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Atari 2600 Hacks
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."
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
FP!
Weeelllll -
my cunt is a'drippin',
your lips are a'sippin',
my ass is a'crappin',
your mouth is a'lappin'
all that comes out of an oracifce
you eat for a main course-ifice
poop and pee, all a'yummy
Sitting proud inside your tummy!
Thank you, thank you very much. I'll be here all week. Tip your waitstaff.
Here is my ass
Which you may kiss.
Take time and aim well
You don't want to miss.
For if you aim low
And your lips they do fall
Then you will find
You'll be sucking my balls.
If you aim high
Despite your true heart
Sucks to be you
Now you're eating my fart.
Thank you, thank you very much. I'll be here all week. Please, remember your waitstaff.
This is pretty geeky. What could be geekier? Well, for one, hooking it up to this
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
"This site is temporarily down for Network Maintenance."
IMHO, one of the biggest challenges that must be overcome before Linux
dominates the typical user's desktop comes not from Microsoft, but from many
Linux advocates themselves. The average Linux user is a different kind of
person than the average Windows or Macintosh user...they are more
technology-oriented, more likely to be professional coders, hackers, or at
least dabblers in programming. Their abilities and their interests put them
in a demographic that is different from 90% of the other people on Earth.
It's this difference that makes people in this group great at abstract
mental activities like mathematics, algorithms, and coding.
Linux is an OS that was written by hackers for hackers. It's a great
movement that I have great hopes for. But an OS written for hackers is not
going to be an overwhelming success with most of that other 90%. Supporting
normal people is not a major problem, but it does require that Linux
advocates recognize and acknowledge that they must understand and respect
their users. It's very common to hear such disparaging comments as
"joe-stupidass-user" or "idiot users", and as long as that kind of attitude
persists, I don't hold much hope for Linux being a success on the client at
the scale that Windows is.
I should add that I've been designing software for ten years or more, and
I've seen plenty of field studies and usability tests where users had
trouble with something that seemed obvious to me...I can't count the number
of times I've thought "oh, that dumb user!", but the fact is that if your
users can't use the design you think is so great, you'd better bite your
tongue and do a new design. You can *think* users are dumb all you want,
but you need to smile and respect their needs if you want your software to
be user friendly. And it's actually rather rewarding to see a user smiling
and saying "Oh this is fun!" while successfully using your software.
Especially if the first couple times got confused stares and frowns or
frustrated responses and failure.
As far as the meaning of "user friendly", I'll suggest that it means "being
useful for the intended users, and being easy to for them to learn and to
use". It is too general a concept to simply mean one feature or another,
and I disagree that it means "idiot-proof", for reasons rambled on about
earlier. (On the other hand, a key principle in user interface design is
"forgiveness", as in "let the user go back a step, let them undo whatever
stupid thing they just did." I guess this could be considered
idiot-proofing, but I'd like to meet the hacker that has never used Undo, or
wished it was there when it wasn't...hackers are human too, and we *all*
make mistakes).
I once had a friend on slashdot, named Nakoruru. This is an account of when I first met him or her:
... I get it. "Little Nakoruruette." Ha ha. Cripes, look at that thing. Looks like a fleck of curry. How do you wack off with that, wrap that little dot on your head around it? Okay, I gotta go Nakoruru. See you tomorrow morning when I get my paper and coffee, ya little sand nig you."
"Nakoruru, what is that, Indian? Go make me a slurpee, Nakoruru, and give me one of those little "wassup" ligthers, too. I love that shit. Is it true you people eat your own children? I think I'll pass on that hot dog, Nakoruru. I don't want to be muching on little Nakoruruette. Hey, what are you doing? Why are you unzipping your pants? Put your pants back on! Oh
Nakoruru doesn't post on slashdot anymore.
Introducing the New Old School Band, with Lenny on the Atari with Synthcart, Joey on a Commodore 64 hacked to do guitar, Danny with the Drumsticks on the Apple IIes...
On another note, if we put together a beowulf cluster of these, would we have a symphony? "Slashdot Symphony in AC Major..."
This
what a waste of time.
For some things, "Because you can." just really isn't a good answer.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
60 versions of pong. Long live atari.
Now there's something that looks good on the 'ol resume.
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
+MONDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: I will not suck any more dick ever again.
+MONDAY EVENING+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
+TUESDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: I will not suck any more dick ever again.
+TUESDAY EVENING+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
+WEDNESDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: I will not suck any more dick ever again.
+WEDNESDAY EVENING+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
+THURSDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: I will not suck any more dick ever again.
+THURSDAY EVENING+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
+FRIDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: I will not suck any more dick ever again.
+FRIDAY EVENING+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
+SATURDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: I will not suck any more dick ever again.
+SATURDAY EVENING+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
+SUNDAY MORNING+
Cmdr Taco: Today is the Lord's day.
+SUNDAY AFTERNOON+
Cmdr Taco: *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
...do I hear some reverb in there? Dont' expect your polyphonic synth to sound like anything but an original atari 2600.
Still, old sound chips do have many unique qualities. I'd love one of these. Now if only he'd sodder MIDI into one...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
good god this has to be a record.
The synth carts are very cool things. If you can find one for sale, I'd reccomend picking it up. My brother bought one and ran it on a black/silver 2600 (?) iirc, but sadly he had to sale all his game systems so it's gone.
A very interesting hack though. To think it runs in just 128 bytes in the RAM!
,
faeryman
heh. "The Simplest Computer" - sounds like an elementary children's book. "The Little Monitor That Could."
.Net strategy - namely, pay per use. It costs $10 per computation, or 15 minutes, whichever comes first.
Anyway, here is the simplest computer around, and the interface is perfect because we are all born with it - the interface is human DRIVE. The computer works like this: I stick my pee sprout in your mom's poop chute for 1, and I stick it in her pee hole for 0.
poop chute = 1
pee hole = 0
Sometimes I stick it in her mouth, but that is for parity.
Sometimes complex operations can take a long time to complete, but that's okay! We're looking for simplicity here, not speed. And waiting for this interface isn't that bad.
This simple computer is very susceptable to visuses. In fact, it comes pre-loaded with several.
For review:
poop chute = 1
pee hole = 0
This computer also fits into Microsoft's
poop chute = 1
pee hole = 0
On MONDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "I will repent and keep my pee sprout free from any fecal flecks."
Monday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes.
***
On TUESDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "I will repent and keep my pee sprout free from any fecal flecks."
Tuesday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes.
***
On WEDNESDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "I will repent and keep my pee sprout free from any fecal flecks."
Wednesday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes.
***
On THURSDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "I will repent and keep my pee sprout free from any fecal flecks."
Thursday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes.
***
On FRIDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "I will repent and keep my pee sprout free from any fecal flecks."
Friday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes. He continued well into the evening.
***
On SATURDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "I will repent and keep my pee sprout free from any fecal flecks."
Saturday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes.
***
On SUNDAY morning, Cmdr Taco said "Today is the Lord's day; I will repent and keep my pee sprout from any fecal flecks."
Sunday afternoon, he was putting his pee sprout into young boy's poop chutes.
what about the fiber samples?
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
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.
This is some amazing stuff, if anybody has anymore links to things like this, post em.
The gory details of my thought processes:
Ooh, new article. Yay.
Reads title: Atari 2600 hacks
Damnit Taco, not another webserver running on strange hardware!
Oh wait, no, this may actually be cool.
Louis Armstrong, trumpet player and Jazz pioneer, died yesterday morning in his Los Angeles home. He was 71. Armstrong's last performance was at James Madison University's Convocation Center on March 24, 2001, where he played to a standing room only 5,000. Armstrong was helped off the stage by his wife of 20 years, and he later told a reporter for the campus newspaper "I don't know how much longer I can do this. This may be one of my last shows." His final song was his biggest hit, Hello Dolly! He is survived by his wife, 3 children and 6 grandchildren.
Were the demo mp3s encoded ON the atari ?
If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.
If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
The SID chip from the Commodore 64 was recently put into a separate synth named the Sidstation. It's not a hack but it's a hack gone professional - aka. an innovative product. Elektron, the people who make it, are the most impressive audio hardware manufacturer's around right now, IMO. I can only wait to see what they do next.
I haven't seen mention of the relatively new song found on Andrew W.K.'s I Get Wet warning: the album has caused some controversy over the artist's bloodied face on the cover. The track is called "Ready To Die" and it features an intro done on what sounds like a PSX...it sounds similar to the chocobo music in the Final Fantasy series and the whole album is a very interesting mix of synth, guitar, and piano.
Just because someone now found a way to hack into an Atari 2600 doesn't mean it belongs on the front page of Slashdot. Shit, they don't even use those for commercial applications. I doubt they can even run a webserver! So why would this guy spend so many years and man-hours trying to hack the 2600 when there are much more productive things to do, like audit Linux code for security holes that hackers could exploit? At least he'd be doing something constructive instead of purely malicious hacking.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
and from the majority of comments on here i can see that most of you don't. you don't see the point. he ddi this for his own enjoyment. to make a machine to something it wasn't designed to. to push the bounderies.
most of the comments on this story have been trolls, or sad people on about why does this belong here. it belongs because it's cool.
slashdot may be news for nerds and stuff that matters, but stuff appears on slashdot also because of it's encentric appeal or sheer coolness. don't forget it.
btw, i had a 2600 with star raiders back in the early eighties. it came with one of those 'keyboard' pads, which i tried to plug into my spectrum and monitor the outputs so that i could use it with a game i was writing. i got nothing out of it that the machine could read, so i'm actaully glad that someone used them for something else apart from the one or two games that needed them.
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, I think the demos might sound insane because they've had a big amount of reverb put on them.
They don't sound much more impressive than C64 demos (and probably less so, in fact), they just have nice postproduction!
aww JEAH! old sk00l ghetto synth in da hizzaus!
as mentioned above, the sidstation uses SID chips from the commodore 64 to generate all sorts of crazeh beeps and gronks-- the site also has a ton of demos as well.
for all you crazeh c64 SID toon fans, be sure to check out the High Voltage SID Collection! tons of great SID toons from your childhood, including, but not limited to:
- Contra! bew bew bee boop ba boodaboop!
- Commando! chikkachikkabowgronk!
- Ultima IV! ba blinng! ba da bling! ba da bling. ba da blonng...
- and who could forget the cutting edge voice synth of Neuromancer? SSSHOMM SHINNGS MMEEEVVERR CHANNNSGE!
you'll need the SIDPlay plugin to listen to these things with winamp. don't forget you can move the slider doohickey to choose from multiple tracks within each SID toon! WOOHOO!
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.
Finally after 26 years of profound research someone has found useful utilization for the Atari 2600!!!
It really makes me think of how underused most technology is before we discard it and "upgrade" to the next better thing.
I think we need more people like this who innovate new ideas into old technology and use it in ways it was never thought of to be used in, even if it is just for a hobby or personal employment. (Did I just say we need more hackers?)
Also, check the songs he made with TWO ataris, wild.sig: There are two mistaakes in this sig.
it sounds like crap!
you can take sid out of c64 without breaking it, so the c64 will still be usable, just without sounds.
-- Matti Nikki
So that's where Richard D James gets his sounds from... and I thought it was a Roland... pah!
But I'll pass on the multicart. Looks like it wouldn't pass the FCC on radiated emissions.
This guy should have gotten some PCBs made so he could avoid the mess.
and now 35$, but only one per person ? i really should start to write games for the bbc micro again, maybe some crazy collectors will buy them for 35$ a pice too.
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.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned the port of Doom for the Atari 2600 yet!
mogorific carpentry experiments
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
However i would have a few questions. First, what is the root device acting as the synthesizer. I believe that Atari was only capable of creating monophonic sounds from its own synthisizer. It is not possible to force and old synthesizer to create something it was not designed to do. Howver what i think that this guy did was create a synthesizer in a box, and used some good electronic engineering techniques to use the same electrical lines as the sound and control input/output, circumventing any microprocessing from the 2600 root board. Also i do question what type of sound quality the machine produces. If the lines inside the 2600 (soldered on a circuit board) are in good condition then he could transfer CD quality music through them. However impedance differences might create problems using noncommercial sound equipment. I applaud the man for creating a device that does indeed hack the Atari 2600, but maybe its not as cool as we thought
"If a man watches 3 football games in a row he should be declared leagaly dead" - A
...grab a copy of the album, "Nintendo Teenage Riot" by Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot fame. He made the entire album on a Game Boy.
I sig for world peace
>:(
Yeah
I sig for world peace
This guy should team up with Kitaro.
I was right in the middle of playing Pitfall, when suddenly I noticed the game start to slow down.
I scratched my head in wonderment until I notice Pitfall Harry stop in his tracks, give me the finger, and a crudely-drawn voice bubble appeared above his head with the words "1 0wnz0r j00R VCS, fagit!!!"
Right away I knew I had been hacked, so I immediately lifted the phone cradle off my modem. Fortunately, it was only a 300 baud connection, so the culprit only made of with a K or so of the Pitfall! ROM that was inserted into the cartridge slot at the time. And simply cycling the power on the console wiped any malicious code he might have entered directly into the 2k of onboard RAM...
Phew! Close calls...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Now what would really be impressive if he used those old thumb-buster joysticks to control the music!
See how long you can DJ for before your hands fall off!
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
...you gotta check out QuadraSID. It's a VSTi for Cubase. Emulates 4 SID chips simultaneously for a total of 12 voices per instance of the VSTi. This is definitely one of my favorite virtual instruments. The sounds bring back fond memories of C64 Tetris - best soundtrack for a game EVER, even today. It was 40 minutes long for chrissake! :)
alex
--- Wherever you go, everyone is always connected...
"...and since noone is making the C=64 now, this is sad..."
You spoke TOO soon! Check out the CommodoreOne, a re-creation of the famous C64, through the use of modern components.
(PS- Jeri, the lady making it, is a fine-looking female!)
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"