Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a substantial difference between the two?
One plays physical games
I know that, but from a gameplay perspective can you tell much of a difference?
Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#52Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#53> 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…
If you were to write a program to make the Atari 2600 copy its own ROM--not that A) it had the RAM and B) it ever had a need, it would very roughly take about 15-20 cycles per byte, and 15-20 more cycles per 256 bytes for looping. Heavily depends on the code used to copy it, probably less if optimized.
The 6507 is a 1Mhz cpu, and again very roughly about 64,000 microseconds to copy 4096 bytes, or twice as many to copy 8192 bytes. Under a second on the original hardware.
So even 2-3 seconds is a long time. Is the embedded OS on the 2600+ bit-banging the ROM via GPIO pins? Is it a Python script doing that from userspace (lol maybe something recycled from a ROM dumper's toolkit posted on some random forum in the early 00's)? Not bad for a script to do that in 2-3 seconds to be honest if that's what it is.
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#54What Atari games are actually worth playing?
Here are the ones that stood the test of time for me:
Joystick games
- Adventure
- Frogger
- Frogs and Flies
- Surround (fun with 2 player)
- Turmoil
- Joust
- Dragonfire
- Pitfall and Pitfall II
- Stampede (really good Activision game)
- Towering Inferno
- Space War (think Asteroids but 2 player combat)
- Combat (the brown levels with ricochet bullets are super fun)
Paddle games
- Astroblast (can use joystick but 10x better with paddles)
- Video Olympics (this is a 70s pong console in Atari cart form and has 4 player games)
- Warlords (fun with multiplayer)
Supercharger games
- Dragonstomper (if you like RPGs)
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#55> 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…
The games had encryption that delayed start up.
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#56> 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…
> 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game Hmm, this is disappointing and something that they should really fix. As I understand it, the whole advantage of ROM cartridges on Atari-like systems is that no loading is required - the games run directly off the cartridge ROM. Enthusiast emulation systems can boot in a couple of seconds. The Nintendo Switch cartridges are more like a read-only file system, but games stil…
In the classic cartridge systems, you plug in the cartridge, and the data is directly accessible on the bus of the system. Some milliseconds to initialize hardware, and the game can start.
What they're doing here is dumping the cartridge, and loading it into an emulator. That, and probably the boot of whatever OS the device is running, is the "load time" for the game.
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
It's not clear if we're talking consistently about the sizes. If 15-20s is referring to a 7800 cartridge that's up to 48kb, that makes sense. This subthread is talking about 2600 games up to 4kb.
Also it's not clear how the console reads cartridges with bankswitching hardware. It can't really know if a cart has that. So it may just have to try all the common schemes on every cart, and read through the entire ROM space multiple times in case anything changed. That would account for the timing.
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#58> 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…
I assume this whole thing is Linux based? (Not that Linux is bad, just it does take a bit of time to boot.)
Re: Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
#59> 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…
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.
Your memory is faulty.
Let's take a trip back to 1992.
In 1992, unless you were rich you had a $2,000 386SX-33 sourced from parts out of the back of Computer Shopper magazine.
Here is a 386SX-33 running Windows 3.1 (1992) launching WordPerfect for Windows 5.2 (1992) a perfect representation of what a normal, typical, average person in 1992 would have as a PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYjrX2P4iY4
WordPerfect takes 45 seconds just to start. You dropped $350 on an ATI Wonder that has hardware acceleration of Windows 3.1 video calls just to get smooth window moving and resizing.
What about a 486? Lol you didn't have a 486, those were for CAD workstations and servers. You had a 386.
Three years later, lusting after Windows 95 and frustrated with slow performance, you shell out ANOTHER $2,000 on a Pentium 75 with 8MB of ram and a 528MB hard drive.
Sure, with the lower FSB that means you're less than half the performance of a Pentium 133 despite having 56% the clock, but you're a regular person with regular person money.
Windows 95 takes over a minute to boot, Space Cadet Pinball takes 15 seconds to launch, and you buy City Streets for Windows which takes 3-5 seconds to redraw its viewport every single time you reposition the map.
From the day you could first afford a PC you chased upgrades: more ram, a hard drive with a higher rotational speed and bigger cache, holy crap they can do 3d in hardware now, can I afford a 256kB COAST module?
Then one day, in about 2011-2012 that all stops. Sandy Bridge. SSDs. Now you only upgrade every 4-6 years: when performance doubles or windows stops supporting your CPU or you drop your laptop and break it.