bmcnett

That's why people stopped talking about bits a long time ago. Nowadays they talk about "generations" which is a better term because it clearly relates to marketing and has no technical basis. Every old system had all kinds of "bits" that didn't match (Atari 800 had an 8-bit data bus, a 16-bit address bus, and <3 bits per pixel at 160 wide) and so the argument that every part of a system must be at least N bits or else the whole system wasn't N bits has always been crazy. You could always find a part with less bits somewhere in the system. Amiga's sound was 8 bits per sample and its graphics were 6 bits per pixel, and its CPU registers were 32 bits, for example. Was Amiga a "16-bit computer" anyway? By any non-crazy measure, yes it was. The Turbo Grafx-16 is a great example of a 16-bit system with 8-bit parts - in this case an 8-bit CPU. Graphics is what people really care about, and that's why the TG16 with its 16-bit GPU competed with the SNES and Genesis, not with the NES or Atari 2600 which had the same 8-bit CPU. It never really mattered how many bits the CPU "had."

They make sense only when one focuses on the GPU, where bits-per-pixel in games is a reasonable proxy for "bits in the system" in marketing literature: 1-2 bits: "8-bit" (2600, intellivision, colecovision, 5200, nes) 4-8 bits: "16-bit" (genesis, snes, turbografx-16) 16-32 bits: "32-bit" (ps1, n64, dreamcast, ps2, game cube, xbox, wii)

It's more accurate to say that Intellivision was an 8-bit machine, because its overall capabilities were more comparable to 8-bit machines. Intellivision's CPU had 16-bit registers, but Genesis' CPU had 32-bit registers and we don't call it a 32-bit system either. The most striking difference between Intellivision and Genesis would be the graphics processors: Intellivision had 1-bit+ pixels, while Genesis had 4-bit+.* You could have swapped the GPUs in an Intellivision and Genesis and every Intellivision game would have looked as good or better, while not one Genesis game would have looked as good. *If you count "tile" bits as fractional because they spread out over a tile's worth of pixels...

Not enough RAM

I have grave doubts anything can be done to make Zaxxon's scrolling smoother on original hardware, except by simplifying the graphics severely. This is one case where an emulator can improve on things. Since the ColecoVision GPU and CPU are so isolated from each other, AND because its games don't push the GPU very far, it's far more possible in a ColecoVision emulator than in others to improve on graphics without touching the game code. The easiest example I can share: every frame a sprite is to be drawn, generate a hash of its 260 bits and use that to look into a table of "improved" shapes with 32x32 pixels @ 32 bit color.

As we transitioned from "8-bit" computers to "16-bit" to "32-bit", nearly every part of the machine doubled in capability. This made each successive generation about twice as powerful per megahertz as the previous generation. In this sense, "bits" was an important way to measure performance at the time. Graphics actually scaled along with the rest of the system: "8-bit" computers usually had "2-bit" graphics, "16-bit" computers had roughly "4-bit" graphics, and "32-bit" computers started with roughly "8-bit" graphics*. This may seem like a good thing, - the graphics certainly looked richer - but this actually cancelled out the advantages conferred by having "more bits." See, if a pixel has twice as many bits, it takes twice as long to process . This was less of an issue for game consoles than home computers, since 2D** game consoles didn't usually process pixels in isolation. But once we hit "32-bit" there was no obvious advantage to scaling up every aspect of the machine one more time. A "32-bit" machine can address only 4GB of memory, but no game system has ever had even half as much memory. A "32-bit" machine can do math on numbers that can have only four billion unique values, but in games we don't need more precision than that. Upping the whole system to "64-bits" would have provided no practical advantages and several disadvantages, such as wasting memory for big integers and pointers. So nobody made a wholly "64-bit" game system as of 2011. Machines that we know as "64-bit" had a few "64-bit" parts but remained largely "32-bit". The first truly all-around "64-bit" game machines are recent PCs, though a recent GPU still isn't completely "64-bit." A recent GPU has 32-bit pointers and 32-bit integers, but its registers are 1024-bit or 2048-bit and its pixels can be up to 128-bit. It wouldn't make sense to pick any of those numbers and claim that the GPU "has that many bits." *yes, there are exceptions. **hoo boy, "2D" console vs. "3D" console. that can be as ambiguous as "32-bit" vs. "64-bit."

Technically speaking a PS1 clone is pretty easy, which is why PS2 and PS3 and PSP can play them. Licensing remains the hard part. Good luck if your company's name doesn't rhyme with Fony.

sadly, game makers produce those "QuickTime events" exactly because the test audiences say they like them. Dragon's Lair seemed like a gimmick at the time, but it seems now to be heading for a place in the standard game design toolbox.

Indy 500 for the 2600 was pretty cool. It and the other 2600 launch titles are the last simultaneous two player games I remember playing until the 1990s.

Damn straight. The one real Star Raiders was the ColecoVision port.* I think it's safe to dismiss it outright. *no

Fixed that for you...

They can redeem the new Star Raiders IF the ship's only onboard computer is an Atari 400 and if it's possible to "win" flying by instruments alone (i.e. playing the original game, projected onto a crap monitor in the 3d cockpit). Of course there should be aspects of the game that reward flying without instruments sometimes...

From the linked article: Hoo boy, that's what I loved about the original Star Raiders - the story and characters. Who can forget Doc, Zippy the Robot and Mr. Zweebo? Those catch phrases were classic. "Now that's what I call hyperspace!" "What you talking about, Zippy?" I want "Pong II" starring Shia Labeouf as the scrappy protege of "Paddle," who returns in a supporting role.

If you count Flash games and iPhone games, there were at least ten times as many new "retro" games released in 2010 than 1982, and most of them were free or cost $1 ($0.25 in 1980 money.) For the "retro" gamer, things have never been better than they are today. The retro games aren't making anyone millions of dollars like in the old days, and they aren't the talk of the playground anymore, but if you're in it for the gameplay, you wouldn't care about those things. True, the new retro games tend to have "touch" or mouse interfaces, which can suck for some modes of gameplay. Guess you win some and lose some. The mainstream game consoles need to push gigabytes of data for various reasons good and bad, one of which is that this inhibits piracy. Ever download a 50GB game image from the Internet? Not me.

A ColecoVision with more RAM is called an ADAM Too bad so few ADAMs were sold, and so few of those survived until 2011...

oh snap, Metal Gear was for MSX2, bad comparison.

MSX1 had the same GPU as ColecoVISION. When I look at comparable games on both systems, seems obvious that ColecoVISION programmers didn't get a chance to push the hardware very far... yeah I know MSX1 had bigger media too. SCROLLING SPACE SHOOTER http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2EA9D7mQQ ColecoVISION Cosmic Avenger http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwVhDDoK_EE MSX1 Nemesis 2 MILITARY-THEME ACTION http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luqO3DJYhDw ColecoVISION Front Line http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2yPpoTeEqc MSX1 Metal Gear

Just my guess - it's possible to clone or emulate NES/SNES/Genesis without counting CPU cycles to match the video scanout hardware perfectly, and still a lot of fun games will work. This isn't true of the Atari consoles. Plus, before NES three-color sprites at 256-wide resolution were possible but tricky. Once you have three colors, you can get characters with moustaches and eyes and shoes and hair. People are hardwired to relate emotionally to those details, so there's more demand for systems that can render them. As for Jaguar, the hardware was complicated and weird (read: interesting!), and there weren't that many games for Jaguar that a large market would feel nostalgia for. N64 had a custom GPU that is hard to clone or emulate. You can target its graphics at an off-the-shelf GPU and get lots of glitching, or maybe run the graphics on a CPU that is too expensive to put in a cheapo clone box.

Twenty years ago, atariksi made a cable like that for Amiga only, but AFAIK never tried to sell it. He gave me the software for free, and explained how I could solder my own DB25 cable. Using my crappy PC's HD as an Amiga HD over the printer cable blew me away! It worked really well. In 1990, I don't think anything like it existed in the world. So when I Googled him a few years back and saw that he's.. well.. making and selling those same damn cables in 2011, and in a kinda sleazy way, I sighed. What happened to this guy? I think he graduated with a Computer Engineering degree, perfect GPA, valedictorian of his class. Now he's a petty, vindictive forum troll who sells flimsy cables from a sleazy web site?

My Dad was VP of Preliminary Design at Coleco at that time, and until his death in 2009 didn't seem very interested in the videogame side of things. Not sure what involvement he had with it - I remember him showing me a dark gray ADAM prototype, the arcade room they used for research of ports, and a development room where they were working on a filled line graphics RPG.

a ten-year-old niece saw me playing 7800 donkey kong and scowled. "why would anyone play an old game like that?" she asked me. what a n00b!

The Colecovision is severely out gunned by MARIA's ability to put sprites on the screen. MARIA can have around twenty 16x16, 4 colour sprites per scan line (with a horizontal resolution of 160 pixels) without flickering or using a sprite multiplexor. If you drop the colour depth to 1BPP and increase the resolution to 320 horizontally its around 29 sprites or so. Yes, of course MARIA can do much, much better graphics than Colecovision. In case my quote above wasn't clear, I'll rephrase it: To a child in the 1980s or an unskilled homebrewer today, getting 32 16x16 1-color sprites to move around on screen could hardly be simpler on Colecovision/ADAM. A skilled game programmer then or today would prefer the 7800, because it can produce so much nicer-looking results. Unskilled people (like me at age 12) might not cope with 7800's learning curve. Ease of programming may have had some impact on the cost of game development for both platforms, but this is hard to quantify even if one knows a lot about game marketing of the era, which I definitely do not. From personal experience with PS2 development, people sure get motivated to climb that learning curve when a console has a dominant share of the market, which IIRC neither 7800 or Colecovision ever had.

Ok let me start by saying that I'm totally uninterested in whether 7800 or CV is "better" because no such conclusion can be reached. In terms of graphics output quality, 7800 seems to be a superset of CV. In terms of games that actually hit the market at the time, there were things 7800 was better at, and things CV was better at. Most typically, 7800 games had better scrolling and more colors, and CV games had higher resolution and better sound. The 7800 was never really commercially exploited to anywhere near its limits, so probably 7800 homebrew can and will blow away CV (has it already? I haven't been following that scene.) Did you mean to say "more than 4 sprites per scanline?" Like NES and A8, CV had the capacity for lots of sprites overall, but few per scanline. I haven't seen a 7800 game with sprite flicker yet, and I haven't seen a CV game with double-wide pixels yet either... Really? I've been assuming for years that CV was very bad at mid-screen tricks. Can you point me at some commercial games that did them? I'm eager to learn about those tricks...

Colecovision's 32 1-of-16 color, 16x16 pixel hardware sprites were a nice feature for kids like me who programmed ADAM and for homebrewers today. Achieving that much spriteage on 7800 or A8 requires a lot more dedication and hard work. Colecovision's 16 color graphics has limits tied to its 8x8 tiles, and these are far less tricky (and capable) than the tricks used with MARIA or A8 IIRC. Colecovision graphics reminds me of NES but without scrolling or 4 color sprites - adequate for static background arcade ports of the day, and simple to program.

Let's call GameStop and ask if they have Battletoads for Atari 800.