7800 Capability

[Riko]

I was wondering just how capable the 7800 hardware is, assuming best case the scenario and the developers know what to do with hardware. I never had a 7800 and know very little about it, i always thought it was an inferior NES when i was a kid and avoided it for the most part of my life. Is it capable to run something on the level like, Super Mario Bros 3 or more advanced games of that sort? Also most of the audio and sound appears to be the same as the VCS/2600 so i wonder how that would even work considering the limitations. Just curious i guess.

Edited Sunday at 07:00 PM by Riko
Additions

[Trebor]

10 minutes ago, Riko said:

I was wondering just how capable the 7800 hardware is, assuming best case the scenario and the developers know what to do with hardware:

1942:

 

Attack of the PETSCII Robots:

 

Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest:

 

Pac-Man Collection - 40th Anniversary Edition:

 

Rikki & Vikki:

 

...and much more:

 

[Riko]

2 minutes ago, Trebor said:

 

Rikki & Vikki:

 

 

 

Heck Rikkie & Vikki and Crystal Quest look (and sound) great! I guess back in the day developers did not have the time or resources to push the hardware and i guess the limits of the system were never fully realized; am actually pretty interested now.

[Riko]

Kind of a bummer Rikki & Vikki is not longer available to purchase for the 7800 from what i can see, would have snagged that in a heartbeat.

[+slx]

It usually takes a couple of years for dedicated programmers to fully realize a machine‘s potential. End of life programs are usually better than earlier stuff.  I‘d say the 7800 wasn‘t relevant long enough for period programmers to realize its full potential. 

[JagChris]

1 hour ago, Riko said:

 

Heck Rikkie & Vikki and Crystal Quest look (and sound) great! I guess back in the day developers did not have the time or resources to push the hardware and i guess the limits of the system were never fully realized; am actually pretty interested now.

You plan on getting original hardware or the 2600/7800+?

[Riko]

3 minutes ago, JagChris said:

You plan on getting original hardware or the 2600/7800+?

Well i have been using an OG 2600 my whole life though it's been dying slowly, was gonna pick up a 2600+ last year though held off so i might just get a 7800+ and hope everything works alright without any nasty surprises.

[+bent_pin]

1 hour ago, Riko said:

Kind of a bummer Rikki & Vikki is not longer available to purchase for the 7800 from what i can see, would have snagged that in a heartbeat.

Get a gamedrive 7800 GameDrive - Stone Age Gamer and you get a free copy of it

Only for original 7800 though, not 7800+. Though the 7800+ plays darn near everything else except the gamedrive and a few homebrews.

[Riko]

9 minutes ago, bent_pin said:

Get a gamedrive 7800 GameDrive - Stone Age Gamer and you get a free copy of it

Only for original 7800 though, not 7800+. Though the 7800+ plays darn near everything else except the gamedrive and a few homebrews.

That's so cool! I will look into it, i hope the 7800+ does make strides to allow more home brew games and carts like the Gamedrive at some point.

[christo930]

Well, one thing is for sure.... We got the best a NES can do.  It had an 11 year commercial life and a ton of experience (1,376 official games released in Japan) by dozens of dev teams and hardware upgrades in the cartridge from different companies including Nintendo.    It also existed at the height of the Japanese bubble.  A ton of money went into it that probably would have never gone into it without an enormous nationwide bubble in every industry.

 

In the last few years, we've seen the 7800 really up its game, even without any hardware in the cartridges (except for Ricky and Vicky, which does have a custom cartridge), even with lone guys working in their spare time for the love of doing it.  I seriously doubt we have seen the best it can do yet.  The best looking 7800 games look better than the NES.  A big problem with the NES is the horrific flickering.

 

I don't think Mario 3 is a good measure of what the 7800 can do.  SMB3 was designed for and for the strengths and weaknesses of the NES.  If SMB3 was originally made for the 7800, it might have more sprites on the screen or some other feature of the 7800 that the NES does not have that strength.  Plus, the Nintendo ain't gonna let such a game exist even if someone made it.  Like didn't the Doom guy write a SMB3 1 level demo he called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement Land (I think it was a proposal to Nintendo for a PC port)?

Edited yesterday at 12:25 AM by christo930

[Riko]

20 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Well, one thing is for sure.... We got the best a NES can do.  It had an 11 year commercial life and a ton of experience (1,376 official games released in Japan) by dozens of dev teams and hardware upgrades in the cartridge from different companies including Nintendo.    It also existed at the height of the Japanese bubble.  A ton of money went into it that probably would have never gone into it without an enormous nationwide bubble in every industry.

 

In the last few years, we've seen the 7800 really up its game, even without any hardware in the cartridges (except for Ricky and Vicky, which does have a custom cartridge), even with lone guys working in their spare time for the love of doing it.  I seriously doubt we have seen the best it can do yet.  The best looking 7800 games look better than the NES.  A big problem with the NES is the horrific flickering.

 

I don't think Mario 3 is a good measure of what the 7800 can do.  SMB3 was designed for and for the strengths and weaknesses of the NES.  If SMB3 was originally made for the 7800, it might have more sprites on the screen or some other feature of the 7800 that the NES does not have that strength.  Plus, the Nintendo ain't gonna let such a game exist even if someone made it.  Like didn't the Doom guy write a SMB3 1 level demo he called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement Land (I think it was a proposal to Nintendo for a PC port)?

I am kind of surprised on what the 7800 seems to be able to pull off, I don't really know its strengths or weaknesses though the takeaway i have is that it came out at a bad time and was dropped before it could really take off. It's a console i'd really like to get into and explore, the homebrew scene in particular without having to resort to roms if i can help it; seems like a lot of fun.

[Pat Brady]

On 10/20/2024 at 2:57 PM, slx said:

It usually takes a couple of years for dedicated programmers to fully realize a machine‘s potential. End of life programs are usually better than earlier stuff.  I‘d say the 7800 wasn‘t relevant long enough for period programmers to realize its full potential. 

 

I think there's some truth to that, but in the case of cartridge-based platforms, later games also tended to have much larger ROMs and sometimes extra RAM and other capabilities on the cartridges. The resulting system could be more powerful than what the early releases ran on. Case in point:

 

On 10/20/2024 at 2:25 PM, Riko said:

Heck Rikkie & Vikki and Crystal Quest look (and sound) great! I guess back in the day developers did not have the time or resources to push the hardware and i guess the limits of the system were never fully realized; am actually pretty interested now.

I think it's worth noting that both of those games, and several other 7800 homebrews, use sound chips on the cartridge, which only 2 of the BITD games had. (These two homebrews also have relatively large ROMs, and Rikki & Vikki has a mapper chip and I think extra RAM. That combined hardware system is quite a bit more powerful than that of, say, Ms. Pac-Man.)

 

IMO the early 7800 games written by GCC, the company that developed the 7800 itself, are well done, including sound. But by 1986, the earliest most people could get a 7800, these ports of early-1980s arcade games were mostly outdated. Some of the later commercial 7800 games were bigger but evidently developed on a shoestring budget.

 

I really appreciate games that get good sound out of TIA (the 7800's built-in sound generator, the same chip that did both graphics and sound in the 2600), and I enjoy the challenge of doing that. But it's much easier to get good results out of a more advanced chip.

[Defender_2600]

Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest:  144k + POKEY

 

Original library:

 

Alien Brigade -------------------- 144k
- Crossbow ------------------------ 144k
- Toki (prototype)(NTSC) --------- 144k

 

- Commando ---------------------- 128K + POKEY
- Ballblazer ------------------------  32K + POKEY

 

- Summer Games ---------------- 128K + 16K RAM
- Winter Games ------------------ 128K + 16K RAM
- Plutos (prototype) -------------- 128K + 16K RAM
- Sirius (prototype) -------------- 128K + 16K RAM
- Impossible Mission -------------- 128K +  8K RAM
- Jinks ----------------------------- 128K +  8K RAM
- Tower Toppler --------------------- 64K +  8K RAM
- Rescue On Fractalus (prototype) - 32k +  2K RAM

 

- Basketbrawl ---------------------- 128K
- Double Dragon ------------------- 128K
- Fatal Run ------------------------- 128K
- Ikari Warriors -------------------- 128K
- Mean 18 Ultimate Golf ---------- 128K
- Midnight Mutants ---------------- 128K
- Ninja Golf ------------------------ 128K
- Planet Smashers ---------------- 128K
- Rampage ------------------------ 128K
- Scrapyard Dog ------------------ 128K
- Title Match Pro Wrestling ------- 128K
- Water Ski ------------------------ 128K
- Xenophobe ---------------------- 128K
- Rampart (prototype) ------------ 128K
- Toki (prototype)(PAL) ----------- 128K