The Atari 7800 ProSystem had been designed in 1983 and 1984 with plans to release the system at the end of the year. The project was originally the 3800 and was later renamed the 7800. The system was designed by General Corporation (GCC), and was the first Atari system designed by an outside company.
Atari had been facing pressure from Colecovision . Who at the time boasted graphics that more closely resembled an arcade machine. All previous game consoles had some difficulty in replicating popular arcade games into home versions. These games often had problems with flickering and slow down when multiple moving objects were on the screen at once. GCC had prior experience in arcade games. They used that knowledge to design the new system with the graphical architecture similar to the arcade machines of the time. With the ability to move around a large amount of objects at once.
After the initial test marketing, They planed to aggressively push the 7800 in time for the coming Christmas season. However one month later, Atari sold their consumer division to Jack Tramiel, who then shelved the 7800 to focus on the new 16 bit system.
The 7800 was re introduced in 1986 after the Nintendo Entertainment System proved the market was still thriving.
Powering the new system was a 6502c processor running at 1.79 Mhz..The 7800 could play almost all of the Atari 2600 games out of the box, with no need for an adapter. It came packaged with simple joystick controllers, and was affordable at $140 in the U S.
The system also was designed to be upgraded to a full fledge home computer. A keyboard was developed which had an expansion port for the addition of peripherals such as printers and disk drives, and a battery paced RAM was designed as well, for storing game scores.
