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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."
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.
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
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
Now there's something that looks good on the 'ol resume.
...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?
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Oh yeah..I don't mean that only this particular 'game' runs in 128 bytes (I assume all the 2600 games did), but rather that it's so small by today's standards but can support something useable. I think it's really cool when people make projects on old systems like this since it's such a difference from computers with a gig of RAM.
,
faeryman
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
Okay - Cuttle Cart. Play any 2600 ROM on real hardware by encoding it as audio and playing it into the cart. A complete collection of Atari 2600 ROMs is six or seven 99-track CDs. That includes a large number of unreleased prototypes, modern releases and hacks.