The Homebrew Wars: Number of homebrew games for every retro system

[carlsson]

10 hours ago, mr_me said:

The Atari 800 should have 4-bit colour and 3-bit luminance for 128 colour shades, just like the Atari 2600.  You might achieve more colours using ntsc colour effects.

The size of the palette and the number of different colours on the screen at the same time generally are two different things. While for instance the Amiga has a 4096 colour palette, only occasionally in HAM modes you can see anywhere close to that, usually closer to 32-64 colours on screen IIRC.

 

The same can be said about the Atari 8-bit, which have a number of different graphics modes defined by the ANTIC and GTIA chips respectively, and that those modes can be combined in different ways, plus various raster tricks that let you change colour settings and graphic modes at some line which increases colour resolution by the expense of the CPU waiting for the change. I agree with IntellliMission that many of the A8 games, in particular the ones from the 80's, tend to have very few hues but in many variations of saturation and lightness, which I understand is due to how the hardware works: cheap to produce a monochromatic fade from intensive to washed out in a single colour but expensive to have many different hues at the same time.

 

Modern homebrews have 40 years worth of experiences to draw from, and programmers have come up with ways to tame the hardware just like on every other system, which is why games from the 2000's and onwards - the newer, the better - tend to look that much better on the exact same system than the commercial offerings back when it was new. But we all know that so I'm preaching to the already believers, right?

[+atari2600land]

Pokemon Mini - one (but it's a flash cart.)

[Newsdee]

On 3/8/2020 at 4:36 AM, IntelliMission said:

What constitutes a "second generation" system? 

Roughly:

- First gen were the home pong games

- Second gen introduced carts and Atari VCS

- Third gen was "post-crash" systems with more standard controllers (NES, SMS, SG1000) and carts with mappers

 

The two first gens had mostly games with a single screen (albeit there were exceptions), whereas in 3rd gen games, scrolling, storylines, etc were more common. 3rd Gen is basically "later 8-bit" consoles.

 

I know some people don't like to categorise in generations but I find it useful. For example, Intellivision was advanced in some ways but it didn't survive the VG crash, and games reflect that era of time. Contrast with NES which started out with simple games, but ended up with things like Castlevania III or Final Fantasy.

Edited March 9, 2020 by Newsdee

[derFunkenstein]

Really fun to see that some systems have more homebrew than official releases. 

[zzip]

On 3/7/2020 at 8:54 AM, IntelliMission said:

 

By the way, can somebody explain the Atari 400/800/XL graphic modes? How many simultaneous colors are allowed? Wikipedia mentions hundreds of colors but the games I saw have around 5-10...

Such a simple question,  but answer is pretty complicated

 

at the basic level, the number of colors decreases as the resolution increases.   High res mode allows 2 playfield colors,  the 160x192 bitmap mode allows 4 playfield colors (or five colors in the character version of that), GTIA modes allow up to 16 colors...   

 

but,  add in the player missile graphics (sprites) and each can have independent colors from the playfield colors

 

Then you have antic display lists, where you can use a different graphics mode on every line if you wanted,  and display list interupts where you can change the entire palette (including sprite colors) on every line if you wanted, allowing dozens of colors on screen (up to 128 or 256 in GTIA modes)

 

Some games will do things to change the palette mid scanline, to increase the number of colors on each line.

 

So the answer is, you can have many colors on screen, but you don't have complete independence on where the extra colors get placed.   If you use the 5 color mode, with five sprites,  I think you can get 10 independent colors without resorting to interrupts or other palette-swapping schemes

[mr_me]

12 hours ago, Newsdee said:

Roughly:

- First gen were the home pong games

- Second gen introduced carts and Atari VCS

- Third gen was "post-crash" systems with more standard controllers (NES, SMS, SG1000) and carts with mappers

 

The two first gens had mostly games with a single screen (albeit there were exceptions), whereas in 3rd gen games, scrolling, storylines, etc were more common. 3rd Gen is basically "later 8-bit" consoles.

 

I know some people don't like to categorise in generations but I find it useful. For example, Intellivision was advanced in some ways but it didn't survive the VG crash, and games reflect that era of time. Contrast with NES which started out with simple games, but ended up with things like Castlevania III or Final Fantasy.

Atari 2600 cartridges had "mappers", bankswitching rom, adding ram, and even additional processing.  The SG-1000 had identical hardware to a colecovision and was discontinued in the same year.  The nes and commodore 64 both had technical advancements that allowed for the games seen in the later 1980s.

[CatPix]

And you can add that although Mattel sold the Intellivision, the console itself as Intellivision III was sold up to 1990, so it did survived the crash.

[IntelliMission]

By the way, here's a relevant opinion from the CEO of Intellivision Entertainment: If he were the CEO of Sony or Nintendo, he would free the development tools for 20-30 year old consoles to promote homebrew games and potentially increase brand loyalty.

 

Of course, this would create a few technical issues: PS1 needs a modchip, price of the old consoles would increase... But there's always a legal way, games could be sold digitally on the store.

[Newsdee]

8 hours ago, mr_me said:

Atari 2600 cartridges had "mappers", bankswitching rom, adding ram, and even additional processing.  The SG-1000 had identical hardware to a colecovision and was discontinued in the same year. 

Atari undoubtedly had the first trials with "mappers", since it's a good way to expand capabilities of the console. But if you are to compare the top 20 Atari 2600 games vs. the top 20 NES games, it would clearly show a generation gap. That said, I'd consider the Atari 7800 to be in the same class as the NES given it's built-in specs.

 

The SG-1000 would arguably be in 2nd gen along with Coleco, in that case. They are both advanced systems, but I wouldn't put them in gen 3 given the gap between those and the NES and SMS.

 

[zzip]

On 3/7/2020 at 3:36 PM, IntelliMission said:

What constitutes a "second generation" system? I think the Colecovision is included there because it has a weird controller. By the way, I just found this Atari Age topic by googling "colecovision vs nes". An interesting read.

Coleco was considered a 3rd Generation (or "3rd Wave", to use the lingo used at the time) when it was released.

 

However revisionism has caused it to get lumped unfairly with the 2nd generation.     CV and the Atari 5200 are a clear generational leap over the 2600 and Channel F system.   I would lump them as 3rd generation with NES,  or make NES 4th gen.

[Steven Pendleton]

16 minutes ago, zzip said:

Coleco was considered a 3rd Generation (or "3rd Wave", to use the lingo used at the time) when it was released.

 

However revisionism has caused it to get lumped unfairly with the 2nd generation.     CV and the Atari 5200 are a clear generational leap over the 2600 and Channel F system.   I would lump them as 3rd generation with NES,  or make NES 4th gen.

I think it's in there because Americans look at it as a pre-crash system, unlike the NES, which is technically a pre-crash/mid-crash system itself if you count the Famicom.

[zzip]

11 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

I think it's in there because Americans look at it as a pre-crash system, unlike the NES, which is technically a pre-crash/mid-crash system itself if you count the Famicom.

Yeah, I know why it happens, I just don't agree with that grouping.

[Pixelboy]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Coleco was considered a 3rd Generation (or "3rd Wave", to use the lingo used at the time) when it was released.

 

However revisionism has caused it to get lumped unfairly with the 2nd generation.     CV and the Atari 5200 are a clear generational leap over the 2600 and Channel F system.   I would lump them as 3rd generation with NES,  or make NES 4th gen.

I wouldn't personally place a number (1st, 2nd, 3rd, whatever) on a generation without giving it some serious thought, but all I can say for sure is that between 1982 and 1984, when I went to retail stores, toy stores and video game boutiques, I saw one section for Atari 2600 games, one section for ColecoVision games, and one section for Intellivision games (if I'm not mistaken, the Atari 5200 was never released in Canada, or at least never in Quebec). Those three consoles were very clearly in competition with one another on store shelves, and that, above any measure of technological advancement, is what makes me "lump" these consoles together into one "generation". By the time the NES arrived (and the SMS soon after), the Atari, ColecoVision and Intellivision were ancient history in terms of retail sales. You were lucky to find them in bargain bins by 1985. So since the NES/SMS did not really overlap with the 2600/Coleco/Inty, I see the NES/SMS as a different generation.

 

Categorizing consoles solely around their technological architecture is not a good idea, IMHO, because at the time, computer technology was progressing by leaps and bounds in the public's eye. Just adding hardware-based scrolling (which in itself was a simple feature added to a graphic chip) in addition to having more ROM+RAM space to work with, made a world of difference in what a console could do during those early days of 8-bit video gaming. Remove hardware scrolling from the NES, and you'd essentially have a ColecoVision with more colors.

 

Going from 8-bit to 16-bit was a clear generation leap, so technological architecture cannot be ignored, obviously. But from my point of view, the Atari 5200 and 7800 were more associated to the 2600/Coleco/Inty era than the NES/SMS era: As a kid, once you "tasted" Super Mario Bros or Mega Man, every console that came before the NES seemed outdated, if not totally obsolete.

 

Edited March 10, 2020 by Pixelboy

[zzip]

6 minutes ago, Pixelboy said:

I wouldn't personally place a number (1st, 2nd, 3rd, whatever) on a generation without giving it some serious thought, but all I can say for sure is that between 1982 and 1984, when I went to retail stores, toy stores and video game boutiques, I saw one section for Atari 2600 games, one section for ColecoVision games, and one section for Intellivision games (if I'm not mistaken, the Atari 5200 was never released in Canada, or at least never in Quebec). Those three consoles were very clearly in competition with one another on the store shelves, and that, above any measure of technological advancement, is what makes me "lump" these consoles together into one "generation". By the time the NES arrived (and the SMS soon after), the Atari, ColecoVision and Intellivision were ancient history in terms of retail sales. You were lucky to find them in bargain bins by 1985. So since the NES/SMS did not really overlap with the 2600/Coleco/Inty, I see the NES/SMS as a different generation.

 

Categorizing consoles solely around their technological architecture is not a good idea, IMHO, because at the time, computer technology was progressing by leaps and bounds in the public's eye. Just adding hardware-based scrolling (which in itself was a simple added feature to a graphic chip) in addition to having more ROM+RAM space to work with, made a world of difference in what a console could do during those early days of 8-bit video gaming. Remove hardware scrolling from the NES, and you'd essentially have a ColecoVision with more colors.

 

Going from 8-bit to 16-bit was a clear generation leap, so technological architecture cannot be ignored, obviously. But from my point of view, the Atari 5200 and 7800 were more associated to the 2600/Coleco/Inty era than the NES/SMS era: As a kid, once you "tasted" Super Mario Bros or Mega Man, every console that came before the NES seemed outdated, if not totally obsolete.

 

This is typical of Channel F:

 

This is Coleco:

 

And this is NES:

 

To say that the 3rd is a generational leap over the 2nd, but the 2nd isn't a generational leap over the first is just absurd to me.   Sure NES has hardware scrolling, but Coleco/5200 had many more innovations over the 1976/1977 systems than that.

 

Colecovision was a big deal for gamers because it was the first time we could really play arcade-quality games at home.   The 2600/Intellivision games were almost always clearly inferior to games we played in the arcade. and we assumed that was just the way things had to be.   But Coleco/5200 changed that.   That isn't just specs,  that was change we could all see and made us excited.

[mr_me]

3 hours ago, Pixelboy said:

I wouldn't personally place a number (1st, 2nd, 3rd, whatever) on a generation without giving it some serious thought, but all I can say for sure is that between 1982 and 1984, when I went to retail stores, toy stores and video game boutiques, I saw one section for Atari 2600 games, one section for ColecoVision games, and one section for Intellivision games (if I'm not mistaken, the Atari 5200 was never released in Canada, or at least never in Quebec). Those three consoles were very clearly in competition with one another on store shelves, and that, above any measure of technological advancement, is what makes me "lump" these consoles together into one "generation". By the time the NES arrived (and the SMS soon after), the Atari, ColecoVision and Intellivision were ancient history in terms of retail sales. You were lucky to find them in bargain bins by 1985. So since the NES/SMS did not really overlap with the 2600/Coleco/Inty, I see the NES/SMS as a different generation.

In 1983 and 1984 the Atari 2600 and Intellivision were selling at about half the price or less of a colecovision.  in those years if you were seriously looking at a video game system you would be looking at a Colecovision or Commodore 64.  I don't really remember the Atari 5200 much either where I was but I understand they were having supply problems in 1982/83 and it was discontinued in 1984 but it was certainly a competitor as was the Vectrex.  The Atari 2600 and Intellivision continued to sell well as budget systems.  And Colecovision was discontinued in 1984/85 but the Atari 2600 and Intellivision were on the shelves next to the NES through the 1980s.

Edited March 10, 2020 by mr_me

[IntelliMission]

I have said this in the past, but all those sytems, all the limitations... I started playing video games in 1989, but those were the days. With the 6th generation, most of the magic was lost (check out this awesome interview with one of the creators of Crash Bandicoot to see how cool was when only a few developers were able to do certain things with a machine, even things not officially allowed).

Edited March 10, 2020 by IntelliMission

[+wongojack]

On 3/6/2020 at 10:22 AM, TailChao said:

Yes and no.

 

Competing with the quality and depth of Nintendo's best (or Konami's, or Capcom's, or Sunsoft's, yadda yadda...) requires a significant amount of resources, but the userbase is also very expansive (and right now - very willing to spend cash). It's also a little difficult to make direct comparisons between platforms since the communities formed around them are very different - NesDev isn't AtariAge. Most of the coverage for "new games on old things" outside of these forums is very NES or Genesis oriented at the moment.

 

Generally though, I think the thought process of "well it's too difficult to compete with these games so I'll develop for something else" is ridiculous. If anything it's a challenge to overcome which hopefully results in a great product. If there's an equivalent on any Atari platform to the success of Micro Mages I'd like to know about it.

 

I just wanted to chime in and say that I got a chance to play Micro Mages at a recent show.  Most other NES homebrews that I've played have been kinda simple like others on this thread have stated, but NOT Micro Mages.  It was really an amazing game that would totally find its place in the regular NES library.   AND it has simultaneous multiplayer up to 4 players!

 

 

[turboxray]

Also, I mean if you're gonna count all those roms.. might as well count all the NES2PCE roms on the Turbografx. Megaman1, Megaman 2, etc

 

 

On 3/6/2020 at 9:34 AM, Pixelboy said:

Are you a programmer?

 

On 3/6/2020 at 11:20 AM, carlsson said:

In case you, just like me didn't keep track, Rikki & Vikki for the 7800 is 512 kilobyte of code (*) + 256 kilobyte of music data as per the programmer's notes.

 

(*) Well, it says "game data" but I'll assume code in included in that number, not just graphics and level data.

You guys really don't have a clue who tailchao is do you ?

Edited March 11, 2020 by turboxray

[Newsdee]

15 hours ago, zzip said:

Colecovision was a big deal for gamers because it was the first time we could really play arcade-quality games at home.  

Generations are just a convenient way to classify consoles to specific an era, and of course the fit is not perfect.

 

I think there is room to place some consoles between generations, as in, above of the previous offerings but not quite to the next level.

That may be also relevant nowadays given the latest gen (8th?) doesn't really innovate over the years except going further towards PC-type specs.

 

So for example:

• Coleco, 5200, and SG-100 = Gen 2.5 (not quite NES level but above the 2600)
• PCE/TG16 = Gen 3.5 (given it's an 8-bit to 16-bit hybrid)
• 32X = Gen 4.5
• Wii U could be Gen 7.5 if we consider the Switch to be still in the 8th gen

Just my 2 cents. I just feel these points cause debate but we could come up with something we can agree on.

 

 

 

[TailChao]

18 hours ago, wongojack said:

I just wanted to chime in and say that I got a chance to play Micro Mages at a recent show.  Most other NES homebrews that I've played have been kinda simple like others on this thread have stated, but NOT Micro Mages.  It was really an amazing game that would totally find its place in the regular NES library.   AND it has simultaneous multiplayer up to 4 players!

...and it's only 40KB, no expansion required. Larger ROM sizes can help, but don't correlate to a better game.

 

 

11 hours ago, turboxray said:

You guys really don't have a clue who tailchao is do you ?

To be fair, I'm not super active online and the only project I did which received wide coverage was released in 2009. So I don't even know anymore.

[+atari2600land]

ActionMax has 2 homebrews, both made by me.

[IntelliMission]

By the way, I just checked and found that:

 

- The Philips CD-I has 6 homebrew games.

 

- The Mattel Hyperscan has a "homebrew" section in an independent Wiki page... but has no homebrew games. The page says

 

"This is a list of homebrew for the Mattel HyperScan.

(TODO: Put something here :P)".

Edited March 11, 2020 by IntelliMission

[turboxray]

21 hours ago, Newsdee said:

Generations are just a convenient way to classify consoles to specific an era, and of course the fit is not perfect.

 

I think there is room to place some consoles between generations, as in, above of the previous offerings but not quite to the next level.

That may be also relevant nowadays given the latest gen (8th?) doesn't really innovate over the years except going further towards PC-type specs.

 

So for example:

• Coleco, 5200, and SG-100 = Gen 2.5 (not quite NES level but above the 2600)
• PCE/TG16 = Gen 3.5 (given it's an 8-bit to 16-bit hybrid)
• 32X = Gen 4.5
• Wii U could be Gen 7.5 if we consider the Switch to be still in the 8th gen

Just my 2 cents. I just feel these points cause debate but we could come up with something we can agree on.

 

 

 

 

2600 is definitely not 2nd gen. Coleco, 5200, sg-1000, etc those make perfect sense as 2nd gen. It doesn't make sense to call them 2.5gen just because of the 2600. If anything, it's the odd ball out.

 

 PCE/TG is 4th gen. Yeah it's the first of the Japanese home consoles, but it's definitely not 3.5 gen. It has more colors than the Genesis, and is faster than the SNES. It's just as fast as the Genesis. Bits don't mean anything - performance does. I mean, are gonna start calling the Master System, and anything with a z80 cpu, a 4bit processor? Matter of fact, the 68k *IS* a 32bit cpu with a 16bit data bus - registers, operations, etc all capable in full 32bit. Yet we don't say it's not part of the 16bit generation. Snes? It's barely a 16bit processor - thee bare minimum. It's processor performance is only almost twice that of the NES, but has more overhead in some respects.

 

 32x? That's part of the same generation as the Genesis. Or if you want to get more technical, 4.15 Gen haha. The CPUs are using 16bit data bus and the only thing it has is a frame buffer.. which it can't even reliably blit to at 60fps.. let alone missing any hardware acceleration or transparency effects.

[zzip]

9 hours ago, turboxray said:

2600 is definitely not 2nd gen. Coleco, 5200, sg-1000, etc those make perfect sense as 2nd gen. It doesn't make sense to call them 2.5gen just because of the 2600. If anything, it's the odd ball out.

1st Gen = pong system with fixed games (no cartridges)

 

2nd Gen = cartridge-based systems that emerged around 1976/1977 with innovations like color graphics (but graphics still very blocky)   Atari 2600, Channel F, Bally Astrocade.

The Intellivision is the oddball here,  clearly more powerful than these systems, but weak compared to Gen-3

 

3rd Gen =  This featured higher resolution graphics, better sound, more RAM and cartridge Rom capabilities.   In my view this generation is split in to early 3rd/ late 3rd gen.   Early 3rd Gen systems would include Atari 5200, Colecovision, Vectrex.   Late Gen 3 systems would be NES, Sega Master System and Atari 7800.   And then you had the Commodore 64 and other 8-bit computers which were used primarily as game systems by many people.   Their popularity spanned the entirety of Gen 3.

 

Some things to consider:  Atari 5200/Colecovision released in 1982,   NES originally released in 1983, using the same 6502 processor as the 5200.   The SMS uses the z80 processor and sound chip as the Colecovision.   These aren't generational leaps in technology,  these were iterations on the same tech.   The crash and the temporary jump to home computers as game systems just confuses everybody.

[carlsson]

^^ If you check some of the latest Intellivision homebrews - even developed in compiled IntyBASIC - you will find that it was more powerful than the old games accounted it for. Part due to ROM were expensive back then, part due to most original games use the built-in EXEC that slows it down to a crawl. Yes, the graphics resolution you can do nothing about and its bitmapping capacities still are limited but hey, it got hardware smooth scrolling in all directions, something you can't easily achieve on the Colecovision at least (not entirely sure how easily the 5200/8-bit scroll things).