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The 7800 was designed to replace the floundering Atari 5200, and to once and for all re-establish Atari's market supremacy against the Intellivision and Colecovision. With this system, Atari addressed all the shortcomings of the Atari 5200: it had simple, digital joysticks; it was backwards compatible with the Atari 2600; and it was affordable.

The 7800 was the first game system from Atari which was designed by an outside company ( GCC ) (later consoles also designed outside the company were the Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar). The system was designed to be upgraded to a fully-fledged home computer—a keyboard was developed, and the system had an expansion port (derived from the Atari 8-bit line's SIO port) for the addition of peripherals like disk drives and printers. GCC had also designed a 'high score cartridge,' a battery-backed RAM cart designed for storing game scores. Unfortunately, Atari manufactured none of these accessories, and after the initial production run they also eliminated the expansion port.

The 7800 was launched in test market (southern California) in June of 1984This page is about the year 1984. For other uses of 1984, see 1984 (disambiguation). 1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday (link shows calendar). Events January January 1 Brunei becomes a fully independent state January 1 AT&T is broken up into 22 indepe. One month later, Warner Communications sold Atari to Jack TramielJack Tramiel (born 1928) is famous for founding Commodore International, manufacturer of the Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga home computers. Tramiel was born in 1928 in Lodz, Poland, as Idek Trzmiel. After the Nazi invasion in 1939 his family was transpo, who believed (along with most of the country) that the video game fad was over. He pulled the plug on all projects related to video games and Atari's existing computer line to concentrate all efforts on development of the new 16-bit line ( Atari STThe Atari ST was a home/ personal computer system released by Atari in 1985. The "ST" allegedly stood for "Sixteen/Thirty-two" which referred to the Motorola 68000's 32-bit internals with 16-bit external buses. Other theories say that ST really stood for). The 7800 was re-introduced in 19861986 is a common year starting on Wednesday. Events January January 1 Spain and Portugal enter the European Community January 1 Aruba gains increased autonomy from the Netherlands and is separated from the Netherlands Antilles. January 9 After losing a pa after the success of the Nintendo Entertainment Systemcomputer than a toy to avoid being associated with the video game industry, which crashed in 1983. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is a video game console released by Nintendo in North America, Europe, and Australia. The console is the internation proved that the video gamescreenshot of Tetris for the Nintendo Game BoyA video game is a game played using an electronic device with a visual display. Overview Often "video game" is taken in a narrow sense to mean those games played on consoles for television and similar handheld market was still viable.

The 7800's technical superiority is debated still today. The architecture is essentially just an Atari 2600 with a slightly better CPU and an advanced graphics chip (MARIA). While the system could handle far more moving objects on screen (up to 100) than any of its competitors, its audio capabilities were inferior. To compensate, some games (notably ports from the Atari 400/800Atari built a series of 8-bit home computers based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU, starting in 1979. Over the next decade several versions of the same basic design would be released, but the models remained largely identical internally. History As soon as computer line) included a POKEYAtari POKEY (C012294) pin-out The Atari POKEY is a digital I/O chip found in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and many arcade games in the 1980s. Its name comes from PO tentiometer and KEY board, as it was commonly used to sample ( ADC) potentiome audio chip in the cartridge. The 7800 was also more difficult to program than other systems available at the time, though this was tempered by the fact that so many game programmers were already well versed in the 2600.

The 7800 faced the severe software drought that would become the mark of all Atari consoles sold after the video game crash. Relatively few titles were released by Atari, many of them unpolished and lacking in features. And there was virtually no effort by Atari to recruit third party developers.