DracIsBack

My vote is 100% for this - just loved the concept!

Paid as well! Looking forward to the game! Thanks, TailChao!

That's one of the problems that the 7800 and other Atari systems had really. The good programmers weren't on the platform. They were making NES games. And then their next generation of NES games. And their next generation of NES games after that. Learning how to squeeze more and more tricks out of it. And trying to compete with each other to standout in the marketplace. Using mappers. Using bigger and bigger games. Tramiel Atari was - um - cheap. Almost no third party development. Even the games Atari funded smacked of cheapness. Of limited dev budgets. Small cartridges. Hardly any cartridges with 'extras' like RAM and sound, when nearly every NES game had some kind of mapper than allowed the NES to do things its base hardware couldn't pull off. Even the 2-color manuals with no screen shots. I mean - what would happen if Nintendo's top software dev team was challenged to make an Atari 7800 game, given a year to do it, and allowed to put in on a 4 megabit cartridge with an MMC-5 type mapper?

My vote is Rezolve Adventure Defender

Bloc Drop showed such promise. RIP Ken

I haven't played it and I'm assuming you haven't either. But I have heard others say that the original is terrible.

Is that actually the case? My understanding is that the computer game it was ported from was equally terrible and that this was simply an ok port of a really poor game. I always go back to the original Atarian review of this title myself. When the reviewer of the company sponsored magazine (which tends not to say anything back about company product) talks about the "spectacular title screen", you know they're struggling to find something good to say.

For sure. IMO, it sounded better with lower tones than higher ones. I personally find Midnight Mutants and Dark Chambers to be fine, but hate stuff like Tower Toppler. Too loud, too high, too shrill. I also didn't mind this, back in the day.

The XL has a nicer keyboard, IMO. I always am nostalgic for the XE form factor and its detachable keyboard, but the system has a bunch of ergonomic annoyances, IMO.

One of the challenges with the 7800 is it felt like Atari first dusted off the old GCC titles. Then they cheaply tried to port computer titles, while focusing on the XEGS. By the time they started working on NES like games (ala Plutos, Sirius, Commando, Alien Brigade, Scrapyard Dog, Midnight Mutants, Basketbrawl, Klax, Toki etc), the system was losing shelf space to the 16-bit systems and many people never saw the games that were released, let alone the ones that got mothballed. To this day, there are people that think it's nothing more than an advanced Centipede playing machine. Rikki and Vikki and Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest are two nice gems made by homebrewers.

That's fair. Still, I sure do get tired of the endless "they should have included a POKEY in the 7800" diatribes. It's like, "no shit. Old news now though".

I'm wondering if people will ever consider the complaint about TIA in the 7800 to be a long beaten, long dead horse? At this point, it's kind of like "no shit, sherlock". The other side of it is that this homebrewer made use of GCCs capability to including unique sound hardware in the cartridge and did in a new way.

I'm ready to buy as well, whenever they go on sale.

Thank you for the thoughts, prayers and encouraging words. The battle rages on, but I remain optimistic

It's unfortunate, but yes. And reality is that reality can happen. I certainly wasn't dealing with Lymphoma when I placed the order, but I certainly am now

I'm mixed, but I was mixed on the arcade version too. As a conversion, it's arguably one of Atari's best. The graphics look sharper than the NES conversion. I do find it a bit repetitive and hate that it doesn't have an ending. And the sound isn't great, even by TIA standards. Years ago, I had a house party where friends actually spent the whole night playing this and Ballblazer over everything else I had on my SMS and 7800. So it had its fans :-) The XE one that wasn't formally released is pretty good too. Still has crappy sound and is less colorful than the 7800 version, though it scrolls quickly from screen to screen.

Yep. Plus, Nintendo locked up developers with ultra restrictive contacts. And some of the 2600 developers went bust in the crash.

I've owned all of them at various points. My pref is: 7800 - a mix of great early arcade titles and some cool NES like titles. Honestly though, the Homebrew scene has been great on this system. XEGS - It's a weird one. I actually was into the look of this system back in the day (the detachable keyboard gave me fantasies of having my own 'pro computer' that was all mine, not a family shared computer). In practicality, this isn't really practical as a computer. The keyboard cable is way too short, the keyboard is a pain in the arse to type on and even the jacks for monitor connections are way too far apart. The joysticks are a PITA to plug and unplug. Still, it's a gateway to 8Bit software and hardware and it runs almost everything you need on that platform. Atari Jaguar - not popular, but I liked it for some original titles (Tempest, AvP) and it had really good 3rd party support as far as Atari Corp systems went. Atari Lynx - Really cool technically at the time, but not practical in terms of large size and awful battery life. Plus, I couldn't get into many of the games personally. 2600jr - with the 7800, this was pointless to me.

Third party support, 100% agree. Horsepower, I don't really. The NES had some advantages sure, but put the 7800 in the same dev stream with A+ developers, A+ budgets, A+ titles, big ass cartridges containing hardware enhancements and I don't think the difference is what you're implying here. It's not like you're talking about Hawaii in the summer vs. Alaska in the winter! They're still two 6502 based systems made in the 1983-4 timeframe with a relatively small amount of RAM memory.

Sigh. I'm really sorry to hear that, Bob. Ugh.

Submitted. Thanks, Curt

Here's the impossible mission thread. It's a cool read! http://atariage.com/forums/topic/135553-impossible-mission-guess-who/

In late 1988/early 1989, I'm fairly certain we'd started to see 256K and 384K games on the NES and 512K games on the Sega Master System. In addition, a lot of these carts had MMC hardware onboard, battery saves etc. When it came to the 7800, it felt like the Tramiels considered video games to be a cash cow, which meant they wanted to minimize what they spent in order to use the profits to fund the computer division. You see it a lot with the 7800. Early game cartridges had the silver, 1-color labels. The manuals were never in colour and almost none of them had a screen shot. Only two games ever put a sound chip on cartridge even though GCC designed the system to take advantage of this. Only a handful more ever shipped with additional RAM. There were never battery saves. There were never carts larger than 144K even though there was no technical reason to prevent bigger games .... even then. I think I remember Mitch saying he had a prototype 512K (4 megabit) 7800 cartridge board.