Comparing the NES and 7800 on a technical level

[DracIsBack]

Peter's quote in context:

 

The 7800 was designed from the outset to be 2600 compatible, and as such is, in essence, a 2600 with a MARIA chip bolted on.

 

 

Since the unit therefore contains a TIA chip it made (business) sense to use the sound capabilities of TIA rather than incur the extra cost of adding a POKEY to the unit - which would have pushed the retail cost of the machine up by a non-trivial amount.

 

While it's quite surprising just what you can do with TIA's sound functions I do feel that, taking the broad view, not including POKEY (or something better)was a bit of a blunder. While it was available as a "bolt on" option in cartridges very few games used it since this was actively discouraged by

Atari....after all it pushed production costs up and ate significantly intoAtari's profit margin! I received several stiff talkings to about the number of

ROM banks "Jinks" used - SHEESH!

 

 

Thank you for sharing. I think I remember reading a variant of this. The arguments over the memory JINKS took sounds familiar. Krewat posted a similar story of having to re-write Impossible Mission to be 128K instead of 256K.

 

This is probably a more accurate quote though

 

The 7800 was designed from the outset to be 2600 compatible, and as such is, in essence, a 2600 with a MARIA chip bolted on ... along with a faster processor, more RAM and the ability to have substantially larger and more complex games.

[RevEng]

Saying Maria is "bolted on" to the 2600 is highly inaccurate hyperbole. Maria is in no way an add-on or extra feature. Maria is the heart of the 7800, feeding the 6502 and TIA their clock signals, halting the 6502 when it needs to, mapping RAM into address space, etc.

 

From the software perspective Maria runs the show in 7800 mode, completely cutting out TIA visuals. Even in 2600 mode, Maria has to selectively connect address lines to the CPU, because the 7800 has a 6502, rather than a 6507 chip like the 2600.

[Lynxpro]

 

 

Thank you for sharing. I think I remember reading a variant of this. The arguments over the memory JINKS took sounds familiar. Krewat posted a similar story of having to re-write Impossible Mission to be 128K instead of 256K.

 

This is probably a more accurate quote though

 

The 7800 was designed from the outset to be 2600 compatible, and as such is, in essence, a 2600 with a MARIA chip bolted on ... along with a faster processor, more RAM and the ability to have substantially larger and more complex games.

 

Did Krewat ever retrieve the source code to his 7800 games?

 

I didn't play the C64 original version enough to notice the differences between it and the 7800 Impossible Mission versions other than the titles, the lack of the voice, the rather atrocious recycled TIA sound effects [many lifted from 2600 Jedi Arena], and, of course, it not being possible to beat [the non-European release]...

[DracIsBack]

 

Did Krewat ever retrieve the source code to his 7800 games?

 

I didn't play the C64 original version enough to notice the differences between it and the 7800 Impossible Mission versions other than the titles, the lack of the voice, the rather atrocious recycled TIA sound effects [many lifted from 2600 Jedi Arena], and, of course, it not being possible to beat [the non-European release]...

 

The 7800 conversion is actually pretty good. If it wasn't for the bug, it would actually be on the upper tier of 7800 games for me. If I were to change anything, I'd add the voice samples (Astro Blaster proved it could be done, even with TIA) and enhance the ending sequence. On the C64 it's animated and has better colours than the 7800 where it's a still picture (space saving) with some of the worst colour choices I've ever seen. Given the 7800's large palette, the colours chosen are BIZAAAARE.

[Lynxpro]

 

The 7800 conversion is actually pretty good. If it wasn't for the bug, it would actually be on the upper tier of 7800 games for me. If I were to change anything, I'd add the voice samples (Astro Blaster proved it could be done, even with TIA) and enhance the ending sequence. On the C64 it's animated and has better colours than the 7800 where it's a still picture (space saving) with some of the worst colour choices I've ever seen. Given the 7800's large palette, the colours chosen are BIZAAAARE.

 

But is there anything else missing from the 7800 version? None of that would explain the 128K difference between the two...

[DracIsBack]

 

But is there anything else missing from the 7800 version? None of that would explain the 128K difference between the two...

 

Not that I can think of, but it's been a while since I've played the C64 version. I'm getting a C64 mini next week. Will keep my eyes peeled.

[Lynxpro]

 

Not that I can think of, but it's been a while since I've played the C64 version. I'm getting a C64 mini next week. Will keep my eyes peeled.

 

Good man. And your ears too...

[Sean39]

Hi Everyone

I know this is a very late reply. I was around in the 1960s and 1970s. My father worked for atari in the 1970s-1980s, and I went to work with him a

lot just to see what was being done.

 

I have read every post and I have all the atari consoles as well one of the first releases of the NES as well the Sega master System.

I always wanted to know who had the best system made, but what I figure out was over the time who wanted to invest the time into

programming games the push the limits of the hardware.

 

The Atari 7800 had the hard ware to do 320 pixels and that out did the NES and the Sega master system.

 

The sound chip on the 7800 would be great with the pokey chip in the cartridges. This put the Atari over the top

with graphics and sound.

 

The NES and Sega master system both had the same screen graphic resolution

 

Now the Sega Master system only had a faster clock speed CPU that was a NEC chip that ran at 4Mhz while it was a clone of the Zilog Z80 chip that ran at 3.58Mhz

With the Atari 7800 and NES the 6502 chips only ran around 1.79Mhz in clock speed.

 

The other difference was that both the Atari 7800 and NES had way less on board memory

 

The Sega master System had 8K of on board memory with 16K of Graphics memory.

Also Sega released 4Mbyte and 8 Mbyte Rom chips for their games.

 

This still did not help them to over come Nintendo sales in consoles or games even with all their efforts.

 

Between Atari,NES, and the Sega Master System.

 

They all had games that made them shine over the other systems. It come down to the user what

games do you like and what system shows them off the best.

 

The Atari 7800 could have out done both the NES and Sega master System in one way.

Atari could have used the Pokey chip in all their 7800 games and tried pushing all the games

using only the higher resolution of 320 pixels in mode 8. If I recall this is the correct graphics mode for

this system.

 

Yes Nintendo did lock up the market but even Sega release 341 games in all and only 114 of them being

american releases. Most of the European games will run on the american consoles which means people

in the US can play eurpean releases. Now the color may be slightly off but they do work.

 

I really wish that Atari would have hired a larger amount of people to make games for the 7800.

This meaning you would have not got the same games as Nintendo had out. I am talking about game developing

in the USA and Nintendo would of had no rights or saying over. In other words America would of had their

own game market and software writers. This is one reason why the Atari 2600 did so well. We deigning and writing

software no one else had anywhere. I grew up in this mess and saw the breakdown of Atari prior to 1984.

In late 1983 is when things started to change in Atari. My dad Quit Atari because of all this mess.

 

He still kept in contact with members of the Atari team just to see what was going on during the developing

of future programs and equipment.

 

Anyway if you want to compare sales then Nintendo won. If you want to compare hardware Sega had only a faster CPU and on

board memory and graphics memory.

 

If you are into Graphic Resolution on the screen Then the Atari 7800 will beat out both the NES and Sega Mater Sytstem.

The Atari 7800 may have a slower cpu but the Memory could be expanded in the cartridge as well the sound chip could also be place

in to cartridge.

 

Now you have System that has great sound and Graphics . The CPU speed probably would have gone not notice with good programming skills.

 

Anyways all the system have their +++++ and - - - - - .

 

It just which one you like over the other

 

I just have them all and get the games that show off the best of each system has to offer

 

Thanks

Edited February 16, 2019 by Sean39

[RushJet1]

The Atari 7800 had the hard ware to do 320 pixels and that out did the NES and the Sega master system.

This is true, but it comes with caveats. Its 320-pixel mode is pretty restrictive with color use, restricting you to 3".5" colors per object, where the .5 is sometimes transparency or background color depending on pixel location.

There's also a weird bug where one of the colors is only accessible if it's next to another color in the palette, which is why Rikki & Vikki has a lot of alternating vertical bar colors.

 

The sound chip on the 7800 would be great with the pokey chip in the cartridges. This put the Atari over the top

with graphics and sound.

Not sure I'd say POKEY is definitively better than the NES's sound- NES is more in-tune and has 5 channels, plus has DPCM which is basically just configurable sample playback. Both systems can make sounds that the other can't imitate, so I'd call it a draw, with a slight nod to the NES because of lack of tuning issues- you can make POKEY music that sounds better than lots of NES music out there, but the skill cap is a lot higher.

 

At least we can probably all agree that both systems curbstomp the SMS here.

 

 

 

The other difference was that both the Atari 7800 and NES had way less on board memory

 

The Sega master System had 8K of on board memory with 16K of Graphics memory.

Also Sega released 4Mbyte and 8 Mbyte Rom chips for their games.

 

This still did not help them to over come Nintendo sales in consoles or games even with all their efforts.

With additional mappers, the NES having less system memory doesn't really matter. You could just bankswitch more stuff in from the cartridge. MMC5 is particularly crazy in this regard.

 

 

They all had games that made them shine over the other systems. It come down to the user what

games do you like and what system shows them off the best.

It's just that the NES had a lot of them compared to the other two systems due to popularity. A lot of later Konami, Nintendo, Hal, and Capcom games push the system pretty hard, and there are a lot more examples than those.

 

The Atari 7800 could have out done both the NES and Sega master System in one way.

Atari could have used the Pokey chip in all their 7800 games and tried pushing all the games

using only the higher resolution of 320 pixels in mode 8. If I recall this is the correct graphics mode for

this system.

The real way it could have had better sound is including the POKEY on the system itself instead of expecting millions of POKEY chips to be made in carts and have devs foot the cost, that's just crazy.

 

Another problem with the 320 pixel mode is that the CPU and graphics chip, Maria and Sally, share their memory bus on the 7800, which means that there is a lot of contention that causes slowdown in 320 pixel mode. This doesn't happen in 160 pixel modes (nearly as much) because there's less to draw. If you're looking at Rikki & Vikki as the bar here, the game very cleverly uses the colors it has to the max, relying on nearby colors and the brain's perception of colors against black to mask the fact that there are only ever 7 colors max on screen, it has its own mapper to assist in the whole Sally/Maria bandwidth thing, and Osman spent months optimizing code for speed in that regard, saving a few precious cycles of CPU execution time etc. every couple updates. Not sure if other game studios would go through all that to make their 320 pixel games play well.

[+Defender_2600]

Asteroids Deluxe, AstroBlaster, Astro Fighter, Baby Pac-Man, CrazyBrix, Dungeon Stalker, Frenzy / Berzerk, Froggie, Graze Suit Alpha, Moon Cresta, One on One Basketball, Pac-Man 320, Ms. Pac-Man 320, Rikki & Vikki, Rip-Off, Scramble, Space Invaders,Tower Toppler: these 7800 games are all made in 320 mode. Atari 7800 Froggie, in 320 mode ( 320×240 ), has over 20 colors on screen + transparent. The maximum number of colors per zone / scan line (7 or 9 colors) it does not necessarily have to be associated with the maximum number of colors on screen.

 

 

The 7800 320 mode (320×240) shows square pixels (pixel aspect ratio: 0.9 NTSC and 1.0 PAL) and can replicate the correct aspect ratio of the arcade graphics. The NES with 256 horizontal pixels by 240 vertical pixels display wide pixels and therefore wide sprites/tiles compared to arcade graphics / 7800 320 mode . Same goes for ColecoVision, Sega Master System, CoCo 3, etc., for these systems the pixel aspect ratio is approximately 1.2 NTSC and 1.4 PAL.

 

 

 

Also, when you have only 240 vertical pixels it may be useful to place a extra display (scores, status, etc.) on the right side of the main game but in this case the play field will be compromised if you have only 256 horizontal pixels rather than 320 horizontal pixels. For example, here is a comparison with Galaga on NES :

 

 

 

Among other things, the NES features a palette of 53 colors, 8x8 tiles / 3 colors from 4 palettes , 8x8 or 8x16 sprites / 3 colors from 4 palettes. The 7800 features a palette of 256 colors and, with the 160B mode, a single sprite / tiles can have 12 colors from 2 palettes + transparent / background (and without limits of size). Therefore the color depth can be considerable despite of the wide pixel aspect ratio. In conclusion, each system has its strengths.

For instance, 7800 Ninja Golf (Dragon Boss) :

 

 

A curiosity, compared to 7800, the SMS puts more colors on screen at one time for the background (SMS 31 colors from 2 palettes vs 7800 25 colors) but for the sprites the SMS has only one 15 color palette while the 7800 can use any palette available.

For example, with 7800 160B mode 24 colors on screen are available for the sprites (12 colors from 2 palettes + transparent / background) and a single sprite can have 12 colors or 24 colors with two overlapped sprites. As a side note, I also noticed that in some SMS games the sprites do not have transparency (see SMS Space Harrier).

 

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"...the SMS has a far, far more limited palette than the 7800 (or even 2600), it's only 6-bit RGB, probably a good bit worse than even the default 56 colors/shades on the NES. (the 7800 has 256 colos, or 16 hues with 16 luminance levels each like GTIA, double the luminance levels of TIA/CTIA)...

...the SMS uses 2 4-bit palettes from 6-bit RGB (64 colors) each with 15 colors (both applicable to the BG, only 1 usable for sprites) plus a solid BG color for a possible maximum of 31 colors on-screen (in both cases you'd have common cases of less than that due to practical limits of separate palettes, probably more so with the NES). Then there's the limits on how those colors are aplied to the tilemap and sprites: for the SMS you could have a fixed 15 color palette for sprites and the ability to select between the 2 palettes for each 8x8 BG tile...

...In any case, you'd be a hell of a lot closer than the SMS's 6-bit RGB... sure it can do 16 colors for any pixel on-screen without any tricks, but there's very few shades of any color... and even if you combined all useful yellowish/orange-ish/brownish shades, you'd probably only manage 6 or 7 colors and even then they'd look a bit off. (games that look best on the SMS tend to be stylized heavily for RGB colors)..."

http://atariage.com/...7800/?p=2174853

http://atariage.com/...lors/?p=2925976

[VintageGamer74]

Doesn't matter which one was technically superior. It's about the games. Every system has great games. NES just happened to have a more robust library. My buddy had 7800 and I had a NES and we always enjoyed and had fun playing the others system and that's all that mattered. My two cents. ✌️

[gorfcadet]

Doesn't matter which one was technically superior. It's about the games. Every system has great games. NES just happened to have a more robust library. My buddy had 7800 and I had a NES and we always enjoyed and had fun playing the others system and that's all that mattered. My two cents. ✌️

I remember manipulating my younger brother to get the 7800 that Christmas. I got the NES. It seemed smarter for us to get different systems. We always had fun playing both, and now I have them both. Playing Rikki & Vikki now I took the exact old 7800 from our childhood over to his place and we had a blast. It's always about the games, but what makes a system superior is always what we project onto that platform with our friends and family and the memories we make playing it. I played a lot of great games alone on my NES, but my brother and I played Joust and Food Fight until our hands hurt when we were kids. Playing Pole Position II with my four year old daughters and Rikki & Vikki with my son is a superior experience. Playing Baby Pac-Man takes me back to begging my folks for one more quarter at Pizza Hut as a kid. I don't imagine I can have a superior experience on an inferior platform.

*end scene.*

A great programmer can make a superior experience on almost any piece of hardware. When we are present for that experience, whether it is Gunstar Heroes on Genesis, Mario World on SNES, Medieval Madness the pinball machine, Zelda on the NES, X-Men VS. Street Fighter on Saturn, or Rikki & Vikki and Baby Pac-man on the Atari freakin' 7800, we are lucky to be in the forest when the tree falls and to have heard the noise. The systems are just vehicles to drive creativity. Whether the Mona Lisa was created with oils or finger paints, it is still amazing.

[VintageGamer74]

@gorfcadet I couldn't agree more. I guess my point was is that I had so many systems after I got a job that I just didn't care what the specs were anymore. I remember enjoying the Dreamcast WAY MORE than the PS2, Xbox and GameCube because of the games that were released. Does that mean I didn't enjoy those other systems? Not at all. I just enjoyed the Dreamcast more. All I know is that I have a load of systems and there are a ton games on each of them that entertain me.

 

Cool that your kids are enjoying some old-school gaming goodness!!! Nice to see that sprites and 2-D gaming are still being appreciated by a new generation!

Edited February 18, 2019 by VintageGamer74

[DracIsBack]

A great programmer can make a superior experience on almost any piece of hardware.

 

That's one of the problems that the 7800 and other Atari systems had really. The good programmers weren't on the platform. They were making NES games. And then their next generation of NES games. And their next generation of NES games after that. Learning how to squeeze more and more tricks out of it. And trying to compete with each other to standout in the marketplace. Using mappers. Using bigger and bigger games.

 

Tramiel Atari was - um - cheap. Almost no third party development. Even the games Atari funded smacked of cheapness. Of limited dev budgets. Small cartridges. Hardly any cartridges with 'extras' like RAM and sound, when nearly every NES game had some kind of mapper than allowed the NES to do things its base hardware couldn't pull off. Even the 2-color manuals with no screen shots.

 

I mean - what would happen if Nintendo's top software dev team was challenged to make an Atari 7800 game, given a year to do it, and allowed to put in on a 4 megabit cartridge with an MMC-5 type mapper?

[RushJet1]

I mean - what would happen if Nintendo's top software dev team was challenged to make an Atari 7800 game, given a year to do it, and allowed to put in on a 4 megabit cartridge with an MMC-5 type mapper?

They'd delay the game for 2 more years, but it would be an amazing game.

[Lynxpro]

I have to mention a few things in here. The Sega Master System cartridges [not the cards, of course] - to my knowledge - maxed out at 4 MegaBITS [512K Kilobytes] of ROM space during its North American and Japanese commercial life cycles. Unlike the NES or the 7800, It didn't have the capability to pack RAM, graphics, or sound chips on its cartridges [or CPUs, like the 7800 although still has yet to be done commercially]. Or, maybe it would be fair to say doing so would require extra logic chips, just like it does for the 2600 and would for the 5200 if anyone did such a thing. It did have 8K RAM as well as 16K (V)RAM for its Yamaha graphics chip, compared to the 4K RAM standard in the NES and the 7800. There was a comment in here mentioning how the sound capabilities of both the 7800 and the NES are greater than the SMS but that is in terms of expansion options since the SMS can't add sound chips via the carts. It also excludes the Yamaha 2413 that was included in the Japanese version which for some reason wasn't included in the North American models.

 

The 7800 could've been far superior with a few tweaks but they probably would've been cost prohibitive considering Warner demanded the console to be backwards-compatible with the 2600, graphically more powerful [in theory] than the 5200/Colecovision/Famicom, and also be a cost-reduced console much cheaper to manufacture than the 5200. Cost-reduction is another reason why GCC/Atari Inc stayed with the 1.79Mhz SALLY 6502 instead of other variants that were in Atari Inc's Consumer Engineering Division where Jerry Jessop and Tod Fry were putting together their own proposed systems to counter the Famicom and the GCC 7800 projects. They supposedly were using 6502s clocked at twice - or faster - as fast as SALLY. Throw in a 3.58Mhz - or better - 6502 and the system would've obviously been more powerful. Put MARIA on a separate bus - like the NES had - and performance would've improved. Give MARIA her own separate DRAM/VRAM/SRAM and her performance improves even more. Stick a POKEY/Dual POKEY/Quad POKEY on the 7800's motherboard along with the standard TIA and you improve the audio even further. But how much would that have potentially increased the MSRP of the 7800 for the Christmas 1984 shopping season which was when it was originally set to debut nationally?

[Sean39]

Hi Everyone

There was a lot of good points made. The systems were all made in the 1980s and everyone of these systems

had their good points and downfalls. What it really does come down to is what games you really want.

There were games on the NES and they were only on that system. Then the Atari 7800 had games that

could be only found on it. Of course there is quite a few games that the Sega Master System only had.

 

So it really the games and at the time these came out everyone looked at the games and not the hardware specifications.

I have all 3 systems and I think they all have games that make them stand out.

 

It the Memory of Playing these with your kids and grand kids that will make them great. Yes I am that old.

Edited February 27, 2019 by Sean39