[bluedino]

The other big problem with the 7800 was it was mostly arcade ports. They didn't really do any original games.

People were tired of the 5th home version of Galaga, Pac Man, and Dig Dug (even though the 7800 had decent ports, especially compared to the 2600, which it was also backward-compatible with). Nintendo came out with originals like Super Mario Brothers and Zelda, and then all the third party games...

[LogicFailsMe]

Almost...

Rescue On Fractalus and Ballblazer*, the first two titles out of LucasArts, were supposed to be lead titles for the platform. And the 7800 was technologically superior to the Famicom. But when has that mattered relative to the game library? See also the Jaguar port of Doom, which was the most faithful adaptation of its generation, written by Carmack himself, on a bizarrely advanced (2 RISCs plus an overclocked 68K) platform born for the dustbin of history because the Tramiels had burned all their karma to the ground messing up the amazing Atari Lynx.

I'm sure there's a timeline where somehow the Nintendo titles ended up on the 7800, looking fantastic, and it all ended with Atari continuing to dominate the console world. But it sure isn't this one. And it probably requires someone other than the Tramiels running Atari (into the ground until it was sold off to a hard drive manufacturer).

*The OG Rocket League

[bluedino]

> And the 7800 was technologically superior to the Famicom.

I'd never heard this before, in what ways?

The 7800 seemed to be lower resolution and I don't really remember any examples of games that looked close to what a good NES game looked like. But even the basic ports like Galaga/Dig Dug looked better on the NES.

I know there were over 10 times as many games released for the NES and probably just as many more developers so they definitely had more work put into them.

[LogicFailsMe]

Famicom was 256x240 whilst the 7800, which was a console variant of the doomed Atari 1400, was 320x240. But to get more colors without doing fancy per scanline tricks, developers opted for 160x240 and you're not imagining it looking clunkier. So as a former demo coder, those scanline tricks were bread and butter to me.

Famicom was limited to 8 sprites per scanline, 7800 had 100 sprites, no limits.

But apparently, you're not wrong and I'm not wrong. Many NES cartridges came with HW enhancements and a few of the homebrew afterlife carts for the 7800 did as well.

But upfront, I thought the NES looked like a glorified Apple 2. The SNES OTOH was the first Nintendo console I loved.

Young me always chose the best technology for my task. Older me looks at the whole package. I miss the younger me.

[ndiddy]

Yeah the 7800 library was basically a bunch of ports of early 80s arcade games that GCC had done for the initial 1984 release date, then ports of whatever computer or arcade games the Tramiels could get cheap licenses for, done by external contractors. Their strategy with the 7800 was competing with Nintendo on price rather than the quality of the game library. Tramiel led Atari wasn't willing to put a bunch of money and effort into pushing video games forward like Nintendo was, they were mainly focusing their internal efforts on the ST computers.