/v/ - Video Games

It was originally supposed to come out before the NES but legal and financial trouble gave them cold feet.

The biggest selling point of it was that it could play 2600 games. Due to Nintendo's exclusivity licenses, they couldn't get games.

wasn't atari developing a new console? whatever happened to that?

>>15561322

It's not Atari anymore. They got bought out by Infogrames a while ago, and I think they might have been bought out again.

It was called the Ataribox, then Atari VCS. It's a mess. Here's a pretty good video about it.

lack of games that really pushed any envelopes whereas the NES was a clear step ahead of what was being done with the previous generation the 7800 was more of what was already being done on the 2600/5200.

Nintendo did have an aggressive third party stance that was solved by proxy in court, but that also goes to show Ataris lack of committal with the Tengen brand. At the end of the day, hardware means fuck all if nobody is taking advantage of it.

It's quite simple, the video game crash destroyed any prospects of it being released before the NES in 1985. Because of Nintendo's aggressive business tactics with near monopoly level of control in the industry. Game studios could only publish 5 games a year at max, and only for Nintendo. Here's an interesting video about Tengen (Atari) fighting Nintendo.

>>15561322

Only Atari in name.

I am legitimately willing to through any kind of money I can to take the Atari brand from these numales and try to have a company to make some games. My idea was just to make a cheap console and have the games maxed out at $30 a pop in price, lower if the publisher wants to.

>>15561364

>>15561339

>it's not actually atari

sounds gay

>>15561360

That was interesting I never knew the connection between Namco and Atari.

>>15561364

atari hasn't been atari since the mid '80s when bushnell sold off the company to tramiel anyway

>>15561552

homosexuality isn't trad, anon

both of you would get roped

It had the same shitty audio as the 2600.

>>15561647

1 guy. 1 guy is pretending. Your mother should have swallowed.

>>15561364

99% of companies are only in the name anyway. Nowadays employee turnover is insane and you can be almost sure that any given sequel isn't developed by people who made the original.

>>15561647

>tim heidecker poster expecting to be taken seriously

>>15561850

I agree completely.

>>15561850

It's so bad in fact that by the time you buy a game there's no feasible way for your money to even reach the guys who actually made it.

>>15561289

From what I remember (and I owned one) it was a little under powered and the cartridges were too small data wise.

>>15561289

All japanese products are superior to western shit. Even the worst of Japan is still better.

>>15562839

Use a japanese browser and go back to 2chan then

Maybe if you try hard enough you might be able to steal some preowned japanese computer, Luciano

>>15561661

>atari hasn't been atari since the mid '80s when bushnell sold off the company to tramiel anyway

Bushnell sold the company to Warner back in 76 and soon left it completely. Tramiel bought the consoles and computer divisions from Warner in 84. (Namco bought the arcade division, and Mitsubishi bought the little-known telecom division.)

>>15561289

A combination of Atari's horrible reputation (they took much of the blame for the crash) and shitty specs that were barely a step up from the previous gen. Nintendo's exclusivity policy was just the icing on the cake, it would have been a failure either way.

>>15561289

Make a single thread instead of making several templates you faggot OP >>15560153

>>15561339

>I think they might have been bought out again.

Apparently in 2005 Hasbro bought back a bunch of their stuff.

Infogrames bought Atari. Hasbro bought Infogrames. I think..they fucked around with renaming so it gets confusing. I think Infogrames renamed itself to Atari. It's some weird amalgamation.

>>15564046

You're beyond retarded. Just letting you know.

>>15564323

You like to reply cuckchan-tier template threads, so kill yourself, just thought you should know.

>responds like a goon

>"no, you're the cuckchan!"

everytime

>>15564331

You're beyond retarded. Just letting you know.

>>15564038

>shitty specs

Not really, it's somewhere in between NES and Master System.

>barely a step up from the previous gen

It's much more compact and reliable than 5200, and the graphics are significantly better.

Because it was a piece of shit with no games, now fuck off.

>>15564399

That's wrong, fuckwit.

>7800

>shit controller

>shit games

>backwards compatible to a cheaper console with a better controller.

the 2600 outsold this piece of shit and outlived it.

>>15564046

>>15564327

>template thread

Are you attempting to make this lose meaning entirely?

>>15564549

They were the standard pack-in in Europe but never released in burgland unless I'm mistaken.

>>15564434

Your video doesn't match what you claim about it being a piece of shit.

>>15564601

Before anyone jumps me I wasn't trying to claim the Gamegear only had two, but that it didn't have the games.

>>15564601

If only every console came packed with a Steel Battalion controller.

>>15564610

>game gear had no games

>363 games

>no games

Granted the Gameboy had over a thousand games (after being out for a decade) are you going to pretend that the handful of notable gameboy games means that out of that thousand most weren't shovelware?

>>15561289

Same reason why the Jaguar failed. Atari still thought that they wielded clout after the crash, they could have come from behind and pulled an upset, but not with the notoriously stingy (((Jack Tramiel))) at the head.

>>15564669

The Jaguar also had the same problem of being released later than intended, which put it in an awkward in between state where it was more powerful than what was already on the market but shittier than things people were looking forward to.

Jews happened. Specifically after the intitial test launch of the thing, Jack Tremiel took over, and was the biggest penny pinching fuck you ever saw. The console ended up being delayed because he refused to pay the actual creators of the console royalties until WELL after the NES took over, and when it finally did reach statewide market, he would only pick the safest shit possible to ship out.

>>15564399

>Not really, it's somewhere in between NES and Master System.

I never looked at the specs, but I do know that the games all look much inferior to NES games. If the hardware was actually better than NES, everyone developing games for it was acting like it was less powerful than NES.

>>15561289

>Why didn't this game console with zero worthwhile games succeed?

Think about what you post before actually posting it, jesus christ.

>>15566175

It had twice the RAM of a NES, not that this really mattered for shit when you can put more on the cartridge itself but still. It wasn't nearly as pathetic as the games made it seem.

>>15566340

What was pathetic was the controller. That was terrible, I don't know why they didn't just use a standard controller.

>>15566175

Base NES hardware wasn't really superior. NES carts just came with additional chips that improved performance in the late 80s. That's why a lot of the early NES titles don't really look that good. It wasn't just learning to make games for the system, the system came out in Japan in 1983. By the time the first Super Mario Bros. came out for the system it was already 2 years old. That game was pretty much pushing the NES to its limits prior to the better mappers that Nintendo made available (and even better custom jobs by some developers.) The best NES games all came out in the early 90s. That would hypothetically be like if N64 carts were made in say 2006 with better technology at cheaper prices and had the N64 doing things never dreamed possible in 1996.

The best NES titles were released 7-10 years after the NES was first launched, with much better technology to load onto the cartridges. That's why some of them were around a meg in size vs 100kb (first couple of years of NES titles were actually less than 100kb)

>>15566404

Yeah but show me the 7800 games as impressive as even Super Mario Bros. 1. Most look marginally better than 2600 games. Even those original black box NES games are much more impressive than the vast majority of 7800 games. And games that were on both were almost always more impressive on NES. Some examples were already posted in this thread. Does Double Dragon actually play better on 7800? Because it looks much better on NES.

>>15566488

If you are referring to the video that was posted a lot of those games look better on the 7800 with better animation. They look blurry because of the fat pixels on the 7800 and have worse sound (generally) though. The point is that if Atari wasn't retarded as has been pointed out in this thread and they had better hardware on their carts going into the future they could have made the 7800 a good competitor instead of a flop.

>Does Double Dragon actually play better on 7800

I don't know. I have never played a 7800 and was curious about it. I already knew about the 2600 (had one handed down to me before my family got an NES) and the 5200 from the AVGN video (for what that's worth.)

>>15561289

>tfw went from turbografx to saturn and finally 360

Feels bad to be an unpopular cuck, at least i got tons of arcade perfect ports and shmups.

>>15566501

Well that's the thing. Everyone knew about 2600. Most people don't even call it 2600. They just call it "The Atari" and don't even realize Atari made other consoles. It's only in retrospect and with the internet anyone became aware of any of their other products.

>>15566404

It's always nice to remember that the base NES hardware was actually inferior to both the SMS and 7800. Pretty much all NES games released by 1987 and later came with additional chips.

The only thing I don't understand to this day is why Atari and especially Sega with the SMS didn't do the same, release games with enhanced graphics and sound using in-cartridge chips. Maybe their architectures weren't as well suited for it.

>>15566488

While SMB1 indeed looks more impressive than most 7800 games, the anon you replied to already explained it: that game pushed the NES hardware to its absolute limits without the aid of additional chips and was a first-party game developed in-house. It wouldn't be realistic to expect the majority of games to achieve the same levels of technical prowess without extra chips, even if they came out later. If the 7800 got the same amount of effort, time and dedication, maybe it could have an even more technically impressive game.

The greatest weakness of the 7800 was its resolution, very inferior to the NES and SMS, as the very pixelated graphics often show.

>Does Double Dragon actually play better on 7800?

No, it's an awful port, one of the worst on the system. Both the NES and SMS versions are miles ahead of it. I emulated it but I doubt experiencing on original hardware would've made much difference.

>>15566175

>>15566404

This, but the 7800 also suffered from the Backwards comparability. It was decided not to include a proper music chip on the machine, opting instead to put the 5200's POKEY chip on the cartridge for games. The problem is, almost NO games used it because Jack Tremiel did not want to shell out cash for that extra chip.

Also all the best looking 7800 games never left the cutting room floor for one reason or another, and Atari themselves were one of the only ones making games for it, so no shit you're not going to get shit that looks as amazing as what end of life NES could be.

>>15566909

Oh, wow, that is impressive. Thanks for sharing that.

>>15567402

>Look at [Nintendo game], it looks primitive!

Well, the thing about that…

>>15567402

Well the first two are only 25kb in size, there's no way they could avoid that. Graphic artists were also quite inexperienced during that time and would drastically improve by the end of the decade.

>>15564399

The CPU was the same 1.8MHz 6502 used in the NES, except the 7800 wasted half its cycles either waiting for memory access or doing operations that every other console used the GPU for. The GPU itself was theoretically capable of some very impressive feats for its day, but due to the aforementioned CPU bottlenecks it was effectively limited to a horrendous non-4:3 resolution and had palette and sprite size limitations roughly on par with its competitors unless you were willing to dedicate the majority of your memory and CPU power to drawing a cutscene. The only area where the 7800 was actually superior to the competition was foreground sprite count, which few games ever exploited because it meant sacrificing both a big chunk of their already-limited CPU cycles and usually also the entire background layer.

>>15561289

A television was a major purchase for families back then. Most households had one, and dad wasn't going to have watching his kids fall to the degeneracy after he worked all day down at the hatchery. People were gaming on black and white televisions that still worked from decades earlier. Now, kids have their own tv usually. Graphics sucked ass too, the arcade was the preferred method of gaming.

>>15567591

>Now, kids have their own tv usually

No they fucking don't. Kids today have fucking cellphones. At 8 years old.

>>15567518

>only 25kb in size

That's really a huge amount of space for a little game like that, it's only how accustomed to bloat everyone's become that makes it seem large. NES programmers didn't do any of the tricks the PC scene did like bundling decompressor code, it was just flat tables of data and bitmap sprites.

>>15567402

The 7800's MARIA chip could do those neat pseudo-3D graphics, and handle a ton of sprites over a static screen. But it was bad at fast-scrolling backgrounds, unlike the NES' PPU. Scrapyard Dog shows a Mario-like platformer is possible, but it was always an uphill struggle.

Also, many NES games used extra chips (the famous "mappers") to go far beyond the original hardware's limits. Atari offered an extra sound chip, but only two games ever used it.

>>15561339

>Invidious

Fuck off

>>15567600

That's only 8kb of CHR rom. How is that a lot?

>>15567634

>Also, many NES games used extra chips (the famous "mappers") to go far beyond the original hardware's limits. Atari offered an extra sound chip, but only two games ever used it.

Atari did have more than that, the game i posted for example was suppose to contain an extra chip for the frame rate, hence why it never came out.

>>15567805

Invidious keeps giving me errors.

I have no idea

>>15567634

This looks like absolute shit.

>>15567811

Me too.

>>15564640

Had a Game Gear as a child and regretted it. It had games, but compared to the Game Boy it didn't have the games everyone wanted.

Polite sage due to getting off topic.