David Hayward recalls the once king of the consoles
Following the success of the Atari 2600 and its successor, the Atari 5200, this renowned games company was desperate to get its next-generation console out to an eager market.
But after the 1984 announcement of the new Atari 7800, it took three years before the console itself was on UK shelves, with it being made available the year before in the US. This gap was enough to cause Atari some immense headaches, as the Nintendo Entertainment System had already been realised and was dominating the gaming market that Atari so desperately wanted to claim.
My fondest memory of the Atari 7800 was the version of Galaga and the original 7800 game Desert Falcon. In my opinion, the 7800 had one of the best ports of Galaga and managed to retain the gameplay, sprites and smooth animation of the arcade version.
As for Desert Falcon, it was a launch title of the 7800 using the same kind of graphical engine as Zaxxon. There was also another game that enjoyed, but which I can't remember the name of. It had you wandering around a castle Gauntlet-style, collecting treasure and avoiding scorpions. Mind you, the Atari 7800 was also backward compatible with the 2600, so it may well have been an early 2600 game I played in the late 80s.
Its History
The Atari 7800 was actually designed by an external company. General Computer Corporation, and had been designed throughout 1983 and 1984 ready for a rollout that same year.
However, the sale of Atari to Tramel Technology Ltd in 1984 put a stopper in the launch of the 7800, which incidentally was going to be called the 3600 to begin with. A quick upgrade a couple of years later made the 7800 a better machine, technically speaking, and one that also allowed the aforementioned backward compatibility for the Atari 2600.
It was powered by a customised 6502 processor running at around 1.8MHz, with 4KB of RAM and a 4KB ROM. The cartridges were each around 48KB in size, although rumour has it that some stretched to around 64KB toward the end of the console's life.
The faster processor, named Atari SALLY, was similar to that found in the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System. This meant that faster graphics could be displayed, which brought a more authentic arcade-like experience to the home.
The end of the 7800, though, was quite swift. Within a few years, there was no choice but to terminate production of the 7800, because Nintendo was dominating the market with a huge 85% share and had secured a large catalogue of gaming content from the likes of Taito. Although profits were generally good for Atari, the company never did manage to reclaim the home console crown that it enjoyed so much in its heyday.
The Good
Classic Atari console design; backward compatibility with the 2600; Commando and Dig Dug!
The Bad
Pretty limited number of 7800-specific games; better graphics on NES (sorry to say that, but there you go); terrible controller.
Conclusion
The 7800 effectively ended Atari's home console division. The XE did follow, but that didn't fare too well either and died a relatively quick death. Such is the way of things, but we do have to thank Atari for bringing us the 7800, because without it we wouldn't have had our Galaga championships at home.
Did You Know?
• The 7800 had a custom graphics processor called MARIA that could manipulate up to a hundred sprites - just play Robotron 2084 to see the chip in action.
• The 7800 had the same audio hardware as the 2600, so to compensate, some games were planned to sell with a POKEY audio chip installed in the cart.
• Thanks to Custer's Revenge (a pretty bad game, even by today's standards), a BIOS lockout feature was coded into the 7800 to stop 2600 games accessing the MARIA chip.
• In 1984, Atari posted a loss of $540 million, and the company hoped the 7800 would claim back most of that. It didn't.