Ai slop 🤮
Honestly, the cartridge system was a (pardon the pun) game changer. Sure someone did it first but Atari really made it main stream. It allowed for a lot of what we see today. Sure you were dropping what was about a $1,000 in today’s money on a toy for you and your kids but you could play so many games on it.
The idea that you had a machine in your living room that you could change what it did just by putting in a new cartridge was mind breaking in the 70’s. Sure your TV could play 5 or 6 channels maybe but it still was a TV, getting a Atari made it a home entertainment system. The whole one machine that did so many different games paved the way for the whole home entertainment universe we have today.What’s impressive to me is how much more was done by later machines, like the Commodore 64, using almost the same CPU as the one in the Atari 2600.
Well, sure, but the C64 had 512 times more RAM(!), plus the VIC-II chip for graphics and the SID for audio. The TIA chip in the Atari was a joke in comparison. The CPU just isn’t that important. It only needs to run some game logic. It’s the graphics and sound that matter for games. The NES and SNES had very similar CPUs[1], too, but the graphics and sound chips are what made the SNES blow away the NES.
Same instruction set, but 16-bit and clocked twice as fast, plus a few more features. ↩︎
