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by bluedino 19 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

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.