I honestly never understood the allure of the Atari 2600. The game ports for that console from other consoles were absolute shit, with only 2 or 3 colors on the screen.
It was actually overdesigned for its release in 1977 as it was meant to be a modular but glorified Pong console as all the others were standalone boxes. A palette of 128 colors, far more than any rival at the time, only 128 bytes (1/8KB), and a predicted lifespan of 3 years, nobody knew how the port of "Space Invaders" would ensure the 2600 lasted another decade after its release. The only other real competitor - Channel F - wasn't as robust in hardware (64 bytes of RAM, but a 2K video buffer - despite having a lower video resolution! Atari had no buffer and was harder to program for...)
But it was more advanced than any Pong console preceding it.
Pac Man comes to mind - it looked nothing like the original.
Atari demanded a rush production and on a 4K ROM cartridge to cut costs. 8K was just coming in but still expensive. Add in the limited RAM size, and numerous corner cutting had to be made.
They also made 7 million units, more than the number of consoles sold. As a result of this combined with unhappy customers, this helped lead to no-returns policies. Any collector will have a Pac-Man box with broken sticker reading "No refund if seal broken".
I enjoyed it at the time because the same concept held true, but it was lesser compared to other ports (and on hardware 5 years' newer and cheaper even if it's the same 6502-series family at the core.)
Now, ColecoVision had the games that looked (mostly) like the arcade originals. It wasn't until Atari released the 5200 (which was basically a repackaged Atari 800XL computer without a keyboard) that things started getting better, but Atari's limited GTIA graphics chipset really didn't give the same variety of colors needed to accurately reproduce the popular arcade games of the time.
Repackaged, but different ROM registers since the computer and video games divisions weren't fond of each other...
The 5200 had 256 colors, more than the competition, but resolution was still lower - the Atari 8-bit line never was increased in that area and Coleco, Intellivision, C64, et al, did have higher resolutions - but Atari definitely held its own with colors. Pitfall on the 5200 beats the 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision... depends on title as Beamrider is sucky on either Atari due to the need for the higher resolution...
The thing that people today don't realize about the "8-bit" world, is that they mostly think it's all about "big pixels with only 256 colors". The reality was that, while there was a palette of 256 colors available, it didn't have a good range of colors to use on the screen at the same time.
True. None of the systems at the time had, but Atari's system was more difficult to program for, which did not help - but take the time to make use of it and it'd easily hold its own. Atari had a thing with consoles being difficult to program for and not sharing source code with; the Jaguar being the most noteworthy example. It had the power but production schedules combined with more popular systems that were easier to program for... the homebrew sector of recent has shown how Jaguar could mop the floor... heck, they have things on the 2600 and 5200 that no competitor of the time could have done...
Of course, the crash of 1983; Intellivision, Colecovision, and Atari rendered it all moot - they were all clobbered.
I can't speak too intelligently about Apple ][ and C-64 - they had more colors available (the Apple cheated - more on that in a bit) - but the Atari only had up to 4 colors (depending on the graphics mode) that could be actively used at any given time. Coders were frustrated with this so a lot of them went to the other platforms and trashed Atari's ostensibly limited capabilities.
True - difficulty in programming, limited base screen modes - though doing time with the sprites and one can overcome that to an extent... most didn't and it did make system speed go down as well.
Then Atari released Atari Basketball:
View attachment 41179
There are a lot more than just 4 colors, aren't there? People took notice and did digging and realized that some "undocumented features" of the Atari's machine code that Atari Corp wanted to keep hidden for their own exclusive use.
Yuppers - Atari always wasn't keen on assisting developers, or they wanted their in-house games to look THE best (not good considering their attitude toward Pac-Man's release). I should read posts through all the way before responding first, hehe!
This included something called "player-missile graphics". These were like "sprites" in other platforms, but instead of sharing the same memory space as everything else going on the screen, P/M objects existed in their own reserved memory block on top of the main graphics memory space. This allowed them to operate independently (and quite smoothly) from the restrictions of the baseline 4-color space, each with its own color and generating even more colors when overlapping.
The games that took advantage of that are all the better as a result.
There were other techniques discovered as well, like
dithering,
blittering and
display-list-interrupting (DLI, also known as raster interrupting or vertical-blank-interrupting), which allowed for more interesting color abilities, coming near to full 256 color usage - but you had to do some serious bending-over-backwards coding to get there at the machine language level.
Big-time.
Commodore had a better graphics chipset - 'nuff said, full stop.
Higher resolution and easier programming made its 16-color limitation less a conscious concern, though I'll take the Atari's version of "Masters of Time", "Ballblazer", "Koronis Rift", et al, over C64's any day of the week. "Rescue on Fractalus" is a near-tie, with the Atari edging out. It was easy to tell which games were developed on the Atari then ported to the C64, or vice-versa...
That didn't keep the Atari/Commode-door rivalry from raging for decades, though!
LOL! Too true!
Apple really only had two colors, but IIRC, their pixels were just small enough, that if you manipulated them correctly, they would light up a small portion of each RGB TV pixel in such a way that it would appear as if you could do multiple colors. This was called "
artifacting". The rendered pixels themselves never had color, they just basically "hacked" the nature of NTSC color TV screens of the era, by making fake colors (hence my earlier "cheating" statement). If you looked at an Apple screen doing this with a non-color B/W or green-screen monitor, all you would see are hundreds of vertical lines painting an unintelligible picture.
IBM's CGA did the same thing. It's a glorified way of offloading color processing to the CRT, if it was in color. CGA was 4-color but looked far richer on a CRT in
composite mode...
Atari could do this too in their "
high resolution" mode (Graphics 8), but were only able to add 2 extra colors that changed depending on the kind of chipset you were using (CTIA/GTIA).
A Poker game existed that used much trickery to combine high-res and multiple colors - probably updating the graphics mode during each scan line paint, allowing the cards to look detailed but keep the scores in lower-res. A shame that trick never got widely released either...
WHEW! Them's some 'memberberries for ya kiddies! This was the world before y'all were born.
