AV Why didn't later atar 7800s have built-in AV ports as well as RF out?

[ApolloBoy]

Really, that country isn't exactly as nice as your anime would lead you to believe. They commonly have 50 year old women dressed as Catholic school girls and they still worship Michael Jackson, for ****s sake!

Yay for substituting one form of ridiculous cultural stereotyping for another!

[Rhomaios]

Yay for substituting one form of ridiculous cultural stereotyping for another!

 

Bingo. Let's leave both kinds of stereotyping out of this thread, please.

[Rex Dart]

Yup. Reductio ad absurdum is lost on most people and they just wind up taking offense.

Edited July 3, 2014 by Rex Dart

[Lynxpro]

Yay for substituting one form of ridiculous cultural stereotyping for another!

 

Point is, not everything made in Japan is golden and Atari's failure there - as well as plenty of other American and European failures there - wasn't due to a quality deficiency.

 

And they do have an unnatural love of Michael Jackson...and tentacles...

[Prosystemsearch]

Point is, not everything made in Japan is golden and Atari's failure there - as well as plenty of other American and European failures there - wasn't due to a quality deficiency.

 

And they do have an unnatural love of Michael Jackson...and tentacles...

I wonder if the C64 or aTari XE got released over there.

[The Usotsuki]

I know the VIC-20 did...

[SoulBlazer]

I know the VIC-20 did...

And the C-64 did. I remember playing a old Commodore game that was made in Japan, a Space Invaders clone.

[Lynxpro]

And the C-64 did. I remember playing a old Commodore game that was made in Japan, a Space Invaders clone.

 

Wasn't the Commodore Max a product that was designed for and sold in Japan?

[Prosystemsearch]

If the 7800 had to have only an RF output, they should have at least put the GUMBY chip in the system!!

[Retro Rogue]

If the 7800 had to have only an RF output, they should have at least put the GUMBY chip in the system!!

 

Gumby didn't exist yet when the 7800 was being designed.

[Greg2600]

5 pages for this thread? Next to nothing had composite in 1984, and we know the system was not going to be redesigned in '86, given the fight between GCC, Warner, and Tramiel.

[Lynxpro]

 

Gumby didn't exist yet when the 7800 was being designed.

 

Will we learn from the next Atari book whether GUMBY was completed? And if so, how it would've compared to the POKEY, AMY, or the YM2149/YM2151?

[Retro Rogue]

Will we learn from the next Atari book whether GUMBY was completed? And if so, how it would've compared to the POKEY, AMY, or the YM2149/YM2151?

 

Curt has more of the spec info but like most of the projects around during the sale, it never made it over to Atari Corp. as a project.

[Prosystemsearch]

5 pages for this thread? Next to nothing had composite in 1984, and we know the system was not going to be redesigned in '86, given the fight between GCC, Warner, and Tramiel.

True for 1986, but 1987, or the spring or summer of 1988 they could have done a redesign with built in AV-out and a built in GUMBY Chip for later units in order to show that they weren't still in the past, as well as to try and get an edge against the NES. It could have happened if either: 1. Jack Tramiel had an epiphany.about him being more often than not a very damn stubborn cheapskate not being good for the 7800, OR he ended up deciding that Atari was not for him anymore, and resigned from Atari Corp permanently, off to work for another electronics company, allowing, somebody else to head Atari Corp; somebody who was NOT Jack.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

Gumby didn't exist yet when the 7800 was being designed.

Pokey did. Lazy Atari cutting corners because "TIA was good enough." Think of how awesome the 7800 would have been if every game used Pokey for BGM and TIA for sound effects.

[Lynxpro]

 

Curt has more of the spec info but like most of the projects around during the sale, it never made it over to Atari Corp. as a project.

Depressing. The GCC staff who probably would've designed it probably were laid off with the rest of their game programmers...

[Greg2600]

True for 1986, but 1987, or the spring or summer of 1988 they could have done a redesign with built in AV-out and a built in GUMBY Chip for later units in order to show that they weren't still in the past, as well as to try and get an edge against the NES. It could have happened if either: 1. Jack Tramiel had an epiphany.about him being more often than not a very damn stubborn cheapskate not being good for the 7800, OR he ended up deciding that Atari was not for him anymore, and resigned from Atari Corp permanently, off to work for another electronics company, allowing, somebody else to head Atari Corp; somebody who was NOT Jack.

 

It's not about Tramiel being cheap, it was a business reality. They had tons of 7800's in stock, and they weren't selling that well. The system was inexpensive to produce, making a redesign kind of pointless. It wasn't successful to have a redesign, and manufacturing run to go along with that. Hell, the NES and SMS weren't redesigned until the 90's, after the 7800 had closed shop. As others have noted, Tramiel's Atari Corp. were given a lame system when they bought the assets from Warner Bros. That's what they bought by the way, assets. They didn't get people, like the GCC team. They bought an empty shell. Projects like Gumby were forgotten. They didn't care enough to replace the colorless 1st party game labels, so to except a redesign for composite AV was not happening.

[7800]

It's my fault the 7800's didn't come with composite A/V.

[Prosystemsearch]

 

It's not about Tramiel being cheap, it was a business reality. They had tons of 7800's in stock, and they weren't selling that well. The system was inexpensive to produce, making a redesign kind of pointless. It wasn't successful to have a redesign, and manufacturing run to go along with that. Hell, the NES and SMS weren't redesigned until the 90's, after the 7800 had closed shop. As others have noted, Tramiel's Atari Corp. were given a lame system when they bought the assets from Warner Bros. That's what they bought by the way, assets. They didn't get people, like the GCC team. They bought an empty shell. Projects like Gumby were forgotten. They didn't care enough to replace the colorless 1st party game labels, so to except a redesign for composite AV was not happening.

 

Right they bought assets, along with only a few people. Also, what happened to the GCC team after commodore bought out the home computer and home console assets of Atari?

[Andromeda Stardust]

It's my fault the 7800's didn't come with composite A/V.

As well it is your fault that the games which existed (with two exceptions) never used Pokey chips, that GCC went on to develop games for the NES (under the Tengen label) instead of the 7800, that Nintendo had crazy unfair licensing practices, and that a kitten dies every time someone suggests otherwise...

[Prosystemsearch]

If only in 1988 or 1989, Jack Tramiel had decided to either change his tactics for the 7800s marketing, OR ended up leaving Atari Corp, off to be with another company. Jack was not just regular cheap, (as tempest said on AtariProtos)a terminally cheap guy in the 7800 days,. It would have been interesting to see one of his sons take over Atari Corp. had he resigned.

[Retro Rogue]

 

Right they bought assets, along with only a few people. Also, what happened to the GCC team after commodore bought out the home computer and home console assets of Atari?

 

Commodore didn't buy anything assets from Atari, I think maybe you're confusing Jack being the founder and former head of Commodore with that?

 

And no, they didn't buy any people, not even a few. Employees are not counted as assets, they're viewed as an expense for business purposes. Assets purchases have nothing to do with people, just things like facilities, stock, and IP. What you usually do is hire people over to the new company from the old one to maintain the purchased assets, which is what they did. Those that were not hired over to the new company were let go by Warner and received their last check from them.

 

As for GCC and their people, GCC was hit hard as well by the two separate industry crashes (coin and consumer) and began laying people off during late '84 as they switched to making computer peripherals (mainly for Mac). By the time things were settled with Atari Corp/Warner/GCC in spring of '85 there was no one left at GCC from the video game and console development areas.

 

 

Pokey did. Lazy Atari cutting corners because "TIA was good enough." Think of how awesome the 7800 would have been if every game used Pokey for BGM and TIA for sound effects.

 

It had nothing to do with being lazy or cutting corners. They wanted on board 2600 compatibility over all else because of the 5200 issues with that. You need a TIA for that. Consequently, adding two different sound chips would have made the console too cost prohibitive (hardware is usually designed to meet a specific price point). So they designed the audio pass through in the cartridge port to allow audio expansion via cartridge or other device. Cutting corners would have been if they simply threw in a TIA without any support for additional sound generation. That would have shown they simply didn't care and were literally looking to cut corners for cost.

[Greg2600]

If only in 1988 or 1989, Jack Tramiel had decided to either change his tactics for the 7800s marketing, OR ended up leaving Atari Corp, off to be with another company. Jack was not just regular cheap, (as tempest said on AtariProtos)a terminally cheap guy in the 7800 days,. It would have been interesting to see one of his sons take over Atari Corp. had he resigned.

 

Well, Sam Tramiel DID take over Atari Corp., and promptly ran it into bankruptcy!

[Lynxpro]

As well it is your fault that the games which existed (with two exceptions) never used Pokey chips, that GCC went on to develop games for the NES (under the Tengen label) instead of the 7800, that Nintendo had crazy unfair licensing practices, and that a kitten dies every time someone suggests otherwise...

Tengen was Atari Games, not GCC.

[Lynxpro]

 

Commodore didn't buy anything assets from Atari, I think maybe you're confusing Jack being the founder and former head of Commodore with that?

 

And no, they didn't buy any people, not even a few. Employees are not counted as assets, they're viewed as an expense for business purposes. Assets purchases have nothing to do with people, just things like facilities, stock, and IP. What you usually do is hire people over to the new company from the old one to maintain the purchased assets, which is what they did. Those that were not hired over to the new company were let go by Warner and received their last check from them.

 

As for GCC and their people, GCC was hit hard as well by the two separate industry crashes (coin and consumer) and began laying people off during late '84 as they switched to making computer peripherals (mainly for Mac). By the time things were settled with Atari Corp/Warner/GCC in spring of '85 there was no one left at GCC from the video game and console development areas.

 

 

 

 

It had nothing to do with being lazy or cutting corners. They wanted on board 2600 compatibility over all else because of the 5200 issues with that. You need a TIA for that. Consequently, adding two different sound chips would have made the console too cost prohibitive (hardware is usually designed to meet a specific price point). So they designed the audio pass through in the cartridge port to allow audio expansion via cartridge or other device. Cutting corners would have been if they simply threw in a TIA without any support for additional sound generation. That would have shown they simply didn't care and were literally looking to cut corners for cost.

 

 

That's certainly a different explanation as to why the POKEY isn't in the 7800. Previously, it was blamed on the mobo size or as a cost-cutting measure. Interesting...