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Checked out the Atari 7800 and its library...
So what type of games are available for the 7800? Mostly arcade ports, and very good ones at that. The system is backwards compatible with the 2600 and is in fact in my opinion 'the atari console system' to own.
The system could output 320x200x256 with 25 colors and 100 sprites and that shows. The sound is lacking in quality though as it uses the same limited sound chip as the 2600.
It's a much overlooked system as the 7800 has great games available for it. Excellent ports of arcade games, mostly action arcade style games. It was designed to be upgradable to a full computer - probably something to up-ease worrying parents - but this never became a reality contrary to the likes of some other 8 bit consoles out there offering the same 'expandability'.
System and software library get a whopping 87% from me.
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Nice video. The Atari 7800 was released in a test run in the US in 1984, but then shelved until 1986 after the NES revived the industry, so it could have been on the market a full two years before its wide release, which was a lost opportunity. As you say, the biggest strength of the Atari 7800 was its ability to push lots of sprites without flicker. Its biggest weakness was that it used the same sound chip as the Atari 2600. The idea was most cartridges would have an onboard POKEY chip (the famous four channel sound/controller chip found in Atari 8-bit computers and the 5200). In reality, because of Atari's cost cutting measures at the time, only a couple of cartridges ever had an onboard POKEY. These same cost cutting measures also prohibited game (memory) sizes, so few games matched the complexity of the games on the competing systems at the time (NES and SMS). Definitely lost potential with the system.
Of course, I was always of the opinion that Atari should have simply kept going with the 5200, just released a version with different controllers. This would have also allowed them to not bother releasing the XEGS. Having a three console strategy (2600jr, 7800, and XEGS) against Nintendo's and Sega's one was not effective. Atari still sold millions of new systems post crash, though.
One of my favorite games for the system is Food Fight. The system's colors and sprite pushing ability were put to good use, and it's a game that's had few home translations. As you say, though, other games are quite good.
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
So what type of games are available for the 7800? Mostly arcade ports, and very good ones at that. The system is backwards compatible with the 2600 and is in fact in my opinion 'the atari console system' to own.
The system could output 320x200x256 with 25 colors and 100 sprites and that shows. The sound is lacking in quality though as it uses the same limited sound chip as the 2600.
Too late, too mediocre - especially in Europe.
But whatever, I only wanted to point out that the only real standout feature of the graphics hardware compared to the earlier 5200 model is the sprite section.
Not counting the sprites the 7800 graphics are *not* similar to VGA - neither in resolution nor in color depth.
You can clearly see that most games - the ones with many colors - only use a horizontal resolution of 160 pixels - which is also the resolution of choice with the older Atari hardware and also often used by the C64 for example.
While 320 horizontal pixels were indeed possible this - like with the 8-bit Atari computers - restricted the amount of colors dramatically: Only two brightnesses without resorting to programming tricks like display interrupts (quite well known at the time, though) which had other restrictions.
So, while it is possible to get more colors with 320 horizontal pixels the "rules" are pretty much strangulating the programmer and they weren't really employed by commercial software.
VGA on the other hand - especially the mode that is most often associated with it: 320x200x256 - is more of a clean engineer's approach to computer graphics and it shows. This mode has four distinct advantages:
- A resolution of 320x200 square pixels. No wider than tall pixels like with a resolution of 160x200 which means circles are round...
- An unrestricted color palette of 256 colors - all of them controlled by color registers from an RGB palette of 3 x 2^6 = 2^18 = 262,144 colors. Changing a register meant changing all pixels using that color in an instant.
- A continuous frame buffer of 64.000 bytes (320x200x1 byte). No weird addressing scheme with holes (Apple II), non line addresses
- This mode like practically all PC graphics modes (and therefore the software using it) runs with 60 Hz wherever in the world you are - so US games software had no problems in Europe and vice-versa. A thing that really plagued games on earlier machines.
Yes, VGA had no 100 sprites and no raster interrupts (AFAIK) but for a good part they weren't needed at all. First of all there were "enough" colors, especially for handdrawn graphics and secondly as every pixel consists of a single byte there's only a limited amount of computation needed to manipulate the frame buffer (for example for moving objects). Now throw in a fast CPU (which had to manipulate the graphics at the time) and you have a good, powerful system. All in all it was equally good for displaying presentations, digitized photos and game graphics.
The 7800 is still far from that, even though it may be sufficient for TV sets of the period and, of course, was clearly more advanced than the 5200.
take care,
Calibrator
The 7800 is still far from that, even though it may be sufficient for TV sets of the period and, of course, was clearly more advanced than the 5200.
take care,
Calibrator
Just how much more advanced though is certainly open for debate, and that's excluding the fact that without a POKEY in the cartridge, the 7800 had far inferior sound to the 5200. Also, Europe was lucky enough to get the 7800 with the gamepad rather than the very poor joystick, which I forgot to mention in my own list of negatives...
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
Not counting the sprites the 7800 graphics are *not* similar to VGA - neither in resolution nor in color depth.
Noted!
You're right it's the absolute max res and absolute max no of colours that the 7800 could output. With only 25 colours available at the same time this is only 1/10th of the colour depth of the VGA modes. Actually the graphics modes of the C64 were quite similar albeit even more limited to 16 colors if you include black and white.
PS3: MarkVergeer | Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | Mark's Tube
Remember how old versions of Windows would make the mouse cursor flicker when something else was drawing on screen under it? Ugh... those hardware interrupts are not just nice for games.
@Catatonic, I remember. But hey at least they did learn from it and improved!
PS3: MarkVergeer | Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | Mark's Tube