atari2600land's Blog

The Harmony cart should work just fine on the 7800 (of course - it will still only play 2600 games).

 

Food Fight was based off the arcade game, so its design was dictated by that.

 

There are some excellent 7800 homebrews that better show off what the 7800 can do. Frankly, the original 7800 library left a lot to be desired.

The game will double it speed up after 16th level on Intermediate level. Those chef will fight back, you been warned .

7800 pretty much can handle many moving object on screen without flickering, kinda similar to the Atari Lynx. I think the low amount of RAM held the system back.

Also, Happy Birthday! (Saw your name on the birthday list.)

Thanks, I am having a good birthday so far.

IMHO the 7800 was held back by the GPU (Maria) architecture:

1. The GPU blocks the CPU while it is drawing the screen. More sprites means less CPU time to manipulate the sprites!

2. While it allows for a larger number of sprites (both overall and on a single line) the display list is CPU intensive to build & manage. (Which compounds problem #1.)

 

The NES had a separate GPU (PPU) bus and used a table structure for the background tiles & sprites. No bus contention means more CPU for more advanced gameplay (and tricks to work around the limited number of sprites), along with less CPU to manage the GPU.