WI the video game crash of the 80's never happened?

How about something along the lines of a "5200" only "sequel" to Chrystal Castles starring Bentley Bear and featuring game play that is a cross between Zelda, Dark Towers, Solstice, and the NES version of Willow, on an Isometric playfield, making full use of the analog joystick.

Next, let's try greatly expanding 720 into a full-blown storyline driven game about the career of you, an amateur and later pro skateboarder on the rise on the park tour circuit. If we possibly can, let's see if we can get some feedback (and possibly an endorsement, but only if he really likes it) on this version of the game by a then young, up and coming skateboarder named Tony Hawk.

Finally, let's see if we can get Namco's permision for a Pole Position III featuring Roadie and Wheels from the cartoon for the "10400" by whatever name it would take.

Any other ideas?

Crystal Castles was a great game and a series of games featuring Bentley Bear could potentially provide such a franchise, especially if the games evolve into what you described; a Zelda/Solstice/Towers type of game series.

Good call there.

A couple of other potential franchises would be Marble Madness and Gauntlet.

Gauntlet could be especially lucrative with it's multi-player dynamics, sword and sorcery setting and potential as a basis for larger, more complex RPG style games later on while Marble Madness was just one of the most challenging and addictive games I'd ever played when it came out.
 
Something else I thought of (because I hate it when threads like this die) is what if Magnavox had purchased Coleco's electronics division after the failure of the Adam?

The engineers who worked on the Colecovision weren't very enthusiastic about the shift of focus from console to computer.

Magnavox was never quite able to get the Odyssey series to pan out, but with Colececo getting out of the business, with millions of units sold (and a bunch of disgruntled engineers with experience with the system shortly to be looking for new jobs) picking up the Colecovision (and it's developers) could have been a perfect way to get into the market to stay.
 
The ColecoVision had an expansion slot, and the third planned expansion (the Super Game Module) would have expanded the power of the system. Instead, they turned that third expansion into the Adam.

Theoretically, one could have kept increasing the power of the ColecoVision, allowing it to be at the top of the market without the consumer having to buy a brand new system each time. However, I suspect that approach might be less feasible than designing a more powerful system as an integrated whole.

What if an executive at Coleco decided "Forget the idea of being a computer. Mom and Dad won't be interested in using the same system as their kids. Let's focus on being the best home video game system." Even back then, you could see games being designed for computers that took advantage of that medium (computer RPGs, for example). Action games were better suited for home video game systems.
 
The ColecoVision had an expansion slot, and the third planned expansion (the Super Game Module) would have expanded the power of the system. Instead, they turned that third expansion into the Adam.

Theoretically, one could have kept increasing the power of the ColecoVision, allowing it to be at the top of the market without the consumer having to buy a brand new system each time. However, I suspect that approach might be less feasible than designing a more powerful system as an integrated whole.

Hits a brick wall, eventually. While the memory can be expanded as much as people are willing to pay, the core's still am 8/16 bit, Z80 CPU.

The Super Game Module would have used an RCA CED and "game wafers" for (presumably) larger and more complex games (depending on how much additional memory they loaded it with. The ColecoVision came with 16k of VRAM with a capacity for cartridges of up to 32k RAM, total working memory of 48k.

About as high as would be practical, for an 8/16 system would be 128k max, and that would require a memory management chip for bank switching.

In short, the games can get bigger and faster and probably sell a good number of systems, but only to a certain point. After a 128k expansion is released, the system can't get bigger without upgrading the CPU.

At that point it needs a replacement, but this brings us to a solution within your very post...

What if an executive at Coleco decided "Forget the idea of being a computer. Mom and Dad won't be interested in using the same system as their kids. Let's focus on being the best home video game system." Even back then, you could see games being designed for computers that took advantage of that medium (computer RPGs, for example). Action games were better suited for home video game systems.

Yes, what if Coleco stays out of the home computer market altogether and concentrates on making the best console, very easy to do in a market where Atari is imploding and about to be bought by Jack Tramiel who is about to mismanage the company into the grave.

Let's say Coleco stays with the original concept for Expansion Module 3:
The Super Game Module.

I don't know the exact details beyond the RCA CED and "game wafers", but a memory boost (perhaps to 64k, with a built in provision for another memory upgrade, to 128k, at a later date) could have been a good idea.

Ultimately, they're going to run into competition, at which point they've got to build a new system.

When Nintendo and Sega (and even a possibly revived Atari, depending on how things shake out) come calling in '85, '86 or so, they're sitting on a four year old machine that's reached it's limit to how far it can be upgraded.

At that point, they'd be just as well to develop a 16 bit system, that would probably look a lot like the Sega Genesis: Motorola 68000 CPU with a Z80 coprocessor and sub-systems (to enable the new machine to keep compatibility with what would likely be a rather extensive ColecoVision software library by then) much like Sega built to succeed the similarly Z80 equipped Master System.

If Coleco goes with something like a "Five Year Program", whereby the Coleco brass want a next generation machine ready to ship by about August 1987 (five years after the original ColecoVision was released) then they get to beat Sega to market by 2 years...but as in all things in the console wars, the implementation is everything.

If "Super ColecoVision" (we'll call it for our purposes) performs up to expectations (and at a reasonable price point) then it'd be a hit.

If it doesn't, it's the system that gets crushed by Genesis, even with it's massive ColecoVision library to fall back on.

Something I've contemplated, from time to time, is what if Jack Tramiel had abandoned the home computer market completely upon acquiring Atari in July of 1984 and, rather than cutting funding to Amiga Corp., bought the completed machine (that would become the Commodore Amiga) and then, rather than sell Amiga computers for the home, use it as a basis for a 16 bit console, with the computer being sold to game developers. That is to say, Atari goes back to it's game roots, focusing on the development, marketing and sales of their new 16 bit home video game console for the general public, with the computer being sold as more so a work station type of machine to developers.

Again, implementation is everything (and if history has taught us nothing else it's this: The minute Jack Tramiel bought Atari, he never implemented anything successfully again) so, no matter what, it may be a dead end.

Still, if Tramiel somehow manages to get it right, he's got a 16 bit console on store shelves (and in homes) across North America by late 1985, early 1986 at the latest, and makes the NES and Master System obsolete before they even hit those same shelves.

Either a focused Coleco or a re-dedicated (and well managed) Atari would definitely make the console wars much more interesting (and even more advanced, perhaps) than they were.
 
It would have been nice to see something like the ColecoVision expansion, released in 1984, with an initial selection of faithful reproductions of the latest popular arcade games. (For example, I remember their version of Donkey Kong lacking the entire pie factory level and the spring things from the elevator level. More memory could have allowed more levels to be programmed.)

Assuming the Atari-driven video game crash still happens, though, would retailers stock it, or would they want to get out of the video game market entirely? Obviously, the idea is preposterous now, but video games were still considered a fad, not an integral segment of the entertainment market. I'd still think abandonment would be more likely than a flight to quality scenario.

Separate idea: What if a cartridge-based game system was designed with a "cartridge within a cartridge" format? The NES game The Legend of Zelda offered something unique at the time: a second quest. Now imagine being able to take out a memory card-sized chip and replace it, adding a whole new world with the same fundamental game play. Expansions like that are easy to do in the computer game market. Could this design have been used in the home video game market? I doubt it would be possible until the third generation systems.
 
At that point, they'd be just as well to develop a 16 bit system, that would probably look a lot like the Sega Genesis: Motorola 68000 CPU with a Z80 coprocessor and sub-systems (to enable the new machine to keep compatibility with what would likely be a rather extensive ColecoVision software library by then) much like Sega built to succeed the similarly Z80 equipped Master System.

Frankly, I think it would have been more elegant (and more easily backward compatible) to use something like a console version of the MSX Turbo R specification (minus the Microsoft DOS/Basic/Windows ROM and Kanji Support, of course):

Proposed ColevoVision 2:



Processor: Zilog Z280 or ASCII R800 @7.16 MHz
  • The Z280 features all of the Z80's undocumented instructions, opcodes, and interactions and can execute an average of 1 instruction every other clock cycle (as opposed to the Z80 or 68000 which execute instructions once every 4 clock cycles), While the R800 has a piplelined RISC microarchetecture and can execute an average of 1 instruction every clock cycle, but doesn't support the undocumented Z80 instructions and opcodes.
RAM: 256 KB Minimum
  • Memory mapped (4 MB/slot max)
  • Additionally 16 KB (FS-A1ST) or 32 KB (FS-A1GT) of SRAM (battery-powered)
GPU: Texas Instruments/Yamaha V9970 Capable of displaying a maximum of 19,268 colors out of a pallette of 65536, featuring a maximum resolution of 512x480, and capable of displaying up to 96 sprites simultaneously on screen, with a maximum of 24 per scan line, but completely backward compatible with the TMS 9919 used in the original ColecoVision. 192 K VideoRAM

Sound chip: Yamaha YM2149 (PSG) (Fully Backward compatible with the General Instruments sound chip used in the Colecovision)

Sound chip: Yamaha YM2413 (OPLL) (MSX-Music) (Might replace this with a later chip from the OPN, OPL, or OPS series)

Sound chip: Ricoh RF5c68 PCM Sound Chip

Question: How many Colecovision games made use of the Z80's undocumented opcodes?
 
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As a die-hard fan of Atari, what exactly did Tramiel do wrong? I know he cut the 130XE off at the knees early on and the ST was not backward compatible, and I know Amiga fans think the ST was junk, but I recall the ST being a decent machine with a dedicated MIDI-enthusiast base.

What should he have done to keep Atari competitive? Aside from buy Amiga.
 
As a die-hard fan of Atari, what exactly did Tramiel do wrong? I know he cut the 130XE off at the knees early on and the ST was not backward compatible, and I know Amiga fans think the ST was junk, but I recall the ST being a decent machine with a dedicated MIDI-enthusiast base.

What should he have done to keep Atari competitive? Aside from buy Amiga.

Basically, it was even more of a pure parts-off-the-shelf design than the Apple II or IBM PC 5150. Not counting the TOS ROM, the only custom chip it had was was the nameless glue logic chip. Then he waited six years for a major chipset upgrade that actually had backward compatibility issues. With the Atari Falcon in 1992, he finally got it right, just in time to cancel it after only seven months.

They weren't even very good parts. The GPU was a General Instruments display adapter with only had 16 colors available out of 512. VTIA for the Atari XE was a better GPU, especially if they could have added the promised Blitter (that never arrived) and MARIA from the Atari 7800. The Sound Chip was the same one found in the Mattel Intellivision. All he needed to do to have a better one was to use the Quad POKEY, that or let the folks subcontracted out to work on AMY finish rather than threatening to sue them. The only thing he got right was the MIDI Ports and the Yamaha DAC.

And actually, at the time his guys were working on the ST, Atari was working on computer chipsets even better the Amiga. I'm basing an Atari ST in an upcoming thread in Alien Space Bats on one of those models, called Project GAZA.
 
It would have been nice to see something like the ColecoVision expansion, released in 1984, with an initial selection of faithful reproductions of the latest popular arcade games. (For example, I remember their version of Donkey Kong lacking the entire pie factory level and the spring things from the elevator level. More memory could have allowed more levels to be programmed.)

Pretty much, but it's the size of capacity of the cartridge ROM (or disk) that ultimately determines how big the game can be, not necessarily the RAM of the machine itself.

However, the Atari 8 bit home computer version of Donkey Kong had the pie level and the springs. I had an 800XL and those features were in there.

Why they didn't show up in other versions (they were in NES version, IIRC), I don't know.

Assuming the Atari-driven video game crash still happens, though, would retailers stock it, or would they want to get out of the video game market entirely? Obviously, the idea is preposterous now, but video games were still considered a fad, not an integral segment of the entertainment market. I'd still think abandonment would be more likely than a flight to quality scenario.

The Crash wasn't exactly Atari driven, it was way more complex than that. There were sick amounts of cut-rate software being churned out for every machine on the planet, coupled with piracy and Atari's own lackluster offerings as the industry leader all factored into it.

Separate idea: What if a cartridge-based game system was designed with a "cartridge within a cartridge" format? The NES game The Legend of Zelda offered something unique at the time: a second quest. Now imagine being able to take out a memory card-sized chip and replace it, adding a whole new world with the same fundamental game play. Expansions like that are easy to do in the computer game market. Could this design have been used in the home video game market? I doubt it would be possible until the third generation systems.

The best way to achieve this would have been a tweaking of the Famicom disk system: Rather than putting the games themselves on disks, keep the games on carts and make a low-cost 3.5 drive for game saves and other data, like add-on features or, in the case of sports games, stat updates and trades.

Frankly, I think it would have been more elegant (and more easily backward compatible) to use something like a console version of the MSX Turbo R specification (minus the Microsoft DOS/Basic/Windows ROM and Kanji Support, of course):

Proposed ColevoVision 2:



Processor: Zilog Z280 or ASCII R800 @7.16 MHz
  • The Z280 features all of the Z80's undocumented instructions, opcodes, and interactions and can execute an average of 1 instruction every other clock cycle (as opposed to the Z80 or 68000 which execute instructions once every 4 clock cycles), While the R800 has a piplelined RISC microarchetecture and can execute an average of 1 instruction every clock cycle, but doesn't support the undocumented Z80 instructions and opcodes.
RAM: 256 KB Minimum
  • Memory mapped (4 MB/slot max)
  • Additionally 16 KB (FS-A1ST) or 32 KB (FS-A1GT) of SRAM (battery-powered)
GPU: Texas Instruments/Yamaha V9970 Capable of displaying a maximum of 19,268 colors out of a pallette of 65536, featuring a maximum resolution of 512x480, and capable of displaying up to 96 sprites simultaneously on screen, with a maximum of 24 per scan line, but completely backward compatible with the TMS 9919 used in the original ColecoVision. 192 K VideoRAM

Sound chip: Yamaha YM2149 (PSG) (Fully Backward compatible with the General Instruments sound chip used in the Colecovision)

Sound chip: Yamaha YM2413 (OPLL) (MSX-Music) (Might replace this with a later chip from the OPN, OPL, or OPS series)

Sound chip: Ricoh RF5c68 PCM Sound Chip

Question: How many Colecovision games made use of the Z80's undocumented opcodes?

Or you could do that.:eek:

That would be a pretty nice machine right there and you've clearly put a lot of thought into it.

Nice hypothetical design. Kinda wish something like that had actually been produced.

As a die-hard fan of Atari, what exactly did Tramiel do wrong? I know he cut the 130XE off at the knees early on and the ST was not backward compatible, and I know Amiga fans think the ST was junk, but I recall the ST being a decent machine with a dedicated MIDI-enthusiast base.

What should he have done to keep Atari competitive? Aside from buy Amiga.

Support and promote the products he actually produced, rather than abandoning them after a few months, year or so, after they came out.

The guy was great at putting out new stuff...and then doing absolutely nothing with the new stuff.

Then, when it didn't sell, he'd put out...more new stuff.

Kalvan explains the ST fiasco quite well as one example and you cited the sad saga of the 130XE in your own post.

Just my opinion, but if the guy had a brain in his head, the Lynx would have been a 16 bit home console to compete with Sega's upcoming MegaDrive, rather than a color portable machine to compete with Nintendo's secondary prodcut (GameBoy).

Basically, it was even more of a pure parts-off-the-shelf design than the Apple II or IBM PC 5150. Not counting the TOS ROM, the only custom chip it had was was the nameless glue logic chip. Then he waited six years for a major chipset upgrade that actually had backward compatibility issues. With the Atari Falcon in 1992, he finally got it right, just in time to cancel it after only seven months.

They weren't even very good parts. The GPU was a General Instruments display adapter with only had 16 colors available out of 512. VTIA for the Atari XE was a better GPU, especially if they could have added the promised Blitter (that never arrived) and MARIA from the Atari 7800. The Sound Chip was the same one found in the Mattel Intellivision. All he needed to do to have a better one was to use the Quad POKEY, that or let the folks subcontracted out to work on AMY finish rather than threatening to sue them. The only thing he got right was the MIDI Ports and the Yamaha DAC.

And actually, at the time his guys were working on the ST, Atari was working on computer chipsets even better the Amiga. I'm basing an Atari ST in an upcoming thread in Alien Space Bats on one of those models, called Project GAZA.

If you get a chance, could you post up a quick run-down on Project GAZA?

I've seen bits and pieces here and there, but what I've seen and read amounts to what could best be described as a really cool rumor about what might have been.

Nice call on the AMY chip also.

Never let it be said that Tramiel couldn't find a way to shoot himself in the foot...even after he'd cut it off and thrown it away.

Atari under Tramiel can be summed up with one, simple gesture: facepalm.
 
Frankly, I'd say that the videogame stuff happening back in the early '80s between Atari, Coleco, Warner Brothers and Nintendo was a side show. (That said, Pac Man, ET, and the OTL 5200 fiasco didn't help matters.)

The real reason for the Great Crash was going on one segment over in home computers. There, Jack Tramiel and Commodore had purchased MOS Technology in 1979, and thereby effectively acquired a monopoly over the 6502, one of the three CPU pillars of the 8 bit era. (The others being the Intel 8080/8085/Zilog z80 and the Motorola 6800 series.) He did this so that he would be able to build computers at a per-unit cost of roughly $180 and sell them for a mere $650.

True, it didn't actually take it off the market (The founder of MOS had had the forsight to register all IP involving it in his own name, and jumped ship to form Western Design, and also second source license it to Ricoh, NEC, and Rockwell Semiconductor, among other companies) but it still set the development of followups back at least three years. Other computers using this processor included all Apples until the Lisa and Macintosh, the Atari 8-bit computers, the Ohio Scientific Challenger, Oric Atmos, and most importantly, the Acorn Atom/BBC Micro.

If Warner Brothers, Apple, and either Acorn, Oric, or Nintendo had had the foresight to each buy large portions of MOS before Commodore could swollow it all up, then MOS would have been able to develop the 65C802 and 65C816 much sooner and the 5200 could have been a 16 bit system. And with Commodore having to pay the same for the 6502 (and successors) as everyone else, there possibly wouldn't have been as much pressure on the video game part of the equation to be Warner Brothers' cash cow. Would that have saved it? I don't know, but it sure couldn't have hurt.

Another thing that would have helped would have been Atari not selling Atari Japan to Nakajima Manufacturing Company, aka Namco, but instead trying to encourage it to grow more on its own. The people employed over there would go on to create the likes of Galaxian, Galaga, Pac Man, and Rally X. If those (among other later Namco Games) had been created under the Atari fuji, there would have been much less excuse to louse them up, since it would have meant possibly the entire arcade unit would have jumped ship.

6502s were not the main reason Commodore could turn out cheaper computers than anybody else. They were a minor element of the cost, for everybody.

The reason was that Commodore had massive vertical integration of *all* the components - this was a long term strategy that Tramiel had been working on since the mid 70s, after losing the calculator wars to TI (who beat him by their own vertical integration), and also worked pretty hard on reducing chip and component count.... the Commodore 16/Plus-4 was the ultimate embodiment of that (a step too far in that direction, but it indicates the obsessiveness with which this was pursued).

Also unlike other MS Basic users (many other home computers, albeit not all), they didn't even pay royalties for that during the Tramiel era, since Tramiel had negotiated a one-off price back in the Commodore PET days, and he didn't upgrade the BASIC just adapt it to each new machine.
 
huh, I'd forgotten that I started this thread in the first place. Interesting discussion.

An interesting point that I wish to direct to the folks who think that a 16 bit system coming out as early as 84 is an automatic recipe for success.

Just because they are years ahead of OTL does not mean that it will work out better for the console makers. Keep in mind that historically, the most advanced consoles have actually usually done worse than their more dumbed down competitors. Lest we forget about the fact that Coleco Vision while an excellent console for its time did not gain the market share that the Atari did. Sega put out the Master System/Genesis two years ahead of the SNES, and yet Sega was the console manufacturer that lost the console wars of the 90's. Then there was the Jaguar and 3DO which were years ahead of their time and have been relegated to the dustbin of history. And finally today we have the PS3 which is the most advanced console out there right now, and yet holds the least marketshare compared to the less capable 360 and Wii.

I think the real question of the success of more advanced consoles earlier on comes down to two major issues. First, will this console be affordable? If it costs two or three times as much as the competitors, then forget about it. Parents will all too often say "video games are video games, I could save $200* and still get Timmy his video games this Christnmas." The second issue comes down to publishers, if a console is so far ahead of its time, will there be enough publishers out there who are willing and able to put out flashy new games for these flashy new systems? This awesome system with revolutionary graphics and capabilities won't sell too much if there are only like a dozen titles compared to the scores of titles for the other consoles.


*this is 80's dollars we're talking about here too
 
huh, I'd forgotten that I started this thread in the first place. Interesting discussion.

An interesting point that I wish to direct to the folks who think that a 16 bit system coming out as early as 84 is an automatic recipe for success.

Just because they are years ahead of OTL does not mean that it will work out better for the console makers. Keep in mind that historically, the most advanced consoles have actually usually done worse than their more dumbed down competitors. Lest we forget about the fact that Coleco Vision while an excellent console for its time did not gain the market share that the Atari did. Sega put out the Master System/Genesis two years ahead of the SNES, and yet Sega was the console manufacturer that lost the console wars of the 90's. Then there was the Jaguar and 3DO which were years ahead of their time and have been relegated to the dustbin of history. And finally today we have the PS3 which is the most advanced console out there right now, and yet holds the least marketshare compared to the less capable 360 and Wii.

I think the real question of the success of more advanced consoles earlier on comes down to two major issues. First, will this console be affordable? If it costs two or three times as much as the competitors, then forget about it. Parents will all too often say "video games are video games, I could save $200* and still get Timmy his video games this Christnmas." The second issue comes down to publishers, if a console is so far ahead of its time, will there be enough publishers out there who are willing and able to put out flashy new games for these flashy new systems? This awesome system with revolutionary graphics and capabilities won't sell too much if there are only like a dozen titles compared to the scores of titles for the other consoles.


*this is 80's dollars we're talking about here too

I never said it would be, I just think it would have saved Atari.

There's also no guarantee that if they did launch one, it'd succeed, even if it was well designed as Tramiel was horrible at implementation.

Here's the key in 1984:

You're looking at 1984 as though the video game industry were in the same condition as it were in 1987, that is to say, Atari would actually have competition.

They wouldn't.

By 1984, Coleco had stopped producing the Colecovision and the Adam had nearly bankrupted them. Magnavox wasn't making Odyssey 2s any more and Mattel was going nowhere with Intellivision.

Now, Nintendo had Famicom and Sega had (or was close to releasing the Sega 3000/Master System) in 1984...but they were only selling them in Japan.

The hypothetical Atari 16 bit system would have an automatic edge of entering a vacuum. Now, combine that with an Amiga/ST machine for game development ( two machines that were very easy to write for) and you have quality software to drive sales.

Granted, this goes against what we know about Tramiel's ability to properly implement or support anything after he bought Atari, but if he can get that much right, yeah, it'll start at $200 but, as market factors dictate, the price will go down as soon as the number of people willing to pay $200 for a game console have either bought in or passed.

So the price drops accordingly to a more affordable $150. Now, still assuming Atari games continues to produce solid in-house titles and the third party publishers are producing quality titles, considerably more systems will be selling as early as summer of 1985 and, depending on how many systems sell at $150 (and if some competition pops up by then) you might even see it selling for the magic price ($100) by Christmas 1985.

Without competition, chances are, the system, presuming everything goes smoothly (strong Atari support, strong third party support) a system launched in fall of 1984, would probably have a short period (3 to 4 months tops) selling at $200, meaning that (figuring an October 1984 release) by February of 1985, it's selling for $150 and then hitting the magic price around November 1985 juuuuust in time for the Christmas shopping season.

There's a common thread that you've overlooked in your assessment of Jaguar and 3DO that killed them: Both machines were a nightmare to write for. (The $600 opening price tag for the 3DO didn't help it any either...)

Machines that are tough to write for don't see a lot of software support. No support, no titles. No titles, no customers. Simple calculus of electronics.

Sega Genesis actually dominated the 16 bit market, holding a steady 55% of the market from 1991 to 1994. (SNES's market share by 1994: 34%. Nintendo was actually losing that war.)

Then Sega launched Saturn...and it had a similar problem as Jaguar and 3DO in that it was difficult to write for. (Not the nightmare Jaguar or 3DO were, but difficult none the less.)

Difficult to write for, as we all know, equals lack of titles, which leads to...

Sony didn't make things any easy by essentially price dumping the original PlayStation on the market. Sony, with it's consumer electronic empire to undercut initial losses taken for selling PS for cheaper than Saturn could basically wait it out until Sega (with a flawed machine and no products outside the video game industry to prop them up during the hard times) pulled the machine.

N64 wasn't competition for the PlayStation, really, thus giving PlayStation a vacuum to fill for a looooong time while Sega crumbled and Nintendo fumbled towards a new solution.

You also mention PS3 and that system's even easier to ID the demise of than anything that came before it:

Sony PlayStation3: We've got Blu-ray! We've got HD! We've got a hard drvie! We've got on-line play! (but this new $600 plus system won't play any of the massive glut of PS2 games, making our customers software libraries utterly useless.)

Sony left the door open and Microsoft (with the BIG edges of having exclusivity to the Halo franchise and limited exclusivity deals with Lucas Arts) to run roughshod over them with XBox. (Regardless of the "Red Ring of Death".)

Also came at the inopportune moment that Nintendo developed Wii, which is a phenomenon I simply can't explain, but more power to them!

So, while you are correct that high tech doesn't always mean world beater, you have to consider that it ain't the price tag that kills systems.

It's the implementation.

My assessment stands:

If Tramiel had stayed with the Amiga, used it as the basis for a 16 bit console while selling computers only to dedicated software producers and thrown all in on the console and a strong Atari Games division, in 1984, he could have put a lock on the market for quite some time.

I assure you, even without competition, that price tag drops on it's own due to the reality of all consumer electronic markets: You sell it for what you can get for it at release (And with consoles, the lower the initial price, the better). When it stops selling at that price, you lower it and sell it as long as you can at the next price, then you settle into your bottom line price for the rest of the production run.

NES and Genesis followed a similar trajectory:

NES at lauch: $200 (in spring of 1986).

Sega Genesis at launch: $189, which actually came in under projection. (in fall of 1989)

NES by the end of spring 1987: $150.

Genesis by fall 1990: $150.

NES by spring 1988: $100.

Genesis by fall 1991: $100.

Same rough time line for our hypothetical 16 bits, economic factors actually being far more favorable in 1984-1987 than 1988 into the early 90's, the odds of the hypothetical Atari doing monster business even at $200-$150-$100 would actually be better than NES and Genesis actually did OTL, which was impressive enough.

Still, the big POD is Tramiel being capable of making a good business decision after buying Atari...and that's a long shot, sadly, as OTL has ample evidence to show.:(
 
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Re: PS3's won't play PS2 Games...
The original Japanese/U.S versions of the Playstation 3 console could play Playstation 2 software in hardware (in short, they effectively had Playstation 2 hardware fitted to the motherboard, notably the Emotion Engine processor from the PS2), while the original 60Gb European version, though not having the Emotion Engine fitted, could play most PS2 games via software emulation...
However, these features were deleted on the 40Gb version, along with the internal multi-format memory card reader, & 2 USB ports to save production costs, as reportedly, Sony was losing money on every Playstation 3 sold at the time, (a study at the time in the U.K, costed the PS3's components, and found that Sony was effectively making a £400 pound loss, on each unit sold in the U.K, as they concluded that the true sale price of the PS3 in the U.K should not have been £600, but rather £1000...), & many argued, this was to just to sneak in sales of Blu-ray software (at the time in a "format war" with the Toshiba developed HD-DVD format) in order so the jointly developed Sony/Matsushita Blu-ray format would win said format war, as at the time, Bluray, sales wise, was losing said format war to HD-DVD...
In short, the original PS3 console was effectively a PS-X Mk 2...
As for the Sega Saturn, it may have been the victim of a misinformation campaign during it's development, as at the time, the "Saturn" was originally intended to use a single Hitachi SH-1 processor as it's CPU...
However, reports of the rumoured Playstation's specifications, that turned up in the Japanese Gaming press, suggested that it would be more powerful than the "Saturn", graphics wise...
As a result, the original design was junked, and a "improved" design using 2 SH-2 processors, that in theory, would "outperform" the rumoured Playstation specification wise, was approved for production...
 
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Re: PS3's won't play PS2 Games...
The original Japanese/U.S versions of the Playstation 3 console could play Playstation 2 software in hardware (in short, they effectively had Playstation 2 hardware fitted to the motherboard, notably the Emotion Engine processor from the PS2), while the original 60Gb European version, though not having the Emotion Engine fitted, could play most PS2 games via software emulation...
However, these features were deleted on the 40Gb version, along with the internal multi-format memory card reader, & 2 USB ports to save production costs, as reportedly, Sony was losing money on every Playstation 3 sold at the time, (a study at the time in the U.K, costed the PS3's components, and found that Sony was effectively making a £400 pound loss, on each unit sold in the U.K, as they concluded that the true sale price of the PS3 in the U.K should not have been £600, but rather £1000...), & many argued, this was to just to sneak in sales of Blu-ray software (at the time in a "format war" with the Toshiba developed HD-DVD format) in order so the jointly developed Sony/Matsushita Blu-ray format would win said format war, as at the time, Bluray, sales wise, was losing said format war to HD-DVD...
In short, the original PS3 console was effectively a PS-X Mk 2...
As for the Sega Saturn, it may have been the victim of a misinformation campaign during it's development, as at the time, the "Saturn" was originally intended to use a single Hitachi SH-1 processor as it's CPU...
However, reports of the rumoured Playstation's specifications, that turned up in the Japanese Gaming press, suggested that it would be more powerful than the "Saturn", graphics wise...
As a result, the original design was junked, and a "improved" design using 2 SH-2 processors, that in theory, would "outperform" the rumoured Playstation specification wise, was approved for production...

Thanks for the background on PS3. I never understood the incompatibility issues and figured there was something I was missing there.

Still, horrible move on Sony's part to save money; eliminating it's compatibility with PS2.

All that software suddenly becomes unusable for anybody who traded in their PS2 to get their PS3 and you're going to have a whole lotta pissed off users on your hands.

As to the Saturn, the redesign was something I hadn't heard about.

I wonder if it was the addition of the extra SH-2's that created the difficulties in writing for it.
 
I lived through that...

Funny, I lived through that 6502 zoo period, and never knew about the wheeling, dealing and cartridge wars...

To be fair, I was too busy writing a 3D Astronomy program on an Apple][+...
 
Funny, I lived through that 6502 zoo period, and never knew about the wheeling, dealing and cartridge wars...

To be fair, I was too busy writing a 3D Astronomy program on an Apple][+...

I was there too, albeit, in '83/'84, I was only 6, 7 years old and was just learning BASIC on an 800XL.

Wasn't until waaaay later that I read about all this stuff.

The colossal screwing EA gave Atari was something I wasn't aware of back when I was in my tweens and wondering "Why can't I get Bard's Tale or Wasteland for my 800XL?"...and only makes me despise Trip Hawkins all the more now that I know the truth.
 
I was there too, albeit, in '83/'84, I was only 6, 7 years old and was just learning BASIC on an 800XL.

Wasn't until waaaay later that I read about all this stuff.

The colossal screwing EA gave Atari was something I wasn't aware of back when I was in my tweens and wondering "Why can't I get Bard's Tale or Wasteland for my 800XL?"...and only makes me despise Trip Hawkins all the more now that I know the truth.

You lucky dog. I was forced to learn it (and Pascal and LOGO) on a TI99.

I would say, though, that even if they could get their stuff together, Atari's biggest eneny wouldn't have been its competition, it would have been the TV Makers.

As far as I could tell, way back in the early Eighties, the only progressive scan televisions available outside of Japan were huge projection screen models no basic family could have afforded, which were infamous for their burn-in problems. without progressive scan, everybody is limited to at most 320x256 resolution reliably. (This is the reason why the Super Nintendo's Mode Six 512x448 resolution was such an eyestrain way back when and why it's such a bitch to emulate).
 
*shrugs* how people were handling things at this time, and how the market was, even if things went another way to ensure a crash didn't happen at this time, it'd probably just lead to another problem down the road.

Without the crash, I often wonder if games would still be an extremely niche market, or if they'd even have reason to "evolve".
 
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