2nd generation console discussion(Intellivision, Colecovision, 2600, Odyssey 2)

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Those D&D games were hardly what I'd call good examples of scrolling, no matter how many directions they had. I doubt any of them were more than 8, despite the controller offering 16 directions. And most side scrollers only had to scroll in one direction.

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You're just showing your unfamiliarity with the library again. Only Cloudy Mountain scrolls.


Here are some 16-directional scrolling games:















The developer cheaped out on full 16 directions of frames for the car, but you can see how the player still gets to move in all directions:





This video is poor quality but it is the best at showing the full directional scrolling:

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River Raid was not a single color. It had blue water and green land.

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Every 8 x 8 tile onscreen that contains any pixelart will require frames of animation to animate. Most of the screen in the Colecovision version is solid single color tiles which require no frames as there is no pixelart. Only the seam where the water meets the green needs to animate. The objects in the water are likely all sprites to save space and because you don't have the horizontal bottleneck. Notice the trees in the Intellivision version? That kind of detail would require frames of animation on Colecovision.

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Defender scrolls just fine in 2 directions on the CV.

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Another good example where only the mountain outline and the two or three star variations require any animation.






You keep intentionally cherry picking random shovelware to somehow prove that the Intellivision isn't doing what it does throughout the rest of the library. I'll say it again, bad shovelware on Genesis doesn't prove the superiority of the SNES or that the Genesis is just bad at anything. It only proves that that bad port was published.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Now, look at these 3 versions of Centipede from Atari for the Intellevision, ColecoVision and 5200. The 5200 nails the sound (the arcade game is using simular sound hardware), but, I'd say that the CV version actually improves the graphics. Intellevision version? Pfff! Tthere isn't a single arcade game from the time that looked or played better on the Intellevison. It just looked way outclassed by the 5200 and CV.

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Why would you compare Centipede without including one of Intellivision's killer apps that just happens to be Centipede on steroids?

How about a version of Centipede with 60+ animated enemies onscreen at once, with a large multi-colored animated player sprite shooting huge projectiles, with fast 16-directional movement... all at 60fps?






Worm Whomper demonstrates how much Commando style games benefit from 16-directional movement.

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That's not smooth scrolling BTW. ;)

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I guess everyone should just stop trying explain what scrolling and tile shuffling actually is as it's hopeless lost on you and you don't understand what you are looking at in videos. Hover Force can't even be pulled off on Colecovision today.

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There's always excuses in this thread with the Intellivision for direct comparisons of the day, but the reality was that it couldn't compete with the CV or 5200 in arcade ports.

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Again you are intentionally ignoring what has been discussed and the actual history of these consoles. Intellivision was created to feature a library of innovative original software and early on Mattel Electronics had a no-ports/no-arcade-style games policy. The Colecovision had a priority to pump out arcade ports and arcade style games. It's like comparing Genesis and SNES only by RPGs.

Yet there are still lots of great arcade style games, great arcade ports, ports in general and many control and play better on Intellivision. You are obsessing over superficial aesthetics and championing a glut of arcade games with compromise gameplay and dismissing Intellivision games that legitimately play great and are more enjoyable.

Why aren't you comparing all of the original software or better yet, games that were innovative or remain unique to this day?

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I'm pretty sure that was a 4K cart and a cash-in title for the pubslisher.

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This pretty much sums up your blinders. After all of your previous comparisons were shovelware and against smaller sized Intellivision roms.

I'm sure that the irony of this comment in a post comparing Lock 'n Chase is lost on you.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time picking each subject, because it's not worth it.

I've heard of Space Spartans, and it looks like a really cool rip-off of Star Raiders. I'm not sure if I'm really seeing 16 different degrees of scrolling, but what is there is pretty sparce anyways.

The Dreadnaught Factor was a game on 8-bit computers. It's definitely inferior to the 5200 and XL versions of the game, and I find it really odd that they changed the movement to horizontal. I'm not seeing much of a difference in degrees of scrolling either.



I'm certainly not seeing anything spectacular (Mud Buggies has some nice graphics though( with those racing games, other than they are way too slow. Racig Destruction Set was a hell of a lot more impressive. Yeah, I can see possibly extra degrees of movement in Safe Cracker, but it's really just making everything look unstable and clunky.



And River Raid has more than just Rivers and green land. There's bridges and roadways along the way, and the river banks wind and split up.

Well, you chose to blow off Defender, and don't acknowledge the far superior version of Moon Patrol on the Colecovision that includes 3 layers of parallax scrolling and much better graphics than that lego looking Intellivision version.

Let's ignore that the 2600 had analog paddles with more degrees of motion than that clunky Intellivision disc. Worm Womper is pretty much a sideways paddle game with an added movement of X,Y, in addition to A,B. I'm not even seeing how you can put that boring looking game in the same category as Defender. And if Worm Womper is considered a killer app for the system, you're not selling me on it's library. Space Spartans, on the other hand, is a killer app, as was B-17 Bomber.

ATARISOFT is not shovelware!

And as far as Lock N' Chase goes, have you ever seen the arcade game?

The gap between the arcade game and the Intellivison game, is much larger than that between the 2600 game and the Intellivision game. Tutenkham on the 2600 was a garbage effort at best, while the CBS version of Omega Race was a real effort at making a quality game for the console.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

Here are some 16-directional scrolling games:

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You keep bringing this up, but I still don't see how it's a big deal. The Intellivision was designed to scroll in 16 directions in tandem with its controller being designed to go in 16 directions. It's beneficial for some games, no doubt. But weren't we talking about console generations? It's hard for me to see 16-way movement as "next-gen" when zero consoles of the next 2-3 generations had it.

If Atari had felt that the Intellivision's 16-way controller gave it a lasting edge over the 5200, they had a clear opportunity to correct that with their "do-over" console, the 7800. Instead, their takeaway from the 5200's poorly-received, high defective rate controller was that they needed to simplify. The 7800 controller didn't turn out great but you can see what they were going for.

I'm not aware of a single controller for any other platform that has 16 directions digitally. It seems no one in the industry felt it was something that needed to be replicated.

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Why would you compare Defender without including one of Intellivision's killer apps that just happens to be Defender on steroids?

How about a version of Defender with 60+ animated enemies onscreen at once, with a large multi-colored animated player sprite shooting huge projectiles, with fast 16-directional movement... all at 60fps?

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Does this game ever scroll? Not seeing it in the video.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

A similar but unfortunate issue are games with lazy color choices. Games like Draconus which have monochromatic backgrounds. They could at least do the Lionheart thing and plaster a gradient all over the screen, or use a bit more color variety per screen, but nope... just a bland 3 shades of the same color for everything.

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I think the game looked reasonable on the Atari, especially the brown/orange sections. The Spectrum version suffered worse IMO

Biggest problems with these systems here was the development environment really. The games were too cheap and disposable, I mean how much was Draconus when it was brand new? £2.99? I know that was what it cost when it came out on Spectrum and C64.

It was an environment of strict deadlines and no money to invest in larger projects with bigger teams of professionals, instead you got two or three guys, one of whom designed the gameplay, programmed it and did the artwork a lot of the time and another maybe did the music. Development time was three months if you were lucky, sometimes as little as a week. Publishers who didn't give a shit about the product were the norm, how long extra was it that the C64 programmer of Salamander said he asked for so that he could finish the game with all the levels? something like 2 weeks? :(

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Originally Posted by j_factor

You keep bringing this up, but I still don't see how it's a big deal. The Intellivision was designed to scroll in 16 directions in tandem with its controller being designed to go in 16 directions. It's beneficial for some games, no doubt. But weren't we talking about console generations? It's hard for me to see 16-way movement as "next-gen" when zero consoles of the next 2-3 generations had it.

If Atari had felt that the Intellivision's 16-way controller gave it a lasting edge over the 5200, they had a clear opportunity to correct that with their "do-over" console, the 7800. Instead, their takeaway from the 5200's poorly-received, high defective rate controller was that they needed to simplify. The 7800 controller didn't turn out great but you can see what they were going for.

I'm not aware of a single controller for any other platform that has 16 directions digitally. It seems no one in the industry felt it was something that needed to be replicated.



Does this game ever scroll? Not seeing it in the video.

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Sorry, I wrote Defender when I was responding to a Centipede comparison.

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

I mean how much was Draconus when it was brand new? £2.99? I know that was what it cost when it came out on Spectrum and C64.

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Wow then you guys had it pretty good across the pond! I don't ever remember new games for that cheap hahah

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Originally Posted by turboxray

Wow then you guys had it pretty good across the pond! I don't ever remember new games for that cheap hahah

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Atari Draconus really represented value for money back in the day, but games like Draconus were very much a minority, an exception to the rule.

When I was a kid my brother literally owned 50 odd budget games he'd purchased in that price bracket during the mid 80s. I just looked through them and actually the situation was worse than I thought, out of those 50 odd games only three were played, Booty, Crazy Caverns, and Zub.

Generally you got your budget game, you played it once or twice, and then it was thrown into a box of other crappy budget games.

Things changed a lot later on though when Code Masters turned up, maybe 1 in 3 Code Masters games had entertainment value, and some of those were as good as the full priced games. Then you had the budget re-releases of older full priced games starting in the 90s (sort of like "platinum" or "greatest hits" releases) those were excellent value for money.

As I said before though, you get what you pay for so even when you have a fun full-priced game (around £10 on Spectrum and C64 Tape, ~£15 for C64 Disk, or ~£20 for C64 cartridge) you're putting up with it having poor graphics or sound, or it'll be very short or missing levels (often leading to the difficulty being ramped up to increase longevity), or it'll be confusing or buggy due to little play-testing etc etc.

Yeah the vast majority of 8bit computer games were... well... very budget. I'm really thankful for the homebrew scene for giving these machines high quality games.

Especially for the Amstrad CPC. Its library is full of bad spectrum ports, 5 fps games or games that just play like crap. It's the Amiga/ST situation only 10x worse since the Amstrad was never that popular. Homebrew games though are really freaking good. Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, Bubble Bobble, Super Edge Grinder, R-Type, Star Sabre, Sub Hunter, Pinball Dreams, Operation Alexandra, Legend of Steel, etc. From a rather forgettable machine to one of the best 8bit computers to own.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

Here is a direct capture of his Castlevania port that I recorded from real hardware:

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I was actually playing this. Its a very good port, feels like it was done by 1st party.

But it definitely shows the Intellivision is quite below the NES. Theres countless downgrades like low frames of animation, single-colour sprites, backgrounds are nowhere as detailed.

But still, this is like The Witcher 3 being ported to the PS3.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Uh....the Intellivision version of River Raid was the choppiest version on consoles. The sound effects are the worst of the bunch as well. The explosions are the generic sound you'd get in most games for the console. Hell, even the 2600 had better explosion sounds in this game.

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So, aren't we gonna play the game of "which port is the best"?


Heres a ColecoVision video with better quality:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hdflw

Time with 8-bit computer games has cemented in my mind that the Amstrad didn't really get any more of a raw deal than any of the other main computers of the era, whatever you had the vast majority of games you experienced were nowhere near approaching optimal. Thankfully, when there's thousands of games for a system all it take is 5% of them being polished for there to be 100s of good games

Those Spectrum ports that Amstrad fanboys complain about incessantly were often made like crap for the Spectrum to begin with and were likely barely more optimised for that system than the Amstrad anyway, just a whole load of lowest common denominator releases.

Also, some of the Amstrad games you mentioned are 128k only, those wouldn't have been market viable in the 80s.

How many 2D Spectrum games were needlessly in monochrome? Shameful amounts.

How many Spectrum games used 8x8 movement in comparison to MSX games from the same era? hardly any. This method had already been showcased by Hudsonsoft on Spectrum at the beginning of 1984 in Stop the Express, yet it was barely used again until Dave Perry brought it back in the late 80s. Sure its not always wise to use it, but in certain games, such as those with large characters it can work very well, Kung Fu Master for example is one game I think should've been done like this on the Spectrum.

For the record, MSX also got a lot of shitty ports from Spectrum (which often were themselves shitty ports). And by that I mean ports, with absolutely no attempt to see if at least the colors could be shuffled around or more than one sound channel could be used (if there was even sound, often it was more like a series of clicks instead) or, you know, actually using the arrow keys instead of QAOP. It was like MSX emulating a Spectrum. I'm going to assume this was in Europe (since MSX had managed to get a small market there).

The perils of sharing the same CPU.

At least for the Spectrum I can think of some pretty decent games that were released back in the day: The R-Type port was about as good as you could ask for from the platform; Rex was just awesome in general; Cobra had lovely smooth scrolling and even basic parallax at 25fps with pretty sweet gameplay; Myth on the spectrum may even be better than the C64 version; Stormlord wasn't a great game but the spectrum port was excellent.

What did the CPC have? Pre-Star Sabre most people thought it couldn't even handle any decent scrolling. C64 had some pretty sweet games as did the Atari 800 and the MSX, nothing on the quality of the NES/SMS but still decent. The CPC? Can't really think of anything that I would say "I want that" before homebrew showed what the platform could do.

The 128k makes a huge difference, more so than the Spectrum (one might argue having music is more important, but I mean what the machine can do with that extra RAM), but some of the new games work on the base machine like Operation Alexandra.

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Originally Posted by Yharnamresident

So, aren't we gonna play the game of "which port is the best"?


Heres a ColecoVision video with better quality:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hdflw

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I can’t see the video. I was more interested in showing that the Colecovision could do scrolling just fine with the right developer. Matt from Atarisoft days was the guy that programmed the excellent Moon Patrol. The game certainly looked better than the version I got on the C64. The game was completed, when Atari shut down all publishing.

He said that Atarisoft didn’t use Coleco’s buggy bios and that they had created their own code so that they could get around any legal action from Coleco. Atari didn’t pay any money to Coleco to publish games on the console.

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/22...lder/#comments

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

At least for the Spectrum I can think of some pretty decent games that were released back in the day

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The Freescape games (Driller, Total Eclipse et al) were made for Amstrad IIRC, they were as "fast" on the Amstrad as they were on Spectrum, but in colour too. Dave Perry's games were generally fine (including his excellent Wally Week games), the Rafaelle Cecco games (Cybernoid, Exolon, and even the Amstrad version of Stormlord) were comparable to the other versions, those mediocre-ish but inexpensive budget platformers made by Hi-Tec (Turbo the Tortoise, Scrappy Doo, Potsworth & Co etc etc) were all arguably best on Amstrad out of the 8-bits, IIRC the racers like Chase HQ, Continental Circus were okay (basically the Spectrum versions in colour).

There were also a handful of originals, Spindizzy and Sorcery being the most notable.

Most of the French and Spanish games seem like they were designed for the Amstrad

Ports that somewhat held their own in comparison to what the Spectrum and C64 were doing at the time; Rick Dangerous, Ikari Warriors, Prince of Persia, Robocop, Renegade and Target Renegade, Spherical, Puzznic, Feud, Motos, Sim City, Split Personalities, Gauntlet, Klax, X-Out etc etc. Contra was better than the C64 and Spectrum versions, Rainbow Islands was reasonable, Shinobi was arguably fine, Total Recall was the best version, Batman: The Movie was no more cut down than the other 8-bit versions, Turrican turned out okay given the Amstrad hardware, most of the isometric games had more colours (though no attempt at really optimising their usage).

Then there were a lot of very basic early games similar to Atari 2600 style games that were reasonable for the time.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Myth on the spectrum may even be better than the C64 version

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Agree with you about MYTH, quite like the Spectrum game, never liked the C64 one, too confusing.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Pre-Star Sabre most people thought it couldn't even handle any decent scrolling.

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It can't, it took them 20 years to do this, and half the time they're using the irrelevant 128k machines :D

Heh, being less flippant though, this depends on what you mean by "decent scrolling" I've seen some people say Stormlord and the Dave Perry games have better than decent scrolling, whilst to others anything under 50fps is unacceptably choppy.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

The 128k makes a huge difference, more so than the Spectrum (one might argue having music is more important, but I mean what the machine can do with that extra RAM), but some of the new games work on the base machine like Operation Alexandra.

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Anyone in 1987 choosing to buy a 128k Green-screen Amstrad over the Atari ST for the sake of saving £15 needed their head examined :p

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Originally Posted by gamevet

I can’t see the video. I was more interested in showing that the Colecovision could do scrolling just fine with the right developer. Matt from Atarisoft days was the guy that programmed the excellent Moon Patrol. The game certainly looked better than the version I got on the C64. The game was completed, when Atari shut down all publishing.

He said that Atarisoft didn’t use Coleco’s buggy bios and that they had created their own code so that they could get around any legal action from Coleco. Atari didn’t pay any money to Coleco to publish games on the console.

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/22...lder/#comments

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There were no "third parties"/licensing bitd. Atari, Mattel and Coleco all tried to stop anyone else from publishing games for their hardware.

Colecovision copying the Intellivision design right down to including a bios helped them stave off the kind of glut of crap software that Atari suffered and took down the overall market with it.

It wasn't that they made it more difficult to develop for Intellivision and Colecovision. Publishers can't just give their word that they didn't touch any copyrighted assets in the hardware and/or that ex Mattel/Coleco programmers weren't using techniques that they learned while working on official "first party" games.

Before a publisher could even begin conceptualizing anything, they had to pay an independent company $150k - $200k to reverse engineer the hardware and document every step along the way. If they were the fourth company requesting the service for the same hardware, they couldn't just print them off a copy of the massive book. They had to do it from scratch each time.

Even after that they weren't allow to touch any of the copyrighted/patented bios. The VCS doesn't have anything intellectual to protect. Which is why both Intellivision and Colecovision had legal "adapters" to play Atari games, but Atari couldn't do the same.

Can't rep but thanks for explaining that. That always seemed so bizarre to me and wasn't sure how it was allowed.

Yeah, I know. The ColecoVision had pretty much off the shelf parts, and like someone had said (was it you?) the Intellivision team insisted that all internal games used their development tools. Atarisoft made sure that they didn’t use any part of the Coleco bios, should Coleco choose to take them to court. They were probably following what Activision did to Atari.

The irony is that Atari’s Tengen tried to circumvent Nintendo’s lock out chip on the NES and got caught cheating.

The even bigger irony is that Tengen had already reverse engineered the CIC interactions and made a compatible clone… then at the very last minute an executive decided they had to use the original CIC's code out of fear that a future revision could be snooping the entire program to ensure validity. Which then Nintendo exploited to sue them. Whoops.

But yeah, pretty ironic in general given how Atari was actively trying to stop others with the Atari 2600. Granted, part of the issue was that they themselves got threatened over not doing anything about third parties selling porn games and such (though I don't think any lawsuit materialized from that?), so even if they had made the platform open they were going to be in trouble :​/

They would have got away with it, if not for that darned patent office visit.

Scooby Doo!

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Originally Posted by gamevet

I can’t see the video. I was more interested in showing that the Colecovision could do scrolling just fine with the right developer. Matt from Atarisoft days was the guy that programmed the excellent Moon Patrol. The game certainly looked better than the version I got on the C64. The game was completed, when Atari shut down all publishing.

He said that Atarisoft didn’t use Coleco’s buggy bios and that they had created their own code so that they could get around any legal action from Coleco. Atari didn’t pay any money to Coleco to publish games on the console.

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/22...lder/#comments

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God damn forum software and their weak Dailymotion support: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hdflw

Personally I think the 5200 version is the best. Has a lot more background detail, though I think the ColecoVision version has the best colours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOAHyS70WMw

I would buy a 5200, if those controllers weren't such a pos. I've actually looked into those gold plated contact replacements, but I don't think that those would remedy the stick itself. The 5200 could have been something special, had Atari actually invested more into the console.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

I would buy a 5200, if those controllers weren't such a pos. I've actually looked into those gold plated contact replacements, but I don't think that those would remedy the stick itself. The 5200 could have been something special, had Atari actually invested more into the console.

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You can get a custom controller adapter. I play 2D games using a Genesis pad.

My rebuilt stock controller works as good as they can, which is enough to play 2D games well. But you have to adjust to centering the stick.

It would be more of a nostalgia thing (it's a console I wanted back in 1982) for me. You have to put in a lot of workarounds to get the thing working properly, and I don't know if it's really worth all of that effort. A majority of its llibrary is available on my C64, which made it pretty easy for me to not persue getting one. I can get a boxed, complete console for fairly cheap though.

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

I think the game looked reasonable on the Atari, especially the brown/orange sections. The Spectrum version suffered worse IMO

Biggest problems with these systems here was the development environment really. The games were too cheap and disposable, I mean how much was Draconus when it was brand new? £2.99? I know that was what it cost when it came out on Spectrum and C64.

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Just ran into some info, Draconus was actually full price on Atari, unlike the other versions.

Its possible the game was made for Atari 8-bit machines and then ported to budget on other machines.

The 8-bit Atari computers were the lead hardware for quite some time. When Atari put those computers out to market, they sold quite well in Europe. It did okay in North America, until the Apple IIe arrived and then the C64. A lot of programmers got their experience on the Atari 8-bit computers.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

I would buy a 5200, if those controllers weren't such a pos. I've actually looked into those gold plated contact replacements, but I don't think that those would remedy the stick itself. The 5200 could have been something special, had Atari actually invested more into the console.

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I lucked out with my 5200 when I got it back in the early 2000s as a friend of mine gave me a non-working set of Wico controllers and the wico keypad. The controllers couldn't be repaired due to broken plastic inside them, but the keypad was a different story. I had that keypad in storage for years before finding it one day about 3 years ago and deciding to look more into it. Well about 20min later once I cleaned and rebuilt the switch buttons and the controller cable and that keypad is working good as new! I use it with an AtariAge redemption adapter that allows me to use a Genesis 3 button pad for the controls and the wico keypad for everything else.

Now some games I prefer to use the stock controllers for them. Star Raiders, Star Wars:TAG, Dreadnought Factor and The Last Star Fighter come to mind as working better with the original stock controller due to the analog nature of it and those games supporting it well.

What are the differences between the 4 colour and 5 colour modes on the 5200?

I take it there were some shortcomings to the 5 colour mode given fewer games seem to have used it.

Quickly looking up and… uh yeah, that looks bad. Seems it's 1bpp characters (2 colors per character), with the foreground color determined by the character number (0-63, 64-127, 128-191, 192-255) and the background color shared by all of them.
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/28...lor-text-mode/

Amusingly there seems to be another way to get 5 colors in the background that's way less restrictive (2bpp i.e. 4 colors, the catch is that you can choose between two values for the fourth color — seems it's one for characters 0-127 and one for 128-255, the rest of the colors are shared):
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/21...omment=2750877

Incidentally it seems Crowland used the latter too (combined with mid-screen palette changes):
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/23...omment=3161324

EDIT: wait, reading further and it seems there's a way to make sprites get OR'd with the background instead of covering them? O.O

Yeah its the Crownland Mode I was interested in as that game is usually held up as being pretty optimal.

Just wondering why it wasn't used more often.

EDIT: So this isn't actually a mode? just a feature of the 4-colour mode? I take it this just wasn't that well known at the time then?

Yep. I guess it's more that there are two 5 color modes, but people usually refer to the 1bpp one as being the "5 color" one.

As for the 2bpp one, I suppose the big problem is that there isn't much freedom in choosing the fourth color — you still only get two choices, and it's determined by the character ID. But at least the other three colors can help take some load off the artist's back (anything that only needs the shared colors can be placed in either half of the charset, so they can be left in whichever has more free room), unlike the situation with the 1bpp mode. Maybe a lot of artists just weren't paying attention to it. Also it may have been used more than is acknowledged (which tends to happen a lot with obscure features).

Yeah I had a look through a bunch of Atari 8-Bit games and I think the 5 colours per line feature is used a reasonable-ish amount, at least after 1983 (Its difficult to tell when the 5th background color is actually a sprite sometimes).

This appears to be pretty optimal for commercial releases -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwfgP7OtQG4

The 5th colour doesn't seem to be used that often on the 5200 though.

The 5 color mode only works for tiled backgrounds unfortunately. Due to the lack of sprites on the 800/5200, software sprites are often a must, or you end up with flickering all over the place like crownland.

It's a lot more efficient to do software sprites on the bitmap modes which makes the 5th color a no go. That color is also shared with the 5th "sprite".
It's amazing just how restrictive 4 colors per line are.

Can you start with a 5 colour per line tiled background for the top segment of the screen where there's no sprites, interrupt and swap mode to bitmap for the middle segment, and then interrupt and swap back to 5 colour tiles for the bottom segment? lol

I was playing this. I feel a lot of the early NES games are no match for the Colecovision, also I'm really fascinated by early 3rd gen games as I've never played the games from this period. All the NES games I owned while growing up were from the late 80s/early 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjG7lVZYxlc

I love those Konami games from that era, I played them on the MSX in grade school. spend many a penny on buying Flashcarts for it until I eventually bought a special cartridge that held them all.

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Originally Posted by Yharnamresident

I was playing this. I feel a lot of the early NES games are no match for the Colecovision, also I'm really fascinated by early 3rd gen games as I've never played the games from this period. All the NES games I owned while growing up were from the late 80s/early 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjG7lVZYxlc

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A lot of 2nd gen games from bitd have superior aspects to many Famicom games. Especially from the first few years of the library.

Track and Field 2 is a massive MSX conversion from the future.

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Originally Posted by Yharnamresident

I was playing this. I feel a lot of the early NES games are no match for the Colecovision, also I'm really fascinated by early 3rd gen games as I've never played the games from this period. All the NES games I owned while growing up were from the late 80s/early 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjG7lVZYxlc

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That makes no sense. You validated this claim after just playing one game??? And while pretty impressive on the Coleco, it's still superior on the NES.

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

Can you start with a 5 colour per line tiled background for the top segment of the screen where there's no sprites, interrupt and swap mode to bitmap for the middle segment, and then interrupt and swap back to 5 colour tiles for the bottom segment? lol

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Yes.

@Turboxray Did you notice that the crowd in the NES version of Track N' Field is only 3 colors and one of the shades is magenta. It's also only 3 rows. Yeah, the prototype is missing a lot of events, but it's not exactly a finished product.

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Originally Posted by Yharnamresident

I was playing this. I feel a lot of the early NES games are no match for the Colecovision, also I'm really fascinated by early 3rd gen games as I've never played the games from this period. All the NES games I owned while growing up were from the late 80s/early 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjG7lVZYxlc

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A lot of the early western releases on the NES were ports from the 8-bit computers. Maniac Mansion was a C-64 game, as was Skate or Die. I got a M.U.L.E cart for the NES about a decade ago. It just didn't feel quite like playing the game on the C64. There were a few things missing.