Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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).
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!
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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?
There are still plenty of real-time embedded applications which have the same kind of time and space constraints. I remember working to a 48K RAM limit and 7%CPU of an Hitachi H8 processor only 18 months ago, and that was to impliment a GUI!
I'm a better programmer for the experience, certainly.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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.
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).
Then port Linux to it.
Thad
Thad
The video subsystems were completely different for computers than for arcade machines at this time[1].
Computers:
- framebuffer
- hardware support for scrolling of the pixels
- blitters
- hblank interrupt for effects
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
There were numerous variants, of course, and some games used a framebuffer (williams games, mostly), but this is the usual architecture. It trades off genericity (you can't really draw a line in a no-framebuffer, tile-based system) for efficiency (zero-cpu-cost layers, independant busses for the graphic roms which are directly connected to the tile/sprites ICs, etc....). That's mostly what made them so impressive compared to the quite feeble CPUs they were using.
OG, mamedev
[1] Now everything has been unified under a common 3d-oriented architecture.
The arcade games details seem to be the same sort of design as a C64. A very efficient design for scrolling shooters and platformers, so it's surprising that the Amiga and ST disn't have a grphics mode similar to this.