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From the programming guide: "You will notice the absence of the 128 bytes of 6532 RAM that make up zero page RAM in the 2600. [...] It's RAM has moved to an area in page four (4) and may not exist in future versions of the MARIA chip, so it should not be used." So they apparently weren't willing to guarantee that the 6532 RAM would be mapped in 7800 mode on future consoles. But it was, so there's really no problem with using it as far as I can tell.

7800, NES, Genesis, SNES (although it's really my brother's), PS2. My early-model Genesis is in bad shape. The picture is way too bright, and at times it has been crash-prone. The crashing seems to have stopped ever since I washed the board, but the picture is still screwed up. I know I could replace it pretty easily, but I'd still rather repair my old one. I wouldn't be able to accept any other Genesis as being "mine". I saved a huge amount of allowance money to buy that thing.

"The 7800 is just a souped up 2600" "The Wii is just an overclocked Gamecube" ========== It seems downward compatibility is an invitation for ridicule. I could belittle the PS2 as an enhanced Playstation. The SNES is 98% downward compatible, good thing they came to their senses in time to avoid being labelled a "souped-up NES". My PC is an overclocked 386 with a few more opcodes. I should have bought an Itanium.

I don't know how common this issue is, but my original 7800 had to be returned to the store because the game (PP2) wouldn't run 9/10 times. It would do what you describe, where the logo comes up, but nothing after that. With persistence I occasionally got it to run, and once it started, it would continue to work until I turned it off. I wonder if any significant number of PP2 carts were defective.

Forgive the question, but the jumper pak/RAM expansion isn't missing, is it?

No, the SMS has 8KB of RAM. Perhaps they were advertising some 128KB ROM cartridges?

As I recall, your dude moves back to center when you tap UP. That's how I used to control the dodges, unless my memory has been corrupted.

I had used assembly before on the x86, but needed to learn 6502. These were the documents I found useful: http://www.geocities.com/oneelkruns/asm1step.html http://www.6502.org/tutorials/6502opcodes.html It's a simple instruction set, but it's easy to mess up the addressing modes or the literal/indirect syntax in dasm. Those are the most common mistakes I make. Without an assembly background it would obviously be harder to learn, but if you're going to learn assembly then 6502 is as approachable as anything else. 7800 graphics was the more confusing thing to learn: http://www.whimsey.com/atari_docs/7800_Software.pdf But it all makes sense when you've digested all the info. The hires modes are confusing to just about everybody so don't worry about those until necessary. There are also more 7800 documents out there, but the above is the most useful for programming. I've never programmed the 2600, and I don't think that experience is necessary. I've never done sound, but I'm sure it won't be hard to figure out. Getting something to happen on the 7800 takes a lot of code, so it's not a very forgiving system to get started with. If your startup code is flawed, you won't get any visual feedback at all. Expect to spend a lot of time getting your initialization code debugged. You may want to refer to other people's published code as a guideline. You don't really need to test on the real hardware at first. The emulator is fine for getting started on something. I'm curious if the A8 computers might be an easier way to learn assembly, but I've never had experience with them myself.

If you have ever seen the show, you know this isnt the sort of thing they take on. How can you scientifically prove, under a controlled environment, that ET carts are buried in New Mexico? That show is more entertainment than science. They also tried to prove whether Jimmy Hoffa is buried at Giants' Stadium (or whatever it's called), but they didn't really have time to search thoroughly as I recall. I've seen a few episodes with a less than convincing approach and an unsatisfying conclusion - Atari Landfill wouldn't be the first. I think it's up their alley, but it wouldn't yield any meaningful outcome unless they hold up a cement-crusted cartridge at the end.

I remember after I had bought a Genesis, some of my friends were impressed that the carts were so much smaller than the NES, yet produced far better graphics/sound. I even distinctly remember one of them concluding "smaller is better." But back when the system was newer, the NES carts just looked cool. With all the fresh games the NES was introducing, the cart size and fancy labels just added to the mystique.

I don't know if I agree with this point, though I do agree with your first about perception. The pricing of RAM and the space available within the 7800 carts was more than ample to play games that were common on the NES and the SMS. To put it in perspective, look at the size of the Lynx and TG-16 carts, both of which held multiple megabits and were much smaller. Heck, back in the day, the NES had pirate carts that were the size of regular carts, but stored hundreds of games on them. Those portable carts didn't come out until a few years later though, and I would assume they were more difficult to produce. The full-size 8-bit cartridges certainly weren't that small, so I must assume that the larger boards were more economical at the time. Otherwise they wouldn't have wasted money on the bigger boards. Unless you develop custom IC's, then you potentially need room for a battery, logic chips for banking, ROM, and RAM. The 7800 carts barely have room, and they never had a cart with both RAM and POKEY, nor did they make any carts with a battery. It's surely possible to squeeze in more parts (probably by using SMT), but I bet the PCB issue may have been a factor in why such carts were never developed. They probably would have had to get into either SMT or custom IC's and Atari probably didn't want to bother with those options. Of course, regardless of space, we all know Tramiel wasn't a fan of adding extra components anyway.

This is a good game. Unfortunately, after playing for a while I realized I must have a hacked ROM. I seem to have infinite lives. A long time ago, an Arkanoid clone was the first large program I wrote in QBasic. The funny thing is, I could never get the joystick to work right, so I had to program it to use the buttons to control left/right movement. As it turned out, the Phoenix BIOS in those days had broken joystick support, so that's why I had problems. Commercial games didn't rely on the BIOS so I only had this problem in my QBasic code. I see what mojo means about stage 3. I must have used about 15 balls on that level. I like the idea at first, but trying to get a ball all the way up to the top is quite difficult.

I agree as well. Even on a technical level, I think bigger cartridges would have helped. The existing carts are rather cramped for space. I think the SMS has the most appropriately sized carts from a practical point of view. Late 8-bit systems by necessity had rather complicated cartridges.

I'm not a 5200 programmer, so my wishes don't matter. But what about having the fixed portion be a RAM chip? The programmer can always copy frequently-used code to the fixed bank RAM, but has the option of doing more volatile things with it as well.

From the company that used to say: "Now You're Playing With Power": "If you want power, you're going to go somewhere else."

Actually, the XBox just has a better graphics card. The NV2A was loosely based on the GeForce3, but contained a lot of GeForce4 features. Which means that the XBox is minimally capable of running current generation engines (e.g. Doom III) while his sister's computer cannot. I am aware of that. While I was talking about XBox specifically what I said can be related to consoles in general. Even with a GeForce 4 in combination with a Celeron (which would more closely resemble the XBox CPU then a Pentium III) at 750MHz you couldn't achieve fluid gameplay with the details that some of the XBox games have (such as Black and Half-Life 2) even at 640x480 or 854x480. They really squeezed a lot of juice out of the thing. I think someone would be hard pressed to get a PC version of one of those games to run equally on similar PC hardware. Of course, which is better is the argument that PC gamers and console gamers will have until the bitter end. Oblivion is a good example. While 360 gamers don't have to worry about hardware configuration to run that incredibly demanding game PC gamers get community addons which can really add to the game. Actually, I think the XBox is really a demonstration of what IS possible on an older PC. Nobody bothers to optimize PC games very much, because it's easy to tell people to buy a new computer. You can't do that in the console market. I don't buy in to the background tasks eating resources. Unless you have something really wacky going on, then you will still have 98-99% CPU availability, and way more available RAM than the XBox has. Whatever optimizations work for the NV2A should work about the same on a Ti4200, if not the Geforce3 in many cases. Assembly code for the P3 will also run on any newer CPU, and you can easily detect the CPU type to run an optimized routine. But I doubt PC programmers write much assembly anymore - it's easier to just code everything in C/C++ and call it good enough.

I guess we can already safely say that Wii-sports will be the most worthless title in the system's library. Not only is it a pack-in - it's also a sports game.

I doubt it's profitable. If this weren't a game console, then they wouldn't be afraid to introduce it at $1000 or more. But when it comes to video games, these companies always like to impose price controls and create a mess. Gamers feel better knowing that the machine nobody can buy is only $600. If DVD players were introduced at that price, nobody would have been able to find them either.

Comes with a game, but still only one controller. It might be a more effective launch if it came with at least 2 controls and something like Mario Party. Multiple controllers would obviously be more expensive though.

That's the version of the story that I believe is more credible. They just trashed a bunch of stuff in general. That also isn't very exciting or unusual. The notion that Atari had to organize a massive expedition just to get rid of E.T. carts is where the story crosses into legend. Is there any documentation that Atari actually produced more carts than consoles? That also strikes me as a possible historical exaggeration.

I did see "Midnight Mutants" once. It was at a Kay-Bee toy store at the mall in about 1990 or 91. By that time I had not only a NES, but also a Genesis. The 7800 was a distant memory by then. To find a new 7800 game like that was a shot out of left field. I thought about buying it, but the stupid Munsters tie-in scared me off. I hated the Munsters, and sure didn't want to play a game about them. I believe the price was pretty cheap, like $5 or so. There were also some old and faded 2600 games for even less, but nothing I didn't already have.

That's something that bugs me. Lots of good games have been ported to the XBox, right? And the XBox is essentially a Wintel machine. I don't know anybody with a cutting-edge PC, but many with about the performance of an XBox. The best example is my sister's computer, which is a P3-866 with a GeForce3 and 256MB RAM. That's awfully similar to the XBox, just a bit better. She should be able to get the XBox experience on any games that have been ported to that platform, but for some reason the industry seems to assume everybody has a brand new computer. Given that they've already gone to the trouble of porting to consoles, I don't see much excuse for why modern games can't offer a P3 mode in the PC version.

When Tramiel decided to release the 7800, they could have taken a little time to make some minor tweaks to the system. I think they could have made another revision to the graphics chip, to help offset it's weaknesses with scrolling and backgrounds. Did the 1984 units have socketed MARIA's? If so, then they'd have been easy to retrofit before shipment. The downside of making any changes is that it takes time, and you might have to dump the existing cartridges. So forgive me but I'm going to flaunt my ignorance with some proposals: ==== 1) Adjust the clock timing so all MARIA reads are latched at 2 clock cycles, instead of 3. This would require faster ROMs in the game cartridges. I don't know how much more expensive the ROMs would need to be though, so maybe it's not realistic. I'd assume that revising the timing would have been a trivial change on the MARIA side, so console production wouldn't have been much delayed. Existing game carts would have to get their chips replaced. Alternatively, sheisty-Atari could just ship the 3-clock MARIA's and pack-in the old 3-clock carts with them. Later a 2-clock version of the 7800 would be released, and owners of the 3-clock version would notice more flickering and slowdown on newer games. The graphics would still work on old consoles, but they just wouldn't be as fast. This is a change Atari could make mid-stream, if they revise the cartridges early enough to minimize the number of 3-clock cartridges in circulation. If somebody plugs a 3-clock cart into a newer console, it wouldn't work. 2) Add autoscrolling to the header format. Put a 1 or 2-bit scrolling flag in the header, probably by stealing space from the width parameter. This flag would cause the graphic to have it's horizontal position automatically scrolled by the MARIA each time it gets rendered. This is a more significant change, but I naively assume it could be worked out and tested within 1-2 months (if they didn't waste time and WANTED to get it done). But maybe it would take longer than I realize. Obviously this would have to be done before production because it breaks compatibility. 1984 game cartridges would work fine with this unless they actually use the full extent of the width parameter, which I doubt. 3) Try to do something about the sound. Was there anybody at Atari who knew the TIA as anything more than a black box? If nothing else, just adding some more TIA sound channels or pitch levels would have helped. And as long as you're making revisions, allowing the TIA to run on the 6502 clock would have been nice. But again, maybe this would have taken too much time to revise. 4) Hook up the IRQ line from the 6532. Then the interval timer would be much more practical to use. I assume this would only require a wire until the PCB gets revised, and if I'm not mistaken the 7800's had plenty of rework on them anyway. Also, perhaps Atari could have used the 2MHz version of the 6532 chip so it can run from the full 6502 clock. The only explanation I've heard is that the 6532 is a type of chip that doesn't downclock stably, so maybe the 2MHz model wouldn't have worked in 2600 mode. Somebody must have tried this before when repairing a 2600. Does it work?

I don't know the exact size, but my Sega-CD RAM cart is huge compared to the internal memory. I lost interest in the system before a lot of the popular games, but at least to me it seemed that the cartridge RAM was amusingly large. I couldn't imagine how I'd ever fill it, and I never did. I believe I remember reading in the instructions that the Sega-CD is supposed to have a rechargeable battery. That might be different on the top-loader though, because nowadays I'm using a top-loader and the internal battery has never come back to life.

If the launch systems had a lot of problems, then that indicates a yield problem which they tried to fudge. That's the opposite of just warehousing millions of good units. I've never heard of a shortage of XBox games, or Sony movies, or new flavors of toothpaste. If Microsoft has a shortage of Windows Vista discs at launch, then maybe I'd buy into the idea. But they only seem to have these problems with exotic new hardware which understandably will have production issues during the start-up phase.