[wiredfool]

The Ataris had Player-Missile graphics, sort of like sprites that were specially/easily handled. I seem to recall that there was one player (16px wide x screen height) and 4 missiles(4 px wide x screen height) that could be cheaply moved back and forth across the screen. There was some collision detection between them and other things that were on the screen.

The Apples had several graphics modes, many of which were strange and somewhat pointless on a green screen (yay for some colors in even columns, some in odd), but nothing special to accelerate games IIRC. On the other hand, they had a lot more memory and they felt about a generation ahead. The 800 seemed like an advanced 2600, but the Apple felt like a real computer.

However, speaking of generations ahead -- the Atari 400 beat the 2016 MBP to the punch in the horrible flat keyboard race.

[rob74]

Ah yes, the player/missile graphics :) Actually there were 4 "players" 8 px wide (although you could of course put several side by side) and 4 "missiles" 2 px wide (the name already gave away that you couldn't draw much more than a bullet with 2 px of width). The width of the "sprites" could also be stretched, but you could only move them horizontally in BASIC - for vertical movement you had to actually move the sprite's bytes in memory, and BASIC was too slow to do that smoothly. I had a 800 XE (the German version of the 130 XE - the same Atari ST lookalike design, but only 64 K) and programmed some games/"demos" in BASIC which I still fondly remember. One of them was a train with a steam engine and 3 carriages (the four "players", the carriages were double-width) which rolled over the screen. Another was a game in which you could bet money on one of four snails (again the four players) - the snails would move a random (small) amount, then pause for a second, then move another random amount, until they all reached the finish line. Nerve-racking action!

[bluGill]

4 players, 4 missiles. The missiles could be combined to a 5th player if you wanted.

The players only had one color and there was a fixed size in pixels. (you could cheat this a bit if you really worked with the display list.)

Edit: as corrected below, each player was (or could be) a different color, but was only allowed one color.

[sokoloff]

The players could be different colors from each other.

Memory addresses 704d-707d are the color registers for Players 1-4.