Jaynz

But, like I said, that's actually what happened. People forget that the crash of 1984 was actually the SECOND great video game crash. The first was in 1978 with the death of the 'pong consoles'. It was the same thing, technology in gaming had progressed to the point where existing consoles were facing obsolescence. Gaming audiences simply wanted better, more up-to-date hardware. The 'powers that be', however, kept saying "That fad is finally over, let's move on to Stompers and Rubix Cubes". Video Games actually pissed off toy stores in 1984 as 'the fad that took too long to die'... so FEW people who made the decisions were really thinking "It's time to unleash the next generation". They hadn't really learned the lessons of 1978, so it repeated to a more dramatic end in 1984. It really would be like Sony suddenly deciding "Well, the PS1 has run its course, to sell Teddy Ruxpin as the next big thing and forget all about video games". Coleco did this even more literally, gutting their successful Colecovision line for Adam (home family computers was the new 'fad', they had thought), then gutting that failure to sell Cabbage Patch Kids.

Ideally they would have released and pushed the machine in 1983 as its primary console. It would have been more competitive at that time, even with the limitations of the sound chip. The decisions for the 7800 would have made some sense if they weren't pushing two versions of the 2600 and the 5200 at the same time with the /real/ desire of the company to push three different Atari-branded computers right with it. We're kinda stating the obvious here. The 7800 wasn't a competitive system in 1986. As a three-year-old system (if it had been Atari's mainline) it would have had momentum and the carts would have seen improved 'default' layouts by then. But as a 'newish' launch against the NES? Suicide. Really, there wasn't a LOT that Atari could have done in 1986 with existing hardware to change things much... but it wouldn't have taken THAT much in a redesign to turn that around.

You can get some pretty good sound out of the TIA (since it was a pretty basic waveform chip), even digitized voices, but the problem is dedicating your SERIOUSLY limited processor time and memory to mixing. So it was a bit more involved than simply 'not rushing'. It would have really driven the costs up skyward to get the TIA to do the things that POKEY, TI, and SID were all doing natively.

That should be a bit of a clue, though. I think a lot of the internal people in Atari didn't want to tell their higher-ups that 'yeah, our console is going to look pretty dated and bad and please don't add me to the personnel cuts you're doing'. The 7800 would have been a strong contender in 1983 and probably would have taken Atari through to 1990 with good support in that scenario, but it was ultimate passed over as a 'new' machine in 1986. The market, and even the nature of console gaming, really had changed, and Atari simply didn't keep up. They blew their window. It may have been a big deal in 1983, which is already an arguable point. (Parents cared more about it than the gamers, who likely ALREADY HAD the 2600 anyway.) But in 1986 it was a bit more of a 'so what?' move. "Johnny, can you play your older brother's (or even possibly your dad's) seven-year-old ASTEROIDS game on it?" wasn't all that important by the time the NES was coming out, and it certainly wasn't worth gutting the quality of your machine in the face of impressive competition.

Maybe? Hard to say in all honesty. The CV and 7800 hit right when the market was shifting and most of those 'in the industry' really just thought that the video game 'craze' was a dying fad rather than recognize a generational change in technology. (In other words, imagine that when the PS1 sales slowed down finally, the entire gaming industry up and said "it's over, no one wants gaming anymore, time to move on to Care Bears and Teddy Ruxpin and forget all about that stupid PS2." That's about what really happened). Even Warner wasn't all that forward-thinking in retrospect.. would they have had more games and more with extended carts than Tramiel? Maybe. But they really didn't get what was happening in the market either, and probably would have looked at 'cost-cutting measures' consistently rather than embrace new technology for gaming. It was a very different mindset than what we have now.

But that's just it. By making that decision, the 7800 was effectively doomed. Atari already had a long history (regardless of who was at the helm) as doing things as cheaply as possible, even if it means gutting the integrity of the product. (Hence, the infamous 2600 PacMan). Having a grossly-outdated sound chip, which was below most competitors at the time, really sent yet another signal to the 'market' that Atari just wasn't serious about competing anymore. It was a major unforced error on Atari's part, regardless of who was at the helm. Not sure if that's a fair comparison, since Commando uses a non-standard cart-layout on the 7800. That would be like comparing the Tengen Ms. Pac-Man to the 7800 Ms. Pac-Man. Yet, of course, PMP's "Pokey-Enhanced" collection blows them both away.

That's just it, though. The decision to throw the POKEY as a 'cart add-on' meant that those carts would inherently cost more (remember how cheap Atari was with chips of any sort) and that Atari would decide to NOT use them whenever they thought they could get away with it. (Which is exactly how it went down). It was simply a DUMB cost-cutting move with entirely predictable results. Meanwhile EVERY game for the CV was expected to use the TI chip by default. Compare, again, the 'typical' games of Donkey Kong between the two systems... the CV sounded like the arcade, nice clean and smooth. The 7800 sounded like someone was murdering cats with an old Pong cabinet. It was a bad move for the original intended launch of the 7800, much less for it trying to compete with the NES!

Threads like this are always tough, 'cause people will get very emotional about their nostalgia. I had a particular fondness for the Colecovision (though I had an ADAM as a kidlet, which was a mixed blessing) and played the hell out of games like Q*Bert, Venture, and Donkey Kong Junior. But was it better than the 7800 once I take the nostalgia glasses off? It actually comes off as a bit of a draw. The 7800 had far superior graphics capabilities, but the controllers, original library, and SOUND I would have to give to the CV. These days? The homebrew scene is doing amazingly well with the 7800 (thanks largely to PMP who has done and is doing amazing work), while the CV homebrew scene died due to infighting and the promise of oddly turning the CV into the NES with a new expansion pack. (This is something I fear with the 7800's homebrew expansion pack, a 'tool' that guts the homebrew scene as even more of a niche within a niche with a niche). It's /exciting/ to see what's coming for the 7800, while the CV seems to have run its course in the nostalgia track.

I got to say it, and it is a little painful to admit, but the 7800 really couldn't, in the long run, compete with the NES. The limitations of the 7800, largely due to being backward compatible at a time where few even CARED about the 2600 (or, if they did, could get one for under $50 new pretty much anywhere) really undermined its competitive edge. The issue with the sound-chip ALONE make the 7800 look 'primitive' compared to the NES, as well as the doorstops, etc. The 7800 needed to come out against the Intellivision and Colecovision (rather than the 5200), and would have kept Atari going strong for a bit.. but it looked anemic compared to the NES. (Seriously, compare the 7800 DK and the NES DK and it really is just /over/ at that point.)

If it can't do the voices 'live', which wouldn't be too unusual, considering, just have them at 'enter screen', 'run away', 'player dies', and 'game over' - each spots where the game is already effectively 'stopped' for the event.

Obviously something for the difficulty switch!

Well.. I WOULD post my thoughts on this so-far excellent conversion, but I guess I'll wait for the next BIN/A78 file to be posted. One minor note: Fire should reference the last direction pushed, not require the joystick to be actively pushed. (If I moved left last, the gun will fire that direction even when I stop.)

The USUAL trick for games like this is to limit the ranges of the robots. For example, if you have 16 robots, divide the screen into four vertical stripes. The missile search then only goes for the stripe it's in by the X coordinate ( X << 2 ). That way you only do a check for 4 robots on any given search, for a total of 5 searches rather than 16. The bigger trick is the little bit of pain that is the reminder that Frenzy's walls, in some screens, are destroyable...

A binary search requires the code for a binary search, not just the data included. It would actually take more space and time than a simple iterative loop.

http://www.pixelsagas.com/viewfont.php?fontid=10 This is my version of it, which is pretty close to the original cabinets.

GORF has a lot of its work already done, which is why I'm recommending it so much. When that's done, I'm going to bribe the crap out of PMP to make Phoenix.

Noo... PacManPlus has to do GORF first, don't make him do Sinistar!

Like I said, it was more of a symptom than the disease. The desire to be 'more than a kid's toy' from marketing made them do some pretty stupid things, and the inclusion of the 'phone pad' on EVERY major console of those years was just part of that. (Why they thought having a phone-pad was a big deal for any player is beyond me.) The 7800, for its part, oddly kept the button placement and rather shoddy stick.. but LOST the phone pad that was the whole reason for the doorstop design!

It sold pretty well for a little bit, but the caveat is that it sold along with a lot of 2600 liquidation. (Retailers also had trouble distinguishing between 2600 and 7800 titles). The momentum wasn't with Atari, though, as you can tell by the release lineup and how quickly the company 'put it in the bin' the second time. Unfortunate, of course, if Atari had really focused on the 7800 (along with a few relatively minor improvements) rather than split their own part of the market in several directions, they may have at least SURVIVED the NES's dominance.

Do yourself a huge favor and just go this route: http://www.amazon.com/Ac-Power-Adapter-Atari-7800-System/dp/B007PE1OZY . Affordable, works great.

I've got the "Euro" Pads and the US 7800 and I'm pretty happy with the combination. The only real issue you're more likely to run into is that the signal seems to have translation issues when going to some modern TVs. A usual 'fix' is to route your 7800 through a VCR first, which seems to clean up most of the issues. This is, of course, assuming you can even find a VCR.

The friend of mine back then that actually had the 5200 got it right when it came out at Children's Palace - and it had faulty sticks in it. Atari replaced them right away, though, and I think he actually got them by New Year's. The replacements weren't too bad for a lot of games, but things like Pac-Man were just frustrating as all hell. Interestingly, the 5200 display unit at Woolworth's had a completely different pair of more arcade-like joysticks, much closer in resemblance to the Colecovision's controllers than what the 5200 actually got. I always wondered what was up with that. Probably a thought best taken over to the 5200 threads, though.

The 5200 had the awkward phone pad and a sloppy non-centering main stick! Win win! But no, "Ergonomics" wasn't on the radar of game companies yet. That would really start with the 'revival' from Sega, Nintendo, and the PC Engine - pretty much as a direct response to the last of the pre-crash systems. Remember, as far as retailers were concerned, these were simply expensive toys and the people who head up toy companies were the marketers. (Read a lot about the Blue Sky Rangers of Intellivision about how all this wound up working). In other words, so far as the 'money people' were concerned, the only difference between the Rubik's Cube, Stomper 4x4s and the Atari 2600 was the price point. I knew a lot of PARENTS that cared about the modules, but most of us already had a working 2600 when the 5200, etc., were coming out. We weren't all that worried about backwards compatibility since we could just plug the old machine in if we were really jonesing for a game that wasn't out on the new stuff. (And this did happen sometimes.) By the time the C-64 came out, though, the issue was dead as pretty much ALL of the 2600's classic library had been done better on that little computer.

You're really parsing nits here to try to 'win'. Okay, congratulations, you win the internet. Be proud. Do a jig. Whatever.

Okay, first, you're being a jackass unnecessarily. Second, at no point did I say "Everyone at the time loved the new joysticks", because that wasn't the point. Marketing, in particular, pushed the joysticks out as a deliberate selling point about how 'professional' and 'mature' the new designs were. The idea was to make the 5200 into the 'adult's gaming system', which was becoming all the rage with the big video-game companies at the time, who were worried that the Atari 2600 legacy was falling out of favor but didn't really understand why. Atari was hardly alone in this mindset, as it also brought down Intellivision and Colecovision. the 5200's sticks were just another example of 'marketing over common sense', which was pretty rampant back in those days. (And hardly unheard of now, right, Microsoft?)