The Atari 7800 is More POWERFUL than the NES?

[@DumbBunny5328]

A teensy bit of correction: The 7800 DID make that June 1984 release in very limited numbers (maybe 10,000 units?) if you’ve ever seen 7800 games like Ms. Pac Man with a more colourful label, that’s the 1984 release. When Tramiel took over, there was debate between him and Warner Communications over who should pay GCC and so the system had to be put on hold while they worked everything out.

[@pojr]

My bad! Didn't realize that

[@eijentwun5509]

Jack Tramiel the creator of the Top selling computer model of all Time: The Commodore 64 was fired from his own company....then started working at Atari...and from what I can tell it looks like he was trying to sabotage Atari with all the amazing garbage they put out......but I guess not because it looked like they tried to compete agaisnt the Amiga with the Atari ST which was a pretty close rival.

[@ostiariusalpha]

​@@eijentwun5509Whoa there, let's not get carried away with saying Jack was the "creator" of the C64. The man never held a soldering iron, much less designing any motherboards or software. He was a mechanic that knew how manage a medium-sized business and recognize market trends. His shortcomings at managing a large business are what hobbled Commodore and later Atari.

[@eijentwun5509]

@@ostiariusalpha Let me rephrase...if it wasn't for Jack Tramiel, the C64 would NEVER have existed in the form it did nor become popular. Jack Tramiel is to Commodore what Steve Jobs is to Apple. Steve Jobs probably didn't put together the iPad or iPhone etc...but it was HIS vision that made it happen the way it did. Same for Jack!

[@ostiariusalpha]

@@eijentwun5509 Eehhhh... not really though. Steve Jobs knew computers, both their hardware and software, by direct experience. The C64 was really the vision of Commodore engineering's two Bobs, with Tramiel's main input being the (for the time) generous amount of stock RAM for the beige wonder. Tramiel surely does deserve more credit generally for making Commodore vertically integrated with its hardware manufacturing, which is what allowed the C64 to have so many capabilities at such a lower price point, but the C64 itself wasn't his baby.

[@ridiculous_gaming]

As many 7800 fans know, there are some expertly currently created titles for this system that look and run incredibly well...the same goes for new games on the dated Atari 2600 hardware. Also, licensing rules of Nintendo, back then, kept most games off competitor's systems. Even the Sega Master System suffered from this.

[@kramalerav]

Was there really such a thing as an Atari 7800 fanbase at the time? I doubt it.

[@EdAbarba44]

​@@kramaleravThere wasn't a community, per set, but the 2600 and 7200 were fairly popular among less affluent consumers throughout the lives of those systems. Your poor friend had Atari.

[@magoid]

People keep repeating that Nintendo's exclusivity contracts with half a dozen developers brought the ruin for all their competitors, but the many, many videos comparing the NES version of a game with other ports show that, no, that wasn't why other platforms struggled. It has more to do with problems with management of the competitors than Nintendo's exclusivity contracts. Back then if you were a developer, you kept only about 30% of the shelf price of a game, a far cry from today's market shares. So with so slim margins, it made sense to develop for the biggest market available, and that was the NES one. As soon as Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis gained significant market share, companies that released almost exclusivity for Nintendo started to release their games on Sega's console, not matter what exclusivity contract they previously had with Nintendo.

[@ericbass3349]

The 7800 could have been a competitive system. It was supposedly capable of handling over 100 sprites without flicker or slowdown, but they cheaped out on the sound, opting to route it through the same sound chip as the 2600. This would be like Nintendo choosing to reuse the sound chip from the NES on the Super NES. It just resulted in the games looking a lot better than either the 2600 or 5200, but sounding really out of place.

[@robertwilson3866]

A big mistake was also calling it the 7800. It means nothing to the mass-market. Just like the 5200

[@dobmaster4412]

Didn’t saga do something similar with the genesis

[@JoeStuffzAlt]

The craziest part is that the Atari 5200's sound chip looks competitive to the NES's. If they put in both the 2600 and 5200 chips in the 7800, the system would have had 6 sound channels, but might be very hard to coordinate two different sound chips.

[@nathanielgreer2764]

On the 7800 version of Pole Position once you realize you are controlling the road and not the car it becomes a very easy game.

[@werpu12]

@@JoeStuffzAlt Most just would have used the Pokey which is a very capabale sound chip, nit SID area but definitely among the best of its time, not bad given this soundchip was a 1978/79 design, but it just shows the genuious of Jay Miner who simply knew his stuff and always was 3-4 years ahead in his designs for GPUs and Sound Chips hence his designs always had a long shelve life (well the Lynx did not but it also was years ahead of every other handheld)

[@cygnusz54]

NES / Famicom games largely looked so good due to additional chips that could be added onto cartridges. This is a big reason why Nintendo pushed for FDS in Japan, it allowed for much larger games at lower production costs. Of course Atari did the same. My point being, a discussion on the technical capabilities of console hardware needs to acknowledge the very important role of add-on chips. Just comparing the base specs of the 7800 and NES doesn't give the full picture as to why NES games largely so much more impressive.

[@patsk8872]

He also didn't cover critical specs like sprite capability. I believe Atari was still using player/missile graphics which was just an antiquated and limiting method.

[@TurboXray]

"NES / Famicom games largely looked so good due to additional chips that could be added onto cartridges." which was by design.

[@kekeke8988]

What you said is contradictory. FDS games couldn't use additional chips. They were on floppy disks.

[@TurboXray]

@@kekeke8988 the FDS *is* more than just a floppy disk (there is additional hardware).. and the floppy disk directly serves the same purpose of the mapper - expanded accessible memory. It's medium change, sure, but it does the same thing.

[@moderusprime]

@@kekeke8988 Only if you have zero idea on how the FDS works.

[@MCastleberry1980]

The 7800 was probably doomed to get stomped out by the NES anyway, thanks to being shelved and then getting a wider release once the NES already had a foothold and rejuvenated the console market... but sticking with the 2600 sound chip did it no favors lol I actually got a 7800 as a kid (Christmas of '89, so you can imagine my disappointment when I got an Atari at the absolute height of Nintendomania), and yeah, Mario Bros was still fun... but good lord did it sound awful.

[@pojr]

Yeah it would have been hard for the 7800 to make a comeback. All the good developers were exclusively making games for the NES

[@mrp4242]

Similar boat. We got the 7800 for Christmas of 1988. A few of my friends has the NES and a few were playing the C64, but we didn’t have anything. I begged my mom to get something at Christmas and this was it. We weren’t made of money, so even the 7800 was a bit of an extravagance. So, I was actually pretty thankful. I would have loved the NES, but at the time I wasn’t *that* disappointed. We picked up Ms. PacMan, Food Fight, One-on-One, DK Jr, Rampage and Mario Bros, and I thought they were all great. Plus I could buy old 2600 games with my own earned money for very cheap, like Pitfall, Defender, Kaboom and Keystone Kapers. By the time 1991 rolled around, we had about 24 games half 7800/2600. Eventually, I bought a SNES with my own money from work. I still have the 7800, but its power supply is defunct. If I had one wish, back in the day, it would be that the system had better sports titles. I would have killed for something like Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble or RBI Baseball. But I probably also would have killed for something like Contra or Blaster Master on the system. Honestly the sound didn’t bother me as much as a kid as is does now. As an adult, I appreciate more the better sounding games with the pokey chip and more unique takes like Bentley Bear, but those might have been lost on me as a young teen otherwise.

[@MCastleberry1980]

@mrp4242 you got more game than I ever did lol We only ever had Pole Position II, Miss Pac-Man and Mario Bros. Going back in their library, I wish we would have at least grabbed Dark Chambers, which is honestly pretty solid

[@jeffyp2483]

we got an nes around that time. i remember my dad saying he almost bought 'this thing called graph...um graphics? it had 16 in the name' i unfortunatly asked 'why didnt you get that!? its the turbo grafx 16! its 16 bit and the nes is only 8 bit!' boy did he dodge a bullet going with the choice he did. many years later i recalled this and called him to say sorry for giving such an unappreciative response. i dont think he even remembered it. but i did.

[@MCastleberry1980]

@jeffyp2483 TG-16 does honestly have a lot of rad games, but yeah, NES during that time was the way to go just for the library. I did want Splatterhouse so bad as a kid though

[@robintst]

I think the most unfortunate thing about the 7800 was it only had 59 official games, people haven't really gotten to see what it can do until more recent years with homebrew and independent developers having a go at it with modern development tools.

[@pojr]

Absolutely true. That's less games than the 5200, in fact

[@fuzzywzhe]

The problem was two fold: 1) ease of coding 2) production of code The 5800 was NOT a good system. This limited adoption so when the 7800 came out a lot of people were burned and they didn't adopt. Also, the 5800 (and 7800) only seemed to ape arcade games, which was incredibly limiting. Because it had a far smaller user base, and Atari was mainly arcade games at the time, they just aped what was available already. The 7800 duplicated this, OLD arcade games that were 1/2 decade old or older. I know these times. Computers made entirely unique video games which were impossible to allow in arcades - you'd play for hours which for economics wouldn't work in an arcade. This is true for today, the value of a game is how long it will keep you engaged, not how many times you'll play. NES made games, like Super Mario Brothers that took you weeks of practice to win. The markets are different. There just were no engaging games of the 7800. There wasn't the user base to experiment, not enough programmers for the system existed. You really had to be an ace coder to work on the 2600. People who programmed for that system would do all sorts of INSANE optimizations to save a few bytes here and there. These types of optimizations were obsolete when the 7800 came out, and arcade games weren't what people wanted when it came out. The "power" of the system wasn't a factor, it was the variety of what people DID do on the system. I have a huge library of video games for preservation, but I've never collected the roms of the 7800. Why collect the library of the 7800 when I can just get the MAME equivalent? It is perplexing to me why people would spend time writing code for these old systems. I worked on them back in the day, and I would never want to go back to bear skins and stone knives. Yeah, I use more memory now, but I don't waste it, I just don't obsess about limiting it. There is literally no reason to do so when you have 8 GB on an average low cost machine, and you only need at most 1 GB, and that's when you're being sloppy and wasteful. Most programs I write, will fit in 256GB easily, the majority of space in a modern video game is graphics, not the code itself.

[@robintst]

​@@fuzzywzhe People write code for these old machines because they still like them and/or have childhood nostalgia for them. Or they just discovered them and find them fascinating and want to learn what makes them tick. Some like the challenge of coding for them because limitation breeds creativity.

[@fuzzywzhe]

@@robintst I worked on these old machines 40 years ago. It was fun figuring out the tricks to do something that (at that time) was amazing, but today, it's entirely rooted in nostalgia. I would never, EVER, want to go back to having to remove code, or optimize code, not for speed, but to fit it into memory. I remember these times well. I was a professional at RCA who, after profiling code, found that several functions took up great deals of CPU time, and my job was to reduce the CPU consumption by translating to assembly, then optimizing it. That job is obsolete. A standard compiler can do a better job than I can today, and I was good. Despite having ONE job where I was "brilliant" doing it, I don't miss this. I wouldn't want to go back.

[@wyleFTW]

Sounds a lot like later Sega consoles

[@SLAV326]

I was overjoyed to get a 7800 for Xmas of 87. It was my first console and I had yet to be spoiled by NES. The system came with Pole Position 2. Because it was backwards compatible with 2600, my cousins who were older gave me hand me downs of their 2600 games. Also thought that was badass at the time. Pitfall and Food Fight owned.

[@mattd6597]

I got the 7800 for Christmas ‘87 as well. Also got Xevious, Robotron, and Food Fight that Christmas. Absolutely loved these first games but quickly realized I had peaked early and there were not very many others.

[@francescookei3785]

my first console too... but i had it in the 92-93 when it was already in last circle life.

[@OneEyedJack1970]

y favoritw game for the 7800 was 2600 Phoenix.

[@jimbox114]

The sound chip was a big mistake on the 7800 imo. Also by the time it came out people had their fill of Pacman, Galaga, Centipede, etc. One game that looks and plays good on the 7800 I didn't see mentioned was Commando. It is very close in quality to the NES version.

[@pojr]

Commando does look great, and it was one of the few titles to feature the pokey sound chip.

[@MCastleberry1980]

From what I could understand they stuck with the sound chip to be able to make the 7800 backwards compatible and keep costs down. Backwards compatability was a great feature, but it really did hinder the overall experience.

[@Elgo2024]

Should've just added the pokey chip into the final 7800 hardware in addition to the 2600 sound chip.@@MCastleberry1980

[@ssg-eggunner]

​@@MCastleberry1980tbh atleast they should've done something like pokey + 2xTIA or 4xTIA

[@lovemadeinjapan]

Still, despite the limited capabilities, the 2600 sound chip has some warmth and quality that was unmatched for a long time. It can sound better than a Paula, SID and YM2612 combined at times.

[@robertdecrescenzo1057]

Thank you so much! I am honored that you featured my game in your video. Just so you know there were excellent sound and graphics people involved as well (Bobby Clark and Illya Wilson, respectively). The game uses the Pokey sound chip.

[@pojr]

I'm really impressed with your work! It's insane what you pulled off in your games.

[@ecernosoft3096]

Legendary people get their games featured on legendary videos.

[@robertdecrescenzo1057]

@@ecernosoft3096 Thank you, you are too kind. :)

[@Advocate_plus_one]

The 7800 system still have it's charm. The neighbor got the 7800 and I genuinely enjoyed playing the games. His dad got him something like 8 games. Xevious was awesome on it, as was ball blazers. I wanted the NES but it was too expensive when it first came out with the ROB robot.

[@pojr]

Yeah the 7800 was advertised as the cheaper alternative

[@AthleticDesign]

Bentley Bears Crystal Quest seems technically accomplished and a fun, well-designed game, but in my opinion Rikki & Vikki is by far the best-looking 7800 game out there. It uses 320 resolution and has an extremely attractive and original visual style that I can't see the NES replicate.

[@madmax2069]

And not to mention the sound for Rikki & Vikki the sound system they developed for it is pretty good. It's a prime example, there's a few others like Exo. Bentley Bears looks good, I just don't like the walking/running animation, and the jump mechanic is pretty horrible (it feels like something you'd play on the 2600).

[@AthleticDesign]

@@madmax2069 More than pretty good, I'd say. The music is excellent, not just compared to other 7800 games, but compared to all other 8 bit systems.

[@ClassicTVMan1981X]

It's a miracle Crystal Quest had even been developed, since the original 1983 Crystal Castles was not ported to either the 7800 nor the 5200; it was planned to be released for the XL computers in 1984 but later scrapped (thus also the cancellation of a 5200 release), but it did get an XEGS release in 1988.

[@davy_K]

7800 was a powerful sprite shifter and could for example host a game like Robotron really well, but NES had hardware features that compensated for its weaknesses - that was very much a Nintendo hallmark - still is to some degree. I still have my 7800 but I just wish it had POKEY on board and composite out at least - I have to run it through a VCR to get a decent image even on a CRT. Its port of Asteroids is superb. I own an Asteroids machine but I still enjoy the 7800 port! Centipede, Joust and Food Fight are very good too. But that type of game was well past its time when the NES appeared. Games like SMB1, Metroid and Zelda changed everything and while the 7800 might have been able to host those games, the developer pool just wasn't around to produce games like that for it. Nintendo deserve a huge amount of credit for moving home gaming on from arcade ports. I loved my 2600 and all things Atari - I still do - but I knew when it was time to move on when the NES appeared.

[@urbanknish]

Great assessment!

[@ericbass3349]

That was one of the biggest of Atari's self-owns. They decided later on to create a POKEY-on-a-chip, and offered it to developers, who generally balked at it, especially since it increased the cost to produce carts. Atari should have either incorporated it in the console (a sound chip that was already 6+ years old), or created a pass-through add-on, similar to Sega's FM device for the Mark III.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

Even the POKEY was antiquated by the 7800. I love the chip but, like the TIA, it's fundamentally out of tune, though to a lesser degree. Atari needed the MIKEY that they designed for the Lynx, just in 1983. They also needed to actually put it into the system and not pretend that gimping the system in the name of 2600 compatibility was any better than not including it at all in the 5200.

[@thedrunkmonkshow]

On a side note, there actually is a version of Ballblazer that got released in Japan for the Famicom but when you compare it to the 7800 version side-by-side it pales in comparison both graphically and sound wise. If more games had enhancement chips on the 7800 just like the overwhelming majority of NES/Famicom games do then we can start to have a real conversation but with so few games on the 7800 that's mostly designed around it's standard hardware we'll never know. I am glad to see homebrew developers pushing the limits because that Crystal Castles looks really impressive and better than Wonderboy on the SG1000 and almost as good as Wonderboy on Master System.

[@werpu12]

Funnily Ballblazer is just a port from the Atari 8 bits and 5200 just shows how capable those machines were in the hands of developers who knew their stuff! I personally prefer the 5200 / Atari 8 bit graphics over the 7800 in most cases!

[@jeenkzk5919]

Great video as always! We had a 5200 when I was real little and we played the heck out of it! I do remember the controller wearing out. It was to the point I was using a fork to get the start button to work. My parents bought it when the price went down and then a couple of months later we found out that it was discontinued. When we got an NES, we never looked back though.

[@Lightblue2222]

That's a great idea with the fork! I may use that. I have a 5200. I always tell ppl who think their controllers are broken to just press it harder. "Start button is needed to start every game so without it the system is useless." I get it working by pressing it harder, but I mean like every once of my strength hard, and then it starts working again. But a fork is what I should have thought of, it'd really mesh into the button the right way to get it going. If you don't play it for a while you always have to press it hard again. Ppl press it a couple times and just give up and think it doesnt work. The fork will make it easier! Thx

[@pojr]

Wow, that's pretty bad that you had to use a fork. Might be the worst controller in gaming history.

[@ostiariusalpha]

​@@pojr Almost certainly the worst 1st party controller.

[@themidcentrist]

@@pojr Yeah, the 5200 controller is what happens when you let accountants design hardware instead of engineers.

[@phlaelym]

The problem with the 7800 was definitely its sound capabilities compared to the NES and Master System. Atari should have put in a dedicated sound chip for newer (7800) games, and the sound chip from the 2600 for when those games were used. By the mid-80s I doubt that would have added much to the cost - they could have used unsold 2600 for the parts.

[@daviddavies3637]

The biggest issue with the 5200 was Atari's decision to take all the custom chips from the Atari 400/800 and completely redesign the memory map. Had they not done that, the 5200 could have been made backward compatible with their 8-bit computers. At the very least, it would then have made it very easy for Atari or third party developers to port their games to it if it, say, needed a keyboard.

[@akaJughead]

4:00 Eventually Atari did come around to including Pac-Man with the 5200. My Uncle picked up a 5200 on clearance back in 84, and his came with Pac-Man.

[@chevtrukman]

I am getting my first Atari at age 43 tonight! So excited. Mint 7800 in the box with all inserts and pamphlets. Still has the clear protector on the silver parts of the console and controllers. I am buying it from the original owner who still has the original sales receipt from 1989! It will look nice sitting on my old cabinet tv.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Nice!

[@Jolt7800]

Congrats!

[@JH-pe3ro]

The 7800 had some potential to do good ports of games from the home computers, I think - games like Ballblazer and other stuff you would find on the C64 or Atari 800; if Atari had been run by a risk-taking visionary, they could have run around scooping up all that IP to flesh out the 7800 library in 1984 - after the crash a lot of companies folded. They could have been the owners of games like "Castle Wolfenstein" and recruited EA and Epyx to make exclusives if they were really thinking ahead and moved to reinvest in gaming instead of computers. The video didn't get into the technical detail, but a big part of the resolution and color difference comes down to the ways in which the different architectures were cheating to get results. The NES followed the pattern common to arcade games of using tiled graphics to build the entire screen, which is a good way to save RAM, but means that most of your games will be side or top scrolling camera, not first person or detailed stills. The 7800 has a more flexible method that allows for a mixture of sprite and bitmap data with color and resolution varying per scan line. This follows the ideas of the 2600, 800/5200, and later the Amiga. It predisposes the graphics to focus on making single screen "playfields" with bespoken detail, versus being expansive scrolling worlds made of repetitive tiles, although clearly scrolling and tiling can be done. There were also some plans to ship other sound chips for 7800 games, scrapped along with the other Tramiel cuts. Any issues with the controllers could be improved on during the lifecycle. A properly supported 7800 would have been very competitive, even if it had to specialize in different types of games.

[@enfieldjohn101]

The reason why I'm getting a 7800 is because I'm getting into homebrew games and the 7800 can run a wider variety of those games than the 2600 can. The 2600 can only run 4K games while the 7800 can run pretty much every homebrew made for an Atari console. The game that has made me make up my mind to get the 7800 is Dungeon by David Weavil which won't run on my 2600 due to its limitations. And like you pointed out there's a lot more of these homebrew games like Bently Bear. I've also found a guy on Ebay who is an Airforce veteran who is modifying classic consoles like the 7800 to work on modern TVs easier. The one I'm getting has RCA video out adapter to replace the RF adapter. The RF adapter in my childhood 2600 went bad a few years ago along with some other parts inside getting damaged during my as-careful-as-I-could-be attempts to clean the dust out of the console. It still sort of runs but it now looks terrible thanks to the no longer properly functioning RF module. I don't know how many official 7800 games I'll get for it. I'll probably use it to play my 40+ library of 2600 games as well as homebrew games. I have a Retron77 emulator and like it a lot, especially the Ranger controllers, but it does have the same 4K limitation that the original 2600 had so I can't play all of the homebrew games. Interesting video! It's weird isn't it how the 7800 was technically superior to the NES in some ways, but not in others. It's also weird how the NES didn't have joysticks while the Atari and other consoles before it did. I've always found joysticks superior to D pads for controlling games.

[@DontrelleRoosevelt]

This is my first video of yours, and I just want to say that I'm really impressed at your demeanor, how you order your segments, and how easy you are on the ears! Keep up the great work.

[@amitzdullnicker2k]

Respect for pronouncing the last name of Jack Tramiel the right way. He would have loved you for that! 🙂And - of course - thank you for another great video!

[@skipbreakfast]

The 7800 and and 2600 had the same sound chip. Ballblazer had the audio chip from the Atari 8-bit computers (and 5200) in the cartridge.

[@pojr]

Yup!

[@IvoryTowerCollections]

I see lots of comments stating that the 7800 having the 2600 sound was a big mistake. But what is overlooked is that the 7800 was designed pretty much from day one to be backwards compatible with the 2600 games. To do that, mean the 7800 had to contain the same hardware the 2600 used in order to be backward compatible. The video and audio are both produced from the same chip in the 2600 known as the TIA. So it was of course already in the 7800 to begin with since the chip was needed for the 2600 stuff. Atari did include an external audio input line to be mixed with the system sound for the very purpose of providing a way to have improved audio in the games as Commando, and Ballblazer on the 7800 demonstrate. The idea being that publishers could spent that extra bit of money to incorporate a better sound chip on the game itself that could be used. This kept the overall production costs of the 7800 in line to be competitive where Atari wanted it to be and if that feature had been used more, would have been interesting to see what could have been done. The audio input off the cartridge port isn't limited to just the POKEY and can take any audio input you drive through it at the proper level.

[@MaxOakland]

None of that changes the fact that the way they chose to do audio was a huge mistake. Nintendo solved the same problem with GBA but still had much better sound than the Gameboy Color. It's all about how you solve a problem and Atari's method was a huge issue for the 7800

[@IvoryTowerCollections]

@@MaxOakland It is possible that the 2600 on a chip that some later model 2600jr models have could have solved this in allowing them enough space in the console for at least a Pokey to be included. But in that didn't get designed and made until towards the very end of the 2600 and 7800s console runs. And in 1984 when it was all originally being designed, Atari didn't likely see the audio as being much of an issue back then since again, they designed it to accept an external audio input from the cartridge port. No different than Konami Famicom carts having the VRC6 etc. in them to do similar.

[@MaxOakland]

@@IvoryTowerCollections Right but my point is, it was a huge flaw in the system. Even though some Famicom carts had better audio hardware than the system, the system by itself had better audio than the 7800, which was an area the 7800 can't best the NES or other consoles of the era

[@wolfshanze5980]

Well now you can get a modern 7800 with HDMI support.... the 2600+ is actually a 7800!

[@stickyfox]

Atari was in a death spiral by the time the 7800 came out. The 2600, and Atari in general, had gotten a reputation for having lots and lots of terrible low-effort titles; and people tended to blame Atari for causing the video game crash; while Nintendo was quietly giving players nearly the same game experience at home and in arcades. The other problem with the 7800 is that it was basically a cut-down Commodore 64 or 800XL, and if you had a computer in 1986 you weren't going to go out and buy a 7800 so you could play Ballblazer or Karateka; we'd already finished playing most of those games before they were released on cartridge. Then Atari did it again with the XEGS while the gaming world was gearing up for the 16-bit era. People got tired of inconsistency, I think; and just wanted to know which really expensive toy was least likely to be in a yard sale the next summer. Atari was putting out serious yard sale vibes.

[@jeeziss]

I think the one takeaway we should get from this is that a golfing sim ninja beat em up game existed and needs to be remade right now.

[@werewolf74]

Ballblazer - Is one of the first games to use 'Digital Jazz'. The songs are made up of partial samples. The game then randomly chooses what parts to put together. The music is amazing on the c64. I love it.

[@SLAV326]

7800's backwards compatibility with 2600 games was still pretty radical for the time.

[@vectorbeam]

As an 11 year old in 1983, I was definitely still interested in video games and the game market crash wasn't something I was aware of. What I did know was there were more ways to play games than ever (ie, home computers) and I was always looking for home systems to catch up to what was perceived as "arcade quality." My friends and I were always chasing that level of appeal and personal computers were increasingly the place to get it. I didn't specifically think 2600 games were bad - some of the best ones on the system were from 82-83. (There were a lot of stinkers too, but you could pretty much tell that from looking at the box). 2600 games were just looking outdated compared to what the new Apple II and Commodore computers could do. So a lot of maturing game fans were asking their parents for computers and paying less attention to their game consoles. And thus the market perception was that video games were no longer interesting. Nintendo came along with the excellent NES and brought the simplicity of console gaming to the next generation of kids that were too young for computers and brought new life to the market. Atari tried to catch up with the outdated 7800, which in many ways was still a great system, but by then Nintendo had changed everything.

[@retronemesis7064]

If the 7800 had a decent sound chip and came with the PAL controller instead, it might have been a contender. A good pack in like Ninja Golf or Alien Brigade and a zapper would have sealed the deal.

[@greenaum]

Yeah that PAL controller was nice, I had a UK 7800 for a while. It had a lot of potential, could've done all sorts. Had a Display-List-List that could divert each scanline to do all sorts of stuff, from occupying almost no bytes, to complex stuff, changing resolution and palette by the scanline. And all with zero (0) CPU effort needed. You just gave it a list and off it went creating amazing screenfuls by itself. The CPU too was the same 6502 but I think 1.9MHz, certainly enough to do some nice 3D stuff. I'll have to look up some 7800 demos. I doubt there are many but I can imagine them being great. Apart from the sound. Obviously. Though I suppose you could put in a POKEY. Actually if you were making a real cart you could stick in a Yamaha, why not? There's that cart, I think Harmony, for the 2600 and 7800. Contains an ARM CPU at 52MHz (sort of thing would power your central heating) that can do amazing things and synthesise sound, then feed it all into the console. It can even bang hard on the data lines to abuse the TIA chip into doing stuff it can't do. Complete cheat, really, but it works IRL so it gets credit.

[@DTM-Books]

One word: memory. NES cartridges used far more memory, usually 1-2 megabits (128k-256k), later expanding to 3 megabits and beyond during its latter years. Meanwhile, the 7800 games used far less memory, and most of the early titles were created in 1984 for the console’s original launch. By the time the Tramiels took over Atari Corp, they just dumped the console out as a cheap “budget” product to clear inventory. By good fortune, the 7800 became a minor hit, ultimately selling 4 million units in the US (outselling the Sega Master System, in fact). Mind you, it was sold for $70 and played all your old 2600 carts, so it worked as a backup retro system in the late 80s. It’s interesting how the 7800 was designed as a Golden Era games system, while the NES/Famiclm was designed around tile-based graphics, which becomes the standard for the post-Super Mario Bros world. Atari was left behind the curve and while the 7800 could handle more sprites, it was notably weaker than Nintendo and Sega where it mattered most. That said, the 7800 has killer versions of Commando, Ikari Warriors, Xenophobe, Robotron and Xevious. And let’s not ignore the indie/retro scene, which has given us so many Golden Era arcade translations like Pac-Man Collection, Scramble, Q-Bert and Burgertime. I totally agree about the lousy 7800 controller. My hands cramp up just thinking about it.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

I agree with everything you said, apart from the 7800 being weaker. I know for a fact that if the 7800 was getting pushed as hard as the NES was in it's later years, the 7800 would have been blowing away the NES in graphics. Despite the homebrew scene pushing some impressive looking games on the 7800, it's still a far cry away from the NES in terms of graphics pushing games. Imagine if the Konami of the 80s had gotten there hands on the 7800, they probably would have gotten near Genesis quality visuals out of it.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

And I also think the 7800 controller is perfectly fine lol

[@DTM-Books]

@@KrunchyTheClown78 Are we talking the Australian NES-style joypads or the long telephone joysticks? Personally, I'd just cheat and plug in a Sega Genesis controller, but that's just me.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

@@DTM-Books I like both, and I can play pretty much any game with the proline joystick 7800 controller, watch the video on my channel. I think the joystick controller gets too much hate.

[@PONTOCRITICO]

A serious problem with this machine was the SALLY processor with a clock that was too modest for the desired graphics capabilities. It still lost 11% of its clock when the MARIA graphics chip was fully used, and so the engineers justified that such a performance deficit made it impossible to use the 320x240 resolution with the simultaneous 256-color palette. The resolution was the heaviest thing for an 8-bit CPU to handle and the only one of its kind that could with such graphics capability was the PC Engine's HuC6280, running just under 7.2 MHz. On the other hand, SALLY didn't reach 1.8MHz, and was much more equal to the NES in terms of core processing than the PC Engine. To make matters worse, the bizarre half resolution of 160 horizontal pixels with 240 vertical pixels did not fit well on TV sets. The way out would be a slightly higher CPU clock and a lower, but better usable resolution. With 2.2MHz processing and a native resolution of 256x192, for example, it would have caused the NES a lot of problems, at least on the American continent where Atari's old reputation was still well remembered.

[@casanovafunkenstein5090]

I think that you're missing a couple of important things here: 1. The 'videogame crash' was exclusively an American phenomenon and in Europe and Japan the market was only getting stronger during that period, driven in no small part by the microcomputers produced by Commodore, Atari, Sinclair and Amstrad. Tramiel was very much focused on trying to break into the business market, but the Atari ST was a reasonably capable gaming platform, as well as being uniquely suited to musicians with its built in midi functions. 2. When Nintendo were looking for distribution for the Famicom outside of Japan they did pitch it to Atari, so part of the reason the 7800 was beaten to market may have been influenced by those discussions. You really don't want to have two competing products available at the same time, so when Nintendo ended up doing it without Atari the latter was placed on the back foot and was left with a less appealing product that had been shelved and needed to be rushed out to try and capitalise on the suddenly reinvigorated US console market. Going back to point 1, I imagine that the team at Atari were seeing Europe as the biggest market for the NES and were rightly skeptical about the prospects of that product in a region dominated by games on audio cassettes that could be purchased for less than a quarter of the price for one of Nintendo's cartridges. Incidentally, Sega were the dominant force in consoles in Europe due to the fact that they were dramatically quicker to get their products out to consumers and Nintendo was never able to achieve the level of dominance they had in the US and Japanese markets due to poor business decisions.

[@napoleonfeanor]

Depending on country, Nintendo or Sega won, mostly quite close so there was good competition here in Europe

[@Jolt7800]

The 7800 could really push the sprites like a brute. I went from the Atari 2600 to the NES without even noticing the 7800. But flash forward to today and I have two 7800s. With good homebrews and the backwards compatibility to play my huge original 2600 collection, it’s the 7800s time to shine for many of us retro enthusiasts.

[@davidmckean955]

You should do another video covering the homebrew arcade ports and more recent commercial releases like Rikki & Vikki and Petscii Robots. The hardware has really been pushed.

[@pojr]

Homebrew games would be a great episode to do

[@NothingMuchHereToSay]

Your background music choice is some of the best I've heard from any KZbinr I've watched. Also very well put together, sometimes I wish there was a chance for Atari to return to the console market. What's the song starting at 7:59 btw? Looking forward to more of your content.

[@turbinegraphics16]

The 7800 strength is being able to change colour and graphics each line, nes and sms can do it too but they don't have as much support for it in the hardware. Atari tried competing by making it a budget system in discount stores but I can see how that would mean you would just get more lower budget software, I never heard of it being sold beside nes and sms but the Lynx was. Still it was starting to get some pretty impressive games near the end.

[@darkally1235]

I used to have a Google Sites which addressed this very question. Basically the biggest limitation of the 7800 is the GPU (MARIA) and the CPU shared the address and data buses. In addition the "display lists" used to tell MARIA what to display require significantly more memory and processing than the simple OAM tables used by the NES. So while it is technically possible for the 7800 to display more sprites than the NES, each sprite required additional memory access by the GPU which then left less clock cycles for the CPU. And for sound the NES wins hands down. Although 7800 games could have up to 48K of address space, this had to contain code and graphics data, while the NES had separate buses for the CPU and PPU. And in practice the address space wasn't a limitation on the size of games for either console due to bankswitching / mappers.

[@maestro-zq8gu]

I really don't understand the mentality of using the same old sound chip for your newest console. They really dropped the ball on that one. That's a HUGE thing.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

They ran out of space on the mother board, and were forced to add external sound support through the cartridge port.

[@henryca03]

GCC not incorporating either Atari's own POKEY chip or a third party PSG like the SN76489 or AY-3-8910 into the Atari 7800's design was a mistake. The Sega Genesis managed to incorporate the Master System's CPU (Z80) and PSG (SN76489) as co-processors.

[@ChrisG9978]

The 7800 was my first console...Food Fight, Joust, Centipede, and Super Skateboardin' were my top 4 titles on that system. Still enjoy playing those titles on emulators to this day. The controllers weren't all that great on the 7800 and it was quickly shelved around '87-88 when the NES arrived in the household. The 7800 simply couldn't compete from a game library perspective, and as noted the sound was awful on the 7800. No idea why Atari cheaped out on the sound...they apparently thought videogamers couldn't care less about sound quality. They were obviously wrong.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

From what I understand, GCC went over budget when developing the 7800, and had to sacrifice the better sound chip to stay within budget.

[@JMFSpike]

First of all, very nice job covering the console and everything that lead up to it. You did such a good job that you've convinced me to subscribe. However, this needs a part 2 because you missed a few things that should have definitely been mentioned. Midnight Mutants (which may have been it's final official game) really shows off what the console was capable of. It's the most complex game on the console. Scrapyard Dog is also a highlight of the console, and Basketbrawl is as well (although only graphically and because of the interesting concept.) I would have loved to see some more homebrews shown off too. Lastly, you didn't mention the Gumby chip. Although it sadly never became a reality, it would have provided even more superior sound then the Pokey chip.

[@phoenix042x7]

Fatal Run, Choplifter, Desert Falcon, Xenophobe, Xevious, Tower Toppler, Ms. Pac Man, and Impossible Mission (which ironically was actually impossible due to a bug) were honestly pretty cool on the 7800 and were favorites of mine. But toss in things like 1943, Cobra Triangle, RC Pro AM, Mega Man games, and others from the NES at the time, I can see why the 7800 got pounded. IDK, Nintendo really knew what they were doing through the SNES era. Quite ahead of its time and the quality-assurance was key. Edit: forgot to mention that the 7800 was backward-compatible with those 2600 games too.

[@nakdad]

you do great work. i had a teletsar coleco pong clone. I was amazed. I wanted a sears Telegames with Tank PLus (combat) to expensive.. You really do reviews and breakdowns like you are Gen X. I give you an honorary GEN X'R 66' to 73' part of that. Keep it up!!

[@scottythegreat1]

The Atari 7800 was a decent console. The problem was limited gaming opportunities. The main reason was that Atari didnt have the third party development that Nintendo had was that most Japanese game companies had agreed to Nintendo's strict game requirements to get approved to be on the system. However, quite a few North American publishers (ie. Epyx, Electronic Arts, Microprose, Accolade, Activision, Br0derbund) objected to the strict requirements that Nintendo had, and stayed developing for the Commodore 64 (a few games were ported over if they sold well, and then an outside company ported it). Why didnt the North American companies go over to the Atari 7800? Jack Tramiel had a reputation for playing hardball with other businesses and has led to too many companies going bankrupt after Tramiel found reasons to sue them, so none of the American publishing companies would support Atari.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

True, devs could have gone to the 7800, but Tramiel was very difficult to negotiate with. He always had every intention of screwing you over. But at the same time, Nintendo was over there bullying 3rd party developers, and retails chains into only making games for there platform, and only selling there platform, and no one elses. While Atari was hurting in the NA console market, they were doing ok in the EU computer market. If Jack had been smart, he could have used Nintendo's licensing policies against them by offering devs better deals.

[@chrisschumacher8553]

There is one rather important qualification to make here. The base NES is pretty underpowered, and in order to really see that you need to look at all the Famicom games that came out before Super Mario Bros. (Even though the NES shipped with SMB, the Famicom debuted three years earlier in 1983. SMB was, at one point, intended to be the last cartridge game for the system, as the Disk System was supposed to take over). Nintendo hit upon the idea of memory mappers when they needed a way to convert their Famicom Disk System games to cartridges for release in the West. This is when they started using memory mappers and using battery saves (I don't think they invented it, since I think some personal computers were already using batteries to maintain the system clock). It would be interesting to see what could be done on the 7800 with these sorts of innovations.

[@DJSpaceRetrotunes]

Great video! I think If developers have thought the "dithering" method in their games, they could use the high resolution and give the illusion that more than 9 colors appear simultaneously.

[@pabloarucas1185]

I just found you not that long ago and have been binging your content! Love your take on the retro Atari content! Keep it up also love that you smile after your intro makes me smile too! ❤😊

[@greenaum]

Ah wow another smile fan! Just something about it, eh?

[@SoulforSale]

Pojr should be on money

[@Curls105anarm]

As a kid I really wanted the Atari 7800. I am so envious of anyone who owns one.

[@desertchurro]

I got one 2 years ago for 50 bucks in the box. You can find the deals and have patience :)

[@redvenomweb]

Speaking of impressive 7800 homebrew games, you should probably mention Rikki & Vikki. It's the best looking and sounding 7800 game I've seen by far, and (from an audiovisual standpoint) easily hangs with the best on the NES.

[@AthleticDesign]

It is outstanding in all respects.

[@briandavis6898]

Ball blazer is still awesome today. My 10 year old nephew loves it

[@timvangenechten5258]

I know this is off topic, but I just noticed your channel has been around for 16 years already and you only have 7k subs... you deserve a lot more. I wasn't looking for another channel to join, but you deserve it... so I'll subscribe right now.

[@greenaum]

Aw I'm starting to look forward to in these videos, the cold open, then the little trademark POJR smile! Keep it up! Honestly making me smile right now, and I don't know why because by nature I'm a miserable sod! Also you know about old video games! Like, actually know, not lazy listicle journalist "know". I'm also impressed by you, Pojr, apparently being younger than a lot of these systems. Much of the stuff in here is the stuff of my childhood. If not necessarily the particular computers, then the era. In the UK Spectrums were big, so that and an Atari ST is what I grew up with. I briefly started a NES collection while it was still, just, on commercial sale, but the way-too-high prices put me off, NES wasn't big in the UK. I expanded my ZX Spectrum collection considerably though and got all the accessories I wanted, and had marvelled at back as a kid. Now I can afford them, and they're cheap! That was back in the early days of course, if I saw a Spectrum on a car boot sale for £6, I'd pass it for too expensive. Now they got for 10 and 20 times that! Damn Ebay! Since then I moved houses so many times I've left it all behind, which is a shame, but still I have the memories. Used to have a nice Acetronic collection too, just because it was so weird! The games were more primitive than even the Atari 2600. Technically the console had a better CPU and a better graphics chip (more sprites, more versatile background), except less colours, which is a big part of what made the 2600 look good. Imagine it with 8 colours, would have looked rubbish and nobody would have bought one. And it was so cheap to add 128 colours to the 2600! You just use a palette register. 7 bits, that's it, instead of 4 bits for 16 colours. 1 register per sprite, and one for the background, so 21 bits I think to give the amazing colour of the 2600. Electronically there wasn't even an RGB DAC, it just used 16 NTSC hue values and 8 luminosity. Tied directly to NTSC so there wasn't even a concept of RGB in the console at all. Programmers had colour charts and experimentation to see which colour was what. It's why PAL 2600s have completely different palettes and NTSC games look so weird with the wrong colours in a PAL console. That is, if your PAL TV will take 60Hz, which most do. 3 more bits, and all those consoles could have had 128 colours! And no RGB so the system would arguably REDUCE the number of transistors you'd need in the video chip. Which was important cos you can only ever fit so many transistors into a chip and expect it still to be reliable. So back then they fought to fit in every feature they could, and clever dodges were standard procedure. Of course chips don't only contain transistors, there's resistors and capacitors too, but transistors are a useful rule of thumb for complexity, especially in digital circuits where there's usually more of them.

[@LordPata]

While the NES had less ram, and the games rom had less space, the developers could add some extra chips on their games cartridges to enhance perfomance and do things the console alone couldn't do. They are called mappers which allowed the NES to access more than 32KB of PRG-ROM and 8KB of CHR-ROM. This helped the developers to be able to make better games since they were bypassing the console's limits, and being able to add things like changing from day to night in Castlevania 2. Another good example is Little Samson which has some impressive visual work on the world map and on every area you explore. It used the MMC3C mapper which helped to expand the console's capacities. Maybe that's where Atari 7800 failed. They only worked with the console's capacities, and didn't used mappers on their cartridge to expand the capacities of the consoles, hence that if you wanted more colours on Atari 7800, resolution had to be sacrificed and go to a lower one and hence the so pixelated games.

[@johneygd]

In my opinion,atari just gave up waaay tpo fast on their 5200,what i needed was a junior design of it with a extra cartride input for atari 400 games.

[@AgentM79]

NES had every bit as much shovel-ware as any pre-crash platform. The Nintendo “Seal of Approval” meant NOTHING in terms of QC. The 7800 was a better machine for accurate arcade ports. I’d also opine that the 5200 was in many ways superior to the 7800. The controllers were a weak point, of course. Had Atari made a suitable revision to the controllers, things would have been different. 2600 compatibility out-of-the-box would have helped as well. As good as Colecovision was, an argument could also be made that the 5200 was it’s equal. For all of Colecovisions specs on-paper, it’s lack of hardware scrolling hampered games like Zaxxon. And we never got Pac Man or Ms. Pac Man. Fine vid! The discussion never gets old for those of us who were there!!!! Every machine has it’s A-list games, as well as it’s stinkers. Atari mismanagement was the 2600/5200/7800, and 400/800/5200 biggest obstacle.

[@Mr.madmight266]

Graphically speaking, the sega Master System wins. The 2600 soundchip was the major step down. Sure, it made it easier to have backwards compatibility, but it didn't make the console sound advanced. They should have added a soundchip similar to the one on the Commodore 64.

[@Clancydaenlightened]

Problem with 7800 is they thought still using the tia to generate audio was a good idea, 8930 would have allowed much better sound, more ram and larger cartridge sizes.... Let riot and tia handle controllers... You did have audio input via cartridge but that makes cartridge cost more... Probably had the best drm system, using high grade military spec drm to check cartridges Only reason you can make new cartridge for 7800 mode is because someone found the development materials and encryption tools in a dumpster....

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

In regards to the 2600 sound chips, sometimes really great sounding music could be achieved. For Adventure Island, I'd go as far as to use expanded sound for in game sound effects, and use the TIA for the music, because someone brilliantly redid the AI music on the TIA chip.

[@freddiejohnson6137]

It really comes down to those developing games for something and the amount of experience that is shared over time. Tech specs can only take you so far and while something may on the surface look more powerful in raw numbers from this period or having a larger colour palette it doesn't tell the full story as over time with better coding you can make hardware do things no one expected it to. The problem is most publishers weren't interested in ever working on a new Atari console again so it's doubtful anyone that could get the most out of the hardware was ever going to try in the first place. The same thing ultimately happened to the Jaguar.

[@2eAsyf0rm3]

Two things to note: 1. Neither the Atari 7800 nor even the Atari 5200 ever released in Japan, so it was already a no go from companies like Capcom and Konami. 2. The 7800 games having more ROM than the NES (48 vs. 40 MiB) was only true for the very early part of the NES lifespan because NES games would later have Memory Management Controllers, increasing ROM up to a whopping 2 MiB via bankswitching.

[@espfusion]

7800 does sound better on paper and indeed it is better in some ways. It can push more pixels and it can do so more flexibly, plus it has a greater number of colors to choose from for its palette definition. But the comparisons in the video are a bit misleading. 7800 has 4KB of main RAM, but that has to be shared with the video chip for display lists, which is roughly equivalent to the separate 2KB tilemap VRAM + OAM on the NES. The 320 pixel mode is really even more limited than it seems. Just 7 colors at a time - two three color palettes plus the BG color, although at least you could viably change the palette midframe unlike the NES. Plus blit objects were at 160 aligned positions and pixel pairs shared a palette, meaning that transparency was basically in 160 pixel boundaries. And since the luma was 2x the chroma frequency you got strong aliasing which while sometimes useful meant it was hard to get much in the way of real 320 pixel luma definition. Personally I'd rather have the NES's 256 width, even if it was also far from great in NTSC. 7800 may have 48KB of ROM address space but NES PPU has tile data on another 8KB, and at any rate both consoles quickly needed address space extending mappers anyway making the limitation largely moot. The biggest weskness with the 7800 vs the NES was the shared CPU/video bus. 7800 could push more flicker free pixels, albeit at lower resolution. But to do so it had to eat a lot of CPU time. This is compounded by the fact that it also needed more CPU time to prepare the display lists. End result? Much simpler games, frankly. I mean if NES games already struggled with slowdown 7800 didn't stand a chance losing a huge chunk of CPU time to rendering. Well, that and relying on the much inferior TIA sound was a huge blunder.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

There are programmers who say if they could trade some of the 7800s sprite drawing capabilities for a non shared bus, they wouldn't make that trade. I even asked multiple programmers if it was really an issue, there answers? "Not really". You are also forgetting that the 7800 has multiple display modes for both resolutions. A B C and D for both 160, and 320 modes.

[@AAjax]

​@@KrunchyTheClown78 a good developer can make up for lost cpu cycles due to dma, with clever algorithms and task scheduling. The 7800 port of Petscii Robots loses a ton of cpu cycles to the pretty display, and runs as fast as the other ports thanks to optimisation.

[@ssg-eggunner]

Now I'm fully convinced the 7800 was garbage

[@-GoldenThiefBugCard]

Edit: Figured out my request. The music at 14:42 is Zena Lan's Stage - Cosmic Carnage.

[@antonnym214]

Nice look at the console. I subscribed. Your research and narration are excellent.

[@angelriverasantana7755]

From what I learned, the reason they didn't put a new soundchip was a way to encourage developers to put in expansion modules in their systems or cartridges (Like the POKEY chip in Commando and Ballblazer and the 3rd party YM sound chip), kinda like what the Famicom did with the BASIC keyboard, the FDS, Namco 163 , Nintendo's MMC chips, the Sunsoft 5B and Konami's VRC series. I've been fascinated with the 7800 and I tried a buncha games on an emulator and I dig what it has to offer. Hell, I learned that games had a quirk where they looked different depending on the system's temperature due to how video signals were handled

[@greenaum]

Nah you don't wanna encourage people to have to put extra chips into their games, increasing the cost. Game companies want a console with lots of good features to make their games good. Nintendo's MMC chips corrected some desperate cheapskating in the NES's design. It didn't have enough video RAM so the video chip read graphics from the CHR ROM in realtime as it was drawing them on screen. Hence the CHR and PRG ROMs, they have to be 2 separate chips because CHR ROM access is required any time you want there to be a display, which is always. Carts supplemented that with RAM for video, then the PRG ROM would copy graphics across to it, making a more versatile system, but needed a chip to control all the address lines, hence an MMC. And as chips became more complex, they stuck more features in. The 7800 had the awful 2600 sound because it used the awful 2600 TIA chip for graphics in 2600 mode. Because it was back-compatible. They didn't see it worth investing in a sound chip when they could just take the shortcut of using TIA's abysmal sound even in 7800 mode. POKEY is also sorta wasteful. It's the POTs and KEYs reading chip, sound is just another feature. They might have instead invented a solo sound chip, either a cheaper or a better one. But apparently POKEY was in lots of their arcade games too so they must have had a stock of cheap ones. Almost none of these expansion chips were in mind when companies developed their consoles. They planned on games using what the console had, and being designed accordingly. The 2600 was designed with Video Olympics, Combat, and Air-Sea Battle in mind, not Ghostbusters. The later games really re-interpreted and stretched the idea of what the 2600 could do. Combat, etc, could be done fairly easily, you had to really work to get more complex stuff out. The SNES had the same problem. It's pathetic processor was 8-bit with 16-bit extensions. But 8-bit data bus, 8-bit ALU, and compatible with the NES's CPU. The idea being easy compatibility with NES games. Fortunately it's graphic chip was very impressive, so the CPU mostly just had to ask it nicely to sling graphics around, rarely calculating much. But it meant anything complex needed the MARIO chip, a RISC CPU running much faster than the system's main CPU. Meanwhile the Megadrive did stuff like the Wolfenstein level of Toy Story (why they didn't put that level first I don't know, it looked amazing!), all with it's own 68000 brain. In fact Toy Story had filled-in floors and ceilings, better than Wolfenstein did. More like Blake Stone, but nobody remembers what that is.

[@angelriverasantana7755]

@@greenaum That is the main caveat of the idea. It kinda made cart production a bitch. There's legit a reason only 2 games used POKEY in its market run

[@VOAN]

@@greenaum If SNES really did only used an 8-Bit processor, then it's a very impressive 8-Bit processor indeed as non-chip games like Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Contra III: The Alien Wars, TMNT IV: Turtles in Time, and Mega Man X really took advantage of it and all five games look, play, and ran nothing like their 8-Bit counterparts but better.

[@kekeke8988]

@@VOAN Even DKC was a non-chip game.

[@diazea4294]

Cool video.... The option of the better Pokey sound chip was if game developer included that chip on the cartridge as it wasn't native to the system. This increased cost of manufacturing the game, so you hardly saw it utilized. Even stranger, the game system that came after the Atari 7800 (Atari XEGS) had worse graphics than the Atari 7800 as it was essentially the Atari 5200 architecture again....(The Atari 5200 and XEGS we both just repackaged Atari 8-bit computers).

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Yup, the XEGS was an effort to get more money, Atari positioned the XEGS as a high end computer gaming machine because of the keyboard, and whatnot, and the 7800 as a lower end game console.

[@Wallyworld30]

My household (Especially my mother) loved "Adventure Island". She would spend hours at a time playing that game. The 4 of us kids loved it too. I'll try and play "Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest" on emulation. It looks like it plays exactly the same as Adventure Island. Thanks for sharing that.

[@pinebarrenpatriot8289]

Adventure Island came out through Hudson a year after Wonderboy was released on the Sega Master System. My friend with an NES didn't know Adventure Island was already a Sega game and couldn't figure out why I was so good at it when he first bought it when I didn't own an NES😄 Fun times.

[@kevinlawson1746]

You should check out Rikki & Vikki for the 7800 , very impressive.

[@pojr]

Never played it, but looks fantastic in videos I've seen

[@Wallyworld30]

3:03 what game is that hummingbird game? I didn't know any other Humming Bird game existed outside of the beautiful "Kolibri" on Sega's 32x? Was this an Intellivision game?

[@anthonybottigliero8336]

One thing I'm wondering: if the 7800's high rez mode only allowed 8 colors, was it possible for the color palate to shift to a different 8 colors? Perhaps you could have like three levels (or whatever), each one using a different 8 colors?

[@Bigbacon]

not that the 7800 would have done any better but 7800 would have been more awesome if they just put that pokey chip in board and figure out how to get the 2600 audio to still work. I also got a 7800 for christmas as well and not a nintendo but I was young enough to still have a lot of fun with it even though my friend next door had the NES. Compared to early NES they are fairly comparable but that changed fairly quickly.

[@maxxdahl6062]

I think Atari should have stuck with computers and computer games at that point, their console reputation was pretty bad at that point but they still did 8 and 16 bit computers pretty decently at that time.

[@losalfajoresok]

Love your content! keep it up!

[@pojr]

Appreciate it!

[@Zeno948]

hey Pojr, i have a question, what do the voices say in "Frenzy" on the Atari 7800? im having a hard time hearing them. more specifically the ones in the Berzerk gamemode.

[@Wallyworld30]

Not to nit pick but as much as I love Colecovision's Donkey Kong the best home version of the game in 1983 was Atari XE version. The Colecovision Version is missing stages and the construction grates are laid out differently in the Colecovision version compared to arcade. The Atari XE Verision has them spot on and had better gameplay too. You could argue that the Atari XE version is a computer game so it doesn't count but I counter that with you could play that same cartridge on Atari XEGS video game Console.

[@legacyoftheancientsC64c]

Atari's theme seems to competent hardware (sometimes amazing ie: Lynx) that is woefully underutilized or hobbled in some way (7800, Jaguar).

[@shiningphantasy1393]

The 5200 was my first home system (played quite a bit of 2600 a the houses of a couple of friends up to that point, and of course arcade visits) and I must have gotten it a bit later following launch as Pac-Man was the included free game and we didn't get Super Breakout. Having a close to an arcade accurate version of Pac-Man was a big selling point, but also good conversions like Dig Dug made an impression. But as you said the accordion joystick was junk quality and just got more mashed around from further use. As for the 7800 compared to the NES and SMS (which I had) it was just kind of there, and seemed like it was stuck in the past both from the way the games looked and the type of software being released. I didn't know anybody who had one; a few of us had Master Systems and the majority had the NES, for good reason.

[@sheed83diggy77]

@14:42 can you tell me which game this music came from?

[@nick6var]

The NES version of Ballblazer never got a release outside of Japan pales in comparison to the 7800 version. On the other hand, many of the early arcade games for the 7800 were programmed for their 1984 planned release date. By the late 80s both gamers and the arcades themselves were far beyond that era and, as a result, looked old at the time. Atari Corp. also split their focus between too many different hardware options (2600, 7800, XE), dividing their resources when they had little 3rd party support.

[@asa-punkatsouthvinland7145]

A few years ago Atari released for Android & iOS a 3-D follow up to Ninja Golf called Ninja Golf. Really fun but repetitive. Unfortunately it stopped working on my phone recently, but you can find video of gameplay on KZbin & it likely still works on older phones as it's still on the app store although hasn't been updated in a while & I doubt it likely will get updated.

[@TheRealJPhillips]

Its crazy cause mat mania on the 7800 is better than a lot of the wrestling games on the nes.

[@deku812]

NES had many basic mapper chips that allowed it to come in much larger cartridges at 32 KB , SMB 2 was 78 KB and SMB3 was 222KB. i think the lack of better sound hardware was the biggest oversight for the 7800

[@SoulforSale]

Desert Falcon was supposed to be a 7800 exclusive but the market response was so dismal that the developers pushed out the 2600 version.

[@BloodiTearz]

As far as i remember, Both atari 7800 and the famicom (1983) used the same 6502 based cpu, but the biggest issue with Atari 7800 that it was not designed to be easy for developers, side scrolling was hard on the 7800 and nowhere near as easily as the Nes. it was also released in 1986 which is one year before the 16bit era where most consoles/computers where designed using the 68000 Motorola ( PC ENGINE- Mega drive , AMIGA etc).

[@CodyNewhouse]

Wonderful content. Much appreciated. :-)

[@greenaum]

The bad sound on the 7800 is due to that demon that has destroyed so many consoles... back compatibility! It's why the SNES has such a weak CPU and needs a Super-FX processor on carts to do anything useful, because... it's back compatible! With the NES's CPU. The Megadrive did OK by including the Master System's Z80 and putting it to work controlling sound, when it wasn't busy being the main CPU in Master System mode. Incidentally Nintendo never released a SNES - NES adaptor (though third-parties did). The Megadrive had a Master System adaptor, that very few people bought. And anyone who had 2600 games would surely have a 2600 lying around, not like it was worth anything to trade in. So the 7800 didn't need back compatibility either. Nobody ever has. It also crippled PC compatibles for years. In the 7800, the CPU can switch to running at half it's speed, which is the same speed it runs in the 2600. It contains a full TIA chip like the 2600 did, and also a RIOT chip. The 6507 (a cut-down 6502), TIA, and RIOT, are basically all there was in a 2600. So they 7800 has that on board, costing money and not contributing anything useful to 7800 games. TIA is the 2600's graphics and sound chip, so it's there for 2600 compatibility. In 7800 mode, the MARIA video chip is switched on instead. But TIA is still used for it's sound. Which as we know is awful. But since they were putting a TIA chip in there anyway, and the thing was already getting expensive having an entire 2600 inside the 7800, they decided to just use TIA's awful sound and to Hell with it. Even one of the little Texas Instruments beepy-beep SN76489 chips would have sounded better. That was a bad idea. So was the whole back-compatible idea. Nobody would buy new 2600 games for the 7800. So if they had any they'd have a 2600 anyway, no need for compatibility. It's an idea that's doomed so many machines. They should have taken the 2600 stuff out, put in a proper sound chip, and kept the extra money as profit.

[@robertdanker6193]

Great video! Had the NES never came out I wonder if the 7800 would have caught on?

[@markbauermeister5449]

There's some inaccuracies in the video: 1. It says "ROM" when you're talking about the unis' RAM 2. 32kB is the max PRG ROM on an NROM NES cartridge. The actual "data" it can carry is 8kB in its CHR ROM. There's, however, plenty of NES mapper chips that can store far more data and game logic than that. My own game will release on a 256kB PRG ROM cartridge, with CHR RAM instead of ROM (the development process with this is more similar to modern game development, in that graphics data is "streamed" into RAM rather than be precalculated) 3. A higher horizontal resolution (while keeping the same vertical resolution) doesn't necessarily make it superior to the NES (just means you have more screen estate to fill. Which can be more work). What does make it superior is the higher use of color (25 and the 30 sprites per scanline (VS 8 for the NES)

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Hey man! Thanks so much for covering Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, and the 7800! they both deserve way more love! And it's true that no 3rd party games back then did anything to show off the capabilities of the 7800. Ninja Golf was pretty much the only good looking game it had.

[@toofusnook]

I would suggest comparing graphics on the type of tv the consoles were designed for. HDMI “pixelates” less pixelated graphics. CRT monitors, in composite or RF input (as they had to be used at the time) dithered the graphics, and this was integral to haw the graphics were designed. Before anyone says it - it isn’t about “crispness”; there is a specific advantage to to the way dithering “blur” shades and softens edges.

[@Asterra2]

The Intellivision shared the same problems with other framebuffer architectures until basically the 5200: Not enough power, on the whole, to guarantee 60fps. The 2600 was the inadvertent trailblazer here, with the "racing the beam" architecture _guaranteeing_ that almost every single 2600 game was 60fps. Meanwhile, you simply will not find a contemporaneous Intellivision game that runs anywhere near 60fps. Look at 2:53. Whatever this game is, the individual elements are taking turns moving, and their motion averages 15fps-which is _typical._ More arcade-oriented games managed 30 on average but this was not common.

[@gregnm369]

My first console was the 7800. Then the NES. Good memories!

[@LITTLE1994]

The 7800 could have been a good system but heavy competition from the NES blew it out quickly.

[@indieeric6530]

I’m not sure how I missed your channel for so long but I’m glad I found it. I love all of the Atari/retro content. This is my new favorite channel on KZbin. Keep up the great work!

[@lurkerrekrul]

The first time I heard of the 7800 was a preview article in Electronic Games magazine. They had artists' renderings of game screens, but I was fooled into thinking that they were color printouts of actual screenshots. I mean there was nothing in the images that didn't look realistic. I instantly wanted one. Then I didn't hear anything more about it until I happened across boxed systems at a local toy store. I forget how much they wanted, but it was out of my price range. Fast forward a few years, I got on the net and someone in the retro video games newsgroup advertised a 7800 for sale for $22, with a couple games. I bought it and got a 100% working console, two controllers, power supply, Pole Position II and some other game. Over the next few months, I bought several other loose games. I enjoyed it, but by then I had an Amiga and the 7800 had lost some of its "wow" factor. I didn't regret buying it, it just didn't blow me away like it would have a few years earlier.

[@AthleticDesign]

Almost the same story here. Read about it in Electronic Games in 1984 and coveted it badly. Then read about it in UK magazines. Now it didn't look quite as impressive, but the colors of the mountains in Pole Position II made me drool, and thus I still coveted it. Then I got an Amiga and the years went by. Finally, in the summer of 1995, a few months before buying a PS1, I ordered a PAL 7800 from Telegames UK. The sound didn't work and the games were not as good as I had imagined them. But there still was something about the colors that made me feel there was untapped potential in the machine.

[@lurkerrekrul]

@@AthleticDesign This may sound strange, but there have been times that I actually preferred the fake screenshots in magazines to the actual game graphics. I don't mean when they looked like paintings, or they're vastly different than the released game, I mean the ones that look like they could be actual screenshots printed out on an early color printer. I sort of like the fake 7800 screenshots in Electronic Games better than the actual games. They just have a sort of charm and warmth to them. Another one was a small fake screenshot of Zaxxon for the Colecovision. Just something about the colors of it really appealed to me.

[@WickedCrispy]

Star Raiders on the 5200 kicked ass.

[@notsuoh16Bit]

I'm pretty sure ballblazer had a sound chip on the rom cart, also the carts of the NES and the Atari could have much larger rom carts as long as there was a mapper chip and coding to take advantage of the mapper chip.

[@ChicoTheMan69]

Rich kids had the 5200 and 7800 the rest of us had the 2600 before getting a Sega or Nintendo.

[@sinistermoon]

Do you have a real 7800 or are your opinions of the console all from playing emulators?

[@MrSamPhoenix]

I had a 7800 back in 1992. My dad didn’t know the difference between that and a 16-Bit console.

[@the_hiroman]

7800 games lacked the 'soul' of the NES games.