25 minutes ago (edited)
I played Atari 800 games at one friend's house and then went to a different friend's house to play on his Atari 5200. I immediately noticed that the games were identical to the Atari 8-bit computer. However, control with the analog joystick was terrible. This felt like a huge error by Atari. What good are the games if you can't play them?
Pac-Man is a game that requires a very good 4-way joystick to control. I can't do it well enough on a computer keyboard or a joypad. I have a Namco Joystick from over 20 years ago, but with the 8-way joystick, I keep making wrong turns. This is why I purchased the Namco Arcade1up with close-to arcade controls. It doesn't have Pac-Man but it does have Ms. Pac-Man.
I have similar problems trying to play Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man/Donkey Kong with a joypad. Joypads are great if don't have to keep switching directions but they aren't precise enough for games as rapid as Pac-Man. Console versions of these games seem to compensate for the difficulty of using a joypad.
When I first saw Space Invaders, it was obvious to me that it was moving just one invader at a time. This is why it speeds up as you eliminate invaders. This is the first game I can recall that had memory-mapped video, but apparently no sprites. So the CPU would have been limited on how many objects it could move at one time.
Atari announced the 7800 around 1984. They said that it was going to have around 128 sprites. I was excited for it. But then they delayed the release and it looked like it was never going to happen. They finally released it to compete with the NES, but by that point, it was the weaker system.
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