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Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

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Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#41

Post by musicale »

ryandrake wrote: post #26
jmount wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to the Internet/Web any sort of pause in software was anathema. Now AppleOS spins for 20 or 30 seconds on file security checks.

I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer from 40 years ago. How we have fallen!

Cartridges were probably pretty fast to load, but I don't expect that Commodore's floppy drives were particularly fast, even if they were much faster than cassette tape.

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#42

Post by musicale »

bitwize wrote: post #25
flashman wrote: post #7

> Speaking of game loading, it is surprisingly slow. You plug in a cartridge and turn on the 7800+, which takes a moment, and then there is a “Loading game” screen that takes 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game. This would have been nearly instantaneous on the original console. You could hit reset and be back at the title screen basically before you'd leaned back from pushing the button. It is very funny that…

It's a fair bit of engineering to design an interface to the original ROMs that can map them into the memory space of whatever modern hardware they're using. It's much easier to design an interface that allows you to bit-bang the data out of the ROM and snarf it into RAM. The loading game screen might've been the only way to keep costs below a certain threshold. And I have a 2600+. Games usually take ~2-3s to load on…

Interesting. I wonder why TFA said 15-20s? An optimized small Linux boot takes ~1s, so what is the delay from?

Still likely a lot faster than loading a PS1/2/3 game from optical disc. And miles ahead of installing a game on PS4/5 (and downloading gigabytes of patches.)

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#43

Post by ryandrake »

musicale wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer from 40 years ago. How we have fallen!

Cartridges were probably pretty fast to load, but I don't expect that Commodore's floppy drives were particularly fast, even if they were much faster than cassette tape.

No, you're right. None of the IO devices were very fast.

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#44

Post by musicale »

dylan604 wrote: post #28
cardanome wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not funny but completely insulting to the customer. The people selling those consoles should feel ashamed about this. It shows complete lack of care for the customer. Any emulator can load those cartridges near instantaneous. This does not show lack of optimization but lack of complete care. It probably boots up the whole operating system or something similarly insane. This is plastic rubbish preying on nostalg…

and yet they sell them like hot cakes. so either the customers don't care, or the customers don't even notice. younger players that are used to waiting for loading probably don't notice at all. only older people might even remember, but the younger kids won't believe them because the olds memory is probably not right.

I wish games still came with instruction manuals; then you would have something to read while you wait 15 minutes for the base game to install, followed by however long it takes to download and install 60GB worth of day 1 patches and updates.

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#45

Post by jhbadger »

guidedlight wrote: post #22

Whilst the Atari 2600+ and Atari 7800+ are faithful reproductions, the controller’s of this era are all kinds of horrible. They don’t even come close to a modern game controller, and these new systems would benefit from a modern interpretation rather than being a faithful rerelease.

Personally I liked joysticks and never understood why d-pads became the standard after the NES. They remind me of playing games with cursor keys and just seem less fun.

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#46

Post by dylan604 »

musicale wrote: post #44
dylan604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet they sell them like hot cakes. so either the customers don't care, or the customers don't even notice. younger players that are used to waiting for loading probably don't notice at all. only older people might even remember, but the younger kids won't believe them because the olds memory is probably not right.

I wish games still came with instruction manuals; then you would have something to read while you wait 15 minutes for the base game to install, followed by however long it takes to download and install 60GB worth of day 1 patches and updates.

I'm a casual gamer at most lenient definitions of my gaming time. I got tired of having an hour to kill, and half of that time being spent on updates. It pretty much was the final nail in the coffin for my interest in gaming.

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#47

Post by bitwize »

musicale wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer from 40 years ago. How we have fallen!

Cartridges were probably pretty fast to load, but I don't expect that Commodore's floppy drives were particularly fast, even if they were much faster than cassette tape.

Cartridges weren't "loaded" at all. They were ROM which was mapped directly into the CPU's accessible memory.

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#48

Post by tombert »

mattl wrote: post #37
tombert wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my MiSTer, and I don't regret buying it, but I'd be lying if I said it was "worth" it; software emulators for every system that the MiSTer runs already exist and have gotten very good. I bought my MiSTer mostly as a "how neat is that?" purchase. I think it's kind of cool to not only be able to run the games, but have a direct recreation of the hardware to do it. I wish I could regale you with tales of lower la…

Have a MiSTER but for Super Nintendo games I picked up the Analogue SuperNT.

Is there a substantial difference between the two?

Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?

#50

Post by jhbadger »

musicale wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer from 40 years ago. How we have fallen!

Cartridges were probably pretty fast to load, but I don't expect that Commodore's floppy drives were particularly fast, even if they were much faster than cassette tape.

I was an Apple ][ (well, Franklin Ace, technically) guy back in the day, but my high school used mostly C64s. The slow speed of Commodore floppies infuriated me. And they even had their own CPU inside the drive! By all rights, they should have been faster than Apple drives which were run by the computer's CPU.
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