ZylonBane

...and lack of 4 joystick ports.

I doubt they were a commodity item. The slotted ports were specifically for the 2800 controllers, which have small bumps on them that let them lock into the slotted ports.

I want some of what this guy is smoking.

It doesn't have the holes in the joystick ports sleeves.

There are actually 3 major variations on the 7800. The rare original production run with expansion port, a second run with slotted joystick ports (identical to the ports on the 2800/Sears Arcade II), and a third component-reduced version, which is the one with all the compatibility problems.

You mean like this one?

Is it set to trackball mode?

That would have been a ground-up rewrite, not an "enhancement".

It's official, I'm going to Hell--

The 6507 can already drive digital audio through it. That's about as hard as you can squeeze any sound chip.

There were definitely maps. Once you get the mapping module, this becomes apparent. One of the highest levels I got to, the layout was a huge spiral maze.

Only because you don't really know what you're talking about. The Robotron proposal (which *I* came up with) was for an ELEVEN-line kernel, not a single-line kernel. Plus, it treated the playfield as a pure RAM-based bitmap with all updating logic outside the kernel, not a RAM/ROM hybrid with logic embedded in the kernel itself. Have done any programming on any Atari, ever?

The 7800 has exactly the same sound chip as the 2600.

That's the understatement of the year. http://www.pong-story.com/atpong2.htm

Have you?

Atari DID make it. Sears only published it. And I think it's pretty fun. A straight port of the old mainframe Star Trek game. For the era it came out, I think a text-based game on the 2600 was considered more cool than lame.

Sounds like this would consume far more CPU cycles than are available in a single-line, non-mirrored playfield kernel.

Only if you have most of the 2600's RAM to spare.

Eh, kind of hard to write code to DISprove that something's possible.

See, joeybastard? This is just what I'm talking about.

Hmm, the author of that review isn't even aware that the 2600 version exists!

Yes, I have played Stargate. Note how far apart the peaks-valleys are. They're arranged so that there are never more than two sprites (missiles, ball, whatever) required on a single scan line. This approach is entirely inadequate for a game like Scramble.

Ah, sacrificed many evenings to Koronis Rift. In retrospect, the only thing it really had going for it was the spectacular graphics and terrain interaction. The way your speed and viewpoint varied as you drove around Koronis (and the shifting engine sounds) was just perfect. Looking back, the actual gameplay sucked hard. You spend all of your time either driving around, or spinning in circles trying to blast the UFOs that hassle you. Success apparently requires figuring out what the modules do via trial-and-error, but in a game where "error" means death by one or two UFO shots, followed by about two minutes to start over, experimentation isn't really encouraged. It's like if someone tried to combine Doom and Mastermind. Just doesn't work. The "Ballblazer" module was pretty cool though.

Orc Attack is a great little gem of a game. Spent hours playing it in my wasted youth. It's amazing how much variety they packed into it as you progress through the levels. FIREBOMB!

Meh, it's an aquired disinclination due to getting into way too many technical discussions where the other side just didn't "get it". In this case, the not-getting seems to be that Nukey isn't realizing that, while sprites are unlimited vertically, they are extremely limited horizontally. A 2600 playfield can represent 20 peak-valley transitions in a single line. That would require 40 sprites to smooth out the scrolling of each side of each pixel.