kool kitty89

There were tons of developers they could commission stuff from, but that wasn't the issue: the issue was the amount of funding they had for it and how their position put them continually behind Nintendo for 1st party support. (outsourcing or hiring new programmers, it's all effectively the same thing, just with different cost/investment trade-offs and ALL requires money) The REAL issue was actual market interest in the 7800 and 3rd party support, that's what will make or break a system in most cases: those that rely mainly on 1st party software are the exceptions to the rule. (and THAT's where Nintendo's licensing policies really killed Atari -that and the fact that Japanese software was dominant in that generation and such developers would have no interest to develop for the 7800 in their home markets and thus would require substantial influence to develop for a western-specific platform even without Nintendo's restrictions -licenses to western developers would be easier, but that would tend to have less consistent results, especially as games got more complex) Regardless of any of that, as I've already mentioned, the absolute biggest missed opportunity for 3rd party development resources to tap would be from Europe: both commissions/licensed games and pushing for interest in actual 3rd party publishing on the platform for both increased European support and for the US. (hell, there's a ton of Euro-specific games that would have been exclusives to the US console market of the time unless Nintendo had caught on quickly) Lack of funding, again, funding was the only thing stopping them from doing that very same thing after the fact (other than not having the exact same programmers). Even without the Atari Inc programmers (coin or console -they did have some of the computer guys already), they could have invested in directly outsourced games that Atari would publish and profit from without a royalties deal as with a 3rd party published game. Likewise, they could have invested in recruiting programmers to develop games in-house. Atari Corp just wasn't in the position to do that in 1984-86, and the sloppy transition of the split played a major role in that. (ie it slowed everything down considerably and made Atari Corp lag well behind where Atari Inc/Natco could have been -granted, in hindsight, there's a lot of missed opportunities that Tramiel and Co could have taken advantage of to make the best of things in spite of Warner's mismanagement of the split) That lagging meant that even as they did build up more funds with things smoothing out by '87/88, the competition (namely Nintendo due to Sega's apparent ineptitude at marketing in the US) would be ever ahead of them and that they'd have to find other ways to compete. In spite of that though, they actually managed a significant market share and surprisingly strong sales in the late 80s, albeit most of that was concentrated in 1987 and 1988. (1989 saw a considerable decline in hardware sales and also Nintendo's peak year with the NES -1990 was almost as strong, and in hindsight, 1989 was probably the year Atari should have had a next generation home console out) They'd have had an uphill battle in the US regardless, but their position in Europe in the late 80s and early 90s was quite positive with the computer line (albeit that started experiencing problems at the very end of the 80s as well -from the DRAM shortage to Sam's transition in as CEO/President, things went south across the board from then on). That's hardly the case though. Firstly it wasn't Sam but Jack (and later managed by Michael Katz) who got the former Atari Inc's consumer products and they most definitely didn't "get 100% of the market" as such. (even at its peak, Atari had closer to 70% of the market and that likely would have changed if the competition had held onto the market rather than ditching it -namely Mattel and Coleco, and unfortunately the CV wasn't managed nearly as well as Intev did after the parent company dropped it) The crash wiped things out considerably and almost made it anyone's market (the very fact that allowed Nintendo to enter with a competitive edge), and that was very little to do about management and almost all to do with the market position. (even more so with the Japanese market just starting to get big as the US market collapsed) Of course, there WERE management issues that exacerbated thing (leading to Mattel and Coleco leaving the industry prematurely and Warner liquidating Atari Inc), but given the situation of the crash, that's hardly surprising. (Coleco botching the Adam certainly contributed to that too) Of course, the biggest counter argument would be the home computer market dominating the video game market in the '84-86 period (roughly) and that, at the time, it was more or less fused with the home console market with heavy overlap in competition and consumer interest. (how many people used the C64 almost exclusively as a game machine?) Or even more, they could have pointed out However, I will agree that Sam squandered what he was charged with in 1989, not just the video games, but the computers. (but that really has nothing to do with the Nintendo lawsuit) I don't like many of the things Sony or Nintendo have done as companies (or Microsoft, EA, etc, etc -Atari Inc and Warner undoubtedly did some unsavory things with their corporate power, though I don't know of anything that really saw them pushing a monopoly as such -they squandered that potential with a lack of any 3rd party software licensing as Nintendo somehow managed without any real form of lockout in Japan . . .), but that doesn't stop me from liking many their products (or software published by 3rd parties for their platforms) or respecting their legitimate accomplishments as much as any other. (while also noting boneheaded mistakes -the N64 being an obvious one ) Ninja Gaiden on the Lynx was, of course, almost nothing like the NES game but rather close to the arcade. (the NES game was an exclusive inspired by the arcade game -it's not even a beat-em-up) I don't think it was just the antitrust lawsuits that Nintendo started shifting things for, but Sega's general competition (especially with their excellent marketing and 1st/2nd/3rd party software strategies in the US under Katz and Kalinske) and more and more 3rd parties becoming frustrated and (aide from potential lawsuits) threatening to drop Nintendo or find other loopholes to get around their contracts. (technically, there were some simple loopholes like publishing under a different label -more often done to bypass Nintendo's 2 game per year quality control limits that to publish for other platforms -Acclaim with LJN and Konami with Ultra- but then there's the other, less legal tactics Nintendo had as I mentioned above, some still practiced to this day -DS ROM production is still forced to go through Nintendo with Nintendo setting delivery dates and quantities) I'm rather surprised that more publishers didn't go unlicensed on the NES given how relatively simple it was to get around lockout with the voltage spiking glitch. (Nintendo tried to protect against it in later models, but I'm not sure that ever worked satisfactorily and 3rd parties may have modified the hack to get around that as well) Then again, Nintendo did have those other tactics that made such prospects unattractive. (namely making stores refuse to carry unlicensed games under threat of Nintendo pulling distribution -not sure on the specifics of that though) I still find it ironic that Tengent went through so much trouble to build the Rabbit chip only to have massive legal headaches when the simple and cheap voltage spike glitch avoided cost and legal issues. NEC was probably putting pressure on Nintendo do loosen their Japanese licensing policies as well.

NOT NINTENDO'S FAULT And around in circles we go. It was indeed Nintendo's fault for Atari Corp. not being able to go to any of the dev studios - Nintendo had a lockout. If they developed games for the NES, they couldn't develop for anywhere else. Consequently it took time to get themselves to anywhere near to what you're talking about - which they did do by the late 80's. Sorry, but this ostrich head in a hole in the ground thing of yours just isn't going to work. Those contract only (officially) blocked publishing, didn't they? Thus the same game (or another game from the same developer) could be published under a different label without conflicting with that contract. (of course, Nintendo had unofficial areas of influence as well: they could restrict cart production for developers why weren't happy with, they were sometimes known for refusing to distribute to retailers selling unlicensed games, etc) Those unofficial areas were the only influence Nintendo had in Japan beyond development tools and their official seal/license on the box. (no hardware lockout whatsoever) But the official contracts should only have hindered Atari from getting 3rd parties to publish for their platform, nothing more. (nothing officially stopping those developers from publishing under Atari or some other label) Then you had the option for European developers who would be less influenced by Nintendo in general. (odd that Atari Corp wasn't commissioning games from European devs at the time or didn't managed to get any Euro published games even) Marty, do you have details on how Atari Corp managed their licensing agreements for the 7800? Given the near complete lack of 3rd party publishers and weak position they were in, it seems like they may have even been best off offering free publishing for all 3rd parties (no royalties for Atari) and only charging for dev kits and such and the only other restrictions being reviewing for quality control. (to avoid the problems some early 80s VCS games had) Maybe they could have had agreements that only gave royalties to Atari if they game sold beyond a certain amount. Even if they didn't make any money off those games, having stronger 3rd party development would have meant better sales of the 7800 hardware and Atari published games. The problem was they had one guy - one programmer, Tom Sloper, doing everything at that time. Writing the dev manual, trying to line up outside developers and farm out game projects and oversee any licenses they managed to get a hold of. Not much of a "creative department". Huh, I thought you mentioned that Atari Corp had hired most of Atari Inc's computer programming staff. (many of whom had developed games for the A8) Didn't Doug Neubauer contribute heavily to TOS? Hardly, their 1st party and (more) MASSIVE 3rd party line up of software on top of very well managed (and funded) advertising is what made them popular. The most important 1st party games were the pack-ins (one thing Sega screwed up with early on too -and even Atari made poor choices with from the limited games available: Ms. Pac Man probably would have been the best launch pack-in from the lineup), but that's not what made them hugely popular, just one facet of it. I highly doubt your friends had mainly Nintendo published games (I didn't know anyone like that and it hardly seems to be the case from any online accounts from NES owners back in the 80s and early/mid 90s either). Sure, maybe they had more Nintendo games than any other single publisher (especially for an average user with only a dozen games -maybe less- after a few years of owning the system), but that should still have made up less than 1/3 of the games they owned. (and even then, you might have many other cases where the pack-in was the only Nintendo game they owned -all others from 3rd parties; we only had the pack-in cart from the power set and Zelda back in the mid 90s -it really depends on your preferred genre)

I don't remember. I wasn't buying any 2600 games at the time. Even then, I thought it a waste for Atari to continue making 2600 games instead of focusing on the 7800... Nah, it was a very good idea: the definitive budget gaming machine to capitalize on. It would have been stupid to NOT support it. (at very least with re-releases and continued production, if not a few new games) It would have been like Nintendo killing off the NES/Famicom in 1990/91 when it had years ahead of it in the budget market. (more so in Japan -same with the SNES, PSX, PS2, etc -Sega made that mistake with the MD/Genesis and lost out big time for a potential strong late-gen budget market) The fact that they 7800 was also so budget oriented limited that though. (they could probably have focused more on the 7800 being closer to NES/SMS game prices -but cheaper enough to still have an advantage in general, more so for hardware prices, and ended up a fair bit better off in general -more profits if nothing else, but also the ability to re-invest that for more/better games and advertising) The 2600 was still selling (more than the 7800 by a good margin from what I understand) and demand actually outlived that for the 8-bit computers and even the 7800. (so for whatever you can argue about the 7800's management, the 2600 was a keeper)

Yea, but "superior" is just wrong. It's fine to say "I like X system more personally" but blatant claims of superiority (from a technical/software/business/marketing PoV, etc) is something you'd better be ready to back up with facts and real supporting evidence. I totally agree, it's just a jerk move for people who don't want any realistic discussion or others who are overly defensive as such. (I can understand those who get defensive over the 7800 being overlooked -same for the SMS- but that's totally different from unreasonably boosting the 7800 beyond its place in history or as a peice of hardware in general) There have clearly got to be 50 different NES vs. 7800 threads on AtariAge that discuss this at length, Just do a search on it. Actually, I don't think any of those did a proper comparison of the merits from those with an intimate understanding of both platforms. (my understanding is limited to a general/high-level undersntanding) I've seen proper comparisons of the likes of the SNES/PCE/Genesis or SMS and NES, but there don't seem to be enough people who really understand (and have programmed for on a low level) the 7800 and NES to give a full and comprehensive comparison as such. (malducci is a homebrew programmer after all, just not one involved with the 7800 -worked on the NES, PCE, Genesis, SNES, I think some on the SMS, and a few others iirc -I think some Atari computer stuff and I remember him mentioning some old CoCo demos he did years ago) The PCE is the only system he REALLY has a bias for iirc. I totally agree, this is a very simple/concise way of stating what I've tried rambling about. Again, I wouldn't be on any site/discussion forum that was filled with "fanboys" as such, and that's what relatively refreshing (a reasonable amount of the time) on sites like AA and Sega-16, among a few others, but that are totally lacked in the Nintendo retro community. (Nintendoage seems to be the best case but is still too full of idiot fanboys from what I've seen) Yes, Nintendo may get more credit by the masses than they deserve, but blowing things out of proportion in the other direction (towards Sega or Atari, etc) doesn't do anyone any good either. (hence why I'm no glad for the work Curt and Marty are doing with Atari history) It's a hell of a lot more than that (especially the launch -only a small facet of the overall situation), but that's been discussed a ton already in other threads (and this one), and I think you've seen most of those discussions. If you don't understand the going-on in the industry at the time, that's fine, but sarcastic comments like that simply magnify that you're not familiar. As has already been explained, two different Ataris. Atari Corp. was not Atari Inc., it had no in-house game developers and no actual game division (the Entertainment Electronic Division was started up in October of '85 for that purpose). When operations started up that October, Katz looked to start licensing more games for the relaunch. He wound up hitting a brick wall as the popular titles of the time and most of the 3rd party studios were already locked up with Nintendo. Nintendo's locking in of 3rd party developers and licenses is part of factual history and legendary, not something made up as an excuse like your sarcasm seems to try and portray it as. As such, he had to go to the computer industry (where he had just come from as the former head of Epyx) to start licensing computer platform games for the 7800. They also had the issues of farming out development. Once again the industry being very different than it was now, there was not a million and one different studios and startups to go to for developing games for a platform. Yep, most of those are the "circumstances" I was talking about above too. Again, they also had limited funding in general, so even with in-house resources (they did have the computer programmers, many experienced in game development), they lacked the funds to compete with Nintendo's in-house R&D, let the 3rd party developers. (plus Atari Corp had other platforms to support too -more significant for the marketing budget) As I mentioned above, there seems to be a few things they could have done differently under the circumstances (more favorable licensing arrangements for 3rd party publishers, possible loop-holes around Nintendo, and pushing towards the considerable European computer game developers of the time), but their options were obviously limited and Katz did an amazing job with all that considered. (even with Atari's brand name helping out) Actually it is sort of Nintendo's "fault" . . . or more Atari being a victim of circumstances and Nintendo imposing monopolistic licensing contracts on Japanese and US developer to virtually lock them out on top of Nintendo's strong market position. (the market position favored due to weak initial competition in Japan and the crash in the US -Sega had the resources to compete directly with Nintendo in the US in 1986, but they seemed to be very lacking in the right management for marketing and distribution). Not only did Atari not have the resources to directly compete with Nintendo's in-house software development, but they couldn't get the 3rd party support that was critically needed. (a relatively small percentage of the NES's library was Nintendo produced) As such, it's rather ironic that you put Ninja Gaiden as an example since that was a licensed Arcade conversion that was ported and published by a 3rd party and NOT Nintendo. Nintendo had Japanese 3rd parties locked up from the start in the US (the bulk of quality console software development of the period) with the exception of Sega who had their own priorities obviously (albeit they did license some games to the Famicom/NES like Space Harrier, Altered Beast, and Afterburner) and soon had most US publishers locked up as well. (hence why almost 100% of 7800 games were Atari published) And, of course, even without the lock-out of 3rd party publishers and arcade licenses, Atari was very strapped for cash. (and as that problem dissipated in the late 80s, the competition grew and grew) Interesting to note that Atari later DID get a license for Ninja Gaiden for the rather good arcade conversion to the Lynx. (it's an actual arcade port -a beat-em-up- rather than the remake the NES got)

Yeah, Gorf's had some good times, but gotten worse over the last couple years it seems. (he's always been temperamental and stubborn though) I had some nice/interesting conversations on the Jaguar with him (especially in the 1993 thread), but yeah, he can definitely rub people the wrong way. (I didn't let that get to me or ruin those discussions though -for the same reason I try to temper my responses to any aggressive/inflammatory comments in general, if I respond to them at all) He's a tech guy and a programmer (one of the most prominent coders in the Jag homebrew community -though his personality seems to hinder that as well) and has definitely had experience with most/all Atari platforms, but I don't think he's actually had any experience working with Nintendo (or some others he's negatively commented on at times) platforms and thus doesn't have a good idea of what he's really saying. That's a little strong, but I agree to a fair extent: a surprising amount of closed-minded people for a retro enthusiast forum especially. (even if you don't like the NES, you should certainly respect its success from a number of perspectives -technical, and more importantly, in terms of actual marketing and software produced for it) From what I understand, there's some advantages in colors per scanline flexibility (and all colors are indexed from the 256 color palette -no odd limits like the NES using the added color flags), it has DLLs somewhat like the A8, it has much greater bandwidth for sprites, no hard limit for on-screen sprites, but everything else has massive trade-offs. (to a large extent due to the low-cost design of the system as well as the limited design cycle -and configuration as such- and being tied to 2600 compatibility on top of those limits -and we're talking hardware here, so that's aside from all the issues with Atari being completely liquidated and split up in '84 and all the other limits imposed by the transition to Atari Games and Atari Corp -ie Trammel Technologies Ltd) You've got a single bus design (low cost and compatibility) with DMA contention for the CPU and MARIA which greatly reduces the CPU time (even more after the overhead of the CPU managing the display lists and sprites), you've got an architecture that wouldn't have been bad to get into for early 80s developers familiar with the likes of the A8 and 2600, but one that was difficult to work with for those used to plain character/cell (or bitmap) and x/y position sprites (iirc, the 7800's sprites had to be manipulated somewhat more like the A8). It's biggest advantage is cost effectiveness and general potential for further consolidation (albeit not exploited due to circumstances -production volumes, funding, etc, but they should have had it down to 2 main chips -MARIA and CPU/RIOT/TIA ASIC- and eventually down to a single chip ASIC -I think Atari Inc already had a similar single chip VCS ASIC in late 1983 or early '84 to go alogn with the Jr project -after transition to Atari Corp, no such ASIC was implemented until the late 80s -initial Jrs had normal chipsets, probably due to large stockpiles of old components). It certainly wasn't superior to the NES as such, but it had advantages with trade-offs. (it was generally superior than the A8 and C64 in graphics -the main disadvantages would be onboard sound and CPU time, but you had better color and use of color than either of those, more flexibility of sprites, reasonable hardware scrolling/assist support) Many of the real-world problems were circumstantial though, not due to flaws of MARIA, but implementation for 1984 with the time constraints, cost constraints, and backwards compatibility constraints of the design. (of course, some of that crossed over with the hardware being designed by VERY new engineers learning LSI by the seat of their pants so to speak -and no collaboration with them and Atari's engineers to facilitate use of DRAM, more complex bus interfacing, onboard/embedded sound, etc) In general, it was well suited for the 1984 release planned though, and everything else was a matter of getting support and high volume production and strong market interest to facilitate tight programming of experienced developers, strong 1st and 3rd party development support, embedded bank switching logic and low-cost embedded sound chips (quite possibly doing both in the same ASIC like many NES mappers), or potential lock-on type add-ons depending on the case. (though I don't think they had any plans for the likes of an expansion module as such, just on cart expansions -which would be increasingly feasible as volumes increases, just as they were on the NES, except still cheaper due to the smaller PCBs and single bus design) It can do most/all of that with various trade-offs, but most is done very differently. (hence the context of developers transitioning directly from the likes of the A8/5200/VCS -especially the latter with its quirks- since the 7800's architecture wouldn't seem odd or difficult in that context -only after the defacto-standard of tilemaps and x/y position registers with developers heavily focused on that would it become alien and problematic, and it's not really fair to fault the 7800 for that either since those things had not yet emerged as full standards in 1983) Well that's really nothing to go by whatsoever, even more so than the likes of the 32x or Jaguar (as both of those at least had examples BITD that came somewhat close to pushing the hardware's limits). The 7800 got weak support due to it being a victim of circumstances (many, many circumstances) that meant it got a limited number of games with relatively low production values and pretty much no independent 3rd party development at all. (ie all games were in-house or -more commonly- commissioned games from 3rd party developers, usually licensed computer games with a few unique titles) The 7800's late gen games are more like what 1986 could have had if it was released in '84 with full effort and an array of titles expanding into the high-end (ie with 128k games by 1987). With Atari Corp's position in 1986/87, they had tons going against them with the only advantages being that they at least had was an established brand name and good marketing/management under Michael Katz (in spite of an extremely tight budget -the opposite for Sega, huge marketing budget ahead of Nintendo initially, but weak marketing/management in the US). Things got worse as support more and more favored Nintendo both due to hardware merits and (more significantly) Nintendo's market position and clout to push monopolistic licensing contracts. By the time Atari Corp was reasonably funded in the late 80s (you started seeing that by 1987 even), they had already fallen to a very negative position against Nintendo (still well ahead of Sega in market share/position until the end of the 80s from figures I've seen) and thus still had a relatively small budget to push against Nintendo for software or advertising. (and 3rd parties were basically locked out by that point, even if they did want to develop for the 7800 -hence Atari being the publisher of almost every single game on the system) The biggest potential they missed out on in that context (given their limitations from 1986 on) was drawing game licenses/development support from European computer developers. (not really big names in the US marketing wise, but a lot of good games that could have catered to the US market) I'm not sure if they ever tried to offer free licensing to 3rd parties or loop-holes to get around Nintendo (like Atari published games that were treated as 3rd party games with corresponding royalties), but that would certainly be interesting to find out. Given their position, it's really a wonder that you saw any 7800 games that were competitive (or even had some advantages) against NES contemporaries. (Joust, BallBlazer, Xenophobe, maybe one or 2 others were actually worse on the NES) The NES is like the 2600: a VERY long lifespan with strong development support that really maxed out the system's potential for the time (or came very close to it) as well as using on-cart hardware to expand on some limitations. (VCS mainly had bank switching and occasional RAM expansion -the latter a rather significant hack due to lack of Phi2- and even the likes of David Crane's DPC coprocessor for Pitfall II -including a rather ingenious hack to allow sound expansion through the cart slot of a system without any remote provisions for such -I think it streams 4-bit PCM and plays that via volume modulation through one of TIA's channels, hence the scratchy sound) It's not, though there are some trade-offs (just as POKEY vs SID or such), the APU is obviously more advanced and especially more capable without special software tricks. (many of which aren't possible on the 7800 as they are on the 5200/A8 since IRQ is heavily limited in utility by DMA contention -inconsistent CPU time in active display- ) Hell, the APU is notable superior to the SID in some respects. (4 hardware channels -but less flexible- and the DMC) Hell, if you put POKEY in the NES, you'd have a lot more flexibility with it than in the 7800 (lots of CPU time without contention and thus full flexibility with the interrupt driven effects), and more so than the A8 since you has the full 1.79 MHz without contention vs the ~1.2 MHz performance of the A8/5200 after video DMA and DRAM refresh. If you want more detailed and definitive tech info, maybe try Groovybee if he's willing to talk on the subject. What if you're a general classic gaming fan who wants to discuss this stuff? What if you like ALL of these consoles and computers (unlike some who fight over Atari Systems vs other Atari Corp/Inc systems even ) and like history and/or technical and/or general fun/collecting of this stuff in general. I know it's unrealistic for the general populous of a dedicated Atari forum to be super well rounded in preferences as such (like myself, Appolloboy, or some others), but I'd at least hope that some reasonable discussion on a logical level would be possible aside from personal preferences. (and the blatant hate from some is really offputting in such a discussion) Anyone who can't see the NES's huge library of good games (for the time) that catered heavily to the mass market (and was marketed well in Japan and North America -hit and miss in Europe) is not willing to take part in logical discussion. I don't go to Sega-16 expencting the members to be blatantly biased towards Sega stuff, otherwise I wouldn't go there at all. (as I've said before, the main reason I avoid Nintendo forums is just that reason: even the best cases -like Nintendoage- are full of idiot fanboys with no reasonable respect or interest in ralistic discussions) Granted, discussion technical, business/marketing, historical, and hypothetical stuff (from any category) is different from personal feelings on what you like in general. That said, I agree that it was a bit unfair to single you out, especially since you haven't been nearly as unfair as others. (I rather like most of your discussions . . . certain others would have been much better examples -I usually don't like to single people out, but I find underball's attitude extremely offputting vs someone gearhead who obviously has biases/preferences but is at least up for reasonable discussion without hatred)

Someone else is doing an RPG type thing on the Jag? Cool : I hope to hear about this in due time I wouldn't really call that an "RPG type game" . . . it would be like calling Zelda an RPG (which some do wrongly all too often -aside from Zelda 2, which may be considered an action-RPG); it's like calling Tomb Raider and RPG . There's some very distinct differences from an adventure/action-adventure (or adventure/puzzle, graphic adventure, text adventure, etc) and an RPG (of any combination of genres thereof, Japanese or Western, action or turn based, text or graphic). Personally, I like adventure/action-adventure games more than RPGs in general (though I like RPGs to a fair extent, some genres more than others -I'm not so big on strategy RPGs and I prefer games without random battles). I think this was address in another recent AA thread, ah, found it: For the acronym-challenged what are: WRPG, CRPG, JRPGs? JRPG = Japanese Role Playing Game CRPG = Computer Role Playing Game WRPG = Western Role Playing Game Reference to style of RPG video game. JRPGs like, say, Final Fantasy are much different in form than CRPG/WRPGs like, say, Ultima. In a nutshell, the latter is closer in experience to the old pen and paper RPGs, with heavier customization and non-linearity whereas the former offers less overall customization but more focus on narrative. Both, obviously, as RPGs in the video game medium are stat and customization based, which is what makes them different from, say, the action/adventure genre. That's part of why LoZ...sorry, Legend of Zelda, isn't an RPG or action/RPG. It's an action/adventure. It merges the action game elements not with RPG stat or customization really but rather with adventure game elements like environmental puzzles, exploration of the environment, item hunting, etc. Same deal with Midnight Mutants on 7800. Action/adventure game. There isn't an RPG on 7800, sadly. Big hole in the line up. Not my favorite genre at all (I rather action games, particularly shmups, and action/adventures) but it would've been nice to see something along the lines of an Ultima on 7800. ...sorry...kinda went off on a tangent. I'm a genre classification geek. Just don't do something like say Metroid Prime is an FPS, and I'll be fine

That sounds more realistic, and it would also have made more sense for the smaller (non bank switched 32/48k) games to be cheaper in general like Sega's card games. $10 would have made some sense for older games that had been on the market for a while. (ie even if the launch games weren't $10 in '86, they could have been sensibly $10 -or close to it- a bit later on) Were the newer 2600 games priced at $10 or less?

Could it be he held anti-Japanese views? And I don't mean to assert that as a slam either...the guy was a victim of the Axis Powers so I can't fault him or many other people of his generation for that possibility... From what I've read on Tramiel (and comments made by him), his push against the Japanese came from their business practices and price dumping that he saw destroy (more or less) several US consumer product markets he was involved with. (typewriters, adding machines, and calculators -albeit TI is still a major player in the latter alongside Casio and such) The same thing happened with DRAM and some other massed produced component markets being virtually destroyed in the US. Though the video game market went to favor Japan for a different reason than price dumping as such, and that's mainly to do with Nintendo's initial success, the strong JP software market, and Nintendo's corresponding success in the west. (of course, Sony changed things again and came closer to dumping -though really just throwing its corporate weight around by selling at an unprecedented loss on top of heavy R&D and marketing budgets with plans to make that up in massive software sales, so more of a monopolistic approach on the razor and blade business model) Had Nintendo had reasonable competition in Japan prior to (or during) the release of the Famicom, Nintendo wouldn't have been able to institute limited licensing agreements as such. (ie competition from Sega among others, or localized marketing of western consoles -it seems like the VCS was managed terribly in Japan under license and the 2800 was far too late, so Nintendo basically ended up in a position in Japan like Atari had in the late 70s US). That, and strong competition when it came to western markets (namely Sega and Atari) would have split things and weakened Nintendo's ability to push such licensing contracts as well, even with the established position in Japan. It's a shame that such competition has rarely surfaced in the video game markets. (you sort of have that now, but in a rather different market in general, and you had it with the 4th generation -NEC and Nintendo in Japan, Sega and Nintendo in the rest of the world -and in Europe with the NES/SMS/7800 and computers -albeit the 7800 was a relatively small player, but I think it still managed better overall market share than in the US)

There's a lot of crossovers in the industry in a number of other areas as well (especially engineers), but that certainly applies on the executive level. It's interesting to note the crossover with Mattel and Sega as well (in Katz's case, you had Coleco on top of that), but it's not all in the same order either. (Katz was at Mattel before Atari and Sega after, Stolar was at Atari before Sega, and then moved on to Mattel as president -Tom Kalinske had been president of Mattel prior to Sega, though he was never at Atari)

Not to mention those who'd want the non working 130 at a lower price to use for parts or to try and repair.

Was it Mead Ames-Klein or Elie Kenan that Atari made a big deal about [to Atari Explorer and Antic/STart] who was supposed to turn around the company and move all operations to Boston but lasted like one month on the job? For awhile there, Atari Corp. was like a revolving door with their "leadership" much like the Soviet Union prior to Gorby, except the Atari people weren't croaking. I'm not sure, but I remember reading that Ted Hoff was brought in for that reason. (and of course, Morgan was for Atari Inc, but he seems to have been the only one to actually make headway as such -of course the split killed all of that -and Hoff was also in the worst situration of any of those, coming into Atari Corp in 1995) Give this timeline: http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/interactive.html Mead Ames-Klein was only there for a couple months, so it sounds like he's the one you're thinking of.

Well considering they axed most of the product under him (2600, 7800, XEGS) not long in to his tenure, I'm not surprised at them wanting to consolidate back over and him wanting to leave. Weren't the 2600 and 7800 not officially discontinued until 1992? (so that's 2 years into his tenure, though I'm not sure when the XEGS was dropped -apparently in January of '92 along with the consoles and A8) But yes, they'd certainly dropped all those products prior to him leaving, and no current generation game system on the market to follow the 7800 -ie against the Genesis/TG-16/SNES. (the Lynx would have been the only thing left to market until the Jaguar was released, the Panther and any ST derived consoles had been canceled by 1991, and by the time the Jag was released, the Entertainment division was pretty much all that was left anyway with the computers being pulled back -and it seems the Lynx was pulled back in favor of the Jaguar as well in '93/94)

Nah, it was just one among many (several larger IMO) issues that contributed to Atari Corp's problems with the 7800. (albeit, unlike some of the other critical problems -especially those directly caused by the mismanaged split/transition of Atari Consumer, it at least had positive trade-offs) Yes, I agree, though I don't think that's what the total prices were. (I know the games with SRAM onboard were significantly more, though I'm not sure of $10 being the standard price in general -rather than the price for the early games or just older releases in general -ie dropped prices after release as all platforms tend to do) In general though, I agree: they could have still focused on low pricing as a definitive element of their marketing, but tempered it more to be just cheap enough to have a significant gap over the competition and make additional changes in pricing depending on how competition responded. That, and you could do both: cater both significantly to the lower end prices as well as offering higher end games at higher prices. (though if catering to the general market model of lower pricing, the most costly games should have been less than the competition's -preferably under $40) That, and they definitely should have kept the low hardware price point (maybe even dropped it slightly lower -selling at cost- if software sales allowed it). The low cost strategy would have catered much more to the Euro market where prices were very sensitive and viral marketing was relatively effective. (except you already had various tape based platforms that would already be undercutting even the tightest cart based prices by the mid 80s, so that would be more of a bust too -and the A8 had more or less lost any chance of a strong market position in Europe by '85 -the C64 and Speccy were the main options with some support for the CPC as well) Again, I'm not sure of the actual price points of new releases for the 7800, or, for that matter, who actually dictated the market model for the system. Jack obviously would have had the influence over any final decisions, but Katz would have been the one actually managing everything to do with the game systems of the time. (from marketing to distribution to delegating software development, etc) Granted, it did dominate the European market into the late 80s (though things were changing by then and it depends somewhat on how you define "budget"). The 2600 was really the definitive budget option on the market ($10 games would have made a lot of sense for that -probably even less for some older/smaller games, especially ones that were stockpiled), as such it also only needed very modest advertising to secure that position (just enough to make sure consumers knew it was still being sold, that a few new games were still coming out, and what the general price point was -they wouldn't need to introduce the 2600 as such since it had a well established market position). As such, the 7800 was not the budget option but, rather, the lower end price bracket of the mid-range/current generation machines of the time. As such, I do agree on some points relative to pricing and games in general of the 7800: Even after all the problems and delays brought on by the split, higher margins on 7800 games would at least have allowed somewhat better competition for 1st party software (commissioned, licensed, and in-house) as well as the critically needed advertising (TV adds being one of the weakest points). Even if nearly 100% of the games still pushed on the budget side in terms of production quality, that could still cater to a certain market model as such. (but even for a budget machine -aside from an old console like the VCS or the NES in the early/mid 90s, etc- you still need to advertise it for people to really know that it exists and what its merits -or supposed merits- are) Obviously, the 7800 would have been better off with a head start and better stability from day 1 (even with the same marketing strategies used later on) and that would have meant more funds as well as a more solid market position by the time Nintendo or Sega emerged in the market in '86, but the problems Atari Corp suffered meant they were relatively stuck on the 7800 even with ideal market positioning. (they may have been able to do better, but they still had a huge up hill battle to work through with Nintendo, much more so after Nintendo had the position in the US to convince developers to sign onto such restrictive contracts) As a side note on the Atari Corp pricing: I think the drop to $99 for the 800XL in 1984 was a bit premature as well since they probably could have cut to around $150 and still had an advantage over the C64 at the time. (Atari Corp didn't seem to have the capacity for production/distribution at that time to even take advantage of possible sales increases at the $99 level -assuming that was even a profitable price point and not just used to generate revenue with stockpiled hardware- so that ended up somewhat moot -they could have made more with their limited stock with more tempered price cuts, perhaps less so in Europe) Again, I don't think $10 is an accurate figure as such, but in any case it would only have been Atari published (developed/commissioned) games that they'd have such influence over. 3rd parties should have been free to develop and sell games for any category as they saw fit (Atari's budget marketing strategy would have had some influence on that, but would not have been a fully deciding factor). The bigger issue is that Atari had almost no 3rd party publisher support (almost all games were developed with Atari Corp money by commission -not sure if any were in house), and that's something that obviously got less and less likely of being corrected after Nintendo came in with their monopolistic licensing contracts. (and something that the 1984 launch could critically have changed, even without a strong marketing budget) One thing I've been wanting to know (but haven't found details on -and haven't really prodded Curt or Marty for details yet) is how Atari Corp handled 3rd party licensing for the 7800. It's a bit ironic that the 7800 ended up with one of the most powerful lockout schemes of the time (almost foolproof and very hard to crack), but was in a position that rendered it largely useless. It seem like Atari Corp should have even considered free licensing for all 3rd party publishers (maybe just a requirement for quality assurance and avoiding the likes of the 2600 porn games ) with only the development tools/hardware being charged for. Beyond that, they could have even offered 3rd parties (especially smaller developers) an out for Nintendo's contracts by offering direct publishing under the Atari label but retaining royalties/sales (or even production) all for those 3rd parties. (whether the licensees were totally free or changed anything would probably depend on Atari's market position -ie the weaker they were, the more favorable the contracts should have been) Many of those problems also tie into my comments on the A8/5200 being used in place of the 7800 entirely. (or various situations where that could have been preferable for a variety of reasons -I detailed many possible circumstances for the 5200 or A8 in my previous 2 posts just above yours) Though a couple added things I hadn't realized: the footprint of the Atari 800 is actually about the same as the 800XL and the motherboard isn't much smaller even, but the 600XL is actually significantly smaller than either. (not sure how the motherboard compares to the XEGS though) So it may have been more cost effective to not invest in the XE series at all, but work more on moderate cost reductions of the existing A8 machines (especially without massive sales figures to make the economies of scale attractive for a redesign -and then you'd want to push more like CGIA anyway). And, of course, it would have been less confusing to consumers if the XL style cases were retained in general. (some XL keyboard feel almost as "mushy" as the XE boards as it is -whether their manufacturing cost showed that is another matter- so actually switching to dome switch+flex circuit keyboards in the normal XL cases wouldn't have been that big of a shift either) Tying into my above statements on a possible XL based game system for '84/85 (ie ASAP), they probably should have used the 600XL motherboard directly and possibly even most of the tooling for the case, but removed the keyboard and added a connector for an external keyboard a la XEGS (except using a ribbon cable to connect it to the normal keyboard connector on the motherboard rather than redesigning the motherboard for a directly mounted connector -at least for early models). You'd then have either a minimal membrane keypad to plug into that pack-in (for all the keys used by most games) or have those keys built into the main unit as buttons and a membrane keypad. (some most used keys might be better as buttons -a la XEGS- to reduce wearing of the membrane contacts)

My 400 (formerly Apolloboy's) is: AV 468285 492 The 492 is stamped. (I assume that refers to the 49th week of the 1982 fiscal year); the 4 is 492 is also skewed slightly to the upper left away from the other 2 (presumably a bad stamp). I haven't read through the whole thread yet, but I noticed the point about early models having the 8 vs 16k RAM noted: was there any notification as such for later machines that shipped with 32k (or 16k machines after 32k ones started shipping)?

When you mentioned voxels I immediately thought Amok, but you beat me to it, haha. That's certainly a good example, as it runs at a blazing framerate for a 32-bit game (and as you noted, it has a mixture of textured polygons, too). More games would have run in a much more fluid manner during this generation had they used this method (including Jag titles!). Yeah, and interestingly there's a demo of Amok's renderer on the 32x from the Scanvenger teams' demo. (Zyrinx and Lemon were the 2 32x developers working on Scavenger projects and you see Lemon's Amok demo in the Scavenger 32x demo tape posted online in several places) I haven't played Amok myself though, and I'm not sure it did any Doom/Duke3D (etc) type height map portions. (again, a really nice engine pushed on a CPU/DSP -ie Jag RISC- resource heavy platform -PC/Jag/32x/Pippin- would really have been best to push faster "3D" methods that other platforms couldn't accelerate in hardware -though the Saturn has more bandwidth/CPU/DSP power than the 32x -N64 might have done very well at such too with an RSP microcode implementation aimed at such sheer flexibility) I think Outcast uses doom-like height mapped spans for some buildings/objects as well as the voxel terrain, water effects engine, and polygon renderer. (that's a really neat example and one of the last purely software rendered PC games -aside from some Java/Flash stuff- ) Of course, if hardware acceleration on PCs had focused on flexibility (powerful DSP/GPU along with moderate blitter based acceleration for 2D/3D textures/objects/shading), you could have seen all that done without excessive CPU resource on PCs. (granted, later gen GPUs actually did push for such flexibility -more like the Jag in some respects- but by then "real 3D" had become the norm -though to this day there are many cases -like most ground/on-foot/vehicle based 1st/3rd person games- where you could use voxel terrain instead of polygons without any added limitations; other games would be a bit constrained by height map rendering though) Not really. It's just a 2D zoom/rotation feature, and to do 3D you have to break each triangle into segments, then draw then one by one. It can't draw a complete texture-mapped (or even flat-shaded, for that matter) triangle by itself. Yes, exactly, that's hardware texture mapping, or more accurately: affine line texture rendering. (as much as the gouraud shading is hardware as well -or plain line filling for solid shaded polys) Texture mapping isn't a 3D thing, it's 2D, you need more than that for 3D. The Jag has no hardware for warped primitive (triangle or quad) rasterization, true, but that's a separate issue from texture mapping. (ie it can't do flat shaded polys in hardware either -needs the GPU to set every single line for the blitter to fill, just like you'd need to for textures) The problem is that texture mapping is unbuffered and thus slow due both to having to work with single words at a time (8 or 16 bits -no support for 4 bit sources iirc) and dealing with page breaks all the time since there's no line buffering or separate source and destination. With buffering like you've got for gouraud shading, texture mapped polygonal 3D would be almost as fast as solid shaded 3D. That lack of buffering is also a great hindrance to rendering rotating sprites or a warped BG plane. Hell, if the blitter's texture mapping feature was fully buffered, the need to have the OPL at all would be much less. You could then render everything with the blitter at pretty high speed and have high speed rotation/warping effects for textures as well -OPL can only stretch/zoom, maybe more so if there was a special high-speed mode for the blitter that disallowed rotation like the Saturn's single point VDP1 "sprites" or the PSX's 2D mode (rendering rectangular object "sprite" cells of any size that could be stretched/scaled but not rotated, thus approaching 100% of the 133 MB/s bandwidth for 2D drawing -sort of like the restriction of the OPL to only doing scaled rectangular objects except you'd be sharing the same logic of the blitter and it wouldn't be as flexible as the OPL for 2D -the PSX's "sprite mode" itself is superficially similar to what the OPL displays or sort of what the Neo Geo does in the sense that it's all sprites -but a big difference compared to the NG's hardware sprite logic). That's what gave the PSX an advantage in 2D over the Saturn in some cases too: the Saturn has a powerful tilemap based BG engine (4 planes with lots of flexibility), but the PSX smokes the Saturn's VDP1 in pure 2D drawing (and texture mapping in general), so a sprite heavy game (or a game not highly optimized to use the tilemap BGs of the Saturn) would thus favor the PSX. (the fact that PC GPUs and many other blitter type systems worked in such a fashion -and tilemap based consoles/arcade machines were becoming proportionally less common- that also favored the PSX for many multiplatform 2D games for PC and such -and many such games directly ported to the Saturn using VDP1 would likely suffer from slowdown due to bandwidth limitations) Of course, all of that is worthless for a game like doom or duke nukem 3D. (those are all column based renderers and thus only the scaled 2D objects would be any good for affine texture rendering -which the Jag's OPL can handle fine) You'd either need a fast CPU/DSP to handle the raycasting and vertical column (constant Z) texture rendering, or you'd need to rebuild the engines to support polygons as well as use software perspective correction to avoid distortion. (PSX Doom did that, 3DO Doom probably would have been much better if it used quads rather than CPU rendering -didn't help that you could only code to 3DO's C libraries/OS and that 3DO Doom didn't allow a low-detail option for 1/2 horizontal res a la PC/Jag/32x/SNES -Saturn Doom was a sloppy PSX port and coupld have been better with a properly optimized Quad renderer like Duke Nukem 3D on the Saturn or a CPU/DSP based raycasting renderer)

Wasn't Mead Ames-Klein head of entertainment for a brief period after Katz before he left as well? (and was then replaced by Larry for Entertainment and Elie Kenan as general manager of Atari Corp) http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/interactive.html It seem the issue over location came up again in Summer of 1992 as Atari Corp was consolidating operations back to California, leading to Siegel's departure: Atari shifted Lynx sales, marketing, and support from the Lombard, Illinois location of Atari Entertainment to the Sunnyvale, CA headquarters. Larry Siegel, president of Atari Entertainment, chose to leave the company rather than relocate to California. Bernie Stolar would now head the Atari entertainment marketing/development operations. After which, Bernie Stolar took up the post as head of Entertainment briefly. (he left that October -of course, he would soon move on to a position at Sony of America and be a major playing in organizing their release of the PSX and would later serve as president of Sega of America at possibly its worst period of the Saturn) I don't see anyone else listed after '92, so I guess Sam was acting as head of Entertainment as well at that point. (granted, by '93, there wasn't really much left other than the entertainment division) Yeah, except it was Warner who did all the firing (100% layoffs of Atari Inc consumer division personnel), Tramiel was interviewing much of that staff for positions at TTL (Atari Corp). Of course, with the absolute mess created by Warner's handling of the split, it's no wonder that people didn't understand what was really going on. (perhaps to some extent exacerbated by Tramiel, but it was largely Warner's responsibility to properly organize the liquidation/split of Atari Inc and the related transition -and it was their fault that Atari Inc was left out in the cold during the whole of the negotiations for the split)

You mean the same rights that Atari Inc ended up securing? (at least in part; I'm not sure on the details, but some seem to have been non exclusive licenses and -aside from Donkey Kong- also applied to Atari's consoles)

I have the PS1 version and its like a cut down kiddies version. No where near as good. Personally speaking I really like Hoverstrike and it is one of the few games that shows how well the Jag can do 3D with textures when programmed properly. That said however the CD version is soooo much better . . . . Seeing what the GPU can push with column based renderers (ray-casting based height maps like Doom or the more complex interpolated height map of Phase Zero or Atari Owl's project -not sure if owl's is interpolated) is the most impressive on the system. I think AVP is doing that too (I can't imagine they'd have used the Blitter's texture mapping feature for that -at least it would have been a bad move performance wise), though it's not nearly as optimzied and rather choppy compared to Doom or Wolf3D. (especially since the game engine itself seems no more complex than Wolf3D, just with more textures and use of floor/ceiling textures, but the same limited 90 degree grid type maps like Wolf3D -ie not even like Gloom on the Amiga with diagonal walls) The jag has hardware texture mapping and you even see it a little in Club Drive (you can see the texture warping), but it's slow (one of the few features of the blitter that's totally unbuffered -not even a word buffer), rather like the Saturn's VDP1. (which is only reasonably fast as it has multiple buses/banks of fast SDRAM and no contention, I think the 3DO had a 32-bit word buffer for textures but maybe it was unbuffered like the Saturn and Jaguar -and with bandwidth/contention issues closer to the Jag than the Saturn) It's a shame that Jag developers hadn't pushed hard for height map based engines (voxels and Doom/wolf3D type spans using constant Z texture rendering) with sparing use of polygons (even more so for affine rendered textures -it has very fast and smooth gouraud shading in CRY color mode, almost as fast as plain flat shading) and probably heavy use of scaled sprites -Phase Zero only has voxels and sprites, though 2D objects and textures eat up a lot of ROM space -even compressed- compared to code, maps, and 3D models. Even primitive Commanche quality voxels would have been pretty impressive for early jag games (with gradual evolution of such for later games). Imagine if Cybermorph had been designed from the ground up with voxel terrain like Commanche with sparing use of shaded (maybe some texture mapped) polygons and sprite stuff. (preferably using Doom type columns/spans in place of polygons for any ground model applicable for such -buildings, etc) The later Amok is a good example of a combined voxel/polygon renderer. (though it's much more primitive than what Phase Zero pushed -but that avoids polygons too) They probably should have pushed for a Commache port as well. Can you imagine Cybermorph with Commanche-like voxel terrain and a higher framerate (maybe longer draw distance even)? That also would have been pushing something that only PCs (in software) and the Jag would really be capable at: later 3D consoles had hardware focused mainly on polygon based rendering (as did the 3DO -albeit using quads rather than trips like the Saturn and Sega's arcade boards). The Saturn actually had enough CPU grunt (and a general purpose DSP coprocessor in the SCU) to make it fairly flexible for such as well (if pushed), but it really wasn't pushed in that direction and the Jag's GPU is much faster at those sort of things than the Saturn's SH2s (not sure about the DSP, but it was poorly doccumented/supported iirc and tough to program as with most DSPs -unlike the CPU-like nature of the Jag's RISC cores, buggy, but MUCH more programmer friendly than most normal DSPs of the time like in the Falcon, Super FX, SVP chip, various arcade boards, etc -I think Hitachi's SH-DSP line may have pushed more towards that sort of programmability)

They were all cheaper. In some cases way cheaper. All of those, or just the Commodore cart/disk/tape examples? (ie all those consoles had cheaper prices for 16k carts than Atari's computers) If that was the case, something was definitely wrong with Atari's marketing of the A8's software.

Accidentally edited this into a post in the wrong thread earlier: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/163658-7800-atari-corp-revival/page__st__200__p__2225079#entry2225079 Or IBM taking a 50% stake in Atari Inc. as Steve Ross was pressing them for... Heh, there's your vertical integration. Then again, they'd also be adding even more bureaucracy to the company. (I shudder to think what a wort case scenario would have been for Warner AND IBM management conflicts with Atari, especially given the mistakes/management issues IBM made on the consumer products side of things) You have examples like the PCJr, PS/2, OS/2, etc (many things having lots of potential but being screwed up in one way or another), in some cases taking longer to fail than others and still contributing to market standards. The PCJr was a pretty fast flop, but the Tandy 1000 is clearly more like what the PCJr should have been. ISA cards for normal PCs to add PCJr sound/video would also have been significant -possibly requiring a replacement BIOS for proper compatibility. (or developers having to cater to that with different software installation/configuration options) It also probably would have made more sense if PCJr video had been directly EGA compatible for the CGA res modes, or if EGA had been directly derived from CGA using similar packed-pixel graphics and such and thus directly compatible with the PCJr's extended CGI by default. They also could have tacked PCJr video onto the EGA standard as CGA compatibility more or less was, but that's less cost effective for EGA. (then again, by the late 80s you had ASICs supporting CGA+EGA+Hercules anyway and the logic for TGA/PCJr video was directly built on CGA anyway -ATi's small Wonder series also included Plantronics Colorplus which was virtually identical in functionality to PCJr extended CGA) The lack of hardware scrolling with EGA was obviously a mistake as well, that and not allowing indexed 6-bit RGB in the lower res modes. (actually, with PCJr modes supported, they could have focused on those alone for catering to CGA monitors and put an emphasis on using the full 6-bit RGB for all EGA resolutions rather than catering to the CGA default palette for the 200 line modes) The PS/2 line was just too proprietary and expensive at the wrong time. IBM tried to do what they could/should have put more emphasis on with the original PC at a time when they needed to be competing favorably on the terms of the clone market standards. (the PS/2s should have been more easily expandable using standard interfaces -including affordable 5.25" drives among other things- and on top of offering ISA slots -as the simplistic model 25 already did- they should have either made MCB cheap to license or pushed for something more like EISA and done the same license wise -EISA is reasonably close to MCB's performance, but keeps board clutter down and adds flexibility with any of those slots usable as 16-bit ISA slots as well)

Did the 32k cards (a al 400) work in the 800 as well? (ie have 32k with one card or 48k with 32k+16k) Edit, found my answer: http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/800.htm "800, replaces middle 16K Ram card only, remove back / last 16K Ram card" So to use the 32k card in the 800, you can only put it in the middle slot and optionally add the final 16k in the front slot. (with nothing in the rear slot)

RE (especially RE1) doesn't really push the PSX much, it's mostly prerendered (static or animated) backgrounds with a limited amount of polygon models rendered on top of that in a fully 2D environment (so not even any 3D game logic or physics to worry about). The jag CD should have handled it easily, but a cart would either have been very expensive, or extremely cut-back. (even if you cut all the FMV and cut down the animation and quality of the BG images with heavy lossy compression, it would take a ton of space for carts of the time or look so heavily artifacted that it wouldn't be worth it -highly cutomized edits to the prerendered BG content and levels that removed some images entirely and stylized others to cut down memory use might have allowed it to a reasonable extent) It's the memory constraints that make Alone in the Dark (and the sequel) much more practical, never mind the simplistic 3D models that could have been handled easily, even by weaker developers. (hell, you could probably get a half decent version on the Sega CD with enough optimization -there's a decent amount of CPU grunt for the 3D calculations and a blitter supporting affine texture mapping and line filling useful for 3D, it would need to be stylized for the color limits of the MD though -the SNES with the Super FX1 probably could have managed a decent version too) Kind of a shame the Jag didn't push for more PC ports back then, it could have allowed for some semi exclusives of some awesome games if they could afford the licensing or could attract 3rd parties to publish as such. You had the likes of Lucas Arts, Origin, and Sierra to push for -except Origin had been bought out by EA in '92, so getting them may have been as difficult as getting EA's support in general. Then you had the shareware developers/publishers (they already had ID working with them) and the likes of Apogee and Epic Megagames among many others. (would have been neat to have enhanced remakes/ports of some of the EGA Commander Keen and Duke Nukem games as well as the 2D and 3D VGA games -you had blake stone prior to Duke 3D, and given the raycasting performance of the Jag's GPU, Duke3D probably would have been a considerably better performer than ID's planned Quake) It would have been really neat to have Jazz Jackrabbit on the Jaguar for sure. Then you have all the European computer/console developers as well. (obviously Atari had a better chance with the Jag in Europe with their market position and brand recognition -though they missed their chance to pull that off)

Those are all ROM carts though, not disk/tape games. (any idea on the VIC or C64's cartridge prices for games of similar size? -ie 16k in this case) Edit: or for that matter, how did 16k VCS, Intellivision, CV, or 5200 games cost? What about disks or tapes? (albeit the latter would have been quickly falling out of favor in the US in the early 80s in favor of disk) That was one of the A8's biggest advantages too: MUCH faster disk load times (19.2k baud vs 2.4k for the normal loaders -and for fast loaders the A8still smoked the best cases of the C64 with up to 3x that default bitrate with 57.6 baud iirc -SIO's max bandwidth is about 128k baud). Obviously that's one area that Atari missed on marketing. (imagine the adds they could have pushed depicting the horribly slow C64 disk speeds -actually slower than the CoCo or Speccy tape bitrates when at 2x speed mode, though CBM's default tape loaders were horribly slow as well at just 300 baud -Atari's weren't great either, but still twice that, albeit the hardware FSK decoder limited fastloaders on the A8 much more than the C64 -only really an issue in the tape-heavy Euro market) Carts were best for entry level users with the 16k 400 or 600XL without RAM upgrades. (granted, you'd soon hit a wall where the cost of more RAM -32k without further modding on the 400- and a disk drive would be a much better investment than shelling out for carts -especially if you were buying new releases, plus there were quite a few disk exclusives) Or even with only 16k there was a fair amount of tape and disk software available. The same was the case with the VIC 20 and TI99, entry level computers with limited RAM and heavy emphasis on cart based games rather than disk or tape. (you'd definitely need at least the 16k expansion on the VIC for any decent disk/tape game use) The hardware costs are something Atari lagged at as well and then screwed up with the 1200XL when they finally got it out. (they should/could have pushed for an earlier redesign as soon as FCC Class B was established, or prior to that they could have pushed such single-board models in Europe -with no shielding at all- and in the US under class A for models used as dedicated computers with monitors rather than TVs -like the Apple II or TRS-80, though they'd have to tighten RFI constraints on those machines after class B was established -they also should have had an intermediate version of the 400 with a full keyboard and maybe monitor AV out) Missing vertical integration was an issue, but there were a lot of other areas to address. (cost reduction and consolidation of the general hardware, upgradability, flexibility of a comprehensive range of machines, and then the marketing/software model in general -and catering to the specifics of the European market) I wonder if there would have been significant cost advantages if they'd stuck with the 800XL form factor rather than the XE redesign (the new motherboard and case would obviously have accrued R&D costs and required retooling -even if it was cheaper to make, that would only have really mattered if they pushed really high production volumes). That, and changing the form factor and styling once again (and changing the name) probably made for a major marketing/consumer perception headache. (to reduce cost, maybe they could have consolidated the 800XL motherboard to fit in the 600XL's case when the 600XL was discontinued) Given the relatively weak late 80s sales of the XE line, I can't imagine the volumes were high enough to really make the XE redesign worthwhile when all was said and done. For that matter, if they were ever going to release a directly compatible A8 derived game system, it probably should have been ASAP in '84 or '85 and probably directly sharing one of the motherboards with the A8 computers, probably the 600XL. They probably should have used somewhat similar styling too (maybe heavier use of black to tie into the game console emphasis), but otherwise just cut it back to a slightly more compact case with no onboard keyboard and the connector for the keyboard matrix attaching to an external connector (like the DA-15 port of the XEGS) with a minimalistic membrane or chicklet keypad pack-in (including only the most used keys for games) and a full XL-type keyboard as an accessory using that same connector. That especially would have made sense with the conflicts over the 7800, though I already mentioned that in some earlier discussions. (that, and you could argue they should have done that instead of the 5200 back in 1982 using the 600's motherboard design) Or IBM taking a 50% stake in Atari Inc. as Steve Ross was pressing them for... Heh, there's your vertical integration. Then again, they'd also be adding even more bureaucracy to the company. (I shudder to think what a wort case scenario would have been for Warner AND IBM management conflicts with Atari, especially given the mistakes/management issues IBM made on the consumer products side of things) You have examples like the PCJr, PS/2, OS/2, etc (many things having lots of potential but being screwed up in one way or another), in some cases taking longer to fail than others and still contributing to market standards. The PCJr was a pretty fast flop, but the Tandy 1000 is clearly more like what the PCJr should have been. ISA cards for normal PCs to add PCJr sound/video would also have been significant -possibly requiring a replacement BIOS for proper compatibility. (or developers having to cater to that with different software installation/configuration options) It also probably would have made more sense if PCJr video had been directly EGA compatible for the CGA res modes, or if EGA had been directly derived from CGA using similar packed-pixel graphics and such and thus directly compatible with the PCJr's extended CGI by default. They also could have tacked PCJr video onto the EGA standard as CGA compatibility more or less was, but that's less cost effective for EGA. (then again, by the late 80s you had ASICs supporting CGA+EGA+Hercules anyway and the logic for TGA/PCJr video was directly built on CGA anyway -ATi's small Wonder series also included Plantronics Colorplus which was virtually identical in functionality to PCJr extended CGA) The lack of hardware scrolling with EGA was obviously a mistake as well, that and not allowing indexed 6-bit RGB in the lower res modes. (actually, with PCJr modes supported, they could have focused on those alone for catering to CGA monitors and put an emphasis on using the full 6-bit RGB for all EGA resolutions rather than catering to the CGA default palette for the 200 line modes) The PS/2 line was just too proprietary and expensive at the wrong time. IBM tried to do what they could/should have put more emphasis on with the original PC at a time when they needed to be competing favorably on the terms of the clone market standards. (the PS/2s should have been more easily expandable using standard interfaces -including affordable 5.25" drives among other things- and on top of offering ISA slots -as the simplistic model 25 already did- they should have either made MCB cheap to license or pushed for something more like EISA and done the same license wise -EISA is reasonably close to MCB's performance, but keeps board clutter down and adds flexibility with any of those slots usable as 16-bit ISA slots as well)

Yes, it did have potential, and, yes, they certainly screwed up marketing in spite of being a huge corporation with vertical integration. (NEC sort of did the same the same thing with the TG-16's marketing/management in the US -and not releasing it at all in Europe) Given the hardware of the system, I think it would have done better if pushed more as a mid to high end machine with some emphasis on the business side. (having a commonly available 80 column text board would have been nice, or integrating it like the Apple IIe -they also could have invested in builing a highly competitive OS, perhaps with CP/M or PC-DOS compatible file/data format -and models with a full loadout of peripheral ports out of the box) For cusiness stuff, RGB (or Y'PbPr since that's what the 9928 used natively, or Y/C short of that) monitors would have been significant, or at least high quality composite/monochome monitors for the colorburst disabled modes. (iirc the 40 column text mode has colorburst disabled, otherwise that would be pretty weak -a good composite monitor with a pure luma signal input would allow RGB quality grayscale as you more or less got with CGA/Tandy/PCJr's grayscale modes when hooked to good composite monitors) Offering a compatible low-end model made some sense too, but they definitely should have been pushing higher-end models from the start in 1981. (if not aiming differently back in '79 with the initial release of the 99/4) The CPU is the biggest sticking point for it as a competitive low-end machine. It was in-house, but rather costly to manufacture (including the large package) and required high-speed RAM to avoid wait states. (granted, the 650x CPUs have some of the same issues, hence the commonly slow clock speeds used for many -especially without added logic to allow full single cycle memory accesses rather than 1/2 cycles and the use of fast page DRAM, though I'm not sure on the exact comparison with the 9900) For a more low-cost oriented machine, the use of the Z80 with that chipset (as seen with many others -CV/Adam/Sord M5/Spectrvideo/MSX) was far more favorable in general (cheaper CPU without RAM speed limitations). Such a machine still could have pushed for higher-end stuff as well, but wouldn't have had the same power of TI's CPU. (though it would have had the advantage of using a very common architecture -and potential for CP/M to be used directly) The MSX did just that with a range of machines (albeit a standard rather than one company) for an array of applications. (it also used a better sound chip than TI or some others) In hindsight, using off the shelf or licensed Z80s in their computer from the start probably would have been a good move on TI's part and could have solved most/all of the fundamental hardware disadvantages of the system (other than having a technically less powerful CPU, at least if left at the same clock speed). Of course, that still wouldn't have mattered much if TI hadn't solved the marketing issues. (including the closed software model) Yes, though it was good for 1 or 2 accessories. What would have been nice is a universally compatible module form factor that could thus be used both as single plug-in modules/carts or be plugged into an expansion box. (Tandy sort of did that for the CoCo's cartridge expansion port with a multi-pak expansion module -heh, I hadn't realized Tandy was using that term for cartridges prior to Nintendo's "Game Paks" ) The full expansion box was over the top too, they should have offered a lower-cost middleground option as well. (smaller, cheaper, simpler, retaining the sidecar direct plug-in form factor, etc) Actually, that's one bad thing about the A8's PBI as well: it's a male connector and thus unattractive to use for the standard plug-in cards (obviously cards for the 1090XL would have been incompatible with the PBI directly), so a female slot that was also pin-compatible with normal expansion cards would have been preferable. (the ECI actually did that too -and reduced cost by piggybacking on the cart slot . . . the 1200XL probably should have done that, especially with the side mounted cart slot being more convenient for such add-ons than the rear mounted PBI -they also could have had high-end models with a full array of expansion slots built-in like the Apple II or PC) The ST repeated that mistake too. (they should have had something more like the ECI or Apple, ISA, VIC/C64/Tandy cart slots, etc rather than just the basic ROM-only cart slot with even less flexibility than the 400's cart slot -they also should have had higher end desktop models with multiple expansion slots out of the box from day 1)

Given the screenshots I've found online (especially gamespot which usually has accurate CGA shots -including the blue/red/green/brown King's Quest in RGB mode) seem to agree with the use of the cyan/magenta/light gray palette 1 low intensity, so it seems to have been a poor choice on the developer's part. (it's a rather mediocre conversion of the game in any case especially as far as 1990 DOS games go -not too bad for a purely budget game, but I'm not sure of the context -contra was pretty poor too, but at least it used a better palette) Black/green/red/brown (palette 0 low intensity) would definitely seem to be the best option. (maybe a couple areas where you'd use something other than black, but keeping black would probably be done most of the time) Some decent dithering would have helped too. There's also the 3rd undoccumented palette in RGB achieved by setting the display to disabled colorburst (grayscale composite) which gives black(or indexed)/red/cyan/white. (a few games like Super C used that for CGA) Of course, there's also the use of composite artifacts to rather good affect, but composite/RF use on PCs wasn't really common enough to push that strongly. (a shame there's only 1 color register to use in CGA bitmap modes and no 160x200 4bpp direct color mode -the PCJr/Tandy graphics added 4 color registers for fully indexed 2 and 4 color modes on top of direct 4bbp color modes . . . having characters only hard coded in ROM -none allowed in RAM- also removed the quite useful possibility for character based games other than those using the ROM character set -the 80 column mode would have made for some decent char based scrolling and high res dithering, and colors are fully indexed in the character modes as well with 2 colors per cell -let alone the potential for composite color artifacts on top of that )