General Computer Corporation History

[supercat]

Atari could've killed Nintendo with the 7800 if they released it as an open system with no liscense fees like the 2600 was. I doubt many developers were happy with Nintendo cart manufacturing terms and huge chunk of each games profit they took.

962952[/snapback]

 

Nintendo wasn't the first closed system. Colecovision was a closed system as well.

[jaybird3rd]

Wow, that's quite an interesting read.  I never knew that the Atari 7800 contained a lot of intellectual property that was stolen -- er, borrowed -- from Coleco.  It is amazing that a few guys on the east coast created this whole thing by themselves (with the borrowed IP).  What were the hundreds or thousands of Atari employees on the west coast doing the whole time -- just taking long lunches and collecting a paycheck?  It kills me that Atari wasn't able develop the 7800 internally -- they must have had a huge amount of resources at their disposal and yet they totally blew it....

962977[/snapback]

Not to mention the 2600 games that GCC did (such as Ms. Pac-Man), which were infinitely better than anything the folks left at Atari were turning out after the Activision and Imagic guys pulled out. From what we've learned about the programmers at least, those enormous resources Atari had at their disposal probably went up their noses or up in smoke. Kinda puts the wild stories from HSW and friends in "Once Upon Atari" in a different light.

[gdement]

I just reread that transcript and they mentioned that a Joust character on the 7800 has 12 colors.  The character images I made for Kenfused's Q*bert were three colors and only three colors.  Does this mean they used some clever trick to make that Joust character seem like it's 12 colors?

963000[/snapback]

 

The maria has an alternate rendering mode to draw 12 color sprites. You can interchangeably draw 3 color and 12 color objects as needed. 12 color objects are normally not used because they require twice as much storage space and take longer to render.

[Harry_Dodgson]

I just reread that transcript and they mentioned that a Joust character on the 7800 has 12 colors.  The character images I made for Kenfused's Q*bert were three colors and only three colors.  Does this mean they used some clever trick to make that Joust character seem like it's 12 colors?

963000[/snapback]

 

That's easy - just use 4 overlapping "sprites".

[Bruce Tomlin]

Atari could've killed Nintendo with the 7800 if they released it as an open system with no liscense fees like the 2600 was. I doubt many developers were happy with Nintendo cart manufacturing terms and huge chunk of each games profit they took.

Atari did not release the 2600 as "an open system". The info for it did get around, especially as programmers moved away from Atari, and others reverse-engineered it. But as far as I've ever known, it was a trade secret without Atari going to the trouble of enforcing it as a Trade Secret. (which would likely be the case if TIA was patented, but then how did Coleco get away with their clone?)

 

After the 7800 was finally released, Atari would probably have digi-signed just about any game code that was provided to them. And in any case, the NES had the advantage of a separate video chip bus, instead of hobbling the CPU while displaying graphics, so the 7800 had a lot less maximum capability. Sure, it could display a couple dozen sprites on Robotron... but that was with no background!

Edited November 10, 2005 by Bruce Tomlin

[EricBall]

Am I correct in remembering that the 7800 cartridge slot had composite audio AND video lines, or was it just audio?  If it was both, that would have REALLY helped to prolong the system's life; they could have simply stuck in new hardware to bring it up to par with the competition.

962510[/snapback]

Nope, just audio on the cart. The expansion port had both audio & video lines.

[EricBall]

And in any case, the NES had the advantage of a separate video chip bus, instead of hobbling the CPU while displaying graphics, so the 7800 had a lot less maximum capability.  Sure, it could display a couple dozen sprites on Robotron... but that was with no background!

963190[/snapback]

Exactly. The NES had three main technical advantages over the 7800:

 

1. The GPU doesn't steal cycles from the CPU.

2. Simple fixed function GPU. (Versus the 7800 display lists.) Sure the NES is limitted to 8 sprites per line & 64 sprites total (while the 7800 can do 30 per line and 256+ total), but it requires far less CPU time for the NES to put a sprite onscreen. And backgrounds (with scrolling) are easy to do on the NES, but significantly impact the number of sprites per line on the 7800.

3. A kick-ass sound chip with built in DMA for sampled sound playback.

 

1 & 2 basically come down to the same thing: more CPU time means better games.

[jaybird3rd]

Nope, just audio on the cart.  The expansion port had both audio & video lines.

963266[/snapback]

Ah, I must have gotten the two mixed up. Thanks for the clarification.