the best company for me for Atari 2600 was property Activation (also in its time). They released many well designed games to Atari 2600. My favorit is of course HERO, but im also liked River Raid very much. Just sad its released very late on its life, when the game industry crashed.

Also.... Its same coder that did Superman, which much code actuelly came from Adventure. Im did my self really newer liked that game.

Activision, yea..almost like the only company back then.
River Raid was OK and HERO is not bad either, I guess there was about...6 games that were good (breakout included).

hehe. im did remember im actuelly got completed Combat School on C64 (and that suparman game, but did have a quit every solid joystick. Im also remember that Superman game on C64 was also nice too, even its does have various bugs.

Im also played some Atari 2600 games using the Atari port adapter im just got last some weeks with a C64 joystick. Most graphics, if not all was designed by the programmer. Like me, im is also not as a greatest artist out here (hehe). Limited palette is all the fun when doing old stuff, 8 or 16bit. DS is a newer machine with full palette.

I did complete the CS as well..on the expense of like 4 joysticks killed, I mean..who the hell thought it was a good idea to design a software around destroying hardware? I swear, haha, the joystick manufacturers paid some of these guys back in the day to make games which destroy joysticks so they can sell more.
OK, JK..but yea, that was blistering barnacles time, all in all.

Atari tho, its not the graphics but it is more about games that utterly have no gameplay, I swear, majority is totally unplayable or rely on 'go left or right till collision kills you' concept. It's like 'Hey we have another game with a yellow box going left, there's only about 500 of them already on the market, what do we do...(other guy) hmmm...let's put a dragon on the cart!'.

And..I know it wasn't the machine to push something superb on it and programmers were probably as baffled as anyone else just why the hell is there another 'yellow box goes left' game so its not them to blame but most of them seriously never even bloody tried. If you look at what people do with Atari homebrew nowadays, yep, totally most of those guys back then didn't even bother.

Hehe batman was blue in the NES game, due limited palette.

Also superman was awful to Nintendo 64, while the Ps2/gamecube works great. Also for some reason I liked the atari 2600 superman game and could been fun to remake that. Even the game is limited, it's was fun to fly around. What that let out game down is the confusion map.  But I'm do use two subway screen to get to either the jail with a cruck or fix the bridge screen.....

Yes... Some ports change the palette quite a lots in a game.

Funny you mentioned that Atari Superman as I was playing it like last week with some other games and its not bad, I even fondly remember the C64 (1983 or so) Superman which was somewhat baffling in gameplay but zapping that green goblin or whatever the heck was that was somewhat strangely fun.
Tho..I did reminded myself that seriously, all nostalgia aside, 99 out of 100 Atari games were inexcusable trash.
I swear, I would look at the box and there would be Dragons, Knights, Spaceship, you put that cart and bloody hell..like yellow square goes from left to green square on the right and is killed instantly by a superb collision detection, like..wtf, where be dragons? Tho, I did fondly kept those blister inducing joysticks for longest time until Combat School on C64 killed them all.

But yes, palette wise, unless you're thinking like Japanese, you'll be in trouble while porting one thing to another.

Oh, totally understood, that part with 'carefree' is the one I'm thinking of the most. That plus just how much you're willing to compromise, hard to decide sometimes. I would at best keep working on original (DS in your case) and slowly figure out just how to approach to downscaled version without too much grief.

But, yes, the flow you expect will likely not be there at least not until you get used to what limits you have and the colors in your case are as problematic as they would be for most of the games out there.

Here's to illustrate what I could do on Warhawk Next versus DS version. The left is DS and these two levels I wanted to recreate somehow for Next and here you can compare and see just how hard it was to get what was very easy flow on DS (I remember HK giving me a tool to count unique tiles and seeing like 40 free with ability to flip them was like 'MAN, I can do anything' moment) compared to a lot of restructuring and major ass compromise to get it in some way on the Next (the level on the right, I changed all the colors on that one 4 times but I could never get those metallic blue shades as they simply don't exist in Next palette). So, yeah it takes a lot of improvisation to get that 'feel' as right as possible.

Howover the Titan Overdrive demo im named previous also show what the machine also can, even its will far too big to use it in a game.... but its a demo anyway and its on purpose in any demo.

All earlier machine have some sort of limits of course.

Just saw that demo, it is brilliant but...as you said, demo is demo and game is something else (game perhaps ). When you have specific thing in mind, say superman drawing, but the blue and red are missing from palette then you're screwed and have to go with alternative universe superheroes and make his costume pikachoo yellow instead which might be more than you're willing to compromise, although, I have this Japanese Batman of yore and Buddha be blessed I don't want to see him in any other way ever again!

yes, even Spectrum Next have some limits as well. That named game seens quite cool and yes (newer hear that before), well used of tiles and design well around limits to safe so much as possible. Howover the Titan Overdrive demo im named previous also show what the machine also can, even its will far too big to use it in a game.... but its a demo anyway and its on purpose in any demo.

All earlier machine have some sort of limits of course.