Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.'"

5 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. oo.o rules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    a two page document takes up only 9kb, compared to my empty word 2000 file which is 17k. bz2 + xml!

    1. Re:oo.o rules by Latent+IT · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Yeah, you know what would be even *more* advanced? Word being able to tell that the fucking file was *EMPTY* and not have it take up 17k.

    2. Re:oo.o rules by Politburo · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      WHY?

      Why? Does it matter? Are you really going to miss the 15K that it might be wasting? There's no reason the Microsoft coders should be worried about optimizing EMPTY FILES. Word isn't made to make empty files! It's made to work on files with text and data in them.

  2. Re:thats microsoft.... by stratjakt · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    What if the words are

    supercalifragilisticexpealidocious and antidisestablishmentarianism

    and the words are stored in a table?
    and fonts change after each letter?

    Who cares. This is the 21st century. I'd make more of the tons of bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries in Open Office than I would of 17k of header data in a Word doc.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  3. Your website by John+Harrison · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Skintigh2,

    Please change the background on your website. I am assuming that it belongs to you due to the name. It is very difficult to read the text with that background pattern.

    Thanks,
    John

    --
    Lasers Controlled Games!