get released despite looking as bad or worse than the 1st generation NES titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXr4__bEmEA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWOEBio6cA0

With the GBA it was more about an over dependence on CGI, yep even CGI can ruin games not just like movies when you have a whopping resolution of 240X160 on a unlit screen. Even when the games weren't 3D in gameplay the tiny screen turn CG prerendered sprites into JPEG postage stamps of pixel mush. When you're low res you have to hand drawn even if only tracing 3D models because with that level of definition every pixel counts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht9qH34vsZE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Vj0zq4qzg

As far as java cell more often than not you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for quality developers, the kind of companies that might last a year or successful ones that pump out crap by the ton. Java cell games are usually so bad I don't even acknowledge they exist because it's a 90% disappointment factor.

Man that Buffy is like Castlevania and classic beat em up had an evil spawn. The levels are so uninspired. What's worse, they used three color sprites for Buffy and the enemies but they look about as bland as Atari sprites. Look at the level of texture and detail that went into sprites for games like Super Mario Bros and such. Less is more. Buffy just solid color filled areas where the NES used dithering and other effects to create the illusion of gradients. Mortal Kombat didn't even belong on the Game Boy Color with it's two buttons.

 

And those 3D games are painful to watch. I can't really tell what is Youtube compression and what is compressed graphics in the games. Tha Crazy Taxi thing reminds me why 3D never worked well during the bit years. But at least games like Starfox or Virtua Racing had 240p to work with. A 160x144 screen is just abysmal for that type of sprite work. not to mention that the faux 3D is really just a ton of sprites moving around in circles on screen as the perspective changed. There was no real raytracing on the Game Boy Color, and very little of it on the GBA (although the GBA could put tons of "Mode 7" like effects to use and have the CPU resources to process it all). That Mortal Kombat GBA game was really bad with the scaling causing all sorts of artifacts as the game scrolled around. Had they used multiple 2D parallax scrolling backgrounds with camera pan and zoom, the game would have had breathtakingly gorgeous 2D instead of "muddy" 3D.

 

Still the GAme Boy Color and GBA excelled at greatness when in the hands of Nintendo developers. Look at Donkey Kong Country for the GBC. The original 16-bit titles had pre-rendered sprite effects, but the GBC with it's limited pallet and reduced resolution looked just (well nearly) as good.

 

Pre-crash consoles had there own problems unique to the era like having too much of the same thing mass produced. Since jumping on this subject I've looked at 10 years of arcade titles (1980-1990) and a large chunk of it is blatant copies or reskins of the classics we know and love, the number of games with spaceships at the bottom of the screen shooting descending aliens is as staggering as Pong clones produced in the 70s that caused there own crash with saturation.

I love the 2600 but Atari made way too many of them and for way too long for something that has a limited lifespan like video game technology but even the concept of buying a game system every few years was a new way of doing things as consoles were likened to a refrigerator or toilet by the then adult buyer IE. "I already bought you a vidyo game 5 years ago, go play with that.". Atari pulled out all the bells & whistles for the 5200 but it didn't sell as well as the 2600, to apply a different era that would be like if the NES stuck around forever and fewer bought the SNES which would have been unthinkable from that time frame's perspective.

 

Personally I think the 2600 was a little too spartan when it came to sprites and specifically the number of colors possible horizontally when it's like 3 versus 192 vertical lines of color as that makes it hard to express even basic shapes. While it is extremely impressive what people pulled from the 2600 it was also like pulling teeth in difficulty, pain staking effort and planning. I know the 2600 was cost effective for its time but man did it make programmers work hard, no slack, no easy outs, just a grueling balancing act of assembly and reassembly to add anything new to the mix just when things work.

That's kind of why it was sad the 5200 didn't do better because the graphics and sound output were topnotch for a game console in 1982 as it was much easier to approximate the arcade titles from then. Listening to the '5200 Super Podcast' much of the old press seems to indicate that console was being marketed to an older audience rather than a general one which tends not to work as was the case of the 3DO with its higher price point and limited market.

The 7800 has a pretty low amount of color count vertically compared to the 5200 or 2600 but I think it at least was designed to reach more of a market with the backwards compatibility. I can't even guess what price the 7800 would have costed if it came out when it was supposed to but I have to assume it would be cheaper than the premium 5200. There isn't much on the 5200 but the quality was high at the time compared to 7800 which was struggling with budgetary concerns so in some ways I think it needs more arcade ports to fill the gap left by the crash fallout.

 

Boy that got long. ^_^

2600 persevered but IDK what the problem was with the 5200 and 7800 not penetrating the market. Retailers were treating video games as a toy fad rather than a permanent stay on the market with regular upgrades. The consoles were simply expected to die off rather than get better. And had Atari marketed the 7800 in 1984 using aggressive tactics, it would have succeeded and both the 7800 and SMS libraries would have benefited from it because Nintendo would not have been able to wield it's power to dictate exclusivity clauses had it not entered into the market with zero competition. Nintendo would have still became a juggernaut but Atari and Sega would have faired better in the end. Also the flailing 5200 controllers, innovative as they were, didn't help Atari's cause.

[Jinks]

What's worse, they used three color sprites for Buffy and the enemies but they look about as bland as Atari sprites. Look at the level

Gee KS. You need to consider what website and forum you are on with trash talk like that.

[BladeJunker]

 

The 5200 is only a re-packed 400 computer-system with new joysticks and without a keyboard - Atari was under pressure - the Intellivision was hot, and Atari

wasn't able to finish the 10-bit "VideoSystemX/5200. They pulled the existing 400 computer in a videogame-system chase and sold it with the innovative new

joysticks for the planned 10-bit VideoSystem X.

 

I like the 7800 much more.

Yeah that is true but I don't see that as a bad thing per se, unlike Amstrad or Commodore, Atari had a much better position at the time to "consolize" their existing technology into cheaper packages. Things like the Amstrad GX4000 or Amiga CD32 would end up only slightly more well known globally than things like the Apple Pippin which are quite expensive and hard to find compared to the 5200 which I should be able to acquire easily enough at a moderate price. Are 5200s common where you live? I came across an Amiga CD32 here because Amiga had some market penetration in Canada but not much while the Amstrad CPC/GX4000 never came out where I live.

I can definitely see the INTV influence on the addition of a keypad for the 5200 and it was pressure but let's be honest, Atari had a near monopoly early 80s for console gaming so it wasn't such a bad thing to have some competition rise. I mean if INTV and Coleco didn't happen would the 5200 or 7800 even happen or would Atari just extend the 2600 into an even longer life cycle while arcade games and computers advanced. The 5200 is pretty "thrown together" and rushed as a design, it certainly indicates Atari didn't have a strong plan for a 2600 successor till they were forced to make one. I'm guessing the 10-bit Video System X was more of paper plan, does anyone have a prototype unit of it? Still other than the price and joystick I think the 5200 showed promise.

 

Yeah most people like the 7800, the conveniences built into are very appealing. I think if backwards compatibility had been in the 5200 out of the box could have helped with the transition of game consoles from appliances to the evolving product they needed to be but weren't thought as initially with average consumers.

[BladeJunker]

Man that Buffy is like Castlevania and classic beat em up had an evil spawn. The levels are so uninspired. What's worse, they used three color sprites for Buffy and the enemies but they look about as bland as Atari sprites. Look at the level of texture and detail that went into sprites for games like Super Mario Bros and such. Less is more. Buffy just solid color filled areas where the NES used dithering and other effects to create the illusion of gradients. Mortal Kombat didn't even belong on the Game Boy Color with it's two buttons.

Lol, good comparison on Buffy GBC genre. I can't figure out how things looked so bad on GBC even if the developers were a younger generation because you got to figure they had at least seen what good 2-bit color graphics look like on the NES, C64, 7800, GB, EGA/CGA, CPC, etc. Can you believe MK4 made it to GBC in that form, it looks and sounds dreadful that 2 buttons is the least of its problems, SFA on GBC is crunched down but it looks and sounds decent, plus you can actually pull off a fireball and dragon punch unlike those pirate NES fighting games.

Was actually wondering if the 7800 could pull off something similar, if not SFA GBC then maybe International Karate?

And those 3D games are painful to watch. I can't really tell what is Youtube compression and what is compressed graphics in the games. Tha Crazy Taxi thing reminds me why 3D never worked well during the bit years. But at least games like Starfox or Virtua Racing had 240p to work with. A 160x144 screen is just abysmal for that type of sprite work. not to mention that the faux 3D is really just a ton of sprites moving around in circles on screen as the perspective changed. There was no real raytracing on the Game Boy Color, and very little of it on the GBA (although the GBA could put tons of "Mode 7" like effects to use and have the CPU resources to process it all). That Mortal Kombat GBA game was really bad with the scaling causing all sorts of artifacts as the game scrolled around. Had they used multiple 2D parallax scrolling backgrounds with camera pan and zoom, the game would have had breathtakingly gorgeous 2D instead of "muddy" 3D.

Well I tried to find the sharpest, least compressed videos possible so even at its best sprites are mushy, CGI needs a lot more resolution for detail than hand drawn stuff. Don't get me started on billboard sprites that always face the player, practically nobody even tried to add a few more prerendered angles for all those years and all those advances in system memory. I think Outlaws was the first time I saw an object sprite change angle based with the player camera "Woah that horse actually has a 8 angles.". ^_^

The GBA was strong with graphics effects just like the Lynx was but there was a preoccupation to make 3D games on it because the big brother consoles were doing that so it had to rather than sticking to smoother 2D presentations. I tried a lot of 3D GBA games, impressive software engines but the lack of perspective correction in texture mapping and the extremely low polygon output meant it couldn't subdivided surfaces to compensate warping like the PS1 and Saturn did.

 

Still the GAme Boy Color and GBA excelled at greatness when in the hands of Nintendo developers. Look at Donkey Kong Country for the GBC. The original 16-bit titles had pre-rendered sprite effects, but the GBC with it's limited pallet and reduced resolution looked just (well nearly) as good.

Well you sure would hope that the company that made the console could get the most out of it. Sega Saturn had a similar deal, only Sega understood how to program on their platform.

Its just too much to ask of the GBC to replicate the prerendered sprites that the SNES did, even the Genesis had a hard time getting that art technique to look good with 64 colors in Toy Story and Sonic 3D Blast while most other such games looked like crap such as X-perts.

 

2600 persevered but IDK what the problem was with the 5200 and 7800 not penetrating the market. Retailers were treating video games as a toy fad rather than a permanent stay on the market with regular upgrades. The consoles were simply expected to die off rather than get better. And had Atari marketed the 7800 in 1984 using aggressive tactics, it would have succeeded and both the 7800 and SMS libraries would have benefited from it because Nintendo would not have been able to wield it's power to dictate exclusivity clauses had it not entered into the market with zero competition. Nintendo would have still became a juggernaut but Atari and Sega would have faired better in the end. Also the flailing 5200 controllers, innovative as they were, didn't help Atari's cause.

Yeah that was a big problem for Atari as ownership passed through several hands like Warner Bros, a bunch of business dudes that never played a video game who were more interested in their next cocaine bump than the future of video games. You can only blame consumer perception so much as computers changed business very ssslllooowwwlllyyy, remember the Xerox geniuses that gave away a fortune in advanced GUI technology to Apple. Atari was a super power of gaming just like Nintendo was in the 90s but they just mismanaged it into oblivion rather than recognizing it for the profitable and sustainable business it was. I often think of the alternate universe where Atari remained a competitor, they would probably be where Sony is now if I had to guess.

[BladeJunker]

What's worse, they used three color sprites for Buffy and the enemies but they look about as bland as Atari sprites. Look at the level

Gee KS. You need to consider what website and forum you are on with trash talk like that.

I'll stick up for KS here. Atari graphics are an intimate affair for programmers "Leave me alone with my work damn it!" ^_^ where the results can be efficient but plain quite often. I've tried to at least suggest an art director can do something for 2600 graphics but its a steep argument when it comes to racing the beam. You would think the nature of the beast changes as hardware improves but it doesn't, I remember a late 90s anecdote where it took a lot of meetings to convince John Carmack to add swimming animations into Quake3 but it didn't click with him till he saw it on screen to see the value.

[Lynxpro]

 

The 5200 is only a re-packed 400 computer-system with new joysticks and without a keyboard - Atari was under pressure - the Intellivision was hot, and Atari

wasn't able to finish the 10-bit "VideoSystemX/5200. They pulled the existing 400 computer in a videogame-system chase and sold it with the innovative new

joysticks for the planned 10-bit VideoSystem X.

 

I like the 7800 much more.

 

There's no shame in that considering the Atari 8-bit computers were originally designed to be a game system to replace the VCS with but Ray Kassar decided he wanted Atari to be in the computer business for its high profitability per system sold and thus a game system became a computer system.

[Lynxpro]

And please stop repeating the "10-bit" game system myth. Whether or not such a system was actually designed, the only thing 10-bit about it would've been the graphics chip. It would've still used a 6502 for the CPU.

 

Here's the details on one such proposed 2600 replacement:

 

http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/sylvia/sylvia.html

 

The 7800 would've been even more interesting had it used a STIA instead of a regular TIA for its 2600 compatibility mode.

[Mister-VCS]

 

There's no shame in that considering the Atari 8-bit computers were originally designed to be a game system to replace the VCS with but Ray Kassar decided he wanted Atari to be in the computer business for its high profitability per system sold and thus a game system became a computer system.

 

Yeah, but the Joystick was planned for the new 10-bit system (sorry for that!) with it innovative new games (dont't know what Atari planned, but i think they planned something different and

advanced games to use the keypad), and the majority of the ported 400-games (Pac-Man, chancelled Asteroids!) where designed for the simple CX-40 joystick - it does not fit.

[+Defender_2600]

Would Popeye (which uses a much higher resolution for the character sprites than the backgrounds) be a good candidate for the 7800 due to its hi-res sprite mode? I'm a long-time fan of the original Nintendo arcade game, but no home version to date has really done it any justice. Although I'm sure there are many stumbling blocks to making a more arcade-accurate port of this title, one thing that I noticed right away by searching Google is that resources to work with appear to be limited as no has ripped the complete sprite sheet from the original game (using MAME or whichever custom utility they prefer). I'm aware that duplicating the original resolution of the arcade character sprites would be impossible on the 7800, but wouldn't someone with the requisite pixel-art skills be able to adapt/down-convert them into a form that puts all of the existing home versions to shame? Just wondering aloud what the possibilities could be for a title like this in the right capable hands.

 

Just for fun, I made a Popeye mockup for 7800.

 

It is in 320A mode with some sprites / tiles overlapped, 12 colors on screen (8 colors for scan line).

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mister-VCS]

 

There's no shame in that considering the Atari 8-bit computers were originally designed to be a game system to replace the VCS with but Ray Kassar decided he wanted Atari to be in the computer business for its high profitability per system sold and thus a game system became a computer system.

 

 

I am not a 5200 hater- own an Atari 600XL and use him as a videogame-console. Just followed the advertising

from Atari Germany (1983):

 

"I pay not more than 500 DM for a toy (*Atari 5200) when I get for the same money a computer with which I still can play Donkey Kong."

 

...and they forgot: -with a real Joystick!

 

[Andromeda Stardust]

What's worse, they used three color sprites for Buffy and the enemies but they look about as bland as Atari sprites. Look at the level

Gee KS. You need to consider what website and forum you are on with trash talk like that.

If you took it in context, I was trashing the lackluster design of a GBC game, not Atari. I'm still amazed the kind of stuff developers pulled off with Atari, which was designed from the ground up to run two games, Combat and Pong.

[Jinks]

If you took it in context, I was trashing the lackluster design of a GBC game, not Atari. I'm still amazed the kind of stuff developers pulled off with Atari, which was designed from the ground up to run two games, Combat and Pong.

Just all the Nintendo talk I forgot what the topic title was.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Just all the Nintendo talk I forgot what the topic title was.

I think Popeye would be cool on 7800. Bonus if they get 320 mode working. May I ask how they got more than 4 colors in the above screenshots if using 320 mode?

[Lynxpro]

 

Yeah, but the Joystick was planned for the new 10-bit system (sorry for that!) with it innovative new games (dont't know what Atari planned, but i think they planned something different and

advanced games to use the keypad), and the majority of the ported 400-games (Pac-Man, chancelled Asteroids!) where designed for the simple CX-40 joystick - it does not fit.

 

Several of those games were tweaked for use with the 5200 joystick so they do respond to the analog sensitivity even if they can be also played with an 8-way digital joystick. And a lot of the 5200 games were re-done and weren't simple ports from the Atari 8-bit computer versions. That is why "Glenn the 5200 Man" was such a popular pirate in the Atari 8-bit scene because he'd backport the superior 5200 game versions back to the Atari 8-bits so they could enjoy those titles without having to buy a 5200.

 

I do have a 5200 and I really enjoy it. When the 5200 joystick works, it obliterates the 7800 ProLines.

[+Defender_2600]

I think Popeye would be cool on 7800. Bonus if they get 320 mode working. May I ask how they got more than 4 colors in the above screenshots if using 320 mode?

 

 

 

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/221754-differences-between-atari-2600-and-atari-7800-sprite-colors/?do=findComment&comment=2925976

[BydoEmpire]

Meh. Lots of good and redeemable tie-in platformers on NES and SNES but devs sure got lazy during the GBA years. Give them a more powerful system and better dev tools and they produce crappier games.

 

 

Laziness is definitely part of what went wrong on the GBA and even the GBC but it was also a time of transition for developers.

I'm willing to bet the developers weren't lazy, they were given a few months to slap something together as best they could and get it on shelves. And/or they were brand new to game development (likely). I bet a lot of the developers of these crappy games worked their ass off just to get something - anything - out the door. That's not being lazy. The GBA market was particularly brutal, cost-wise, for developers whose publishers were hopping on the licensing bandwagon. I was doing GBA games in the early 00s, and my company signed a developer to put out a title in 6 weeks, start to finish, deal signed to rom submitted to Nintendo.. It was absolute trash (it got a 0.0 in EGM), but I'm amazed the team (outsourced somewhere super cheap) pulled off what they did. Then again, from the publishers perspective, that game cost next to nothing to make but it sold enough due to the name on the box. Hence there was little incentive to take a chance spending a lot of money developing a quality (or God forbid, original) game that may or may not sell.

 

The "time of transition" comment is apt, though. Most of the more experienced programmers were working on console titles, which were a lot more... prestigious for lack of a better word.

Edited February 13, 2016 by BydoEmpire

[NostAlgae37]

Defender_2600, those sprite mockups of Popeye that you made already look way better than any home version, and make me even more excited about the prospect of seeing this game on the 7800. I wonder if these were quickies and there is more room for tweaking/improvement (some of the details have the jaggies but this might be unavoidable). It would be a nice touch if the 7800 version included the optional "Dream-Walking Olive Oyl" level from that cell-phone conversion that someone on this board worked on (although there could be some legal issues with that).

[Andromeda Stardust]

I was doing GBA games in the early 00s, and my company signed a developer to put out a title in 6 weeks, start to finish, deal signed to rom submitted to Nintendo.. It was absolute trash (it got a 0.0 in EGM), but I'm amazed the team (outsourced somewhere super cheap) pulled off what they did.

Care to tell us what the game was? If you're still under a NDA or care not to divulge, I'll understand. Just curious...

[Trebor]

...I wonder if these were quickies and there is more room for tweaking/improvement (some of the details have the jaggies but this might be unavoidable)....

 

Original Arcade Popeye was double the resolution of typical games of that time @512x448.

Defender_2600 has worked wonders (as usual) within the resolution limitation of 320x240.