7800 Dev. Documentation

[Tempest]

I was just reading through the 7800 dev. kit documentation (awesome stuff BTW) and saw this little quote at the bottom of a page:

 

"Now let's get going and create 7800 games that eat Nintendo alive!"

 

Too bad it didn't happen that way...

 

Tempest

[DanBoris]

Yeah, I love that quote! I personally thing the 7800 hardware was more powerful then the NES hardware. But as we have seen so many times the best technology isn't necessarily the one that becomes successful.

 

Dan

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dan Boris:

Yeah, I love that quote! I personally thing the 7800 hardware was more powerful then the NES hardware. But as we have seen so many times the best technology isn't necessarily the one that becomes successful.

---

 

Especially where Atari is concerned!! Lynx vs. Gameboy anyone? Only now with the advent of the Gameboy Advance do we have a reasonable competitor, but it's not even backlit! However, playing Doom on the GBA is awesome (and supposedly it's a port of the Jaguar code!)

 

..Al

[Atari-Jess]

where did you hear that?? thats neato!

[mos6507]

The 7800s biggest weakness was in its horizontal resolution. Most games featured 160 horizontal res which was pretty weak by mid 80s standards. It has a 320 horizontal res but I don't think there is enough screenram to allow for the entire screen being that res, or you have only 2 color per scanline in that mode or something. Few games that I know of used the higher resolution mode. The NES therefore had an effectively higher resolution (which I think is 256 horizontal, a weird res to use compared to the C=64 and Atari 8-bits that used 320, but convenient for 8-bit CPUs to store the X coordinate in one byte). I think the NES can do many more colors per scanline, but has a more limited palette overall (52 colors vs. 128 or 256 on the 7800), and can't push sprites as effectively (regardless of how you classify 7800 sprites, games like Robotron definitely demonstrate how many simultaneous moving objects you can have).

[DanBoris]

The 320 pixel modes are more limited in the number of colors per sprite then the the 160 modes, but different sprite on each line can use different colors so you can get a pretty good color mix in 320 modes, but it's not as easy as in the 160 modes. The screen memory isn't a limitation in 320 mode since the 7800 doesn't have any screen memory, except for the line buffer in the MARIA chip. The other limitation to the 320 modes is that you can only position sprites on 2 pixel increments.

 

Dan

[Mayhem]

Yep, the C64 is 320 res across. To get round the 1 byte problem, there's a flag somewhere for the graphics chip to tell it to add 256 to the X position of each sprite if it goes further right than position 255 on the screen...