I know plenty about the internals of the 7800, having tried to write a homebrew game, and done some hardware stuff with 7800 cartridge boards. I have no particular love for the NES, but it had a few things that made it better, while the 7800 had a few "wut"s that were annoying. First of all, the history of the 7800 is basically irrelevant as to which is more powerful. Yes, the failure to release hurt it in the market, but the tech was what it was. I'm just talking about the fundamental hardware limitations here. The main thing about NES was not only did it have the video RAM on its own data bus, it also brought that video bus out the cartridge port, something that nobody else ever did. The 7800 Maria chip being on the main CPU bus meant that it basically halts the CPU while building up each display scan line. But even beyond that, bringing out the video bus to the cartridge port let the NES video system be updated on the cartridge with mapper chips. This prolonged the shelf life of the NES with mapper chips that not only allowed more RAM and ROM, but also interesting video tricks. As for the amount of RAM (not ROM), the NES actually had 2K CPU RAM + 2K video RAM, so surprise, it had 4K as well. Cartridge sizes? Sure, you could cram a bunch of stuff into a cartridge since they both had a full CPU bus, but the standard size 2600/7800 plastic cartridge shell/board barely had room for a Pokey, a ROM, a RAM, and a mapper chip. Atari's insistence on using Pokey didn't help, it was so big because it had I/O pins on it that were useless in a cartridge. The Famicom cartridge had plenty of room for more chips, and the NES cartridge was laughably large. The main wut about NES cartridges was the toaster mechanism, and the metric pin spacing. The 7800's "wut"s didn't help. The way that you have to interleave graphics data, with each scan line starting on a different 256 byte page is a pain in the ass to keep track of, but at least I understand how it made Maria easier to design. Sprites? Most systems with sprites have a set of registers where you set the X, Y, and a pointer to image data for each sprite. But the 7800 didn't have that, a sprite was just another object that YOU had to keep track of in the display lists. For good reasons, the DLL had to be broken up into groups of 8 lines or so, but if your sprite wasn't exactly within the 8 lines of a single DLL zone, it had to be in the DL of both zones, and the vertical offset had to be specified in both of them. Taller sprites just go into more DLs. Yeah, there's no flicker, but the cost is having to manage all the display lists to reference all the sprite chunks, every frame. And you had to do this in the vertical retrace time (or during low-detail scan lines), because Maria hogged the bus to fetch graphics data during screen time. It was easy to specify more on a DL than could be fetched in the time for a scan line, then it stopped and displayed the partial line. (It was a long time before emulators got this right, so you could write a game that looked awesome on an emulator, but wouldn't work on real hardware.) This is exactly the same reason that a room full of ghossts on Gauntlet would only draw a few of them. But here's the big part: if you want more than a single color background behind those sprites, the background also has to be an object in the DL and it uses up memory cycles too. Notice how the sprite demo has a black background? (Robotron too) 320 mode also means twice the data to fetch. But many games were in 160 mode, which looks noticeably inferior to NES games. (160 and 320 were used because of 2600 video timing) As for audio, TIA sound was so bad to begin with that it was dumb not to drop a Pokey into the 7800. You shouldn't be required to cram a sound chip into a cartridge just to not sound awful. But this was a decision made *before* Jack Tramiel. 64K RAM in the 7800? Not likely. 64K in 1984 needed to be 8 chips of DRAM, with support for address mux and refresh, so a new VLSI chip would be needed. I don't know how affordable 62256 chips were a few years later, 32K would have been nice, but you would have to find a memory address for it, and 7800 carts had already been made for the old memory map, so more memory would still have to have a way to switch the extra RAM in and out. By the time more memory was affordable, it was too late, and it would have needed a compatibility mode for old games. After all, Nintendo never made a "NES Plus" either, it was 2K+2K for its entire life, making the "cram it in the cartridge" idea valid, aside from 7800 carts being physically smaller.
Awesome, best comment about the whole subject so it gets pinned - thank you. As for thinking of 64K in the 7800, I meant when it was released in '86, not '84 (although in '84,it still would've been nice if it had 8 or 16k) but still good to know the context about the memory map stuff. On 7800 cart sizes, they could have done bigger if needed - not sure if you've ever seen them but CommaVid is one company who created tall carts for their games; Or Xonox who made those unusual double-enders. That's not optimal of course, since it mucks with storing games, but I think if it was needed they could have gone that route. Although using a smaller than POKEY chip would have made more sense - it sure would've been something if a 7800 game had used SID, lol Would a mapper of any kind help with those MARIA bus issues? I could be totally wrong on this but I was under the impression from what I read on AA that Rikki & Vikki uses something like that which freed up cycles, allowing him to do more in 320 mode.
@@iratanongrata5973 The thing is, in 1984, they had already built 5000 or so units, which Jack just shoved into a warehouse when he took over. It finally got released in 1986 because Jack needed some cash. So many things could have been done, but those in charge thought that consoles were dead, and made no effort to solve the real problem: people were sick and tired of the previous generation. They were too busy chasing the home computer meme with their own proprietary architectures, while the PC slowly won. Even a 24-pin Pokey would have been fine, just don't bond out all the I/O pins. It would have taken almost no engineering. The cart size wouldn't have been so bad with surface-mount chips, but that was still a few years away. I don't go to the 7800 part of AA much these days, so I don't know was done, but it's nothing a mapper could help. Maria is just an automaton that scans the display lists, fetches bytes, and paints them into the scan line buffer. The only thing that could speed it up is to speed up the bus. It's hard to make a bus of that era go faster, and the timing was all derived from the color burst frequency, so the only good option would be 2x. But I also remember that 320 mode was rather limited in color options, so maybe you couldn't quite make it need twice the data. Still, a faster Maria would mean you could put more background detail into a scan line. In the end, Maria was just too fiddly for me, and I don't like the 6502 either. I'm just glad that someone had the patience to deal with those display lists and make some nice looking games.
I’ve wondered, for years, if GCC, persuaded Atari Inc. not to use a sound chip in the console, so they could sell their Gumby sound chip indefinitely. It’s too bad GCC didn’t incorporate sound into Maria, like they originally planned. That might’ve been interesting… Thoughts?
@@8bitwiz_ I just wanted to comment on the desktop computer market at the time. Really every desktop computer architecture at that point was proprietary, and IBM definitely never intended their computers to be anything but that. It was most importantly Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC series firmware (BIOS) that changed this. Still, most of the reason that the PC slowly won was that it was used in business, while the competition was originally aimed at the home market. So, even though it's easily argued that all of the home computer competition was superior to the IBM PC at the time (especially at graphics and sound), as well as less expensive, people ended up wanting to get computers that were compatible with their work machines. That turned out to trump computer games and multimedia at the time. So while Atari, Commodore, and Apple battled it out in the multimedia department, PC compatibles quietly walked away with almost the whole market thanks primarily to spreadsheet software.
"Really every desktop computer architecture at that point was proprietary" That's the joke. The problem is they skated on cost-reduced versions of the same tech for way too long. Or they went outside their core competency, such as Coleco should have made a super game system, not the Adam, etc. But if I think about it, I guess a big limitation was getting new VLSI video chips designed soon enough. Atari had already lost Jay Miner, but would they have had him making new chips in 82-84? Coleco was using TI's chip, but only Sega (SMS) and Yamaha (MSX2) went forward with better versions. The PC was all off-the-shelf chips, and simple graphics standards with no sprites, so anyone could join in. Simpler standards are much easier to go mainstream.
very well thought out video. you made a lot of good points, i did get some of my facts wrong in that video and my game choices could have been better. this video definitely does the 7800 justice. good stuff.
No worries - I also seem to have got some things wrong on the 7800's design too :P I definitely would when it came to the NES's design. Keep up the great work on your vids!
The NES had hardware scrolling which made development much easier than in software. Big reason there was so many sidescrollers. The resolution modes are kind of restricting on the 7800 where as the NES used a happy medium. Having said that the 7800 can produce a very impressive game. As a 7800 developer i could easily be bias towards the system, however the fact is they both are great and have their own strengths and weaknesses. What i have found first hand with my Bomber Hero port (WIP) is the 7800 can outshine the NES graphically but you need a good artist. You can also use a combination of sprite modes if not needing to render too much onscreen at once. 160B Sprites allows up to 12 colours in a single sprite. NES can't do that AFAIK. Bomber Hero im working on very slowly for fun but haven't updated the ROM for awhile. It does show how the 7800 can look more on par with the TG16 over the NES
From a business perspective you can totally see why the XEGs was released and the 7800 was not a primary focus. Tramiel Atari had inherited a lot of Atari 8bit computer inventory which was coming to the end of its life, and needed to be shifted.. there were also no licensing fees which I suspect was an issue with the 7800 - which explains the XEGS - the best way to use up that inventory and get some money in. The 7800 wasn't focused on because Atari had a better gaming platform in the ST (with respect the 7800), which was a full 16bit computer in 1985, and capable of so much more than the NES or 7800.. and the 7800 was essentially old hat to Tramiel Atari by that point. You can argue in retrospect with the coming of Windows ubiquity that the ST line would always eventually fail in the long term and Atari would have been better off sticking to consoles, but to Tramiel, who had had the C64 become the most successful computer ever, this would not have been obvious in the mid- 80s. Arguably as well, Atari was actually doing pretty well again by 1987 thanks to the ST, and if it hadn't been for the Federated chain purchase disaster they would actually have been doing very well after that point. So not sure it is cash shortage, more priorities.
Limited liquidity tends to narrow your priorities. Tramiel Atari had to focus on what they believed would reliably generate the most revenue. If they had the capital, they would have likely invested more in their diverse secondary products. Focus your product line when cash is tight, and diversify when your margin is growing.
That's a fair point - perhaps a better way of expressing it is that Atari should have taken the hardware they would have used for the XEGS and found ways to integrate it into the 7800. Perhaps with a 5200/800XL convertor cart, or more POKEY powered games. I still do think that the efforts that they put into XE exclusive games would have been much better to have steered towards getting those games on the 7800 instead (Into The Eagles Nest, Blue Max, Crime Busters, the XEGS light-gun, etc). And thanks, it was Federated I was thinking of but couldn't remember their name. That really was a disaster. Atari was looking into an ST game console but it seems to never have taken off - if they could have done that by 86/87, then it certainly would have been a better bet than either the 7800 or the XEGS. Although the weirdest hardware they were working on, perhaps I will do a video about, was a Super XEGS that had the Maria chip in it.
Between having way too many consoles on the market and the insane decision to not put a decent sound chip built into the console pretty much killed the 7800 out of the gate. Doubling the working ram would have been nice and wouldn't have been too bad to bodge into the existing systems from 1984. The only person I knew that had a 7800 was my aunt, and most of her games were 2600 games for it. It was fun for me and my cousin when we came over but otherwise we both had NES systems at home and we played those a lot more.
I was aware of the Atari 7800 since 1983 (or maybe it was 1984). I read about it being developed in Compute! magazine. But then Atari got split up and I figured the system would never see the light of day. Then in 1986 I learned the Atari 7800 was actually being released along with the 2600jr. I ended up getting my parents to take me to I think three Toys R Us stores in a single day before we actually found one, and they bought it for me.
Pojr did mention the Crazy Otto hack in a video he did about Pac-Man bootlegs. And yes, the NES does have a port of Xevious that was developed by Namco, published by Bandai (this was decades before they merged into Bandai Namco.)
Thanks - I'm just surprised that he didn't mention it in a video about GCC. No biggie though...it is weird that GCC didn't end up creating a better Ms. Pac-Man port on hardware they designed though.
It sounds like Atari made the same mistake Sega made, they made too many consoles in a short period of time instead of just sticking to one system and lost credibility with consumers
Actually... Atari's later years, and Sega's Early years problem, was with Software. They didnt have many quality 3rd party companies, programming games for the systems. Atari made things worse.. re-releasing the same titles.. with virtually no real difference (And none of the ports, matched the Arcade level of Quality). Sega also had a similar issue with releasing extremely poor arcade ports. Outrun on the Master System, was total Garbage. Sega was at least a lot more Creative with their Console creations... making many great Original games.. such as: Phantasy Star, Zillion, Shooting Gallery, Missile Defense 3D, Maze Hunter 3D, and a few others. Where as Atari, had the same few Arcade games.. but done extremely poorly. All of their Original games, were pretty much Trash.. not really worthy of the price that you would have paid for them. The Genesis became a lot more Successful, because the system had decent power, a few good games right out of the gate, and this caused a bunch of 3rd party developers to jump in pretty quickly. If Sega had been without 3rd party support again... the Genesis probably would have ended up failing quickly. The Saturn was what Sega fans wanted way back in the Master System days: Sprite Scaling and Rotation, for ports like Outrun and Afterburner II. But by that time, people were no longer as Impressed with these games... and to make matters worse.. was that they lacked the proper arcade controls to be able to play them correctly anyways. Had Sega released proper analog controllers, and added features to these Arcade games... such as more Tracks, More soundtracks..etc.. it "Might" have saved the system. But since the Saturn was also Notoriously Difficult for programmers to program... that killed a lot of the 3rd party software development. That lead to the Dreamcast... which basically was like the first "PC" in a Console Shell. The main issue with this again, was with software support. They had a really poor game lineup.. and nothing that screamed "I NEED THIS" console. A Prime example, is the original Super Mario cartridge, for NES. That game alone... sold NES machines like MAD.. because it was so damn addictive. Still is... decades after its creation. Atari eventually would later try the Jaguar... and focused on 3D games. Big mistake. 3D on such underpowered hardware... looked and played Awful. Rayman (2D) looked amazing on it... but there was no other games that even came close to that quality, on the system. And Rayman on the PS1, was even better.. and the PS1 had Ridge Racer.. which completely blew away the Jag's janky 3D, in comparison. The PS1, was the basically the bare minimum requirement, for "OK" looking, and playing... 3d games. And even many of those PS1 games, were awful looking garbage. Nintendo always played the right hand. They had dedicated their best developers.. to make the best Console games. And they seemed to have been able to retain these top developers... unlike companies like Sega... whom seemed to have a revolving door of employees (likely many "fresh out of school" / Interns). Sega also had troubles.. because it chose to put its best developers on the Arcade development teams... and the lowest level developers, on the Console games. To be honest... the Atari 2600 was on the market for far too long. They tried to squeeze every penny out of it.. and paid the price, when other console systems came in... and started selling more powerful hardware. And of course, it didnt help, that most of the games for the 2600, were absolute Horse Poop... due to a total lack of any quality control. But that said.. it was Greed and poor hardware choices, that made the next Atari systems Flop... in combination with poor game lineups, and no good 3rd party software devs. Atari would eventually start to fail in the Arcades as well... with many Sub-Par offerings, that were not that visually appealing, not very original, nor that fun to play / replay. Sega managed to outlive them, with superior 3D hardware.. in games like VR Racing, and Daytona USA. However, before that... they had several 3d "STINKERS". Eventually the entire Arcade industry stopped making uniquely creative, and challenging games. Couple this with a flood of Non-Skill related ticket games (basically boring slot machine type games, for kids), and the Arcades imploded.. failing forever. Anyway... the truth is... Even the most Powerful of Hardware... Is completely Useless, without excellent Software (games).
@@johndough8115OutRun on the Master System was so far from being garbage that I now have to assume that the rest of your opinions here are equally foolish.
@@ostiariusalpha As a person that LOVED the Arcade version of Outrun.. it was a HUGE disappointment, in comparison. It lacked the hardware sprite scaling technology. Its sprites / graphics were very flickery at times. It was low in speed, and seemed low in frame-rate. Ive recently seen the PCengine version of Outrun... and it looks and sounds much better than the SMS version. Compare them yourself. The SMS hardware just wasnt suited for this type of game. And or... the programmers rushed it, putting the most minimal of effort into it. (probably both)
@@johndough8115 I'm sorry, but have you hit your head on something? OutRun's graphics are entirely reasonable for an 8-bit port of the arcade game, and far better than any of the 8-bit microcomputer ports. No one in 1987 was disappointed by how OutRun looked or played on the Master System. And what exactly is even the point of comparing the PC-E/TG-16 port? That came out _three years_ after the Master System port, and on a console with a 16-bit GPU and a wave table audio chip. They were not contemporary with each other at all, so it damn well better look and sound superior on the PC-Engine.
@@ostiariusalpha Im telling you, that I WAS upset at the games look, and gameplay. I purchased it brand New. As a kid, I was hoping for something closer to the PCE version. Obviously, the system wasnt capable of it... and frankly, they never should have released it as it was. A version of Segas "Turbo" would have been far more appropriate for the system. Especially if it came with the Japanese Spinner, that never made it to the US. Also.. I will say, that the scaling of the sprites seemed better on Space Harrier. They are much larger, when fully scaled. I have to wonder, if they at least doubled the cart size... if the could have fit more sprite frames into the game... to make it look and play a little bit better.
I'm so confused by that assertion. It doesn't take a lot of effort to see SMB3 outclasses literally everything pretty much any Atari model had by far... After seeing this video though, wow I had no idea Atari could do any of these things and so well. It's amazing the hardware was way more capable than it's remembered to be, even by me who loved my Atari as much as my SNES and Genesis.
The sad story of Atari hardware is that it pretty much never got to see it's full potential used in release games :/ We're lucky to have homebrews taking care of that now though.
The thing is, Atari didn't do this, GCC did. They're the people who came up with the Ms. Pac-Man conversion kit. And later they sold accessories for the original Macintosh. It was created by outsiders, so not-invented-here syndrome at Atari was one of the reasons the 7800 didn't do better.
It's worth noting that SMB3 had pretty significant add-on hardware in the cartridge through its MMC3 mapper that enabled functions well above what the NES was capable of by itself. It's not an entirely fair comparison to the 7800. More fair comparisons of base hardware would be games with no mapper, which is most of the early single-screen arcade-like games the NES had. Super Mario Bros. was just about the pinnacle of what the unexpanded Famicom/NES could do. Kung Fu and 1942 were other good examples of no-mapper games for NES, with Kung Fu even having direct comparisons available. Unfortunately we'll never know what kind of heights the 7800 could have gotten to with a decade of focused, dedicated support with multiple levels of mappers and cart addons.
@@Scoth42 I disagree that it's an unfair comparison. Part of the competition here is whether there's forward-thinking design, and the one place the FC/NES really shines is the way mappers could be upgraded over time. That the 7800 didn't have anything comparable is as much a factor of their desire to be backwards compatible as it was for them to not really forward think the hardware.
@@firehawker4822 The point is that there's no technical reason the 7800 couldn't have had just as fancy and complex mappers as the NES/FC, it just didn't last long enough in the market to see that happen. It was fully capable of upgraded mappers as well, and we saw some inklings of that before it died as well as in some recent homebrews. We'll just never know what it could have done with it had those mappers been made.
24:47 I believe that Dark Chambers is a rework of Dandy, and that game preceded Gauntlet by a couple of years. Making Gauntlet more of the clone here than the other way around.
I was at a trade dealers show in 1983 and the Atari Rep brought me up to his Hotel Room and showed me the prototype 7800. No case, just PCB boards in a box. He had Pole Position running, and it looked very good for the time. He said this system would be on shelves within a year.
New Sub! Dryden, MI I got a 7800 for Christmas '89, $59.00 Toys-R-Us SUPER SALE! I still have it, I'm about to finally get around to Restoring it with some New-Age Upgrades! Excellent Job!
Overall the NES was better but the 7800 was better in certain ways, it's just that few of the video game programmers of the time made full use of what the 7800 could do. Alien Brigade was an exception. That game is probably better than the similar Operation Wolf on the NES which is a great game. Some of the new homebrews for the 7800 show what it was capable of. Dragon's Havoc is a great example of this. I played an emulator the programmer posted on AtariAge. Amazing game. Looks great and plays great. If they had released stuff like that at the time, the 7800 would have easily competed with the NES. I really think the big flaw with the 7800 was the sound chip. Having a good soundtrack is very important. And it's a hassle to have buy some add-on to have good sound... Anyway, great video! Lot of excellent points here. And I'm certainly sympathetic to anything that gives the 7800 it's due. There are a few really good games on it and a few great homebrews.
To answer your question about if Xevious did have an NES port, it did and said port was actually quite a landmark title for the console as in its home market of Japan, Xevious was among the first two Famicom or NES cartridges to be entirely manufactured by a third party and the NES version of Xevious was also the first NES game released to have its rom size to entirely take up the max cartridge space that the NES could handle before the introduction of memory mappers as the Japanese release date for Xevious on the Famicom was just under a year before the Japanese release of Super Mario Bros.
I've got a follow-up now posted if anyone cares, focusing more on Rikki & Vikki and why I think it's perfectly fine to use it as an example of what the 7800 could do: ua-cam.com/video/Q2GQOtUOCRU/v-deo.html
Did you know that 1E78 hex is 7800 decimal??!! Just wondered seeing the demo in the dude's browser tab, I watched the demo the other day. And I thought... Spooky eh? Starts in 78, ends in 78. Still there's probably 255 other numbers like that at least, below FFFF.
If these were mentioned in other comments I apologize, but in regards to recent home brew releases that are also very impressive and show what the system was able to do, I would look at the release of Revenge of the Petscii Robots on the 7800. That version is very impressive and looks really good. The scrolling looks janky and I've seen folks complain about it, but that is basically by design as the scrolling looks that way in all ports of the game. Another one that is visually impressive with a LOT of variety in the art is E.X.O. but that is only available digitally at this time and so limited mostly to playing in emulation or specific flash carts.
Yes, excellent point! I was thinking of showcasing EXO here soon, although I only had an earlier demo build. I might just have to get the digital version
The XEGS would have been a great console... in 1982. It's what the 5200 should have been - direct backward compatibility with 8-bit computer games, and the classic joystick instead of the lousy analog one that the 5200 used. That would have carried Atari to 1987 or so, and they could have then introduced a proper next-gen console. Perhaps the 600XL computer could have been marketed as a console.
The joysticks were the worst thing about the 5200. Just having the fire buttons on the side (same with the US 7800 joysticks) was awful for my thumbs. I would even say they are anti-ergonomic. Then there were the buttons themselves. The tin coating on the flex circuits would fail from oxidization even if you didn't use them. I've found one pair with that black carbon stuff that every TV remote uses, and they actually work! You could even damage them if you open them the wrong way. If you don't pop off the start row bezel first, it could tear that part of the flex circuit. Yeah, XEGS is what the 5200 should have been. But they had to keep the computer and home divisions separate because that's how the business was organized. They intentionally made it just slightly different enough that they couldn't share software without porting it.
I am glad you showed Xevious, it was one of my favorites I played in the arcade and I have played it on many other systems but the one for the 7800 I always felt played and looked fantastic, not a 1:1 to the arcade but it was one of my favorite ports of the arcade game. Very few people mention it when talking 7800 games.
With regards to Tower Toppler looking like crap on emulators: Retroarch has a crt shader called CRT-GUEST-ADVANCED-NTSC.slangp that will display the correct image at stock shader settings. You can also tweak it to max NTSC imperfection. This shader will also correctly display the pseudo-transparency effect of the waterfall in Sonic the Hedgehog or any other game that used NTSC artifacting intentionally.
@@ostiariusalphaTrue, but not to the same extent. The joke used to be that NTSC stood for “never the same color”. And that’s why the shader file has NTSC in the name: PAL and NTSC look different.
Honestly, what doomed the 7800 was Jack Tramiel. He was hell bent on getting even with Commodore he didn't realize he had a cash cow on his hands. The 7800 needed a dedicated sound chip out the door, 8k of ram would have done it justice, a lock on a killer game to be developed and released like Pac-Land, and it needed to be released no later than 1985. NES may have never been seen in North America. However rather than an Atari 5200 and repackaged the 400 into a game system it is possible the 7800 would have never been developed.
I don't think the sound was a big deal since it sounded like the 2600 which was already a familiar sound at the time. None of the 8 bit consoles had spectacular sound. It was all based on various tones of static and beeps all done in mono. The 7800 didn't succeed as expected because it's weak game library via shoddy investment and marketing related to software development. Hardware wise, it was on par with the NES.
Think you are talking about the game 'Knight Guy in Low Rez World" by Vladmir Zuniga? Yes it is a lot of fun and one I pick use for testing 7800 consoles for servicing.
Let's forget about the CPUs for a bit, since Z80 and 6502 can actually do exactly the same thing that you coded for (Atari 7800 and NES technically have the same CPU, only each variant of 6502 are different), it's the GPU that's far more important than anything else since back in the day, they were weird and custom fixed function graphics processors so it's also the software that makes or breaks the consoles. People want much more fun eye candies so naturally it pushes both NES and Atari 7800 to their limits. Yet if you think about it, they both have their equals in graphics strength. The only difference is in both GPU and CPU configuration (as well as their clock at which they operate at - for both consoles, it's usually under 10 MHz) - programming them both is kind of trivial compared to one of the later consoles, Sega Saturn (two GPUs and two CPUs, gonna be fun to juggle all those computational performance in this console while coding the homebrew games and apps for it 🫣 ). Still, I never have had Atari 7800 console, only had Nintendo consoles, of course I knew how important Atari is to the game industry as whole back in the day.
Thanks for this! I had the Pro system joysticks. Suffice to say, "The Arcade" was _a lot_ better. Read about the 7800, but it seemed really tough to code. Like you say.. The XEGS was silly. Atari did so many crazy pivots that lead nowhere. Even before Tramiel came along. That Ricky and Vicky game looks awesome.
That's why I explained it in the video but many seem to hand wave the intentions of the designers away. There was a plan for a chip, but the issue was that it needed a resource heavy company like Warner to pull it off, not penny pinchers like the Tramiels.
Great stuff. Im biased towards the 7800 but theres a reason the NES was a cultural phenomenon at the time and its not just because of marketing. A lot of this information i planned on hitting on my channel and I probably still will but its great to have it out there via as many sources as possible!
Also it was the gumby mini that they wanted to use in carts. Gumby was meant for the project spring that never came to be. Both essentially the same but the Gumby mini would've been more cost effective
I read that before Jack bought Atari there was plans to make it possible to turn the 7800 into a full fledge computer. I think they should have went this route including releasing a module to make it play Atari 800 games. It would have been a total backwards system that way as well as a cheaper base system alone.
That is true, it's those components I show briefly (the keyboard and the 5200 convertor cart)...later the Tramiels did look at turning the Jaguar into a PC but that also never happened.
Atari 7800 could have been better than it was......... If it was out on the original release date, and got good software support..... but that didn't happen.
I don't particularly know what the ROM size for a nes was, but the 7800 had 4kb of ROM AND 4kb of RAM. Really doesn't matter though as NES cartridges installed themselves as actual hardware in the system and could contain more ram in them. If you're going to mention that the Atari 7800 could have extra chips in the cartridge, that's really the same for all cartridge systems. The need to do so makes the cartridge much more expensive to produce though. The wikipedia page says the the limit is 48kb for rom without bank switching so his 48kb is correct. Bank switching requires special hardware.
Most cart systems could use the extra hardware, I was just giving that emphasis since in the original docs from GCC, that's where most of their emphasis was being placed. Seems like NES gets a pass for using extra hardware in the carts though, whereas, pointing that out on the 7800 is cheating because they didn't in the day or something
It’s actually funny that the 7800 did have 4kb of rom, so pojr did get that right lol. I know he meant ram but I thought it was funny cause it also had 4k of rom too lol. Also I’ve always found it odd that the 5200 that was based on a 1979 computer, released in 1982, had 16kb of ram but the 7800 released in 1986 had only 4kb? Feels like they went backwards lol.
The Atari 7800 is a more powerful evolution of the Atari XE, but they share the same architecture and this is very noticeable in that many of the Atari What I'm trying to get at is that you can find games on the Atari It is impossible to recreate the NES, XE's Rescued in Fractalus and in 7800 there is a prototype that is unthinkable on the NES. So you can find many pseudo 3D games on the Atari XE that are possible by default on the 7800 that serve as an example of what it could do.
Doesn't matter how much more powerful a system is. At the end of the day, its all about the games as to whether its fun or if the game is trash. I liked Atari. I owned a 7800, a Jaguar, a 1040STF, and a Mega ST2....built my first website on a 1040STF in 1993....no pictures and just text obviously. There were only a few good games for the console and what killed it was NES's licensing deals. Atari had a chance to make the NES their console but they screwed up. They could have also launched the 7800 earlier whenever it came out so that plenty of games could be made for the system to avoid the future licensing mayhem. But power means nothing. The Atari Lynx was way more powerful than a Gameboy but the Gameboy was a lot more fun and it had a much longer battery life and was easier to carry. Atari had the best products....just horrible execution. BTW, Rikki and Vikki doesn't count. That game was impossible to make when the system came out and if it did, it would be thousands of dollars to purchase. I still would not have bought the game if it was priced the same...its graphically impressive and sounds good but its a boring game and to truly beat it you would have to have a friend to be bored along with it. The only time power matters is when it comes to a computer which is why I got a 1040STF. 1 Meg of RAM and did everything that a Mac could do for a whole lot less
Agreed that games ultimately matter and most of what Atari has output over the years pales in comparison to the big names out of Japan. The point was addressing pojrs video about system power, where it failed to take into account various factors. The misconception about Atari taking on the NES is that Nintendo had approached Warner with that deal while Warner was actively looking for a buyer, firing Ray Kassar then rehiring him. Warner was a complete mess in 83/84, so even if they had taken the deal, it likely would have been a disaster, probably even handing it off to the Tramiels mid-way through. So it's not a guarantee that would have saved Atari. The Tramiels could not have launched the 7800 much earlier than they did as again - there was an unresolved payment dispute that took a while to settle. Perhaps they could have figured it out in '85 when all their focus was on the ST but like you point out, that wouldn't have changed the game output/quality in any way. Disagree that R&V "doesn't count" - the point is that by using additional hardware, which the 7800 was designed to do, much more was possible on the console than demonstrated by the small selection of games that pojr decided to focus on. Whether you enjoy the game or find it boring doesn't matter to the subject, which is whether or not the 7800 was capable of holding up against the NES.
@@iratanongrata5973 Tramiel should have paid the bill because time is money and it wasn't that much, just a lack of business awareness. I said Rikki and Vikki doesn't count because its a game that would not have been made in the 80's, the game has 512kb of game data and 256kb of music, it has its own custom sound chip, and a built in memory mapper. The largest games at the time were just 128k. I bought my 7800 for 80 bucks and it came with 5 games, Pole Position, Xevious, Robotron, Ms Pacman, and Galaga. All 5 of those games and the system combined has way less memory than the Rikki and Vikki cartridge...the cost for that game would have been in the clouds. Again, makes no difference. People wanted adventure, platformers and beat them up games at the time that you couldn't play in an arcade....Zelda, Super Mario, Guardian Legend etc....exploration games. The 7800 for the most part were still arcade conversions. And that's where the line is on this
@VinceGoodrum: Rikki and Vikki does count because it would've been made in the 90s just before support ended for the 7800 circa 1991. The biggest 7800 game was Alien Brigade at 144k. NES games routinely went well over 128k. Kirby's Adventure is a 1mb cart.
POJR does talk more of the history in his other videos that's why it was so brief. 48kb is correct unless you use bank switching then you can go higher, but the base size is 48 according to Atari forums. Another reason the 7800 has the 2600 sound chip is backwards compatibility . Yeah why they had the 7800, Atari 2600 JR , Atari XE and the entire computer line out at the same time is beyond my understanding. It's like Atari never could figure it out even when the Jaguar came along it was the same old song and dance , projects that they should of never done , spending money on multiple things when they should of just focused on one or two, like did we really need the Atari Portfolio which came out when the Jaguar did, so now it's portable computers , Atari Lynx , Atari Jaguar and more all at the same time. Honestly I think Atari is just now figuring stuff out , maybe because they have a new CEO that has a real love for Atari.
The 48k ROM thing isn't a big issue, I just think it was worth noting that it could see a higher size (that's what all the "Super Game" carts like Desert Falcon were). The NES could get as high as 1MB thanks to those famous mappers. I could do a video or a series of them on the failure of the Jaguar, but perhaps that would be too pedantic :P
The Tramiels made the same mistakes that Warner did. They never money up for development of any ideas they had to enhance existing systems. That's why all the best Atari 8-bit systems never got made...corporate stupidity. Tramiel was simply cheap and short sighted.
The Tramiels originally very well with the ST, which became a 16 bit C64 with such a great price compared to the competition; however, their console market,vas mentioned, was far too diluted with not enough resources and too many releases. I love my XE game system, but this console should not have launched.
Well, that's where it's important to look at some of the more recent homebrews - Rikki & Vikki, Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, 1942, EXO, Wizard's Dungeon, etc. These all show to one degree or another that the system was perfectly capable of competing with the NES - Atari just didn't have the in-house talent and the money for 3rd party talent to make it show. Most of those games also make use of additional sound chips - yes the base hardware sound sucked, but it could easily have used arcade-quality sound chips too. Again, that comes back to money. Another thing I should have mentioned in the video is that the 7800 could much more easily handle 8-way playfield scrolling than the NES could. Dark Chambers is one of the few release games to show that; Had mappers been a thing for the system, then we could have seen many more with improved graphics.
Well, it wasn't out long enough for it to get the money put into it and research & development in understanding the hardware and developing better software development software and hardware that the NES received (there's multiple generations of NES games, while the 7800 barely even got a single generation). And the fact that when the 7800 came out Nintendo already had most higher end game devs locked onto the NES. It takes time and money and research to learn the hardware, to develop better development software to unlock better capabilities of the hardware, better development hardware, it takes figuring out what can be added to the carts to expand the capabilities of the stock hardware to give it capabilities that it didn't have when it first game out. I mean you can't just compare a late generation NES game with the first generation NES game. I mean yeah, the TIA sounded worse, BUT devs back in the day didn't really have full understanding of sound design. If you look at what the homebrew scene, and the Demo scene has been able to achieve with just the TIA alone it's quite a stark difference then what you heard from a TIA from back in the 80s.
You say that the Atari 7800 "never got a fair shot"... it did get a "fair shot"... Atari Corp management KNEW that Nintendo was interested in launching the FamiCom in North America or the U.S.A. first... they KNEW by at least well over a year and they dismissed it because all their money was in selling very expensive Atari Computers and whatever software they made for it... They as in 80s Atari Corp did NOT believe in the home videogame system market at all... they had the Atari 7800 hardware in 1984 and launched the Atari computers during those years instead of the 7800. Atari Corp basically rejected Nintendo in 1984 and 85... sat on it and after seeing the profits of the NES launch they went in cause they saw dollar signs... It's pretty simple... no excuses... Also look at the timeline when the Atari XE became available and how Atari Corp sent that system to the Atari computer market and simply didn't and never bothered to send it into the home videogame system market... and no one bothers to talk about it... The same management ideology just repeater itself when they finally had the Atari Jaguar launched... a lot of boasting and bragging and acting like they were entitled to win the home consumer videogame system market but they completely ignored Capcom's SF2 and Midway's Mortal Kombat arcade games and wanted you to play phonecall on a game controller that was obsolete and DOA at launch... nevermind useless.
As explained by Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg (Atari historians who have interviewed hundreds of people who worked at the company both during Warner and during Tramiels), there was a payment dispute that was the main reason for the delay. Sure, they did make some bad decisions with the 2600 and that sold 1m+ units in 1985 without any marketing, but when I say that it didn't get a fair shot is that the "fair shot" would have been to be released under Warner as originally planned, with their millions of dollars in backing it. As for the NES, Nintendo approached them while Warner was in charge; When Jack bought the company, he fired most everyone who had been around, including the people who were working on the NES deal. It's very difficult(especially with a Japanese company) to pick up a complex deal like that and not have it fall apart. Like with E.T., I think more of the blame for that lies with Warner. Of course that's not to say that the Tramiels hadn't screwed up in managing things with their home consoles, like you said. Boy, I do a video like this on the Jaguar and I'm sure things will get spicy.
@@iratanongrata5973 ok bud you have to make a distinction between pre-Tramiels Atari and Tramiel Owned Atari because a company name, building and logo is not a singular entity, its a vehicle that gets directed from point a to point b and if the person in charge of driving said vehicles steer it in a different direction, no matter "what direction it is" under that leadership, there is no crying about a "fair shot" The fact is Nintendo did not come into 1985 like they were destroying companies unfairly and this repeats all the way to the last year of the 80s, there was no competition period in 1985 and rest assured that if by some miracle Nintendo Japanese headquarters had decided an intentional aggressive plan to invade the U.S.A. videogame market just one year earlier in 1984, that the Tramiels at Atari Corp would have had a year earlier rude awakening of their own design and taken their monkey see, monkey do attitude towards home videogame systems. It does not matter that there was a "money dispute delay verified by Atari historians", that is not even relevant as a credible reason because there was no intent to maintain or return to the home videogame systems and I am sure that old interviews exist from between 1983 when the fictional Atari crash happened to months before the Nintendo NES launched in 1985. It also does not matter if Jack fired a bunch of people, that's what new company owners do or most of them do because they have their own vision which they believe is right and that vision did not lie in home videogame systems, it lay in selling computers of the 80s before IBM/Clone PCs made that impossible in the early 90s. There is no blame with Warner or whatever name they had as owners, partners, whatever... they did not create Atari, they only came in after Atari had become successful years earlier and the creator of the company and vision decided he had a different vision which again did not lie in home videogame systems for whatever reason. I am sorry that you cannot seem to notice this, I can remove any fan bias and just see what they were doing and the fact is that when they aka, Atari Corp held the power in the early 80s, they abused it and marketing alone, nor ET over production will serve as an excuse because that is what they are in terms of Atari Corp because they had other competitors like Colecovision and Mattel and other before 1984. They can also look at the market of that time, refuse to realize they made any errors with their hardware and software and just make a decision of "hey, forget these lame consoles, lets sell computers because of reasons and because the U.S.A. is a first world country where such products could sell in the millions in the early 80s" Also, it is not to demonize the Tramiels but they went to a different hill, they had a non-entity with no muscles Nintendo basically tell them, "Hey you guys rule here, you can have our product and sell it, we will manufacture it and you decide what works" thank God they rejected Nintendo because they would not be able to handle doing that... same goes for the time Sega Enterprises Japan basically and independently offered Atari the Sega MegaDrive with the same conditions which would have been a disaster for Sega, the fact is Atari Corp had professional people that year who saw the Atari 7800 and instead of taking the risk and placing any "belief" in the product, they said no. When Nintendo came, they had ZERO belief and said no... that is why Nintendo went alone...because they believed, just like Sega Enterprises Japan once it came into being in the early 80s... if you do not believe in hardware and software and market, you do not invest and technically it was not a mistake but you cannot then show up with historians and blame Nintendo and Sega or vice versa in some scandalous book interviews with "historians" Its a bad analogy but a car is available to you in the 90s, you have the income but do not know about the car and do not bother reading up on it to know what it can offer you, so you basically do not go to make an offer for the late 80s Toyota Supra Turbo and instead went for a newer front wheel drive car... then years later you come to see the value of the vehicle dramatically change Also it bears repeating that once the Tramiels were in charge and immediately launched the 7800 in 1986, the beat new Sega here in U.S. which caused Sega to be a distant third place yet Sega in Japan alone made a lot bigger contribution to the game software library aka they did not need the third parties Nintendo had because they made enough games, they just got stuck in third place while in Japan they were also a distant second and third or fourth place until 1994. Finally your paragraph making it seem like it was Warner and not the Tramiels.. once the buyout happened, the Tramiels have the books, it then becomes their obligation to either maintain relations or communications (if they cared), they were not obligated to use nintendo hardware and had every right to say no but the point is, they had the books, they KNEW that a NEW challenger is around and they just... kept to their vision of selling computers... Then once they sold the 7800 at nearly half the price of the Sega Master System and had tons of tv commercials and advertising everywhere back then (something your Atari historians also seem to forget during the Tramiels) instead of focusing on one hardware platform they offered the Atari 2600 Jr, Why? the 7800 was already BC... then they offered the XEGS and that commercial was everywhere on tv back then if you were old enough... Atari Corp as a company was just out of touch and the Jaguar was harsh evidence of this... there was never any unfair market practices, just resentment for the guy who was ignored and took the market alone, then later resentment for the other guy who sucked but stayed steady.. Atari historians will never write that because they have a bias.
@@apollosungod2819 I guess we're going to have to co-write a novel here. Too bad much of what you just said is full of your own bias and ignores basic facts of what happened. The crash of '83 was not "fictional." The fallout in the North American market was obvious as shown in the closure of numerous video game companies, all across the board - arcades, consoles and computers. Warner began losing millions of dollars through Atari; Their sales of arcade machines was drastically reduced (Centipede had sold over 50k units in 1981 yet Star Wars only ended up selling 12k units). Williams and others likewise saw huge losses. None of that is made up or reflective of a bias - it's simple numbers. Your claim that it was fictional though shows your own bias and misunderstanding of the past. Another fact is that Warner fired Ray Kassar in '83, only to rehire him immediately afterwards as they had no replacement. Eventually they found James Morgan, who was doing an excellent job at turning the company around but Warner had already decided to sell the company off. All this left the company in a big mess in '83 & '84 With the 7800, there was a payment dispute. Could the Tramiels been more aggressive in resolving it sooner than 1986 - sure. But that fact matters because they had a lot of options coming in- there was the NES deal, which had started under Kassar; There was a deal about the Commodore Amiga that could have been turned into a console, along with considerations of doing the same with the ST. There is a saying in business called "hedging your bets." They obviously took the safer route that made sense to them at the time. Claiming that they should have known that the NES would be a megahit is silly. If anyone is that good at predicting the future then they'd be a billionaire who made all their money in Vegas, not from games. As to your panties being in a bundle over the fair shot thing, let me try and explain better - under Warner, the plan for the 7800 was to correct the mistakes made with the 5200. It had some great accessories in the works. It had BC. You also still had people at Atari who were great creatives like Howard S. Warshaw. That was all lost in the sale - the talent was fired, the accessories chucked, the drive to create the best games with the best advantages in hardware like mappers was lost. In that sense, it didn't get a fair shot at its potential because of how the Tramiels hamstrung it. I don't think we're really in disagree on that point, so not sure why you're harping on it, unless it's just your own pro-Nintendo bias kicking in. "it doesn't matter that Jack fired people" - would you say that if Nintendo had fired Shigeru Miyamoto or Iwata early on? Would you like to argue that wouldn't make any difference? Yes, new owners tend to fire a lot of people. But it was still a bad idea to not have identified who was the skilled and creative talent and kept them on-board. What they could have made for the 7800 would have been better than what it got. They could have made better games for the ST as well. Talent makes or breaks companies. If you don't believe me then ask any Sega fan about how they feel about current Sega vs. 80s and 90s Sega. Almost everyone from Sega in those days has left, and it shows. Claiming that there were no "unfair practices" is also being disingenuous. Tengen's history and the lawsuit that came out of that is one example there, as was Atari Corp's failed lawsuit. You can also easily find an article from the LA Times dated Dec. 8th 1989 where a sitting member of Congress also accused Nintendo of unfair practices. You can try and hand wave that away but it doesn't change what happened. That's no excuse of course for Atari to not have managed the 7800 better - not sure why you think I'm 100% on the Tramiels side. But claiming things never happened when they did doesn't bolster your argument.
jack had the money, its just he would not spend it. there is a joke amongst the few dealers left by 1990, he would save a penny, and lose a dollar. the reason for the cheap bids on development, was because of his business practices, very few were willing to work with him. so most companies were small. you could only discuss games a little bit with him, the family hated games. if you pushed on games just a little bit, the conversation would change, and you would be notified to back off, or the words watch it. the department store the video is speaking about was federated. i had a lot of interaction with them, because atari did not want their games for sale inventory sent back, it ended being sent to me. as far as the XEGS is concerned, there were three major atari dealers left standing by 1990 or so, i was one of them, and still am, we were bidding on the unreleased XEGM games like commando and xenophobe, which by the way were superior than the 7800 versions, but that's another story. we wondered how and why the XEGS came about, and why was the artwork so good compared to the artwork on the 2600 and 7800 which was terrible for a while under jack. from the people we knew, no one was completely sure including hold overs from the warner days. what we think was something like the XEGS was on the drawing boards at warners management, and the artwork was already there in some cases. besides, because of jacks actions, the 7800 was a mystery to atari, and things that they needed to know had to be worked out on how the machine operated, in the early days games like karateka were butchered. the XEGS was easy to roll out. and many of the games turned out to be strong sellers, but as usual, jack never followed up, he did not like games, and went onto to other things, and the game machines withered on the vine.
Awesome, thanks for that insider look! I have heard a lot about their attitude in regards to games and developers...if they hated it so much, they should at least have hired someone as a Game Dev VP to handle that all. I wish I had been paying attention to the scene back then, although I was just a kid :)
@@iratanongrata5973 they did hire someone, a left over from the warner days. he was a good friend of mine. every game he reviewed, he had to send a internal memo to jack. he had to word the memo carefully, to try to get the game past jacks objections. some got through, many did not.
Arguing about which ancient, long dead platform was technically "better" should have died out shortly after the systems themselves did. They were what they were. All of them COULD have been improved, bigger budgets, better games, better marketing etc. But hindsight is wonderful, whilst accurate foresight is often quite elusive. But people would expect the "new" 7800 to have been far better than the Atari 800/XL/XE computer systems... were all based on the same basic architecture released back in 1979. Using that old sound chip in the 7800 was just one of many silly decisions Atari made. But companies like IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and AMD have all made huge mistakes over the years, and will no doubt continue to do so.
Sure, it's ultimately pointless since we're way past the expiration date, but it can be a little useful to point out that a certain console could have done better than people think since the NES sucked up all the oxygen out of the room. It's also an opportunity to highlight recent homebrew efforts that are quite a labor of love from the programmer.
Jack was the GOD of computer company owners BUT his success with Commodore was due to MOS Technology in his back pocket hence the all conquering C64 costing Commodore peanuts to manufacture, he didn't have that kind of advantage at Atari sadly. The NES is not brilliant being a Famicom really, which is inferior in some ways to the 1981 chipset in the C64, but the 7800 has even worse sound and even more limited graphic display resolutions.
If Atari wasn't so cheap it sounds like the system could've had more success the labels on the 2600 were so cool in comparison and had much more games than the 7800 Atari shoukdve taken out a loan or got funding from somewhere how did they expect a console to compete when it only came out with 2 games in an entire calender year
That's why I brought up the way it was designed - GCC had their own MINNIE sound chip that they were designing that they were going to put into carts and charge Atari for. Great for GCC but not for Atari, so later on, it just got stuck with TIA
@@iratanongrata5973 Correct. But that was the worst design flaw. You can't tell game publishers to put better sound chips in your game cartridges. While the 7800 might have been.. better than the NES.. in most respects, that sound. I will never let it go. Why did Atari's THIRD console sound like it's first console? culture outgrew atair sounds. I don't even understand how they thought atari sounds were even viable in that market.. we're talking 1986 here right?
@@xenxander That's why the context about the MINNIE plans matters. Had the 7800 been launched under Warner, then you would've had games using that sound chip. It was really GCC's greed that caused this problem - they should have designed MINNIE and included it right on the board. But they figured they could bilk Warner on putting it into every cart, which probably would have worked. Should the Tramiels have included it? I think so, although it's possible they didn't know about it or if they did, they didn't want to spend the money. I don't think that 5000 test market units being out there wouldn't have been a problem (just issue a recall). It took two years to resolve a payment dispute just to release the console as-is, it's possible that had they gone to GCC and wanted changes, it'd have delayed it further. But I think that would have made more sense than releasing the XEGS. The 7800 is a series of unfortunate events..
I really want to watch Pojrs videos, but i can't get past how he talks (at the end of most sentences he elongates the final letter. as example: Starsssssssss) its like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Maybe don't record at the arcade? The background noise is distracting and annoying. This whole "rebuttal" is filled with a bunch of excuses.... woulda, coulda, shoulda. Don't get me wrong, I love Atari and was 10 when the VCS was released. Sure there were a few minor faults in the video in question but to bring in homebrews decades later is pretty lame. Put a 7800 and NES side by side in the mid '80's and almost every kid picked the NES. I didn't like the NES because I hated that controller (shocking right?) But later Atari controllers were even worse considering how great the VCS controllers were. Just because the 7800 "was capable" of doing it....they didn't do it. And that's the bottom line.
It's not an excuse to point out instances where the 7800 did pull off certain effects, but was ignored because of being overshadowed by the NES. Nor is it an excuse show elements like superior color and handling of sprites. Both pojr and myself use homebrews for a simple reason - the 7800 didn't have the 3rd/4th/5th generation games to show off what it could do like the NES had. I'm sure if it was reversed and the NES only had 60~ games in their library, then Nintendo fans would also have to resort to more recent things to say "here's what it could do." As for the arcade, well, sorry. Thanks for watching anyways.
Now hold on a second...you guys are bringing up "what if, what if" expandable equipment for the 7800...why isn't the fully realized and released Famicom expansions being discussed. They had the Famicom Disk System, keyboard, and even a very rare cassette player. Also where are the Nes tech demos? The Nes/Famicom did feature expandable carts in retail games. We're not just talking memory mappers either. Castlevania 3 as an example added extra channels of sound that really made the Japanese version of the game pop. There is no reason Nintendo (or 3rd party) couldn't have added extra hardware to their carts either. The question is why would they? Until the Genesis hit the market and slapped them down Nintendo ran the gravy train. Addendum- I'm playing devil's advocate here as I am not a huge Nintendo fan. They're okay...I just want a bit of fair play all the way around. Personally I think the Sega Master System wipes the floor with both of them (sorry, I had to do it). Tech demo NES- ua-cam.com/video/338r2BRYg3A/v-deo.html
I think Atarians in general focus on the what ifs because we didn't get half the things that the NES did, so in essence, a game like Rikki & Vikki is our CastleVania 3 ;) but thanks for sharing that NES tech demo, that's cool!
Game demos are awesome to look at BUT The issue with demos is that most of the stuff you see in a demo can't be applied to an actual game because the system rarely has enough left over to run game logic and such. You usually have to rely on helper chips to do much of anything with them.
the 7800 can't do Ninja Gaiden 3, Megaman 5, SMB3, Adventure Island 3, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, Mighty Final Fight, Ninja Turtles 3, there's like a whole generation of difference between both systems. It's like comparing Sega Saturn or PS1 with Playstation 2.
I don't know about every title you mention there but I know a few like Mega Man 5, SMB3, Final Fantasy, TMNT3 all used mappers, which expanded the abilities of the NES beyond the base hardware, whereas with the 7800, 99.9% of the games ever released to the system didn't have anything like it, excepting a bankswitching scheme. Rikki & Vikki is the only game to use a mapper and it makes a huge difference. I point this out in another video I did about that R&V game, but had Atari been developing their own answers to the likes of the MMC3 or 5 and having games take advantage of the features, then it would be a different story. That's part of the purpose of the video and why I say that the 7800 didn't get a "fair shake" like the NES did ;)
It didn't live long enough to be able to see if it could. With that being said the homebrew community is the only thing that can show what the 7800 is capable of. A while ago someone made Zelda demo for the 7800 that you could run around in that looked like something you'd see on the SNES.
If it wasn't for awful marketing and other decisions made at the top Atari and Sega would still be making the best consoles. Nintendo is proof that you need more than just a great system.
4:24 That's not really unique to the 7800, though. The NES has games that had additional ram in them. Indeed bank switching is how a lot of the larger games got around the limits of the console. You're going way off tangent here talking about peripherals. This is the same kind of thing SEGA people do when talking about the Genesis vs the SNES "Well the 32X... " No. Stay on target. Spec to spec, which system is superior from the raw standpoint? And then you factor in the difficulties of programming, the hardware bottlenecks, etc... But getting into things like expandability and these metaphysical potentialities is not addressing the question of which is weaker or stronger.
Fair enough. The reason I did go off on that tangent is because it's not well known that the system was designed for that purpose and had it been released under Warner, then many more games would have shipped with a Gumby sound chip and extra RAM, probably mappers. But of course it didn't work out that way, so I'm just wasting my time, but I guess the autist in me can't help but bring it up
Relying on cartridges to enhance hardware capabilities is a bad design IMO. Why scab on the hardware when it could be installed in the console itself? The consumer has to purchase the good hardware every time they buy a game. Silly design.
From GCC's original point of view it was a genius design, as they were going to bilk Warner out of a ton of money that way...they didn't anticipate Warner selling it off though, which ruined the plan
It worked for Nintendo. The NES was 2K+2K RAM to the end, though it helped that the cost of more cartridge memory sort of tracked with the improvement in developer skills for the system.
Which has more power isn't nearly as important than the quality of the games. The NES had awesome games (for the time). Atari? Well they had games but, the overwhelming majority of them were bad to terrible.
Believe me,even if the tremals released a keyboard,a high score card and a laserdisk adden and even if games used more rom,ram and an extra soundchip and ran at full resolution and even if all cartride labels & instruction manuals were in full blistering colors,the 7800 still wouldn’t have do any better,it might have do it even worse because of the extra costs added to those games & addons etc,,, It might could,ve caused confusion among gamers whether they should buy an atari xe or just a 7800 with keyboard,what the 7800 needed was more platform and rpg games because those types of games became the new rage, It’s not that graphics did really matter back then like they did in the 90’s on 16bit & 32bit systems, The problem was that nintendo just monopolized the marked by contracting game developers to only make games for their nes for two years,if game developers were allowed to also make games for the 7800 then the 7800 would,ve had a much much better chance against the nes and graphics & sound didn’t matter that much aslong you could destinguish enemies from objects and you as the main character off course and aslong those controls were smooth as well, an underpowered system could not generate destinguishable graphics & sound along with smooth controls and that’s what all mattered back in the 80’s,i cannot blame to harsh on tramel.
It's always difficult to ascertain what should/would have worked but I do think that ultimately, the 7800 needed to pull out all of the stops to hold up against the NES juggernaut. Keep in mind, it took time for the NES to become the force it did, so the sooner Atari had reacted in a smart way, the better chance they would have stood. Instead, they launched that system then stomped on their own johnson by releasing the XEGS right after. Momentum is crucial in product sales and Atari figured out how to kill it instead of boost it. (Note that Atari was working on a "Super XE console" that combined hardware from both the XE and 7800. It was ultimately canned) The devs the Big N has locked in were more Japanese, which was important but not insurmountable. Atari could have brought Tengen on if they had tried, and they did manage the likes of Absolute Software and Epyx; Atari's rep in Europe was also fairly solid. But, the Tramiels were notorious for not being very 3rd party dev friendly, being difficult to work with. There's one legend (dunno how accurate), that they would make the CEO of Froggo games sit around waiting in the lobby for hours, instead of just working hard to give him what he needed. Similar complaints of difficulties existed with the Jaguar too. They also needed more in-house talent. I imagine that had they not laid off guys like Howard Scott Warshaw early on, they could have continued to create fun and original games for both the ST and the 7800. On the 7800, a stronger launch with something more original as the pack-in (let's imagine that Atari had created something like Crystal Quest and packed that in, instead of PP2), marketing to focus on the great graphics with 2600 BC as a bonus, and peripherals like the high score cart would've been more likely to sway consumers in '86 than to turn them away. Had the keyboard come along with some cool computer games - Star Raiders, The Eidolon, Ultima, Rogue, Lucasfilm's Labyrinth, EA's Starflight, etc. - that would have turned heads. I agree, it needed more platformers and RPGs. Just having mostly arcade ports was not the strongest selling point. I also have maintained that the 7800 should have seen more ports from the 2600 to show how it could do them better. Keep in mind, the 2600 sold 1 million+ units in 1985 without any marketing from Atari whatsoever. That's what triggered them to start hiring devs for the system again and I can't imagine that anyone would have complained with 7800 versions of Adventure, Haunted House, Solaris, Pitfall II, River Raid, etc. I also don't know why they didn't get late 2600 stuff like Secret Quest made for both systems. Again, it couldn't have hurt :)
@@iratanongrata5973 well i wish that pac land was ported to the 7800 that would,ve be a great game to compeat against supermariobros,also i don’t umderstand why both klax & paperboy were never ported to the 7800 considering these are atari games but those games did get ported to both the mastersystem and nes,why is beyond me,BUT i found it sooo cool that both donkeykong ,dk jr and mario bros were ported to the 7800,this could,ve be a serious treat against nintendo,imagine a unaware mario fan coming into a store and seeing an atari 7800 along with those mario games,he/she would likely buy it because of that🤣
If the system had come out on time and had two years to develop and gain 3rd party support and learn the ins-and-outs of the system, by the time Zelda, Mario and Metroid dropped in 86 they would have been right there to compete and keep up soon after. They would have started putting add-on chips on the cartridges just like Nintendo did.
The consoles are not better or worse for their technical details. After all, without a good video game, silicon is useless. Nintendo has always known how to survive and succeed not because of the consoles but because a game is the difference.
I know plenty about the internals of the 7800, having tried to write a homebrew game, and done some hardware stuff with 7800 cartridge boards. I have no particular love for the NES, but it had a few things that made it better, while the 7800 had a few "wut"s that were annoying. First of all, the history of the 7800 is basically irrelevant as to which is more powerful. Yes, the failure to release hurt it in the market, but the tech was what it was. I'm just talking about the fundamental hardware limitations here.
The main thing about NES was not only did it have the video RAM on its own data bus, it also brought that video bus out the cartridge port, something that nobody else ever did. The 7800 Maria chip being on the main CPU bus meant that it basically halts the CPU while building up each display scan line. But even beyond that, bringing out the video bus to the cartridge port let the NES video system be updated on the cartridge with mapper chips. This prolonged the shelf life of the NES with mapper chips that not only allowed more RAM and ROM, but also interesting video tricks.
As for the amount of RAM (not ROM), the NES actually had 2K CPU RAM + 2K video RAM, so surprise, it had 4K as well. Cartridge sizes? Sure, you could cram a bunch of stuff into a cartridge since they both had a full CPU bus, but the standard size 2600/7800 plastic cartridge shell/board barely had room for a Pokey, a ROM, a RAM, and a mapper chip. Atari's insistence on using Pokey didn't help, it was so big because it had I/O pins on it that were useless in a cartridge. The Famicom cartridge had plenty of room for more chips, and the NES cartridge was laughably large. The main wut about NES cartridges was the toaster mechanism, and the metric pin spacing.
The 7800's "wut"s didn't help. The way that you have to interleave graphics data, with each scan line starting on a different 256 byte page is a pain in the ass to keep track of, but at least I understand how it made Maria easier to design. Sprites? Most systems with sprites have a set of registers where you set the X, Y, and a pointer to image data for each sprite. But the 7800 didn't have that, a sprite was just another object that YOU had to keep track of in the display lists. For good reasons, the DLL had to be broken up into groups of 8 lines or so, but if your sprite wasn't exactly within the 8 lines of a single DLL zone, it had to be in the DL of both zones, and the vertical offset had to be specified in both of them. Taller sprites just go into more DLs. Yeah, there's no flicker, but the cost is having to manage all the display lists to reference all the sprite chunks, every frame.
And you had to do this in the vertical retrace time (or during low-detail scan lines), because Maria hogged the bus to fetch graphics data during screen time. It was easy to specify more on a DL than could be fetched in the time for a scan line, then it stopped and displayed the partial line. (It was a long time before emulators got this right, so you could write a game that looked awesome on an emulator, but wouldn't work on real hardware.) This is exactly the same reason that a room full of ghossts on Gauntlet would only draw a few of them.
But here's the big part: if you want more than a single color background behind those sprites, the background also has to be an object in the DL and it uses up memory cycles too. Notice how the sprite demo has a black background? (Robotron too) 320 mode also means twice the data to fetch. But many games were in 160 mode, which looks noticeably inferior to NES games. (160 and 320 were used because of 2600 video timing)
As for audio, TIA sound was so bad to begin with that it was dumb not to drop a Pokey into the 7800. You shouldn't be required to cram a sound chip into a cartridge just to not sound awful. But this was a decision made *before* Jack Tramiel.
64K RAM in the 7800? Not likely. 64K in 1984 needed to be 8 chips of DRAM, with support for address mux and refresh, so a new VLSI chip would be needed. I don't know how affordable 62256 chips were a few years later, 32K would have been nice, but you would have to find a memory address for it, and 7800 carts had already been made for the old memory map, so more memory would still have to have a way to switch the extra RAM in and out. By the time more memory was affordable, it was too late, and it would have needed a compatibility mode for old games. After all, Nintendo never made a "NES Plus" either, it was 2K+2K for its entire life, making the "cram it in the cartridge" idea valid, aside from 7800 carts being physically smaller.
Awesome, best comment about the whole subject so it gets pinned - thank you.
As for thinking of 64K in the 7800, I meant when it was released in '86, not '84 (although in '84,it still would've been nice if it had 8 or 16k) but still good to know the context about the memory map stuff. On 7800 cart sizes, they could have done bigger if needed - not sure if you've ever seen them but CommaVid is one company who created tall carts for their games; Or Xonox who made those unusual double-enders. That's not optimal of course, since it mucks with storing games, but I think if it was needed they could have gone that route. Although using a smaller than POKEY chip would have made more sense - it sure would've been something if a 7800 game had used SID, lol
Would a mapper of any kind help with those MARIA bus issues? I could be totally wrong on this but I was under the impression from what I read on AA that Rikki & Vikki uses something like that which freed up cycles, allowing him to do more in 320 mode.
@@iratanongrata5973 The thing is, in 1984, they had already built 5000 or so units, which Jack just shoved into a warehouse when he took over. It finally got released in 1986 because Jack needed some cash. So many things could have been done, but those in charge thought that consoles were dead, and made no effort to solve the real problem: people were sick and tired of the previous generation. They were too busy chasing the home computer meme with their own proprietary architectures, while the PC slowly won.
Even a 24-pin Pokey would have been fine, just don't bond out all the I/O pins. It would have taken almost no engineering. The cart size wouldn't have been so bad with surface-mount chips, but that was still a few years away.
I don't go to the 7800 part of AA much these days, so I don't know was done, but it's nothing a mapper could help. Maria is just an automaton that scans the display lists, fetches bytes, and paints them into the scan line buffer. The only thing that could speed it up is to speed up the bus. It's hard to make a bus of that era go faster, and the timing was all derived from the color burst frequency, so the only good option would be 2x. But I also remember that 320 mode was rather limited in color options, so maybe you couldn't quite make it need twice the data. Still, a faster Maria would mean you could put more background detail into a scan line.
In the end, Maria was just too fiddly for me, and I don't like the 6502 either. I'm just glad that someone had the patience to deal with those display lists and make some nice looking games.
I’ve wondered, for years, if GCC, persuaded Atari Inc. not to use a sound chip in the console, so they could sell their Gumby sound chip indefinitely.
It’s too bad GCC didn’t incorporate sound into Maria, like they originally planned. That might’ve been interesting…
Thoughts?
@@8bitwiz_ I just wanted to comment on the desktop computer market at the time.
Really every desktop computer architecture at that point was proprietary, and IBM definitely never intended their computers to be anything but that. It was most importantly Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC series firmware (BIOS) that changed this.
Still, most of the reason that the PC slowly won was that it was used in business, while the competition was originally aimed at the home market. So, even though it's easily argued that all of the home computer competition was superior to the IBM PC at the time (especially at graphics and sound), as well as less expensive, people ended up wanting to get computers that were compatible with their work machines. That turned out to trump computer games and multimedia at the time. So while Atari, Commodore, and Apple battled it out in the multimedia department, PC compatibles quietly walked away with almost the whole market thanks primarily to spreadsheet software.
"Really every desktop computer architecture at that point was proprietary"
That's the joke. The problem is they skated on cost-reduced versions of the same tech for way too long. Or they went outside their core competency, such as Coleco should have made a super game system, not the Adam, etc.
But if I think about it, I guess a big limitation was getting new VLSI video chips designed soon enough. Atari had already lost Jay Miner, but would they have had him making new chips in 82-84? Coleco was using TI's chip, but only Sega (SMS) and Yamaha (MSX2) went forward with better versions. The PC was all off-the-shelf chips, and simple graphics standards with no sprites, so anyone could join in. Simpler standards are much easier to go mainstream.
very well thought out video. you made a lot of good points, i did get some of my facts wrong in that video and my game choices could have been better. this video definitely does the 7800 justice. good stuff.
No worries - I also seem to have got some things wrong on the 7800's design too :P I definitely would when it came to the NES's design. Keep up the great work on your vids!
At least your work was original
The NES had hardware scrolling which made development much easier than in software. Big reason there was so many sidescrollers. The resolution modes are kind of restricting on the 7800 where as the NES used a happy medium. Having said that the 7800 can produce a very impressive game. As a 7800 developer i could easily be bias towards the system, however the fact is they both are great and have their own strengths and weaknesses. What i have found first hand with my Bomber Hero port (WIP) is the 7800 can outshine the NES graphically but you need a good artist. You can also use a combination of sprite modes if not needing to render too much onscreen at once. 160B Sprites allows up to 12 colours in a single sprite. NES can't do that AFAIK. Bomber Hero im working on very slowly for fun but haven't updated the ROM for awhile. It does show how the 7800 can look more on par with the TG16 over the NES
The Atari has more of a open/free design, so it is better to make new kind of games.
From a business perspective you can totally see why the XEGs was released and the 7800 was not a primary focus. Tramiel Atari had inherited a lot of Atari 8bit computer inventory which was coming to the end of its life, and needed to be shifted.. there were also no licensing fees which I suspect was an issue with the 7800 - which explains the XEGS - the best way to use up that inventory and get some money in. The 7800 wasn't focused on because Atari had a better gaming platform in the ST (with respect the 7800), which was a full 16bit computer in 1985, and capable of so much more than the NES or 7800.. and the 7800 was essentially old hat to Tramiel Atari by that point. You can argue in retrospect with the coming of Windows ubiquity that the ST line would always eventually fail in the long term and Atari would have been better off sticking to consoles, but to Tramiel, who had had the C64 become the most successful computer ever, this would not have been obvious in the mid- 80s. Arguably as well, Atari was actually doing pretty well again by 1987 thanks to the ST, and if it hadn't been for the Federated chain purchase disaster they would actually have been doing very well after that point. So not sure it is cash shortage, more priorities.
Limited liquidity tends to narrow your priorities. Tramiel Atari had to focus on what they believed would reliably generate the most revenue. If they had the capital, they would have likely invested more in their diverse secondary products. Focus your product line when cash is tight, and diversify when your margin is growing.
That's a fair point - perhaps a better way of expressing it is that Atari should have taken the hardware they would have used for the XEGS and found ways to integrate it into the 7800. Perhaps with a 5200/800XL convertor cart, or more POKEY powered games. I still do think that the efforts that they put into XE exclusive games would have been much better to have steered towards getting those games on the 7800 instead (Into The Eagles Nest, Blue Max, Crime Busters, the XEGS light-gun, etc).
And thanks, it was Federated I was thinking of but couldn't remember their name. That really was a disaster.
Atari was looking into an ST game console but it seems to never have taken off - if they could have done that by 86/87, then it certainly would have been a better bet than either the 7800 or the XEGS. Although the weirdest hardware they were working on, perhaps I will do a video about, was a Super XEGS that had the Maria chip in it.
Between having way too many consoles on the market and the insane decision to not put a decent sound chip built into the console pretty much killed the 7800 out of the gate. Doubling the working ram would have been nice and wouldn't have been too bad to bodge into the existing systems from 1984.
The only person I knew that had a 7800 was my aunt, and most of her games were 2600 games for it. It was fun for me and my cousin when we came over but otherwise we both had NES systems at home and we played those a lot more.
I was aware of the Atari 7800 since 1983 (or maybe it was 1984). I read about it being developed in Compute! magazine. But then Atari got split up and I figured the system would never see the light of day. Then in 1986 I learned the Atari 7800 was actually being released along with the 2600jr. I ended up getting my parents to take me to I think three Toys R Us stores in a single day before we actually found one, and they bought it for me.
Pojr did mention the Crazy Otto hack in a video he did about Pac-Man bootlegs.
And yes, the NES does have a port of Xevious that was developed by Namco, published by Bandai (this was decades before they merged into Bandai Namco.)
Thanks - I'm just surprised that he didn't mention it in a video about GCC. No biggie though...it is weird that GCC didn't end up creating a better Ms. Pac-Man port on hardware they designed though.
It sounds like Atari made the same mistake Sega made, they made too many consoles in a short period of time instead of just sticking to one system and lost credibility with consumers
Actually... Atari's later years, and Sega's Early years problem, was with Software. They didnt have many quality 3rd party companies, programming games for the systems. Atari made things worse.. re-releasing the same titles.. with virtually no real difference (And none of the ports, matched the Arcade level of Quality). Sega also had a similar issue with releasing extremely poor arcade ports. Outrun on the Master System, was total Garbage.
Sega was at least a lot more Creative with their Console creations... making many great Original games.. such as: Phantasy Star, Zillion, Shooting Gallery, Missile Defense 3D, Maze Hunter 3D, and a few others. Where as Atari, had the same few Arcade games.. but done extremely poorly. All of their Original games, were pretty much Trash.. not really worthy of the price that you would have paid for them.
The Genesis became a lot more Successful, because the system had decent power, a few good games right out of the gate, and this caused a bunch of 3rd party developers to jump in pretty quickly. If Sega had been without 3rd party support again... the Genesis probably would have ended up failing quickly.
The Saturn was what Sega fans wanted way back in the Master System days: Sprite Scaling and Rotation, for ports like Outrun and Afterburner II. But by that time, people were no longer as Impressed with these games... and to make matters worse.. was that they lacked the proper arcade controls to be able to play them correctly anyways. Had Sega released proper analog controllers, and added features to these Arcade games... such as more Tracks, More soundtracks..etc.. it "Might" have saved the system.
But since the Saturn was also Notoriously Difficult for programmers to program... that killed a lot of the 3rd party software development.
That lead to the Dreamcast... which basically was like the first "PC" in a Console Shell. The main issue with this again, was with software support. They had a really poor game lineup.. and nothing that screamed "I NEED THIS" console. A Prime example, is the original Super Mario cartridge, for NES. That game alone... sold NES machines like MAD.. because it was so damn addictive. Still is... decades after its creation.
Atari eventually would later try the Jaguar... and focused on 3D games. Big mistake. 3D on such underpowered hardware... looked and played Awful. Rayman (2D) looked amazing on it... but there was no other games that even came close to that quality, on the system. And Rayman on the PS1, was even better.. and the PS1 had Ridge Racer.. which completely blew away the Jag's janky 3D, in comparison. The PS1, was the basically the bare minimum requirement, for "OK" looking, and playing... 3d games. And even many of those PS1 games, were awful looking garbage.
Nintendo always played the right hand. They had dedicated their best developers.. to make the best Console games. And they seemed to have been able to retain these top developers... unlike companies like Sega... whom seemed to have a revolving door of employees (likely many "fresh out of school" / Interns). Sega also had troubles.. because it chose to put its best developers on the Arcade development teams... and the lowest level developers, on the Console games.
To be honest... the Atari 2600 was on the market for far too long. They tried to squeeze every penny out of it.. and paid the price, when other console systems came in... and started selling more powerful hardware. And of course, it didnt help, that most of the games for the 2600, were absolute Horse Poop... due to a total lack of any quality control. But that said.. it was Greed and poor hardware choices, that made the next Atari systems Flop... in combination with poor game lineups, and no good 3rd party software devs.
Atari would eventually start to fail in the Arcades as well... with many Sub-Par offerings, that were not that visually appealing, not very original, nor that fun to play / replay. Sega managed to outlive them, with superior 3D hardware.. in games like VR Racing, and Daytona USA. However, before that... they had several 3d "STINKERS".
Eventually the entire Arcade industry stopped making uniquely creative, and challenging games. Couple this with a flood of Non-Skill related ticket games (basically boring slot machine type games, for kids), and the Arcades imploded.. failing forever.
Anyway... the truth is... Even the most Powerful of Hardware... Is completely Useless, without excellent Software (games).
@@johndough8115OutRun on the Master System was so far from being garbage that I now have to assume that the rest of your opinions here are equally foolish.
@@ostiariusalpha As a person that LOVED the Arcade version of Outrun.. it was a HUGE disappointment, in comparison.
It lacked the hardware sprite scaling technology. Its sprites / graphics were very flickery at times. It was low in speed, and seemed low in frame-rate.
Ive recently seen the PCengine version of Outrun... and it looks and sounds much better than the SMS version. Compare them yourself.
The SMS hardware just wasnt suited for this type of game. And or... the programmers rushed it, putting the most minimal of effort into it. (probably both)
@@johndough8115 I'm sorry, but have you hit your head on something? OutRun's graphics are entirely reasonable for an 8-bit port of the arcade game, and far better than any of the 8-bit microcomputer ports. No one in 1987 was disappointed by how OutRun looked or played on the Master System. And what exactly is even the point of comparing the PC-E/TG-16 port? That came out _three years_ after the Master System port, and on a console with a 16-bit GPU and a wave table audio chip. They were not contemporary with each other at all, so it damn well better look and sound superior on the PC-Engine.
@@ostiariusalpha Im telling you, that I WAS upset at the games look, and gameplay. I purchased it brand New.
As a kid, I was hoping for something closer to the PCE version. Obviously, the system wasnt capable of it... and frankly, they never should have released it as it was.
A version of Segas "Turbo" would have been far more appropriate for the system. Especially if it came with the Japanese Spinner, that never made it to the US.
Also.. I will say, that the scaling of the sprites seemed better on Space Harrier. They are much larger, when fully scaled. I have to wonder, if they at least doubled the cart size... if the could have fit more sprite frames into the game... to make it look and play a little bit better.
I'm so confused by that assertion. It doesn't take a lot of effort to see SMB3 outclasses literally everything pretty much any Atari model had by far...
After seeing this video though, wow I had no idea Atari could do any of these things and so well. It's amazing the hardware was way more capable than it's remembered to be, even by me who loved my Atari as much as my SNES and Genesis.
The sad story of Atari hardware is that it pretty much never got to see it's full potential used in release games :/ We're lucky to have homebrews taking care of that now though.
The thing is, Atari didn't do this, GCC did. They're the people who came up with the Ms. Pac-Man conversion kit. And later they sold accessories for the original Macintosh. It was created by outsiders, so not-invented-here syndrome at Atari was one of the reasons the 7800 didn't do better.
It's worth noting that SMB3 had pretty significant add-on hardware in the cartridge through its MMC3 mapper that enabled functions well above what the NES was capable of by itself. It's not an entirely fair comparison to the 7800. More fair comparisons of base hardware would be games with no mapper, which is most of the early single-screen arcade-like games the NES had. Super Mario Bros. was just about the pinnacle of what the unexpanded Famicom/NES could do. Kung Fu and 1942 were other good examples of no-mapper games for NES, with Kung Fu even having direct comparisons available. Unfortunately we'll never know what kind of heights the 7800 could have gotten to with a decade of focused, dedicated support with multiple levels of mappers and cart addons.
@@Scoth42 I disagree that it's an unfair comparison. Part of the competition here is whether there's forward-thinking design, and the one place the FC/NES really shines is the way mappers could be upgraded over time. That the 7800 didn't have anything comparable is as much a factor of their desire to be backwards compatible as it was for them to not really forward think the hardware.
@@firehawker4822 The point is that there's no technical reason the 7800 couldn't have had just as fancy and complex mappers as the NES/FC, it just didn't last long enough in the market to see that happen. It was fully capable of upgraded mappers as well, and we saw some inklings of that before it died as well as in some recent homebrews. We'll just never know what it could have done with it had those mappers been made.
24:47 I believe that Dark Chambers is a rework of Dandy, and that game preceded Gauntlet by a couple of years. Making Gauntlet more of the clone here than the other way around.
I was at a trade dealers show in 1983 and the Atari Rep brought me up to his Hotel Room and showed me the prototype 7800. No case, just PCB boards in a box. He had Pole Position running, and it looked very good for the time. He said this system would be on shelves within a year.
Look at who was running Atari back then. There's why the 7800 never had a chance.
New Sub! Dryden, MI
I got a 7800 for Christmas '89, $59.00 Toys-R-Us SUPER SALE!
I still have it, I'm about to finally get around to Restoring it with some New-Age Upgrades!
Excellent Job!
What? No mention of the exclusivity contracts and the lockout chip that Nintendo forced on game studios?
And that Atari sued Nintendo?
21:20 Tower Toppler uses composite color artifacting, that's why it looks wrong in emulators
The 7800 version of ikari warriors is much much better than the Nintendo version.
Scrotum guns...
Overall the NES was better but the 7800 was better in certain ways, it's just that few of the video game programmers of the time made full use of what the 7800 could do. Alien Brigade was an exception. That game is probably better than the similar Operation Wolf on the NES which is a great game. Some of the new homebrews for the 7800 show what it was capable of. Dragon's Havoc is a great example of this. I played an emulator the programmer posted on AtariAge. Amazing game. Looks great and plays great. If they had released stuff like that at the time, the 7800 would have easily competed with the NES. I really think the big flaw with the 7800 was the sound chip. Having a good soundtrack is very important. And it's a hassle to have buy some add-on to have good sound... Anyway, great video! Lot of excellent points here. And I'm certainly sympathetic to anything that gives the 7800 it's due. There are a few really good games on it and a few great homebrews.
To answer your question about if Xevious did have an NES port, it did and said port was actually quite a landmark title for the console as in its home market of Japan, Xevious was among the first two Famicom or NES cartridges to be entirely manufactured by a third party and the NES version of Xevious was also the first NES game released to have its rom size to entirely take up the max cartridge space that the NES could handle before the introduction of memory mappers as the Japanese release date for Xevious on the Famicom was just under a year before the Japanese release of Super Mario Bros.
I've got a follow-up now posted if anyone cares, focusing more on Rikki & Vikki and why I think it's perfectly fine to use it as an example of what the 7800 could do: ua-cam.com/video/Q2GQOtUOCRU/v-deo.html
Did you know that 1E78 hex is 7800 decimal??!! Just wondered seeing the demo in the dude's browser tab, I watched the demo the other day. And I thought... Spooky eh? Starts in 78, ends in 78. Still there's probably 255 other numbers like that at least, below FFFF.
If these were mentioned in other comments I apologize, but in regards to recent home brew releases that are also very impressive and show what the system was able to do, I would look at the release of Revenge of the Petscii Robots on the 7800. That version is very impressive and looks really good. The scrolling looks janky and I've seen folks complain about it, but that is basically by design as the scrolling looks that way in all ports of the game. Another one that is visually impressive with a LOT of variety in the art is E.X.O. but that is only available digitally at this time and so limited mostly to playing in emulation or specific flash carts.
Yes, excellent point! I was thinking of showcasing EXO here soon, although I only had an earlier demo build. I might just have to get the digital version
The XEGS would have been a great console... in 1982. It's what the 5200 should have been - direct backward compatibility with 8-bit computer games, and the classic joystick instead of the lousy analog one that the 5200 used. That would have carried Atari to 1987 or so, and they could have then introduced a proper next-gen console. Perhaps the 600XL computer could have been marketed as a console.
The joysticks were the worst thing about the 5200. Just having the fire buttons on the side (same with the US 7800 joysticks) was awful for my thumbs. I would even say they are anti-ergonomic.
Then there were the buttons themselves. The tin coating on the flex circuits would fail from oxidization even if you didn't use them. I've found one pair with that black carbon stuff that every TV remote uses, and they actually work! You could even damage them if you open them the wrong way. If you don't pop off the start row bezel first, it could tear that part of the flex circuit.
Yeah, XEGS is what the 5200 should have been. But they had to keep the computer and home divisions separate because that's how the business was organized. They intentionally made it just slightly different enough that they couldn't share software without porting it.
I actually used an Atari 600xl as a console, with the very nice feeling metal cartridges and Atari 2600 joystick it was a great setup for it's time.
I am glad you showed Xevious, it was one of my favorites I played in the arcade and I have played it on many other systems but the one for the 7800 I always felt played and looked fantastic, not a 1:1 to the arcade but it was one of my favorite ports of the arcade game.
Very few people mention it when talking 7800 games.
With regards to Tower Toppler looking like crap on emulators: Retroarch has a crt shader called CRT-GUEST-ADVANCED-NTSC.slangp that will display the correct image at stock shader settings. You can also tweak it to max NTSC imperfection. This shader will also correctly display the pseudo-transparency effect of the waterfall in Sonic the Hedgehog or any other game that used NTSC artifacting intentionally.
It sounds weird when you call RF/composite color bleed "NTSC artifacting" since PAL RF/composite video does the same thing.
@@ostiariusalphaTrue, but not to the same extent. The joke used to be that NTSC stood for “never the same color”.
And that’s why the shader file has NTSC in the name: PAL and NTSC look different.
@@thetechn1que518 😅 It has a different file name because the screen refresh is different, not because they look different: 60Hz versus 50Hz for PAL.
@@ostiariusalpha Never saw a single PAL tv set living in North America for the last 53 years. Is it still weird now lol
@@sockcutter Yeah, 50Hz TVs tend not to work that well when you plug them into 60Hz power; same for most PAL consoles.
Honestly, what doomed the 7800 was Jack Tramiel. He was hell bent on getting even with Commodore he didn't realize he had a cash cow on his hands. The 7800 needed a dedicated sound chip out the door, 8k of ram would have done it justice, a lock on a killer game to be developed and released like Pac-Land, and it needed to be released no later than 1985. NES may have never been seen in North America. However rather than an Atari 5200 and repackaged the 400 into a game system it is possible the 7800 would have never been developed.
I don't think the sound was a big deal since it sounded like the 2600 which was already a familiar sound at the time. None of the 8 bit consoles had spectacular sound. It was all based on various tones of static and beeps all done in mono. The 7800 didn't succeed as expected because it's weak game library via shoddy investment and marketing related to software development. Hardware wise, it was on par with the NES.
I was really impressed by that homebrew platformer with the Knight.
Think you are talking about the game 'Knight Guy in Low Rez World" by Vladmir Zuniga? Yes it is a lot of fun and one I pick use for testing 7800 consoles for servicing.
Let's forget about the CPUs for a bit, since Z80 and 6502 can actually do exactly the same thing that you coded for (Atari 7800 and NES technically have the same CPU, only each variant of 6502 are different), it's the GPU that's far more important than anything else since back in the day, they were weird and custom fixed function graphics processors so it's also the software that makes or breaks the consoles. People want much more fun eye candies so naturally it pushes both NES and Atari 7800 to their limits. Yet if you think about it, they both have their equals in graphics strength. The only difference is in both GPU and CPU configuration (as well as their clock at which they operate at - for both consoles, it's usually under 10 MHz) - programming them both is kind of trivial compared to one of the later consoles, Sega Saturn (two GPUs and two CPUs, gonna be fun to juggle all those computational performance in this console while coding the homebrew games and apps for it 🫣 ).
Still, I never have had Atari 7800 console, only had Nintendo consoles, of course I knew how important Atari is to the game industry as whole back in the day.
The Hero & Ricki Vicki home brews would've been so good in 1987.
Thanks for this! I had the Pro system joysticks. Suffice to say, "The Arcade" was _a lot_ better. Read about the 7800, but it seemed really tough to code. Like you say.. The XEGS was silly. Atari did so many crazy pivots that lead nowhere. Even before Tramiel came along. That Ricky and Vicky game looks awesome.
I need to post this video on AA and start another, I can't believe the NES did better than 7800 thread... 😢
That was a well thought out video.
Awesome video and info
The 7800 is lacking a decent sound chip, reverting to the one used in the 2600. That was a big mistake.
That's why I explained it in the video but many seem to hand wave the intentions of the designers away. There was a plan for a chip, but the issue was that it needed a resource heavy company like Warner to pull it off, not penny pinchers like the Tramiels.
Great video
Great stuff. Im biased towards the 7800 but theres a reason the NES was a cultural phenomenon at the time and its not just because of marketing. A lot of this information i planned on hitting on my channel and I probably still will but its great to have it out there via as many sources as possible!
Also it was the gumby mini that they wanted to use in carts. Gumby was meant for the project spring that never came to be. Both essentially the same but the Gumby mini would've been more cost effective
I had the 7800 and then got the XEGS too! I had a ton of fun with XE but it never really gets mentioned at all...
I read that before Jack bought Atari there was plans to make it possible to turn the 7800 into a full fledge computer. I think they should have went this route including releasing a module to make it play Atari 800 games. It would have been a total backwards system that way as well as a cheaper base system alone.
That is true, it's those components I show briefly (the keyboard and the 5200 convertor cart)...later the Tramiels did look at turning the Jaguar into a PC but that also never happened.
Atari 7800 could have been better than it was......... If it was out on the original release date, and got good software support..... but that didn't happen.
I don't particularly know what the ROM size for a nes was, but the 7800 had 4kb of ROM AND 4kb of RAM. Really doesn't matter though as NES cartridges installed themselves as actual hardware in the system and could contain more ram in them. If you're going to mention that the Atari 7800 could have extra chips in the cartridge, that's really the same for all cartridge systems. The need to do so makes the cartridge much more expensive to produce though. The wikipedia page says the the limit is 48kb for rom without bank switching so his 48kb is correct. Bank switching requires special hardware.
Most cart systems could use the extra hardware, I was just giving that emphasis since in the original docs from GCC, that's where most of their emphasis was being placed. Seems like NES gets a pass for using extra hardware in the carts though, whereas, pointing that out on the 7800 is cheating because they didn't in the day or something
It’s actually funny that the 7800 did have 4kb of rom, so pojr did get that right lol. I know he meant ram but I thought it was funny cause it also had 4k of rom too lol. Also I’ve always found it odd that the 5200 that was based on a 1979 computer, released in 1982, had 16kb of ram but the 7800 released in 1986 had only 4kb? Feels like they went backwards lol.
The lore of the 7800 goes on
my thoughts exactly.
The Atari 7800 is a more powerful evolution of the Atari XE, but they share the same architecture and this is very noticeable in that many of the Atari What I'm trying to get at is that you can find games on the Atari It is impossible to recreate the NES, XE's Rescued in Fractalus and in 7800 there is a prototype that is unthinkable on the NES. So you can find many pseudo 3D games on the Atari XE that are possible by default on the 7800 that serve as an example of what it could do.
Doesn't matter how much more powerful a system is. At the end of the day, its all about the games as to whether its fun or if the game is trash. I liked Atari. I owned a 7800, a Jaguar, a 1040STF, and a Mega ST2....built my first website on a 1040STF in 1993....no pictures and just text obviously. There were only a few good games for the console and what killed it was NES's licensing deals. Atari had a chance to make the NES their console but they screwed up. They could have also launched the 7800 earlier whenever it came out so that plenty of games could be made for the system to avoid the future licensing mayhem. But power means nothing. The Atari Lynx was way more powerful than a Gameboy but the Gameboy was a lot more fun and it had a much longer battery life and was easier to carry. Atari had the best products....just horrible execution. BTW, Rikki and Vikki doesn't count. That game was impossible to make when the system came out and if it did, it would be thousands of dollars to purchase. I still would not have bought the game if it was priced the same...its graphically impressive and sounds good but its a boring game and to truly beat it you would have to have a friend to be bored along with it. The only time power matters is when it comes to a computer which is why I got a 1040STF. 1 Meg of RAM and did everything that a Mac could do for a whole lot less
Exactly. Video is basically a midwit game take.
Agreed that games ultimately matter and most of what Atari has output over the years pales in comparison to the big names out of Japan. The point was addressing pojrs video about system power, where it failed to take into account various factors.
The misconception about Atari taking on the NES is that Nintendo had approached Warner with that deal while Warner was actively looking for a buyer, firing Ray Kassar then rehiring him. Warner was a complete mess in 83/84, so even if they had taken the deal, it likely would have been a disaster, probably even handing it off
to the Tramiels mid-way through. So it's not a guarantee that would have saved Atari.
The Tramiels could not have launched the 7800 much earlier than they did as again - there was an unresolved payment dispute that took a while to settle. Perhaps they could have figured it out in '85 when all their focus was on the ST but like you point out, that wouldn't have changed the game output/quality in any way.
Disagree that R&V "doesn't count" - the point is that by using additional hardware, which the 7800 was designed to do, much more was possible on the console than demonstrated by the small selection of games that pojr decided to focus on. Whether you enjoy the game or find it boring doesn't matter to the subject, which is whether or not the 7800 was capable of holding up against the NES.
@@iratanongrata5973 Tramiel should have paid the bill because time is money and it wasn't that much, just a lack of business awareness. I said Rikki and Vikki doesn't count because its a game that would not have been made in the 80's, the game has 512kb of game data and 256kb of music, it has its own custom sound chip, and a built in memory mapper. The largest games at the time were just 128k. I bought my 7800 for 80 bucks and it came with 5 games, Pole Position, Xevious, Robotron, Ms Pacman, and Galaga. All 5 of those games and the system combined has way less memory than the Rikki and Vikki cartridge...the cost for that game would have been in the clouds. Again, makes no difference. People wanted adventure, platformers and beat them up games at the time that you couldn't play in an arcade....Zelda, Super Mario, Guardian Legend etc....exploration games. The 7800 for the most part were still arcade conversions. And that's where the line is on this
@VinceGoodrum: Rikki and Vikki does count because it would've been made in the 90s just before support ended for the 7800 circa 1991. The biggest 7800 game was Alien Brigade at 144k. NES games routinely went well over 128k. Kirby's Adventure is a 1mb cart.
POJR does talk more of the history in his other videos that's why it was so brief. 48kb is correct unless you use bank switching then you can go higher, but the base size is 48 according to Atari forums. Another reason the 7800 has the 2600 sound chip is backwards compatibility . Yeah why they had the 7800, Atari 2600 JR , Atari XE and the entire computer line out at the same time is beyond my understanding. It's like Atari never could figure it out even when the Jaguar came along it was the same old song and dance , projects that they should of never done , spending money on multiple things when they should of just focused on one or two, like did we really need the Atari Portfolio which came out when the Jaguar did, so now it's portable computers , Atari Lynx , Atari Jaguar and more all at the same time. Honestly I think Atari is just now figuring stuff out , maybe because they have a new CEO that has a real love for Atari.
The 48k ROM thing isn't a big issue, I just think it was worth noting that it could see a higher size (that's what all the "Super Game" carts like Desert Falcon were). The NES could get as high as 1MB thanks to those famous mappers.
I could do a video or a series of them on the failure of the Jaguar, but perhaps that would be too pedantic :P
What’s Commodore doing, lately?
All these expansions are also on the NES, if i’m not mistaken
Kinda surprised you guys didn't go over the XM expansion module project though it might be fleeting at best. Great video otherwise.
Thanks! The XM crossed my mind but I was enough into the weeds anyways. I guess I should have at least mentioned it though.
The Tramiels made the same mistakes that Warner did. They never money up for development of any ideas they had to enhance existing systems. That's why all the best Atari 8-bit systems never got made...corporate stupidity. Tramiel was simply cheap and short sighted.
The Tramiels originally very well with the ST, which became a 16 bit C64 with such a great price compared to the competition; however, their console market,vas mentioned, was far too diluted with not enough resources and too many releases. I love my XE game system, but this console should not have launched.
The sound is much worse it has more RAM but if it was more powerful than the NES the games didn't show it
Well, that's where it's important to look at some of the more recent homebrews - Rikki & Vikki, Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, 1942, EXO, Wizard's Dungeon, etc. These all show to one degree or another that the system was perfectly capable of competing with the NES - Atari just didn't have the in-house talent and the money for 3rd party talent to make it show.
Most of those games also make use of additional sound chips - yes the base hardware sound sucked, but it could easily have used arcade-quality sound chips too. Again, that comes back to money.
Another thing I should have mentioned in the video is that the 7800 could much more easily handle 8-way playfield scrolling than the NES could. Dark Chambers is one of the few release games to show that; Had mappers been a thing for the system, then we could have seen many more with improved graphics.
Well, it wasn't out long enough for it to get the money put into it and research & development in understanding the hardware and developing better software development software and hardware that the NES received (there's multiple generations of NES games, while the 7800 barely even got a single generation). And the fact that when the 7800 came out Nintendo already had most higher end game devs locked onto the NES.
It takes time and money and research to learn the hardware, to develop better development software to unlock better capabilities of the hardware, better development hardware, it takes figuring out what can be added to the carts to expand the capabilities of the stock hardware to give it capabilities that it didn't have when it first game out.
I mean you can't just compare a late generation NES game with the first generation NES game.
I mean yeah, the TIA sounded worse, BUT devs back in the day didn't really have full understanding of sound design.
If you look at what the homebrew scene, and the Demo scene has been able to achieve with just the TIA alone it's quite a stark difference then what you heard from a TIA from back in the 80s.
You say that the Atari 7800 "never got a fair shot"... it did get a "fair shot"... Atari Corp management KNEW that Nintendo was interested in launching the FamiCom in North America or the U.S.A. first... they KNEW by at least well over a year and they dismissed it because all their money was in selling very expensive Atari Computers and whatever software they made for it...
They as in 80s Atari Corp did NOT believe in the home videogame system market at all... they had the Atari 7800 hardware in 1984 and launched the Atari computers during those years instead of the 7800.
Atari Corp basically rejected Nintendo in 1984 and 85... sat on it and after seeing the profits of the NES launch they went in cause they saw dollar signs...
It's pretty simple... no excuses...
Also look at the timeline when the Atari XE became available and how Atari Corp sent that system to the Atari computer market and simply didn't and never bothered to send it into the home videogame system market... and no one bothers to talk about it...
The same management ideology just repeater itself when they finally had the Atari Jaguar launched... a lot of boasting and bragging and acting like they were entitled to win the home consumer videogame system market but they completely ignored Capcom's SF2 and Midway's Mortal Kombat arcade games and wanted you to play phonecall on a game controller that was obsolete and DOA at launch... nevermind useless.
As explained by Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg (Atari historians who have interviewed hundreds of people who worked at the company both during Warner and during Tramiels), there was a payment dispute that was the main reason for the delay. Sure, they did make some bad decisions with the 2600 and that sold 1m+ units in 1985 without any marketing, but when I say that it didn't get a fair shot is that the "fair shot" would have been to be released under Warner as originally planned, with their millions of dollars in backing it.
As for the NES, Nintendo approached them while Warner was in charge; When Jack bought the company, he fired most everyone who had been around, including the people who were working on the NES deal. It's very difficult(especially with a Japanese company) to pick up a complex deal like that and not have it fall apart. Like with E.T., I think more of the blame for that lies with Warner.
Of course that's not to say that the Tramiels hadn't screwed up in managing things with their home consoles, like you said.
Boy, I do a video like this on the Jaguar and I'm sure things will get spicy.
@@iratanongrata5973 ok bud you have to make a distinction between pre-Tramiels Atari and Tramiel Owned Atari because a company name, building and logo is not a singular entity, its a vehicle that gets directed from point a to point b and if the person in charge of driving said vehicles steer it in a different direction, no matter "what direction it is" under that leadership, there is no crying about a "fair shot"
The fact is Nintendo did not come into 1985 like they were destroying companies unfairly and this repeats all the way to the last year of the 80s, there was no competition period in 1985 and rest assured that if by some miracle Nintendo Japanese headquarters had decided an intentional aggressive plan to invade the U.S.A. videogame market just one year earlier in 1984, that the Tramiels at Atari Corp would have had a year earlier rude awakening of their own design and taken their monkey see, monkey do attitude towards home videogame systems.
It does not matter that there was a "money dispute delay verified by Atari historians", that is not even relevant as a credible reason because there was no intent to maintain or return to the home videogame systems and I am sure that old interviews exist from between 1983 when the fictional Atari crash happened to months before the Nintendo NES launched in 1985.
It also does not matter if Jack fired a bunch of people, that's what new company owners do or most of them do because they have their own vision which they believe is right and that vision did not lie in home videogame systems, it lay in selling computers of the 80s before IBM/Clone PCs made that impossible in the early 90s.
There is no blame with Warner or whatever name they had as owners, partners, whatever... they did not create Atari, they only came in after Atari had become successful years earlier and the creator of the company and vision decided he had a different vision which again did not lie in home videogame systems for whatever reason.
I am sorry that you cannot seem to notice this, I can remove any fan bias and just see what they were doing and the fact is that when they aka, Atari Corp held the power in the early 80s, they abused it and marketing alone, nor ET over production will serve as an excuse because that is what they are in terms of Atari Corp because they had other competitors like Colecovision and Mattel and other before 1984.
They can also look at the market of that time, refuse to realize they made any errors with their hardware and software and just make a decision of "hey, forget these lame consoles, lets sell computers because of reasons and because the U.S.A. is a first world country where such products could sell in the millions in the early 80s"
Also, it is not to demonize the Tramiels but they went to a different hill, they had a non-entity with no muscles Nintendo basically tell them, "Hey you guys rule here, you can have our product and sell it, we will manufacture it and you decide what works" thank God they rejected Nintendo because they would not be able to handle doing that... same goes for the time Sega Enterprises Japan basically and independently offered Atari the Sega MegaDrive with the same conditions which would have been a disaster for Sega, the fact is Atari Corp had professional people that year who saw the Atari 7800 and instead of taking the risk and placing any "belief" in the product, they said no.
When Nintendo came, they had ZERO belief and said no... that is why Nintendo went alone...because they believed, just like Sega Enterprises Japan once it came into being in the early 80s... if you do not believe in hardware and software and market, you do not invest and technically it was not a mistake but you cannot then show up with historians and blame Nintendo and Sega or vice versa in some scandalous book interviews with "historians"
Its a bad analogy but a car is available to you in the 90s, you have the income but do not know about the car and do not bother reading up on it to know what it can offer you, so you basically do not go to make an offer for the late 80s Toyota Supra Turbo and instead went for a newer front wheel drive car... then years later you come to see the value of the vehicle dramatically change
Also it bears repeating that once the Tramiels were in charge and immediately launched the 7800 in 1986, the beat new Sega here in U.S. which caused Sega to be a distant third place yet Sega in Japan alone made a lot bigger contribution to the game software library aka they did not need the third parties Nintendo had because they made enough games, they just got stuck in third place while in Japan they were also a distant second and third or fourth place until 1994.
Finally your paragraph making it seem like it was Warner and not the Tramiels.. once the buyout happened, the Tramiels have the books, it then becomes their obligation to either maintain relations or communications (if they cared), they were not obligated to use nintendo hardware and had every right to say no but the point is, they had the books, they KNEW that a NEW challenger is around and they just... kept to their vision of selling computers...
Then once they sold the 7800 at nearly half the price of the Sega Master System and had tons of tv commercials and advertising everywhere back then (something your Atari historians also seem to forget during the Tramiels) instead of focusing on one hardware platform they offered the Atari 2600 Jr, Why? the 7800 was already BC... then they offered the XEGS and that commercial was everywhere on tv back then if you were old enough... Atari Corp as a company was just out of touch and the Jaguar was harsh evidence of this... there was never any unfair market practices, just resentment for the guy who was ignored and took the market alone, then later resentment for the other guy who sucked but stayed steady..
Atari historians will never write that because they have a bias.
@@apollosungod2819 I guess we're going to have to co-write a novel here. Too bad much of what you just said is full of your own bias and ignores basic facts of what happened.
The crash of '83 was not "fictional." The fallout in the North American market was obvious as shown in the closure of numerous video game companies, all across the board - arcades, consoles and computers. Warner began losing millions of dollars through Atari; Their sales of arcade machines was drastically reduced (Centipede had sold over 50k units in 1981 yet Star Wars only ended up selling 12k units). Williams and others likewise saw huge losses. None of that is made up or reflective of a bias - it's simple numbers. Your claim that it was fictional though shows your own bias and misunderstanding of the past.
Another fact is that Warner fired Ray Kassar in '83, only to rehire him immediately afterwards as they had no replacement. Eventually they found James Morgan, who was doing an excellent job at turning the company around but Warner had already decided to sell the company off. All this left the company in a big mess in '83 & '84
With the 7800, there was a payment dispute. Could the Tramiels been more aggressive in resolving it sooner than 1986 - sure. But that fact matters because they had a lot of options coming in- there was the NES deal, which had started under Kassar; There was a deal about the Commodore Amiga that could have been turned into a console, along with considerations of doing the same with the ST. There is a saying in business called "hedging your bets." They obviously took the safer route that made sense to them at the time. Claiming that they should have known that the NES would be a megahit is silly. If anyone is that good at predicting the future then they'd be a billionaire who made all their money in Vegas, not from games.
As to your panties being in a bundle over the fair shot thing, let me try and explain better - under Warner, the plan for the 7800 was to correct the mistakes made with the 5200. It had some great accessories in the works. It had BC. You also still had people at Atari who were great creatives like Howard S. Warshaw. That was all lost in the sale - the talent was fired, the accessories chucked, the drive to create the best games with the best advantages in hardware like mappers was lost. In that sense, it didn't get a fair shot at its potential because of how the Tramiels hamstrung it. I don't think we're really in disagree on that point, so not sure why you're harping on it, unless it's just your own pro-Nintendo bias kicking in.
"it doesn't matter that Jack fired people" - would you say that if Nintendo had fired Shigeru Miyamoto or Iwata early on? Would you like to argue that wouldn't make any difference?
Yes, new owners tend to fire a lot of people. But it was still a bad idea to not have identified who was the skilled and creative talent and kept them on-board. What they could have made for the 7800 would have been better than what it got. They could have made better games for the ST as well. Talent makes or breaks companies. If you don't believe me then ask any Sega fan about how they feel about current Sega vs. 80s and 90s Sega. Almost everyone from Sega in those days has left, and it shows.
Claiming that there were no "unfair practices" is also being disingenuous. Tengen's history and the lawsuit that came out of that is one example there, as was Atari Corp's failed lawsuit. You can also easily find an article from the LA Times dated Dec. 8th 1989 where a sitting member of Congress also accused Nintendo of unfair practices. You can try and hand wave that away but it doesn't change what happened.
That's no excuse of course for Atari to not have managed the 7800 better - not sure why you think I'm 100% on the Tramiels side. But claiming things never happened when they did doesn't bolster your argument.
jack had the money, its just he would not spend it. there is a joke amongst the few dealers left by 1990, he would save a penny, and lose a dollar. the reason for the cheap bids on development, was because of his business practices, very few were willing to work with him. so most companies were small.
you could only discuss games a little bit with him, the family hated games. if you pushed on games just a little bit, the conversation would change, and you would be notified to back off, or the words watch it.
the department store the video is speaking about was federated. i had a lot of interaction with them, because atari did not want their games for sale inventory sent back, it ended being sent to me.
as far as the XEGS is concerned, there were three major atari dealers left standing by 1990 or so, i was one of them, and still am, we were bidding on the unreleased XEGM games like commando and xenophobe, which by the way were superior than the 7800 versions, but that's another story. we wondered how and why the XEGS came about, and why was the artwork so good compared to the artwork on the 2600 and 7800 which was terrible for a while under jack. from the people we knew, no one was completely sure including hold overs from the warner days. what we think was something like the XEGS was on the drawing boards at warners management, and the artwork was already there in some cases.
besides, because of jacks actions, the 7800 was a mystery to atari, and things that they needed to know had to be worked out on how the machine operated, in the early days games like karateka were butchered.
the XEGS was easy to roll out. and many of the games turned out to be strong sellers, but as usual, jack never followed up, he did not like games, and went onto to other things, and the game machines withered on the vine.
Awesome, thanks for that insider look! I have heard a lot about their attitude in regards to games and developers...if they hated it so much, they should at least have hired someone as a Game Dev VP to handle that all.
I wish I had been paying attention to the scene back then, although I was just a kid :)
@@iratanongrata5973 they did hire someone, a left over from the warner days. he was a good friend of mine. every game he reviewed, he had to send a internal memo to jack. he had to word the memo carefully, to try to get the game past jacks objections. some got through, many did not.
Arguing about which ancient, long dead platform was technically "better" should have died out shortly after the systems themselves did. They were what they were. All of them COULD have been improved, bigger budgets, better games, better marketing etc. But hindsight is wonderful, whilst accurate foresight is often quite elusive. But people would expect the "new" 7800 to have been far better than the Atari 800/XL/XE computer systems... were all based on the same basic architecture released back in 1979. Using that old sound chip in the 7800 was just one of many silly decisions Atari made. But companies like IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and AMD have all made huge mistakes over the years, and will no doubt continue to do so.
Sure, it's ultimately pointless since we're way past the expiration date, but it can be a little useful to point out that a certain console could have done better than people think since the NES sucked up all the oxygen out of the room. It's also an opportunity to highlight recent homebrew efforts that are quite a labor of love from the programmer.
Jack was the GOD of computer company owners BUT his success with Commodore was due to MOS Technology in his back pocket hence the all conquering C64 costing Commodore peanuts to manufacture, he didn't have that kind of advantage at Atari sadly. The NES is not brilliant being a Famicom really, which is inferior in some ways to the 1981 chipset in the C64, but the 7800 has even worse sound and even more limited graphic display resolutions.
If Atari wasn't so cheap it sounds like the system could've had more success the labels on the 2600 were so cool in comparison and had much more games than the 7800 Atari shoukdve taken out a loan or got funding from somewhere how did they expect a console to compete when it only came out with 2 games in an entire calender year
Only if you keep the sound off.
7800 had no good sound chip.. a really big problem
That's why I brought up the way it was designed - GCC had their own MINNIE sound chip that they were designing that they were going to put into carts and charge Atari for. Great for GCC but not for Atari, so later on, it just got stuck with TIA
@@iratanongrata5973
Correct. But that was the worst design flaw. You can't tell game publishers to put better sound chips in your game cartridges.
While the 7800 might have been.. better than the NES.. in most respects, that sound.
I will never let it go. Why did Atari's THIRD console sound like it's first console?
culture outgrew atair sounds. I don't even understand how they thought atari sounds were even viable in that market.. we're talking 1986 here right?
@@xenxander That's why the context about the MINNIE plans matters. Had the 7800 been launched under Warner, then you would've had games using that sound chip. It was really GCC's greed that caused this problem - they should have designed MINNIE and included it right on the board. But they figured they could bilk Warner on putting it into every cart, which probably would have worked.
Should the Tramiels have included it? I think so, although it's possible they didn't know about it or if they did, they didn't want to spend the money. I don't think that 5000 test market units being out there wouldn't have been a problem (just issue a recall). It took two years to resolve a payment dispute just to release the console as-is, it's possible that had they gone to GCC and wanted changes, it'd have delayed it further. But I think that would have made more sense than releasing the XEGS.
The 7800 is a series of unfortunate events..
Wasn't a big deal in 1986. We were already familiar with the 'Atari' sound.
I really want to watch Pojrs videos, but i can't get past how he talks (at the end of most sentences he elongates the final letter. as example: Starsssssssss) its like nails on a chalkboard for me.
It was proven the 7800 can do low level polygons
Hardware Without Good Ganes Means Nothing , Atari 2600 was amazing on 80s Brasil...meanwhile Phillips Odissey Was a Pile of Garbage....
Maybe don't record at the arcade? The background noise is distracting and annoying.
This whole "rebuttal" is filled with a bunch of excuses.... woulda, coulda, shoulda. Don't get me wrong, I love Atari and was 10 when the VCS was released. Sure there were a few minor faults in the video in question but to bring in homebrews decades later is pretty lame.
Put a 7800 and NES side by side in the mid '80's and almost every kid picked the NES. I didn't like the NES because I hated that controller (shocking right?) But later Atari controllers were even worse considering how great the VCS controllers were.
Just because the 7800 "was capable" of doing it....they didn't do it. And that's the bottom line.
It's not an excuse to point out instances where the 7800 did pull off certain effects, but was ignored because of being overshadowed by the NES. Nor is it an excuse show elements like superior color and handling of sprites.
Both pojr and myself use homebrews for a simple reason - the 7800 didn't have the 3rd/4th/5th generation games to show off what it could do like the NES had. I'm sure if it was reversed and the NES only had 60~ games in their library, then Nintendo fans would also have to resort to more recent things to say "here's what it could do."
As for the arcade, well, sorry. Thanks for watching anyways.
SNES proved more than anything else that great games make the difference, not over blown hardware specs.
Now hold on a second...you guys are bringing up "what if, what if" expandable equipment for the 7800...why isn't the fully realized and released Famicom expansions being discussed. They had the Famicom Disk System, keyboard, and even a very rare cassette player. Also where are the Nes tech demos?
The Nes/Famicom did feature expandable carts in retail games. We're not just talking memory mappers either. Castlevania 3 as an example added extra channels of sound that really made the Japanese version of the game pop. There is no reason Nintendo (or 3rd party) couldn't have added extra hardware to their carts either. The question is why would they? Until the Genesis hit the market and slapped them down Nintendo ran the gravy train.
Addendum- I'm playing devil's advocate here as I am not a huge Nintendo fan. They're okay...I just want a bit of fair play all the way around. Personally I think the Sega Master System wipes the floor with both of them (sorry, I had to do it).
Tech demo NES- ua-cam.com/video/338r2BRYg3A/v-deo.html
I think Atarians in general focus on the what ifs because we didn't get half the things that the NES did, so in essence, a game like Rikki & Vikki is our CastleVania 3 ;) but thanks for sharing that NES tech demo, that's cool!
Game demos are awesome to look at BUT
The issue with demos is that most of the stuff you see in a demo can't be applied to an actual game because the system rarely has enough left over to run game logic and such. You usually have to rely on helper chips to do much of anything with them.
the 7800 can't do Ninja Gaiden 3, Megaman 5, SMB3, Adventure Island 3, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, Mighty Final Fight, Ninja Turtles 3, there's like a whole generation of difference between both systems.
It's like comparing Sega Saturn or PS1 with Playstation 2.
I don't know about every title you mention there but I know a few like Mega Man 5, SMB3, Final Fantasy, TMNT3 all used mappers, which expanded the abilities of the NES beyond the base hardware, whereas with the 7800, 99.9% of the games ever released to the system didn't have anything like it, excepting a bankswitching scheme. Rikki & Vikki is the only game to use a mapper and it makes a huge difference.
I point this out in another video I did about that R&V game, but had Atari been developing their own answers to the likes of the MMC3 or 5 and having games take advantage of the features, then it would be a different story. That's part of the purpose of the video and why I say that the 7800 didn't get a "fair shake" like the NES did ;)
It didn't live long enough to be able to see if it could. With that being said the homebrew community is the only thing that can show what the 7800 is capable of. A while ago someone made Zelda demo for the 7800 that you could run around in that looked like something you'd see on the SNES.
If it wasn't for awful marketing and other decisions made at the top Atari and Sega would still be making the best consoles. Nintendo is proof that you need more than just a great system.
4:24 That's not really unique to the 7800, though. The NES has games that had additional ram in them. Indeed bank switching is how a lot of the larger games got around the limits of the console. You're going way off tangent here talking about peripherals. This is the same kind of thing SEGA people do when talking about the Genesis vs the SNES "Well the 32X... " No. Stay on target.
Spec to spec, which system is superior from the raw standpoint? And then you factor in the difficulties of programming, the hardware bottlenecks, etc... But getting into things like expandability and these metaphysical potentialities is not addressing the question of which is weaker or stronger.
Fair enough. The reason I did go off on that tangent is because it's not well known that the system was designed for that purpose and had it been released under Warner, then many more games would have shipped with a Gumby sound chip and extra RAM, probably mappers. But of course it didn't work out that way, so I'm just wasting my time, but I guess the autist in me can't help but bring it up
Why don't you do your own work, instead of criticism review of someone else's work. Pretty sad
What's sad is you're too lazy to look at other videos on my channel showing tons of my own work. Double sad!
Relying on cartridges to enhance hardware capabilities is a bad design IMO. Why scab on the hardware when it could be installed in the console itself? The consumer has to purchase the good hardware every time they buy a game. Silly design.
From GCC's original point of view it was a genius design, as they were going to bilk Warner out of a ton of money that way...they didn't anticipate Warner selling it off though, which ruined the plan
It worked for Nintendo. The NES was 2K+2K RAM to the end, though it helped that the cost of more cartridge memory sort of tracked with the improvement in developer skills for the system.
@@8bitwiz_ it wasn’t a requirement to pack hardware in the NES cartridge to make a decent game. The 7800, it was.
@@iratanongrata5973 and the consumer gets screwed.
Which has more power isn't nearly as important than the quality of the games. The NES had awesome games (for the time). Atari? Well they had games but, the overwhelming majority of them were bad to terrible.
Believe me,even if the tremals released a keyboard,a high score card and a laserdisk adden and even if games used more rom,ram and an extra soundchip and ran at full resolution and even if all cartride labels & instruction manuals were in full blistering colors,the 7800 still wouldn’t have do any better,it might have do it even worse because of the extra costs added to those games & addons etc,,,
It might could,ve caused confusion among gamers whether they should buy an atari xe or just a 7800 with keyboard,what the 7800 needed was more platform and rpg games because those types of games became the new rage,
It’s not that graphics did really matter back then like they did in the 90’s on 16bit & 32bit systems,
The problem was that nintendo just monopolized the marked by contracting game developers to only make games for their nes for two years,if game developers were allowed to also make games for the 7800 then the 7800 would,ve had a much much better chance against the nes and graphics & sound didn’t matter that much aslong you could destinguish enemies from objects and you as the main character off course and aslong those controls were smooth as well, an underpowered system could not generate destinguishable graphics & sound along with smooth controls and that’s what all mattered back in the 80’s,i cannot blame to harsh on tramel.
It's always difficult to ascertain what should/would have worked but I do think that ultimately, the 7800 needed to pull out all of the stops to hold up against the NES juggernaut. Keep in mind, it took time for the NES to become the force it did, so the sooner Atari had reacted in a smart way, the better chance they would have stood. Instead, they launched that system then stomped on their own johnson by releasing the XEGS right after. Momentum is crucial in product sales and Atari figured out how to kill it instead of boost it.
(Note that Atari was working on a "Super XE console" that combined hardware from both the XE and 7800. It was ultimately canned)
The devs the Big N has locked in were more Japanese, which was important but not insurmountable. Atari could have brought Tengen on if they had tried, and they did manage the likes of Absolute Software and Epyx; Atari's rep in Europe was also fairly solid. But, the Tramiels were notorious for not being very 3rd party dev friendly, being difficult to work with. There's one legend (dunno how accurate), that they would make the CEO of Froggo games sit around waiting in the lobby for hours, instead of just working hard to give him what he needed. Similar complaints of difficulties existed with the Jaguar too.
They also needed more in-house talent. I imagine that had they not laid off guys like Howard Scott Warshaw early on, they could have continued to create fun and original games for both the ST and the 7800.
On the 7800, a stronger launch with something more original as the pack-in (let's imagine that Atari had created something like Crystal Quest and packed that in, instead of PP2), marketing to focus on the great graphics with 2600 BC as a bonus, and peripherals like the high score cart would've been more likely to sway consumers in '86 than to turn them away. Had the keyboard come along with some cool computer games - Star Raiders, The Eidolon, Ultima, Rogue, Lucasfilm's Labyrinth, EA's Starflight, etc. - that would have turned heads. I agree, it needed more platformers and RPGs. Just having mostly arcade ports was not the strongest selling point.
I also have maintained that the 7800 should have seen more ports from the 2600 to show how it could do them better. Keep in mind, the 2600 sold 1 million+ units in 1985 without any marketing from Atari whatsoever. That's what triggered them to start hiring devs for the system again and I can't imagine that anyone would have complained with 7800 versions of Adventure, Haunted House, Solaris, Pitfall II, River Raid, etc. I also don't know why they didn't get late 2600 stuff like Secret Quest made for both systems. Again, it couldn't have hurt :)
@@iratanongrata5973 well i wish that pac land was ported to the 7800 that would,ve be a great game to compeat against supermariobros,also i don’t umderstand why both klax & paperboy were never ported to the 7800 considering these are atari games but those games did get ported to both the mastersystem and nes,why is beyond me,BUT i found it sooo cool that both donkeykong ,dk jr and mario bros were ported to the 7800,this could,ve be a serious treat against nintendo,imagine a unaware mario fan coming into a store and seeing an atari 7800 along with those mario games,he/she would likely buy it because of that🤣
ummm.... no
If the system had come out on time and had two years to develop and gain 3rd party support and learn the ins-and-outs of the system, by the time Zelda, Mario and Metroid dropped in 86 they would have been right there to compete and keep up soon after. They would have started putting add-on chips on the cartridges just like Nintendo did.
@@johneymute I was playing klax on 7800 just the other day.
The consoles are not better or worse for their technical details. After all, without a good video game, silicon is useless. Nintendo has always known how to survive and succeed not because of the consoles but because a game is the difference.
✔️ Promo sm
Pronounced trammel