7800 vs Everything else

[Joey Kay]

In relation to the previous posts about the 7800 vs SMS/NES - here's a thought...

 

Perhaps the problem doesn't lie so much in the 7800 Hardware as it does with the programmers. Had the 7800 had big time support for a few years, and some programmers that weren't working for bread and water at Tramiel's Atari, imagine what it would have been capable of (Compare the 2600's Space War to Solaris and you'll see what I mean)

 

When I play games like Scrapyard Dog, I just froth at the mouth thinking of how easily the 7800 could have done a game like PacLand...

 

Anyhow, just for a bit of shameless self-promotion, read my article about this at the Atari Times and see what you think...

http://www.ataritimes.com/classics/feature...7800doomed.html

[ubersaurus]

Well, with this newfound 7800 interest, maybe we shall see some very good NES style games.

[mos6507]

The 7800 is effectively limited to 160x200 because that's the highest color mode (8 per scanline).

 

Most games use this mode, which makes the games look a little too much like the Atari 8-bit. Remember, the 7800 was designed during the C=64 era. The C=64 was doing 320x200 with 16 colors (albeit garish hardcoded ones).

 

There are some weird modes in 320x200 but I don't know how effectively they can increase the color count. There is only so much you can do with palette shifting on a scanline by scanline basis. Rainbow-stripe type games with vertical separation were pretty played out during the 2600/5200 era.

 

The 7800 really should have supported at least 16 colors per scanline at 320x200--as the Amiga did. I don't know what the limiting factor was during the engineering phase, but the 7800 does only has 4K of RAM inside. That's less than the 5200 had! So that limits you.

 

A lot of games don't even appear to use 8 colors per scanline even at the lower resolution.

[liveinabin]

I totally agree Aimee, history has proved it aint the system that matters, its the games- and one is not necessarily dependent on the quality of the other.

For example, a couple of years ago, Pokemon Blue/Red, running on a greyscale screened 8-bit console outsold everything on the everybody elses 32/64/128 bit systems- simply because it was good.

the 7800s specs (good or bad) are totally irrelevant, the games just weren't there.

[Eckhard Stolberg]

Just some small corrections here:

The 7800 can easiely display 24 colours (plus the background) in one scanline in different objects. And if you are talking about a pixel-by-pixel base without overlaying objects, you can still get 12 colours (plus the background) per scanline in the 160x4 mode.

 

Two of the 320 pixel modes are pretty useless, as several pixels have to share the same colour. The two other modes are 320A and 320B. 320A allows monochrome objects where each object can choose from one of 8 colours. In 320B mode each object can have 3 different colours, and you chose between 2 different three-colour palettes. In both modes you also can set the colour for the background.

 

And IIRC the C64 320 pixel modes were monochrome too. You could set a different colour for each character and sprite though. Only the 160 pixel modes allowed you to set 4 colours per character and sprite. But you could select the resolution of each sprite independently from the resolution of the background or the other sprites. Some games used that to create the illusuion of having a high resolution and lots of colours at the same time.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[HawgWyld]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Joey Kay:

In relation to the previous posts about the 7800 vs SMS/NES - here's a thought...

 

Perhaps the problem doesn't lie so much in the 7800 Hardware as it does with the programmers. Had the 7800 had big time support for a few years, and some programmers that weren't working for bread and water at Tramiel's Atari, imagine what it would have been capable of (Compare the 2600's Space War to Solaris and you'll see what I mean)

 

When I play games like Scrapyard Dog, I just froth at the mouth thinking of how easily the 7800 could have done a game like PacLand...

 

Anyhow, just for a bit of shameless self-promotion, read my article about this at the Atari Times and see what you think...

http://www.ataritimes.com/classics/feature...7800doomed.html

---

 

Yep, read that one after it came out, and you've got points all the way through it. The Atari 7800, I maintain, had more than enough firepower to host some fantastic games. However, the push seemed to be to make it an arcade system more than anything else. While I love the old arcade classics on the 7800 (my main reason to own the system, by the way), the vision for the system was decidedly limited.

 

And, when games for the 7800 were designed that were supposed to keep up with Nintendo, they often failed. I mean, "Scrapyard Dog" vs. "Super Mario Brothers?" Come on! "Scrapyard Dog" isn't a bad game, but it plays like a rip-off of a very successful Nintendo system.

 

Point is, the 2600 programmers made up for that systems shortcoming by putting together some wildly-innovative games ("Adventure," a ton of stuff from Activision, the great Imagic carts, off-the-wall stuff like "Fast Food" and etc., etc.) With the 7800, the innovation was often not there.

 

Still, I love my arcade ports on the 7800.

[mos6507]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eckhard Stolberg:

The 7800 can easiely display 24 colours (plus the background) in one scanline in different objects. And if you are talking about a pixel-by-pixel base without overlaying objects, you can still get 12 colours (plus the background) per scanline in the 160x4 mode.

---

 

If 160x4 means 4 colors, then how do you get 12 colors on one scanline?

 

I'd love to see a demonstration of this to see exactly how you build a colorful display.

 

Most 7800 games that I've seen don't appear to display anywhere near that many colors per scanline.

[Eckhard Stolberg]

No, in this case 160x4 means 160 pixels with 4 bit per pixel. This would usually give you 16 colour choices for your pixel, but due to the way the palettes are set up in this mode, you only get 12 colours plus transparent.

 

The 7800 has 8 sets of palettes with 4 colours each. But the first colour is always treated as transparent or background colour. In the 160x4 mode the 8 palettes are grouped together in two sets of 4 palettes to build two larger palettes with 16 colours each. But since the first colour in each of the four smaller palettes is transparent, every fourth colour in the larger palette is transparent too. This leaves you with 12 colours for your object.

 

But you can use both 12-colour palettes for different objects in the same scanline, so you can have all 25 colours in the same scanline in this mode too. You could even put two objects with different palettes on top of each other, allowing free choice of all 25 colours for all pixels. But since the DMA isn't fast enough to handle two objects that large, this trick would only work for about 120 pixels.

 

And since most games in the 7800 library were ported from arcade machines or homecomputers with more limited colour handling possiblities, it's no surprise that those games don't show the full potential of the 7800 in this field.

 

Atari's development cartridge came with a colour tester demonstration program. It shows 16 colour blocks per scanline plus some text in a different colour. This is no game, and I don't know which display mode it uses, but I'm sure it doesn't pull off any increadible tricks to get that many colours in one scanline.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Jetboot Jack]

100% agree - it is not the hardware but the software that makes a system shine!!

 

The 7800 is plenty poweful to do GREAT games - certainly more than arcade ports with bad audio! Bu its lack of commercial success meant no one ever bothered to push the system.

 

And I'm certain that if it had been a major format workarounds for ROM size etc would have been developed too.

 

Likewise the 5200, a system I believe is more than capable of keeping up with the BEST of the machines of that time, machines that got better software support and so over shadowed the system.

 

In truth the 5200 and 7800 hardware is EXCELLENT, but the programs released were often pretty lame.

 

If there had been more Rescue on Fractalus and less Jinx the world of late Atari console would be a far better place...

 

sTeVE

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Hell if Moon Patrol or Fractalus or Sky Fox had been completed for the 7800...then perhaps it could have gotten more notice. I bet the 7800 could have done a mean Fractalus port! Control issues aside...they could have it use the switches or heck...plug in a Video touch pad and use that!

 

Oh well, I think Tempest dug into this the most and found out that it never really got much past the preliminary design phase...so most likely there isn't even a proto rom or anything like that of it.