Question about 6 button and 4 button consoles....

[headphone_kid]

PLEASE EXCUSE THE DUMBNESS OF THE QUESTION - JUST WONDERING - ANY INFO IS APPRECIATED.....Is there any real difference between the 6 button and 4 button consoles besides the button placement? Do the difficulty buttons function any differently from the 4 and the 6? I mean, I understand the purpose of the Difficulty buttons, but other than the configuration is there any real difference? Also, why are there 2 different configurations? I've just dusted my 2600 off recently and was doing some research and haven't really found any info on that. Thanks!

[Thomas Jentzsch]

From a players point of view there is no difference, except that the difficulty switches are easier to use on the six switch consoles.

[keilbaca]

A few games don't work on the 6 switch, they just refuse to work, river raid II is notorious for that, also sku_u had a problem with a blue label moonsweeper.

[Red 5]

My Space Shuttle overlay won't fit right on a 4 switch.

[bjk7382]

Also the older 6 switch consoles seem to have better video quality. All of my 4 switch systems look like they have slightly lighter washed out colors, while the 6 switch systems have nice colors.

[BlackAtarian]

Whats the point of the B/W / color switch?

[highinfidelity]

And here we go again...

[Ze_ro]

Whats the point of the B/W / color switch?

The reason for this was that back in the 70's, not everyone had a color TV... so, if you wrote a game using specific colors, they might not look right on a black and white television set (ie, you might get light characters on a light background that would be very difficult to see). The point of adding the switch was so that programmers could specify two seperate palletes: One that looked good on a color TV set, and one that looked good on a B&W television set.

 

By the mid 80's though, B&W TV's were a dying breed, and for the most part, even games that didn't take black and white TV's into account were still completely playable, so lots of programmers didn't bother doing anything with the switch.

 

Nowadays, since nobody uses B&W TV's anymore, there isn't any point in playing in B&W mode... however, some games do other stuff with the switch... some games will use it as a pause switch, and others (Space Shuttle comes to mind) use it for actual gameplay.

 

--Zero

[keilbaca]

Whats the point of the B/W / color switch?

 

Actually, being that I have 2 atari's and one is modded for a/v cables, I was asking a few people who had the ONYX atari 2600, to figure out how the pause button works, and converting the b/w switch into a pause switch.