mos6507

What people do forget sometimes when they talk about the 5200 is that while yes, it was a 3 year old chipset, that chipset was part of home computers which were sold at a much higher pricepoint. By the early 80s there were plenty of new technologies out there. It's one thing to be state of the art. It's another to be able to market a piece of affordable consumer electronics. The 68000 had come out already. But bleeding edge technology was truly insanely expensive at first. Remember how much Apple charged for the Apple Lisa?? It really wasn't until the C=64 came out that home computers began to be sold at pricepoints close enough for them to be sold as consoles. This was a big reason for the videogame crash in general, as gamers were doing just that, buying home computers AS game machines since they got more bang for the buck. So while the Atari engineers would have liked the 400/800 to have debuted as a game machine, it would have been very difficult to have done this in 1979 without reaching a Neo Geo pricepoint. The big change in those few years was RAM pricing. Most 1st generation home computers like the TRS-80 shipped with very little RAM in the mid 70s, like around 4K or so. And even then, they were expensive. The 2600 shipped with 128 bytes of RAM in 1977, which was quite economical. But to release a console in 1979 with 8K of RAM, let alone 16K, would put it into the Neo Geo style pricepoint, not to mention the fact that the original Atari 8-bit designs had 5 chips, 3 of them custom, and a lot of board space, daughtercards and the like. Remember that even though it was 3 years later, they dropped the 8-bit's PIA chip when they did the 5200 to get the price down, which is one reason why it has analog controllers. The PIA supplies the digital joystick signals to the Atari 8-bit. The 5200 compensates for this by somehow routing the keypad and triggers to the POKEY in a way that makes it work like the keyboard, and the sticks are read like two paddles. That's really the only thing about the 5200 that you could say justifies it being incompatible with the 8-bit software. But from a long-term standpoint it was a mistake. They should have maybe tried to cost-reduce the chipset somehow to reduce silicon rather than making the 5200 incompatible. The 5200 really should have been an expandable entre into the existing 8-bit universe instead of a watered down 8-bit that required 3rd parties to re-port their 8-bit software to it. I remember at the time I was getting Atari Age magazines I was very keen on getting an Atari home computer but that was when the Atari 800 was still $800. It wasn't until Atari started to liquidate their 1200XL edsels that you could get an Atari 8-bit for less than $300. I think my 1200XL was around $200 or something. It would have been great if a year earlier, like in 1981 or so, you could get an Atari 5200 for $150 that was functionally an Atari 400 without a keyboard that you could build up over time into a full 48K system with SIO peripherals et. al. But how expensive were those Atari 400 membrane keyboards anyway? Just look at the O^2 that shipped with a keyboard and that was a real budget machine. I think by 1982 they were definitely charging too much for the 8-bits and competition from C= was what got Atari to lower prices.

The older I get the more I realize that there isn't as much of a difference between being a kid and being an adult. The basic drive for recreation and fun are just part of the human condition from birth to death. It's just that this manifests itself in different ways in different age groups. Considering the various damaging ways that purportedly mature adults often pursue their gratification (booze, sex, gambling, drugs) I'm not sure clinging to harmless childhood hobbies is such a terrible thing.

I always enjoyed the Williams pinballs that had the Defender-esque sounds at the time, like Firepower and Black Knight. Games of that vintage make you feel like you are almost playing a classic videogame, because of the sound effects. I'm also probably the only ones who enjoy the Pinball 2000 games (Revenge from Mars, Episode I). I like the greater interactivity that comes from the video overlay. I also find these a lot easier to play than other pinabll games.

I was always under the impression that the highest setting in Video Chess implemented an artificial intentional delay, hence the postal-chess name it has. Can anyone confirm or deny that? I'm assuming now that that was a way to make an excuse for it, but you have to admit that the benchmark on that game is far beyond all the other settings, so it makes you wonder.

I don't think it's hackable. And it's not a true 2600 either. It's some kind of mishmash of hardware and software emulation. So don't get your hopes up.

The 8-bit also has a faster full fledged 6502 vs. the 2600. It also has a lot more RAM and more ROM addressing abilities. That on top of all the extra chips. The 7800 has the same speed 6502 as the 8-bits when in 7800 mode, but the Maria chip interfaces with its internal RAM at a blazingly fast 7.16mhz, or so I've read. This is a big part of how it's able to throw around so many sprites in games like Robotron. Had Atari progressed as Jay Miner and company had envisioned, the Atari 400/800 would have debuted as game machines in 1979, followed by the Amiga circa 1983/84. I don't know what kind of pricepoint they would have been able to reach with those systems at that timeframe, but the hardware would have been ready. Instead, Atari Inc lost Jay and his team mostly over their handling of the 400/800 project, and surved on the 2600's late-bloomer explosion from 80-82. Kassar blew this time away with bad ideas for new game consoles like the 10-bit Intellivision-ish thing. Then when they really needed to work on a next gen system they cost-reduced the Atari 400 into the 5200, and when that flopped, they outsourced the 7800, which was too little too late. Had the 7800 debuted just a couple years earlier it might have made a difference, especially because of the digital signature system to lockout unlicensed 3rd parties. But then maybe we'd just have another bad version of ET to laugh at had it happened the way that company was being run... The turning point was definitely when they lost Jay's team. They just didn't have the vision anymore. They had the bucks, for a while, but it takes more than that to run a company.

A lot of people mention EdTris as the first homebrew, which is circa 93/94, but there was a long gap between EdTris and 1997 when the homebrew scene really heated up (culminating in releases like Oystron and This Planet Sucks). The 2600 homebrew scene got going because of multiple of factors: Computers were just getting fast enough to run 2600 emulation at full framerate; before that you had things like Action Pack which cut all sorts of corners to run on 486/66 class hardware. The first time I ran 2600 emulation at full speed was on a 486/100 using PCAtari for DOS around 1996. The Stella CD and Bob Colbert's makewav opened up the 2600 hardware itself for easy development. No EPROM burner necessary. Just cross-compile and send to the VCS through your audio card. Because of that, a community developed at the newly formed Stellalist which began to aggregate a braintrust of information on how to write for the 2600. Before that it was really a no-man's land of incomplete information and no easy development environment. It should also be remembered that since 1997 there have been a few lulls in development. There was a bug lull before Manuel and Thomas arrived, for instance. So it's had its ups and downs. But now it looks like there is a sustainable stream of development in the pipeline.

Which titles for the 2600 do you wish were ported to the 8-bit home computers? I know many Atari, Activision and Imagic games wound up on the 8-bit, but are there any that make you wonder how they would look on the 8-bit?

Atari's best system was the one that got away, the Amiga. But other than that, I think the Atari 8-bits were the best because (at least after the first couple years) they were a hacker's dream computer and had all sorts of commercial and homebrew (before they were called homebrew) games written for them.

When it comes to console hardware, the lessons to be learned from the pre-PS1 era of the Saturn, 3D0, and Jaguar, is that dedicated 3D hardware was not an option, it was a necessity. Those 3 platforms were lacking in that department, and that's why they failed. These transitional systems thought (improperly) that 2D with more color and more detailed sprites equated with next gen performance when it was 3D which enabled the next "killer app", so to speak. They thought Space Harrier or Wolf 3D style games were as advanced as they had to go in the 3D department. They didn't read the tea leaves with what was going on in the arcades and the PC domain at the time. As far as raw general purpose CPU muscle, the PS1 really isn't that much more powerful than the Jaguar, but its 3D chip makes up for that by doing all the hard stuff in hardware rather than software. That's why a game like Battlesphere that is optimized pretty much to the limit of what the Jag can do, running as much as possible out of its tiny little caches, winds up looking like a Playstation 1 game with the texture maps removed. Then you have the Saturn which has more muscle than the Jag, but was in the same boat because it forced developers to roll their own 3D routines from scratch. Thus only a select few Saturn games have truly PS1-grade 3D. Add to that the fact that most Jag developers were simply not of the same calibre of the rest of the industry and you have a recipe for failure.

The Activision 10 in 1 was licensed through Activision. As far as I know NO permission was obtained from Hasbro/Infogrames to produce this "clone". So that should open the floodgates to clones, IMHO.

Just look at what Andrew Davie is doing in 32KB for the 2600. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 512KB game for the 2600 with Andrew's graphics mode animations in it. More memory opens up some interesting possibilities. I'm all for that.

512kB SRAM. Games do not run from the MMC. Chad Does that mean that the full cart address range visible to the 7800 is always writable all the time regardless of whether the banking scheme you are emulating was intended to be read-only? That could be really useful, especially if some of the 7800 banking schemes allow you to swap in and out smaller chunks leaving the "ROM" code intact.

I really like the idea of a fully functional serial port because then you could write games that used the POKEY for both sound and other forms of interfacing. If standard libraries were written for POKEY serial hardware handlers then they could be like an extension to the BIOS and provide a more Atari 400/800 like backbone to the 7800. How much RAM does this have on board? I know some 7800 games use extra RAM. It wouldn't write back to the MMC for RAM, right? That would wear out the MMC.

== Yeah, but the 2600 was dead for several years though, the Game Boy has yet to have the ax fall on it. I know what you mean, though. Long "live" Atari! == When you judge the relative success of the 2600 vs. newer machines you have to take into account the change in the industry as a whole. When the 2600 took off the industry didn't even really exist beyond a blip on the radar. It was the 2600, and Space Invaders for the 2600 in particular, in 1980, that basically created the modern home gaming industry for all intents and purposes. When you consider that, comparing the length of time the Gameboy has been on the market vs. the 2600 is really no comparison. But then you also have to look at it as complete apple and oranges. The Gameboy also never had to really live up to the same sense of technological urgency to progress that consoles do. They still sell simple LCD games not that different from 20 years ago. Recreations of Mattel handhelds are on store shelves right now. The portable market is a different market. I also don't think there was as much of a difference in game quality between the first generation and last generation titles with the original Gameboy hardware vs. the 2600. Did the Gameboy ever have the equivalent of a Solaris in its waning years that made you wonder how the machine pulled it off? I don't think so. That's the whole reason Nintendo had to come out with the GBColor and GBA.

That's not entirely true. The Atari 2600 is an evolution of Atari's earlier coin-op hardware (which typically ran without even a true CPU). Atari's approach to graphics was always more sprite-oriented vs. background oriented. Atari's hardware was rarely ever overdesigned. It did the most with the least all the way back to Computer Space (Computer Space did a lot with just TTL that was previously only possible with minicomputer-grade hardware). Atari had prior experience in the coinop domain and they knew that gameplay required animation over fancy backgrounds. Just compare the arcade hardware of Atari's mid 70s games vs. Midway's, for instance. Atari's hardware tended to have smoother animation and Midway's 8080-based Mass-RAM system was more flickery and jerky. If there were any questions about any of this, the design of the 400/800 would put that to rest. With the 400/800, Atari chose to maintain a lot of what the 2600 did, including, at its core, a scanline-based kernel not so different from the 2600. Only instead of the 2600, the ANTIC chip could drive the GTIA rather than the program. But you could turn ANTIC off and drive GTIA directly if you wanted to. So even though they were working with enough RAM to support a full bitmap and completely abstract away the chores of building a display, they chose to carry over some of what you call the "economy" features of the 2600. They did this specifically because it provides efficiency, flexibility, and speed. Also remember that from the 2600 to the Amiga, the engineers worked closely with programmers. In fact there was a fine line between the hardware and the software engineering in general (Joe Decuir designed the hardware AND wrote Video Olympics, for instance). So there was a synergy between the hardware design and the programming model. That was not the case with other designs (including the Intellivision). Consoles tended to be designed by engineers who had no game programming sensibilities, and they made some bad judgement calls. Even though the 2600 is generally regarded as the most difficult console to write for, it is also the most responsive platform to meticulous programming, and the software developers at that time were nothing if not meticulous! So maybe it wasn't in the official requirements document, but I think Jay Miner in the back of his mind put in that flexibility with the understanding that it might come in handy. If it was an accident he certainly learned to repeat it by following a consistent design evolution through the 400/800 and the Amiga.

The only disadvantage I see with this over a CC is that it has no direct connection to a PC. So while it's great for end-users as a multicart, it might not be that convenient for developers quickly debugging changes to sourcecode as you'd have to shuttle an MMC card back and forth to the unit. So I think I'd stick to my Cuttle Cart unless I wanted to write a 7800 game. So this thing basically does everything the Cuttle Cart does as far as banking schemes PLUS 7800 mode? Can it do Starpath RAM? Can it fit even the largest 7800 games on it (like Scrapyard Dog)?

You know something has reached the point of cultural icon status when songs are written about it. In classic rock you'd have songs about muscle cars. Now we have songs about the 2600. I thought the Splitsville song I put on Stella at 20 and the Stella CD v.2 was the only song written about the 2600, but I was wrong. After doing some searching on Kazaa I found this stuff: I'm not much of a fan of hip-hop, but this might just change my mind. Atari 2600 (is for the children) Here is something that might have some 2600 sounds mixed into it: 1982

There are some people who judge a game machine based on a static screenshot. This misses a lot of the finer points of what a console has to do. The approach that the 2600 designers chose emphasizes animation fuidity and color choice above background graphics. The approach of most other early consoles was towards a dumber bitmap display with CPU or coprocessor muscle that was rarely fast enough to update to maintain fluid animation. A lot of old systems use a card or character approach towards graphics which, if you don't have enough characters, results in coarse animation. If you don't have a true separation between hardware sprites and background you get into all sorts of problems when sprites cross. Then you have the design mistake of opting for a fixed (usually 16) color palette. The Intellivision, Colecovision, Apple II, Astrocade, and C=64 all suffer from one or more of these sins. The 2600 may not have a lot of sprites and almost no background, but because it is only scanline-based, the kernel can make any change to any register at any time even in mid scanline let alone scanline to scanline. This is incredibly powerful and most other consoles provide no facility for this, and even if they did, if they had a fixed color palette like the INTV, it's not going to gain you that much.

Amen. I actually missed out on the Amiga until really late (93 or so when I picked up a used A1200). I had stuck through my Atari 130XE through college partly because I was so disgusted with the PC with its CGA graphics, mono-speaker sound, and DOS. There was a period in time when the PC was replacing mainframes in the workplace, so the main consumers of PCs were NOT home users, as was previously the case with the 8-bit home computers, but rather an older, stodgier generation of business managers with some backwards notions of what computers should be. To those people, graphics and sound were equated with game machines, toys, so the idea of a monochrome or 16-color text-only display and no sound capabilities actually appealed to them. It was much later when the multimedia capabilities of computers would be appreciated, first for game, and now for media playback (MP3, video files, etc...). In retrospect it's really amazing that we had to go through that dark ages when the older 1mhz 8-bit machines had better graphics and sound than the 80286-386 era PCs. And the Mac wasn't much better either with its greyscale display. Great for DTP and little else. At least it had a GUI. It's no surprise that in the mid 80s, 8-bit machines hung on for quite some time with teenagers. They were just much more exciting (albeit less expandable for the most part) architectures.

I don't think that's possible. Yes it is possible. Some Supercharger games like Escape from the Mindmaster do that, but Frogger isn't one of them.

That's what I experienced. The game has dead-ends because some doors don't open.

I'd like to see a port of the underrated Juno First, a game that hasn't seen many (if any) home ports. The 7800 seems to do well manipulating a lot of small sprites against a solid background. That's ideal for games in the Williams mode (Robotron, Defender, etc...). Juno First used similar hardware to the classic Williams games even though it was created by Konami. Juno First Juno First plays similar to Solaris, actually, although the feel is quite different and it's more of a straight shooter. It feels more like a vertical version of Defender.

When GM started Saturn they deliberately isolated it from most of the rest of the GM universe in order to let the brand develop its own unique infrastructure all the way down to how their management structure worked. Say what you will about Saturn, but it is a far more distinct entity than, for instance, Buick vs. Chevy. If Atari is simply a symbol that Infogrames slaps onto certain titles, it doesn't mean that much. In order for the name to matter, you need to partition Infogrames up and dedicate exclusive resources to the Atari branch and let them develop their own way of doing things. The Atari way, back before Kassar and the Tramiels destroyed things, was to videogames what Xerox Parc was to computers: it was a breeding ground for free-form innovation. It was largely a hands-off policy of trusting the developers to do what they wanted. Innovation is something the game industry solely needs. Not innovation in graphics or sound or theme, but innovation in GAME DESIGN. Neverwinter Nights is an RPG that breaks the mold and I'm glad that Infogrames gave it the Fuji, but the game was not developed by "Atari". It's a real anomoly in the industry and isn't likely to be repeated. The industry in general has largely given up on the idea of a single unified in-house developer-base, but that's what you really need in order to somehow try to recreate the Atari spirit. If every game is a mini-movie with its own teams that come together when the game starts development and then disperses permanently when the game is complete (like long independent contractors) then you can not achieve consistency from game to game. At least not without some Movie-Mogul-like guiding force which I don't think exists at the top of these organizations. Because ultimately it's the people behind the games and the way they are managed that determines how good a game is. The way game development is done today is NOT conducive to great games. Acceptable games, games that barely make you feel like you got your money's worth, games that hold your attention for a couple days, games you "rent" and forget about. That's it. That's just not the Atari way. I think Hasbro remaking the old games was a good concept and some of the remakes were arguably well done. The problem was that they had no game plan on how to go beyond that. Plus some of their final remakes really sucked (Galaga especially) that showed that upper management following the development of these titles never truly "got" what made the original games great and what not to mess with. What they should have done was be bold and write new games that felt as though they were remaking a classic game but were in fact original game concepts. But I think today's game designers lack the know how in nuts and bolts classic game design AND lack the balls to put forward a deliberately simple game concept to be able to do that. Plus management feels the only way they can release a simple game (without the public chopping it to pieces for not being an expansive immersive simulation) is if it's a remake.

There were a significant stock of leftover CDs that I donated to Randy. The booklets are all gone and some of the last CDs don't have jewel box inserts, but for $5 it's hard to go wrong. I would be really surprised if he's managed to sell all of them. Let me know if he's no longer selling them because if he isn't I'll have to ask him to pass the boxes on to someone else who will.