[karmakaze]

I've never thought quite so much about these generations despite growing up during them. The reason why I don't much care about this lost 2nd generation is that it was too little too late. I was already on my Atari 400 8-bit computer (released in 1979) which had graphics comparable to the 5200 three years later.

A definition of a generation needs not only a technical differentiation but also impact in the way of sales volume. This lost generation had the former but not the latter and in fact existed during the decline prior to the NES. I remember this vividly as I worked at my family's computer/game store selling Atari and ColecoVision.

I really do like having this all documented and brought into awareness to all the interesting consoles that get mentioned in passing but not collectively discussed. The gen 2.5 naming is fitting.

I was very much in the Atari camp--I had C64 friends too. I felt like Atari really dropped the ball--when rolling in cash and had all the tech to release something like the Atari XEGS[0] in 1979/80 but instead they were milking the VCS/2600 profits.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_XEGS

[syntheweave]

I think one thing that could be said of "Lost Generation" systems is that they primarily reflect memory size, not other aspects of performance. The graphics on 400/800/5200 could be described, in rough terms, as the 2600 plus a lot of framebuffer RAM and generalizations on the rasterization to move it out of software kernels and allow different allocations of video memory for the application. If RAM had been cheaper when the 2600 was designed, the architectures would be more similar than different. You can also see this in modern Intellivision homebrew: while the graphical I/O is limited, the CPU on it is a Motorola 68000 and can easily throw around whatever processing is needed for any 80's game experience. Like Atari, Mattel dropped the ball, experienced corporate paralysis, and didn't go forward with a planned upgrade to the Intellivision platform(Intellivision IV), which would have been a very high-spec third generation machine.

And this theme of memory basically holds true through the end of the "Fourth" Generation: games on console were assumed to be memory-starved, and advancements within those generations occurred through larger ROM enabling larger and more animated sprites, more graphically distinct "worlds," full soundtracks and scripted cutscenes. In 1988, the year of the great DRAM shortage, more of the games released used smaller ROM space, and it caused a notable regression back to technically simpler productions.

When you get to the Playstation/Saturn/N64 the approaches diverge quite a bit because the bottlenecks shift according to which platform you talk about. Memory is still a major consideration, but data streaming can be either relatively easy(N64) or a considerable engineering problem(everyone else), while the inverse is the case with data storage capacity. It's easier to discuss specific platforms as stable entities from that era onwards, since there's a cleaner separation of computing resources from game content.