No. The 7800 couldn't reproduce the sound! That is where the definite advantage to the NES comes into play!
No. The 7800 couldn't reproduce the sound! That is where the definite advantage to the NES comes into play!
Ah, but the 7800 allows for external sound chips to be used in the cart, while the NES doesn't (although the Famicom does).Originally Posted by guitargary75
Still, tossing sound chips into carts isn't cheap. 7800 games would be quite pricey if they all came with sound chips in them...
The NES didn't really have a need for one though. The 7800 did.
A Pokey chip wasn't expensive, but to a Tramiel era Atari, something that added $1-2 to the manufacturing cost of a game was unacceptable no matter what its benefit was.
It's too bad they just didn't integrate it with the hardware like it is on something such as the 5200, but legend has it that there wasn't any room in the casing for it so they decided to push it to cartridges since it was cheap and there was room for it. But then the crash happened and Jack Tramiel showed up.
Last edited by Leo_A; 09-18-2011 at 12:41 PM.
Did any 7800 games do this?
Commando and Ballblazer both had a Pokey sound chip (The same used by the Atari 5200, their line of 8 bit computers, and some of their coinops).
Other than those two, that capability went unused until recent years when the 7800 started to see some excellent homebrew development occur.
I heard that too, and that just seems plain silly. It makes no sense: if the mobo was too big with a sound chip included, why not just widen the case?
I think the real reason for not including one was that Atari took a look at the rapid development of sound chips (ie. TIA -> Pokey -> SID) and realized that whatever they tossed in there would sound like crap within a few years. They 7800 was supposed to be their flagship for years to come, so they wanted it's sound capabilities to be able to keep up with the times. Why spend a lot of expensive R&D developing and including a pricey and impressive sound chip in the 7800 when most programmers wouldn't always use it's capabilities? It'd be cheaper to force the devs to use custom chips if they wanted better audio, and it gives them more flexibility. And it's just like '80s Atari to give the developer a flexible platform to program on.
Of course it's possible to do a version of SMB3 on the 7800. If you can do arcade games like Tutankham or Defender or Ms Pac Man on the 2600, you can do an NES game like SMB3 on the 7800. Will it look and sound the same? No. I guess if depends if you're asking "can you make the exact same game" or "can you do a version of the game?"
I always liked the pre-crash arcade-to-home ports. They had their own charm and unique way of interpreting the game.
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Check out these protos, it proves that the 7800 was more than capable in the right hands. Missing in Action and Sirius looked pretty cool as does plutos, all third party. The 7800 would probably be capable of advanced graphics had they made a larger cartridge with more chips like Nintendo did. But again we'll never know. To say that the 7800 could never do mario 3 is just harsh, what if the NES failed in its first year with no cart expansions or whatnot and the 7800 succeeded, we'd probably be saying that the Nes could never have handled the games that it does now.
check these 7800 games out
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Can these extra chips on the cart consist of a Mario 3 ROM, an NES on a chip, and a video pass though calbe a la the 32X? If so, then yes, it's completely possible.
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First of all, a Pokey chip was already in existence and was extremely cheap. It was already being used in all their 8 bit computers, the Atari 5200, and many of their arcade cabinets. It wasn't expensive and there was nothing to develop, so it blows that theory away as to why it wasn't included. And it would be far more expensive (Not cheaper) for every cartridge to have a custom sound chip. And if everything needed, at a minimum, the already existing Pokey for decent audio, why not just include it in the console itself?
Atari was as focused on things like the outward appearance of their hardware as they were things like fuctionality. I suspect they designed and approved a casing for the hardware and manufactured the expensive dies (Or whatever the term is, somehow that doesn't sound right) necessary for production of the console casing, and discovered afterwards that they wouldn't have the space to integrate a Pokey into it. Or perhaps they had to revise the internal hardware after the casing had already been designed and the expensive production tooling having been created, and eliminated the Pokey for room knowing it would be cheap to just have on the cartridges, rather than scrap the production tooling.
After all, by 1984, Atari and the industry as a whole were already in big trouble. Something like eliminating a sound chip, knowing that it would be cheap to include in games where it was necessary and that developers could scrape along with 2600 quality audio in many cases, just to save having to scrap the tooling for the casing of the console, sounds very much like Atari to me. We're talking about a company that was routinely making foolish mistakes that we've long been puzzled about.
Producing a console casing and tooling up to produce it before realizing what the hardware designers had created wouldn't fit within it's confines, sounds very "Atarish" to me. It also sounds very much like an urban legend, so I wouldn't be surprised at all that it wasn't true.
Last edited by Leo_A; 12-11-2009 at 08:23 PM.
They Pokey chip wasn't included because of backwards compatibility with the Atari 2600, from what I remember. There's an audio interview with the guys who formed GCC and designed the 7800 somewhere on this site, but I can't seem to find it.
I'd be interested if you could locate that, I'm unsure why inclusion of a Pokey would affect 2600 compatibility as long as the necessary 2600 hardware was also still present (Such as the TIA). But if someone from GCC says it, it has to be true since they knew what they were doing back then better than most anyone else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIAgk...eature=related
MSX hack of something similar to SMB3. MSX 1 uses the same video chip as the Coleco. If the Coleco/MSX can do this pirate game, then the 7800 should be able to do at least something comparable, if not better. While I don't think the 7800 could pull off SMB3 to the tee, that's not to say it couldn't do a "version" of it. Half/low vertical res (a turn off for me), but maybe some improvements else where. A pokey chip on the cart would be nice.
Also, the mapper in SMB3 isn't really some magical chip that beefs up the NES. The samples in the music is just native NES DPCM. And the mapper mostly is used for the rom space. Mapper for rom space are very common. It doesn't all anymore sprites or colors or such to the game.
Oh, come on.
This hack looks awful, sounds awful and (probably) plays awful. Also, watching the speedrun video, it's only 2 worlds. I suppose if the question was whether the 7800 could handle this, then sure. But the spirit of the discussion is whether it could handle the real thing or a very close facsimile. This hack is nowhere near close to the real thing.
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That is very impressive for the MSX since it does not have hardware support for smooth scrolling, at least in the horizontal.
The 7800 is a great machine, cabable of doing amazing arcade ports. Scrolling platform titles was something that it was never really designed to do well, and I doubt that a "decent" version could ever be done. With that being said, I am sure someone will try, for that I wish the programmer or programmers luck.
I agree that that a "quality port" is in question. I am sure that it could be done, but how good could it be really?
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Then you miss the whole point I was trying to make. If the MSX 1 (the original, which is basically just a Coleco system) can pull *that* off, surely the 7800 could do much better. Or do you think the 7800 is just comparable to the Coleco/MSX 1 ?
If I remember correctly, the 7800 features the same CPU as the 5200. The difference is the 7800 has less RAM, but a more powerful graphics chip. Based on those specs, how much better was the 7800 than the 5200, XEGS, or ColecoVision?
Also, wasn't there a laser disc add-on in the works for the 7800? I wonder if that would've boosted its performance at all.
Anyway, going by early games only, the graphics in NES games still look better than 7800 games. To me, the NES's higher resolution makes a huge difference. I hate the 7800's low-res, stretched out pixels. Compare games like Pro Wrestling, Mach Rider, Kung Fu, Excitebike, Galaga, etc. to the equivalent 7800 games. Even Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. look a bit better on the NES.
Yeah, same here. Another reason why I don't care for C64 stuff too (the "fat" pixel look).
No...I got your point. What I'm suggesting is that while a 7800 version would undoubtedly be much better than that pirate, I don't think it would be anywhere near the quality of the actual NES version.
We've already established how poorly the 7800 handles scrolling, but even overcoming that, it seems really unlikely to me that a 7800 version of SMB3 would be on the same level as the real thing.
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