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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- Joust was one of the most enjoyable arcade to game console ports. In this video, we'll compare all the Atari versions of Joust, on the Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800.
There was a lot of flickering on the Atari 2600 as more opponents were rendered to the screen, similarly to what you might expect when playing Atari 2600 Pac Man. This is the likely result of a memory saving technique where sprites are drawn to the screen in alternate frames to save memory. Older CRT screens are a lot more forgiving of this effect, but today's monitors and certainly today's recording software make it appear like a real problem.
The Atari 5200 version looks identical to what I used to play on the Atari 800 and Atari 800XL when I was a kid. I spent many hours playing this game and loved it.
The Atari 7800 had some very obvious visual differences than the 5200. The game showed more color per sprite, making the opponents, player sprites and platforms look a lot more like the actual coin-op arcade.
Overall, despite significant visual differences, Joust plays pretty close to the same across all consoles and is a lot of fun regardless of your preferred Atari platform.
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This is a great comparison. Thanks for making the video. I grew up with the 2600 and never got to play these other versions.
hey! this is great stuff I would love to see more. As a collector, it's nice to see someone commenting on the differences, some things I don't even see
This was an interesting video. The 7800 port of Joust is the best port of Joust that I've seen so far and it's also one of the games that really shine on the system, compared to the NES. (Ballblazer and Joust definitely out-do their NES counterparts.)
Wait, there was a Ballblazer on the NES? I don't know if I knew that. I'll have to look that one up.
Well I didn't think it was good compared with the 7800 version so between the 2 I'd just recommend the 7800 version but yeah.
Ballblazer was only released in Japan on the Famicom.
Commando and many others beat NES too! Imo games that were on both platforms were very close. Theres at least 10 or so cross platform games to compare ;) I keep finding more.
The sprite limit on the 2600 is not per frame but per line. You are allowed two players, two missiles, and one "ball" per line. With clever sprite re-use, the 2600 can have dozens of sprites onscreen with no flicker where you couldn't on the "more powerful" systems like the Intellivision (which had 8 sprites per FRAME) or the Colecovision (32 per frame AND no more than 4 per line) which make it almost impossible to re-use sprites within a frame. Activision's Spider Fighter is a good example of dozens of sprites on screen with no flicker and insanely smooth movement that would be impossible on the Intellivision or the Colecovision.
Interesting, is it a per line limitation? It seems like they could have managed the visuals better in that case. And like you mentioned, I've seen examples with more action and less flicker. Thanks for the clarification!
MrTBoneSF And the sprites, missiles, and ball could be used in very creative ways, too. For example, the impassable walls in "Adventure" were stretched-out missiles, and the vine in "Pitfall" was just a really long and skinny ball!
Eric Norton well you can see it that way. In reality the wine was just a 1x1 pixel ball that was repositioned to form the wine. Maybe that is that what you meant just want to mark the difference between the actual solution for the wine vs the wall solution.
They are all technically the same computers but the hardware was slightly less limited on the 7800.
I loved Joust in the arcade, though I couldn't handle the pterodactyl either. I was afraid the 2600 version would be bad so stayed away from it. It's too bad you didn't compare the arcade version that I think is on one of my "Arcade Classics" CD-ROM for Playstation.
Atari 8-bit Joust is one of my all-time favorites. Played the crap out of this on my 130XE.
If only my Atari 800XL could speak.. :-)
In the early 90s my mom bought an entire Atari 800xl set up from a computer developer who was married to her coworker. We had hundreds of game on floppy disk most of witch had never been released or accepted ( beta versions). We had games on cassette and the keyboard had the slot for the game cartridges. I wish I still had the computer but it was lost in a flood back in 2002.
I love console comparison videos!
+Rethink Retro Yeah, they're fun. I especially like titles like Joust that span all three of the classic consoles. Every single version has noticeable differences. Unlike comparisons between say Commodore 64 and Atari 8 bit, for example, where some titles have only subtle differences.
Best ones are for MARIO cart
One of my favourites on the 2600. Shame it is not any modern compilations.
5:30 I loved this game when i was 7 i found it finally 😍❤️
Came here from reading "Ready Player One". Who else?
The reason the sprites flicker is there just were not enough of them for the number of objects on the screen. To get around this objects were only displayed in one field. This took advantage of the each frame contained 2 interlaced fields. Making a video from the game at frame rate that can't pick up both fields won't look right.
It's always worse on youtube than it is on the actual system. They usually flicker so fast that it isn't bothersome or very noticeable, but when recorded doesn't pick up all the frames.
For instance. I didn't realize Joust had any flicker until watching this video. I have the 2600 cart, nothing dissappears. The goal was to flicker so fast the eye couldn't catch it. If anything the birds go mildly transparent rather than dissappear
The sound chip in the 7800 is the same one as the one in the 2600. The 7800 can also use the POKEY from the 400/800 computer and the 5200 by adding it into the game cartridge.
Yes, but few games added the Pokey chip....if it didn't come with it you're out of luck.
7800 is the same sound chip as 2600 but in 7800 mode it runs faster. Same 2 sound channels but more sounds and variety.
Games that are both on 2600 and 7800 always sound a bit better on 7800.
Also for 2600 that same TIA sound chip also does the graphics, as where on 7800 it's only for sound and has it's own MARIA graphics chip. Thus giving it more resources for sound.
Example. Ms. Pacman, Mario Bros, and Crossbow 2600 have only a couple different sound effects. As where 7800 version crams in a bunch.
Joust forever - I too played the home computer version (on my Atari 800 XL), which is identical to the 5200 one - and IMHO, it is the best of the three - all the physics in the game are just awesome.
My family and friends and neighbours battled it out without mercy - and we all had tons of fun doing it :-)
Anyone who likes Joust should try "Blood Hawks" it's basically Joust for a new generation: suitsnnukes.itch.io/blood-hawks
These are great games, but did you play these videos on actual hardware or on emulators? Playing them on the real hardware is a very different experience, especially the "gravity" glitch you experienced in the 2600 version would not happen on the real hardware.
I like how all these ports emulate the original arcade game's unintentional platform bounce when the bird bounces along the platform.
But, please, like so many of these videos, and judging from the pixel clarity of the recording, it seems to appear that you might be using an emulator and not the real hardware. They all play better on real hardware.
Oh you're 100% correct about real hardware vs emulators. Yes, the gameplay recording is on an emulator strictly for ease of capturing video.
I agree - it's a double-edged sword. Playing on the real consoles is a more authentic experience, but, especially in our digital age, emulators are so much easier to work with, and the quality of the recording is much clearer than you could possibly hope to accomplish with 30-40 year old equipment designed for a different era of technology.
Can he say ....bird ass? Lol,
Morning, very insteresting comparaison video, Yours Faithfully
Full Gore Mode
I loved this game. Game queen I was. Space dungeon was mine 2. Great
great stuff ..they are all good ports in their own right !
+zombee38 Agreed. This is one of the titles that carries pretty well across all the Ataris IMO.
+TechZonk I had joust for my Atari 2600.. I can't believe the gfx are bad looking today looking at it...! it's funny how the egg never hits the ground.. just stays in the air... lol..
later I got the Atari 5200 & got joust for that... gfx is damn good on the 5200! used to play the hell out of that on my 5200! when u kill the guy on the bird near the lava at a certain point.. the bird commits suicide into the lava & doesn't even bother flying...i used to do this trick lots of times!! lol..other consoles doesn't do this..... i got the 5200 on eBay a few years back as a Christmas present & it brought back memories! last year I played JOUST & gotten a score of 800,000+ made a video of it... i never had a high score like this as a kid...seems when we get older, we play better.. ;) hehe..
cadiman12 the atari 5200 is awesome with great sound for the time...graphics were great too bummer about the controllers
zombee38 your 100% right on the controllers .. joysticks were cool looking at its time ,but Atari should've done a better job on on their workmanship.. joysticks weren't working right
When they were only a few years old when I had my system.. They should've lasted for a lifetime such as the Atari 2600 joysticks & COLECOVISION... the cool feature on the 5200 joysticks is the pause button! We didn't have pause on the 2600 games... :) If we had to go to the bathroom doing #1.. we had to run fast.. then back to the game if u were lucky u didn't get killed & still get back into the game... Lol..
cadiman12 can you use the atari 2600 joystick in the 5200?
It's not memory causing the flicker, it's a shortcoming of the TIA. Even games with the superchip (like Defender II) have flicker. You shouldn't see flicker unless 2 objects are on the same scan line. Mattel totally botched Burgertime over the flicker issue, which is why some of the enemies look like flags in the wind. The cart actually has 2k of ram on it and it would be an excellent conversion if not for the marketing department insisting that there would NEVER be flickering in any game made by Mattel, whether for the 2600 or the Intellivision.
I think there was two things going on. You could have lots of sprites as long as they weren't on the same horizontal, like enemies in Berzerk, and you can switch between 3 enemy sprites without noticing, like in Mouse Trap (a Pac-Man clone with 3 enemies instead of 4). I think they said Ms. Pac-Man used both so there was only a problem when two ghosts were on the same horizontal. Wizard of Wor had 2 players and 5 enemies, so it gets worse than Pac-Man. But I wonder if you switched 2 enemies with player 1 whether that would prevent noticing flicker, so you could have had 5 enemies without noticing?
Since you mentioned Mattel, I'll have to look at what they did with the Thirsties in Kool-Aid Man, an M-Network game.
READY PLAYER ONE
Gosh. Atari games are the best!!! I love how you can just pick them up and play. And it's not about some stupid story or quest, it's solely about the gameplay and experience. That's what modern gaming needs!!!
N64 Joey I couldn't agree more! And that's why I enjoy playing 30 and 40 year old games (doesn't time fly?!) even now - you turn them on, you play them, and you have a great time. Yes, games look so much more impressive today, but I often get the feeling that they're more interactive movies than games, and, at least for me, that's a bit of a turn-off.
Absolutely. These early games are great. In this case, Atari just did the conversion. The geniusses at Williams did the even better Arcade original.
u betta have a story if you chargng 60 bucks for it lol people waana know a plot
stfu.
Anyone else here after reading ready player one?
Yep, problem with 5200 was monochrome sprites too often.
Too bad. They had discovered a way to make multi-colored ones in Superman for the 2600 as long as each horizontal line has only one color.
I LOVED this game!
the 5200 and the 800 were nearly identical
I guess that's a reason the former failed. Maybe if it were a cheap version that could play the existing computer cartridges? Or perhaps they just should have skipped it and went straight to the 7800? When I went to college I played and liked only a few NES games. I played computer games then. After college I saw the SNES and was impressed so bought a lot of games which I traded in when finished.
belezabeleza
You need to record in 60fps, not 30fps
they could have done a far better job on joust on the 2600, i guess they just didn't want to and slapped it out like many of the other 2600 games. this is where the homebrew scene shines
Absolutely not. The 2600 version is really a masterpiece in itself. One would be hard pressed to find a 2600 home brew with significantly better graphics technically. Can’t believe this got “likes” - some severe ignorance here.
@@datacipher You automatically assume I'm talking about graphics, but I'm not. I'm talking about how the game plays, It's a fair bit off. its by no means is a masterpiece, I'm also not calling it the worst game on the 2600 either.
Back in the day when I was a kid, I never really paid attention to how the 2600 version played vs the arcade version, but as an adult, it's clear as day. About the only thing resembling Joust is how it looks, and the name, everything else about it definitely isn't. it's basically tag that looks like Joust.
You bring up graphics, I can only bet that they can also improve that as well.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. It has nothing to do with color palate, it has to do with the number of colors per sprite. The 2600 can display an enormous number of colors on the screen, it just can't do so in a way that would benefit a game. You have to remember that the 2600 was designed to be little more than a pong machine with a estimated 2 year life span and was released in 1977 or 78 and went straight through until late 1983 and then picked up steam again in 1984 and was supported until 1990 and is still getting home brew releases today, some of which are just incredible. The 5200 has the same video and audio chips as the 400/800/8 bit line, but doesn't have much ram, though MANY 8 bit games have been ported to it. The 7800 wasn't even designed by Atari, it was designed by GCE. Had it been released when it was ready, Nintendo might not be a household name in America.
Fun fact. The 5200 and the 7800 use the same hardware for video/graphics.
The same 1.79mhz CPU is in both consoles.
In-fact, if you look into it it's basically a overhaul of the 5200. Makes one wonder what 5200 games would look like had the controllers not sucked, and developers took the same time with it they did on the 7800.
+Objectified Cross www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/7800/7800menu/
The 7800 does not have the same graphics hardware as the 5200.
This is completely incorrect. For graphics the 5200 used the antic chip (and gtia) chip - from the 8 bit computer line. The 7800 used a totally different approach with the Maria graphics chip designed by gcc. For sound, the 5200 used the pokey chip also found on the computer line. The 7800 did not - and had to stick with 2600 sound - the plan was to out sound ships on individual cartridges but this didn't happen.....
It actually did happen, but only with two games that I'm aware of. Both Commando and Ballblazer for 7800 has the Pokey chip.