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

[mr_me]

The Intellivision's low resolution really hurt it when the new systems came out in 1982.   And yes Mattel stuck with the exec game engine too long, but a couple of third party developers were able to make some smooth high frame rate games before the crash.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

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.

I'd look more at graphic processing rather than cpu.  Things like tile layers, hardware scrolling, sprites and sprite pixels per scan line, number of colours per sprite and tile, sprite scaling, and overall resolution.  It distinguishes the nes and c64 from colecovision.

Edited March 12, 2020 by mr_me

[+Cafeman]

Quote

Atari 5200: Around 12 games

That isn't accurate, being based on the current 5200 games in the AA store,. Also,  one is an enhanced A8 port (Zaxxon) and another being a actual Atari prototype from BITD (Xari Arena).  (do these count as Homebrews for this list? not sure). 

 

Looking at this 2008 link - https://atariage.com/forums/topic/121698-is-there-a-complete-list-of-the-5200-homebrews-hacks-conversions-repros/     ,  which lists these 9 homebrews: 

 

Adventure II   in AA store

Beef Drop     in AA store

Castle Blast   in AA store

Castle Crisis   in AA store 

Combat II Advanced   (not counted yet - MeanHamster)

Haunted House II 3-D  (not counted yet - MeanHamster)

Klax      (not counted yet - MeanHamster) 

Koffi: Yellow Kopter   in AA store 

Rent Wars   (Not counted yet)

 

Looking at Good Deal games' 5200 homebrews, the majority seem to be conversions from A8 games, thus not really "homebrews" 

 

.==> What number can we come up with?    

 

 

[zzip]

31 minutes ago, mr_me said:

 

I'd look more at graphic processing rather than cpu.  Things like tile layers, hardware scrolling, sprites and sprite pixels per scan line, number of colours per sprite and tile, sprite scaling, and overall resolution.  It distinguishes the nes and c64 from colecovision.

Ok, let's look at graphics processing.   The Atari 5200 had hardware fine scrolling too.   On the other hand, the Atari 2600 didn't even have a screen buffer and programmers had to use the "race the beam" technique to program it.    That alone is a bigger difference in graphics technology between Gen 2 and Atari 5200/Coleco then the number of hardware sprites a system had.

Edited March 12, 2020 by zzip

[carlsson]

For that matter, already the Fairchild Channel F had a 2 kilobyte video buffer. The RCA Studio II has at least 256 bytes display buffer. The Bally Astrocade I'm not sure if it shares its memory between CPU and graphics, but on this merit it looks like the Atari 2600 is the oddball of them all, generation 1.5 perhaps.

Edited March 12, 2020 by carlsson

[mr_me]

In the 1970s, some of the other game systems were trying to bitmap the screen.  Atari, knowing ram wasn't cost effective for that, took a different approach with only making sprites high resolution.  This was the winning approach.

 

Mattel took it a step further with tiled backgrounds, and again with less ram than a channel f.

 

You can't just look at one or two features when comparing.  The Atari 2600 could put more colours on the screen than an nes.

Edited March 12, 2020 by mr_me

[IntelliMission]

I actually don't give a damn about generations: you could say all my favorite systems are in the same generation as Pong machines and I would still be happy to have played them.

 

However, the discussion is interesting because it's revealing lots of technical data which is part of how different each system used to be.

[zzip]

5 minutes ago, IntelliMission said:

I actually don't give a damn about generations: you could say all my favorite systems are in the same generation as Pong machines and I would still be happy to have played them.

The only reason I care is because to me, the early 80s were a golden age of games and arcade, and this era tends to get ignored and trivialized by post-NES gaming historians.   And this is one of the ways they do this...  use revisionism to eliminate the 3rd generation was widely acknowledged in the gaming press to have started in 1982.   Instead they lump these systems in the with the mid 70s systems and say they were all basically the same.

 

[IntelliMission]

For me, the most blatant omissions from the "official" history of video games that most gaming websites tell are

 

- Consoles before the NES. Barely mentioned except for a quick mention of the 2600. For example, the Intellivision did many important things and in Spain most of us didn't even know it existed until recent months.

 

- Arcade machines. They tell the history of games as if you could only play in consoles, but arcade games were huge in the 80s and 90s.

 

- Computers. Again, it's like they didn't even exist. 8 bit computers, 16 bit computers, MS-DOS... Many important games were exclusive to this systems and never appeared in consoles, and many others appeared in computers first. This is the most criminal omission IMO.

[RT-55J]

Part of the reason dividing console generation can be difficult is that Moore's law provides (or at least provided) a sizable improvement in cost/performance every two years, while the life cycle of a decently successful console is 5 years at the very least. Those two realities do not cleanly mesh together.

 

Another reason is that the system of numbering console generations is something invented by Wikipedia editors (who probably weren't too interested in anything prior to the NES), and not really based on actual historical realities. What they consider the "second gen" could readily be split up into two or even three different generations as others have mentioned here.

 

Another issue is that consoles are made of several different components, which might be from different generations themselves! For instance, while the SMS's VDP was two years newer and better than the NES's VDP, it's audio chip was 4 years older and stodgier, and both of those facts are evident in how the games on those systems both sound and look.

[mr_me]

Another thing to consider is that colecovision, atari 5200, and Vectrex game libraries were cut short compared with other third generation systems.

[IntelliMission]

Another interesting anecdote related to the revisionism and the NES: I was reading a review of a 1989 Amiga game. The reviewer said that Zelda for the NES (1986) was the first game to offer the option to save. A pretty good fairy tale story... if you live in a world where computers don't exist.

 

The reality: You could save the game in Zork (1981), and possibly even before in some early mainframe games.

[Tanooki]

Maybe they typo'd/forgot to throw 'console' on there and the word battery to be more clear.  I think it was the first battery backed save cart.

[IntelliMission]

I don't think so... They were reviewing a 1989 computer game, complaining about the inability to save.

[+Black_Tiger]

World Series Major Leeague Baseball for Intellivision is a 1983/2 BN console game that supports game saving.

 

I believe that all Keyboard Component software supports data saving of some kind. There are 1981 software releases, but the first real games came out in 1982.

[+Black_Tiger]

On 3/10/2020 at 9:20 AM, zzip said:

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.

You showed what was "typical" for Channel F and then attempted to post a very atypical Colecovision game to try to make it seem closer to NES (looks like an Atari 8-bit computer screen). The actual Colecovision version of that game looks more like a "typical" Intellivision game.

 

Colecovision held the potential for higher visual detail in static screen games but it still took at least as many steps backwards from Intellivision as it did forward. It can't do Pac-Man with single color objects without flickering. Intellivision had hardware scrolling before the NES and lots of games with more sophisticated gameplay than typical arcade games. The biggest difference between games released earlier than games released later is their rom sizes. Homebrew arcade ports without addons prove this. But many pre-NES console games still looked better than many Famicom games from the first few years.

 

I got to play many of the best Colevision games bitd. The visuals were the main draw, but it was clear that games like the Donkey Kongs didn't play like the arcade and DKJR was pretty choppy.

 

Remember, this is also what Colecovision arcade ports looks like:

 

 

 

The Colecvovision benefited from those games not requiring scrolling.

 

 

And this is what 1977 hardware looks like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 15, 2020 by Black_Tiger
fixed a capitalization.

[m.o.terra kaesi]

neogeo ist missing!

funny, cause it is one of the easiest to count on ?

 

[Mikebloke]

In an attempt to take advantage of this necrobump, is there anywhere that does a definitive homebrew list? There seems to be 2 or 3 major sites that list various games of different consoles, then each system usually has a site or section on another site dedicated to it. I know someone here has a pretty comprehensive excel sheet that is pretty good for the 2600!

[m.o.terra kaesi]

1 hour ago, Mikebloke said:

In an attempt to take advantage of this necrobump, is there anywhere that does a definitive homebrew list? There seems to be 2 or 3 major sites that list various games of different consoles, then each system usually has a site or section on another site dedicated to it. I know someone here has a pretty comprehensive excel sheet that is pretty good for the 2600!

I'm pretty impressed with the current list here. There are even links to each source. It is going to be a crazy big list if you want to try to get together all released games of all systems of all years!

[high voltage]

Here's an older Atari VCS listing

 

Homebrew/Proto Release Levels and Source Material - Emulation - AtariAge Forums

[turboxray]

I didn't realize homebrew was a war...

[high voltage]

Here's an older Atari VCS homebrew  listing

 

Homebrew/Proto Release Levels and Source Material - Emulation - AtariAge Forums

 

 

As for Generations:

 

[high voltage]

2 minutes ago, turboxray said:

I didn't realize homebrew was a war...

Always for Nintendo fanboys

[zzip]

2 hours ago, high voltage said:

As for Generations:

 

 

Or just compare some of the few multiplats that exist on the 2600 + NES generations and see if 5200/CV are closer to 2nd or 3rd gen.   It's obvious, I think:

 

 

Edited September 29, 2021 by zzip

[m.o.terra kaesi]

this list here is pretty impressive in my eyes. there are even links to each source per console. haven't found anything else close to this one yet.

[Steven Pendleton]

On 9/30/2021 at 3:56 AM, turboxray said:

I didn't realize homebrew was a war...

War has changed.

 - Solid Snake