Games That Push The Limits of the Atari 7800

[@Elrond_Hubbard1]

I begged and pleaded for six months nonstop for a NES system only to have my mom be talked in to buying this by a KB Toy's store associate. All my friends were playing Mario and Zelda, I was playing Galaga and Food Fight. God bless my mom lol.

[@roberthazelby4424]

I bought a batch of sealed 7800 games around 20 years ago with Food Fight amongst the titles. Because it was so difficult to tune the 7800 into a modern TV it remained sealed. A week back I purchased the 2600+ (which can also run 7800 games). Last night I finally opened Food Fight! I’d not played it before, but what a game!

[@adamb89]

Frankly by rights the 7800 SHOULD have been a superior system. It came out 5 years after the NES was first released in Japan. That's practically an eternity in console terms. If you consider what 1982's Atari 5200 looked like compared to the 1983 NES, you could be forgiven to think that the 7800 would be light years ahead.

[@Elrond_Hubbard1]

@@roberthazelby4424 Oh yeah. That was in heavy rotation for me.

[@cf105cp]

​@adamb89 Ugh. NO. The Famicom (NES) came out in 1983. The 7800 had a soft launch in 1984 till Traimel bought Atari then he shelved it till 1986 and then released it. 7800 is not 6 years older than the Famicom. Idiot.

[@bobstevenson3130]

@@adamb89 It came out 5 years later, but the system itself was developed in 1983-84 by GCC. The project was shelved when Atari was purchased by Jack Tramiel in 1984 and he pivoted the company more towards home computers, believing game consoles were a dead market in the wake of the crash of 1983. It was only after the NES found success in North America that the 7800 was released, which is why its hardware is more on-par with the NES despite coming out several years later.

[@vincenzomottola7778]

Did you know? In Xevious for the Atari 7800, the mothership is a massive sprite object that hovers in the air (like in the arcade original). However, in the NES version, the mothership is a background object that sits on the ground.

[@Slightly_Sadistic]

Xevious for the 7800 was my favourite game since Adventure. At the time of course.

[@greenaum]

Yeah the 7800 was pretty decent with sprites. A display list rather than tilemaps, but with powerful sprite functions on top. Much more versatile and powerful. If you'd done it as a sprite on the NES, it'd flicker to the point where only a quarter would be visible on screen at once, the whole things flickering like they were testing some sort of prototype cloaking device. Also there wouldn't be any other ships. Including the player.

[@Slightly_Sadistic]

@@greenaum that's quite interesting. Wasn't there an NES port? I haven't played it myself. It was always the Atari version when I was young.

[@greenaum]

@@Slightly_Sadistic I didn't have a NES (got a NES Mini now though, hackety-hack-hack!), but yes there was a Xevious for it as the top post in this thread mentions. The sprite flicker I mention is something that comes up in NES games, you could only have a few sprites on a scanline at once, after that they just weren't drawn. So you'd alternate their order which at least gave them all a chance, but since they were taking turns to be drawn, they flickered, drawn one frame, not drawn the next. So imagine how many 8x16 sprites you'd need to draw the mothership.

[@Slightly_Sadistic]

@@greenaum cool nice to know. I didn't have one until about 1993 and only had a few games for it like The Guardian Legend and SMB3 and like another one or something. Never tried out NES Xevious. But, I have thought about getting the Mini. I have the SNES, Genesis and Genesis 2 Minis. Hopefully Gen 2 will be hackable soon. It's got a lot of storage.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

Great coverage, and I even learned a few things Atari Age never taught me. Only thing that's really missing is a mention of how Jack refused to make 7800 ROM carts large enough to compete with Nintendo and Sega, and demanded third parties use his "barely trying to compete" brand instead. But then, he also tried to pretend the XE was the real prestige 8-bit system, despite being nowhere near as powerful. There were warehouses full of unsold stock just taunting him...

[@AFourEyedGeek]

Jack was terrible for Atari, 7800 could have been released years sooner if he had paid the wages owed. Released at an earlier time, the Atari 7800 hardware choices would have been understandable. Saying that, the Pokey chip should have been inside the 7800 from the start.

[@rpgspree]

​@@AFourEyedGeek Pokey was far too big to include on the board. There really wasn't room for any other sound chip either. Gumby/Minnie was the proposed cart-based chip. Cancelling it was just one of the many ways Tramiel kneecapped the 7800. Pokey was simply their fallback solution, but it was still too expensive. There might have been more competitive 3rd party sound chips, I don't know. A slimmed down Pokey without all of the leftover cruft from their early 8-bit computers could have been a solution, but Tramiel had no interest investing any more money into it.

[@UberMan5000]

"Jack Tramiel Ruins Atari by Being a Skinflint: Part 78."

[@ssppeeaarr]

thats really sad so it suffered what sega of usa did during the tail end of genesis days and saturn... with a bafoon in charge of operations. i always had a respect for atari. even tho im a nintendo fan. also sad they never learned their lession n kept with the shady tactics even to the jag days. which i wish was indeed a true 64bit system. like n64. sad they went out like that in hardware. like sega.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

@@ssppeeaarr Technically, the Jaguar can make a legitimate claim to 64 bit, as it can run two 32-bit operations in parallel to create and run a 64-bit instruction. It's got a wide enough databus to allow this, and the blitter (it handles all the Gouraud shading, for example) is true 64-bit. This is also true of the Object Processor. Basically, it is fair to say that the Jaguar's graphics are enhanced by the power of 64-bit...when people actually used that power. (Rarely. It was easier to just write everything to the 68000, since Atari wasn't fond of handing out accurate hardware documentation to third parties.)

[@violator1017]

Hi, just to correct the thing you said in the video : the flickering on the NES doesn't appear when there are too much sprites on the same line... The flickering is "coded" by the developpers to go over the limitation that the display of the NES struggle with... Basically, if the developpers don't code the flickering effect, the NES doesn't display the sprites over the 8th on the same line AT ALL !^^ BTW, great video !

[@Dwedit]

Sprite Dropout is what happens when there are too many sprites on the line. Flickering is what happens when the sprite order is changed to make a different sprite drop out every frame.

[@Sharopolis]

Yes I totally glossed over the details on this one!

[@chitlitlah]

That doesn't really sound like a correction. The flickering happens because there are too many sprites on a line -and- the programmer put forth a little effort to make it look a little bad instead of completely awful. It's still because the NES can't handle that many sprites on a line.

[@alanbenson1505]

I used to use a similar trick on the Amiga. If a game had semi-slow homing bullets and you wanted 18 on screen, I'd save blitter time by drawing them in batches. If you draw the bullet art to look like electricity or plasma, it would look like they were intended to flicker. The saved blitter time could be spent elsewhere (extra enemies etc). As only the bullets flickered, it looked like an intended animation choice.

[@kevinmarriott8698]

Given the success & longevity of the NES isn't it surprising Nintendo didn't build a chip with better sprites to put in cartridges? Or was that not possible?

[@dankpelt]

If Atari had released this when they were supposed to, it could have been a contender. If they had revised the sound chip to not be the same as the 2600 when they DID release it, it could have had a longer life.

[@vincenzomottola7778]

I guess they didn't have the space for an extra sound chip, and the 2600 sound chip is merged with the video chip (the TIA), which was needed for backwards compatibility. If only they didn't insist on backwards compatibility

[@Zellio2011]

@@vincenzomottola7778 Tramiel was so cheap he refused to pay the guys who made the 7800 for 2 years. He had the space, he was a notorious cheapass

[@video-luver769]

@@Zellio2011 I've often wondered if he'd made a bet with someone that he could drive Atari into the ground in under a decade.

[@Chordonblue]

@@video-luver769 It might seem that way, but what it really is, is a cautionary tale about revenge. Taking revenge on your opponent (in this case Commodore), might feel good at the time, but Tramiel made some TERRIBLE business decisions. It also didn't help that very few understood what video games were, how they had progressed, what the kids expected from the next generation. For one thing, most of Atari's games were quarter-based play with time or 'life' limitations. That worked in the arcade, where start of the art ruled, but at home, players were discovering a new kind of extended and in-depth play: On computers. The problem was the crash. Once video games crashed, taking many game companies with them, to older folks, it seemed like a fad - like Hula Hoops. Parents, investors, store chains, were all understandably reluctant to buy consoles and games due to quality issues. Overall though, gaming thrived on the computer systems that survived - especially the Commodore 64. In my opinion, Tramiel did not understand the whole gaming thing. Perhaps he saw console gaming as a fad, as he cancelled the 7800 altogether, only bringing it back two years later when he realized Atari missed the boat. Could it have been successful? Probably not. ROM-based games weren't dead, but the kids wanted more in-depth gaming - games Atari didn't have and didn't specialize in. And when Atari's divisions were divided, with the arcade division becoming its own company, "Atari Games", there was no love between them - even if it made sense for Tramiel's Atari to develop those games. Even the console's joystick controllers seemed out of step - and this was especially true when the NES showed up! And don't forget, the initial group of games for the 7800 were incredibly dated only 2 years later. It took time for developers to create new games, and many of them were already out on computer. It's easy to look back on the 7800's library of games and think, 'That's not terrible...' But it WAS terrible on launch and for some time afterward.

[@Lightblue2222]

Nintendo was constantly releasing new and great games, as where Atari just didn't keep up. The sound chip is an overall small issue, as certain games would have it included in the cart. Graphics, and gameplay alone with more new games could have made it a contender. NES had Super Mario 3 while 7800 had Scrapyard Dog.. But to be extra fair, 7800 sound was slightly better than 2600. The TIA runs at a faster clock speed while in 7800 mode. That as well as programmers getting better with TIA in general. Galaga and Ms Pacman sound competes with the NES versions well enough. Xevious too. Sadly Atari just didn't give 7800 the support.. those games I mentioned were actually made by GC in 84, imagen if they had came out then.

[@MotownBatman]

7800 was my First System: My Dad got it in '89 with a pile of $1.00 bin games for Christmas for me. I still have it, Proudly displaying my ET Cart on my Office Desk

[@Halbared]

That's really cool.

[@mohhingman]

Well done to your Dad

[@nthgth]

Haha that's really cool

[@stevetb7777]

Wow! I had no idea the 7800 could do that. I played my 7800 for 2 years drooling over my friend's NES! I couldn't believe how much better the games/graphics/sounds were. I had no idea the 7800 was capable of so much more than I witnessed. Thanks for this video.

[@MrTBoneSF]

Your description of scrolling on the 7800 is backwards. Vertical scrolling is trivial (as it was on the 2600) and requires changing a couple of values while horizontal scrolling requires rebuilding the entire screen with the cpu.

[@feralstorm]

Some of the more polished 7800 examples are the early arcade ports, like Robotron 2084, Joust, and Food Fight, as they were programmed by GCC, who designed the 7800 itself, and showcase a lot of flicker free sprites on screen at once. Early 1980s single screen arcade ports were considered old hat by the NES days, not to mention done to death on multiple consoles and computers, including Atari's own.

[@Barcrest]

They went on to repeat the same mistakes with Jaguar. That was also a pain to code for if you want to get the best out of it.

[@fungo6631]

But it was significantly more powerful than the SNES and Megadrive, running a very decent version of Doom on stock hardware, with shadows that are even better than the PC version.

[@Barcrest]

@@fungo6631 i was referring to how games were usually just 68k ports and not using the hardware due to how difficult it was to program like the 7800.

[@aboriginalmang]

But the jaguar was a rushed, half finished console with buggy chips and architecture that could use some improvements. It needed like another year in the oven. The 7800 and Lynx are very much mature systems with fully realised capabilities, by the system makers themselves at least. Also the Jaguar had no chance at 3D against the PS1 and N64 to begin with due to its lack of a dedicated geometry processor ASIC. The 7800 and Lynx however were a lot more capable than their contemporaries. The Lynx actually beat the SNES at many things while also being the older, less expensive, and much more power efficient system. Even with the expensive colour LCD it had it still managed to be cheaper than the SNES. All of Atari's systems after the 2600 would thrive incredibly well had they weren't forced to suffer from the company's utter mismanagement, but the gaming industry in the US from the 80s all the way through the 00s was in shambles so they had to stick with Atari's idiocy.

[@ecernosoft3096]

Not really. I code for it and sure it’s not super easy but it’s not that hard once you figure out how the DLs work. It’s really not. Give the 7800 a chance.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@aboriginalmangJaguar needed a further 2 hardware revisions to fix the bugs according to Rob Nicholson of Handmade Software.

[@barry-allenthe-flash8396]

If you're talking about the Atari 7800, you _have_ to talk about Rikki & Vikki, so I'm happy to see you found it and dove into the homebrew scene. I heard about that game and bought the Steam version and it really is mind-blowing. If the hardware was capable of stuff like that, it really is a shame it was dead so fast. Just like with the Dreamcast, the Lynx, maybe the OG Xbox and other short-lived consoles, it's a big case of "What if?" where you just can't help but imagine what kind of games it might've had if developers took the time to really dive into the hardware and figured out the tricks to make it really sing and, well, push its limits. Awesome platform to highlight this time!

[@samfrito]

Possibly the greatest "what if" of my gaming life pertaining to the Master System, Lynx, Dreamcast, Jaguar, Xbox, etc. I just wanted to see a game of theirs in the majors.

[@aboriginalmang]

@@samfrito master system, dreamcast, and xbox sold pretty well and got a significant amount of hardware pushing titles. The Lynx had tons of untapped potential, it would do much better as a home console in my opinion.

[@samfrito]

@@aboriginalmang agreed. Playing Electrocop, Turbo Sub or Todd's Slime World really show a 16 bit console that nothing at the time could touch. I think Lynx should get a "mini" handheld collection (console) next. "What If" number 2 for Atari in my book.

[@ViciousAlienKlown]

The OG Xbox lived past 5 years though.

[@samfrito]

@@ViciousAlienKlown still alive to me.

[@DehnusNorder]

Actually EVERY GAME should be in "Fuzzy TV Emu mode", because even for the NES, Master System, Megadrive and SNES... developers developed their graphics with this in mind and used it often to create better looking games. Heck they used the glow as well, it's why Mario looks so weird in emulation in Super Mario Bros 3 when compared to an actual TV set. heck they even used the RF signal and composite signals to their advantage.

[@hjk7833]

Let's keep those ol' CRTs safe and in good working order so future generations can experience these games the way they were designed to be played.

[@ssg-eggunner]

Odd, I don't really remember Mario having dithering

[@MattMcIrvin]

Artifact color was also used in many Atari 8-bit games that used the highest-resolution graphics mode there (e.g. Choplifter, Pinball Construction Set)--but they were almost always the games that were straight ports from the Apple II, since you'd be unlikely to write an Atari 8-bit game from scratch that way, but doing an Apple port to that mode was relatively straightforward. The Apple II had a special bit in its hires mode that doubled the number of artifact colors you could get by shifting the phase of the output, so porting these games to Atari involved losing some of the colors. But the display retained a very distinctive artifact-color look.

[@pweddy1]

The biggest problem with the 7800 is Tramiel shelved it for 3 years or so and let Nintendo beat it to market. But Atari was a general mess during that era, with them screwing up the opportunity to have the NES distribution rights in the US!

[@Sinn0100]

It also didn't help that it only had the sound chip from the 2600...making the developers pay for the pokey chip. Only 2 that I know of did this (Ball Blazer and Commando).

[@Asterra2]

@@Sinn0100 Just to complete the story on that for passersby: Although it was stuck with the 2600's audio chip, it didn't have the same harsh and bizarre limitations when it came to *using* said chip. On the 2600, ultimately you could only play certain tones with the chip, and those tones weren't in any way coordinated to be music-friendly, leading to the phenomenon that attempts at music on the 2600 were extremely rare. 7800 developers, on the other hand, had basically the same freedom with the chip that NES developers had with the 2A03.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@Sinn0100 That wasn't the plan though. There was supposed to be a chip called "Gumby" (IIRC) available at very low cost to be developed by GCC (which is who developed the 7800) to be put on cartridge, GCC and Atari were connected at the hips in the 80s. GCC created Ms Pac Man for the arcades. They also developed a bunch of 2600 games, like Ms Pac Man for the 2600. Also, the cartridge slot for the 7800 allows a lot natively, like extra RAM and other hardware plus the audio chips.

[@MichaelPuterbaugh]

The 7800 didn't offer much more flexibility with TIA audio than the 2600 did: the same hardware restrictions on waveforms, frequencies, and attenuation were all still there, plus it was still only a 2-channel chip. The main advantage the 7800 could offer was to update the registers more often, for example once per scanline instead of once per frame, which made finer control of musical parameters possible. It's why the Atari ST gets a better result from the AY chip than, say, the Spectrum ZX does, and a hardware-assisted version of this technique is responsible for the exception soundtrack in 2600 Pitfall II.

[@Sinn0100]

@@tarstarkusz Gumby? Don't you mean Pokey?

[@wiremesh2]

Man, Atari just loved giving their systems awful resolutions. Though in this case it was maybe to support backwards compatibility? If they could have managed a few more colors in hi-res mode, we'd probably have seen some really impressive stuff.

[@yoymate6316]

ikr. this system reminds me of the lynx… probably the most advanced console of its category at the time if you were willing to excuse its nonexistent resolution

[@Nestalgba92023]

Does their low resolutions systems including Atari 5200, both 4-port (with auto switch box) and 2-port?

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

I love the resolution of those systems! That chunkopixel look is my favorite thing in the world!

[@Chordonblue]

With 8-bits, you have to make compromises somewhere. You couldn't have great resolution AND great color, and you have to remember the times - memory was EXPENSIVE - especially in the 1970's! Jay Miner, the designer of graphics for the 2600, Atari 8-bits, and the Amiga, chose a different path then most - more color. NTSC TV resolution sucked with only 260ish lines available per field, BUT, it could represent over 1000 colors per field. 2 fields combined would give you over 500 lines and 1000X1000 colors, but due to the nature of NTSC, sharp contrasting lines caused a lot of interlace flicker. You have to remember the times in which the 2600 was developed. HDTV was a LONG way off. Most people were still using an 'Antenna' split wire hook up on their TVs, and most people hooked up their 2600's to those TV's (my first gaming TV was in black and white!) The trade off was that you got GREAT color (or B/W shading), at the cost of big sprites and/or resolutions. The 2600 had 128 colors at a time when most competing systems had 16 (Intellivision, Colecovision, Odyssey 2, etc.) The first games didn't use the fancy tricks the later ones did, but the 'Atari Rainbow' effect existed because only their machines could do it. A lot of Atari games used this to great effect. For instance, Many Activision games used it to produce sunrise/sunset effects like in Barnstorming, Frostbite, Keystone Kapers, H.E.R.O., Enduro, Pitfall II and Robot Tank, and they also used it in their colorful logo at the bottom of every one of their games. I like Jay's choices better - if not only because of the times, but because the Atari could do things NO ONE else could do. It was only until the Age of Sprites and the NES that the clear advantages of a dedicated sprite system overcame the idea of more color. Besides, the NES had 64 colors as well, and that was good enough when combined with the awesome power of the PPU in the NES. THAT SAID... Atari's early games showed a LOT of creativity. When you have a fixed system of sprites and resolution, you are limited to games that favor that system. However, the Atari was essentially an open book with the CPU doing pretty much everything, and your code had to 'race the beam' to get executed. A GREAT programmer could do Ms. Pac-Man or Pitfall II, or Solaris - any of which were excellent, comparable to any competing system of their day.

[@wiremesh2]

@@Chordonblue This would be a really great comment on a video about the 2600, but this is about the 7800 which released 9 years later. Even had it released in '84 as originally intended, they made some odd choices for output resolution and sound.

[@baroncalamityplus]

For what its worth, the 7800 did beat the Sega Master System in total sales and units sold in North America.

[@hjk7833]

At 3-13-1, the Texans had a better season than the Chicago Bears this year. XD

[@nthgth]

Interesting. I'm sure the games library influenced that, but Sega was surely much less of a household name than Atari at the time as well

[@arcadeheroes_coinop]

I'm glad you mentioned Rikki & Vikki - you need to play it on a CRT to enjoy the artifact blending. Looks and plays amazing. I'm surprised you didn't mention Desert Falcon though - while it's not the best in gameplay at being a Zaxxon-clone, the color use+number of objects is pretty good. The reason they didn't include a POKEY sound chip in the 7800 is because when it was being designed by GCC (same guys who created the Ms. Pac-Man hack, Crazy Otto), they had the clever idea of putting the sound line in the cartridges so you could put any sound chip you wanted in each cart; Naturally, they were going to have their own "Minnie" sound chip that they would have milked Atari for but after Warner sold Atari to the Tramiels, the latter didn't want to do that and was content on leaving it with the TIA sound for 98% of the games :/ I think that's why the games that are on both this and the NES are poor for the 7800 - Tramiels hired the cheapest dev houses to create a lot of the games and often refused to spend more on other things it could - bigger ROM sizes, more RAM in the carts, it could even run a different CPU like the 6809. Had it been Warner's money behind the 7800, then I think it would have been a different story. We also never really got "3rd gen" games for the system, 2nd at best.

[@MrMegaManFan]

As someone who has a modded 7800 and a Cuttle Cart, I love every bit of this video.

[@greenaum]

You know what would have been a great idea? The Lynx, but as a TV-based console. It had amazing capabilities, sprite scaling and rotation, STUN Runner has full filled polygon tunnels zooming away, all on a 6502 (well a 65C02), but running at 16 MHz! The graphics chip was amazing. Better graphics than the SNES and Megadrive, more CPU power too, I'd argue. Certainly better than the SNES's joke CPU but compare to the 8MHz 16-bit 68000 in the Megadrive. Half the speed, and the 68000 takes more clock cycles to execute an instruction than the 6502 does. 65C02 takes extra work to do stuff with 16-bits, but you don't always need to use 16 bits, sometimes 8 is plenty for your game's function. And it's clocked twice as fast. What let Lynx down as a handheld was the screen. LCDs weren't as clear back then. And before white LEDs were invented, the backlight was a fluorescent lamp! With a 100V generator circuit to drive it! No wonder the 6xAA batteries went so fast. The battery life was the second problem. But dump all that, put it in a box, and make it Atari's latest home console! Standing up well even to arcade machines of the time. It could even go in a tiny box like the PC Engine to look Japanese! The chips in it were wonderful, a great design, but colour LCDs just weren't viable back then. The designers would have to tweak the video circuit a bit but it could be done. Something that is maybe halfway to a Neo Geo at a price people can actually speak without their jaw dropping.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Stun Runner uses sprite rings to mimic the look of the Polygon tunnels of the Arcade, that way it retains the feeling of speed, versions which used polygons, for example the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, lack. Those 2 versions had terrible frame rates.

[@DouglasZwick]

As soon as I was done watching this video, I went straight to Steam and bought Rikki & Vikki. What a fantastic game! Such superb art and music and gameplay.

[@hjk7833]

It's a fabulous game and great for playing cooperatively. My 10yo likes to play it with me. It's a sad that Penguinet won't do anything more with it. I wanted to buy a 7800 cart, but they sold out just before I could order (back in November of 2020 iirc). They won't make any more carts or license it to anyone else to do so. I'd love to see it on an Evercade cart. I don't know if Blaze is interested, but I do know that Penguinet has stated that they will not be licensing the game for release on any other platforms in any case. So even if Blaze wanted to pick it up, they won't do it. I'm sure that Penguinet has good reason for not making it more widely available, but it's a shame, considering how phenomenal the game is.

[@tarstarkusz]

The 7800 was never pushed to its limits because there were so few games. Plus, Jack Tramiel wasn't dumping money into it the way Nintendo did with the NES. The 7800 was/is VERY expandable with hardware in the cartridge including provisions for sound chips. Check out the recent homebrew version of 1942 for a fine example. Also, check out the homebrew of Mario Bros (not the commercial version). It is absolutely outstanding. Best looking home version bar none.

[@Bubba__Sawyer]

I can't find that Mario Bros homebrew game anywhere. Do you have a link to it?

[@tarstarkusz]

@@Bubba__Sawyer It hasn't yet been released. But check out the episode of ZPH featuring the game and interview of the author. (edited to put in working link) watch?v=Af7yqllOl9Q&

[@Halbared]

@@tarstarkusz That link goes to a video titled, ' A cheap turntable with a twist - Gemini TT-900.'

[@tarstarkusz]

@@Halbared this one should go to the 7800 Mario Bros homebrew watch?v=Af7yqllOl9Q&

[@dan_loup]

This bout pretty much mirror the arcade situation in japan vs america pretty much. Since the galaxian arcade, japan fell in love with drawing graphics with a tilemap you can finely scroll and sprites over it, while the US arcades were trying to brute force bitmap graphics as hard as they could. The galaxian way pretty much ensures you will get 60 FPS scrolling etc because changing a tilemap is a lot less hardware taxing than changing individual pixels. Now with bitmaps, you don't have any sort of color per tile limit and can do all sorts of math graphics such as rotations, 3D polygons etc.. but you need a much more powerful hardware to update the entire pixel grid at a playable frame rate. And the 7800 use bitmap graphics and a hardware blitter to try to push those free graphics around, while the NES rely on tilemaps just like donkey kong and all the galaxian hardware likes.

[@aboriginalmang]

Thats not always the case. The Texas Instruments graphics chipset used by Colecovision, MSX and most Sega 2D consoles was sprite and tile based. The C64 and Amiga are also sprite based system, although they did it differently from Japanese consoles by making use of segmented unified RAM that nearly give them the speed and simplicity of tilemap systems as well as the flexibility of bitmap systems. I feel like the C64 architecture should've been the winner in the 80s, but nintendo was just too big and commodore was just too incompetent for that to happen. The 7800 used a display list within a display list, it wasn't bitmap the same way ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC were, but it certainly was faster and more cycle efficient than those two. It was designed by GCC, an old player in the Atari arcade business, and certainly took inspirations from their arcade systems of the past. None of these systems really "brute forced" the CPU, they all had display chips that aided the process, but yes having limitations such as 2 or 4 colours per tile and segmented memory mapping reduced the burden of the system.

[@turrican4d599]

@@aboriginalmang THIS!

[@dan_loup]

@@aboriginalmang sadly there are some systems that don't have a blitter to help em, like the MS-DOS era computers or the 32x

[@aboriginalmang]

@@dan_loup the 32X had smaller color palate and screen resolution than the Jaguar, and also no z buffering or goraurd shading, it didnt need one

[@dan_loup]

@@aboriginalmang The lack of a blitter crippled most of it's games because it couldn't do 2D at 60 fps in full screen so a bunch just used the mega drive graphics for background, or cut the frame rate in half

[@Dark.Shingo]

I have a complicated history with the 7800, since my father got me one with the horrendous stick controller and barely any 7800 game just because it was cheaper than a NES. So there I was, using old 2600 games while my friends were playing in their Nintendos.

[@turrican4d599]

What a cruel father. 😂

[@Dark.Shingo]

@@turrican4d599 Can't complain too much, but I swear he bought me things just to avoid buying a NES.

[@desktorp]

I was lucky enough to have a dad that liked video games, so we had this golden era where we could choose between TI-99, Atari 7800 and NES + a computer with DOS.

[@Dark.Shingo]

@@desktorp Oh, that reminds me, he also bought me an Atari PC/Console hybrid INSTEAD of a NES. It was nice, because IIRC it used Atari 400 cartridges. Gotta check which one it was, it had like 4 pastel colored big buttons.

[@hjk7833]

I was right there with ya, bro! The thing is, I don't regret it at all. I wasn't that into games anyway, and the fact that I didn't have a NES and none of my closest friends did either kept us all out in the real world, riding our bikes, wrestling around, and climbing trees. Meanwhile, the "lucky" kids who got the NES were sitting on their couches munching on Doritos and staring at the CRT. I bought a Sega Master System on clearance with my own money at one point and returned it the next day for some reason. Sometimes when I see how great of a system the SMS was, I kick myself for doing that. But, honestly, I'm glad I didn't keep it. I was perfectly fine with my 7800.

[@j.d.6915]

Thing that always stuck out to me, was how chunky graphics on the 7800 were. The NES smoothed some of the chunk.

[@mercster]

Are you trying to refer to resolution?

[@mercster]

I'll be more specific.. the "NES" didn't "smooth out some of the chunk"... the developers who were making games for NES took more time and made more detailed graphics, because they were going to a massive market. There's nothing intrinsic about the NES that "smoothed some of the chunk", the developers just put more time in.

[@Halbared]

Yes, they remind me of 64 games, which had that low-res look.

[@mistress_remilia]

This was my first console

[@Sir_Uncle_Ned]

Using an ARM SoC as a sound chip is a genius bit of using new tech for old consoles. People nowadays tend to forget that cartridges supported extra hardware to make games better. If more people were willing to make an ARM SoC behave in a way to improve graphics and/or sound then the retro scene could end up with some bloody amazing stuff that would just not be possible back then. That SNES SuperFX is absolutely ancient. Imagine what you could do nowadays with a modern ARM version of it.

[@cupuacu4life13]

It kinda exists already if you consider reverse emulation, once you put whatever in the cartridge it becomes difficult to draw the line between enhancing the nes or just using the NES as a raspberry pi zero dock. Or [insert some other system] in the place of RPi zero. Reverse emulation does count as running snes games on the NES, but also doesnt. I do think theres some stuff possible tho, like, using an extra 6502 chip and dedicate it to run even more calculations on the NES, maybe make games that look as good as a NEC PC98 game. Im just typing out of my heart here, aint no expert, but typing this just made me trip balls on what could be done man, imagine a FFVII port for SNES using a revamped FFV engine and an improved romchip to fit LOTS of content plus another soundchip and just a straight up early 90s jrpg wet dream LMAO, all ppl have to do is an FFV romhack and then someone put the cart together using pcbway or smth lol Edit: yes im aware the game's code would have to be edited to take advantage of the cartridge's hardware.

[@ArtieOddity]

I love the Atari 7800 astheic. The color palette and low res wide pixels. The arcade ports of Galaga, Joust, Food Fight, Centipede and Robotron have become my favorite versions of those Arcade games.

[@ryanyoder7573]

I bet it would be a good platform for 3d games and full motion video due to all the colors and low res.

[@greenaum]

The 7800 is pretty similar to the 5200 and Atari 8-bits, from reading the docs. Display lists, and display list lists, take care of a lot of stuff automatically, zero CPU time, that other consoles would need interrupts for. It's not massively different to 8-bit computers, just better with the display list versatility. I think it's biggest problem was the 160 horizontal resolution, it's just not enough, looks crap. In 1977 it was OK for the 2600, which couldn't fill most of it's pixels ("color clocks") anyway, but it had really had it's day. In fact it had half the res of the Atari 8-bit computers, though they sold for something like 4x the price new. Vertical scrolling should be really easy. You just knock one scanline off the top of the display list, and add a new one to the bottom. It's all done with pointers so it'd only be a couple of bytes to change. You could also easily mix fixed and scrolling scanlines, and even different resolutions. If it'd come out in 1984 like it was supposed to, it would have done well, but by 1987 it had lost a lot of ground. Really though if they'd doubled the resolution and maybe more RAM, they might have won. Atari's other big problem was thinking, somehow, that people still want to play arcade conversions from 1981, games that had already been done on the 2600 (AND the 5200, and even the bloody Jaguar come to think of it), and also a lack of mascot-type characters that kids could invest in. No stickers, no lunchboxes, and the back story behind Scrapyard Dog seems to be "some bloke woke up in a scrapyard". By the colour of his nose, drunk again. Nobody wants to play games about alcoholics who live in heaps of rubbish. No kid, anyway.

[@matthewkeeling886]

Having the (already half a decade old) sound chip from its predecessor built in wouldn't have hurt either.

[@greenaum]

@@matthewkeeling886 Yeah the 7800 advertised itself as 2600 compatible, as if that was any sort of selling point in 1987! "Play shitty old games from the Stone Age, we're Atari, we've done nothing since 1982!". Doing that meant putting in a TIA chip, the one that the 2600 used, and switching between that and the real graphics chip ("Maria") depending on the presence of a couple of extra pins on 7800 carts. Actually, TIA, RIOT, and the 6507 CPU, are all the 2600 was! Three big chips and a few bits and pieces here and there. The expense and bother though meant they could save a bit of cash by not including a decent sound chip and relying on the 2600's TIA instead. It had a sound output you could use even if you weren't using it for video. It was just shit though, was the problem. So 7800 carts often included POKEY ("potentiometers and keys"), a chip from Atari's 8-bit computer range, and the 5200, that read paddles and the keyboard, and also had a sound generator onboard. So again, Atari ignored the stuff it was invented for and just used it's sound function. Which was also pretty poor. Me, I'd have created a custom chip that was compatible with the 2600 but had more functions. But then they wouldn't have been able to use the big stock of TIAs they had laying around for free. Yeah it was a mess, and the Tramiel family's famous cheapskatedness didn't help. They also, like most CEOs back then, didn't play games themselves, so didn't understand or care what they were selling. Saving a few cents made their eyes light up, looking and sounding shit went right over their heads. It annoys me when they put extra chips in carts. Like the Super FX, a powerful CPU because Nintendo chose a useless, 8-bit CPU (the 65816) for their "16-bit" console. The 65816 was the same 6502 the NES had, but with a few extensions for some extra bits here and there. It was still really an 8-bit chip. But most of it's job was to make simple decisions and feed data to their excellent graphics and sound chips. The 65816 is back-compatible, Nintendo were considering having the SNES play NES games, so made a crippling decision early on, then stuck with it. So every game where anything complex happened, you need a CPU on board the cart. And you couldn't just install it once, on the expansion slot or whatever. Every game that used it, had to include a separate Super FX in the cart. The Megadrive used a sensible, extremely popular, fairly powerful 68000 chip instead. 16 / 32-bit rather than 8 / 16-bit. A 16-bit chip with some 32-bit extensions. Or maybe a 32-bit chip cut in half to save money. Later versions of the family, the 68020 and 68030 etc were fully 32-bit all the way through, and would run the same code. So Megadrive games could be complex to start with, even a bit of 3D graphics is possible. And the maze in Toy Story! It's practically Wolfenstein 3D! All running on normal Megadrive hardware. SNES games are much more about the CPU instructing the graphics chip to shift huge amounts of scenery. Nice filters and effects and stuff but imagine if it had a real grown-up CPU!

[@matthewkeeling886]

@@greenaum I was, in fact, talking about POKEY, which first entered the market in 1979, 5 years before the 7800 was intended to hit store shelves before the infamous delay caused by the takeover. That chip was already in production for multiple systems (computers and arcade games) and could be easily integrated but the outside design bureau that created the hardware didn't include it as it isn't needed for backward compatibility and you get "adequate" sound for 1982/83 from the older hardware. As far as the processors are concerned the 65816 is actually a true 16 bit CPU with an 8 bit compatibility mode (not the other way around) and the 68000 is internally a true 32 bit from the first version onward that was strangled by a 16 bit data bus and a massive number of neigh-useless minicomputer commands hard coded into the chip that shot transistor counts through the stratosphere (for the late 1970s) in the early versions. A similar clock speed 65816 usually outperforms a "16 bit" 68000 in real world applications, just look at the true Apple II GS programs vs. their counterparts on the contemporary Mac for a direct comparison. They blow them out of the water and that chip is clocked much slower in a fundamentally similar architecture. As far as the Super FX chip is concerned it is more akin to a modern computer graphics card's 3D accelerator in function than it is a true processor as applied in the SNES. The early plans for what became the 32x expansion for the Genesis/Mega Drive were for general use of a similar in-cart chip, the Virtua Processor used in Virtua Racing, as the internal hardware simply couldn't keep up any more. This was an extremely common way of allowing for more complex games than aging base hardware was capable of handling in the age of ROM Carts; almost all the best NES titles had used the same trick (the base hardware is only marginally superior to the ColecoVision and 5200) and the PC Engine also did similar (though it switched to CDs AND installed an expansion card in the ROM Card slot). Various other systems were using similar techniques to a greater or lesser extent, even the 2600 used bank switching hardware in carts that it was never designed to use. The reason this was so common is simple: the cartridge slot is functionally the same as a PC's expansion busses and not like a modern card reader, which is functionally equivalent to a floppy drive on old hardware.

[@greenaum]

@@matthewkeeling886 No, the 65816 really is the other-way round. It has 16 bit registers, but only an 8-bit ALU, so 16-bit operations have to go through it twice. The same way the 68000 puts 32-bit operations twice through it's 16-bit ALU.The 65816 also has an 8-bit data bus, so reads RAM and accesses peripherals in 8-bit chunks, and RAM speed has long been a limiting factor for computers, CPUs have usually been ahead of RAM. It's one reason Pentiums used 64-bit RAM on 32-bit chips, or indeed the Jaguar, to quote some Atari engineer I've forgotten, was "64-bit" just to get speed out of commodity DRAM (pssst! it wasn't really 64 bit!). The SNES needed the Super FX for anything that needed any sort of CPU power, it had a weak CPU with some very good graphics hardware. The MARIO chip really was a CPU, it couldn't access the SNES's hardware through the cartridge bus so the 65816 spent a lot of time pulling in bytes from it. My point is, the Megadrive could do much more versatile types of games than the SNES could, with its stock CPU. The Virtua chip came at the end of the Megadrive's life, and let it play 3D games before the Saturn was ready. The MARIO chip was used from early on because the SNES needed it. If it weren't for the abandoned NES compatibility, they would surely have chosen a much better CPU. Incidentally although Nintendo didn't release a NES module, a few Hong Kong companies did. I see your point, but bank switching didn't give the 2600 more processing, just bigger ROM (and sometimes RAM) than it's initial design as a machine to play Pong and Tank. Just a couple of logic gates. MARIO was an entire CPU that dwarfed the 65816.

[@matthewkeeling886]

@@greenaum And the Z80 is unarguably an 8-bit chip but has a 4 bit ALU. Register width, not ALU width or data bus width, is what is used to determine processor width and it is only a rough indicator of performance. The biggest problem with the processor on the SNES was the clock speed, 10MHz versions of the chip were already available but they chose to limit the chip to 3.58MHz (in NTSC regions). That is where the issues with CPU power come into play, not the specific chip architecture. This situation is shown by the SA-1 chip (by far the most common SNES enhancement chip), which is a much faster 65816 with some add-ons rather than a totally new processor. The Mega Drive actually has similar; every Sega CD game uses the faster 68000 built into the unit along with enhancement chips for both sound and graphics. Implementation is only different due to the different storage media used for the games. This was hardly the first, or last, time a very powerful full fledged processor (with special add-ons for graphics in the instruction set and chip layout) had been used for graphics, the 8-bit Atari computers had done a similar thing with their graphics system (particularly ANTIC) a decade earlier and EVERY modern graphics card has a minimum of one powerful processor for graphics generation.

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

I always find it interesting to see how different consoles tackled the workarounds and compromises needed to make a game when RAM was extremely expensive and gfx and processor chips were exceedingly slow by today's standards. These varying methods are what gave those old consoles and computers their PERSONALITIES, which is why the uber powerful systems of today don't have any. Personality, that is.

[@blakfloyd]

Dude, I love your presentation style. You're very no-bullshit and present your points in a well-paced and interesting manner. Keep kickin ass :)

[@MySamurai77]

There is all 7800 games and then there is Ballblazer. That game is so goddamn slick and smooth, the tunes and sounds are awesome. It doesn't feel like an 8 bit game. 7800 plus sound chip has the potential for amazing games.

[@desiv1170]

It's also backwards compatible with the 2600 for those who had those and wanted to play those on their new system (at the time). ;-) It's become my favorite retro console with that and all the incredible quality homebrews... Fun system... Great vid...

[@aboriginalmang]

The backwards compatibility partially led to its downfall actually. The console developers were restricted to Atari 2600 sound chip and cartridge size, and I believe they wanted to give it a bigger RAM as well, with a DRAM controller it could have something like 32K of RAM without hurting its retail price but backward compatibility with the 2600 couldn't let that happen. Not to say there's anything wrong with that, and Atari would probably sell even less units without it, but without those restrictions it could've been a much more technically impressive console. No easier to develop for of course, but objectively more powerful.

[@desiv1170]

@@aboriginalmang Mu gut tells me that it wasn't really any harder to develop for, and I don't even believe the lack of an on board sound chip was the killer. You could add a Pokey to the cart and those carts with Pokeys didn't cost much more than NES carts. I think it failed because of Atari management. The lack of a newer onboard sound chip (which would have required a bit of a board design, but could have been done) and those terrible original controllers were just signs of Atari mistakes/mishandling. I think if they started with the Europads and had a Pokey onboard (of Gumby), Atari still would have mishandled it. But that's me. Still love the system nowadays tho. ;-)

[@zxpresh]

Rikki and Vikki looks like it could also benefit from a CRT filter to create the perception of more colours on screen? Just looking at those vertical lines in the waterfalls and elsewhere in the tile graphics...🤔

[@iamdarkyoshi]

Speaking of efficient code, you should do some videos on the demoscene, you've got a great presentation style and breaking down how some of the demos work would be really cool.

[@bobstevenson3130]

Even if the 7800 and the NES were released at the same time and the markets were receptive to both consoles, I think the 7800 would've lost the console war anyway. The MARIA was great at handling lots of large sprites, but the pixels were chunky in the commonly used 160 resolution mode and scrolling was more difficult for the system compared to the NES. The NES' CPU also enjoyed more time to execute game logic since the CPU and PPU had separate address spaces and could execute instructions at the same time, unlike the 7800 where the CPU had to be halted for graphics to be drawn to the screen. Both consoles used a down-specced 6502 running at 1.79MHz, so the NES was just simply more efficient at using CPU time. Another factor to consider is that the 7800 is prone to significant chroma artifacting at the 320 resolution mode, since the clock rate of the MARIA is twice the colorburst frequency, meaning that alternating horizontal light and dark pixels would be interpreted as color information by a color CRT. This is just another caveat to the high resolution mode that makes it not ideal for development.

[@Chordonblue]

If Ballblazer 7800 is programmed like the Atari Computer version, and I think it is essentially that, it's more sophisticated than you might think. At the time, anti-aliasing was becoming a 'thing' in high end, Hollywood-style computer animation, but you rarely saw it on 8-bit machines because of a lack of full color palettes and rendering speed. Atari's machines had 256 colors and they had a little more 'junk in the trunk', running at 1.79 MHz, rather that most competitor machines that ran at a simple 1 MHz. Lucasfilm worked with Atari on this and three other titles which pushed the machines to the utter limits of their capabilities. Ballblazer makes use of anti-aliasing (in both the playfield AND the ball!), and it has enough speed to do it because of the low res graphics mode it's using for the playfield. With the color indirection, you could cycle colors just by changing a register, and so it was just a matter of moving lines for right and left movement, cycling colors for up and down. I converted a pseudo-code program from Byte magazine in 1984 to my old Atari 800xl. It took over 10 minutes to do a single frame of a picture at close to this game's resolution in Atari Basic. In Action!, a more C-like structure language, I was able to get it down to 7 seconds. But this game manages what appears to be at least 30 frames a second animation - amazing!

[@aboriginalmang]

Wonderful explanation man, they must've been using lookup tables a lot.

[@SlartiMarvinbartfast]

Great video as always, I love seeing how systems can be pushed to the limits via clever programming or, on a hardware level, how the old micros and consoles can be enhanced.

[@moot6794]

Great video, but I’d suggest any time you are referring to the quality of music in a game, please take a moment to showcase it without any commentary. There were many times during the video I would have loved to hear the music you were so passionately describing.

[@AnHebrewChild]

exactly

[@AdmiralFace]

The scrolling playfield on ball blazer is a mix of simple palette swapping with half-colored lines between each color field to give it that softer look. Same way it's done on NES, just taking advantage of the additional colors the NES didn't have.

[@shiningphantasy1393]

All I can really say and recall about the 7800 was that I generally acknowledged it but in no way was it ever considered as a viable alternative to the NES or SMS. Same with the Atari XE with the hokey rap marketing commercials; nothing about the software or overall package Atari presented was compelling to a 12 year old who already had a SMS and had friends with the NES. We just kind of scoffed at it; the Lynx on the other hand garnered a lot more interest initially as it offered features in a portable system the the Game Boy couldn't match.

[@bossK78]

I had a 7800 and loved it.

[@techdistractions]

The joypad was also released here in Australia :-) i got a 7800 for christmas around 1992 when I really, really wanted an NES. My dad and I played the built in asteroids forever - 🎉

[@plainlazy2097]

Another great episode! Just shows that it’s not always about the tech, it’s the developers that make a machine ‘sparkle’

[@alexc836]

I got a used 7800 with a composite video mod awhile back, along with an NES-style aftermarket gamepad. Pretty fun machine, if you ask me. I only wish more games used the extra sound chip in the cartridge, like Commando, which greatly improved the audio. I think the 7800 could have done some real damage with more 3rd party support.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Homebrews are becoming more common thankfully.

[@philmason9653]

A friend of mine had a 7800, Ball Blazer absolutely blew me away, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It looked better than any attempt at 3D I'd seen on home computers at the time.

[@AnthonyFlack]

The 7800 graphics hardware looks quite powerful and pretty fun to develop for if you had the inclination. Love the 256 colour palette.

[@creaturalshade7054]

Those homebrew games look great for the era. I'm glad people take the time to show respect to the unique hardware capabilities. It's interesting and fun to see what could have been.

[@AGwolf2097]

10:54 ^VERTICAL Same thing happened on the Genesis/MD when using composite output. Plenty of mid and late era genesis games had striped vertical dithering to create higher onscreen colors (or pseudo transparencies) than the system hardware was capable of... Earthworm Jim 1 &2, Vectorman 1 & 2, Socket, Chaotix on 32x, and adventures of batman & robin on Sega CD are good examples off the top of my head, but there were a lot of other later games that also took advantage of this quirk of the composite encoder. It blends adjacent pixel columns, and while some older games end up with fuzzy graphics and really muddy text, later games literally benefited from the same effect when the developers deliberately built their games for it... it worked much better than the traditional checkerboard patterning that most people think of when someone talks about dithering. This is part of the reason why RGB, pixel-perfect output isn't always the best solution for an older game if you want the clearest picture quality.

[@prodos8]

I had both in the mid 80s. All my friends wanted to come to my place and give the 7800 a go. It made me more popular than having a NES.

[@JRJohnson1701]

My question is, with the Pokey sound chip (I think that's the name), can you recreate NES games on the 7800? Could I theoretically play Megaman 2 on 7800? Castlevania? Contra?

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Yes, Yes, and Yes. The POKEY chip can often replicate the NES sound/music quality very well, go watch Fragmare's youtube channel, he recreates a lot of popular NES music on the Atari POKEY chip, including Castlevania 3, and it sounds amazing. The 7800 was beyond the NES, even the NES equipped with the MMC5 mapper. The NES still had horrible color and sprite limitations.

[@drumtum]

Atari should have focused on the 7800 earlier on. The 5200 was a waste of space. Hardly any better than the 2600. The delayed release for two years of the 7800 didn´t help either. Announced in 1984, released 1986.

[@BMichaelNeal]

Playing Centipede with a trackball, at home, was awesome.

[@VinsCool]

This poor system suffered from Atari's poor decisions and every possible ways to reduce costs, it could have been so much better otherwise. Thankfully, modern homebrew scene has proven how much this machine is capable under the hands of dedicated programmers.

[@MaxOakland]

Can you explain more about that?

[@aboriginalmang]

No it was mostly a side effect of the 2600 backwards compatibility. The 5200 was heavily criticised for not having that, so Atari felt compelled to include it in the 7800. It was designed and had a limited released before Tramiel took over the company, contrary to many myths.

[@AFourEyedGeek]

@@aboriginalmang How is the backwards compatibility a problem if modern homebrew games can show games playing and looking great? EDIT Since the hardware can work with external sound chips, they could have worked internally too, so they could have included the POKEY chip on the 7800. Which would have made the hardware more desirable.

[@aboriginalmang]

@@AFourEyedGeek to be fair, warner planned expansion modules for the 7800, including a RAM cartridge to save high score and game progress (presumably would also include the pokey chip) and a keyboard. If you want to blame tramiel for something, it should be for canceling those modules.

[@kjrehberg]

The lack of a dedicated sound chip really hampered this console and made many cartridges needlessly costly when they included the sound chip in the cartridge. Also, management delayed the release of the finished console for two years. It was two years obsolete when it was finally released!

[@dustux]

5:56 The background has sort of a "optical illusion" effect to it. It moves on its own even while paused

[@thecunninlynguist]

all things considered they look pretty good for atari games

[@PG-gs5vb]

Nice video. Perhaps you could have also mentioned the unreleased prototypes Sirius and Plutos, which look quite nice, too.

[@NeotricIron]

⬜

[@Witchling86]

Wow Basketbrawls ball physics looks really good.

[@keithlowe5512]

Fascinated by what homebrewers can accomplish!

[@FranklyPeetoons]

This is weird because the 7800 hardware was roughly adjacent in time to the 5200 and the Atari XL computers, which means they were among my college-bound big brother's pile of abandoned & gifted relics in the late 80s-early 90s (he eventually became a fancy successful guy). I'd swear that XL, 5200, and 7800 games were nearly identical, although I can't be sure if my memories are accurate. At the time, with a tot's wisdom, I assumed all those 80s Atari systems shoehorned the same guts into pointlessly different SKUs.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

The 7800 is a beast compared to the two, but small carts (for the era) and the low resolution really hold it back. Plus bad faith efforts like Karateka, which is actually far better on the weaker hardware. That said, compare Mario Bros, Xevious, Joust, etc, and the weaknesses of the older technology are difficult to ignore - it was invented in the 70's and it shows. Still, there's ways to hide that weakness. Just look at Air Ball...or better yet, modern homebrew like Albert.

[@hjk7833]

Yeah, visually the 7800 is noticeably significantly ahead of the 5200/8-bit computers. Acoustically, though, it's the other way around.

[@jh5124]

The artwork problem on the 7800 games just seems to be rushed work. Like rough draft stuff they threw out there. Both Double Dragon and Rampage have had their artwork touched up to look as good as not better than the NES versions.

[@zugisskates7262]

Ballblazer and xenophobe are super fun to play and run incredibly well on the atari 7800.

[@ZylonBane]

There are two simple reasons NES games almost always look "better" than 7800 games. First, the NES has a significantly higher horizontal resolution: 256 pixels across vs the 7800's 160 pixels (there's a 320 mode, but it has severe limitations). Second, the NES palette, while smaller, has more saturated colors. On the 7800, the brighter a color is, the less saturated it becomes. So it's impossible to have bright, bold colors and everything ends up looking kind of washed out.

[@Halbared]

Nice info.

[@jetfrog4574]

NES games don't always look better.

[@ssg-eggunner]

It's crazy how questionable the color choices of the Famicom is (I'm looking at you stupid peach tones) And yet manages to be better

[@goatbone]

That opening level of "Nebulus" was brutal.

[@joefell5311]

Rikki & Vikki looks great. The old game and computer systems are now just kids toys to today's programmers who are working wonders with much more complicated and abled technology, so it's no wonder they can squeeze every ounce of juice from the old consoles and produce awesome software. It was still all so new and fresh back in the day for developers so experience for some was limited. Cool video.

[@Halbared]

Wowser, Rikki and Vikki looks amazing.

[@MTIX_iy]

For some reason, this video is only available in 360p. There is 1080p, but it's premium. This only applies to this specific video. Does anyone know why this might be like this?

[@freddiejohnson6137]

Games that pushed the limits of the Atari 7800 also known as games that were released for the Atari 7800. There aren't really enough games from enough different developers to really tell what was pushing the limits of the hardware or not. Just some games were better than others.

[@aboriginalmang]

Ah yes, props to all the devs who spent their time learning its architecture and making games for it. It was a wholly different console from anything else, and Atari was the only company daring enough (or desperate enough, most likely) to bring these distinct systems into the market.

[@Nestalgba92023]

And why didn't they release the 7800 port of Rescue of Fracules like the magazines has promoted?

[@ZylonBane]

What a nonsense post. The games that push the 7800 have mostly been homebrews. Most commercial releases were low-budget rush jobs by people who barely understood the hardware.

[@aboriginalmang]

@@ZylonBane I'd like to disagree, theres still no homebrew 7800 game as sophisticated as ballblazer yet. I wish to see someone attempting to clone wolfenstein 3D, I know this console could do it.

[@ZylonBane]

@@aboriginalmang You know nothing. The 7800's hardware is designed for pushing sprites. That's useless for rendering a screen full of raycast walls. You need a fast CPU or an actual blitter for something like that.

[@loganjorgensen]

As far as potential I'd put it right in between the C64 and NES, double wide pixels but definitely a strong sprite pusher. Even though NES used helper chips in carts a lot I think the 7800's default 2600 sound hardware was a huge flaw, to this day I see nice looking 7800 homebrew mired by poor sound that just doesn't match in fidelity without a POKEY enhancement. Had to be a better way to make it backwards compatible. :\ Any comparison to NES has to consider that unlike Nintendo the 7800 carts didn't get to use ever increasing ROM sizes or graphic helper chips either Ie. simple games with no bankswitching, where most 7800 games are like NES black series. Despite that it didn't seem to be held back in the linescrolling department for the 7800, as the NES needed hardware assistance for that. The system palette color range is quite full on 7800 that I think it likely could have done more vertical palette shifting to get more colors on screen more often, not quite Amiga grade but better than the NES or C64. You got to do something more to compensate the overhead of tricky pointer based coding and less standard tile based rendering ijs. It's all poor implementation on 7800 rather than anything especially bad with the platform, even if I do wish the controllers had a Pause button heh. Less conventional setup aside anything visually excellent on C64 or NES can be done on 7800. The POKEY is a capable sound chip and the options of others can be blessing to chip tune makers. While management wouldn't do larger carts bitd the modern homebrew can pretty much do the sizes that are parallel to NES. So if you like programming challenges please make some 7800 games, does the NES really need more quality platformers lol? And pixel artists, if you can do a C64 mockup, you can do a 7800 mockup. ;) If you have a 7800 you owe yourself a trip to the AtariAge store to go get some homebrew games as there are some excellent authors on the forum. There are some flash-cart options now too and emulation was always on the table if that's the way you like to play. :D

[@veg411]

Rikki and Vikki is a beautiful game, and the puzzles are brilliant, but the bosses are quite literally impossible to beat by strategy and require a blessing from the gods themselves to get a good enough cycle to give a slight chance of winning.

[@gus750]

woohoo new video....we love you so much Shanopolis

[@mohhingman]

great video. Thanks for including 1942!

[@TheLairdsLair]

I'm absolutely shocked you didn't talk about Ninja Golf, because it's doing some pretty incredible things. For example it splits the screen in two and uses display list interrupts to display twice as many colours on screen. It also uses this same trick to mix high-res and low-res modes on the screen, as best seen in the dragon battles. Then there is the parallax scrolling too and some of the best use of the TIA chip for sound. I'm also very surprised you didn't look at Alien Brigade or Desert Falcon either, as they are both hugely impressive titles. F-18 Hornet is worth mentioning for the 3D visuals too. I'd also go against your argument that all NES games except Ballblazer are better than the 7800 versions - stuff like Commando, Ms. Pac-Man, Joust, Dig Dug and Xenophobe are superior on the Atari console.

[@10p6]

Other than the silly lack of an internal Pokey chip, the 7800's biggest issue is one that plagued all Atari consoles, even the Jaguar, and that is Atari never wanted to use large ROMS in carts to expand games. For example, going to the Jaguar, Rebellion had to beg Atari to allow them to do AVP on a 4MB Rom when Atari wanted the game to be on a 2MB Rom (AVP should have been a big CD game), or Tempest 2000 only being 2MB so it missed out on a lot of the music and music samples. So when you have 128K and UP NES games and Atari wants 16K games, it makes games look bad and have a lot less depth.

[@NeotricIron]

🗨️❓

[@timaerts8015]

Lol. The Basketbrawl you are showing is the Atari Lynx version. Not the Atari 7800 version! 😂

[@espfusion]

Best thing Atari/GCC could have done would have been to put a decent PSG in the same chip as the 6502 like the NES did. They were already using customized silicon with their "Sally" 6502 derivative so they should have been able to do this. The other big issue was Maria and Sally being on the same bus, so the more complex the graphics the less CPU time you got. The CPU overhead in building the display lists only exacerbated the problem. They would have done a lot better with a dual ROM bus, again like the NES did. Had they done these things and released for real in 1984 things could have gone a lot differently for them.

[@Dwedit]

The best thing Atari could have done was actually pay GCC so that the system could have been released on time, and not have been 4 years out-of-date at launch.

[@espfusion]

@@Dwedit System was 100% ready to go in 1984, even got a test release. Paying GCC wasn't the problem, Jack Tramiel just arbitrarily hated video games even though he bought a video games company.

[@MichaelPuterbaugh]

Best thing Atari could have done is to not have had THREE home gaming systems -- the 2600 Jr, the 7800, and the XEGS -- all on the market at the same time. Competing not just with more popular consoles from Nintendo and Sega, but also with each other.

[@aboriginalmang]

@@espfusion he made the vic-20 and c64 which were both the best selling gaming computers of their respective eras though. I think he just mismanaged the already struggling company, although he probably wasnt wrong, focusing on atari st was proven to be a good decision. Also he alienated a lot of business partners, he certainly wasnt aiming for a sustainable long term strategy, but only for capturing the market at the very moment.

[@harveykongtin3665]

A pretty decent effort according to it's title. However - you missed out one homebrew that ended up being called 'Portal'. This may end up with a new set of graphics? If I can get enough peace and quiet at home to work on it, undisturbed? My home situation hasn't been that good over the past 2 years getting me down...

[@teeroux]

Didnt know much about the 7800. But a basket ball game where someone throws knives at the players is metal as fuc4.

[@NorthWay_no]

My understanding of the 7800 is that is has _only_ sprites, either in free-flow mode where you have to put them all on-screen by yourself or with an auto-feed mode where it will stack 40 of them next to each other and I expect you have some more available for free use. Robotron 2084 is the perfect example of no real background where a mass of sprites is just perfect. I wonder what Nebulus looks like on PAL systems - I expect it had a separate release?

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Yup, true. The 7800 does not use true tiles for graphics, it uses sprites in place of tiles. On the 7800, you would only want to use tile mode to save on memory, as it acts like compression. In order to maximize the 7800s capabilities, you would want to use bitmaps for the background, which are far superior, and offer better performance at the cost of needing more RAM.

[@robbiereisman8954]

Xenophobe looks much better on the 7800 than the NES. I think Commando looks better on the 7800 too

[@1960ARC]

Having been a big Atari fan, I have 6 of their systems. I think their problem was, they would release a system and rather than get on with supporting that system, they would start promising another future system that often didn't even make it to market before they started talking about the next next system.

[@swampdonkey4919]

Blitzball looks really good. I'm sad I missed that one.

[@teddym2808]

The 7800 was a perfectly capable system with a terrible sound chip, something Atari just seemingly never cared about time and time again until the Jaguar, and even THEN it was compromised by being too reliant on free cpu cycles. 7800 has 2600 sound, Lynx is barely better again, ST was pretty bad, and so on. I don't know why but they just never bothered putting in legitimately good sound into their gaming hardware.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

ST sound was really bad, even the 128K ZX Spectrum had a buzzer that could be used in conjunction with the AY chip.

[@noneofyourbusiness4616]

The Arch Rivals arcade game is the fighting basketball game I loved.

[@desktorp]

I still have a 7800 stuffed in a drawer .. it was the only Atari system we had, but the coolest thing about it was its backward compatibility. We had a decent amount of 7800 games but also some previous generation.

[@tom11zz884]

The 7800 was just a mess. Came around too late and the NES crushed it

[@clochardruelle]

What's the background music during the Tower Toppler section?

[@talideon]

Display lists wouldn't be all that unusual for anyone who developed for the Atari 8-bit machines, as they also had the same concept. Mind you, I've no idea how the two implementations differed, so there might have been something about the 7800's version of them that made them less accessible to anyone familiar with the GTIA and ANTIC.

[@jmcclain8237]

When it com3s to basketball games, ill stick with Double Dwibble.

[@FCEngine]

Rikki & Vikki is what Atari 7800 would look like in the hands of Japanese developers

[@bitset3741]

Decent system for it's time (1984) My only suggestion: If they couldn't integrate Pokey in the system, just a dirt simple 8bit DAC would have had devs counting cycles but could have added a lot to the audio.

[@hicknopunk]

I'm so glad my family got a NES

[@blakegriplingph]

Ditching the shot clock for someone throwing knives around the court would be far more entertaining. And yes, Tramiel is a real life Mr. Krabs, no wonder why they simply used the anaemic TIA for audio lel

[@banesbox]

The fact the basket ball rotates on BasketBrawl shows you the 7800’s potential horsepower.

[@natireson4140]

had a 7800 when I was a kid loved it

[@unsurreal83]

From what i've learned, the video works basically on a type of scanline-buffer system, where you can set objects (more like set of colored pixels at certain horizontal positions), hence the "unlimited" number of sprites on a scanline, the limitation is more time-based than anything else. My guess is that this was not a very common way to work, so developers were not so familiar with that approach and couldn't often use it so well. This, and of course, the bad decision about the sound chip, were the main causes of the "failure" of this system in my opinion.

[@curcumin417]

Didn't ColecoVision do the same thing using its Texas Instruments video chip?

[@JuanGarcia-vh7zo]

Dark Chambers and Tower Toppler two of my favorites 7800 games. I have to get them again. I was the only kid out of my family and friends who had the NES, 7200 and yes the Master System. Everyone else only had the NES. No I wasn't rich, my mom was just a gamer.

[@linkthehero8431]

12:55 "The wicked Dr Evil?" Is he Grandpa Monster or Austin Powers?

[@3rdalbum]

What's next? A "games that pushed the limits of the Lynx"? That would be cool. Especially since the Lynx had some surprising features for a 1980s system, let alone a handheld...

[@ILikeStyx]

10:00 - oh man I had Castelian as a kid... it was great until it became frustrating :P

[@Studeb]

How did they get the antialias in Ballblazer?