Phredreeke

No, because there was never FULL software PS2 emulation. A few consoles had partial software emulation (60gb PAL units and 80gb NTSC units I believe) but they still had the graphics synthesizer (PS2 gpu) in hardware.

You sure about that? I always read that the NES had 52 colors vs. the 7800 (and SMS's) 256. It was obvious for me in Ballblazer when the Lucasfilm logo was shown. The 7800 version had 16 shades of gold. The NES version made heavy use of dithering. Sort of, the NES has a 64 color palette, of which many entries are black. However, there are three flags which attenuate red, green and blue colors, and could such be used to achieve different colors. These flags are applied to all every color register though. I guess you could say the NES has 8 different 52 color palette, only one which can be used at a given time. I'm not exactly sure of how the Atari 7800 works, but the NES can only display one out of 4 palettes (each with 3 colors plus a shared background color) for each set of 2x2 tiles (in other words 16x16 pixels)

Depends on how accurate the emulation is. Even then it's not as much a comparison between consoles as a comparison between two different games/different versions of the same game.

F-16 Fighting Falcon is incompatible because it used the old TMS9918A graphics mode (for the same reason it fails to run in early SMS emulators). I also recall that a few games that won't work with megadrive controllers (but will work with SMS controllers plugged in)

Personally I find the PS3 exclusives more appealing than the 360 exclusives, although that's a matter of personal taste (the PS3 has both Ratchet and Clank and Little Big Planet while the 360 is severely lacking in the platforming genre) BC on 360 is very hit and miss. Just because a game is on the list doesn't mean it will run smoothly. I would not recommend the 360 for playing xbox 1 games.

Do you have a computer with TV-out? Most of the time they're multistandard, just set the graphicscard to output NTSC instead of PAL. How to set it? I think it's different depending on what graphics card and OS version you have. Sorry.

Do you have a computer with TV-out? Most of the time they're multistandard, just set the graphicscard to output NTSC instead of PAL.

Look on ebay UK for a Dragon computer - it will be PAL. Yup... but it won't support any CoCo3 only games and not all CoCo games have been ported to it. More importantly, it won't support games relying on artifact colors. Here are a few screenshots of a game running in NTSC and PAL (Dragon 32/64) versions. You can see why NTSC is preferrable.

A PAL 2600 always puts out a PAL color signal, even if it's playing an NTSC game. Coco 3 has RGB output, but then you don't get any artifact colors (to my knowledge anyway, maybe they simulated it with internal circuitry?) If you use composite video then your TV must support NTSC (as a colour standard) in addition to 60hz framerate.

An NTSC unit is preferrable as many games take advantage of artifact colors that does not occur on a PAL unit

I'm no expert, but this is what advantages and disadvantages I could see. Atari 7800 has a 256 color palette while Coleco only has 15 colors Coleco is limited to 4 sprites per scanline while Atari 7800 is only limited by the time it takes to construct one line The background graphics is limited to 2 colors per 8 pixels on Coleco Coleco has better sound chip (although the 7800 could have a separate chip in the game cartridge) Coleco has separate VRAM while MARIA has to halt the cpu while reading from RAM and ROM

Is there any reason the Coco 1 and 2 had such strange palettes? Were the engineers color blind?

Thanks, I'll give it a try. Does this mean PAL TV's use a different colour frequency to Secam TV's? PAL and SECAM are very different systems. PAL (and NTSC) encodes two colour difference signals per line using quadrature amplitude modulation. SECAM encodes only a single colour difference signal on each line (using frequency modulation) and requires a delay line to "repeat" the signal from the previous line. This site has a more detailed explanation if you're interested

The Atari 5200 wasn't designed to compete with the Commodore 64, it was designed to compete with the Intellivision. Using 400/800 technology meant that it was familiar for developers to work with.

Not really. As long as the color difference signals aren't bandwidth limited they should be equivelent.

Actually they weren't hardwired on the Intellivision 2, but that system had its own problems.

Since the Intellivision CPU used 10-bit instructions, wouldn't code take up slightly more space than Atari 2600 code? (although the opposite could also be true, if the extra instructions allowed the Intellivision to accomplish things in less instructions than on the 2600)

Actually I think it was part of their licenses that they would make a version for all three major consoles, thus making more royalties to the licensor, which is why Coleco were able to get so many arcade licenses.

Because Pauline is part of the background and each 8x8 background tile is limited to 2 colors. They could have used a sprite to add another color but then they'd lose one of the barrels/flames (Intellivision can't change sprites between lines the way the 2600 does) I think it's more likely the programmers were simply inexperienced with the platform (the GI1610 wasn't really used in anything other than the Intellivision) and rushed to get the game out in time. DK was bad but some titles (Lady Bug, Venture, Donkey Kong Jr) were decent enough.

I don't get why people diss the 2600 DK. It's pretty good considering the system's limitations. The Intellivision version on the other hand is awful. The system could do much better than that, as seen by the hack GroovyBee linked to.

I know the Atari 7800 produces Y/C (aka S-video) internally and the french model has a built in PAL-to-RGB decoder. How does the RGB picture compare to a 7800 modded for S-video output?