Atari 7800 - Great Machine, Bad Marketing
Written: Jun 22 '02 (Updated Jun 22 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great Graphics and Sound compared to the Atari 2600, and it even played 2600 games.
Cons: Lacking video co-processing and memory in comparison to Nintendo's popular 8-bit system of the time.
The Bottom Line: This machine could have been much more popular, but it was still a nice addition to the Atari line despite poor marketing. Definitely a must for a video game collector.
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| mistrtonee's Full Review: Atari 7800 |
If you look back to any video game machine of the 1970s and 1980s, you will find that many of the machines from a given generation are similar in alot of ways and different in others. When it came to the Atari 7800, it was a great machine for its time. It could play the games from Atari's old 2600 system and had new games with much improved graphics and sound.
This is a great machine and a worthy addition to any video game collector's stash. It is surprisingly common despite being beat by the Nintendo Entertainment System in terms of market share. You can find these machines on eBay for certain, along with many different games. There are brand new shrinkwrapped surplus games left over from Atari's demise at www.oshealtd.com. If you want to collect for this machine, it's easy. And of course, you can always bust out the old 2600 games and play them too.
For those of you wondering, Why didn't this worthy machine make it in the market?, I'll try to answer that question now. Everyone knows that this machine did not stand a chance against the Nintendo Entertainment System. The reason the Nintendo fared so well technically is because of a special chip they developed called the "Picture Processing Unit". This chip ran alongside the normal microprocessor and generated the television video automatically, freeing up the microprocessor itself to work on calculations related to the game in progress. The Atari 7800 was just a new and improved version of the original 2600 that needed the microprocessor to do all the dirty work of generating the video display. Thus, the Atari 7800 had more flexibility in WHAT it could display. It wasn't limited to tiled graphics. However, it wasted much of the CPU's time on just generating the video signals and much more memory was needed to keep track of everything. Nintendo basically came up with a scheme that was ideal for the amount of memory available at the time, allowing much more complicated levels and worlds than Atari. Believe it or not folks, the Nintendo and Atari 7800 used the same microprocessor chip!
Something that many of you may not know, is that Atari stood a chance with the 7800. It was originally slated to be released in 1984, not 1986!!. This would have been more than a year prior to the NES rather than significantly afterwards! What happened? A terrible economic crash of the video game industry in 1984 prevented Atari from releasing the 7800 to the store shelves. They instead concentrated on surviving with the 2600. The Nintendo came along and brought the video game industry back from the dead. Atari finally had the money to market and release the 7800, nearly 2 years after they were stockpiled for a 1984 release. The real reason that the Atari 7800 seemed technically inferior to the Nintendo, despite it being newer, was that it wasn't newer. It was actually designed, prototyped, and initially produced in the early 1980s. It would have blown away the video game market had it been released in 1984 as originally planned.
Now why did I go and give you this amazing history lesson? Because the historical significance of the Atari 7800 and the story behind it makes it even that much more of a collectors item. It's even more fun to pull it out and play with it if you know the story behind it, and it's not bad right now when you consider that you can get something with that much of a history for a few measly bucks on eBay. Who knows, maybe they will be hard to come by and worth hundreds of dollars in a few more decades!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mistrtonee
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Member: Tony Young
Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota
Reviews written: 43
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
B.S. Computer Engineering Purdue University 2002. Getting Married in October!
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