How powerful was the cancelled Atari Panther compared to the Atari ST/Amiga?

[carlsson]

Ok, so perhaps the press was more eager about a new Atari console than the dev studios... In that case it doesn't matter how technically advanced the hardware is if it has strange shortcomings, problems and may be difficult and different to program compared to all other systems on the market, meaning porting and making new games would be tedious and problematic. Not always the system with the best specs wins the war.

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

[empsolo]

47 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Ok, so perhaps the press was more eager about a new Atari console than the dev studios... In that case it doesn't matter how technically advanced the hardware is if it has strange shortcomings, problems and may be difficult and different to program compared to all other systems on the market, meaning porting and making new games would be tedious and problematic. Not always the system with the best specs wins the war.

Right. It is who has the most to offer to the consumer. Nintendo beat Atari and Sega for two successive generations via "lateral thinking with withered technology." Sega trounced the N64 in Japan based on the Saturn's appeal as a 2D platform and RPG powerhouse.

Edited September 4, 2020 by empsolo

[carlsson]

While it would've been highly unlikely, I begun to think what could've happened if that person at Sony for some reason had contacted Atari regarding a CD-ROM expansion instead of courting Nintendo. Obviously for that to happen, Atari needed a somewhat current and popular console to begin with. I don't know if the Panther could've been this device, if it was launched in 1991. I know that eventually the Jaguar got a CD expansion, but that is a different matter.

 

Perhaps in some very twisted, parallel universe, Sony would've come to terms with Atari, never made their own PlayStation series. Atari would never have gone down and been acquired by the clowns that today run the brand and instead been one of the top three gaming giants, but how many felines are there left to name future consoles in 1994, 1998, 2003, 2009, 2014 and 2021?

[Leeroy ST]

2 hours ago, empsolo said:

Right. It is who has the most to offer to the consumer. Nintendo beat Atari and Sega for two successive generations via "lateral thinking with withered technology." Sega trounced the N64 in Japan based on the Saturn's appeal as a 2D platform and RPG powerhouse.

NIntendo beat Sega 3 successive Generations, beat Atari twice but there not succesive.

 

Also Sega didn't trounce the N64 in Japan. The N64 came out two years later and nearly caught the Saturn and if they had a bit more of a push they likely would have beat Sega there.

 

Sales:

 

Saturn - 5.9 million

Nintendo 64 - 5.5 million

 

and that's with a two year head start for the Saturn with originally more mindshare and irritation with Nintendo delaying the ultra 64 while also having many games that were popular on the PSX, in genres that sold really well on it in Japan, even sharing some games.

 

That should put things into perspective.

 

 

[CatPix]

Did Sony approached Nintendo? Wasn't that the othey way around, when Nintendo got worried to see that the PC-Engine Cd-ROM addon was getting big, and that Sega announced their own already?

In the long run, I don't think it would have changed much. Atari didn't had (at least at this time) the mindset of encouraging developers (I remember reading interviews of French developers working on Atari Falcon and Jaguar games, and they all said that working with Atari was an uphill battle. Though, they might have been communicating with Atari France, not Atari USA) and the success of a peripheral is supported also by providing games. NEC-Hudson had, well, Hudson, churning games for the CD-ROM², which encouraged sales, which encouraged other develoeprs to step in, which encouraged sales, etc...

On the other hand, the failure of the Mega CD is attributed by former Sega executives to the lack of games by Sega on the add-on.

Ultimately, unless Sony went out of their way and made games for an hypothetical "Sony Panther CD", it wouldn't have changed much.

[Leeroy ST]

16 hours ago, davidcalgary29 said:

Well, I'll certainly agree that this side conversation has completely moved away from the original topic. Back to the Panther!

That's a very poor discussion tactic your using.

 

  

3 hours ago, carlsson said:

Ok, so perhaps the press was more eager about a new Atari console than the dev studios... In that case it doesn't matter how technically advanced the hardware is if it has strange shortcomings, problems and may be difficult and different to program compared to all other systems on the market, meaning porting and making new games would be tedious and problematic. Not always the system with the best specs wins the war.

 

As far as people have said the Panther was among the most straightforward of the Atari systems. But another thing you have to consider is sometimes programming difficulty is done on purpose to trap developers into an ecosystem for a length of time. See Sony for an example of a company that did this.

 

However, something like Cybermorpth in 1991 would have been enough to attract developers and cause people to run out and buy the game. As much as Youtube has warped perspective to younger gamers born after 1994, a free roaming 3D space combat game on a console was a big deal. Even assuming that the best the Panther could do would be the early Jaguar footage it still would have been a big deal.

 

3 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

OTo answer the question of how powerful the hardware was, let's let those who worked on it answer.. 

 

Rob Nicholson, HMS :

 

The Panther had a pathetic amount of RAM. Maybe 128K. Certainly not

enough to create two bit-maps as big as the whole screen and implement

standard double buffering. I think there was 32K of static RAM for the

display list. This was a good idea as it sped up generation of the

display. The same system was used on the Jaguar but the object processor

was beefed up and made more flexible to handle other features such as

read-modify write (for shadows etc). Unfortunately, on the Jaguar the

display list was in normal DRAM which meant the whole system stopped

when the video processor wanted to access memory. It also meant that on

the Jaguar, the advantages of page mode RAM where accessing the next

byte/word along was often defeated as different devices (display,

blitter, 68k and GPU etc) kept reading from different pages.

 

 

Jeff Minter :"Hmmm - well I certainly never had it displaying 65,535 sprites

simultaneously!

 

The sprite hardware was a lot like the OLP on the Jag, and had similar

limitations - putting too many sprites on one scanline would cause

"tearing" where the OLP had insufficient time to traverse the entire

list during the time of a scanline. Also, sprites that were scaled up

would take twice the bandwidth of standard, unscaled sprites, ISTR.

 

I did a demo with this whopping great dinosaur about 2 screens high, a

couple of ground planes and 40 bouncing, scaling antelopes that bounced

along the ground. ISTR that if you had too many beasts land at the one

time, you'd get a bit of tear at the bottom of the screen.

 

You could do some nice warping though by using an IRQ per scanline to

twiddle scaled sprite params... had some nice stuff with wibbly,

colour-cycling Mandy images that warped and scrolled, ISTR..."

 

\

(:-) - Y a K

/

 

Seems like the Panther had some corners cut in its architecture.

[Leeroy ST]

6 minutes ago, CatPix said:

On the other hand, the failure of the Mega CD is attributed by former Sega executives to the lack of games by Sega on the add-on.

Ultimately, unless Sony went out of their way and made games for an hypothetical "Sony Panther CD", it wouldn't have changed much.

Yeah it was Nintendo that approached Sony, and dumped them for Phillips but then changed their mind on them to and dropped CD's altogether. Which is funny because Sony's first game "system" was a CD-i machine, the only thing is a giant circle.

 

Anyway I find this quote funny, I think the Sega CD has a good number of games, I think the issue was lack of quality control for the FMV and the traditional games, as well as many lazy ports that just included CD audio. CD hype can only carry you so far without decent hitters.

[Lost Dragon]

3 hours ago, carlsson said:

Ok, so perhaps the press was more eager about a new Atari console than the dev studios... In that case it doesn't matter how technically advanced the hardware is if it has strange shortcomings, problems and may be difficult and different to program compared to all other systems on the market, meaning porting and making new games would be tedious and problematic. Not always the system with the best specs wins the war.

The software in development was lacking, to be brutally honest. 

 

An RPG which had started life on the Konix Multisystem 

 

Another version of Shadow Of The Beast. 

 

An update of Pong

 

Some original titles by Rob Zybdel, he can't remember what they were. 

 

Jeff Minter planning to do his take on Star Raiders 

 

Tiertex planning to convert Strider II

 

HMS used ST Elite to test the hardware, but Atari wouldnt grant them the license for it on the Lynx, so unlikely it would of made it to Panther. 

 

Your not going to make inroads without some big name titles and killer apps from the start. 

 

[Lost Dragon]

3 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

That's a very poor discussion tactic your using.

 

  

 

As far as people have said the Panther was among the most straightforward of the Atari systems. But another thing you have to consider is sometimes programming difficulty is done on purpose to trap developers into an ecosystem for a length of time. See Sony for an example of a company that did this.

 

However, something like Cybermorpth in 1991 would have been enough to attract developers and cause people to run out and buy the game. As much as Youtube has warped perspective to younger gamers born after 1994, a free roaming 3D space combat game on a console was a big deal. Even assuming that the best the Panther could do would be the early Jaguar footage it still would have been a big deal.

 

 

Seems like the Panther had some corners cut in its architecture.

There's also still the rumour Atari were looking to drop it's custom soundchip, one of it's most powerful features, to save costs. 

[CatPix]

7 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

Anyway I find this quote funny, I think the Sega CD has a good number of games, I think the issue was lack of quality control for the FMV and the traditional games, as well as many lazy ports that just included CD audio. CD hype can only carry you so far without decent hitters.

There were alot of games, including good ones, but lots of FMV games and most other games were ports of cart games with a few added things and music. Also most of those games were NOT from Sega. Looking at a list of games, there were about 200 Mega-CD games, with about 20 developed by Sega. For comparison, on about 700 games for the PC-Engine Cd-ROM², Hudson made over 70 games (most of them between 1988 and 1991).

Sega aexecutives I think, meant that Sega themselves didn't made oustanding games and created original licences to support the support, not that globally, there weren't enough games. There weren't enoguh games from Sega themselves.

[Leeroy ST]

4 minutes ago, CatPix said:

There were alot of games, including good ones, but lots of FMV games and most other games were ports of cart games with a few added things and music.

Uh, that's what I said lol.

 

5 minutes ago, CatPix said:

Hudson made over 70 games (most of them between 1988 and 1991).

If you include NEC publishing/partners it's near 200 iirc.

 

But that' not a really fair comparison, NEC and hudson switched focus to the CD with a few hucard games still in the works after the CD's success in japan. Sega had by the time of the Sega CD's release a portable they had to push games on since Nintendo had most of the third-parties, the base Genesis itself, arcade machines, iirc an educational consoles, and now the CD.

 

I don't think Sega had much of a choice.

 

 

 

 

[Leeroy ST]

27 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

The software in development was lacking, to be brutally honest. 

 

An RPG which had started life on the Konix Multisystem 

 

Another version of Shadow Of The Beast. 

 

An update of Pong

 

Some original titles by Rob Zybdel, he can't remember what they were. 

 

Jeff Minter planning to do his take on Star Raiders 

 

Tiertex planning to convert Strider II

 

HMS used ST Elite to test the hardware, but Atari wouldnt grant them the license for it on the Lynx, so unlikely it would of made it to Panther. 

 

Your not going to make inroads without some big name titles and killer apps from the start. 

 

This might explain why some games like Rygar were on the Lynx instead of the cancelled Panther.

 

27 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

There's also still the rumour Atari were looking to drop it's custom soundchip, one of it's most powerful features, to save costs. 

Well they did it before with the 7800, so I wouldn't put it past them. 

 

It's crazy how Atari never really fixed their game situation and still let Atari games sit out there even after the ST "saved" the company and made money, they never once though to actually by that arm and let Midway absorb it.

[zzip]

16 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

There's a difference between didn't want and didn't want to pay for.

At the end of the day, it makes no difference, they lost their videogame edge to Nintendo because they weren't out there competing.   I'm not even convinced they wanted to.  I remember those early days well.   They were all about the ST.  The 8-bit owners weren't happy and felt ignored because of slow pace of new development.   Consoles were virtually ignored.   Then after a couple of years they shocked the world by announcing a 2600Jr.   When asked why, they basically said they were surprised with how well the 2600 was still selling without marketing, so they were going start marketing it again.   Then they were suddenly all about games.   They dusted off the 7800, they created the XEGS (further annoying the 8-bit owners)

 

16 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Including near 3D games like f18 hornet which were ambitious projects at the time which of course wouldn't play to well on home console hardware for another 6 or so years.

Yeah eventually they had to fund new developments,  but at the start they where selling games from 82, 83 ,84  for their "new" systems.  If they truly wanted to be players in the videogame market, they would have been working on obtaining new IPs in the meantime.   I know they use the excuse that they were trying to sore out contract issues with the 7800, but they didn't even release any new 2600 games until 86

[carlsson]

37 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

An update of Pong

Haha! Old Atari, new Atari, pseudo Atari. It doesn't matter, all are circling around this 70's game that has been challenged if it even is Atari's property to begin with.

 

Yeah, that selection of games in development would have been a yawn for both Nintendo and Sega, even Philips with its CD-i almost stands out like a gaming powerhouse in comparison.

[Leeroy ST]

2 minutes ago, zzip said:

At the end of the day, it makes no difference, they lost their videogame edge to Nintendo because they weren't out there competing. 

They lost their edge to Coleco because they weren't "competing" you're saying nothing new outside of trying to make it seems like Nintendo was the only issue Atari had to face. Also the 8-bits were 70's machines and they still supported the XL's and put out the XEGS so how much more support do you think Atari should have given them?

 

They also didn't "dust off" the 7800, it was in legal limbo. You also greatly underestimate, and I'll say it against GREATLY underestimate how much access to funding Atari had before the ST started bringing money in (as well as the 7800/2600 to a lesser extent) you are complaining about things Atari didn't have the finances to do, outside a few exceptions. Sure they weren't run that well, but you are attributing not wanting to compete instead of the lack of money.

 

7 minutes ago, zzip said:

Yeah eventually they had to fund new developments,  but at the start they where selling games from 82, 83 ,84  for their "new" systems.  If they truly wanted to be players in the videogame market, they would have been working on obtaining new IPs in the meantime.   I know they use the excuse that they were trying to sore out contract issues with the 7800, but they didn't even release any new 2600 games until 86

Again you aren't really getting what happened. The 7800 was supposed to launch with those games, those were the hold overs from the cancelled 1984 national launch. In addition, the 7800 was in limbo and Atari was short on cash, how many new Ips could they make from the start of the consoles 2? The owners switched hand, just got the company fresh out the oven and the ST being the focus is not even remotely surprising since it's what "saved" the company and what was relied on to generate money, and sure that applies to the consoles as well, but it would take at least a year to get things going on that end.

 

[Leeroy ST]

5 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Haha! Old Atari, new Atari, pseudo Atari. It doesn't matter, all are circling around this 70's game that has been challenged if it even is Atari's property to begin with.

 

Yeah, that selection of games in development would have been a yawn for both Nintendo and Sega, even Philips with its CD-i almost stands out like a gaming powerhouse in comparison.

Well CD-i is a disc format so it's not really running anything, but the players had a few games, Burn Cycle, Tetris, Kether, 7th Guest, Mutant Rampage, Dragons Lair II as an exclusive, so it had some interest. Plus online gaming later on.

 

It seems Ataris launch titles were always rather underwhelming even if some of the games turn out good. Except maybe the Lynx.

[+davidcalgary29]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

That's a very poor discussion tactic your using.

 

 

 

If it's unclear, I will spell it out for you: I wanted to end our side-discussion because you are being dismissive and, quite frankly, rude. 

[Leeroy ST]

14 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

If it's unclear, I will spell it out for you: I wanted to end our side-discussion because you are being dismissive and, quite frankly, rude. 

Or you are being dismissive and rude by lying about me being rude by saying something factual like:

 

Quote

 even in present times those two industries are separated and not integrated together.

It's fine to have you own opinion but even the industry separates the two that's not "rude" that's how it's done. By arguing against that you are dismissing what the industry is doing, also by saying it's the "reality of the game market" when the gaming market separates them.

 

I have no issue with your opinion and preference of not separating the mobile and traditional industry. 

 

I even said one of your arguments was valid and I agreed with

 

Quote

 

Now the WII is a valid argument, it just managed to strike a fad audience into the industry but ut was in the same market despite the "HD twins" shenanigans and Nintendos own words for being a "separate" competitor. Although the Switch is on the line with that one.

 

So not sure how you're coming to these conclusions. Me saying the industry separates the two is not "dismissing you" sir.

Edited September 4, 2020 by Leeroy ST

[hwrd]

18 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Considering that the ST was a profit driver with as little cost put into it as possible while still having decent specs to raise profit margins all those moves make sense exceptt for launching the STE too late. They also tried a PC clone they should have went all in on that in hindsight.

 

 

We had the Atari dealership here, and when the Atari sales rep visited in '88, he said "expect Atari PC sales to become 90% of Atari sales".

It never happened, or even came close to 10%.  The Commodore PC's sold far better for us; the PC sales here were mostly to the school boards.  If I recall correctly, the two companies PC's were similar, except the Ataris had EGA.  The school boards did not want the "Atari" name.

[zzip]

8 hours ago, atarian1 said:

PC clock speeds don't mean much. Everyone with a decent amount of computer knowledge knows the Motorola 68000 is a lot more efficient that any Intel processor. A decent 486 system still costed more than a Falcon and didn't have the specs of the Falcon. I know because my brother bought one because he needed it for college work.

I used to believe this.   It was true at the time of the 8086 and 286,  but by the time the 486 came out, it was a lot more efficient and Motorola no longer had much of a clock efficiency advantage, if at all.

 

When I got my first 486, I was able to prove this because I could run emulators for 680x0 system, and they could run faster than a TT or Falcon, even after the overhead of emulation.   The 68030 was roughly equivalent to a 386, it was certainly much weaker than a 486.   Yes the Falcon had the DSP, but that was only useful in certain apps, certainly didn't help application performance.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

They lost their edge to Coleco because they weren't "competing" you're saying nothing new outside of trying to make it seems like Nintendo was the only issue Atari had to face. Also the 8-bits were 70's machines and they still supported the XL's and put out the XEGS so how much more support do you think Atari should have given them?

Coleco wasn't really a threat, it may have seemed like one at the time, but they shot themselves in the foot with the Adam, then then bowed out in 85.

 

In the meantime Atari panicked and started working on the 7800.   What they didn't realize is having the best hardware isn't the end-all be-all.   Having the right games is more important,  being competitively priced is more important.  Lots of generations have been won by the weaker system.   They should have stuck with the 5200, bringing better games to move more units instead of jumping to 7800 so quickly.   I mean..  if the idea was that the 5200 wasn't good enough to go against Coleco in 83,  how on earth was the XEGS good enough to go against Nintendo/Sega in 87?

 

In the 80s Atari 8-bit owners wanted the kind of support that Commodore was giving the C64/C128 and Apple was giving the Apple II line.   They used them as serious computers,  they wanted hard drive options, better floppies, better capabilities, better app support.  All that stuff came late, if at all, and was lacking.   When the XEGS came out, many owners took it as a slap in the face because they wanted their computers to shed the "game system" image.    Also XEGS did nothing to expand the graphics/sound capabilities of the system.

 

2 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Again you aren't really getting what happened. The 7800 was supposed to launch with those games, those were the hold overs from the cancelled 1984 national launch. In addition, the 7800 was in limbo and Atari was short on cash, how many new Ips could they make from the start of the consoles 2?

These are excuses.   The game industry isn't going to pause and wait for Atari to get enough income from ST.   Tramiel Atari wasn't serious about gaming at the time.  Sorry, they just weren't.   If they were, they would have made resolving the 7800 legal issues a priority, not let it fester for two years.   They would have kept releasing 2600 carts the whole time.   Instead they stopped completely, and only started again when they "rediscovered" the 2600.

 

Tramiel went into Atari only caring about the ST.   He only rediscovered game consoles when he noticed they started bringing in cash again.  In the meantime he squandered Atari's market position.   Mr. "Business is War" would never have let that happen if he cared about games.

[Lost Dragon]

I've personally always viewed the Panther in a similar light to that of the Konix Multisystem, press hyped up as a killer system, but then you look at the ports from other 16-bit systems and all you saw were more colorful versions of old Amiga titles. 

 

And i think the sprites on Konix Hammerfist are smaller than the Amiga version. 

 

 

Edited September 4, 2020 by Lost Dragon

[Leeroy ST]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Coleco wasn't really a threat, it may have seemed like one at the time,

They were a threat, the 7800 was a response to it, and they survived the crash. Atari messed up with the 5200 and dropped it to put out another competitor.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

In the meantime Atari panicked and started working on the 7800.

In the meantime what? Atari 7800 was trapped in legal limbo, unless you mean after the 5200 was scrapped, in that case 7800 was just another attempt at a sucessor I wouldn't say Atari panicked that seems a bit extreme, but they did react.

 

By the way it should be noted that new 5200 games were made after the discontinuation so if anything Atari Corp did actually try to appeal to all the platform fans, they didn't do it very well but they tried.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

What they didn't realize is having the best hardware isn't the end-all be-all. Having the right games is more important, 

If you are talking about the 7800 they did have the right games for a quick launch in 1984. Maybe not the right number of games sure.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

They should have stuck with the 5200, bringing better games to move more units instead of jumping to 7800 so quickly. 

The 5200 did have good games, the problem was that the controllers were bad and retailer displeasure was high creating an environment where they couldn't get as high a quantity of games as they wanted and eventually all that took a financial toll Warner didn't want to bother with, so they came out with the original vision of the 7800 which would have build in game save scores, the ability to expand, sound capability promises, and a lot of powerful games that wouldn't run on previous consoles or run on the 7800 much better. 

 

Sure, you could argue that they should have stuck with the 5200 and tried salvaging it, and I'd agree since a 5200 success would have put less reliance on the VCS, which would have allowed it to become more of a base console for new games and could share software with the Atari computer line which it was based off of. Yes.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

if the idea was that the 5200 wasn't good enough to go against Coleco in 83,  how on earth was the XEGS good enough to go against Nintendo/Sega in 87?

Again you are misreading the history, the 5200 WAS good enough against the Coleco, but some back-end problems self-inflicted by Atari plus the controller issues created a slight money pit warner didn't want to deal with overtime.

 

Also the XEGS sold out it's initial shipments, and actually had a strategy the 5200 should have used (why Atari decided not to push it in marketing is a mystery) and that is to have cross-games with the computer line. 5200 should have had the games it came with and received its first years plus posts of computer line-up games. 5200 got some like Rescue on Fractlus among others, but not enough. 

 

You can't really compare the design or strate

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

In the 80s Atari 8-bit owners wanted the kind of support that Commodore was giving the C64/C128 and Apple was giving the Apple II line.   They used them as serious computers,  they wanted hard drive options, better floppies, better capabilities, better app support.  All that stuff came late, if at all, and was lacking.   When the XEGS came out, many owners took it as a slap in the face because they wanted their computers to shed the "game system" image. 

I disagree on this viewpoint because history shows that it was useless and an uphill battle to fight against the gaming image and Atari used gaming in order to attract people to the other software on their computers.

 

Commodore would learn this the hardway with the 128 and the Amiga. Sure it would have been nice to still provide the "power users" more software, and the 8-bit line had a decent amount of software, but you also have to consider is it worth money developing more in-house stuff for an audience that is a small part of your base? We are talking about the 80's computers could cause a rich company to go bankrupt in one year.

 

The XEGS was for the gaming and media (like music which the ST would be known for) side of their computer line which was the majority of their base. If they actually tried to switch over their marketing and business strategy to power users the 8-bit line would have died before the 5200 came out or just after because it would have failed to gain marketshare.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Also XEGS did nothing to expand the graphics/sound capabilities of the system.

 

Uh yeah, the XEGS wasn't an upgrade, it was a consolized XEcomputer , hence XE Game System(XEGS) with the ability to actually turn the console into a computer with the right add-ons. A strategy that could have worked to some extend if they pushed it more, but they didn't. 

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

These are excuses.   The game industry isn't going to pause and wait for Atari to get enough income from ST.   Tramiel Atari wasn't serious about gaming at the time.  Sorry, they just weren't.

 

I mean you're wrong. They kept the gaming branch, they made the ST with games in mind and had an idea of a ST console around the time the ST released, put out more 5200 games, continued support for the dying 8-bit line and so on.

 

I also don't get why you are being stubborn on this, the 7800 was in LEGAL LIMBO, they couldn't DO ANYTHING, nobody believed the industry would wait for Atari and I'm not even sure what that means since the NES was a 1983 machine the 7800 was strong enough. The games it launched with were hold overs that were already COMPLETE when it released in 1986 it would take time to put out new games and they did come out at the end of the year. There's really nothing to misunderstand here, you seem to be just beating on Atari to beat on them.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

If they were, they would have made resolving the 7800 legal issues a priority, not let it fester for two years. 

This shows you don't understand the cause for the delay. Atari Corp didn't "let" anything fester for two years. It was actually Warners fault the system as delayed in the first place since they screwed over GCC, which eventually Atari Corp caved to cover their mess and then had to create a new studio and department head for the console division.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

He only rediscovered game consoles when he noticed they started bringing in cash again.  

 

This isn't even close to the way you put it.

 

7 hours ago, zzip said:

  I know they use the excuse that they were trying to sore out contract issues with the 7800, but they didn't even release any new 2600 games until 86

I wanted to go back to this because one could argue that your stance on wanting Atari to put more focus on gaming with the 7800 conflicts with you thinking they should have released more 2600 games/the jr. If anything they should have scrapped the 2600 since the 7800 had BC. 

[atarian1]

14 hours ago, zzip said:

I used to believe this.   It was true at the time of the 8086 and 286,  but by the time the 486 came out, it was a lot more efficient and Motorola no longer had much of a clock efficiency advantage, if at all.

 

When I got my first 486, I was able to prove this because I could run emulators for 680x0 system, and they could run faster than a TT or Falcon, even after the overhead of emulation.   The 68030 was roughly equivalent to a 386, it was certainly much weaker than a 486.   Yes the Falcon had the DSP, but that was only useful in certain apps, certainly didn't help application performance.

We were comparing systems and price. A decent 486 was still more expensive than a Falcon and the DSP certainly helped in application performance. Maybe not in word processing or spreadsheets, but for graphics and music, it certainly helped. Can you really tell the difference in the speed of a word processor or spreadsheet on a 486 vs a Falcon? Not really.

 

Emulators at the time could not emulate a Falcon, so I know you are lying about the PC emulating Falcons faster than a real Falcon.