Let's say it comes out in the US with the NES style Euro gamepads, in 1984 as originally planned, with a built-in Pokey sound chip and with Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, Rikki & Vikki and Ninja Golf as launch titles. Does it stand a chance against NES when it drops the next year? Also Jack Tramiel was hit by a car and killed in this timeline before he could run Atari so a competent person is the CEO
>Does it stand a chance against NES when it drops the next year?
Probably not. Atari didn't have the best reputation at that time.
Let's say 5200 also never came out
>Also Jack Tramiel was hit by a car and killed in this timeline before he could run Atari so a competent person is the CEO
>so a competent person is the CEO
You have absolutely no idea about the time period you are speaking about.
How about the Console and computer divisions, during this debacle after the 5200 conundrum, got sold off to Fujitsu, AT&T, or perhaps, Mr. Curry of Acorn Electronics?
The NES was basically a next gen experience compared to the 7800 due to the quality of the titles and far superior sound and mostly better graphics capabilities. Even if they put a new sound chip in the console instead of relying one the cartridge based one, I doubt it would had mattered.
7800 could had been a mild hit if it came out in '81 or '82 instead of the 5200.
7800 was already complete in terms of development by mid-1984! NES came before then on the scene in 1983. The only thing lagging is its native sound processor. Oh, and the 7800 had the ability to handle more sprites on screen without worry about flicker.
>the ability to handle more sprites on screen without worry about flicker
And that's it, and due to its lower resolution. Games ran at 256 pixels wide for NES vs 160 for 7800.
The 7800 had a 320 pixel mode, but could only be used for basically static screens.
The 7800 could shine on arcade games like Xevious, but simply couldn't have ran things like SMB3.
I think it would been a decent 2nd place competitor, if it came out in 84 it would have been on its 2nd generation of software by 86. I think the Atari 7800 name is too confusing, when I first got mine at the market I thought it was some Atari 2600 variant. I think the graphics would be good enough if 256k games came out in 87 or so.
The atari forums seem to hand wave this off, my impression is everything is drawn like playfield graphics with no true sprites. The graphics give a good impression to the eye but technically they are far less detailed than nes. I think there is not quite enough cpu power to draw the entire screen in 1 or 2 frames which is why games have lots of black space.
Being right after the 5200 and not that much more powerful, very odd, they could have made it a bit better.
Are you daft? The 7800 in was already superior to the NES in many respects and only hobbled by Tramiel's corner cutting.
The NES was already dated on it's release because consumer grade 16 bit chips were already widely available and being used in PCs. The industry even called them out on it at the time.
It's why Sega was able to make the NES look ancient overnight with the Genesis in '89.
With Atari's brand recognition they would have dominated. Even if you believe the NES was technologically superior it would have wilted on the vine just as the TurboGrafx 16 did against the vastly interior NES.
>It's why Sega was able to make the NES look ancient overnight with the Genesis in '89.
Genesis came out 5 years after the Japanese release of the Famicom and 4 years after the NES in America. You may have had a point if it was within one year or something
The NES was released to limited markets in late '86 but wasn't widely available to most people until '87. The NES was released in Japan in '83. So not only was it lagging on it's earliest release in Japan in 1983, because there were 8 bit chips were already made obsolete by 16 bit chips. It was positively ancient even by the benchmark set by itself.
People handwave away the resolution of the 7800 saying it was too much of a compromise but the color pallet of NES always looked like shit even compared to the 5200.
Nintendo even approached Atari about distributing the NES for them.
You have to stack so many hypotheticals for Atari to even stand a chance that it seems pointless.
The only one that has legs and could have been significant is "what if the Nintendo deal had gone through and the Famicom was released in the US as the Atari Entertainment System?"
They are the only one to make even worse decisions than Sega, and that's saying alot.
The Atari 7800 should have never existed.
The Atari ST should never have existed.
The only system that should have been made was the Atari CD in 1986 or 87.
No, just roll out XEGS.
my dad got me a 7800 when I was 5, but it was 1990 so he bought it for real cheap, then he got like a couple dozen 7800 and 2600 games (7800 could play 2600 games) for under 20 bucks so for like two years I was playing 7800 Galaga and 2600 Combat while games like Super Mario World were out on the market, never mind the NES library at the time
wouldn't of wanted it any other way though
>Let's say a 10's baby tries to go back in time and change things
They dun blow up real good. Didn't you watch the documentary? Aliens altered post 60's babies DNA to make them explode when time traveling to prevent them from fricking up the timestream and turning the world into the hellscape it's become. True story.