How Powerful Was The Super Atari VCS (The Atari 3200)?

[Music] greetings it's Adam with irata nrata and the last time I did a video about an unreleased Atari system I talked about their last gasp the Atari Jaguar 2 this time let's jump back to the beginning of atari's console era and look at the never finished never relas sequel to The Mighty Atari 2600 called the Atari 3200 back in 1979 toy manufacturer Mattel released the intelion a console designed to Dethrone Atari from its pedestal this launched the first console war and by the end of 1982 several companies would all be clamoring to take the 2600 out not content to sit by and just let that happen Atari engineering began cooking up new designs for a 2600 successor according to Atari engineer Jerry Jessup in 1981 through 8 3 we were literally cranking out a new derivative Stella design schematic per week what he means by derivative Stella design is a variation or enhancement of the Atari 2600 chipset which had originally been code named as Stella part of that chipset is an important component called the Tia chip I'll just call it the Tia which sounds close to a common word in Portuguese which I speak the Atari 8it computer line had the CA and the more commonly the G Tia chip although this was not backwards compatible with the Tia to those variations that Mr Jessup spoke about they all went nowhere including a quad Tia design that 2600 Pac-Man and sword Quest programmer Todd fry worked on to try and stop the tari 7800 from becoming a thing engineers at Atari weren't very happy that Atari brass had hired an outside company to cook up their next console after the 5200 and flopped had the squad Tia design been finished it would have operated at four times the resolution of the 2600 but that's not what project Sylvia aka the super Stella aka the Atari 3200 was thanks to both the late Kurt vendel and the still living Jer Jessup we'll try and reconstruct what the 3200 was supposed to be first off this was 1981 we're talking about it was the peak of the Video Game Mania in the United States where not only were tari 2600s flying off the shelves arcades were exploding in numbers the population of arcade operators or people who would put equipment into places like laundromats gas stations movie theater lobbies and so on had more than doubled in that year alone it was a good time to be in the game's business although Atari was worried that they might lose their dominance to a competitor while Atari marketing was busy asking people what it is they wanted from a new Atari console engineering began developing those several projects as mentioned and Sylvia was just one of those and it was made as a direct response to the intell vision now Kurt had found some documentation and we can also get glean some things from others who were there at the time so that's the info I'll be going over today check the description for links and such principal design to the 3200 was by Doug nbow who created the original Star Raiders and later created games like Solaris one of the oddest bits about this system is that it was long rumored to be a 10bit platform just like the Intel Vision was Mr Jessup confirms that this was true however details on how that worked were often missing according to the schematics which Kurt vendel discovered along with feedback from Mr Jessup it's that its core processor was the 8bit bit 6502 the same processor used in all the isari 8bit computers the 7800 the NES many arcade machines and so on so where does the 10 bit part come into play well that was with the super Tia or sta chip the STA would have allowed the system to be fully backwards compatible with the 2600 while offering improved graphics and sound including Graphics running at a higher resolution according to groovy b a home brew game developer who looked at the schematics that curtain shared it had four Luma lines instead of the TS3 th it makes sense that it also would have had higher color capabilities over the 2600 how that compares with the CA and the gtia in the 8bit computer line though will never fully know and that's because there are no existing examples of the super Tia there's no circuit board of the syvia that ever reached production really just existed on paper Al although at one point something physical did exist since some software was created for it but we'll get into that in a moment Ram wise there are two different configurations that have been mentioned either 2 kilobytes or 8 kilobytes the 8 kilobyte one comes from Atari Inc businesses fund which is a book that Kurt vendel and Marty Goldberg wrote unfortunately had some typos in it particularly near the end and so it's possible that the eight might was supposed to be a two but then again had the 3200 reached production it's possible that they could have changed it to anything it could have been 8 bit or 8 KOB bytes or it could have been 16 kilobytes like the 5200 ended up being now the schematic also indicates that it was going to have a bus line to allow for additional RAM within the cartridges and possibly additional CPUs just like the Atari 7800 ended up doing regardless of which amount is the correct one that was going to be used it would have vastly outclass the 2600 which only came with 128 bytes of memory it's not kilobytes that's just bites other chips mentioned in the spec include the Frantic chip which was literally the same antic chip found on the Atari 400 800 just given a different name although it's possible that had this progressed to production they might have thrown in some additional features to that chip the there was also the 6532 Riot chip for input and output and last but certainly not least there was going to be a voice chip the votrax SC1 speech synthesizer which was used in several arcade machines such as gor wizard of war and some others and so because of that we can know what the speech on the Atari 3200 would have sounded like such as this for of course often it's really hard to tell what it's saying but it would have been a cool built-in feature regardless some computers and consoles had their own voice add-ons I remember it being pretty cool that my Texas Instruments 994a computer had voice in several games although the voice Clarity on the ti games is far better than what they co1 was capable of doing still had the sylv 3200 been released it pretty likely that many if not most games would have ended up using it one thing that Jessup was able to confirm about this were the rumors that the system was very difficult to code for in fact Mr Jessup says that it was that reason why they decided to dump the design now this wouldn't be because of the 6502 but rather due to a major Hardware bug that existed within the STA according to Rob zidel zidel sorry uh there was an issue where the Sprites when they would overlap each other would cause crashing issues so a version of Pac-Man was developed for the 3200 but anytime you would have Sprites overlapping it would crash now this was a hardware bug where had the designer Douglas sbower stuck around apparently he left Atari for a little while at some point and just kind of left this project up in the air um had he stuck around he probably would have been able to resolve that but as it was it was such a difficult bug to figure out that none of the other Engineers wanted to tackle it and of course where none of the game coders wanted to deal with it either and so where you have a platform where your games are basically going to be unplayable unless you could design games where the Sprites never overlapped each other um yeah that just made it kind of a dead letter now let's assume that resolved this bug and made it easier to program for what would the games have looked like well the best guess from all of this information is that it certainly would have looked better than the Atari 2600 and the intell vision but perhaps it would have been lagging behind the Atari 400 or perhaps on par with some of the 400's earliest games or maybe it's l impressive ones I would also venture to Guess that you could use the star path supercharger as a good case study to show what some of the 3200 games might have looked like um of course all that did was interface with the cassette tape for more ROM storage space but it also included more RAM and so it showed you what could be achieved by putting more RAM onto an Atari 2600 perhaps games would have looked more like the the latest generation of the last generation of 2600 games like Solaris and Pitfall 2 uh and maybe even slightly better than that and sounded better too since the th ship is also where you get the sound generation from given what Atari did with the 5200 it would have had a lot of arcade ports now this is actually part of the reason why the game Crash happened was that you had companies porting arcade games over to consoles like the 2600 within months of when they were released onto the arcade Market this upset a lot of arcade operators who spent 2500 to $3,000 on a brand new game only to find out that it already was available on consoles or it was coming to consoles very very soon and they would often see that hurt the earnings um but Atari finding success from Space Invaders and asteroids being ported to the system didn't care about any of that and they just went full steam ahead of course they also had competitors pushing that as kico and Par brothers were licensing arcade games and porting them over to the 2600 and reaping those financial rewards um but either way if we look at the library for the Atari 5200 I think that would give us a pretty solid idea of what the 3200 would have looked like as far as its game Library goes but whether or not it would have received some more original games like counter measure and the 5200 did have several original titles in development for it but they were all canned when the 5200 was canned itself um but it's a good guess that it would have followed a pretty similar path to the 5200 the syvia project was act around Christmas of 1981 according to Jessup primarily due to the difficult nature of coding for it well again the bugs could have been fixed it would have required more money and effort and with Pac-Man soon coming to the Atari 2600 as that was released in April of 1982 the sense of urgency that they had to replace the 2600 just wasn't there yet in fact they overproduced the number of Pac-Man cartridges as well as Atari 2600 consoles expecting that Pac-Man Fever would carry them through that year but then something happened that they weren't expecting a competitor launched their own console the kico vision and it came packaged with Donkey Kong a pretty decent port at least better than what uh they had ported to the 2600 themselves and it had a module that allowed you to play Atari 2600 games on it as it was Atari needed something very fast and so that's where the Atari 5200 super system came from now Jerry Jessup on the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection he does talk about the development of the 5200 and he says that at one point it w it did have a built-in mechanism for backwards compatibility but somebody at Atari management said no we don't want that but right before the system was about to be released they came back screaming hey we need it to be backwards compatible but the engineer said well if you want this released now it's too late um we're pretty much ready to go and so it was mismanagement that basically killed that for 5200 and would the Atari 3200 as the spec stands would it have saved Atari as you may or may not know on December 7th 1982 Warner Communications posted a horrendous earnings report and from there the company just started losing millions and millions of dollars with every port report and it got to the point where it was they knew what was causing them to be dragged down and it was all Atari that's why they sold it off to the tral now would the 3200 saved that probably not just because again the issues that caused Warner to start losing all that money were in place well before that earnings report happened and that was reflective of the summer time in the fall of 1982 not December itself and this is where I would argue ET actually did not cause the crash uh ET was just a symptom of the core management that was going on at both Warner and Atari um but that just simply made a bad situation even worse but it did not trigger the game's crash and there are lots of things that caused the game Crash to happen uh which I will publish in a book that I'm currently working on that's focused on Arcade history um but would a console that was designed like Sylvia say with full backwards compatibility and voice speech synthesis have saved it probably not cuz again they just would have thrown a ton of arcade ports onto there and not as much original fun stuff that uh would really Drive players to it and just would end up with a similar result but as it is at the end of the day it's probably for the best that it didn't release what do you think about it from what we do know if they did somehow find a populated circuit board that could play 3200 games bugs and all would you still want to see it pop up let me know in the comments below and we'll catch you on the next video

Channel: IratA Non Grata

Views: 27,438

Keywords: atari, unreleased, console, never finished, Atari VCS, games, video game, video games, Atari 3600, Atari Sylvia, Super Stella, history, tech talk

Id: rtHJCjOI1Uk

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024