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Atari 2600 Game Development

Posted by timothy on from the support-your-local-thriftstore dept.

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.'"

7 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. That's ongoing development, not news by lightspawn · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer by joeflies · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    1. Re:And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer by Abcd1234 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  3. Rom Size by skintigh2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    '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...

  4. Second article on ExtremeTech--wireless Atari! by MarkRH · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!

  5. 2600 Homebrew Games Already Released by TheAlchemist · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  6. Retro by Stween · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 :)