WI: Atari releases the 7800 in 1984?

[Drunkrobot]

In the early '80s, Atari was reigning supreme in the console market, with their 2600 reaching its twilight years but boasting a vast library of games. Even with the founding of Activision and the startup of competitors like Mattel's Intellivision, it seemed that the only way for Atari was up, and that between the release of a new console and the sale of some huge system selling games, the crown was going to stay on Atari's head.

However, they managed an impressive chain of missteps in a very short space of time. The planned successor the the 2600, the 5200, was a flop with its ungainly controller and inability to play 2600 games without a peripheral (weirdly, its main competitor, the Colecovision, had the exact same thing. As the Nerd once put so eloquently, that's like Sony announcing a disk drive that can play Xbox games for the Playstation). There was an utter lack of quality control on its games, and no game review establishment to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the final nails in the coffin where a few rushed, high-profile games that failed to deliver on Atari's own hype, like the port of Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. By 1983, consumers in America simply no longer trusted the home console market, and they certainly didn't trust Atari. Atari, partnering up with General Computers, tried to fix this, with the announcement of the Atari 7800 in 1984, to be released that year.

One rather significant thing blocked them from making that deadline. Warner, the company that owned Atari, sold it to Jack Tramiel, the guy who founded Commodore. The bought out portions of Atari was to undergo an 'evaluation process', during which progress on all projects was to be halted. The 7800 was eventually released, in 1986, but by then the home console market had a new king, one that almost nobody back in 1984 could have predicted would conquer every home in America, Nintendo. The 7800 was left in the Nintendo Entertainment System's, and even the Sega Master System's dust, and one more console would be made in Atari's name, the Jaguar, before Atari went full third party.

Let's say Atari managed to at least get a few things right. Say they hit a home run with Pac-Man for the 2600, they win Christmas 1982 with an E.T. given a little more time to be developed, they set up some kind of quality control, just enough to convince Warner that holding on to Atari would be a good idea. The 7800 hits selves in 1984, a full year before Nintendo's Famicom crosses the Pacific. On one hand, the 7800 hundred was a solid system for 1984, and if nothing else had complete backwards compatibility with 2600 controllers and cartridges. On the other, home consoles were still toxic to customers and even retailers, and Sega's Dreamcast proves that even a good system can be spoiled if its parent company ruins its own reputation. How would Nintendo perform in America, if Atari still has some semblance of standing? Would one quickly beat down the other, or would the dynamic evolve into something similar between Nintendo and Sega, or Sony and Microsoft, an ongoing multigenerational 'console war'?

 

[Kalvan]

MARIA has some excellent sprite generation capabilities, but it needs a faster CPU to take full advantage of it, either another chip to handle scrolling (preferably with a bitmap or tile modes) or 16k more System RAM, and something better than TIA to handle the sound.

I would have used a 65C02 with SALLY instructions clocked to 3.57MHz (3.38 MHz in PAL and SECAM markets) with 16K extra RAM and either an AMY or a QuadPOKEY. Either that, or taken Nintendo up on its offer and then simply add the Ricoh RP2C02/20C7 to the motherboard. If I wanted to be particularly farsighted, I'd add a FREDDIE, too, obviating the need for future memory mapping chips when games inevitably exceed 64KB in size.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxG6qdVpNpg

 

[Nivek]

Why not better, rather releasing the distrasous 5600, they skyp directly to 7800(here 5600) and pushed both Backward compatibilty and new graphics better. see nerd video about 5600, was barely a jump, that if you can make the system work.

 

[Sigma7]

Read up on the 2600's Pac-Man port for the reason '2600 Pac-Man is a home run' isn't a possibility. There was literally no way to make a good Pac-Man for the 2600. The guys who were tasked with making it TOLD the honchos as much and even showed them the 2600 port that went to market just to make the point clear.

Atari execs weren't thinking about 'This thing is crap and cannot be made 'better'.'. They were thinking "We can put out ANYTHING for the 2600 and people will buy it.".

They were so wrong, it just about killed the company.

The best scenario for a successful 7800 in 1984 is this:

Either the Warner idiots or Jack Trameil STOP MAKING 2600's AND SHIFT ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCES TO PROMOTION, DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING OF THE 7800.

It's that simple.

The dumbest thing Trameil did when he bought Atari was shelve the 7800 and continue to sell 2600's for 50 bucks a pop. He undercut his own market with a cheap, inferior product that was already obsolete, while he had a perfectly viable replacement machine on the shelf.

If Trameil terminates the 2600 line completely and shifts all of Atari's resources into the manufacture and promotion of the 7800 (perhaps with a few improvements, like a corrected Super System controller, or a Japanese style control pad, featuring more buttons for more complex games) and production of nothing but 7800 games (with an emphasis on quality over quantity of titles from the company label), the 7800 would have been a good machine to win back the consumer and a machine that could have held it's own against both Sega and Nintendo's future moves into the North American and European markets.

Full release of the 7800 in 1984 isn't enough to save Atari or make the 7800 a viable system; a total termination of all things 2600 MUST BE part of Atari's market strategy from January 1, 1984 on.

The 7800 could probably be built in a more compact package, thus reducing production costs further, and, unlike the Super System, 2600 owners aren't sitting on a pile of games they can't play on the new machine without a special peripheral; they can scrap the old machine, keep their games and play them on the new machine, along with new games of a more sophisticated nature.

Simply put, Atari has to totally commit to the 7800 as the machine that brings them back from the dead, rather than clinging to the past while merely gazing at the future right there and then: 1984.

MARIA has some excellent sprite generation capabilities, but it needs a faster CPU to take full advantage of it, either another chip to handle scrolling (preferably with a bitmap or tile modes) or 16k more System RAM, and something better than TIA to handle the sound.

I would have used a 65C02 with SALLY instructions clocked to 3.57MHz (3.38 MHz in PAL and SECAM markets) with 16K extra RAM and either an AMY or a QuadPOKEY. Either that, or taken Nintendo up on its offer and then simply add the Ricoh RP2C02/20C7 to the motherboard. If I wanted to be particularly farsighted, I'd add a FREDDIE, too, obviating the need for future memory mapping chips when games inevitably exceed 64KB in size.

These would make some excellent modifications to the overall machine too.

I'd go with the WDC65SC02 (if it's available in 1984) else the WDC65C02 for the CPU and FREDDIE on board for bank switching to increase game size. If anybody who created AMY was retained, sure, put her on the board too, but, unless the guys who developed it and know how to make her sing are there to teach developers how to do so, QuadPOKEY is probably the way to go.

 

[Drunkrobot]

Read up on the 2600's Pac-Man port for the reason '2600 Pac-Man is a home run' isn't a possibility. There was literally no way to make a good Pac-Man for the 2600. The guys who were tasked with making it TOLD the honchos as much and even showed them the 2600 port that went to market just to make the point clear.

For your consideration: Ms. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. While it's still a shadow of the arcade version, it is still much closer to the original than the first port. Same hardware, just better used.

 

[marathag]

They should have just put out a simplified 8bit 400 with a 2600 emulator, without the keyboard when the the 1200XL came out in 1983. No idea why anyone thought the 5200 would sell.

That cheaper to build 400 would be the next game machine, and would be able to tap into the existing 8 bit cartridge library for games.


Hopefully this would let Atari be in the Black and keep the Stock price up, preventing Tramiel from buying in, while letting Jay Miner do at Atari, what would become the Amiga

 

[Nivek]

For your consideration: Ms. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. While it's still a shadow of the arcade version, it is still much closer to the original than the first port. Same hardware, just better used.

Yeah, the issue was that Pac-man like ET later were infamosly rushed for christmas and both game pay for it heavily(plus ET they've not idead what they were doing), have they given time, pac-man would have been decent, the killer app they wanted but nope.

Still i defend my point, skip 5200, push 7800 and have good against Famicom

 

[voss749]

Yeah, the issue was that Pac-man like ET later were infamosly rushed for christmas and both game pay for it heavily(plus ET they've not idead what they were doing), have they given time, pac-man would have been decent, the killer app they wanted but nope.

Still i defend my point, skip 5200, push 7800 and have good against Famicom

Famicom may still be a market leader BUT with dozens of 7800 games available, 7800 would be a strong established console instead of latecomer. Also such cool ideas as the high score cartridge(which allowed for saved games) would have likely been integrated into later versions.

 

[martyg]

Just some corrections to some inaccurate history you guys are trying to build an alternate timeline from:

1) Atari (Atari Inc.) wasn't sold to Jack Tramiel. He bought the Consumer Division assets from Warner, and all the rest of Atari Inc. was immediately renamed to Atari Games Inc. Jack folded the assets into his company TTL which he in turn renamed to Atari Corp. He then began hiring some people over to Atari Corp. from Atari Inc./Atari Games Inc., but the bulk were largely new hires and ex-Commodore people. Even then, most of the people hired over to Corp. were gone by the end of the year or early '86. Either way, Atari Corp. was a brand new company. Not a continuation of the previous one.

2) The 7800 was designed by a company called GCC, not Atari. GCC's contract was with Warner, not Atari. It didn't come with the Consumer Division assets purchase. They were still owed money for the development of MARIA and the 10 launch titles, and wanted Warner to pay. Jack, who still planned to release the 7800 that Christmas expected the same. Warner wanted Jack to pay if he wanted the 7800. So began on again/off again negotiations that lasted until spring '85 when Jack relinquished and paid GCC for the MARIA development. That's what had "delayed the 7800." They then wrapped up payment for the 10 launch titles by early summer.

3) There was in no way a "new king" at the time the 7800 was reintroduced in January '86. Nintendo had only done a single test marketing in the New York area that Christmas (which by accounts didn't go that great). Nintendo didn't become king until the national release/Christmas '86 season.

4) The SMS was actually third in US sales, behind the 7800. Both the 7800 and SMS were of course far behind the NES by the late 80s.

5) They could not have "skipped the 5200 to the 7800." The 7800 was designed by GCC in response to the 5200.

6) Pac-Man was not rushed. That's a complete myth. Nor did the guy tasked with it show it to anyone and say it couldn't be done. The full story behind its development and any challenges is here (including direct answers from the developer Tod Frye):

http://ataribook.com/book/what-are-the-real-facts-behind-pac-mans-development/

Ms. Pac-Man is not the same hardware better used btw. It's a single player game and uses a larger ROM. The original Pac-Man was done during a time when only 4K carts were available, and a two player game (hence having to use up limited resources to track two mazes, something the new 4K homebrew doesn't have to do).