so whatch y'all think o the first homebrew console package?

[Room 34]

things that make you 'hmmmm'

(period piece from the time of the 7800,)

Is it your intention to quote Arsenio Hall, or C+C Music Factory?

 

Either way, shame on you!!!

[Godzilla]

well i left out the word 'go' but c&c was intention. gonna make you sweat!

[NE146]

WTF.. Are you causing trouble again Zilla?!?!

 

 

 

 

 

[raindog]

how did they look or sound so far off? man you got your nose stuck up marios butt, man. I have the NES & 7800 version of almost every game that existed on both platforms, and the 7800 spanks down the NES. It's not even debateable.

 

I'm actually not that much of a fan of Mario, and I think if I had given him a rim job I'd remember that. But ad hominem attacks aside, answering a question like "how did they look or sound so far off" is easy on the sound side (7800 sound = 2600 sound, and Paul Robson wasn't writing audio code for the Tramiels). On the video side I think a picture is worth a thousand words so here are 21,000 words. Arcade's in the middle, 7800 to the left, NES to the right.

 

 

Sadly, to fit them in 640 pixels I had to shrink them somewhat, so the fine details -- like how the 7800 has no better resolution on these titles than the 2600, just more colors and objects per line -- are lost. For those with such attention to detail I left the OpenOffice Draw file I used to lay out all these images out there in http://www.kudla.org/nesvs7800.

 

The sad thing is that the 7800 was probably capable of looking much closer to the arcade games than the NES was given a little more programming effort (maybe "Xype level", but I bet not even) and they learned to compensate for the sound with the on-cart POKEY chips... but from about 1982 till the release of the Lynx, Atari was a company who just didn't seem to care about their own products.

 

You're right, it's not debatable - the 7800's arcade ports did suffer from lower resolution, less authentic graphics, and less accurate sound than the same ports on the NES. They seem to me very much like what could have been accomplished if someone had just made a 4MHz 2600 with enough RAM to buffer a whole screen, not too impressive for the mid 80's. Whether they played better was another issue altogether, but the 7800 lost me and perhaps many other potential buyers with the first set of screenshots.

 

Rob