5200 and the arcade experience

[ledzep]

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

They did.  I have a pair somewhere. They're red and otherwise look like an intellivision controller with a little joystick where the disc would be.  My main Intellivision is a Sears Super Arcade which has the detachable controllers. The buttons suck.   As for it being a conspiracy theory, I completely reject that framing.  Nobody conspired to do anything. They just failed to fix the problem. You also cannot "conspire" to do something legal.

 

No no, I just meant a "conspiracy" to not fix a known problem that everyone was aware of.

 

Huh, I don't remember those aftermarket Intellivision controllers.  Probably because it was my friend's system, not mine, so I wasn't on the hunt for new games or controllers.  And he had the original that didn't have removable controllers, anyway.

 

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

Neither have I. I just know they claim to have played the games a lot as they were being worked on. So they had to know.  My first experience with a 5200 was at a store with a 5200 set up and with a Pac Man cartridge in it.  My first impression was that it looked good but was not very fun to play because Pac Man would go ways he wanted to go, not where I wanted him to go. This was borne out years later when I was an adult and bought my first 5200.

 

They had to know they weren't the best controllers?  Probably.  They had to know that they were terrible?  Probably not.  As I said, I was big stickler for accurate and usable controllers back then playing all those arcade games and seeing home systems claiming to be like the arcades.  Ok, prove it.  If the those 5200 joysticks had been as bad as the complainers all insist, believe me, I would have noticed and agreed that they must go.  But I was fine with them, I had hours of fun playing 5200 games while dreading dealing with Intellivision controllers and also loving playing the 2600 except for no analog control for certain games and only having 1 fire button when many arcade games by then would have 2 (bombs and guns).

 

And, for me anyway, fuck Pac-Man.  Hated that game, rarely played it in the arcade (usually because I was waiting for a favorite game to get open and I was bored).  I will say that Wizard Of Wor was a challenge to play with those analog sticks (needed precision in the mazes) but, guess what?  We played that game a lot.  Had fun, too, it wasn't a 2 hour bitchfest about the controllers.  So clearly we figured out how to play it well.

 

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

I couldn't tell you where I read it, but I have read that play testers complained about the joystick.  IIRC, they had "focus groups" who supported it and said they liked it, but these were focus groups only looking and feeling the controller, not playing a game.  But that play testers complained about it and didn't like it.

 

I believe you (and them) but I don't remember it being some sort of wide-spread problem where everybody was confused why Atari wasn't addressing it.

 

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

Also, in my experience, the Intellivision disc is not as bad as the 5200 stick, though the buttons on my Sears version suck.  I'm not defending it, a joystick would obviously be better, but it's just not as bad.  The fact that it rotates makes it easier to use, at least for me.  Having to pick up your thumb to move to a different part of the disc would be harder. Overall, I really only occasionally lose control or have to fight with the disc to do what I want it to do.  Again, I'm not defending it. I agree it's bad. Most of all, it's uncomfortable.

 

The issue, at least for me, was that because that stupid disc could rotate it would easily slide a little bit one way or the other and change the direction I was moving.  You had to pick up your thumb to go left and then right, you wouldn't rotate around and possibly hit a direction (up or down) that you definitely didn't want to go in.  It was easier to keep the 5200 stick in one place once you picked that direction.  The disadvantage there was that if you were relying on the 5200 stick to go back to center, you were a fool.  I think a brand new stick might do that because the rubber collar on the stick would be stiff enough to make the stick center (or nearly center) but once you broke the thing in with a few dozen hours of playing that would no longer work.

 

In terms of the subject "arcade experience", the Intellivision was by far the worst compared to actual arcade games.  No paddle, either.  The 2600 had almost everything but analog control, the 5200 had almost everything except a reliable digital stick (and a paddle).  Never had a ColecoVision so I can't compare the controllers there.  The Vectrex was really good, had a self-centering analog stick but no paddle (though, like the 5200, easy to create one) or trak-ball and 4 buttons to cover most Asteroids type controls.

 

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

One thing I will give Atari for the 5200 stick is they got rid of that god-awful rubberized plastic cover (on the 2600 stick) and just went with a regular plastic stick.. That rubber really irritates my skin.

 

Huh, I never noticed.  I mean I knew it was there because I took a few 2600 joysticks apart but since I moved it from the top it wasn't an issue.

[GaryH917]

On 3/20/2023 at 7:05 AM, ledzep said:

And for anybody who complains about the 5200 joystick, that Mattel controller was thee worst piece of shit I ever had to deal with in terms of playing video games and trying not to throw that thing against a wall.  A 16-direction disc that freely spins and has no markings on it to tell what direction you've selected, Odin how I hating using it!!  There was no tactile indication that anything had happened, either.  The keyboard had a slightly different feel that was no better or worse than the 5200.  The fire buttons were just as spongy.

This +1! Plus the Colecovision controllers were just as worse. Rectangular in shape with a knob style joystick with hard buttons to push consistently? Thankfully there are many new joysticks made nowadays as an upgrade to the originals.

[zzip]

17 hours ago, christo930 said:

I don't have anything against stacking (as such) and I didn't know they were doing that at the time I first saw the games.  The problem with stacking is it takes up sprites. The Colecovision is limited to 4 sprites per scanline. Two 3 color sprites eat up your scanline allotment. Then you have to start flickering the sprites.  if sprites were unlimited or at least available in higher numbers, this wouldn't be a problem.

yeah that's the thing, few of us knew.   We saw games with multi-colored sprites, we saw games with single color sprites.  The developers did a good job of working with the hardware they had for the most part.   It wasn't obvious to many gamers that there were serious limitations.

 

It wasn't until I read "Computes First Book of Atari Graphics" (I think that was the title) that I became aware of the limits of 5200/8-bit graphics,  then when I went back and looked at the games, I couldn't unsee it!   'Oh so that's why the ghosts in 5200 Pac-Man don't have white eyes like the arcade, that's a bummer!, '  and so on

 

It's interesting for how different the Colecovision and 5200 sprite systems are, the limitations are so similar.     On 5200 sprites span the entire screen vertically, but you can chop them up with DLIs to make more independent sprites (as long as they stay in their vertical zone).   You can't put more than 5 full width sprites on a line without multiplexing (flicker).   Seems like Coleco does it more in hardware.

 

18 hours ago, christo930 said:

I left that out because the 16bit address bus on 8bit CPUs wasn't really a hard limit when you can bankswitch. Oddly enough, I believe the C64 needs bankswitching for anything above 16k.  I'm not sure if anyone has ever been able to create cartridges bigger than 32k for the 5200 though.   I believe the biggest carts for the 2600 are fairly large with those movie carts. The Colecovision has some pretty large carts now. I think the Intellivision does as well.

 

To me what the next gen consoles delivered were much faster processors and much faster and better graphics and sound chips. The graphics ram alone fully occupies the 16bit address bus of the 8-bits. I think the TG-16 gets around this by utilizing a 20 bit address bus to get 1 MB.  I get the whole bits things is kind of dumb in a literal sense (after all, adding a single bit doubles), but it's generally good shorthand.

 

Bankswitching can be a pain to work with though.  Your code and data need to be efficiently organized so you aren't trying to access something that's been "switched out".  Likewise you may need to disable interrupts before switching banks or some interrupt could trigger and try to execute code that isn't available at that moment and crash the system.       Now maybe you are coding in a language that manages all that for you,  great1   but there's still extra overhead involved.   Extra cpu cycles spent on it on systems where ever cycle counts.   Dealing with a large, flat pool of memory is much more convenient.

 

Also having a larger pool of flat memory allows for larger frame buffers and better graphics.    6502-based systems can address 64K directly, and screen memory seems to be around 8K max on Atari, C64 and Apple.   Having more than that is less space available for code, data, OS, BASIC, etc.   Instead they use various tricks to increase the number of colors on screen. 

 

For instance, the 320x224 @ 64 color capabilities of the Genesis would require around 54K which is almost all the RAM available to the 6502!   They could do it PC style and have the graphics processor use its own graphics memory separate from main memory,  but that kind of architecture and the high cost of RAM in the early 80s was probably going to drive up the price of the console out of the reach of most consumers.

 

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

Keep running that fantasy in my head at overclocked speeds - going back to 1983 with a miniPC + MAME and incorporating it into my console & computer collection. Of course it would have a quantum communications module to connect to the future for ROMS and other updates.. Must speak with a counselor!

Hell, just a $35 Raspberry Pi would have blown our minds in 1983

[Keatah]

IIRC that INTY controller had two sheets of Mylar with conductive ink. And the every button and disc "switch" happened by pressing the two sheets together. Surely that ink wore out over time, unlike a real switch with moving metal contacts.

 

Granted today's computer keyboards are the same way, but they have a soft rubber bumper that pushes the Mylar together which don't make hot-spot kinks that wear out fast.

[Keatah]

18 hours ago, ledzep said:

In terms of the subject "arcade experience", the Intellivision was by far the worst compared to actual arcade games.

The Intellivision felt like a stuffed-up headcold system. Wheezing it's way though any "action" game. But we loved it for strategy and slower-paced stuff. Always swapped back and forth between INTY and 2600 on a regular basis.

 

In retrospect I was (and still am) impressed at the 2600's color palette and resolution.

[NE146]

On 3/7/2023 at 11:23 AM, Flyindrew said:

Last Saturday I took a walk to Barcade in my neighborhood (its a bar with dozens of 70's, 80's, 90's arcade machines). I played Pac Man, Defender, Moon Patrol, Dig Dug, Galaxian, Centipede, Jungle Hunt, Joust and Pole Position.

 

The next day, Sunday, I played these exact same games on my 5200 at home. 

 

In some instances the 5200 port of the games were exact arcade clones or near perfect. 

 

 

I basically lived my entire 70's and 80's life searching for the dream of playing arcade games at home and while the 5200 ports of most of those games were at least better than the VCS ports, but I wouldn't say they were identical to the arcade. But I'm a little more nitpicky for stuff like Pacman where my criticism is the collision detection was less forgiving on the 5200, etc. THAT SAID, the 5200 had a damn good Joust, Defender, and Space Dungeon. It also had an awesome Berzerk but I recall that coming pretty late in the system's life.  Everyone's right though in that the 5200 and the Colecovision were the best we could get at the time. But I do have memories for example of looking forward to Qix, and then getting it and thinking that the Qix wasn't as well animated. But hey it worked and where the heck else would I have gotten Qix?  lol

 

My one regret about the 5200 is we didn't get stuff like Tempest, Super-Pacman, Jr. Pacman, Millipede, Asteroids, Stargate, Blaster, Xevious, or heck even Donkey Kong until much later in life. I think if those titles were around in the 80's, then even those alone would have completely solidified it as an arcade beast.

Edited March 21, 2023 by NE146

[christo930]

4 hours ago, Keatah said:

The Intellivision felt like a stuffed-up headcold system. Wheezing it's way though any "action" game. But we loved it for strategy and slower-paced stuff. Always swapped back and forth between INTY and 2600 on a regular basis.

Isn't this because of the exec?  AFAIK, Mattel forced the devs to use routines in the exec and that these routines were slow.  Also the exec was the reason most of the first party games didn't run at 60fps.

[christo930]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

yeah that's the thing, few of us knew.   We saw games with multi-colored sprites, we saw games with single color sprites.  The developers did a good job of working with the hardware they had for the most part.   It wasn't obvious to many gamers that there were serious limitations.

 

Knowing it after the fact helps explain things which were a mystery to me as a younger kid.

6 hours ago, zzip said:

t wasn't until I read "Computes First Book of Atari Graphics" (I think that was the title) that I became aware of the limits of 5200/8-bit graphics,

Those Compute! books were great.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

 They could do it PC style and have the graphics processor use its own graphics memory separate from main memory,  but that kind of architecture and the high cost of RAM in the early 80s was probably going to drive up the price of the console out of the reach of most consumers.

I think it is done this way in the Colecovision.  I've been told the 16k the video chip needs is not part of the 16bit address bus of the Z80.

 

 

[Keatah]

10 hours ago, christo930 said:

Knowing it after the fact helps explain things which were a mystery to me as a younger kid.

Mmm.. I recently decided I rather like keeping the mystery intact. It's very nostalgic and sentimental. Since I'm not a professional developer/programmer I don't need to know the nitty-gritty details. I want the black boxes to stay black boxes.

 

Reading the present-day equivalent of the vintage "Theory of Operation" section and perhaps a chapter or two about a chip's features and capabilities is more than sufficient to satisfy my curiosity. Anything more and I begin to see limitations of a component and that puts a damper on discovering what's next.

[zzip]

3 hours ago, Keatah said:

Mmm.. I recently decided I rather like keeping the mystery intact. It's very nostalgic and sentimental. Since I'm not a professional developer/programmer I don't need to know the nitty-gritty details. I want the black boxes to stay black boxes.

 

Reading the present-day equivalent of the vintage "Theory of Operation" section and perhaps a chapter or two about a chip's features and capabilities is more than sufficient to satisfy my curiosity. Anything more and I begin to see limitations of a component and that puts a damper on discovering what's next.

Learning the limitations back then was disappointing.   But learning/knowing them now makes homebrews and demos a lot more interesting when you see them pulling off things the hardware wasn't really supposed to do.

[phuzaxeman]

On 3/19/2023 at 3:54 PM, christo930 said:

The Colecovision was a better buy. I think the MSRP was only 179 or something like that.   The problem they had was all the best arcade games were tied up by Atari and to a lesser extent, the Intellivision.  For the price of 2 games, the Colecovision could play 2600 games.  The 2600 adapter for the 5200 came later.

 

 

 

Frankly, they all cheaped out on the ROM size.  AFAIK from some reading I did, but cannot find again, Coleco had a shipped out the door cost of like 5 bucks.  Doubling the ROM might have raised the out-the-door shipped price to $6 maybe  But for a slighter higher price, could have the missing levels or other things kept out?

 

I honestly cannot see how the Colecovision can be a different generation from the Intellivision. That's probably true for the 5200.  The Intellivision has a "16 bit" processor and uses sprite and tile graphics and has a music chip (not just a noise maker like the 2600. And it has a bios with runtime functions and a font built in.  It's a bit of semantics I suppose. It's also hard in my mind to put the NES in a different generation than the Colecovision for the same reasons.

 

The Colecovision had a ton of arcade conversions. Of course, so did the 5200.  But somehow Coleco did a better job of convincing us that it was like bringing an arcade into your living room.

 

 

 

This was a pretty common thing. I recall a lot of the store demo units were always breaking.

 

Nostalgia only goes so far though.  For me, the old games is the type of game I like playing.  They are just fundamentally different from later games.  The early games were usually (though nowhere near always) pick up and play type games. They (meaning even original games)  were the home equivalent of arcade games. You might have to scan the short manual for more specifics, but the object of the game and what you were supposed to do was usually very obvious.

 

After the 2600, the consoles and most of the computers could do "music" Even an Intellivision had a 3 voice chip. Unfortunately, even when we got music, it was often a short tune playing on a loop.  Probably due to them cheaping out in ROM space..

 

 

 

Atari blew the 5200 in different ways. It should have come out earlier and it should have been cheaper.  To this day it blows my mind that they released the 5200 with the joysticks they did and with super breakout as the pack-in game.  This was the new "super system" shipping with a 4 year old game the pack-in controllers were not suitable for.  It would be the equivalent of Taito releasing a game system with a joystick and packing in Arkanoid in 1994.

 

 

 

The 5200 and Colecovision were both years old at their launch.  Though I am obviously a fan of both, they both were pretty limited for 82. The lack of colored sprites holds them both back, I think.  Both have adequate sound though.

 

 

Are you talking about a bar in Fishtown in Philadelphia?  If so, is it any good?  Is it safe?  Fishtown is a pretty rough area (I know parts of it are "gentrified" with well to do hipsters), though by the map, it looks like it's right at the edge..

 

 

Some of these ports were so bad you would think they deliberately did it.  DK on the intellivision is indeed terrible. Though I have to give them credit for Carnival on the 2600. It's actually a pretty good port.

 

 

This was the problem with using old hardware. Both the Colecovision and the 5200 were 1970s machines. By the 80s, most arcade games had multicolored sprites.  Though both have OK sound chips.

 

 

The lack of a lot of colors and "rules"(limitations) with color I find to be charming.  I like viewing the artwork in game machines from the era.  Recently a C64 game was released called "Pig Quest" which has some really nice artwork, plus some decent music.  Colecovision has a game called "Suite Macabre," a recent release which also has some very good artwork.: The limitations drive the art.  Once you are into this era. it takes artistic talent to design the graphics.  I am not aware of any such projects on the 5200 though.

 

5200 and Colecovision were limited for 82? 

 

What other console wasn't limited and was better?

[christo930]

On 3/23/2023 at 7:39 PM, phuzaxeman said:

5200 and Colecovision were limited for 82? 

 

What other console wasn't limited and was better?

While not a console, the C64 was better.  In some ways, the Bally Astrocade was better.

 

The reason I say they were limited for 1982, was they couldn't even faithfully reproduce arcade games from 1980. Multicolor sprites were pretty standard by 1980 with only a few exceptions.  By sprite stacking, you end up with a bunch of flickering.

[phuzaxeman]

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

While not a console, the C64 was better.  In some ways, the Bally Astrocade was better.

 

The reason I say they were limited for 1982, was they couldn't even faithfully reproduce arcade games from 1980. Multicolor sprites were pretty standard by 1980 with only a few exceptions.  By sprite stacking, you end up with a bunch of flickering.

First, comparing a 1000+ disk games C64 computer to a video game console is not a good comparison. There are a million threads on the 8bit vs. C64 discussions.

 

Second, I grew up playing the Astrocade. My uncle and cousins owned the Bally, and my family would play it a lot. We would always compare the Bally with our first VCS. At the time, I felt some games were better on the Astrocade than the VCS. The Bally controllers took some time to get used to, but it was a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time playing Galactic Invasion and Bally Pin. 

But when the 5200 arrived in 82, it was a different beast in the console battle.

5200 had hands down better graphics than the Astrocade. In terms of graphics, the Intellivision was better than Astrocade, and the 5200 was even better than the Intellivision. The Astrocade was impressive during the date of its design, but the 5200 was easily better and on a whole different level. Compare Bally's Star Battle to 5200 Star Raiders or Star Wards. So many Astrocade games look like a better version of the Fairchild Channel F. Muncher vs. 5200 Pacman? Grand Prix vs. Pole Position? It's not even close.

 

Atari 5200 had much better sound. Incredible Wizard had some great audio but listen to Pitfall II, Moon Patrol, and Berzerk. Hands down the 5200 is on another level. You have games like Berzerk and Realsport Baseball with speech too. 

 

5200 also had more complex games like Star Raiders or Realsports Baseball that utilized the keypad, analog sticks, and two shooting buttons. Countermeasure also used the keypads to break codes while the top button rotated the cannon. 

 

The 5200 also has a high-quality list of games. Over 85%+ are arcade classics. Bally has no game that comes close to the 5200's Centipede version or Defender. This is because there are so many hits on the 5200. Astrocade has about three or four A-list games, while a bunch are the generic late '70s arcade and number games that are versions of Channel F, Atari VCS, and Odyssey 2 consoles. You won't play a game like Space Dungeon or Gremlin quality games on the Bally. Bally only had 28 official games.  

 

Astrocade was fun and had some decent titles. It was innovative for its time. But the 5200 was on a whole different gaming level. I grew up on both systems.  

Edited March 25, 2023 by phuzaxeman

[christo930]

14 hours ago, phuzaxeman said:

First, comparing a 1000+ disk games C64 computer to a video game console is not a good comparison. There are a million threads on the 8bit vs. C64 discussions.

I'm not comparing the libraries, I'm comparing the hardware.  The VICII can display up to 64 multicolored sprites, 8 per scanline.  The C64 was developed in 1981 into early 1982 and the 5200 was developed in 1978 into 79.  The chipset was 3 years old in 1982. The same is true of the Colecovision. It was first developed in the 70s, but Coleco didn't think it could bring it to market in 79 at a reasonable price, probably because of the 16k needed for the video chip.  The SID of course blows away the Pokey (not that Pokey is a bad chip). This is what happens when the chip is 3 years newer.

 

14 hours ago, phuzaxeman said:

5200 had hands down better graphics than the Astrocade. In terms of graphics, the Intellivision was better than Astrocade, and the 5200 was even better than the Intellivision.

I didn't make a blanket statement. I said "in some ways"   I don't believe the Astrocade is better overall.

I think it depends on the game as far as Intellivision is concerned.  Even the modern homebrew version of Wizzard of Wor for the Intellivision doesn't stand up to the original The Incredible Wizard, at least in some ways like multicolor sprites.

 

14 hours ago, phuzaxeman said:

The 5200 also has a high-quality list of games. Over 85%+ are arcade classics.

I mentioned earlier in the thread that I'm a fan.  You don't have to sell me on the 5200. Lots of good games.  Same with the Colecovision. Lots of good games on the Colecovision, but again the same problem, older hardware.

 

14 hours ago, phuzaxeman said:

. Muncher vs. 5200 Pacman?

5200 Pac Man is a big disappointment.  Much better than the 2600 version, but still has single color sprites. It was also 2 years old at the time the 5200 version was released.  Mucher was available in 1981, though i don't know the exact date.  Of course, Atari corrected the Pac man shortcoming for Ms Pac Man and had multicolor sprites.

 

Despite the fact that I like the 5200 and its games, Atari should never have released it, at least not in the form they did. The 7800 was everything the 5200 should have been.  The 5200 was a stripped down Atari 400 computer.  This gave them a lot of software they could release cheaply and quickly, saved a ton of money on chip design, but it also meant they were using 3 year old chips.

[Keatah]

I didn't know the Colecovision was designed and completed in the 1970's. Seems a long time to wait to bring it to market. But like you say it was the price of RAM. And I totally get that having had early experience upgrading the Apple II.

[phuzaxeman]

11 hours ago, christo930 said:

Quote

I'm not comparing the libraries, I'm comparing the hardware. 

Comparing hardware on a computer vs a console isn't a good comparison because both c64 and 5200 have different purposes.  They are not in the same market. 

11 hours ago, christo930 said:

 

Quote

I didn't make a blanket statement. I said "in some ways"   I don't believe the Astrocade is better overall.

In some ways? What ways? There literally isn't a single game nor is the hardware in every aspect better than the 5200. 

11 hours ago, christo930 said:

 

 

 

Quote

5200 Pac Man is a big disappointment.  Much better than the 2600 version, but still has single color sprites. It was also 2 years old at the time the 5200 version was released.

  

5200 PacMan is better than any version of PacMan in 1982 including the mono sounding and choppy looking Muncher from Astrocade.  Unlike the 800 version, the 5200 version had all three intermissions too. The proof is in the pudding. 5200 was smoother, had better sound, and music was sounded like the arcade. Mucher sound was terrible. 

 

 

 

11 hours ago, christo930 said:

Quote

Despite the fact that I like the 5200 and its games, Atari should never have released it, at least not in the form they did. The 7800 was everything the 5200 should have been. 

 

The 5200 and Colecovision were the top consoles in 82.  The 7800, which I owned in 87, couldn't compete with Sega and Nintendo. 7800 sound was really bad, some games were good, but compared poorly to the NES. There are games like Realsports Baseball that were better than the 7800. 5200 library was stellar.  So many great games. 

[BIGHMW]

42 minutes ago, phuzaxeman said:

Comparing hardware on a computer vs a console isn't a good comparison because both c64 and 5200 have different purposes.  They are not in the same market. 

In some ways? What ways? There literally isn't a single game nor is the hardware in every aspect better than the 5200. 

5200 PacMan is better than any version of PacMan in 1982 including the mono sounding and choppy looking Muncher from Astrocade.  Unlike the 800 version, the 5200 version had all three intermissions too. The proof is in the pudding. 5200 was smoother, had better sound, and music was sounded like the arcade. Mucher sound was terrible. 

 

 

 

The 5200 and Colecovision were the top consoles in 82.  The 7800, which I owned in 87, couldn't compete with Sega and Nintendo. 7800 sound was really bad, some games were good, but compared poorly to the NES. There are games like Realsports Baseball that were better than the 7800. 5200 library was stellar.  So many great games. 

...and then later on they corrected the munching sound on both A8 and 5200 versions to the proper "wacka-wacka" sound in which it should be.

 

I'll include the links to both of those tomorrow morning. That was well before the brilliant Pac-Man Arcade came out for both, some 25+ years later.

[NE146]

I have always thought the presentation on 5200/8-bit Pacman is top notch. However even back in the 80s as a kid, I was critical of the gameplay. Again as I stated before it was the little nuances especially with the much-less-forgiving collision detection where close calls you would get away with in the arcade. e.g. https://i.imgur.com/f8OUVhe.mp4  (which we know the reason for it now: occupation of sprite's center pixel point within discrete tiles) , you couldn't in the 5200 version. i.e. once you brush with a ghost, you're pretty much toast. Conversely, it seems Pacman had to really pass over the dots before they were considered "eaten", so close calls with the power pellets and a ghost you would also lose whereas you would win the same situation in the arcade.  Additionally, cornering didn't work as well when attempting to outrun pursuing ghosts.. i.e. ghosts seem to take turns at the same speed as Pac-man. Additionally I wasn't able to come up with any easy "patterns" in the 5200 version.. something of course everyone did in the arcade version (even though those who could score high without using patterns were considered superior players).  Lastly.. I saved this for last because I forget if the 5200 version had the "safe zones" escape routes where you could escape ghosts going upwards right above or below the ghost-pen. I think it did actually so I don't know.

 

Granted this is nitpicking and only if you were familiar with the arcade game. But many people definitely were (Pac-man was a phenomenon), and was wanting to have that same experience at home. The 5200 version came close but those little gameplay details were the annoying flies in the ointment that made you know you weren't playing the original. THAT ALL SAID.. it's probably unrealistic to think the developers at the time would have been able to translate those details anyway with the environment they were in (they may have been unfamiliar with them anyway), and regardless, it was the best around if you wanted Pac-Man at home in 1982 especially with the visuals, sound, and yes the gameplay. There's zero dispute about that

 

Edited March 26, 2023 by NE146

[+Cafeman]

2 hours ago, NE146 said:

I forget if the 5200 version had the "safe zones" escape routes where you could escape ghosts going upwards right above or below the ghost-pen. I think it did actually so I don't know.

I believe the 5200 version follows that safety rule where the ghosts can’t go up above the pen. But I have seen the pink monster do it more than once in the A8 version, that might be a bug. 
 

I agree about the pinpoint collision being unfair in all these versions.  They fixed that, and cornering, in 5200 Ms PAC. 

[phuzaxeman]

13 hours ago, BIGHMW said:

...and then later on they corrected the munching sound on both A8 and 5200 versions to the proper "wacka-wacka" sound in which it should be.

 

I'll include the links to both of those tomorrow morning. That was well before the brilliant Pac-Man Arcade came out for both, some 25+ years later.

Pac Man arcade is even more incredible. 

 

 

[Keatah]

With ports of this quality, if we had them bitd, I would have been more like to've kept the 5200 at the top of my gaming heap.

 

I believe it could have been done back then too, because the machine doesn't show any signs of struggling and handles the game just fine.

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 3/25/2023 at 2:41 PM, Keatah said:

I didn't know the Colecovision was designed and completed in the 1970's. Seems a long time to wait to bring it to market. But like you say it was the price of RAM. And I totally get that having had early experience upgrading the Apple II.

I was under the impression that the design went through at least one revision between 1979 and 1982, making it less of a 'Super Telstar' design and more of the one that we know as the ColecoVision.  That's not to say that hardware costs driving retail pricing weren't a consideration (they definitely were), but what was finally released in 1982 wasn't fully-representative of the 1979 design.

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 3/25/2023 at 12:45 PM, christo930 said:

Despite the fact that I like the 5200 and its games, Atari should never have released it, at least not in the form they did.

While I essentially agree with the points you're making, there are a few things that are worth pointing out in relation to them.  More:

On 3/25/2023 at 12:45 PM, christo930 said:

The 7800 was everything the 5200 should have been.

Yes and no.  Sound is still its Achilles' heel, and while the idea of being able to include sound hardware on-cartridge to produce whatever audio the programmers wanted to use without being limited by the hardware on the system was a good one, in practice it just didn't work out.  Doing so would increase development costs, which would require bigger budgets, which would lead to higher retail costs of the software incorporating sound hardware.

 

The other thing to keep in mind was that the lawsuits and settlements between Atari and GCC that led to GCC designing the 7800 didn't take place until the 1980s.  The 7800 couldn't really have been on the market before its 1984 launch due to this, so the timeline remains pretty much the same for both it and the 5200.

On 3/25/2023 at 12:45 PM, christo930 said:

The 5200 was a stripped down Atari 400 computer.

Not exactly.  The 400 & 800 were derived from the early 5200 designs, so it would be more accurate to say that the A8 is a beefed-up 5200.  Remember that the 5200 was originally intended to be on the market in 1980 as the VCS' replacement; if anything, it missed that target date by two years, but did eventually get there in the end.

On 3/25/2023 at 12:45 PM, christo930 said:

This gave them a lot of software they could release cheaply and quickly, saved a ton of money on chip design, but it also meant they were using 3 year old chips.

Re: software: Atari really screwed up there.  They could have leveraged in-house ports between the A8 and 5200 (and vice-versa) to speed development and lower costs, but largely didn't.  This is why Pac-Man on the A8 is very different to the 5200 version.  Same with Qix, Centipede, and others.  It made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and goes some way towards showing how mismanaged large chunks of Atari were at the time.

 

As for three-year-old chips, it really didn't matter.  Bear in mind that this was a time where nobody really cared about what was in the console, only that it was a) within budget and b) had the games that they wanted.  No-one was obsessing over Z80s vs. 6502s, how many megahertz could be squeezed out of each CPU, available RAM, or other things that were largely-unrelated to actually playing the games.  If it looked better than another console, great, but the 2600 was still selling strongly when the ColecoVision and 5200 were on the market, and continued to do so even through the (first) introduction of the 7800.  That was technology that dated from the mid-1970s in 1984, and while nobody thought of it as a spring chicken, it still had good games coming out and a huge userbase to buy them.

[zzip]

On 3/24/2023 at 9:01 PM, christo930 said:

The reason I say they were limited for 1982, was they couldn't even faithfully reproduce arcade games from 1980. Multicolor sprites were pretty standard by 1980 with only a few exceptions.  By sprite stacking, you end up with a bunch of flickering.

At the time, it was commonly believed that they wouldn't allow console ports to be as good as arcade games-  need to keep people coming into the arcade!   The 5200 and CV were closer than anything we had seen up to then.    

 

People view tech differently in retrospect  "that couldn't do X or had such and such problem",  but at the time it's exciting and doing things we never had at home before.

[zzip]

15 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

As for three-year-old chips, it really didn't matter.  Bear in mind that this was a time where nobody really cared about what was in the console, only that it was a) within budget and b) had the games that they wanted. 

It's still true today by and large.  A weaker system with a better games library will usually beat the one with better hardware..   The fanboys who beat each other over the head with specs have always been the vocal minority.

 

On 3/25/2023 at 1:45 PM, christo930 said:

Despite the fact that I like the 5200 and its games, Atari should never have released it, at least not in the form they did. The 7800 was everything the 5200 should have been.  The 5200 was a stripped down Atari 400 computer.  This gave them a lot of software they could release cheaply and quickly, saved a ton of money on chip design, but it also meant they were using 3 year old chips.

7800 was not an Atari design.  They didin't know about it in 82,  it fell into their lap in 83.    Maybe if they had known they'd have skipped the 5200, who knows?

 

But 7800 sound chip was much older than 3 years,  and the 160 width mode most 7800 games used would soon become dated next to the 256 width modes of the NES and SMS.  So it could have used some enhancements before it was brought to market.