Why do certain things on some of Imagic's titles just look better on the 2600 when compared to the Colecovision and Intellivision?

[bigfriendly]

The two games I'm thinking about are Dragonfire and Fathom. On the surface the 2600 versions are obviously more simple and don't have as much going on when you play them. But when you look closer the colors in the 2600 are just better in a few ways. Look at the seagull on the 2600 version of Fathom with multiple colors and then on the other consoles it just a single shade of white. On Dragonfire both the Intellivision and Colecovision versions have more obsticles and the Colecovision's even offers some three dimensional depth in the treasure room. But look at how bland the treasures look when compared to the 2600 version. Is there some limitation to the more advanced consoles that made it more difficult to create smaller sprites that were multicolored?

[Pixelboy]

One thing you have to keep in mind is that all those old consoles followed very different hardware architectures. For starters, did you know that the Atari 2600 doesn't have any video memory? This means that a substantial portion of the software on an Atari 2600 cartridge is dedicated to drawing stuff on the screen on the fly. To make the most out of this hardware "limitation", the hardware lets the programmer run a tiny amount of code before drawing each TV scanline. This is how the seagull in your example can have so many colors: The sprite itself is single-colored, but if you change the color of the sprite at the start of each TV scanline, you get a multi-colored sprite on the screen. Note that this technique only works well vertically. Changing a sprite's color while the scanline is in the middle of being drawn is much harder to pull off.

 

Consoles like the ColecoVision and Intellivision do have video memory, and they work quite differently under the hood. For example, the ColecoVision doesn't offer any way for the game software to run code at the beginning of each scanline like it can be done on the 2600. All it offers is a single interrupt signal sent to the CPU after the entire TV screen has been refreshed, and when the software receives this interrupt, it has only a finite amount of time to alter the contents of the video memory before the TV starts the next screen refresh. So that's why the seagull in the ColecoVision version of Fathom only has one color. I'm not very familiar with the Intellivision hardware, but I know it's similar to the ColecoVision in the way it handles displaying graphics.

 

Ask any programmer and they'll tell you that having video RAM to work with is way better than not having it. But video RAM always comes with its own set of constraints, at least where game consoles from the 80s and 90s are concerned.

 

Edited March 18 by Pixelboy

[carlsson]

Also, the Atari 2600 has 128 colors in NTSC, 104 in PAL (and 8 in SECAM), compared to the Intellivision and ColecoVision which both have 16 colors, though slightly different palettes. That means even if those had the ability to change color per scan line, you could not get quite as smooth color fades as the 2600 can.

 

Technically, I believe one of the differences between the TMS VDP in the ColecoVision and the STIC in the Intellivision is that you can address the VDP at any time (at least when interrupts are disabled), but changes will take place at next vertical blank, while the STIC can only be addressed at vertical blank.

[Mikebloke]

On 3/18/2024 at 12:34 PM, Pixelboy said:

Ask any programmer and they'll tell you that having video RAM to work with is way better than not having it.

 

I'm any programmer and I endorse this message.

 

One of the fun things about trying to code (never got a game fully working to date on 2600) is how easy it is to change colours on the 2600 due to the scan line feature to generate images like that. In comparison the Fairchild channel F that came out prior did have video ram but you basically splat data into it, there is no objects as such, everytime something moves you have to be mindful of what you want the pixel just moved is going to be, having one colour for the background makes this easier.

 

2600 has some objects though (two for players, two for bullets, one for background) which makes moving or editing these much more viable, and ultimately later consoles kept that which keeps everyone a little bit more sane.

 

Some of us just like to make it hard for ourselves though.

[Video]

Yeah Atari often looked better than superior hardware even with monochrome 8 pixel sprites. Like said, because a sprite on 2600 is one line and can have comer and size modifications done per scanline, resulting in amazing looking stuff. Intv, 5200, odyssey, and a few others also had monochrome sprites, but they were 8x8 blocks, meaning no modification from one line to the next, giving the 2600 a clear leg up when programmers chose to make use of individual scan line changes.

 

On multiplatform games, it was often a base translation for each console, so even a system like coleco, which I think could do multicolored sprites often got monochrome sprites.

 

2600 also messed with background and could actually show its entire 128 color palate on screen at once, despite each scan line being limited to four colors. As time went on, people did amazing things with the 2600's limited architecture, proving limitation can be in the eye of the beholder so to speak.

[carlsson]

2 hours ago, Video said:

even a system like coleco, which I think could do multicolored sprites often got monochrome sprites

Not that I can think of. You can overlay two sprites though, but the video chip has a limitation of showing max 4 (or 5 with flicker) per scan line, a total of 32 across the entire screen. In that respect the Intellivision is barely better, as it has a total of 8 sprites but can be placed all next to each other if required.

 

I don't know which was the first home system that had multicoloured sprites, perhaps the C64 in the second half of 1982. However it halves its X resolution in order to get more colours.

[zzip]

16 hours ago, Video said:

Yeah Atari often looked better than superior hardware even with monochrome 8 pixel sprites. Like said, because a sprite on 2600 is one line and can have comer and size modifications done per scanline, resulting in amazing looking stuff. Intv, 5200, odyssey, and a few others also had monochrome sprites, but they were 8x8 blocks, meaning no modification from one line to the next, giving the 2600 a clear leg up when programmers chose to make use of individual scan line changes.

5200 sprites aren't 8x8, they are the height of the screen + border area.   On 5200 you can change the sprite color per line or even the sprite horizontal position (resulting in seemingly more sprites on screen)