Worst console ever

[JB]

I doubt that say, Ball Blazer would've moved as fast, or as fluidly on the NES, perhaps even the Master System.

Didn't Ballblazer come out on the NES? I remember hearing that it was terrible, with slow and choppy scrolling and all around weaker gameplay.

FamiCom. And you heard right.

The gameplay issue is probably just a result of the far lower framerate, but it's hard to say.

[Video]

Actually, a lot of people say the 7800 was weaker in comparison, but pretty much anybody I've ever shown Ball Blazer to was impressed, not sure if the Nintendo could do that.

 

To bad the sound chip wasn't built into the 7800, yeah it saved cost on the system, but also ment any game with the chip was really expensive for their time.

[supercat]

To bad the sound chip wasn't built into the 7800, yeah it saved cost on the system, but also ment any game with the chip was really expensive for their time.

 

I wonder how much it would have cost for Atari to package a 28-pin version of the POKEY, No change to the chip--just leave off a bunch of pins (as was done to the 6502 to yield the 6507). Or was Atari no longer manufacturing POKEYs by the time such a thing would have been useful?

[jaybird3rd]

I wonder how much it would have cost for Atari to package a 28-pin version of the POKEY, No change to the chip--just leave off a bunch of pins (as was done to the 6502 to yield the 6507). Or was Atari no longer manufacturing POKEYs by the time such a thing would have been useful?

I do wish Atari had come out with a cost-reduced POKEY, or that GCC had finished their GUMBY sound chip as originally planned. Either option would have made the 7800 a LOT more palatable.

 

Even a full-sized POKEY (mounted on a daughterboard if necessary) probably wouldn't have added even a dollar to the hardware cost of the 7800; with the 8-bit computers and some coin-ops still using them, Atari must have been making enough POKEY chips already to tile their parking lot.

[supercat]

Even a full-sized POKEY (mounted on a daughterboard if necessary) probably wouldn't have added even a dollar to the hardware cost of the 7800; with the 8-bit computers and some coin-ops still using them, Atari must have been making enough POKEY chips already to tile their parking lot.

 

There are many things about the 7800 I don't understand. The MARIA chip is in some ways interesting, but in other ways unduly limited. Had I been designing the thing, I would have put many of the its registers under the control of the display list. Shouldn't be any harder than having the processor control them, but would have allowed for much greater versatility including the ability to use several different types of write behavior within a scan line.

[DracIsBack]

Compare between the NES and 7800 the following games: Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Joust. I don't think you will find a game on both platforms that looked better on the 7800 than the NES. If you do, let me know...I'll wanna see it for myself.

 

Xenophobe, Commando, Ballblazer ...

 

Point is taken that the NES generally looked sharper and sounded better. Not always but often. But I have never seen anyone I've shown the 7800 to mistake it for anything other than competition for the NES. ALIEN BRIGADE gives that away every time.

 

And of course, it's not always lopsided in the NESes favor either. Games can look good but flicker with six sprites.

 

Now, to be fair, the 7800 did have it's own merits. I doubt that say, Ball Blazer would've moved as fast, or as fluidly on the NES, perhaps even the Master System. But numbers are theoretical. Look at actual performance. If not 100% of the time, then darn near, the NES wins.

 

Again, playing field was not even. The developers were not the same, the effort put into each console was not the same, the investment was not the same.

 

It's a pointless effort to talk about hardware only when there was SO MUCH MORE going on to influence the market.

 

Again -- as I've stated before, it has strengths, it has weaknesses. But I stand by my view -- technology was not the 7800's biggest enemy or anything even close to it.

 

Jack Tramiel and his tight wallet was. For all the reasons I've mentioned. While I don't agree with JagFans trolling or his opinion of the 7800 he is right in that the NES delivered while the 7800 did not often. Jack was the reason it did not deliver because he wanted to sell STs and make a quick profit off of consoles riding Nintendo's coat tails.

 

What Warner wanted to do with the 7800 and what Jack ended up doing were two very different things.

 

The proof was there that it could play in the diamond with the other consoles, but its coach wasn't as good as the others.

Edited July 13, 2006 by DracIsBack

[jaybird3rd]

There are many things about the 7800 I don't understand. The MARIA chip is in some ways interesting, but in other ways unduly limited. Had I been designing the thing, I would have put many of the its registers under the control of the display list. Shouldn't be any harder than having the processor control them, but would have allowed for much greater versatility including the ability to use several different types of write behavior within a scan line.

From the remarks that Steve Golson (GCC cofounder and 7800 codesigner) made at the VCF East show in 2004, I got the impression that the 7800 was GCC's first attempt at designing such a large-scale project. They had done mod kits for coin-operated arcade machines before, but nothing near the complexity of an entire game console (at least as far as I know; someone correct me if I'm wrong). The MARIA itself went through at least one major revision before the 7800 went into production. Perhaps with the benefit of more time and experience, some of those limitations would have been addressed.

 

Even so, the 7800 is a very interesting machine and nowhere near the worst game console ever. I've been trying to learn the 7800 architecture well enough to take a stab at developing games for it, and I really need to pick it back up again; there's still a lot of untapped potential in that machine.

[supercat]

There are many things about the 7800 I don't understand. The MARIA chip is in some ways interesting, but in other ways unduly limited. Had I been designing the thing, I would have put many of the its registers under the control of the display list. Shouldn't be any harder than having the processor control them, but would have allowed for much greater versatility including the ability to use several different types of write behavior within a scan line.

From the remarks that Steve Golson (GCC cofounder and 7800 codesigner) made at the VCF East show in 2004, I got the impression that the 7800 was GCC's first attempt at designing such a large-scale project. They had done mod kits for coin-operated arcade machines before, but nothing near the complexity of an entire game console (at least as far as I know; someone correct me if I'm wrong). The MARIA itself went through at least one major revision before the 7800 went into production. Perhaps with the benefit of more time and experience, some of those limitations would have been addressed.

 

No doubt true. I do find myself irked, though, at how often I see even designers of new chips doing things which I, as a programmer, could have easily told them were not good. And they seem unwilling to learn from other designers' mistakes.

 

There is a lot cool about the Maria. As someone who grew up with a C64, though, I don't like games that use 160 mode for everything (on the C64, using 160-mode for everything usually meant a game was a port by someone who didn't really understand the C64). Unfortunately, the 7800 doesn't allow much flexibility in 320 mode.

 

What I would have liked to have seen would have been a mask/compare register that would take the upper four bits of a 160-wide pixel's color, mask off selected bits and compare them to the 'compare' value, and if everything matched, toggle the LSB of the color number fot the second half of the pixel. This would allow one to define a particular pair of "colors" as e.g. black/white and white/black. Such color pairs could then be used to draw object details in high resolution while the screen as a whole was in low resolution.

 

BTW, in the 7800 outside the MARIA chip, I would have liked to have seen a slight change in the color-mixing circuit. Rather than having bit 0 of the color just control the luminance LSB, I would have also had it boost the chroma amplitude. Probably not a hard hardware change--just adding a resistor and/or capacitor, I suspect, but it would have made the palette much more interesting.

[RHUDSON7650]

atari 7800, all i got to say is thank god it played 2600 games and not just 7800 games.

 

 

Your 5200-owner penis envy is showing again, troll.

 

lol, i do love my 5200. But seeings how i've never played any other console in this topic, and i own a 7800 and a bunch of games, i still say the 7800 is the worst console i've ever played. I get more enjoyment from my Game.com

 

 

Cease thy blasphemy, heretic!

 

The Atari 7800 had some great games and it would have had even more great titles if the idiot Tramiels had released it in 1984 instead of shelving it until '86.

 

Now the Fairchild F and the original TRS-80, those stunk.