What does /vr/ think of this weird little system? It's pretty much the Japanese equivalent of the 7800.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHwPMUgdGII
>>12911095>Japanese equivalent of the 7800.is pretty good but hardware is vastly different. anyway. this cassette vision reminds me more of bally's astrocade (especially the sound) than anything atari related. interesting machine.
>>12911101I was thinking of the 7800 because they both have weird graphics hardware and terrible sound.
>>12911107yea. fair enough. the sound isn't too bad on the vision. it sounds slightly better than the 2600/7800 - not by much. going by what i'm reading, the audio chip in this vision has a permanent rom inside of it to generate the tones.
>>12911107>>129111167800 has much more sophisticated graphics with more colors and sometimes even 2.5D style graphics scaling. Sounds are ass but TIA chip is more versatile, and you could add a POKEY sound chip in the cartridge slot.
>>12911095weird that they went with a microcontroller instead of just a microprocessor
>>12911217was extremely common to use microcontrollers because they saved space on boards by incorporating features inside of them that would usually require more chips and added circuitry, that in turn dramatically reduces the cost of manufacturing. toys, consoles, musical instruments etc.etc. of the 1980s used billions of the things
>>12911254Sure, that makes a lot of sense for devices where the microcontroller comprises most of the electronics in the device (like some of the more primitive 70s consoles), but the Super Cassette Vision is a 1984 3rd gen console with reasonably sophisticated additional video & audio hardware. By then a console having a microcontroller instead of just a standalone CPU was definitely an oddity.
>>12911272>instead of just a standalone CPU was definitely an oddity.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_2A03an oddity it wasn't. extremely common for manufacturers to make custom chips or use microcontrollers to save money on production costs.
>>12911280fair enough
>>12911217>weird that a child parrots something retarded it saw in the youtubesNot at all. Children are getting more retarded by the second.
>>12911095Epoch was the only one making games for it and on its release they were still handling their old electronic handhelds, an attempt at marketing the old Cassette Vision as a budget system and the development of the Game Pocket Computer. You weren't going to get a glut of software from them anyway, but they sure didn't need to have all those distractions. Would've been better if they stuck to either the SCV or tried pushing the GPC a bit harder.I liked Star Speeder, plays well and is visually quite different from other 2D racers. Pop & Chips was interesting too, it attempts to clone the look of NES Nuts & Milk but not the gameplay which is more like Lode Runner+Pengo. Has a few annoying elements though, enemies that get hit by a moving block or ladder bounce around the screen first and can still kill you for example. Most of the other games range from bad-decent. I personally found the CV more interesting because everything just looks much more alien.
>>12911450Fun fact, Pop & Chips was the first game to have a battery backup, predating anything on the Famicom. It would eventually end up being reworked into Cyraid on the Game Boy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_DtQn_frFg
>>12911095Has my favorite 16 color palette of any console or home computer.
>>12911095The sprite power is insane for what it is, it beats the Famicom and Master System significantly in some ways.>>12911165With the 7800 the cpu stops when updating the screen which is a bit lame.
>>12912824It's a pretty distinct palette, combined with the low resolution the games remind me a lot of the VIC-20.>>12912863The catch is the sprites have to be used for pretty much everything on screen. They're divided into background sprites and object sprites and each group has its own unique functions. For the background you can only choose between single-color text with a fixed character set or a low-resolution bitmap.
>>12912863>The sprite power is insane for what it isNot sure about that, I can't even find a technical doc. But as far as I know, despite the 128 sprite count, they're all monochromatic, so only 2 colors, and there are no background tiles, so you have to make them out of sprites. And I'm not sure why the movement seems jerky.>With the 7800 the cpu stops when updating the screen which is a bit lame.7800's CPU interruption is an overrated problem. It's no lamer than most 8-bit computers with single channel memory. Screen updates always saturate the memory bus in these systems. Yeah the 7800 DMA takes away plenty of cycles, but during screen blanks you have exclusive access to 100ns zero wait state SRAM and fast ROM. I did some rough calculation based on the documentation, at 160x120 game resolution it seems you have about 20K cycles, that's more CPU cycles per frame than C64's CPU. Moving sprite X and Y values doesn't take a lot of processing power really. On Atari 7800 building the Display List is actually the most taxing, but that depends on the sprite complexity and how often you have to update the sprite graphics (in most types of games it's really not often at all). Updating the fixed 512-byte Display List List isn't quite slow. Basically just moving X and Y values. The 7800 definitely beats Super Cassette Vision in graphics. Really flexible color system and sprite count and size. You could choose between a ton of monochrome-simple-shaped sprites or a few many-color-complex-shaped sprites, the smaller the DL is the faster MARIA GPU can process. Sprites have no horizontal size limit so have fun with that. Atari rainbow background would be really fast but NES-style tile based background would be a bit slow.MARIA is extremely powerful for its time, no other system back then had DMA with lightning fast internal cache. It's basically Atari 2600 with two CPUs and on steroids. How good it performs really depends on how creative you are.
>>12912993> And I'm not sure why the movement seems jerky.no scroll registers, slow cpu>so you have to make them out of spritesaccording to the mame source code for it there's two other modes that can place 4x4 or 8x8 blocks onto the screen and can draw text.
>>12915017>slow cpuSupposedly, it's a Z80 clone with internal SRAM. It shouldn't be too slow. I suspect it's the sprite controller rather than the CPU.
>>12915058>I suspect it's the sprite controller rather than the CPU.seems to be. manufactured to be cheap. probably cost them 5c per chip or something. can't find a spec sheet for it anywhere. would like to know more about its internals besides what i can see in the mame driver.
bumping with some homebrewhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MudYEDUK3Nwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZKGjGliqrkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1wDLOa_4H4
>>12911116>the sound isn't too bad on the vision. it sounds slightly better than the 2600/7800No, the Super Cassette Vision might be the worst sounding game console ever made in my experience, and it has only one channel compared to the TIA’s 2.>>12918723That Cho Ren Sha port looks really cool though, admittedly.
>>12911095Rndstranger, who did the Famidaily series, did a chronology series on it. It's a very small library having only 30 games but it's cool to have a resource on such an obscure console with a very limited release like this in English.https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1sb8k4ZPagbvyrcU13KRv9kyXliprYd7
>>12918810Why does every retro game youtuber have to be either>tranny>idiotic brit reading wiki entries>progressive virtue signaler who clutches their pearls over 40 year old game aspects of their time that wouldn't be done in vidya today I can understand making a point about some of the culturally insensitive portrayals in some old Jap Famicom games but Rndstranger getting his panties in a twist over Nazis in WW2 simulations, cowboys killing indians (not the heckin' native Americans!) in wild west games (etcetera) is fucking ridiculous and annoyingly performative.
>>12919018It's in like five of literal hundreds, kinda annoying but whatever. If you know of any other documentation of these obscure consoles or games then share.
