Atari 2600 vs. Atari 7800 Which Should You Get?
49 comments
·February 6, 2025mikerg87
Alas, the 7800 had better graphics but was hobbled by keeping the original TIA sound chip from the 2600.
guidedlight
Whilst the Atari 2600+ and Atari 7800+ are faithful reproductions, the controller’s of this era are all kinds of horrible.
They don’t even come close to a modern game controller, and these new systems would benefit from a modern interpretation rather than being a faithful rerelease.
jhbadger
Personally I liked joysticks and never understood why d-pads became the standard after the NES. They remind me of playing games with cursor keys and just seem less fun.
musicale
Paddle controllers and trackballs are ideal for games that were designed for them. Analog joysticks are a different experience.
mattl
Luckily most home computers of the era plus the Sega Master System and Genesis/Mega Drive used the same joystick port and wiring so many better controllers have been made and some are still being made.
DrillShopper
There is a more standard controller: https://atari.com/products/cx78-gamepad
They released this in the 80s with the 7800, and they make it for the Atari 7800+, including a wireless version
flashman
> Speaking of game loading, it is surprisingly slow. You plug in a cartridge and turn on the 7800+, which takes a moment, and then there is a “Loading game” screen that takes 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game.
This would have been nearly instantaneous on the original console. You could hit reset and be back at the title screen basically before you'd leaned back from pushing the button.
It is very funny that as computers have become more powerful, we've lost the incentive (and probably the skills, outside of the demoscene) to make things run fast and close to the bone.
Also, I think "disappointing joypad" is faithful to the Atari experience, having used those spongy suckers for many hours in the early 90s.
cardanome
It is not funny but completely insulting to the customer.
The people selling those consoles should feel ashamed about this. It shows complete lack of care for the customer.
Any emulator can load those cartridges near instantaneous. This does not show lack of optimization but lack of complete care. It probably boots up the whole operating system or something similarly insane.
This is plastic rubbish preying on nostalgia. They can't even get the basic function of playing the games right.
You will have a better time just playing the games on a cheap laptop. It is one of the easiest systems to emulate anyway.
dylan604
and yet they sell them like hot cakes. so either the customers don't care, or the customers don't even notice. younger players that are used to waiting for loading probably don't notice at all. only older people might even remember, but the younger kids won't believe them because the olds memory is probably not right.
musicale
I wish games still came with instruction manuals; then you would have something to read while you wait 15 minutes for the base game to install, followed by however long it takes to download and install 60GB worth of day 1 patches and updates.
musicale
> 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game
Hmm, this is disappointing and something that they should really fix.
As I understand it, the whole advantage of ROM cartridges on Atari-like systems is that no loading is required - the games run directly off the cartridge ROM. Enthusiast emulation systems can boot in a couple of seconds.
The Nintendo Switch cartridges are more like a read-only file system, but games still load quickly without a lengthy installation process and can usually run without an internet connection.
jmount
Prior to the Internet/Web any sort of pause in software was anathema. Now AppleOS spins for 20 or 30 seconds on file security checks.
musicale
> Prior to the Internet/Web any sort of pause in software was anathema
We should really go back to the blazing speed of cassette tapes, floppy disks, and optical media.
> Now AppleOS spins for 20 or 30 seconds on file security checks.
Trying to recreate the experience of loading a program from floppy or optical drives.
I feel your pain though: syspolicyd is my sworn enemy. Not only does it cause apps to hang on startup (ugh) while it tries to phone home (no thanks), it also periodically decides it needs to rescan all huge files it can find (like game updates that I've downloaded over the years) in case they might have suddenly turned into known malware. Whenever my laptop heats up for no obvious reason, it's usually some infernal combination of evil macOS demons (not a typo), (syspolicyd, mdworker, photoanalysisd).
It's a shame that in the current malware environment syspolicyd seems to serve enough of a useful purpose (for some subset of Mac users) to be turned on by default.
ryandrake
I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer from 40 years ago. How we have fallen!
musicale
Cartridges were probably pretty fast to load, but I don't expect that Commodore's floppy drives were particularly fast, even if they were much faster than cassette tape.
dylan604
um, what? how many times would a game get to a point that would require you to remove the disk from the drive to replace with a different disk because all of the data didn't fit on one disk?
pausing was not unusual.
bitwize
It's a fair bit of engineering to design an interface to the original ROMs that can map them into the memory space of whatever modern hardware they're using. It's much easier to design an interface that allows you to bit-bang the data out of the ROM and snarf it into RAM. The loading game screen might've been the only way to keep costs below a certain threshold.
And I have a 2600+. Games usually take ~2-3s to load on it.
musicale
Interesting. I wonder why TFA said 15-20s? An optimized small Linux boot takes ~1s, so what is the delay from?
Still likely a lot faster than loading a PS1/2/3 game from optical disc. And miles ahead of installing a game on PS4/5 (and downloading gigabytes of patches.)
crims0n
I prefer my original 800XL with FujiNet... I love that thing.
UltraSane
What Atari games are actually worth playing?
rbanffy
My all-time favorites would be Missile Command, Megamania (2600), Galaga (7800), Centipede (7800), Ms Pac Man (7800).
I don't have a 7800 on hand, and haven't started up my XEGS in some time, so I might remember more titles.
epcoa
Playing home arcade ports doesn’t have much appeal to me except for nostalgia when you can just as easily emulate the “real thing”. Activision and Imagic titles at least have some originality. River Raid(s), Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, Demon Attack, Alien Brigade, etc.
ruleryak
2600 games worth playing: River Raid II, Pitfall, Jungle Hunt, Ghostbusters, Lock n Chase, Cosmic Ark, Demon Attack, Mountain King
toast0
I'd say my favorite 2600 game is Super Breakout in progressive mode. Warlords is also pretty fun with four people and two sets of paddles.
There's a lot of games out there with really tight gameplay loops. Much fewer with deep gameplay, though. So it kind of depends on what you're looking for.
crims0n
I have a soft spot for 400/800/XL/XE versions of PAC-MAN and Donkey Kong. They are both pretty close to the arcade originals.
rbanffy
We used the term "arcade quality" back then.
Now even my Apple TV is significantly better than anything I can find at an arcade.
tidwall
Vanguard, Adventure, Track and Fields (with controller), Pitfall, Berzerk, Kung Fu Master
nlarion
Yars' revenge is pretty good. I'm guessing these don't boot homebrew, but synthcart allows you to play music.
rbanffy
I think they can run from cartridges, so if you have one loaded with homebrew games, they should work. Most Atari 2600 games had no copy protection.
bitwize
Flashcarts don't work unless you devote the entire flash to a single ROM (some of them can do this). This is because the console snarfs the entire contents of the ROM into RAM first, rather than mapping the ROM directly into the CPU's memory space like the original consoles did. So the bank-switching tricks that flashcarts use to provide multiple ROM options on original hardware don't work on these. This is also why the 2600+'s pack-in multicart has a janky, DIP-switch solution to select a game.
Many large carts (8K and larger) also don't work, at least not without the firmware knowing how to bankswitch to read the whole ROM, so a fw update may be required.
raspyberr
I think that's not far off the same as asking what 1890s films are worth watching. You could watch a couple for a bit of novelty and an idea of what technology was like but none of them are "good".
rbanffy
It really depends on your expectations. None of these games will be comparable to today's AAA games, but a lot of them are very playable and similar to today's casual in-browser games, with some animation and resolution limits.
UltraSane
I would have to agree. About the only Atari games that are actually fun are Missile Command and Space Invaders, and then not for very long.
aussieguy1234
sounds like these two + systems are essentially the same system, but with a different case and controller.
snvzz
miSTer all the way.
jgalt212
miSTer is a technical marvel, but from all the YouTube videos I've seen it seems the gains from miSTer over the latest emulators is not noticeable.
tombert
I love my MiSTer, and I don't regret buying it, but I'd be lying if I said it was "worth" it; software emulators for every system that the MiSTer runs already exist and have gotten very good.
I bought my MiSTer mostly as a "how neat is that?" purchase. I think it's kind of cool to not only be able to run the games, but have a direct recreation of the hardware to do it. I wish I could regale you with tales of lower latency and how it has made me better at Donkey Kong Country, but I feel like most of the differences I see are probably placebo, especially since I just plug it into an LCD TV, not some fancy low-latency OLED or a period-accurate CRT.
If your goal is to play SNES games, you're likely to have a comparable (or even better) experience downloading Higan or something, but even if it's placebo, something about it feels more accurate to me.
Plus FPGAs are just cool.
mattl
Have a MiSTER but for Super Nintendo games I picked up the Analogue SuperNT.
snvzz
It's always been about implementing hardware in hardware, rather than software.
Sure, software-based emulators for old hardware exist, but miSTer and its community have clear preference for the FPGA approach.
And, of course, timing accuracy aside, where miSTer excels is in the ecosystem it has created. The overall UX.
The software emulator community is trying (with efforts such as e.g. retroarch) but isn't quite there.
rbanffy
It depends. Where FPGAs excel is at using actual period hardware, such as CRTs and peripherals. For less powerful platforms, software emulation is quite enough for the casual gamer.
I can't stress this enough, however: the physical interaction with the device is extremely important. Even being a software emulator inside a physical C64 reproduction, the fact it's a tiny ARM SoC in there is irrelevant - typing on a physical C64 keyboard makes it much closer to any FPGA connected to a PC keyboard.
The title is wrong, it's about the recent Atari 2600+ and 7800+, not the original models.