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Old Atari Design Docs Online
gribbly writes "Forget emulation -- now you can read classic Atari design docs!" It's all documents from the early 1980s, I think, and looks totally...I dunno. It's like taking a journey into the past.
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I thought he meant the amiga, which has all the "computer" features.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
yeah, a rusty old second hand 520 (or 1024) st for 30 quid, keeps *much* better time in cubase than a amd k62-300 pc using soundblaster platinum.
Heh
:)
I Remember once around the Uni. there someone had ripped a pay'n display meter out of the ground and used it to hammer about 10 more into small bent piles of metal. How we laughed
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Interestingly enough, Atari used VMS for their internal systems:
[MOORE.PACKRAT]shi.mem
(It was something close to that. It was in the pink book in a mention of cartridge specifications.)
And having used VMS software that came out of that era, I have to say it was probably a good move. Honestly, I've seen more people with problems trying to use Win32 OSs and software than back in the days of DEC when we just told the lusers what their logins were and set up their accounts to pull up a simple menu.
But then, we also had to make sure that people went to class(es) to learn how to use the software effectively, gave them complete paper instruction manuals, keyboard templates with key combos, etc.
DEC was a fun place to co-op. *sniffle*
Chris
A few of em are still at Atari/Midway West.
Somewhere in the late 80s the trend started to spread out a bit. If it wasn't the fact that the video games were designed to eat your quarters faster than the change machine could produce them (read: Heavy Gear or something similar), then it was the brand new pinball machines that were demanding 50 for one play or 75 for two games.
Nowadays all the games are 50 and most of them suck. The only ones I like playing are the driving games, but at $1.00 a pop it makes no sense.
Anyhoots..
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
"The lynx was not American. It was made in Japan and Taiwan. The Jaguar was US-made."
Sorry, i meant designed. *Everything* is made in the far east, from the American flag (Roll Bill Hicks jokes) to the Simpsons.
Man, looking through this guy's site really depresses me. It takes me back to my happiest days, spent plugging quarters into the old arcade, Gizmo's (long since turned into one shit-shop after another) in downtown Omaha.
:)
Emulation really doesn't do it for me. Sure, I get the satisfaction of PLAYING the game, but I don't get the "Arcade" feeling. I like plugging quarters (1, not 4!), and playing a simple game like Galaga, or Gyruss, Missile Command, Super Zaxxon... I go to an arcade today, and get a headache from the lack of good "clean fun" type games, and the $1 or greater per-play price.
I really wish I had the money, time & patience to get into this hobby of collecting old Arcade consoles. If anyone has any pointers on how to get started in this hobby, post a reply. I'd really like to get my hands on a Good Condition Gyruss box for under $300
Sideways scrolling was made easy on the Amiga because of the ability to have a 0 -> 15 pixel shift value, and you could change the bitplane addressed to get word accuracy, voila smooth scrolling. But you needed to blit the new blocks, say, on the right off the screen. If you wanted to overscan the display you`d need to make it wider still, so say goodbye to 2 sprites.
(That left you enough sprites for the player character (if you want 16 colours anyway). So you`d have to use blitter objects for all the other bad guys, scores etc. Which meant that slow cookie-cut blits with 4 sources were needed.)
On the megadrive you had the mapped blocks, and all the objects (player, bad guys, bullets, scores) were done with sprites, which are free (as in processor time).
So although there were loads of scrollers (more after the megadrive came out and pushed standards up), the vast majority of them were pretty shallow (now many characters on screen at once), and not very fast (maybe 10% of games were in 50 frames a second, practically the megadrive games were)
If by chunky graphics you mean chunky pixel mode - where one byte = 8 * 1 bitplanes - then i`m afraid they didnt become a necessity for 3d games for the simple reason that that mode didnt exist on the amiga - at least, not until the cd32 came out. And even then it was extremely limited. The Amiga 500/600/1000/1200 was purely planer.
MAME handles Tempest quite nicely -- If you can manage to find the ROMs. Lucky for you, there's a copy of the original 1980 Tempest ROM set on PROPAGANDA for your retro-pleasure. Its listed as "Tempest ROMs" under the "Other Resources" category. Enjoy.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
wow! you have a C compiler for the 800? now there is something i'd be interested in.
i admit it - i still love my 800. i only called it glorified b/c all the kids in my neighborhood used it for games - while i at least did a 'little' programming.
yeah - my dad bought the whole thing b/c it ran VisiCalc, which was the first computer program i ever had interaction with.
for fun, check out Ebay for old 800 stuff. how cheap!!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Hey, i was agreeing with you! That wasnt sarcasm, cubase on the pc sucks.
There was also a really nasty software
hack that could be done on the original
ST that sort of enabled hardware scrolling.
With this hack you could place the place
the start address of the framebuffer
anywhere, so you could do vertical scrolling
to a pixel, and horizontal scrolling
to 16 pixels.
Unfortunately, the STE came along which
had this kind of thing officially supported,
but wasn't entirely backwards compatible.
RoboSmurf
(who used to be an ST demo coder...)
(read: Heavy Gear or something similar)
I believe you're thinking of Heavy Barrel, not Heavy Gear. (Heavy Gear was a series of computer games from Activision.)
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
The original name for PacMan was "Puckman" !
,Collect the whole set !
They changed it at the last minute for fear that kids
would change the "P" to "F" and get.........well you get it !
The 80's were great.
Bring back the games like Tempest !
- Save The Whales
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
I know well what I am talking about. Yes, Jack made Commodore. He also destoyed it. The C-64 was not the model T, nor was my beloved Atari. The Apple was the Model T. Sorry.
Jack did NOTHING to help with mutltmedia; the Amiga was designed outside Commodore by Jay Miner who had left Atari to form his own company. Atari had a share in the company, and was to license the "Lorraine" (as the Amiga was then called) chipset for their new computer.
But when Jack Tramiel took over Atari, he decided to refuse Amiga Systems any more funding, knowing that they would go out of business and the computer would default to Atari, as majority stockholder; he would just steal it.
But Amiga sold the computer to Tramiel's old company, Commodore. In the lawsuit that followed, Tramiel got rights to some of the technology, but nothing to do with the Amiga was designed during his reign at either company; it was designed at Atari during the Warner days, then at Amiga Systems, then sold to Commodore after Jack bought Atari. Commodore did not steal it, Amiga sold it to them rather than face bankruptcy. They were ex-Atari guys; they wanted to sell it to Atari. But they did not want to sell it for Jack's price, .10 on the dollar.
Was Atari going down under the reign of Ray Kassar and Warner? You bet it was. But Jack's solution was to kill everything. He did not care about beauty or quality, just price.
In the late 1980s, Atari employees asked permission to hold a Christmas party--an Atari tradition since 1972. Jack responded that he would not help pay for it, and if they wanted one they would have to pay for it themselves. The employees passed the hat around, and finally threw their own party.
Jack and his sons came. They ate the employees food, drank their wines, and gave a speech about how important the employees were at Atari. The next day they fired most of them.
If you want to really know Jack Tramiel, spend a few days with his ex-employees. Then you may feel different.
So, let's see: "Model T"...well the Commodore was just a cheap copy of the Atari, which was alreay four years old by the time the C-64 came out. The Atari was a 6502-based design like the Apple, but with a bunch of value-added features. Sorry, the Apple II wins the price for the "Model T" computer. The Atari was the luxury machine, "the Duseldorf", and the Commodore was just a knockoff. Since Jack had nothing to do with the development of the Amiga, and Atari's refusal (under Jack) to provide the final third-level funding for the Amiga so he could get it cheap instead of paying what was owed destroyed the company and probably contributed to Jay Miners early death. So he gets an "F" on the Multimedia claim. The Jaguar was designed in England by Flair, and while Jack had people working on it he fired the Falcon development staff to do it, so that is not too much credit for him.....
Buy you are right on the MIDI ports. Jack did do that. But he destroyed Atari to do it.
"the PSX had a lead start"
:)
Well, yeah, but as you just pointed out indirectly, that didnt help the DC...
They've hooked up with VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) and will be putting on a show of classic arcade games in San Jose towards the end of September.
Blue elf needs reality check, badly.
"
Computers:
- framebuffer
- hardware support for scrolling of the pixels
- blitters
- hblank interrupt for effects
"
Atari ST scores 1/4
But the ST was a home computer was it not?
"
Arcade games:
- n planes of tile oriented video (i.e, the screen is divided into 8x8 elements selected by number)
- sprites generator (usually a plane of its own)
- priority manager
- hardware support for global scrolling of the tile planes
- horizontal and vertical line scrolling
- vblank interrupt only
"
Commodore 64 scores roughly 4/6.
But the commodore 64 was not an arcade machine.
Your memory seems to be not quite as clear as it could be.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Well, tile-based graphic modes are nice for action games, but not that nice for aventure games with non-tiled graphics, not nice for showing how the kid can easily draw a circle with a simple basic command, and definitively a pain for any windowing system (look at the gem and/or workbench, compare to the pc text-mode interfaces of the time).
Once you have implemented (in hardware) a framebuffer, which is a simple linear memory read + color palette lookup + DAC, you'd rather spend time and money accelerating its use thru blitters, coppers and equivalents (Amiga) or not accelerate anything at all and reduce the costs (Atari) rather than having to add a tile-based display system.
OG.
Yeah, they suck
Bother.
Well, the original poster was talking about the atari st, so I placed myself in that time frame. The ST hardware was definitively of the "framebuffer" category. You'll notice that the STE added hardware scrolling and a blitter.
BTW, the ST has an hblank (on both timer B or maybe C, I'm not completely sure, and irq level 2).
Older home computers were inheriting from the arcade games/text console era. The VIC20, C64, ZX81... had a tile based architecture. The evolution started with the Spectrum and the Oric, which had an intermediate representation between tiles and framebuffer. The Amstrad is one of the first widely used pure framebuffer implementations.
OG.
The Gauntlet specs are attributed to -
P. Brosnan
M. O'rourke
and summink else I can't remember...
Brown Out
Yeah, Atari had some PC. Designed by a guy called Jay Miner. Ever hear of him?
Another company made a cheap clone of it without all the custom ASICs four years later and sold it with the worst disk drive ever made.
Aha, now i know how they pulled the spiffy scrolling map off =:-) I've been wondering about that for years... Of course they have basicly a character generator (sorta like the old NES) to deal with the background and then a "motion object" (sprite generator) to deal with the foreground.... Cool =:-)
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
I like the name, as long as nobody confuses it with the Pink Shirt Book.
Actually, MAME's run all the games described here for years - you can get all the tech info here right out of the source.
was, I think, Dragon's Lair that was $.50 a play.
However, there were some others that were that much as well. The game Firefox was that much to play, and so was another of the laserdisc games that was out (it was one where you were on a futuristic motorcycle and the track was displayed to you as video from the LD. I had a lot of fun with that one!).
I do remember that Electronic Games magazine way back then had lots of questions about "when will we all start paying $.50?" If you think about it, finding a $.25 game is worth it any more. Hell, it hasn't changed since Pong!
But, last time I went to the arcade they were $.50 minimum to play, and most were either $1 or some even $2. So, I just wander around the place and find the $.25 games. They are more fun anyway.
You know why they want you to enter part of your registration number on the machine, bloody weird! Is that in case someone nicks your reciept?, or in order to stop you from giving it away to someone else? tsk, tsk, tsk
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I wonder if we can improve the current Atari arcade emulators with these documents? Any one noticed how the voices in Gauntlet arcade games suck? :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
maybe, maybe not, but an *awful* lot of studio engineers are/were so used to the ST version, they took a long time to switch.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Hmm, when did I get my ST... 1989, I think. In 1989 more UK companies were using Atari STs for desk top publishing than Apple Macs. It's a slightly misleading statistic, because the big companies were using Macs, and several of them, but the ST was an enabling technology - every little company could afford a #300 Atari ST to do their in-house DTP. My Mac-fan mates (including Wombat - hi there!) happily informed me that the Mac market was worth far more, and prefered to use that statistic, but I would always counter with a comment that that was because they cost more! FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Also, Atari released a version of System V for the TT030. I don't know anything about it, except that is supposedly exists in some back closet somewhere. I've got an old version of NetBSD on mine. Rock solid.
DISCLAIMER: Some info on this page assumes you are from the Omaha, NE area. I apologize.......
I just got into arcade collecting/building myself, so I'll try to lend a few pointers (though most of this info will be totally region-centric)
You mention Omaha, so I'm assuming you are from the area. I usually check out the old used arcade cabinets from Central Distrubting. They are located off 108th street in the Old Mill area, right next to Old Mill Toyota (by the hotel over there). I picked up my SF 2 cabinet there (not exactly a classic, but it's Jamma based with lotsa buttons, more on that later) and they were pretty cool. They'll deliver it to you for a small fee I think (I lived too far away for them to deliever). Anyway, the salesman there you want to talk to is Joe. He'll let you come in and look around. Most of the stuff is in pretty bad shape, but occasionally you'll find some nice gems. Another place to check out (and I forget the name) is the ammusement place close to 84th and 'F' (next to Skateland). A friend of mine went there, said they had good deals. Also check out the arcade places at Westroads/Crossroads/and Oakview. Especially Oakview, they tend to sell a lot of cabinets from time to time (but most of their's are newer machines). And I'm not sure, but Family Fun Center might be willing to part with some older ones (they have a really cool retro arcade there, if you manage to dodge the bullets
As for what kind of cabinet you want, I recommend sticking to Jamma based cabinets (most are, but the really old ones aren't). Basically, the Jamma harness provides a uniform interface to the monitor/buttons/etc, so swapping out PCB's are pretty easy. I like old Capcom games (Strider, SF 2, Final Fight), and you can find tons of them on Ebay or perhaps purchase them from a place like Central Distributing. For the really really old ones that used dedicated hardware, there are a few sites on the net that show you how to make a Jamma harness yourself, but you'd be better off buying the whole thing in a lot of cases (if you are interested in coverting a non-jamma to jamma, check out This link.
You will also want to check the condition of the monitor. It's pretty much a given that older games will have some burn in. You'll have to watch out for that. The good news is, if you have to settle for a monitor with burn in, Happ Controls has a good selection of monitors to choose from, if you need to replace it.
Personally, I like to pick up my cabinets from local outlets (like that place Central Distributing). Usually, they are more than happy to let you mess around with it and make sure all the controls work and the monitor looks sharp and the sound works, etc. In other words, you know what you are buying. :)
Once you find yourself a decent cabinet, you can start buying just the PCB's and swap them in an out (nice thing about the Jamma harness, it makes this painless, for the most part). Like I said earlier though, older games ( Pac-Man, Gyruss era) might require a bit more work.
While I realize you don't like emulation, there is a neat cabinet from Hanaho called the ArcadePC. It gives you more of the arcade "feel", while running the games from a PC under MAME or something. Sometimes, this may be your only choice :(
Here is a list of some of my favorite sites (all can be found by searching Google with the keyword 'jamma' or 'jamma pcb' or something like that
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/vide oarcade/faq/
http://nexus.nanospace.com/~spo onman/neogeo/faq.htm
http://www.ntrnet.net/~braze/ arcade/tech/repair.shtml
http:/ /directory.google.com/alpha/Top/Games/Coin-Op/Arca de_Games/Collectors/ (TONS of links)
http://www.tir.com/~devilman/index.html
http://members.xoom.com/organian/
If you need more info or anything, feel free to email me (remove the NOSPAM) and discuss!
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
sure, the Deep Blue C compiler . . . not sure of the exact location (deep in the dark recesses of a closet in the spare room, with a sign that says "Beware the Leopard" no doubt) but if you want to email me at this ID @ cavtel.net, when I locate it, I'll let you know.
--
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
The PSX had a lead start, resulting in more units and more games in the market at the N64's introduction. Also, the N64 uses Nintendo's cartridge system and is way more controlled with respect to what games can be made for it, which leads to fewer and more expensive titles.
Judging by reports on IGN's FGN site, the N64 and DC are also both dying re support, since everyone and their grandmother are focusing on the P2X and/or XBox.
What was suprising was that Sony went for that market at all, despite Sega and Nintendo's dominance.
Where is the concept artwork, world ideas and sketches like artists do for today's games? It seems like games of yesteryear were created only by comp sci people, with little creativity. :(
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
(..or was it the Pet?)
With these doc's I will build my own out of date machine, make millions and put Nintendo, Sega and Sony out of busniess!
guvf vf zl fvt
No, the design documents where released to allow creation home made do-it-yourself machines able to play Atari games.
"Hey, lets sell the Lynx at about twice the cost of the Gameboy!"
"Surely we should be competitive and launch it at a similar price, you know, like we`ve promised?"
"No - besides, ours is colour, and American goddamnit. Whos going to buy a black and white Japanese version?"
What do this "Atari company" think is going to happen? Do they really think that people are going to buy these machines? Even if they do, are people really going to be putting coins in again and again with no chance of a financial reward?
This is a ridiculous idea and its never going to catch on.
Look here. I wonder how existing ROMs can be put on catridges...
...can the Atari 2600 no longer run DeCSS?
Tempest evidentally had an option for a Two-Game minimum(it's mentioned at the bottom). Interesting "feature". It would be neat to see the history of a credit. When did it become acceptable to have $.50 games. Some games now cost more than a dollar. How common was the two-game minimum? Being 6 in 83, I don't remember it all that much ;-)
anyone ever compiled this sort of thing? would anyone other than me care?
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
We will see someone create some games from these specs. It will run on linux and someone else would want to port it the other Unixes and win NT
I notice that there is emphasis on the hardware scrolling feature in the hardware spec.
I had an ST, my mate had an Amiga, he had hardware scrolling, I didn't.
Funny that the feature should be deprioritiesed when it came to the home machine.
I guess they wanted to bite into the Mac DTP market, which they did _very_ sucessfully, more than they wanted to compete as a games oriented machine with the Amiga.
Bugger, I've gone off topic.
(Oh, and I'm _not_ saying that the Amiga was only good for games, far from it.)
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I don't think that they got very far with the DTP, although the ST didn't have bad programs for it. I remember the ST's display being a dog to lay out in ASM tho. What kept the ST in sales was the one thing it had that the Mac, PC and Amiga didn't, and that was the in-built MIDI ports. I think that the ST's designers knew that the YM2149 chip used was sub-standard, and they were hedging on cheap MIDI add-ons later, which didn't materialise. However, most recording studios I've worked in still have, behind their new-fangled Mac and PC systems, their (t)rusty old ST, to whip out when the BSOD strikes.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
The Atari Video Computer System model 2600 could never run something as large as, say, DeCSS. It only had 128 bytes of RAM. No, really. (Of course it doesn't run NetBSD!)
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
It was really easy to do graphics this way, and was really ultra fast too.
I don't know how Commodore or Apple or anyone else did it (I can only assume they did the same thing) but it was a very simple matter of copying the character set in memory then changing all the characters to help make your image. Then just toss them up on the screen and viola! Instant image! Then by doing VBIs, you could make some really nice scrolling images. It was quite easy to do.
Of course there were problems - only 4 colors at a time (later to be 128, but still only 4 colors max on a line) and in high res mode you only had 2 colors but by changing the pixel's location you could use moire patterns to get 4.
I'm still debating what my first one will be. Probably Star Castle or Pong, while they're still available.
I don't see why a planar graphics mode should make scrolling easier.
I always assumed the poor scrolling on the PC was because it had a fixed video memory pointer position.
Tempest had only 24 KB of ROM and 2 KB of main CPURAM. Even Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo was bigger (40 KB ROM + 2 KB RAM).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wow. I haven't seen hardware that simple for a long, long time... It's kinda odd to think of the guys sweating blood trying to get just 8 more MOBs per scan line, or justify the cost of an additional 2K of RAM.
Imagine having to build half of your display engine in hardware, just 'cause the processor couldn't keep up (of course, we're back to that again, but it's different somehow).
Rose colored glasses, anyone? They're free...
Much to my astonishment it seems that Ms. Packman was actually created FIRST. According to the design doc I just read, the marketing department felt that people really liked the idea of a chomping circle moving around and eating other, smaller circles, but just couldn't relate to the fast, in-your-face action that Ms. Packman's bow would present to gamers. Because of this, Packman was born. Later, after people began to except Packman's greedy circle eating attitude and began wondering what Packman's family life was like, Ms. Packman was released to the public.
Hey, anyone know where I can find these guys working today? I think it would be so cool to have one of them working for my company. These were the visionaries who brought you the video game revolution!
A good engineer is hard to find.
Bring back the 80's baby!
"a powerful and unexpected ally..."
This kind of info can be very valuable to the Emu scene. First, it provides some info. But it may also be used as an help for those who want to try themself to Emu... And an old-atari machine may be a stepping-stone before working on greater projects.
It would have been beter however if Atari has released that info himself as it could have been a step toward Emulation/Old game preservation.
This document shalt be referenced to as the Atari Pink Book
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Sorry. I forgot a keyword.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...would be trying to get people to shell out upwards of $50 to buy *just the software* to play a game *on their own hardware*, in their own homes, again with no financial reward possible. Wow, these guys really started a racket =).
--
The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
ahh..Tempest..I think I'm gettin a woody..
But anyway I use to play it alot and I don't think I ever saw the two-game minimum either.But that reminds me of the greatest feature that Tempest had.Now I can't remember the "exact" sequence but if you got to a score in a range like 160 to 180 thousand then got your score to end in an odd number??or something like that..then died with that score you would then see the credits inflate to an incredible 80 free games and you could start at any level.The only thing that comes close was the realization that at our local arcade the tokens they used could be counterfieted by smashing on nickels with a hammer until they were flattened out a bit.My brother and I spent many an afternoon hammering nickels in our garage.That trick only worked on Atari games but they had the best shit anyway...oh the memories
notimeforsigs
Then port Linux to it.
Thad
Thad