Atari 7800 and Vanilla NES: Similar machines with opposite Strengths?

[Bill Loguidice]

It's not that much of a mystery why the 7800 never really took off. It both didn't have the games and had more unnecessary restrictions (ROM size limits, limited use of POKEY) than the competition. The last time there were no shackles on an Atari system was with the 5200, and that system's lifespan was cut short by the Crash.

[zzip]

I think the 7800 didn't succeed like it could have partially because it didn't differentiate itself enough from the 26? It wasn't a new company, a very different looking console, etc? Nintendo was new and novel. And the 7800 didn't have a first party IP mascot like big N had Mario, Gen had sonic, SMS had... Alex Kidd... hehe. So it came off as old hat I think. And I'd guess that hurt developer interest. I also think that although it did have a D-Pad, it shipped with sticks and maybe that was also a kind of outdated image maybe.

It didn't have enough of the side-scrolling platformer games and fighting games that everyone wanted in that era. Library was too heavy on games like Asteroids, Joust, Pole Position, Robotron that already felt dated in 1986 when it finally hit the market. That's a stark difference between Warner Atari and Tramiel Atari. Warner knew they had to get the right IPs on their platform. Tramiel Atari seemed content to "dump what we have on the market, and cut corners developing and securing new IPs"

[mbd30]

Its backwards compatibility was probably the 7800's biggest selling point. That's why my family got one in the late 80s to replace our aging 2600 that was having issues. We already had a big pile of 2600 games.

[enoofu]

Thought it main problem was it was not marketed well compared to the NES

Don't think most people knew at the time that 7800 existed or where you could buy one

Nintendo was very aggressive having Demo machines in the arcades and in retailers and was spending serious dough on televisions ads

[mbd30]

Thought it main problem was it was not marketed well compared to the NES

Don't think most people knew at the time that 7800 existed or where you could buy one

Nintendo was very aggressive having Demo machines in the arcades and in retailers and was spending serious dough on televisions ads

 

There wasn't much to market in the first place compared to the NES.

[Bill Loguidice]

 

There wasn't much to market in the first place compared to the NES.

 

I agree. What exactly could Atari promote against the likes of Mario and Zelda?

 

Sega had some pretty memorable commercials as well. I remember drooling over the commercials for Phantasy Star. Atari's modest first party output and limited third party support really was no match for the post-Crash competition.

[Torr]

Other than the occasional comic book advertisement, I never saw Atari 7800 stuff ANYwhere in the NES/SMS/7800 days (well... 87-89 I'm sayin').

When I started reading comics around '87 the ad for Atari games often confused me... I was like.. there's no Atari 7800! It's called the 2600!

Any way I slowly realized it WAS a new system... ONE kid in my community, that I didn't even know personally, was the only one I knew of with such a machine.

It intrigued me.

 

Let's drop the 'shackles' and assume the 7800 was blessed with games that had whatever ROM size the developer wanted to put and would work, and a POKEY in every cart, maybe even a few with POKEY+ or something...

COULD it have succeeded against the competition? No... we'd also have to throw out the fact of Nintendo 3rd-Party Policy.

So COULD it have had some Great games? The SMS certainly provided a few shining examples of games that shouldn't be forgotten. I'd say the 7800 could have too. Wonder what they would have been.

Edited June 13, 2017 by Torr

[CatPix]

Well the 7800 could have had more success. The Lynx managed to sell a few units, and that was because Atari took computer developpers from the US and Europe to make/port titles to them, which probably explain why the Lynx had a decent success in Europe, where it would bear names and titles familiar to many people.

 

But for the 7800 to get successfull they should had never released the XEGS. Or better, never release the 7800 and use all the money for making the XEGS a successfull game. I mean, when the XEGS came out, it already came out with the libraby of almost 10 years of Atari 400 and 800 games behind it. Sure, they would have been a little outdated, but tht could have been an ideal couple; the big brother in the family, or the father with it's familiar Atari 400/800/600XL, and the little brother with his rugged XEGS console that soulc read his father/brothers carts and tapes.

 

Or never release the XEGS and offer computer developpers an opportunity to release their games on a more affordable platform than the super expensive 16 bits computers.

Edited June 14, 2017 by CatPix

[JaguarVision]

Well going by Atari's reports it was successful, but that's a different topic.

 

People say that the 7800 couldn't compete with NES MMC chips, but wasn't that limited to the hardware? like games still could only have limited action the screen, and games like Ballblazer and F18 would still be near impossible to replicate on the NES, so i'm not sure one could look at say F18 and Ballblazer and SMB3 and Megaman 4 and thing the latter is more technically advanced than the former.

[empsolo]

Well going by Atari's reports it was successful, but that's a different topic.

 

People say that the 7800 couldn't compete with NES MMC chips, but wasn't that limited to the hardware? like games still could only have limited action the screen, and games like Ballblazer and F18 would still be near impossible to replicate on the NES, so i'm not sure one could look at say F18 and Ballblazer and SMB3 and Megaman 4 and thing the latter is more technically advanced than the former.

Except Ballblazer is on the Famicom and NES and Famicom are host to a couple of decent Flight Sims.

 

 

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Edited July 28, 2017 by empsolo

[JaguarVision]

Except Ballblazer is on the Famicom and NES and Famicom are host to a couple of decent Flight Sims.

 

 

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I don't think you understand, look at a video of Famicom Ballblazer.

[empsolo]

I don't think you understand, look at a video of Famicom Ballblazer.

It's decent enough. But then Ballblazer is an okay game all things considered.

 

 

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[phoenixdownita]

The simple fact that the cart connector in the NES brought out both CPU bus and PPU bus is a big advantage on the NES as it is the enabler for powerful chip enhancements/mappers.

 

Atari had a unified bus design hence a single bus on the cart side, no direct access to any of the Maria pins .... Atari wasn't alone with such design, Sega with the SMS was in the same boat, only the CPU bus was exposed so custom chips that enhanced the graphics capabilities were largely a no go.

Something similar happened on the SNES/MD front with the SNES exposing the B bus on the cart while the MD largely had only the CPU bus .... which it's weird given Sega had tons of real Arcade expertise one would think they were familiar with multibus design (the extreme of which can be seen on the NeoGeo).

 

My point is that the thought of exposing more than the simple CPU bus in and on itself is what allowed extra chips to enhance much more than a simple memory pager would make possible.

 

Unified bus designs were popular for a while on the microcomputer world as they were cheap and the slow CPUs of the time allowed some manner of interleaved access (memories were faster), they fell out of favor once dedicated GPU came to life, then the GPU mem was mapped again in linear space so the CPU could access it in a more sane fashion but that didn't change the game that the GPU worked on a dedicated bus.

Funny thing is that all the consoles/microcomputer based on the TI 9918/19/29 (that is ColecoVision, MSX, Sega Master System etc...) had the separation to begin with given the TI 9918/19/29 had its own memory bus but those systems had the tendency to fill it with 16K of DRAM (as per spec to be clear) so the designers likely thought not to expose any signals.

[JaguarVision]

It's decent enough. But then Ballblazer is an okay game all things considered.

 

 

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The famicom version looks nothing like the 7800 version was the point I was making.

 

And that HAD MMC chips in the cartridge. hence why i figured, that although the details in sprites are better with MMC chips adding certain advantages over the 7800 (which arguably had no disadvantages on the famicoms base hardware), the weak famicom hardware may have held back the system.

 

The Famicom didn't have anything like robotron, changing sprite sizes, f-18, or Ball blazer running and looking the way it did, while the best MMC chip games still had to limit the amount of sprites on screen, still had to use multiple sprites for big enemies, and at times still had slowdown.

[JaguarVision]

The simple fact that the cart connector in the NES brought out both CPU bus and PPU bus is a big advantage on the NES as it is the enabler for powerful chip enhancements/mappers.

 

Atari had a unified bus design hence a single bus on the cart side, no direct access to any of the Maria pins .... Atari wasn't alone with such design, Sega with the SMS was in the same boat, only the CPU bus was exposed so custom chips that enhanced the graphics capabilities were largely a no go.

Something similar happened on the SNES/MD front with the SNES exposing the B bus on the cart while the MD largely had only the CPU bus .... which it's weird given Sega had tons of real Arcade expertise one would think they were familiar with multibus design (the extreme of which can be seen on the NeoGeo).

 

My point is that the thought of exposing more than the simple CPU bus in and on itself is what allowed extra chips to enhance much more than a simple memory pager would make possible.

 

Unified bus designs were popular for a while on the microcomputer world as they were cheap and the slow CPUs of the time allowed some manner of interleaved access (memories were faster), they fell out of favor once dedicated GPU came to life, then the GPU mem was mapped again in linear space so the CPU could access it in a more sane fashion but that didn't change the game that the GPU worked on a dedicated bus.

Funny thing is that all the consoles/microcomputer based on the TI 9918/19/29 (that is ColecoVision, MSX, Sega Master System etc...) had the separation to begin with given the TI 9918/19/29 had its own memory bus but those systems had the tendency to fill it with 16K of DRAM (as per spec to be clear) so the designers likely thought not to expose any signals.

 

But Vanilla wise this wasn't the case.

 

But as i said above it seems that even with the MMC chips the vanilla hardware held the MMC's back from certain features the 7800 still had it seems at least from the games released.

 

While i do agree that design allowed for Nintendo to do something like Megaman 6 or SMB3 easier than the 7800 would if Atari went the same route with the PPU architecture, i do believe that the fact SMB3/MM6 have slowdown with multiple sprites on the screen and limited size, along with still having issues with pseudo-3d games may have still put the NES at a slight disadvantage outside of visuals.

[empsolo]

The famicom version looks nothing like the 7800 version was the point I was making.

 

And that HAD MMC chips in the cartridge. hence why i figured, that although the details in sprites are better with MMC chips adding certain advantages over the 7800 (which arguably had no disadvantages on the famicoms base hardware), the weak famicom hardware may have held back the system.

 

The Famicom didn't have anything like robotron, changing sprite sizes, f-18, or Ball blazer running and looking the way it did, while the best MMC chip games still had to limit the amount of sprites on screen, still had to use multiple sprites for big enemies, and at times still had slowdown.

 

And my point was that I don't get the Ballblazer hype. At all. Seriously the game is pretty meh and despite it's pretty visuals, has nothing else really going for it. It's like those people who hype up Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar and sitting here going "where's the beef?" I mean it's flipping tempest for Christ's sake.

 

And yet the NES also had a pretty damn good port in Smash TV, had some pretty good flight sims to boot. It was more than capable of playing some really good single screen games and as a result could more than compete with the 7800 in that regard.

 

 

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[Good_Times]

Its backwards compatibility was probably the 7800's biggest selling point. That's why my family got one in the late 80s to replace our aging 2600 that was having issues. We already had a big pile of 2600 games.

 

I remember being amazed by the backwards compatibility. Definitely the biggest selling point for me back then.

(Well, that and every yard sale had 'em for a few bucks each, heh.)

 

I'll need to get another, been jonesing for Food Fight in a bad way.....

[phoenixdownita]

 

But Vanilla wise this wasn't the case.

 

But as i said above it seems that even with the MMC chips the vanilla hardware held the MMC's back from certain features the 7800 still had it seems at least from the games released.

 

While i do agree that design allowed for Nintendo to do something like Megaman 6 or SMB3 easier than the 7800 would if Atari went the same route with the PPU architecture, i do believe that the fact SMB3/MM6 have slowdown with multiple sprites on the screen and limited size, along with still having issues with pseudo-3d games may have still put the NES at a slight disadvantage outside of visuals.

I think the fact that it was easy to get a "chocolate swirl" instead of just "vanilla" was one of the strength in the NES design.

Obviously the mappers were cheap enough to manufacture, I read that instead Pokey not so much (the only custom cheap inside a 7800 carts, I don't count the Activision PAL/PLA) which then makes even less sense to be inside the carts instead of inside the console, just have the user pay for it once and be done, I doubt it would have added more than 5US$ to the price of the console.

 

I don't see why limiting the comparison to the base machine is any relevant, a strength of the NES was that it could be extended via mappers much easier and likely deeper than other contemporary designs and because of that it could overcome some (not all) deficiencies ... not that it is not possible (check the vcs2600 bus stuffing) but 30Y ago it was just not a viable option for other designs.

Also if you look at what the Brazilian developers have made the "vanilla" SMS do then it's likely an even superior "vanilla" machine! A "french vanilla" console.

[Cynicaster]

 

I remember being amazed by the backwards compatibility. Definitely the biggest selling point for me back then.

(Well, that and every yard sale had 'em for a few bucks each, heh.)

 

I'll need to get another, been jonesing for Food Fight in a bad way.....

 

It's interesting to me that so many here say the backwards compatibility of the 7800 was such a huge selling point for them back when the system was on the market.

 

We transitioned from 2600 to 7800 in 1987, and honestly, the second we got our hands on the newer system we couldn't have cared less about the drawer full of 2600 games we had. By that point, we had lived in the 2600 world for 5-6 years solid. By 1987, we were starting to feel outright besieged by arcade games, home computers, and other consoles that made the 2600 seem like it was from the stone ages, which I think resulted in a fair bit of 2600 fatigue; we were ripe and ready to move on and not look back. I'm not sure I remember ever inserting a 2600 cart into that system, other than to satisfy the fleeting curiosity about whether it would actually play the old games as claimed on the box.

 

I can see how parents would like the backwards compatibility concept, since they probably felt that they'd save a lot of money being able to continue using their library of 2600 games and pick up lots of 2600 games for cheap in stores. For all the gamers I knew though, the ability to play 2600 games was not terribly exciting.

 

Of course, time passes and we rediscover our love for old stuff, as retro gamers are wont to do. In this context, in 2017, the dual-use console is a lot more appealing, for obvious reasons.

[CatPix]

I shold ask and see if that helped the 2600 to sell in France. The French 7800 is a PAL system with a RGB converter, making it easire to plug, and it restore the 2600 games form the 8 colors schemes of the SECAM model to the 104 PAL colors.

This might have been an argument to sell the system, but I have yet to meet anyone that owned a 7800 back in the day, either in person or on forums.

[kevtris]

I think the fact that it was easy to get a "chocolate swirl" instead of just "vanilla" was one of the strength in the NES design.

Obviously the mappers were cheap enough to manufacture, I read that instead Pokey not so much (the only custom cheap inside a 7800 carts, I don't count the Activision PAL/PLA) which then makes even less sense to be inside the carts instead of inside the console, just have the user pay for it once and be done, I doubt it would have added more than 5US$ to the price of the console.

 

I don't see why limiting the comparison to the base machine is any relevant, a strength of the NES was that it could be extended via mappers much easier and likely deeper than other contemporary designs and because of that it could overcome some (not all) deficiencies ... not that it is not possible (check the vcs2600 bus stuffing) but 30Y ago it was just not a viable option for other designs.

Also if you look at what the Brazilian developers have made the "vanilla" SMS do then it's likely an even superior "vanilla" machine! A "french vanilla" console.

 

Well I like to compare the 7800's later games such as Scrapyard dog to mid-level NES games such as Zelda or SMB. Scrapyard Dog is 128K bytes... same size as Zelda (and more than twice as big as SMB). SMB has no mappers and is a "barefoot" cartridge, while Zelda has the MMC1. The MMC1 is extremely simple and composed of a shift register and some latches. The banking hardware on Scrapyard Dog isn't much simpler than MMC1, and is still indeed a memory mapper.

 

The 7800's big weakness IMO is it has NO sprites at all, and the Maria is just a DMA engine. This means the 7800, while it has a single memory bus (unlike the NES) it does "double duty" with the Maria being able to directly access graphics in the cartridge ROM. The down side of this is that it steals CPU cycles because it has to stop the CPU to pull data off the bus. All the talk of the 7800 having sprites just isn't true. Anything you have moving on the screen must be painfully done by manipulating an ocean of display lists, which are then rendered by the display list-list (wished I was making that up. lol). This means the CPU is hamstrung twice: once because bus time is being stolen to grab the graphics data, and again because the CPU must composite and manipulate the various display lists to make things move around. The 8 bit has a display list too, but it also has hardware sprites/missiles which can be multiplexed with the help if display list interrupts which lets you have more than a few sprites on the screen at once, so long as they do not share a horizontal coordinate.

 

Writing a game using a scanline renderer like this is a huge pain compared to on i.e. the NES where you simply tell the PPU which tile to use and where to position it. The downside with the NES is sprites are limited in size; either 8*8 pixels or 8*16. The advantage is you just tell the PPU where you want them and what tile and palette (and X/Y flip) to use. Combine that with the background tile map that can scroll easily in any direction without doing anything except writing to the X and Y scroll register means scrolling backgrounds are absolutely trivial. Mappers are not needed to perform smooth scrolling in any direction. For a "minimalist" mapper implementation like AMROM, Rare made Battletoads, Wizards and Warriors (1 and 2) and other games. AMROM is just a single 4 bit latch, with nothing else. This is even simpler than the stock 7800 mapper.

 

Be all that as it may, it does not address the major failing of the 7800 <puts on flame suit>. The 7800 for me just lacked any really good "Gottahave" games. The NES had many killer games that defined it. 7800 had a bunch of arcade ports that had been done before and not much else at the time. I am not putting the 7800 down and I enjoy some games on the system, but it just can't put a candle to Zelda or even SMB. Scrapyard Dog is one of the few platformers for the system and I found it kind of lacking and boring and frustrating in places.

 

Having TIA only sound was a huge mistake and seems to have been done purely for cost reasons; the Maria chip could've easily had a few sound channels thrown onto the silicon, even if it was just some squares and a noise channel or something. Anything is better than what it got. Pokey is nice but having to put one in every cartridge isn't terribly economical. They might've gotten away with it though if they could've made a combined mapper+audio chip. This would've solved both problems and made things more engaging IMO.

 

Those are my thoughts after getting inside the 7800 design and stomping around for awhile while REing it. I think the 7800 could've had some really good games but they ran out of money, time, and programmers to pull it off. Good to see some decent homebrews coming out lately for it at least!

[RevEng]

Having actually written games for the 7800, I'd say there's more than a bit of hyperbole in saying you are "painfully manipulating an ocean of display lists". I had my first basic sprite engine up and running in half a day. It's not really that complicated. Definitely not as easy as traditional hardware sprites, but in some ways not as limited either.

 

Agreed on the CPU being held back by "double-duty". I've sometimes described the 7800 as having hardware-assisted soft-sprites. This is one area that's lacking, but it's not as crippling as you might expect either. I have a demo that moves 40 16x16 sprites over a tiled background with zero flicker. No real trickery needed, other than maintaining a couple display list lists.

 

Speaking on sprites... it's not really fair to say the 7800 has no sprites. Do people see (large!) smoothly moving objects over background? That's pretty much where the rubber meets the road. Same way that one can't deny the extensive and quality NES game library. It's what the people experience, rather than some arbitrary definition of the background tech, that really counts.

[CatPix]

It's what the people experience, rather than some arbitrary definition of the background tech, that really counts.

In the end. The lakc of hardware sprites reminds me of computer, and that sentance rminds of the war you have over which is the best machine... between the ZX Spectrum and C64.

And yes, it's a thing on many European forums. Sometime adding the Amstrad CPC in the mix.

And you always have the side that go with the figures (wiht the weakest machine being the Spectrum, then the CPC, and the C64) and the side that goes with the "best" games. And you have to take acocunt of good games that are impressive on either machine, else, obviously, The ZX Spectrum would fail... And in hte end, most people goes with the CPC having the worst games, then the ZX Spectrum and the C64 being close first.

It's a rathre complex fight ;D

[homerhomer]

Maybe, If you take a look at the Atari games on the NES, like Joust and namco's Ms. Pacman. I think the 7800 faired better. Could Robotron even be done well on the NES? And at first during Nintendo's black box era 7800 might have pulled it off, but they really needed that pokey chip in all there games and some amazing arcade ports. The sad thing is Atari had the games to do it. Gauntlet, Rolling Thunder, Super Sprint. Once Super Mario Bros. and Castlevania landed, it was over.

Edited August 13, 2017 by homerhomer

[8th lutz]

Maybe, If you take a look at the Atari games on the NES, like Joust and namco's Ms. Pacman. I think the 7800 faired better. Could Robotron even be done well on the NES? And at first during Nintendo's black box era 7800 might have pulled it off, but they really needed that pokey chip in all there games and some amazing arcade ports. The sad thing is Atari had the games to do it. Gauntlet, Rolling Thunder, Super Sprint.

Atari actually didn't have the arcade games for doing amazing ports for the 7800. Jack Tramiel didn't own the arcade division of Atari. The 7800 was affecting by tramiel multiple ways from a negative standpoint.

 

What happened was Tramiel bought some parts of Atari from Warner, but not the whole company. What Tramiel bought was the computer division of Atari and the rights of Atari game consoles despite the 7800 not being part of the sale at all. The arcade division of Atari was renamed Atari Games Corporation.

 

The arcade division not being part of the sale hurt the Atari 7800. The only way for Tramiel to get arcade games was buying a license for them. Jack Tramiel actually needed an agreement with Atari Games Corporation for having arcade ports such as Gauntlet on the Atari 7800. The problem is the agreement didn't happen before 1988 and it was too late for the 7800, but it helped out the Atari Lynx out. The 7800 was stuck with prototypes of Pitfighter, Klax and Rampart. The 7800 also got stuck with rumors of Paperboy, Steel Talons, Toobin', Gauntlet and Road Riot 4wd.