Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HuYMQr5oNw
The Weird Story Of The Atari 7800
Introduction
In 1986, after a troubled few years, Atari finally released their 7800 console. The first Atari console to be outsourced to an outside company, the 7800 was a flawed machine but all the more fascinating for it. So let’s find out the story, perform a UAV composite and s-video mod, and check out some of the interesting and unique games on the Atari 7800!
Script
I think it’s fair to say that the 7800 was a very strange chapter indeed in Atari history - I mean for a start it was the very first console from Atari that wasn’t actually designed by Atari and it gets weirder from there.
Did you know for example that they designed a sound chip for this which was incredibly powerful and sophisticated for its day and then right at the very last minute said: “actually, you know what? Let’s not include that.”
Or the fact that they made lightgun games for this - despite the fact that they never actually released a lightgun for it!
And speaking of controllers, it was released in the US with a joystick initially, and then they changed their minds and thought: “you know what? We’re going to release it with a gamepad for the EU market!”
But that’s not the strangest part of the story - oh no, when they actually manufactured these, they made hundreds of thousands of them, filling up their warehouses, and then thought: “you know what? Let’s sit on these for two years before we even actually release them to the market!”
Yeah, it’s a strange one - so I thought with Atari recently announcing the new and improved 7800+ it was finally time to visit the story of one of my favourite consoles.
But before we can do that, I do want to do a couple of small hardware mods to it to bring it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Well, the late 20th century anyway.
…and if you’re an electronics tinkerer like me you’ll no doubt have dabbled in PCB design and fabrication, something that this video’s sponsor PCBWay have 10 years of experience in - and I can personally vouch for their competitive prices, quality control, and fast shipping. But did you know that they’re now also offering CNC machining, 3D printing and injection moulding? All that and more is available on the link down in the description.
Thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring this video.
“So, Rees…”
I hear you ask,
“What modifications exactly are you proposing that you make to this lovely, original, untouched Atari 7800 console to make it supposedly more useful in this day and age?”
And of course the answer to that question is a bit of a two-pronged one, a bit of a two-pronged approach, and it’s the same for a lot of these old computers and consoles: so, the first thing that we want to take a look at is the video output situation, and the second thing is the power supply. So if we just flip this over and take a look at what’s going on on the back, the first thing you might notice is this, which is an RCA connector, and that is the original video - and indeed audio - output from the 7800.
What we would’ve done back in the day is we would’ve plugged this via a coaxial cable into the back of our CRT TV and tuned into it as if it was yet another TV channel - I’m sure you all remember that very well. The trouble with this is that it’s not really very useful in this day and age - a lot of those old TVs with built-in analog tuners are sadly dying out, and I want to be able to connect this to stuff like professional broadcast-type monitors like the Sony PVM, that kind of thing, and also to upper scalers like the RetroTink and the OSSC and stuff that will allow me to use it with modern displays. So the solution to that, as always - and if you’re a regular viewer, you’ll no doubt be familiar with this little piece of hardware - is the Ultimate Atari Video, or UAV mod, and what this does is it basically just hooks up to the original video circuitry inside the console and cleans it up a little bit, amplifies it, and just outputs it to S-Video and composite video - so no modern voodoo here like HDMI or anything like that - I think composite and S-Video is very era appropriate for this console, but talking about stuff that’s perhaps a little bit less era appropriate, we’re going to be having a look at the power supply situation as well.
Now the original PSU looks like this, as you might imagine, and as you’ve probably spotted, it has a bit of a weird proprietary connector on it - so it’s got this square thing with like a little locking latch thing on there and these are starting to die now - they’re not very reliable - and when they fail they can output weird voltages and they can create short circuits and stuff like that and actually end up destroying the electronics inside the console which is not what we want, so I want to replace this with something a bit more modern and hopefully a bit more reliable and a bit more consistent and I’m going to be doing what I think is actually - I think it might be a first - because I’ve not come across anyone else doing this particular mod. I’ve seen people adding barrel jacks and that kind of thing, and that’s all well and good, but what I wanted to try was this - which is a USB-C PD board.
So what this does is basically - you’re probably familiar with these from your laptop and your mobile phone, that kind of thing - plug in a USB-C connector and it uses the PD or “Power Delivery” protocol to negotiate the correct voltage for the console, and we can actually use that bang up to date modern power supply situation for this console from 1986, so if I can get that working I’ll be very pleased because I think that’s going to solve a lot of people’s problems out there. But without further ado, let’s take this thing apart and get on with these mods.
Right, so with all of that out of the way, we get our first clear look at this motherboard - and what a motherboard it is! I mean, look at this - it’s all nice and logically laid out, it’s a really nice, tidy, compact design, so really, really cool stuff, this. It has just occurred to me that this doesn’t look like any of the boards in any of the documentation that I’ve got - this is the 7800 PAL version, of course, from the UK, and the instructions that I have are for the NTSC version so I’m going to have to work this out as I go along with the UAV installation, but that’s perfectly fine - I’ve installed plenty of those over the years. So, I’m sure we’ll get there in the end, and then, of course, it’ll be documented for other people to follow, which is always good - but I thought just before we get into that, I’d talk a little bit about this motherboard, and about this system’s architecture, and about what makes it quite so special.
So, you might already be aware that the 7800 is actually two consoles in one - not only was it designed to run a whole new range of games that took advantage of its MARIA graphics chip - more on that in a minute - but it was backwards compatible with original 2600 games, and this was at the insistence of Atari itself. So, when GCC - again, more on them in a minute - developed the machine, they decided to just, well, chuck a whole 2600 in there.
That comes in the form of two chips - the MOS RIOT, which handles joystick input and the 2600 side’s 128 bytes of RAM - yep, bytes!
And the Atari TIA, or Television Interface Adapter - the exact same chips found in the 2600. Coupled with Atari’s custom 6502 CPU - named SALLY - clocked at 1.79MHz, this ensured pretty much 100 percent backward compatibility with Atari’s huge back catalogue, remedying a mistake they’d made previously with the failed 5200 console which, well, wasn’t, at least not without an expensive and clunky adapter.
In fact - and here’s a fun fact for you - the 7800 was actually the first ever console to offer built in backward compatibility with a previous console generation.
So, how was the new 7800 functionality handled?
Well, that came courtesy of the MARIA chip, which was arguably one of the most advanced graphics chips available when it was created way back in 1983 by GCC - or General Computer Corporation.
Ah yes, I did mention I’d talk a little bit more about them and their rather odd relation to Atari.
Founded in 1981 by a group of MIT dropouts under the leadership of Steve Golson, General Computer Corporation swiftly set up shop selling unofficial upgrade kits for arcade machines. Their most famous work actually ended up becoming Ms. Pac-Man when Midway spotted their 1981 Crazy Otto Pac-Man upgrade kit and decided they liked it so much that they’d buy the rights from GCC and bring it in-house.
In the same year, GCC reverse engineered Atari’s hugely successful Missile Command hardware, and again released an unofficial hack kit called Super Missile Attack. It was sold for $295 and was somewhat of a hit with arcade operators - so it’s easy to see why Atari decided to do the same as Midway and bring GCC’s project in house… right?
Right?
Well, they didn’t - in fact they tried to shut the whole thing down, filing a trademark infringement lawsuit. Golson and his plucky band of engineers with nothing to lose financially, outmanoeuvred the world’s biggest entertainment company at every turn, making minor modifications to his kit every time Atari had a specific version blocked by a judge, and before too long Atari threw in the towel and settled out of court.
GCC did very well indeed out of the whole affair, with a $1.2 million 2 year contract to develop new hardware and software for Atari - and Atari ended up reaping the benefits of their expertise, with all new arcade games Quantum and the iconic Food Fight, as well as unreleased top down shooter Nightmare.
On the console side, GCC handled the official Atari 2600 ports of Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede, not to mention over half of the cartridges for Atari’s 1982 5200 console. But it was their new console project, started in 1983, that would become the 7800. Feeling the pressure from Coleco’s brand new and rather excellent ColecoVision, not to mention a Japanese company called Nintendo with their new Famicom, Atari gave GCC a deadline of one year to come up with something truly revolutionary.
So they took the 1.79MHz 6502-based SALLY CPU from the Atari 8-bit line, the TIA and RIOT chip from the 2600 for backwards compatibility, and then began work on MARIA - a powerful raster based display list graphics chip, capable of drawing hundreds of independent sprites at resolutions of up to 320x200, with 25 simultaneous colours per line from a palette of 256.
The system as a whole became something of a weird bodge between old and new, and although both 2600 and 7800 mode ran pretty much independently - with their video output fudged together with 7400 logic - they were both tied to that system clock of 1.79MHz for backward compatibility.
So, for their final trick, GCC added a DMA mode to MARIA, allowing it to access the system’s 4KB of SRAM directly at a blistering 7.15MHz.
Unfortunately, MARIA didn’t have room for any audio capabilities, so GCC developed MINNIE, a sophisticated wavetable synthesis chip based on their earlier GUMBY design.
MINNIE was 100 percent complete and was intended to be included in the cartridges themselves by developers to keep the cost of the console down, but Atari’s new owners, the Tramiels - more on them later - took a dislike to GCC and halted development on the project, meaning that MINNIE would never make it to production.
The extra data lines added to the cartridge port, however, did allow developers to include an Atari POKEY chip inside the cartridge instead - a very capable chip that had been used in various arcade games, as well as Atari’s 8-bit computer range. This was eventually taken advantage of by BallBlazer and Commando, which came very late on in the 7800’s life - in 1988 and 89 respectively - and to be honest, didn’t really use the POKEY to its full potential.
So, apart from those two much later games, sound capability unfortunately fell to the 2600’s TIA - 1970s technology which, sadly, was really only capable of pretty basic beeps and boops.
Finally, rounding out our tour of the 7800’s hardware, we have the operating system ROM - nothing particularly noteworthy here, although the PAL version of the console does have Asteroids built in, which is nice.
For some reason the chip in my console is an EEPROM, so that’s interesting, I guess.
Thus concludes the tour, and pretty much everything you need to know about the Atari 7800’s hardware.
So let’s get back to our UAV, or Ultimate Atari Video Mod installation - and I know I mentioned earlier in the video that I was breaking new ground here and I was going to document all of this in great detail because I was the first to do this on a PAL console, but I should have known better - I went away, I did some searching and a user called JAC or Jack over on the AtariAge.com forums posted a really, really thorough guide on how to install one of these in a PAL 7800 back in 2017 so I followed his guide - I used all the hookup points from his diagrams and yeah, it works!
So I don’t think there’s much point in me repeating all of that here, but as you can see, if I press the power button on this…
There it is, Asteroids running from that operating system ROM like I mentioned a moment ago - but I’m sure the eagle eyed among you will have noticed that this isn’t the EPROM that I showed earlier in this video - and that’s because this is a completely different board, and I’ve been on quite a journey over the past week or so, and yeah, it has been over a week, and I just wanted to talk a little bit about that before we continue because it’s been quite the ordeal!
To start off with, here’s my original board that you saw earlier in the video and went through the whole UAV installation process on this - as mentioned - plugged it into the TV for the very first time and powered it up and got a white screen, I got nothing else out of it. I had a bit of a prod and a poke around and just couldn’t get it to do anything else. So I went through Atari’s official troubleshooting flowchart from back in the day - and this is a six page document, it’s got loads of steps, it involves hooking up the oscilloscope, looking for clock signals, and the multimeter, checking that pins are high when they’re supposed to be high, and low when they’re supposed to be low, and all the rest of it - and I made it all the way through to the end of that process, and I must say, the final step of the process did give me a good laugh, and I did need it so thank you to Atari for that, but unfortunately it didn’t help, and I decided to hang onto this board rather than throw it in the bin, because these things are actually quite valuable nowadays, and you can still get hold of the custom chips, which I will talk about in a minute.
So that was the point where I went on to Discord, and I vented my frustration, and a very good friend of mine, a chap called Dan, came to the rescue, and I must say, he went above and beyond, and he actually sent me his Atari 7800 on a next day, pre-1pm delivery service, so I actually got it the following morning so thank you ever so much to Dan, that was incredibly helpful. I will just mention that Dan does have a business selling all sorts of retro merchandise and stuff - this isn’t sponsored or anything like that, but it only seemed fair just to give him a little shout out, just because he went above and beyond for me. He sent me that really cool Atari clock that you may have seen on my second channel a while back. But yeah, I modded his board and guess what?
Exact same fault as my original board - I plugged it in, fired it up, and I had that white screen, and on his, I actually left the RF modulator on, so I could test it with an RF TV, just in case it was a problem with the UAV installation itself, and no, it does the exact same on an RF TV as well. So evidently, one of the custom chips has failed. I, you know, just didn’t know where to go from there.
And that is when I went searching on the internet and found myself on the Best Electronics website, as I quite often do - and no, again, this isn’t some kind of sponsored thing or anything like that, I did spend quite a lot of money with them - but yeah, I got chatting to Bradley, who runs the website and is a really lovely chap, I’ve dealt with him quite a few times over the years, and as you can probably tell from the look of his website, he is quite the character, but he is also incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly helpful when it comes to this old Atari stuff - and it turns out that he’s the only place in the world that has the sets of custom chips for these PAL Atari 7800s, so I ordered a set of those and I paid quite a lot to get them shipped from California.
But he also mentioned that they had sets of Alps replacement tact switches for these - and I must admit, I had noticed that that in testing all of these boards that the switches were very unresponsive so I also ordered three sets of those so I can get them installed in all three of these boards - if I can get them working using some combination of the custom chips and things that I have.
But the important thing for now is that I at least have one working board - and if you’re wondering where this came from…
Yeah, I bought a tested and working console on eBay.
Yeah, I know, I know, that’s admitting defeat, but I spent so much time on the first two boards and I was going round in circles and I just want to get this video finished, I want to get the story of the 7800 told, and of course I will go back and revisit those other two boards once the video’s out of the door and hopefully get those consoles fixed as well, but for now I want to cover the one aspect that the UAV doesn’t do - which is the audio output - so we need to work out how to get that hooked up, and I also want to get those switches installed of course, so let’s get on with that.
Replacing the switches should be pretty straightforward, so I guess I’ll tackle that job first - and what I’ve done is just added some nice fresh leaded solder to everything, just to help get things flowing, and then it’s a case of just giving it a quick once over with the desoldering gun. Now, some of the legs on these switches had been bent, I guess, to help hold them in place while they were being done at the factory originally, so I’ll just straighten those up with a screwdriver, a bit more fresh solder, and then again just desoldering those with the desoldering gun just to make sure that everything came off nice and cleanly - and indeed it did - there’s no damaged traces or damaged solder pads or anything like that so that’s a nice job, a quick clean with some IPA, and then it’s time for the new ones to go in.
And it was at this point I spotted that they’re actually ever so slightly different to the originals - so they have these two locating lugs moulded into the back, and there are two corresponding holes in the board - and the original switches didn’t actually have those so I guess that’s why they bent the legs to hold them in place - but yeah, I had to poke a few of the holes with a screwdriver just to open them up a little bit, but all the switches clicked in quite nicely.
You have to make sure that they are very flat and properly flush against the board, of course, so everything lines up properly when the case goes back together, and then a little bit of flux, and just a case of soldering those back in with some leaded solder again.
So, with that job out of the way my thoughts turn to the audio output situation - and there are quite a few different schools of thought on the best place to pick up the audio signal from the 7800, but I’m going to go with a suggestion from someone called Juan Solo over on the AtariAge forums - partly because I’ve seen a lot of their posts on the 7800 and they’ve done quite a lot of work on reverse engineering this thing and doing various mods to it, but also mainly because Juan Solo’s a really cool name and they must know what they’re talking about with a name like that.
So what I’m going to do is just lift this end of these two resistors here, I’m going to add a 10uF capacitor to the output to help to clean up the audio signal, and the general consensus with these mods is that it’s also best to remove these two components just here because that will apparently give you a much cleaner signal - and who am I to argue? So, let’s get that done.
Right, so that’s everything hooked up just temporarily just for testing and I guess the first thing that we need to test are these new switches, of course, so we’ll just start with the power switch, as you might expect, and yeah, that works, which shouldn’t be remarkable, but it kind of is compared to the original, which I did have to sort of jab a lot to get it to actually do anything.
The other one here, I guess, is the Select button that we can just cycle through - so we can just go through all of the various different game modes here - and yeah, that looks like it’s working great. We’ll have to see how these new switches stand the test of time, but for now they’re already an improvement, so that’s great to see - and of course, the most important thing is that audio output - so let’s just start a new game…
…and yes, we have audio! So if I just pause this and just turn the volume up…
…yeah, there’s an ever so slight, ever so slight hum there which is probably coming from the lights or something like that, just a bit of interference. But yeah, sounds like a really nice clean audio output there so that is fantastic to hear - I’m quite happy with that!
Then, of course, my thoughts turn to how I’m actually going to connect this to the outside world - so at the minute I’ve got this plugged into a 3.5mm TRRS connector just using this Raspberry Pi wired cable - so this has got the four contacts on here - it’s got the composite video and the left and right audio, although I have got this wired for mono at the moment - these things they’re not really stereo, there are some so-called “stereo mods” and things for them, but they were never really intended to be stereo so I like to wire them just as dual mono just to make my life a lot easier.
But the thing is that I would usually install the 3.5mm socket on the outer casing somewhere but in the case of the 7800, of course, it has this integrated cable management in the bottom which was originally used for that RF cable - so what I can do is actually run the cable out through one of these holes here and have it nice and neatly wrapped up around there, and that’s a hole that doesn’t need to be drilled in the case, which should make a lot of people very happy - and of course, this also works just as a bog-standard audio output as well if I’m going to hook up the S-Video output to to the UAV so that sounds like a plan, but of course the next thing that we need to do before we can get all of this put back together is to work out what’s going on with the power supply…
…and with that in mind, I’ve been playing with these little USB-C PD, or “Power Delivery” boards - this is known as a “Trigger Module” or a “Decoy Module” depending on where you buy it from, and this one cost me less than £5 on eBay. It can do various different voltages as per the USB-C Power Delivery spec - so we’ve got 9V, 12V, 15V, or 20V, you can take your pick just by moving a little solder bridge, and apparently it can also deliver up to 5A, which should be plenty to power our 7800 console. Now earlier on in this video I mentioned Jack, or JAC, over on the AtariAge forums and how he posted some really useful information about modding the PAL version of the 7800, and included in that information is a corrected version of the schematic, and just having a poke around this schematic, it would seem that the 9V coming in from the PSU is doing some quite interesting things.
Usually it goes straight into a 5V regulator and then the whole thing just runs on 5V internally but it seems that’s not the case with this - we’ve got 7V, for example, on the variable capacitors that are used to calibrate the colour, and I have tested that and confirmed it myself. So, Rather than try to second guess what’s going on with this board, I thought, well, the USB PD spec does allow for 9V, so why not just remove the original power connector, replace it with this - configured for 9V, of course - and that should be it. We shouldn’t have to worry about anything else so let’s give it a go!
I must say I am so, so pleased with how this Atari 7800 is starting to come together, if I do say so myself, and I’m sure you’re quite keen to see the results of that USB-C PD power mod as well, so let’s just test that out.
As predicted - no issues whatsoever powering this console from USB, so that’s definitely the route I’m going to go down because that’s going to make life so much easier - and there’s also another positive side effect of switching to that power supply as well, and that’s on the audio output side of things. I demonstrated before that there was an ever so slight buzz coming through the speaker and it really was nothing - but since I have switched to this, it literally is nothing, it’s completely eliminated that so I guess the power that’s coming in through this USB supply is just so much cleaner than it was through the original 40 year old power supply - I guess that’s probably to be expected - but speaking of the AV side of things, as mentioned earlier I have installed the AV cable now, so that just uses the existing integrated cable management for the original RF cable - it just pops out through an existing hole in the bottom of the case - and then that’s all hooked into the Ultimate Atari Video mod, and that audio output that I just connected up earlier.
And, on that note, there’s also S-Video available courtesy of the Ultimate Atari Video mod, so I was just having a look at the best place to put this connector - and it turns out it actually fits absolutely perfectly in the original RF modulator output hole there on the case - so, very excited about how all of this is coming together!
I do need to work out the best way to mount the USB-C power connector - I do have a few options, I did pick up a few different USB-C panel mount extension things, so I’m going to have a play with those, not quite worked out how I’m going to mount that yet, but next time you see me this thing should all be fully connected up and it will be the last time before I button it up and then we can do the fun part of checking out some games!
…and here we are - the modded Atari 7800 console!
It’s got that ultimate Atari video mod with the composite and S-Video video outputs built in, and indeed that USB-C PD power mod as well. So really pleased with how this has all come together - I’ve got the S-Video hooked up to my RetroTINK 5X upscaler here, which is just upscaling that video signal and outputting it over HDMI to this monitor, and that’s looking super crisp, so really happy with that - and if we have a look at the back of the console, we can see that it’s all looking really tidy using all of those original openings on the back of the case. No cutting, no drilling, no modifying of that either, so really pleased with that in particular.
But that does all come with one rather large caveat which becomes apparent when we take a look inside - now, I have to say, I’m not really all that enamoured with this solution, I’m kind of looking at it as a bit of a temporary thing, a bit of a prototype. Longer term, I’d like to revisit this as a proper project - a custom PCB and a 3D printed mount to get it all in here nice and tidily and of course, release that to the community as a free thing so people can make their own and upgrade their own consoles. But for our purposes today this will do. I haven’t done anything here that isn’t reversible - so hot glue can be removed, super glue can even be removed, and of course I’ve got those other two cases to play with as well.
So if you’ll just forgive me for this, it does all go back together really nicely - of course, the original RF shield goes back on and the original case screws back together, so as far as the outside is concerned, this thing is looking pretty much completely stock, which is really nice. It’s what I like to do with my consoles. So that’s that, and I think it’s finally time we checked out some of the games on this thing, because there are some quite unique and interesting titles available for the 7800 - so let’s have a look at some of my favourites!
…and I suppose the sensible place to start would be Asteroids, I guess, the game that we’ve just spent the past 20 odd minutes staring at, and I must say, this game was a real godsend, what, 20 years ago, whenever it was, when I first picked up this console for next to nothing at the local market, because I didn’t have any other games for it at first and this is indeed built in to the PAL version of the 7800.
I think it’s a pretty competent take on the Asteroids formula - of course, it’s not all that exciting or original - but slightly improved graphics compared to the original 2600 version.
It’s a shame the audio’s not really all that much better, but hey, that’s the 7800 for you - and what it does offer are some really nice different competitive and cooperative game modes, which of course I would need a friend to demo so unfortunately I can’t demo that, but, yeah, it’s Asteroids - not really much else to say, really.
So where do we go from here? Well, if you’re looking to pick up an original 7800, or indeed the new 7800+ you’re probably going to want to buy some games for it - and where else to start but the consistently cheapest games available on eBay, which I found tend to be Super Huey, Hat Trick, Jinks, and Meltdown for some reason and these are all available for around £20 and they’re generally boxed and in decent condition as well - at least at the time of recording - I’m, not sure if Atari’s new announcement is going to have any impact on the value of these games but let’s have a quick run through those.
So Super Huey is a helicopter piloting simulator - a flight simulator type game I guess - and I must admit I always find this one kind of confusing, a difficult to work out where to go, but it looks alright - and when you do eventually encounter some enemies, I guess it’s kind of fun. So, uh, is it worth the price of admission?
Yeah, probably worth picking up for the collection.
Hat Trick, on the other hand…
Er, I kind of struggle to come up with anything positive to say about this game. What I will say is if there are two of you and you’re sat on a sofa together and you’ve had a few beers or whatever, it’s probably quite fun playing against each other, but the computer player is absolutely hard as nails - on the verge of being cheaty - I should probably play it a bit more and just git gud, but the graphics are pretty terrible, the sound is pretty terrible, I haven’t fired this game up in years, and to be honest, after this, it’s probably gonna be years before I look at it again, but hey, it’s cheap, I guess?
So, Jinks, and this is a game that you’ll probably see for sale everywhere once you start looking at Atari 7800 games. It starts off with this really awesome sampled voice at the beginning…
[Welcome!]
[You can’t catch me!]
…and indeed, the intro music is pretty cool too…
…unfortunately, it kind of goes rapidly downhill from there. Now, this game is quite frustrating, the in-game sound is really annoying…
Later on it gets harder and it gets uglier. If you like Breakout but would rather have no idea of what’s going on while feeling completely out of control while simultaneously having your eyes and your ears assaulted, then this might be the game for you, I guess.
And finally, in my little roundup here of the four cheapest and most common 7800 games, we have Meltdown. Now, this is quite an interesting game - I mean, for a start, it’s a lightgun game! So you’re not going to be able to play this on the new Atari 7800+ on your HDMI TV, you’re going to need the original console with a CRT - and indeed it does work with the Ultimate Atari Video mod, so that’s great to see, and the story behind this game is quite odd. Basically it’s something to do with nuclear reactors and they’re melting down and there’s been some kind of terrorist attack and the only way to stop it is by, well - by shooting the inside of the reactor!
Yeah, that’s basically what the story says on the back of the box, but it’s quite a fun little game. It’s probably better on a bigger TV than the little 9” thing that I’ve got here - and of course, Atari never officially released a lightgun for the 7800, so you’re going to have to pick up one of the XG-1 lightguns from the XE game system, they are getting quite rare now, but probably not all that much demand for them in this post-CRT world, so that might work to your advantage.
Yeah, if you are in a position to play a lightgun game, and you own a 7800 - it’s not bad.
So that’s the built-in version of Asteroids, and four of the cheapest and most accessible games available for the Atari 7800 today - and indeed, over its very short lifespan, the 7800 only actually had 59 commercial releases, so hey, if you’re interested in getting into console collecting maybe, might be a good complete set to go for - but I will warn you that a few of those games are quite expensive - and as you might expect, it does also have a thriving modern homebrew scene.
So we’re going to discover the rest of the story behind this console, the design inspiration, and ultimately why it was such a colossal failure - but I did promise some personal game recommendations, so let’s just very quickly rattle through those first.
First up we have Choplifter - now, this is a game that you probably recognise from various different platforms back in the day. It’s been ported to pretty much everything over the years, and I’m very pleased to report that the Atari 7800 version is a very competent one. I’m sure you’re familiar with the basic gameplay loop of setting people’s houses on fire and kidnapping them…
…yeah, no, I don’t think that’s what’s actually happening, but yeah, this is a great version of a great game - even if one of the enemies isn’t really In this version is a giant purple barbecue!?
Scrapyard Dog is quite a rare and expensive game on the Atari 7800 and this is essentially Atari seeing Mario on the NES and thinking, “Oh, actually people are interested in things like platformers and things that aren’t just ports of arcade games”.
It was a platform exclusive when it first came out, and later on it did receive a port to the Atari Lynx, which I think is far better known - it’s certainly the version that I’m more familiar with. But quite a solid platformer, although a little bit weird in places, and it does have some quite interesting puzzle elements to it as well, so if you can get your hands on this one, I think it’s well worth checking out.
Pole Position is another one of those arcade games that ended up getting ports to pretty much every single system over the years, and I love it! I think it’s a great game no matter what platform it’s on, and the 7800 actually ended up with a version of Pole Position 2, the sequel, and it’s a pretty solid racing game to be honest. The only thing that really lets it down is the audio, which thanks to the 7800’s TIA chip, makes the cars sound like they’re underwater.
So the first of our two games that used that POKEY sound chip - which of course came from the Atari 8-bit computer range and some of their classic arcade games - this is BallBlazer, and it’s actually a really interesting two player 3D arena combat type game. I’m not really sure there was much else like this at the time, and the graphics are actually quite slick in this.
Unfortunately, although they did use that POKEY chip, I really don’t think that it uses it to its full potential, and so the sound is still not all that brilliant, but well worth checking out because it’s quite a unique and interesting game.
…and the second of the two games that famously used that POKEY sound chip on the 7800 was Commando of course. A really, really good port of a classic arcade game, I must say. I actually really enjoy this game, I think it’s great on the system, and I can highly recommend it - and of course, it has a two player mode as well.
So from yet another arcade port to an absolute stone cold classic home computer game - this is Impossible Mission, and I think by far the best known version of this was on the Commodore 64, although I used to play it absolutely loads as a kid on my Atari ST. I wasn’t very good at it, and to be honest I don’t remember ever completing it, but hey, it’s still fun to run around the corridors, go up and down the lifts, search the various rooms and try to avoid those robots - and this is actually quite a good version of it - it’s quite fast, the colour palette is not too bad, and just an all round quite nice experience.
So, another game that you’re probably familiar with - of course this is Rampage, it was a huge arcade hit back in the day, and it’s another one of those ones that’s been ported to various different systems.
Again, very pleased to report that the 7800 got an excellent version of this - it’s got all three playable characters, it’s got that two player mode, and it’s just hours of fun. Everything’s here, and if you want a decent version of Rampage, you certainly can’t go wrong with the 7800.
Motor Psycho is a strange one because it’s quite often touted as one of the best games on the 7800, and the fact that it’s one of the rarest and most expensive games means that it’s not one that I actually had really any experience of until I checked it out for this video - and I must admit, I couldn’t really get into it. I mean, it does have some quite interesting features like some very basic customisation of the bike handling and stuff, but essentially, it’s just Pole Position on motorbikes.
You can jump six feet in the air on command - just like you can on a real motorbike!
…yeah, but anyway, joking aside, it’s okay, I guess, but I’m not quite sure I would pay the full asking price for this one.
Now this is Tower Toppler, and this was also released under the name Nebulus on various different systems back in the day, and I must admit, I never really got this game - or I never really got the 7800 version of it - I think the colour palette is adding to the difficulty here and it makes it quite difficult to work out exactly what you can and can’t do, which is a shame because it’s quite a good puzzle game and the mechanics are actually quite unique and quite interesting - so it’s one of the more common games on the system and if you do see it at a reasonable price I think it’s worth picking up and having a play with, but yeah, just one that I never really got on with.
…and here we have another racing game - this time it’s Fatal Run, and this one’s got a bit of a twist because it has combat in it, it’s got weapons, in fact it’s got quite an impressive arsenal of weapons and quite nice handling and gameplay for its time as well, so I can definitely recommend this game. It’s fast, it’s fluid, it’s a good time - and evidently Atari agreed with me because they have announced that they’re going to be officially re-releasing this alongside the 7800+.
So we will wrap up this little roundup with two Atari 7800 exclusives - the two exclusives available on the console, in fact - and the first of those is Midnight Mutants. Now, this game starts off with a really cool animated intro, and it actually gets better from there as well. I think this is a great game.
There’s a lot of stuff to explore, loads of different areas, a good range of enemies, good combat, and it has an in-game hint system as well - and if you think the guy from that hint system looks familiar - yeah, that’s “Gramps” from The Munsters. Now, The Munsters was a little bit before my time, but I do remember the re-runs from when I was a kid, and an interesting fact about this game is that they never actually officially got the license for his likeness, so they used his face in the game and indeed on the box art, and never got sued for it, never paid for it - not quite sure what’s going on there, but hey, if you get the chance to check this one out, definitely do!
…and last, but by definitely no means least, if you know anything at all about the 7800, you will have seen this one coming an absolute mile off - of course, it’s Ninja Golf - it’s the game that the console is probably best known for.
Essentially what they did was they took a very mediocre golf game, and a very mediocre fight and go right brawler type game, combined the two and came up with something that was far greater than the sum of its parts. This game doesn’t take itself seriously at all. It’s a load of fun. I must admit, I’ve never actually played golf before, so for all I know, maybe you do constantly get attacked by ninjas - and hey, maybe the green is defended by a giant dragon, and I’ve been missing out on all the fun over all these years. I don’t know. But yeah, Ninja Golf, it’s the game that the 7800 is best known for and if you have a 7800, you definitely need to check this one out!
…and so sadly our time together today is starting to draw to a close, but not before we’ve learnt just a few more interesting facts about the Atari 7800. So here’s something that might be a little bit less familiar to you - this is the 2800 and was released exclusively in Japan. Now the reason this is a very rare and unusual console is because this was even more of a commercial failure than the 7800, so why even mention it here?
Well, you may have spotted that the cases are identical in shape and size, and the reason for that is because Atari reused the moulds to save some money - now, if you’re in America, you’ll probably also recognise this as the The Sears Telegames 2 and indeed they used the same mould to make those as well. I have done a video about the 2800 by the way on my channel just talking about the history of this console because it is absolutely fascinating - so I’ll put a link to that at the end of this video so you can check that out as well.
And as for this video - you’ve no doubt spotted me using this rather nice Atari branded two button gamepad throughout - and indeed, this is the official European controller for the 7800. It’s known as the CX-78, and it replaced the original American controller with the which was the CX-24 ProLine joystick.
Why did they change the controller? Well, the simple answer is that Nintendo and Sega were both shipping their consoles with gamepads, and the joystick was starting to look quite old hat by comparison, so when Atari launched the 7800 in Europe, they designed their very own gamepad for it - and it’s quite nice, I actually quite like it.
It also has this very cool removable thumbstick, which Atari didn’t invent, but hey, it’s a nice feature.
…and so, with all of that in mind, you’re probably asking, “What went wrong?”
I mean, in May 1984 when this was released, it was a genuinely good console.
It was officially announced and demonstrated at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and it was received very well.
Atari manufactured warehouses and warehouses full of the things, and they even started selling them in their local home market of California.
Well, what went wrong was that a month later the Tramiels completed their purchase of Atari from Warner for $240M - so Jack Tramiel was the founder of Commodore and he was essentially looking to get back at his previous company by purchasing Atari and competing with them directly in the home computer market. He didn’t really have all that much interest in the world of gaming and so he put the whole 7800 project on hold - and that meant that GCC didn’t get paid for their work for over a year, and he didn’t actually officially release these things to market until two years later in 1986 - and of course, by that point, Nintendo’s NES and the Master System had managed to gain a massive foothold in the market, and this thing looked decidedly long in the tooth as a result - and that was that!
That was the end of the Atari 7800, which I think is a very sad end to quite an interesting tale.
So that’s the story of the Atari 7800 - thank you ever so much for joining me for this video, and indeed, thank you as always to my channel supporters on Ko-Fi, Patreon and YouTube channel members - they get videos a little bit earlier and also ad- and sponsor-free. But most of all, thank you to you for watching, I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about one of my favorite consoles, and I’ll hopefully see you see you next time.
Original Video Links
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Relevant Links:
Ultimate Atari Video Mod: https://thebrewingacademy.com/collections/atari-7800/products/tba-ultimate-atari-video-uav-board-for-atari-7800
USB-C PD Board (Affiliate): https://geni.us/VTzn6
Steve Golson MIT Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlopaTBDYuo
7800 MINNIE Sound Chip Info: https://7800.8bitdev.org/index.php/The_7800_Minnie_sound_chip
JAC! PAL 7800 Info / Schematics: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/269768-the-uav-rev-d-video-upgrade-installation-in-an-atari-7800-pal
Retrofied (Dan’s Site): https://retrofied.uk
My Second Channel ST Clock Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC4hKs0jN8g
Best Electronics 7800 Page: https://www.best-electronics-ca.com/7800.htm
Juan Solo 7800 Audio Mod: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369797-pal-atari-7800-brewing-academy-uav-mod/?do=findComment&comment=5504384
My Atari 2800 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bso-rI8eZ-Y
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