Phredreeke

I would think majority of 360 owners already have a harddrive, and as said above, a 8 gb flashdrive doesn't cost much.

Keep in mind that unlike the Ataris the INTV cannot change sprites mid-screen. For Ms. Pac-man the sprites available are enough for Ms. Pac-man (2 sprites, yellow and red), fruit (2 sprites, red and green for the strawberry for example) and one per ghost (the ghost's body color) On some systems the eyes of the ghosts are drawn directly to background. On the Intellivision that is a little bit harder since you use a tiled background and is limited to 64 userdefined tiles (along with 64 or ~200 predefined ones depending on the graphics mode)

There's a difference between a TV supporting NTSC and supporting it through RF. A lot of TVs will display a NTSC image when using composite or SCART cable. Very few will however pick up an NTSC image from RF. So you most likely have to modify the console to output composite or S-video.

I believe PSO v2 had a subscription fee. Strange enough as the first version was free.

A few games, Frogger and Backgammon comes to mind, updated sprite registers mid-screen to achieve a larger number of sprites. The catch is that timing is different between NTSC and PAL units, so such a game would run on either PAL or NTSC, but not both, unless you make a second version for the other system.

I would suggest adjusting mixing depending on the intensity of the previous frame, so there's more blending going from bright to dark than dark to bright.

The Dreamcast is 128-bit if you count the Vector Processing Unit, sorta like the Jaguar is 64-bit if you count the object processor/blitter

Flicker is unavoidable for Pac-man on 2600. If you want less flicker you could play Ms. Pac-man, which only flickers when needed (FYI, Pac-man shows each ghost only 1 out of 4 frames, so if you wanted to show "all at once" you'd have to blend 4 frames together...)

One difference from those machines is that the VIC-20 lacks a bitmap mode (although you can simulate one by placing characters in a grid while using the double height character mode. of course such a setup would require a ram expansion)

Could it be done? Yes. Would it be as profitable as said NES/SNES/Megadrive clones? No. If anything, it would be the 2600 being cloned. The 5200 and 7800 just don't have the same following, and even the 2600 pales compared to the popularity of the NES, SNES and Megadrive.

Not a chance that will happen. Too much profit to be made there. Don't forget that consoles are usually sold at loss at the start of their lifespan. No, first of all it's much more affordable using digital distribution than manufacturing physical copies. Second, stores would rather stock games for the system with the big studio games than indie titles for a niche system (when was the last time you saw a Dreamcast game in a store?)

Don't forget that you can only use ONE tablet controller for the Wii U. Everyone else has to use wiimotes or this new controller.

I think "Pay $10 to unlock extra content (that might even be on the disc already)" is a lot easier for people to accept than "Pay $60 and have your game interrupted by advertising" Forcing ad breaks in premium games would make the platform look bad, and giving the competition an edge in claiming an "uninterrupted experience". I can see this working in a budget priced or even free game though.

Thing is if you put ads in your game you don't want to sell it for a premium, you want those ads to reach out to as many people as possible.

You forgot the Starpath Supercharger version of Frogger.

The Atari 2600 can repeat sprites one or two times with set distances. So you can have 2 groups of 3 sprites (but said sprites are either 8 or 24 pixels spaced a part in a group) on a single line. Certain games (Galaxian for example) gets additional sprites by repositioning mid-scanline.

The same thing happened to the original Diablo.

Ok. I've played the game since launch and enjoyed the hell out of it (pardon the pun) Now I can see why people complain about it being online-only but playing past Normal difficulty is pretty much impossible without the AH (or a lot of grinding I guess)

That's what I was referring to I suppose one would be temporal multiplexing while the other vertical multiplexing?

Also sprite multiplexing is done by the hardware (like the Colecovision) so you don't have to update sprite registers mid-screen to get additional sprites (like the C64)

The VIC-20 was succeeded by the arguably most successful 8-bit computer ever. That would be more relevant if this were a 2600 v. C64 comparison, eh? I suspect that the C64's success was largely based on its own merits (bang/buck) rather than the Vic-20 having done a whole lot for it. I'm not comparing the 2600 to the C64 nor am I saying the VIC-20 was the sole reason behind the C64's success. The success and aggressive pricing of the C64 made the VIC-20 obsolete. The 5200 and 7800 never got successful enough to replace the 2600.

The VIC-20 was succeeded by the arguably most successful 8-bit computer ever. I'm not intending to step on the toes of 5200 and 7800 fans out there but the 2600 didn't have the same in-family competition.

Actually CED aren't laserdiscs, it's a completely different format read by a stylus not a laser. You can get a pretty detailed description of how it works on Wikipedia

Yeah, Atarisoft did a good job porting their games, even to competing systems. I believe Donkey Kong has all four levels in every version Atarisoft made (not counting the 7800 version which was made much later) It does make an interesting comparison, the character-based display of the VIC-20 versus the Atari 2600 with its players and low resolution playfield.

The NES is certainly more similar to the Colecovision than Atari 2600, although the main similarity would be the graphics chip, which originated in the TI99/4A, more specifically it's Graphics Mode 1. The NES is fairly unique in having a separate bus for its graphics chip, this allows it to read tiles directly from VROM, making the PPU work with merely 2 kilobytes of VRAM (as opposed to 16 kilobytes in the Colecovision) Another difference would be in how the color attributes are assigned (TMS9918 assigning colors based on tile numbers, while the NES PPU attribute table shares palette between 2x2 tiles regardless of the tiles used, this explanation may be rather confusing, perhaps a simpler explanation would be to say that one tile in VRAM on the colecovision can only use two colors, while on NES is can use any of the 4 background color palettes but 3 neighbouring tiles will also use the same palette)