[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.