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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?

#61

Post by rbanffy »

bitwize wrote: post #27
rbanffy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they can run from cartridges, so if you have one loaded with homebrew games, they should work. Most Atari 2600 games had no copy protection.

Flashcarts don't work unless you devote the entire flash to a single ROM (some of them can do this). This is because the console snarfs the entire contents of the ROM into RAM first, rather than mapping the ROM directly into the CPU's memory space like the original consoles did. So the bank-switching tricks that flashcarts use to provide multiple ROM options on original hardware don't work on these. This is also why…

> This is because the console snarfs the entire contents of the ROM into RAM first

The console itself should never know the cart is not a simple ROM with some bank-switching logic. Since Flash (or an SD card) isn't ROM, the ROM image will always be loaded into the cartridge RAM by the microcontroller software. There were many different strategies back then, so the ROM would need to have a file attached telling the on-cartridge microcontroller how bank switching worked on that title.

All you'd need is some UI to make it easier to switch between titles.

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

#62

Post by rbanffy »

epcoa wrote: post #36
rbanffy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My all-time favorites would be Missile Command, Megamania (2600), Galaga (7800), Centipede (7800), Ms Pac Man (7800). I don't have a 7800 on hand, and haven't started up my XEGS in some time, so I might remember more titles.

Playing home arcade ports doesn’t have much appeal to me except for nostalgia when you can just as easily emulate the “real thing”. Activision and Imagic titles at least have some originality. River Raid(s), Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, Demon Attack, Alien Brigade, etc.

I'm not a gamer myself - I enjoy using these machines as computers, programming them and learning the different techniques people used back then. I was employed to write educational software for Apple IIs in the mid 80's, and it's interesting how the same tricks have different implementations across various platforms.

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

#63

Post by wkat4242 »

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.

Not sure about the commodore but atari's floppy drive was connected via a 19200 bps serial connection so even for those days it was really slow.

Both atari 8 bit and commodore had a disk drive with a trimmed down 6502 in it so you basically bought a second computer. This is why the drives cost more than the computer itself.

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

#64

Post by ben7799 »

snakeyjake wrote: post #59
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.

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 ta…

This guy gets it!

And even that 386 was hot stuff in 1992. I was in high school then and stuck with a 286 with 16-color graphics and like a 40mb hard drive or something. We got a 486 right around Christmas 1993 I think, which was a mind blowing upgrade at the time. 256 colors in DOS video games and Windows could display 16k colors. CD-ROMs that had little postage stamp videos and we got one of those CD-ROM encyclopedias.

We had like 286 class machines in most of the lab my senior year of High school in 1994 with amber displays and we learned Turbo Pascal on them. The school had a handful of 486s but they were setup to run exactly the same software as the 286s, no Windows for us. They must have waited till they replaced everything to start using Windows.

In spring 1995 I spent like $250 (or was it $500?) of my summer job earnings on 4MB RAM for our 486 to get Doom to run better. The upgrade struggle was real. That was a ton of money for me and my parents thought I was absolutely nuts but eventually gave in.

When I went to college I spent essentially my entire summer's earnings on my first laptop, it was close to $4k back then and it was not exactly great!

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

#65

Post by dole »

wkat4242 wrote: post #63
musicale wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure about the commodore but atari's floppy drive was connected via a 19200 bps serial connection so even for those days it was really slow. Both atari 8 bit and commodore had a disk drive with a trimmed down 6502 in it so you basically bought a second computer. This is why the drives cost more than the computer itself.

The Commodore serial bus ran at 3200bps, the 1541 disk drive maxed out around 400bps stock.

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

#66

Post by wkat4242 »

dole wrote: post #65
wkat4242 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the commodore but atari's floppy drive was connected via a 19200 bps serial connection so even for those days it was really slow. Both atari 8 bit and commodore had a disk drive with a trimmed down 6502 in it so you basically bought a second computer. This is why the drives cost more than the computer itself.

The Commodore serial bus ran at 3200bps, the 1541 disk drive maxed out around 400bps stock.

Wow that's hardly faster than the tape recorder :O

So the atari was relatively fast! I never knew. I didn't have the disk drive until I was much older.

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

#67

Post by snvzz »

tombert wrote: post #51
mattl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One plays physical games

I know that, but from a gameplay perspective can you tell much of a difference?

miSTer is an open source ecosystem with open source cores.

The SuperNT uses a proprietary core from Analogue.

I fully prefer an open source core I can fix/modify, YMMV.

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

#68

Post by musicale »

bitwize wrote: post #47
musicale wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The loading part is inserting the cartridge. ;-)

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

#69

Post by bitwize »

rbanffy wrote: post #61
bitwize wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flashcarts don't work unless you devote the entire flash to a single ROM (some of them can do this). This is because the console snarfs the entire contents of the ROM into RAM first, rather than mapping the ROM directly into the CPU's memory space like the original consoles did. So the bank-switching tricks that flashcarts use to provide multiple ROM options on original hardware don't work on these. This is also why…

> This is because the console snarfs the entire contents of the ROM into RAM first The console itself should never know the cart is not a simple ROM with some bank-switching logic. Since Flash (or an SD card) isn't ROM, the ROM image will always be loaded into the cartridge RAM by the microcontroller software. There were many different strategies back then, so the ROM would need to have a file attached telling the on…

Most flashcarts have a UI that is shown on first boot; when a game is selected, the ROM for that game is loaded into the flashcart RAM, the appropriate bank switching or mapping logic emulated, the ROM banks remapped into the console address space replacing the UI code, and the console reset or told to jump to boot the game.

This doesn't work on the Atari 2600+ and 7800+ because those systems attempt to load the entire game ROM into their own RAM on boot and run the game from there. You might get the UI, but unlike in the actual hardware there is no rereading of the ROM directly. It's all done from what the system captured into RAM on first boot. So if a new game were to be loaded into that address space, the modern console wouldn't see it.

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

#70

Post by musicale »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
musicale wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course I'm ignoring any needed system or firmware updates. For a while Sony's updates seemed magically synchronized to my gaming schedule.

Or try being an online gamer, buying a new game or expansion, installing the game and all of its update patches, and finding that there is a multi-hour queue to log on and actually play the game.

Fortunately remote play allows you to boot up your console remotely from your smartphone, install any updates, and get into the login queue. So when you get home you can log on and play for 5 minutes before the servers shut down for maintenance.

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