Atari 2600. Seriously! When games were games, not visual glory-fests...
How in the world did the Atari do that sweet special effect with all the color lines? That looked like an awful lot of color. Its on the title screen for one of the Tron games, and a few others like maybe Swordquests.
I don't know how it was done on the 2600, but on the Atari 8-bit computer line (which has basically the same hardware as the 5200) you could change the color registers during the interval between the end of drawing one scanline, and the beginning of the next (the time when the electron gun in your CRT was being repositioned). I assume this was how the 2600 worked as well. Using this technique every color in the system's palette could displayed onscreen at one time, although you were limited to changes per scanline (which is why the color changes were always horizontal) and however many color registers you had to play with for the graphics mode that particular scanline was being displayed in. The ANTIC/GTIA chip combo was really awesome for the time: hardware scrolling, sprites, mixing and matching of various graphics modes on a per scanline basis, large color palette (256 colors), etc. Amazing for hardware designed in '78 and released in 79-80. Check out some of the later Atari games like the '88 Mario Bros. remake, the (unfortunately unreleased) port of Commando, Airball, Rescue on Fractulus, Alternate Reality, etc. to see what this system was really capable of. I always used to laugh at the dorks who wrote Gamefan raving about things like multiple layers of parallax and "line scrolls" (per scanline scrolling) on Genesis games like that was something new. The Atari 8-bit hardware could do all that and it was 10 years older than the Genesis
Well, as you can tell I'm a bit of an Atari fan
. Not so much the 2600, more a fan of the Atari 8-bit home computer line. My Atari 800XL, which I received in 1983, was my main gaming system up until '89 when I got a Turbografx-16 (I only owned an NES briefly during 1989, but I sold it to buy the Turbo). I still have tons of fond memories of that machine even though it doesn't work anymore.
However, besides the Turbo my next most favorite system would have to be the Sega Saturn. The Saturn is the spiritual successor to the PC Engine in my eyes. Just like the Turbo/PC Engine, it was decently popular in Japan while bombing over here in the US. And the Saturn got more of the "core" games like the PC Engine and had sort of the same vibe (to me anyway) as that system.
Super NES rounds out my top three console systems. Just too many fantastically good games on the SNES to ignore. The SNES really was the best of both worlds: all of Nintendo's games (and some of their all-time best IMO) combined with tremendous third party support.
As for this gen: everything except the Dreamcast has left me cold (the DC just misses out on a spot amongst my top systems, it just wasn't around long enough to make it). Good games here and there, but I'm just not into console gaming much anymore (more a PC gamer nowadays).