seldane,
you must be younger than i thought! theres alot of decent 2600 games. and actually a large number of 5200 games were good, but were hampered by a shoddy controller. the 800 computer, was the exact same hardware and those games rocked!
as for 7800, so much potential, including over 100 sprites on screen with no flicker, but had only a handful of games comepared to NES, or even SMS.
Lynx was great! it was extremly powerful and had some real orginal games, it just the nintendo mind-control machine that kept anyone from buying it.
ah the jag! again same thing as the lynx, i say. plus by getting a head start meant that developers learning how to do 'next-gen' had cranked out duds in 93 94 and 95 but by the time the PS1 took off,and the jaguar dead, 3-d had been perfected.
anyways i made this thread as, next to the TG16, atari has a dear place in my heart, is not talked about much these days and i wanted to see what people thought.
here's some did you know's:
the 2600 only had 128 bytes of ram! everything was run out of the software. despite this massive games like pitfall 1 and 2, solaris and secret quest some how came to be.
the 2600 first launched in october 1977, and atari formally pulled the plug in january 1992, spanning 3 decades!
the atari 5200 was designed in 79 but to compete with the apple IIc was made into a home computer first, and many 5200 games were ports.
after the 5200 atari never formally developed any hardware in house, 7800, lynx and jaguar were works developed by outside companies.
atari actually fared well in europe with its PC sales, and while the 2600 may have been seen as old news to ever kid with an NES they remained profitable until the very end.
the NES rights (in america only) were offered to atari first, we all know this story. but also atari owned a large portion of sega after 1994 and had talks of crosslicensing sega and atari games, of course club drive for saturn never happened, as we also never saw phantasy star collection on jaguar.
atari's fate came when they merged with a disk drive manufacturer named JTS, which was run by someone i recall being college aged, and JTS itself was out of business soon after, hasbro picked up the ashes, made jaguar developement public domain (awesome) and started the retro bandwagon, only to sell it to infrogrammes who continues to shill crap.
