Atari 2600 Game Development

gjb6676 writes "An article over at ExtremeTech is covering recent game development projects on the Atari 2600. The amount of cartridge space they have to work with is a sobering thought: 'A two-word file in Word 2002, for example, requires 20 Kbytes. "That's 20 Kbytes, five times the amount of (ROM) space developers had to work with in the 2600.'"

Comments

That's ongoing development, not news

[lightspawn]

Check out, for example, the homebrew projects at Atari Age.

And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer

[joeflies]

so the code had to be writing directly to the screen output as fast as the action required. I don't know if any systems at that time did have a buffer, but I thought I read something about why it was worthwhile in the book "High Score".

It allowed the system to extend its usable life of the platform after developers got familiar with how to work with it.

Re:And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer

[Abcd1234]

Actually, the 2600 had enough "VRAM" to store background data for a single line on the screen. So, you had to write out the data for each successive line during the horizontal blanking period of the video display. This also means that, even if the screen is static, you still have to do all this work, just to keep it there.

Now, this all had to be done just to keep the background of the display intact. The programmer also got 2 player objects and 2 missile objects to work with... basically primitive sprites. 'course, with such limited resources, writing any kind of advanced game is a challenge. As they mention in the article, the Defender! programmer(s) tried to get around the sprite limitation by changing the sprite objects during even/odd frames to simulate more of them.

Memory switching

[jhampson]

Ahh, but I seem to remember that developers used to do something called 'bank switching' in the carts.
They had more than 1 memory chip in there and they could switch to another chip.
Was it Activision that started using that trick? I remember that they had the shweetest games. A friend of mine got the first "extra memory" game, although I don't recall what it was. The one with chopper flying down the river, maybe?
And it was cool the first time I heard my Atari talking to me...(not imagined, really!)

Rom Size

[skintigh2]

'A two-word file in Word 2002, for example, requires 20 Kbytes. "That's 20 Kbytes, five times the amount of (ROM) space developers had to work with in the 2600.'

Initially, games were 4KB. But there were also 8KB games (I believe on a single ROM, but I may be wrong) and with an extra chip in the cartridge to handle addressing games of 16KB could be squeezed in.

For instance, Solaris, which was the best gane ever. http://skintigh.tripod.com/atari/solaris.html

Less related: there were cartridges that I assume had 64 4KB roms. The first was a menu to select which of the games to play. I also assume this was done without permission of the copyright holders. Then there were tape drives...

Re:Rom Size

[Anonymous Coward]

There were a few 32KB carts - Road Runner is one I believe, and Fatal Run. They were released very late. Ironically the larger carts aren't necessarily particularly good games - most of my favourites are 4K or even 2K. I'm not sure whether Klax (which I think was the last cart Atari released, in 1991) was 16KB or 32KB. Note that that's just the bank size, the game doesn't necessarily use all of it. It's not really a question of an extra chip, just a larger ROM and some minor TTL logic for a bankswitch scheme.
If you like Solaris, try out Radar Lock by the same author (and with similar gameplay, but more accessible).
The ROM constraint wasn't half as big an issue as the RAM constraint IMO - that's why the Supercharger games could be so good.

You can if you're careful!

[govtcheez]

You just need to do it right, as shown here.

RTFA.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article mentions bank switching very clearly:

Atari ROMs typically contained just 4 Kbytes of ROM memory for program storage, although programmers typically came up with a technique called bank switching, where the high-order address bits were used to select the bank of memory in which operations took place.

Incidentally, it's 128 bytes of RAM, not 256 bytes, and 4 KB of ROM. Though you could use bankswitching to get around the latter, and some carts had extra RAM chips to get around the former.

Second article on ExtremeTech--wireless Atari!

[MarkRH]

By the way, we also published a second story last Friday on the connection between Microsoft's SPOT smart objects and a wireless games distribution platform from Atari that was field-tested, but never produced. (You thought the Xbox was huge...) With pics!

2600 Homebrew Games Already Released

[TheAlchemist]

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of the homebrew games that have been released for the 2600 in recent years:

2600 Homebrew Search Results

And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):

Titles In Development

A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!

Atari 2600 Hacks

And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart) to play these binaries on a real television:

Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions

Enjoy!

Re:4K

[racerx509]

"Can't fit much pr0n in 4K."

maybe some ascii pr0n

Re:what id like to see

[SethJohnson]

The texas chainsaw game was NOT banned in the US for 'violence'. The game was just a pac man-type maze game where the power pills were replaced with gas cans to fuel your chainsaw so you could kill the people.

Within the 2600 graphical display environment, this was hardly violent compared to the original movie.

The availability of the game was very limited because it wasn't officially licensed by Atari. It and Custer's Revenge were basically bootleg software for the 2600. I think you could freely order it from places like 47th street photo.

I only chimed in here because I get a little annoyed when people say XYZ piece of entertainment was "banned in the US" because of its violent content. The US government has never banned anything because of violent content.

Even more development system for Atari 2600

[Westmalle]

Believe or not, but there is even a competitive market for developing new Atari 2600 games. On top of the one mentioned in the Extreme Tech article, there is also the one shown at http://www.vgwiz.com that also provided bank switching solutions. Talk about resiliency for the Atari 2600.

Retro

[Stween]

For anyone interested in games of yesteryear in the UK (like myself), I'd recommend the Edge magazine spin-off Retro.

The current issue has a truckload of "The making of..." articles from Edge, covering a lot of games up to the early 90's, including: Space War, Asteroids, Battlezone, Civilization, Carrier Command, Populous and many others :)

I bought it today and it's excellent, IMHO :)

I wrote a newbie's guide for Atari 2600 dev...

[kisrael]

2600 101. Albert from AtariAge has eventual plans to give it a permanent home there.

Good place to get a feel for the basics.

Re:Blah blah blah, 20KB my ass

[zapfie]

Nope.

I just typed Hello world. and saved the file using Word XP. Windows reports the filesize as 23.5 KB (24,064 bytes), with size on disk being 24.0 KB (24,576 bytes).

Now I typed Hello world. in Notepad and saved that. Windows reports the filesize as 12 bytes (12 bytes), with size on the disk being 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes).

I'd be happy to email you the files if you still aren't convinced.