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Atari 2600 Hacks

Posted by michael on from the things-man-was-not-meant-to-know dept.

olclops writes "Check out this guy's projects. He's an Atari 2600 programmer who's created, among other things, a cartridge that uses the 2600's sound generators to turn your atari into a full polyphonic synthesizer! The demos sound insane. Imagine being able to play console-perfect pitfall music from an atari hooked up to an amp. His other games look cool, too. Apparently, he'll be at the Classic Gaming Expo next weekend."

4 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. This is great! by httpamphibio.us · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's really interesting that in the last couple years lo-fi synthesis and reworking of old systems has made more progress than hardware synthesis (I'm aware of all the advances in software such as Scanned, Fourier, etc but none of them have made it to hardware yet. We've seen C64 SID chips make a comeback in the form of the SIDstation, and two great Gameboy synthesizers, Nanoloop, and Little Sound DJ all three of which are incredibly useful and have interesting and unique sounds. The kind of DIY synthesizers we'll find in 10 years is going to be fascinating.

    I hope the guy that is manufacturing the carts doesn't get overly slashdotted so I can get mine! :)

    --
    sig.
  2. Off Topic? by paganizer · · Score: 2, Informative

    My Brother, who is an Insane Genius©, Has been using Atari systems, mainly the 800's and the Mega ST, since around '87 I think; He's got them hacked all to hell, built a scanner head into a printer, Parallel processing with random mutated code, good stuff like that.

    These machines are incredible for their era, which is not surprising considering they pretty much lost all the best talent in the company to Amiga.

    Enjoy Freenet & Frost while you can.

    --
    Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
  3. Synthcart Beat Programming Contest by TheAlchemist · · Score: 2, Informative
    Paul did a great job with the Synthcart. We held a Synthcart Beat Contest back in February where users could submit beats that would be included on the final version of the cart. You can listen to all the submissions, at the buttom of the page. Many of them are quite good considering the instrument. :)

    Len Charest even created a web-based Synthcart Beat Data Generator for the contest to assist people in generating the beatdata.h file necessary to recompile the beats binary that you could then run on an Atari 2600 to listen to your creations.

  4. Synthcart by Paul+Slocum · · Score: 2, Informative

    Wow! Slashdotted. And my page survived too. Now I just have to bowl and 300 and get on the gong show. :o)

    Programming the Atari 2600 is pretty unusual. I had never programmed anything else like it. The 128 bytes of RAM and crazy cycle dependency is really satisfying to conquer. For in-depth info on Atari 2600 programming, check out The Dig.

    I've always had fun getting music out of devices that weren't really intended for it. One day I whipped together a really simple music program on the 2600 and it sounded so neat that I just kept adding features.

    The Synthcart does just use the Atari 2600's built in sound circuits. The only modification I did to my Atari was to get the audio before it goes to the RF modulator, but this was just for convenience. The 2600 has two independent oscillators. It's basically got 8 different waveforms, 4 bit volume control, and 5 bit pitch. The biggest limitation is the pitch since it's just divided down from the system clock, so you don't end up with many in-tune notes.

    There are a lot of other great Atari 2600 homebrew authors out there doing some neat stuff. You'll find most of their works on Hozer Video and you can find info on works in progress on Atariage.

    See you at CGE!

    -Paul