Re: What could have made the 5200 a success?

Lack of first hand experience is a problem here. Let's break this down.
(For the sake of perspective, I am surmising by what I observed here in
the St. Louis area.)

In article <1183018712.590477.201600@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
The Space Boss <drsmith666@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jun 26, 10:09 pm, "rob.oce...@xxxxxxxxx" <rob.oce...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


The difference is in the two tiers of marketing for computers and
consoles that existed back in the 80's. You bought consoles and
console games in department stores for the most part, and computers
and computer games were sold in computer stores.

Sorry, Rob, but I won't agree with this at all. I CLEARLY recall
seeing ALL of the following being sold at K-Mart: Vic-20, Commodore
64, Atari 400 and 800, and the TI 99/4A, and I'm sure I could dig up
evidence pretty quickly that computers were also sold at Sears,
Pennys, and other stores like them.

You excluded the TRS-80, which was only sold in its own store.

The Apple ][ was only through computer stores, along with the Altair.

CBM machines were through computer stores until 1982, at the end of the
Vic-20 sales cycle. The PET was never in any dept. stores, and the
C=64, while available at dept. stores, was predominantly in computer
stores.

The Atari 8-bits were available through Sears marginally, but mainly
through computer stores, again, until 1982, when they broke out. By the
crash, Atari 8-bits were pretty much Dept. stores only.

It-99/4 and then the 99/4a were initially ONLY available through TI's
exclusive retail stores. When they realized these stores were a big
mistake, they lateraled into dept. stores and dropped price, closing all
their stores in 1982.

1982 was a key year, that's when computers moved into the department
store arena. From that point, only the TRS-80 and Apple ][ were
computer store wares. That was also the time when the IBM PC was
dawning on the scene.

It made better sense
in Atari's eyes to make 'new' cartridges and hide the fact that the
5200 was a stripped down 800 (now 3+ years old) than to repackage the
existing 800 cartridges with '5200 compatible' branding. Put another
way, People expected to see and buy computer things in a computer
store and Atari was only happy enough to oblige.

Again, I will disagree with this, sorry. The lines between computers
and consoles were getting blurred as time went on. In my opinion, if
they had released the XLGS from the beginning to replace the 2600, it
would have become one of history's greatest systems. People who had
consoles WANTED computers but could not afford them. If they could
have sold the XLGS, expandable to a full computer and fully
compatable, for the price of a console, I don't think people would
have looked upon that as a bad thing. As it was everyone was
scrambling to "upgrade" their consoles into a "real computer.

The reason the 2600 wasn't replaced in the first place was that it kept
selling. As Sony is seeing great sales currently on the PS2, and MS
pissed the hell out of people by cutting the XB cold, back in the day,
as Atari released the 8-bit line, and a bit later when the 5200 hit, the
2600 continued to sell strong. The computer upgrade hardware that made
a computer more than a video game was comparatively expensive.
Keyboards had contacts, disk drives, printers and telephone couplers
(each of which were expensive to manufacture mechanisms) required data
ports, which pushed the costs in their own right. And for the home
market, computers had to have joystick ports or kids didn't want them
(thus the Altair wasn't highly coveted).

And then, parents complained that they put out all this money for a
computer system, and all their kids did was play games. The factor that
made computers desirable after the crash was that there were good games
and the ability to write your own games on computers, and computers had
more memory than carts. With disks, storage was easy. Also, you could
copy games cheap or free, and that black market really helped computer
sales.

Thing is, almost everyone had announced a keyboard and was making a
big deal out of it (including MB/GCE with the Vectrex). Would any of
these keyboards helped the systems survive the crash? Possibly, but
keep in mind that the Computers that took off post-crash (C64, ST,
Amiga) were new and different, compared to the 2-3+ year old
consoles. Also, support for add on components fractures your consumer
base, and it's been pretty much the rule that the parent company
abandons the add on hardware rather quickly because (duh) it's a
smaller market. Sony found this out the hard way with the add on hard

I will agree with this. However, this would NOT have been a problem at
all had the XLGS been released from the beginning, as the "stuff"
would have been all there anyway to expand the thing if people wanted
it or not.

You still don't get it. The XEGS was a desperate attempt to make money
off then very dated technology. It was the Atari 800 reshelled and
rebranded as a video game console. But the manufacturing processes that
allowed it to be produced so cheaply and so compact were a result of
advanced chip design that was NOT possible back in 1980. The wiring
that connected the keyboard inside the 800 was a very wide ribbon cable.
The detached keyboard used a parsing circuit to send keystrokes through
a small number of wires to the main console, and that parser was on a
single chip, with the decoding parser in the console on a single chip.
The 800 required three huge cards to achieve 48K of ram, in the XEGS,
the ram was a single chip.

The XEGS wasn't technologically possible in 1980. And the cartoonish
look may have had the same impact on potential customers that it did in
1988, most people thought it looked goofy, and did not want it.

drive for the PS2 (which supported how many games? 2?) and Microsoft
will also get their lumps with the HD-DVD addon for the 360. It's a
lesson that doesn't seem to sink into the hardware makers in the
industry even 25 years later.

I won't even go into the 360 "needing" an add-on to play HD-DVD, as
we've all got back into good, on-topic discussions, and I don't want
to start another off-topic flame war.

And yet, for any of the computers back in the day to do anything really
computer like, they ALL had to have add-ons; disk drive(s), rs-232
interface, telephone coupler (and later, direct connect modems), and/or
cassette cable or drive.

#4) Offer a modestly improved VCS controller, with some extra buttons,
a "pause" feature, etc.

This I agree with. I said above that the 5200 Controller was a better
design than the CV, but that's not saying much. The single biggest

I will disagree with this. I always thought the Colecovision
controller was a fine controller, much better than the 5200 - and more
importantly in the long run, much sturdier. Sure, it doesn't control
as well as the good old atari stick, but what the hell did?

That's the pivot. Controllers back than could not be to complex as
technology restricted abilities, and trying to add depth took away from
control.

flaw of the '3rd generation' controllers was the placement of the
buttons where it was impossible to sit the controller on a surface or
your lap and play. All of them, save for the Vectrex required you to
grip the controller and push buttons with one hand and move the stick/
pad with the other which was tiring the the short term and cramp-
inducing in the long term. Compared to the NES and SMS controllers,
where you gripped the controller equally with both hands, the
advantage (and staying power) of that design is pretty clear. We
still use a variation of it today.

True, the Nintendo controller was an innovation, and works NICELY for
most games, but some games it is NOT very well suited for. Take Pac
Man for instance. Damned near unplayable on the D-pad if you want to
get any good at it. Hell - the 5200 controller would beat the D-pad
for Pac Man.

No.. when I plug Pac Man into my NES, I use the "Joystick" controller.

And the NES had the advantage of evolved technology in all fronts,
including controllers.

Had Atari taken these steps, I feel they could have survived the crash.

I doubt this. The only system to survive the crash was the 2600 --
barely,

It depends what you mean by "survive". I never, ever had the
perception that the Atari 2600 survived the crash. If you mean a
handful of games straggling in over the years means the system somehow
"survived", then I guess it must be surviving to this very day because
there are more new releases now than in the latter half of the 80's.

I'm willing to be open to the idea of the Atari surviving the crash
though. Let's hear more..

The 2600 survived as in it was still being made, and it was still being
sold. All the other players were out of the game. Granted, it was
struggling after the crash, but it was still around, plain and simple.

Which again, demonstrates that the 2600 was a stalwart, and the XEGS
would have likely not worked out.

jt
.

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