INTV Game Quality

[ZillaRUSH]

I have a few of these recent Atari 2600 releases....I have no idea how they get such an amazing quality into a cart. EX: Draconian, Mappy, (upcoming) Galaga & WOW. I am far from a game designer. Can INTV be pushed to the limits like this? These games blow me away! Then I ask why did the designers years ago put out crap at times? Im sure money/time...but quality games are heads above the rest...think DK from Coleco on INTV for total junk. I know we never reach for that cart!

[pacman000]

I think some of the most recent 2600 games, like Draconian & Galaga, have an extra processor in the cart to help handle game logic. I suppose someone could do something similar with the INTV, but I'm not a developer, so I'm not sure what would be involved.

 

As for your second question...there are bad homebrews today, & sometimes a developer's too close to their game to know it has problems.

[+5-11under]

There are also good homebrews today, of course. Some simple games with great gameplay. Some very complex games with great gameplay.

[Ignorama]

As far as I noticed the actual game quality depends on the publisher. On the Intellivision I am pretty sure Elektronite is the best average quality and I would say they often go to the limits of the console.

[carlsson]

Yes, the mentioned 2600 games have a helper chip, possibly an ARM chip to off-load the CPU. Remember it doesn't have a frame buffer like the Intellivision has so on the 2600 the CPU needs to draw line by line which gives less time for other computations. I suppose the closest currently existing on the Intellivision might be the LTO! Flash cartridge which has support for JLP RAM, Flash memory and fast multiply/divide though I don't know how many games utilize the latter functions yet.

[+nanochess]

From memory I think Intellivision is doing well with recent releases:

 

Intellivision Revolution: Donkey Kong Jr, Jr Pacman, Jumpking Junior, Deepzone

Elektronite: Miner 2049er, Ninja Odyssey, TNT Cowboy and upcoming A.F. and Defender of the Crown.

Collectorvision: Moonsweeper, Astro Invader, Sydney Hunter and the Sacred Tribe.

[mr_me]

The atari 2600 technically has a higher resolution, and more colours compared to intellivision. It can also put out more independent moving objects on the screen as long as they are not on the same line. The atari 2600 was much more difficult to program compared to intellivision. The early 2600 games used two scanline resolution but over time they were able to program single scan line resolution where intellivision background is fixed at two scanline resolution. The original games were also limited by costly rom and were only 2k in size for a while. Intellivision cartridges started at 4k but also leveraged 6k of common rom inside the machine. Using the internal rom (exec) was restrictive but it made making games easier so a lot of the original games used it. Eventually rom size became less of an issue and programmers became better but still the intellivision graphics chip (stic) is somewhat limiting where the atari 2600 doesn't really have much of a graphics processor as much of it is done in software. This allowed things like changing a sprite's colour before it's done drawing it. One of the most restrictive things with the stic is that you can't reuse sprites further down the screen to have more than eight objects. The intellivision stic does have advanced features like hardware scrolling and more and more programmers are using it.

[mr_me]

I'll add that with modern development tools they are both easier to program today; more so with the atari 2600.

[ppelleti]

Then I ask why did the designers years ago put out crap at times?

 

mr_me already touched on this, but one of the big factors is ROM size. Early Intellivision games were 4K x 10 bits, 6K x 10 bits, or 8K x 10 bits, with some of the later games getting up to 16K x 10 bits.

 

Most of today's homebrews (especially the good ones) are much larger than that. For example, Sydney Hunter and the Sacred Tribe is 41K x 16 bits, and Christmas Carol vs the Ghost of Christmas Presents is 36.5K x 16bits. ROM used to be expensive, and now it's not, so games can be better.

 

Not that a game has to be big to be fun. I still consider Night Stalker to be one of the best Intellivision games, and it's only 4K x 10 bits.

 

Another possible factor is that people today have seen modern video games, so the bar has been set higher. Back when video games were new, people didn't know what they were missing.

[mr_me]

In the early 1980s, programmers were expected to complete a game in three months and much of that time was spent compressing the code to fit 4k. In the case of coleco Donkey Kong, it's an example of a programmers first effort being a dog. And he/she did not have the benefit of the support structure at mattel or aph. With DK Arcade, Carl took the time to reverse engineer the original arcade code and get the jump animation just right. The coleco programmer wouldn't have had access to that code nor the time to analyse it. Homebrew programmers doing this as a hobby can take as much time as they like although working part-time alongside a different full time job can have it's own challenges.

 

Edit:

Regarding coprocessors on the cartridge. I have the impression that it's quite common with newer atari 2600 homebrews. In fact the game logic might be running on the cartridge rather than the 2600 native cpu. I don't think that's the case with intellivision homebrews. They pretty much use standard intellivision processing. You can tell it's native intellivision if it runs on other old emulators like mame, nostalgia, and others.

Edited May 18, 2019 by mr_me