Bushnell's clan at Atari was more interested in dope and scoring points with the 13-something stoner crowd than in producing good games. After driving the console industry in North America into the ground, Atari was split up and sold. The only home console Atari ever really produced was the 2600, a very lo-res affair that rode on the back of the video game craze in the early 1980s. After the split up, Atari hardware released the 5200 and 7800 to almost no sales. The 7800 didn't use encruption technology or lock-out chips, although early emulators thought it did. 7800 series cartridges had a validation key identifying for the BIOS whether it was a 7800 or a 2600 cart, the default. Atari coim-op games did use a form of encryption involving bank switches to the game ROMs.
Skuld-Chan may be thinking of a different case. Namco bought Atari games ca. 1987 and formed a subsidiary called Tengen to receive licensing from Nintendo to make NES games. Tengen eventually stole Nintendo proprietary source code by misrepresenting itself to the US Copyright Office and began producing carts for NES without going through Nintendo licensing procedures. The NES has a lock-out chip that does a handshake with a custom chip in the cart. Atari engineers failed to reverse-engineer the system and just requested the patent for the lock-and-key system Nintendo had on file and filed for the copyrighted source code as part of litigation which wasn't in fact underway at the time (it soon began in earnest, Nintendo won).
Significantly, Nintendo's idea with the lock-out chip was to ensure the quality of games available. Hiroshi Yamauchi-san had a shrewd concept of suplly-side economics Japanese style, and fueld with profits from Shigeru Miyamoto-san's completely brilliant coin-op hit Donkey Kong, Nintendo of America began working hard to revive the North American console market Bushnell and company ran into the dirt. Atari's version remains that they created the entire market, although their one and only real hit was Asteroids, while Nintendo continued to produce interesting and good games over the last two decades. When NoA was forming Bill Gates was still pretty much operating out of his parents' basement in Bellevue. Following the Z80 Softcard, MicroSoft tried to set the standard with the MSX computer. Gates has come so late to the home console market it's hard to expect the Xbox will have any impact at all on gaming. Even with the old arcades and carts going trans-platform thanks to the efforts of all the mad emulators out there, Nintendo remains the strongest contender for one simple reason, its traditional emphasis on quality, not quantity. The company has also proven it plays fair, as seen with Arakawa-san's personal involvement in licensing Tetris from its creator, while Tengen-Atari and the rest basically stole the game and didn't pay any royalties.
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Bushnell's clan at Atari was more interested in dope and scoring points with the 13-something stoner crowd than in producing good games. After driving the console industry in North America into the ground, Atari was split up and sold. The only home console Atari ever really produced was the 2600, a very lo-res affair that rode on the back of the video game craze in the early 1980s. After the split up, Atari hardware released the 5200 and 7800 to almost no sales. The 7800 didn't use encruption technology or lock-out chips, although early emulators thought it did. 7800 series cartridges had a validation key identifying for the BIOS whether it was a 7800 or a 2600 cart, the default. Atari coim-op games did use a form of encryption involving bank switches to the game ROMs. Skuld-Chan may be thinking of a different case. Namco bought Atari games ca. 1987 and formed a subsidiary called Tengen to receive licensing from Nintendo to make NES games. Tengen eventually stole Nintendo proprietary source code by misrepresenting itself to the US Copyright Office and began producing carts for NES without going through Nintendo licensing procedures. The NES has a lock-out chip that does a handshake with a custom chip in the cart. Atari engineers failed to reverse-engineer the system and just requested the patent for the lock-and-key system Nintendo had on file and filed for the copyrighted source code as part of litigation which wasn't in fact underway at the time (it soon began in earnest, Nintendo won). Significantly, Nintendo's idea with the lock-out chip was to ensure the quality of games available. Hiroshi Yamauchi-san had a shrewd concept of suplly-side economics Japanese style, and fueld with profits from Shigeru Miyamoto-san's completely brilliant coin-op hit Donkey Kong, Nintendo of America began working hard to revive the North American console market Bushnell and company ran into the dirt. Atari's version remains that they created the entire market, although their one and only real hit was Asteroids, while Nintendo continued to produce interesting and good games over the last two decades. When NoA was forming Bill Gates was still pretty much operating out of his parents' basement in Bellevue. Following the Z80 Softcard, MicroSoft tried to set the standard with the MSX computer. Gates has come so late to the home console market it's hard to expect the Xbox will have any impact at all on gaming. Even with the old arcades and carts going trans-platform thanks to the efforts of all the mad emulators out there, Nintendo remains the strongest contender for one simple reason, its traditional emphasis on quality, not quantity. The company has also proven it plays fair, as seen with Arakawa-san's personal involvement in licensing Tetris from its creator, while Tengen-Atari and the rest basically stole the game and didn't pay any royalties.