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.

Comments

The controls...

[Emil Brink]

Ah, gotta love the controls specifications:

1. 1 Player start switch/LED
2. 2 Player start switch/LED
3. fire switch (2 if cocktail)
4. superzapper switch (2 if cocktail)
5. whirly gig (2 if cocktail)

The coolest are of course the last two... Words like "superzapper" and "whirly gig" rule! Just to make it better, the last one has "rotation control" scribbled next to it in what looks like ball pen ink. Ah, that really clears it up for me. Aplogies to all old hard-core players who alwayss called it a "whirly gig" and never thought twice about it, of course...;^)

Anything about the Lynx?

[pallex]

"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?"

This will never catch on

[91degrees]

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.

This is how the Atari computers were also

[Randy Rathbun]

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.

The History of Packman

[kb9vcr]

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.

Re:Feature priorities askew?

[Olivier Galibert]

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.