Did early consoles include screen savers / color-cycling?

[CRV]

Well, Solaris doesn't have any color cycling and it was developed in 1984 (but released only in 1986).

On closer inspection, it seems it's mostly Atari-made games from 1977-1983 that do it (1983-1984 games were mostly developed at GCC). Third-party games don't do it, as far as I can tell.

[digitalpress]

That was actually just the pause feature. The screen would go to black, and would come back when you pressed anything.

I don't think that screen savers, as we know them first started showing up until the PSX era.

Just to confirm or elaborate, the Intellivision has a pause feature that you can execute from the controllers (pressing 3 and 7 or 1 and 9 simultaneously) and ALSO a screen saver that kicks in after about 10 minutes of non-use. In both cases, tapping any button on the controller brings the game back onscreen.

[veronica_marsfan]

Third-party games don't do it, as far as I can tell.

Activison games do. Like Freeway or Fishing Derby.

Color-cycling was eliminated when newer games required more memory to do advanced tricks. And so the color-cycling routine had to be deleted.

it seems it's mostly Atari-made games from 1977-1983 that do it (1983-1984 games were mostly developed at GCC).

What's GCC?

[djsquarewave]

What's GCC?

General Computer Corporation. They sold hacked Missile Command boards which got them sued and subsequently contracted by Atari to make games for them.

[Lady Jaye]

On closer inspection, it seems it's mostly Atari-made games from 1977-1983 that do it (1983-1984 games were mostly developed at GCC). Third-party games don't do it, as far as I can tell.

However, the example I gave (Solaris) wasn't developped by GCC but by Doug Neubauer at Atari (the game was shelved for 2 years upon Atari Corp's sale to Jack Tramiel).

BTW, GCC was also the original developer of Ms. Pac-Man...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General...er_Corporation