/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8391117]

The great debate. How did they compare to each other? How did they compare to the 2600?

[Anonymous No.8391123]

I doubt many people here actually experienced either outside of an odd situation like finding one in the attic, it's a lot more likely people played a 2600 because they made so many

[Anonymous No.8391159]

Colecovision is really great, save for the fact that it's libary isn't that big and most games also where on the C64

Intellivision had some interesting games here and there but ultimately feels a bit lackluster and power wise somehow is a little slower and duller looking than the 2600

Either compared to the 2600 is apples and oranges, Atari 2600 just had loads amount of games but lots of them also got on the Atari 8 bit computers and C64, If you'd ask if one would be worth having over the 2600? than become idort

[Anonymous No.8391290]

>>8391117
Colecovision's home ports of arcade games were so good, it directly inspired the Famicom. Also, fans ported dozens of MSX and SG-1000 games to it. Winner - Colecovision.

[Anonymous No.8391362]

>>8391117
why did people think 1-9 and a weird wheel would be great controls???

[Anonymous No.8391434]

>>8391362
The home computer era has just begun and console manufacturers expected the line between computers and gaming consoles to be blurred pretty soon. They thought that one or two buttons and a joystick would not be enough to play computer games. They were looking for a solution to problem which did not arrive until 30 years later.
Picrelated is Bally's failed home console. They produced a BASIC cartridge to program your own games and record them on tape. You had to use calculator keys on the console itself to type in code.

[Anonymous No.8391442]

>>8391362
That's not a wheel, that's a joystick you could either press with your thumb or hold with your hand. On the intellivision, it's a 16 direction dpad, but it's quite primitive and lacks tactile feeling.

>>8391434
Basically this. In order to save memory they mapped the menu options to the numpad buttons too.
>They were looking for a solution to problem which did not arrive until 30 years later.
This is not true. Intellivision and Colecovision had a few computer titles that benefited from the numpad. They also both had RPG games.

[Anonymous No.8391452]

don't be fooled, Colecovision came lile 3 years later and was drastically superior. Intellivision was a souped up 2600, Colecovision was a new generation

[Anonymous No.8391462]

>>8391362

The first controllers were wheels because it was a new medium and they simply used a manipulatable poti, the simplest method, for input. That then carried over to a lot of following consoles.
That specific one is not a wheel though.

[Anonymous No.8391464]

>>8391452
>Intellivision was a souped up 2600
They're nothing alike. Also it's noticeably more powerful and got better graphics than 2600.
>Colecovision was a new generation
It's launched 3 years after the Intellivision. Yes it's in the same gen as the NES, people who put it in the 2nd gen are dumbfucks. While it's not very good for scrolling games, it's more capable than the NES in many ways, it has 16+1 KB of internal memory and DRAM support.

[Anonymous No.8391518]

>>8391434
Comfy wood console.

[Anonymous No.8391536]

>>8391442
On Intellivision it is actually a wheel, kinda. You can use the disc like an oversized uncomfortable dpad, but it also rotates on its central pivot, so you can quickly rotate it instead of moving your thumb like on a dpad. One game in particular, Turbo, even had controls which makes you use Intellivison disc like a miniature car wheel to move player car sideways.

[Anonymous No.8392412]

>>8391117
>The great debate.
In what alternative universe was this thing?

[Anonymous No.8392426]

Colecovision was the PS5 of the first gen era.

[Anonymous No.8392528]

>>8391452
So much so that Wikipedia is notoriously wrong in insisting Colecovision is 2nd gen. It actually should be with the Master System and NES in 3rd gen.

[Anonymous No.8392863]

While Colecovision is a more powerful system and offered better arcade ports, the Intellivision had better exclusives
>Ice Trek
>Worm Whomper
>Thunder Castle
>Tower of Doom
>Beauty & The Beast
>Tropical Trouble
>Thin Ice
>White Water
>Hover Force
>Space Hawk
>Buzz Bombers

Colecovision does have Wing War though, really the moral of the story is that Imagic were stellar on whatever hardware they were on and they died too soon. I would have loved to see them make it into the NES era.

[Anonymous No.8392869]

The Intellivision was the first console with tile map graphics and h/w scrolling. It could also address up to 50k of cartridge RAM. In some aspects it was more advanced than the NES.

[Anonymous No.8392879]

>>8392869
It even contained a proper built-in firmware which performed several common functions, freeing up program space on cartridges, in addition to containing a full English font as seen on title screens.

[Anonymous No.8392885]

Sound was 4 voice square wave+white noise, so basically identical to POKEY. It only had 1k of RAM however while the NES had 2k.

[Anonymous No.8392889]

>>8392869
>It could also address up to 50k of cartridge RAM
*ROM I meant

[Anonymous No.8392898]

>>8392885
ColecoVision's sound chip had three square wave channels + 1 dedicated noise channel. POKEY had 4 square/noise channels, so it was more versatile.

[Anonymous No.8393136]

>>8392879
Also had the first licensing policy and lockout system to prevent unauthorized third party games.

[Anonymous No.8393348]

Why are Colecofags in damage control?

[Anonymous No.8393705]

>>8392869
The NES is actually pretty fucking shit. People only think it's a generation ahead of intelivision and colecovision because it has mapper chip, banked ROM, 40K of ROM per bank (as opposed to 4K-16K in older consoles), extra SRAM, and shit that the costumers had to buy everytime they buy a non NROM game. Basically the NES looks better thanks to the advancing ROM technology, not the console itself. Atari 5200 and Vectrex sharted on all of them anyway, including the sega master system at 3D graphics, despite being categorized as 2nd gen.

[Anonymous No.8393790]

>>8393705
The Colecovision addressed 32k of ROM. Actually the NES's most important advantages were two.

1. Hardware sprite flipping
2. The cartridge slot had R/W lines while the older consoles had only R lines which made adding cartridge RAM easier--some Atari 2600 games have extra RAM but it required separate addresses for reading from and writing to it.

[Anonymous No.8393819]

The Colecovision had de same architecture as the Sega SG-1000

[Anonymous No.8394063]

>>8393819
SG-1000 is pretty much the same console as ColecoVision. The only major differences between them are RAM layout and the fact that Coleco has built-in firmware. I believe that the majority of SG-1000 games were eventually converted for Coleco by romhackers.

[Anonymous No.8394071]

>>8392528
wrong, this is how it really works:
>odyssey and home pong machines: gen 0
>2600, channel F, intellivision, astrocade: gen 1
>colecovision, vectrex: gen 2
>c64, NES: gen 3
>master system: gen 3.5

[Anonymous No.8394083]

>>8391464
it's about as 2nd gen as you can get, basically similar capabilities to the NES except the graphics are one bit per pixel instead of two. the NES's weird architecture sticking the RAM on the cartridge doesn't make it weaker. it is about twice as powerful as intellivision though and they definitely shouldn't be considered the same gen; the issue is lumping two completely different eras together under "2nd gen" when 2600 should clearly be considered "1st gen" and everything prior pushed back to 0th gen.

[Anonymous No.8394092]

>>8392863
both 2600 and intellivision got some fresh releases post-crash as a budget system while I don't think colecovision ever had that. a lot of the best 2600 games are from that era.

[Anonymous No.8394096]

>>8394063
The SG-1000 doesn't have a BIOS so some additional ROM space will have to be wasted with code to read the controller and handle IRQs. It's more reliable and runs cooler than the Colecovision since the VDU uses newer single rail DRAM instead of dinosaur triple rail DRAM. The Colecovision also uses the RGB variant of the VDU which makes for easy RGB modding, but I don't know if the SG-1000 uses that.

Colecovision programming is annoying because it uses the NMI to detect the vertical blank and this requires some programming gymnastics you do not have to do on the SG-1000 or MSX as those use the IRQ for the blank and you can just turn it on/off with a DI/EI as needed.

[Anonymous No.8394104]

>>8394063
it was really stupid of sega to use that awful soundchip instead of the MSX's chad one. also one of the few things intellivision has over colecovision.

[Anonymous No.8394142]

>>8393790
>1. Hardware sprite flipping
The NES needed it because it only had 2K of VRAM. Colecovision and Master System didn't, they could always generate new tiles in the VRAM.
>2. The cartridge slot had R/W lines while the older consoles had only R lines which made adding cartridge RAM easier--some Atari 2600 games have extra RAM but it required separate addresses for reading from and writing to it.
Not a big deal actually. In total the colecovision had 17K of memory while the NES only had 12K (2+2K internal RAM plus the commonplace 8K RAM expansion).

[Anonymous No.8394151]

>>8394071
>vectrex: gen 2
Vectrex was more powerful than all 8-bit consoles of the 3rd gen. Its 16-bit CPU is capable of floating point calculation, among other advantages over the 6502 and Z80, resulting in buttery smooth vector graphics.

[Anonymous No.8394169]

>>8394142
Which isn't really true. The lack of sprite flipping was a known handicap and a lot of NES games like LOZ would be a big problem if you were to attempt them on the Master System. You can flip tiles and make soft sprites with those instead but it's choppier than h/w sprites.

>In total the colecovision had 17K of memory while the NES only had 12K (2+2K internal RAM plus the commonplace 8K RAM expansion).

Most of the RAM gets eaten by the tile map and graphics so there's not really much space left and it can only be accessed indirectly through the VDU registers which is slow.

[Anonymous No.8394170]

>>8394151
it has an 8-bit CPU—a good one, but it's still 8-bit. it also doesn't have floating point hardware though it can do them in software better than competing architectures.

[Anonymous No.8394174]

>>8392426
so it sucked

[Anonymous No.8394182]

>>8394170
16-bit address and built in ROM for FPU calculation to be precise. It was a substantially more expensive CPU.

[Anonymous No.8394185]

>>8394182
thoughts on the tandy coco 3?

[Anonymous No.8394194]

>>8394185
It had low budget zelda and contra clones that looked and played pretty close to the NES ones even though they're very unpolished. It also renders wireframe 3D graphics really well even compared to ZX Spectrum. Pretty impressive 8-bit machine with a very lacking library unfortunately, being released after the Atari ST and Amiga were out. To be fair it's very cheap, but it would probably find a better success if it was released a year earlier as a game console. Too little too late.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFQuYko1RO4

[Anonymous No.8394225]

>>8394194
>contra clones
I know of Thelda, but what Contra clones did it have? Only run n guns of sorts I can remember ever playing on it or seeing were Thexder and RoboCop.

[Anonymous No.8394236]

>>8394225
Yes it did. It's a half assed clone as I said, but still, it's contra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7kGpRz6iK4

[Anonymous No.8394258]

>>8394151
yeah on reflection vectrex really is more of a gen-3 system, I was careless with that one.

[Anonymous No.8394287]

I like Intellivision better, technically it does have hardware scrolling and a couple of games from back then use it but it was hard to take advantage of because of lack of rom space, early games were 20 fps because they used routines in the rom on the console to save space. Sound chip is also good on Intellivision for music but not used that much.
Main characteristics of colecovision/msx/sg1000 are jerky scolling and ugly colour pallete. The msx is just full of ugly games but atari 2600 has good looking ones like seaquest and millipede.

Interesting fact, Intellivision outsold the master system and they were one of the biggest game companies in America. After 84 they pretty much went to nothing in no time.

[Anonymous No.8394298]

>>8394287
Intellivision had a custom built 16-bit CPU like the vectrex. Shit was powerful. It runs mario.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ttNz2UVw8

[Anonymous No.8394317]

>>8394298
this is badass, looks about as good as gameboy mario (similar resolution)

[Anonymous No.8394438]

>>8394317
And it's developed using a BASIC compiler engine rather than bare metal assembly programming. It could've been optimised further. The same guy also made a compelling and accurate Dragon Warrior port using only 77KB of data.

[Anonymous No.8394692]

>>8394298
>Intellivision had a custom built 16-bit CPU like the vectrex.

[Anonymous No.8395112]

>>8394287
The VDU has no actual scrolling, Colecovision et al games can only do a crude block scroll or a pseudo-scroll by shifting tiles.

[Anonymous No.8395171]

>>8394287
Don't worry Intellivision bros, the Amico is bringing it back... in a BIG WAY

preorder now

[Anonymous No.8395234]

>>8394692
Correction, vectrex's cpu was built by motorola, intelivision's cpu was built by general instruments, they were supposed to be off the shelf CPUs but they're very scarcely used outside those consoles.

[Anonymous No.8395265]

>>8395234
wat? the Vectrex used a 6809 which was a stock CPU used in tons of stuff.

[Anonymous No.8395694]

>>8395171
He's right you know. Get the Amico, amigos.

[Anonymous No.8395737]

>>8394287
That 50 or whatever kb of ROM the Intellivision could use was a bit pointless back when the average game was 8k.

[Anonymous No.8396151]

>>8395234
>Correction
>still gets it wrong

[Anonymous No.8396267]

>>8395171
>>8395694
Delete this, sirs

[Anonymous No.8396550]

>>8395171
How much is the pre-order,?

[Anonymous No.8396907]

>>8394298
Looks better than the c64 version in many ways, the atari 2600 version while good for the system, I think many people would not be able to recognize that version straight away.

>>8395112
OK, it still seems to have something in the hardware that makes scrolling possible since a couple of developers were able to figure it out. I don't think it was appreciated at the time since the main thing people cared about was not being blocky.

[Anonymous No.8396915]

>>8396907
No. The VDU literally does not have hardware scrolling. Some games like Circus Charlie on the MSX manage to fudge it by manually shifting the tile patterns but it's not clean and still has noticeable artifacts.

[Anonymous No.8397007]

>>8396907
I think what the intellivision has is the ability to shift the tilemap by 0-7 pixels but if you want to keep going you need to move all the tiles over one, or something like that. other anon seems to be talking about the colecovision.

[Anonymous No.8397026]

>>8396907
>Looks better than the c64 version in many ways
The C64 version is literally the same as the NES original but with C64's colour palette. You probably don't like the dark and subdued palette, but I do. That said, the intellivision version is amazing and I'd love to play it too.

[Anonymous No.8397032]

>>8397007
lyl that's how almost all consoles work. you can move about one row of tiles before having to set up the next row. the NES is somewhat unique in that you can move an entire screen worth of tiles without updating anything depending on the mirroring setup.

[Anonymous No.8397092]

>>8397032
no what I'm saying is the tilemap doesn't even wrap around, you have to shift EVERY TILE by one and set the offset from 7 back to 0 instead of just going from 7 to 8. most consoles have more than a 3-bit scroll value.

[Anonymous No.8397096]

>>8397026
C64 in multicolor mode is 160 pixels wide, so it's obviously not the same.

[Anonymous No.8397159]

>>8396550
$249.99

[Anonymous No.8397235]

>>8397159
Good lord. I don't know about that one chief.

[Anonymous No.8397274]

>>8397096
200x160 is for 4 colours per 8x8 block. Using 320x200 mode it draws 2 colours per 8x8 block, while the NES draws 4 colours per 16x16 colours, so practically it's just the same. The C64 could draw even more colours per block than the NES using colour multiplexing.

[Anonymous No.8397328]

>>8397274
regardless, C64 mario uses wide pixels for most of the graphics and skinny pixels for the mario sprite and the single-color clouds. and it does that because 2 colors per 8x8 tile is in fact a lot worse than 4 per 16x16.

[Anonymous No.8397381]

>>8397328
>2 colors per 8x8 tile is in fact a lot worse than 4 per 16x16
It depends on what you're drawing. NES games usually have really blocky looking tiles that don't mesh together smoothly. Turrican games look fantastic on the C64 and ugly on the NES because the series was made with C64 in mind, the NES version lost a lot of the finer details like the textures on the rocks and high tech metal surfaces, every sprite was made smaller to fit the 16x16 blocks, and yes the ugly blockiness of every environmental object. SMB, SMB 3, and Kirby are games that were specifically designed with NES limitations in mind. They've got bright colours, simple tilemaps, and 16x16 size for everything. These games would look ugly on the C64.

Now back to the SMB port. The dev that did it took the source code from the NES version. Not much of the art style was modified, although the higher horizontal resolution and sprite multiplexing are a pretty nice addition to the NES original. The C64 doesn't render graphics the same way the NES does and the result was a port with more washed out colours and slightly poorer framerate.

[Anonymous No.8397409]

>>8395171
Earthworm Jim is BACK, baby!

[Anonymous No.8397421]

>>8397159
>ARMshit with 2GB RAM is $249.99 prus tip
How is that possible? If you're buying a phone with that money you'll be getting 4GB of RAM and OLED screen at minimum.

[Anonymous No.8398001]

>>8396907
>something in the hardware that makes scrolling possible
That was mainly a fuckton of ram on the vdp. You can do a lot with that, if you’re willing to make the effort. But it didn't have registers for scrolling.
But despite all the hype ITT, intellivision hardware scrolling is very limited. Plenty of intellivision games did their scrolling the same way they would on colleco because of this. And if this was a NES vs C64 thread the same faggots ranting about how great intellivision hardware scrolling is would be ranting about how useless C64 hardware scrolling is because it basically has the same limitations as intellivision.

[Anonymous No.8398013]

>>8392879
BAEEE SHEVENTEEN BAWWWMMMER

[Anonymous No.8398026]

>>8398001
C64 can only scroll 2 tile rows before you have to set up the next row but it does wrap and you can also use VSP for NES-style scrolling.

[Anonymous No.8398078]

>>8398001
>>8398026
You don't even have to actually scroll. C64 has plenty of RAM. Just write a self modifying code that updates and repositions the charset for every frame.

[Anonymous No.8398086]

it's 2 tiles before updating if H scroll, 1 tile if V scroll. also VSP is only for H scroll but there's a similar V scroll trick called line crunching

[Anonymous No.8398094]

hmm well C64 doesn't have ugly scroll artifacts like NES does

[Anonymous No.8399320]

>>8397007
sounds really similar to C64 hardware scrolling

[Anonymous No.8400343]

>>8391117
I played all 3 in their day. Intellivision controllers sucked and game quality was variable but loved some of the games (eg DnD) Graphics do not compare with the better colecovision games like zaxxon and Smurfs, and the coleco controller was a big improvement. Generally both were ahead of the 2600.

The c64 was in another league well ahead of them though.

[Anonymous No.8400778]

>>8398026
>>8398078
I really wish it was as easy as just saying some words you've heard and your game would magically code itself to scroll whatever way you desired. Unfortunately, it just ain't so. Also, amazing how /vr/ went from "c64 can't do scrolling" a few summers ago to people who have never even tried knowing how to do it.

[Anonymous No.8400801]

>>8400778
It's easy, just get an autistic assembly programmer to do it for you. Just kidding, but scrolling games on the C64 had existed for years by the time SMB was released, and some of them look better than SMB. That means it was never that hard to figure out.

[Anonymous No.8401014]

>>8400801
You're replying to the assembly language LARPer.

[Anonymous No.8402993]

>>8391123
I owned both. Dad bought Intellivision of a guy down the road when he upgraded to a Commodore 64, and my nan & pop got a Colecovision from the op shop they volunteered in. I got the Intellivision when I was about 7 and the Coleco a year later, with the Atari 2600 adapter.

I preferred the Coleco games mostly, except Burgertime on intellivision was better and Intellivision also had Treasure of Tarmin, my first WRPG.

[Anonymous No.8402997]

Who can stop ColecoVision bros?

[Anonymous No.8403032]

>>8391442
Best use of the numpad
>tfw my Mom and I duo'd this game like crazy
>tfw we got to the Dragon together
>tfw we spent MONTHS trying to kill the Dragon and failing
>tfw 30+ yrs later I read on some site that the Dragon couldn't be killed bcuz devs ran out of cartridge space, so technically we had beaten the game
>tfw I can't tell her bcuz she's dead
>don't worry mom. You are a Wizard in Heaven now, and I am still your loyal knight and guardian

[Anonymous No.8403054]

>>8403032
>>tfw I can't tell her bcuz she's dead
>>don't worry mom. You are a Wizard in Heaven now, and I am still your loyal knight and guardian
I know this feel. Lost my mom in October of 2019. I'm sorry, bro.

[Anonymous No.8403603]

>>8400801
Scrolling exists even without a game. Turn the machine on and hit return a couple dozen times. Scrolling. Scrolling on the 64 is so easy you don't even have to write a line of code!