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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.'"
Check out, for example, the homebrew projects at Atari Age.
I think that says more about Word 2002 than it does about the 2600.
Since a 2 word Word 2002 document takes 20kB I don't think that the Xbox has enough resources for the MS version of a 2600 game.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
We paid a buck a byte, and we liked it! None of them fancy schmancy kilobytes, and most definately not 20 of em! With 20 of em, we could've written programs to launch people to the moon, and get em back safely again! And still had room to fit the bible in too! Heck, we could've done that in 10! You kids these days and your fancy megabytes, and gigabytes... I bet you've never had to walk to and from school up hill in both directions, either.
'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...
The bloat for a Word document is no doubt completely justified by its ability to host a virus capable of bring the Internet to its knees.
The 4K Atari cartridge ROM is only capable of enabling you to play a silly game on your television.
I see two angles here.
1. the number of programmers has exponentially ballooned since the early 80s, leading to a larger number of less godlike programmers, AND programmers have become more reliant on fat libraries and limitless resources, so coding something this small would bend my brain for sure.
2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.
Focusing on #2, I'd like to see if there really is some creative game writing locked away in some programmer's brain out there, or if we've become a nation of UnReal, GTO, Final Fantasy, and Madden XFL clones.
I don't mean to put down these fine games, I enjoy many console games. What I'm trying to get at is the utter weirdness of what people come up with when severly limited by resources. Facsimile and simulation are out the window, so you really have to dig deep for a good game.
We'll see, I'm very interested in the outcome. Maybe the winners of the IOCCC should check this out.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
* 2D paddle motion
* horizontal or vertical brick orientation
* gravity in some modes
* "English" on the paddle/ball interactions
* single or dual player in competitive or cooperative simultaneous play
* sound effects (CPU generated)
* etc. etc.
Just before release, with 9 free bytes left, a bug was found. The initial fix would break the ROM barrier by 13 bytes. Yet another pass through the code doing the 4th or 5th optimization -- finally got it in and ended up with 11 free bytes.
Amazing what is possible in ASM but, boy, it was many 20 hour days!
So I understand those 'smallest executable' contests, but how much functionality does the executable really have? Or how much of the Word document is really information?
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
It's hard for kids these days to imagine a PC with anything less than 128MB of RAM and a graphics card equipped with 32MB of it's own (512MB and 64MB are typical figures on newer PCs and graphics cards) but, back in the day, we got by just fine with only a few KB to play around with.
Sure, Tank and Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 weren't deep, multi-layered games but they did provide hours of fun. Similarly, Paradroid, Wizball and even Elite, the cream of the crop on the Commodore 64 would seem dull and shallow to most of the new generation of gamers used to the depth of Grand Theft Auto 3, Starcraft or EverQuest.
But, to those of us who were gaming back then, these titles were as immersive and addictive as anything available today. Hell, I still fire up VICE (the best C64 emulator available) to play some of those titles today, and not just for nostalic reasons - back then, without the flashy graphics and sound games had to be immediately playable and fun or else they just didn't capture the imagination.
Who remembers breaking joysticks waggling them back and forth playing Track and Field? Who remembers the pride they felt when they finally reached Elite status? Or when they completed Impossible Mission? The shear unadulterated fun of playing Pong and Breakout for hours on end, not giving a damn that the last five minutes weren't at all visually distinguishable from the first five?
It's funny, but even though I'm an avid gamer I've bought fewer games in the last two years than I have in any one year before that, going back as far as 1983. Partially this is because today's games have more depth to them, but mainly it's because there are fewer and fewer titles that really enthuse me any more.
The lack of originality in the games industry today is part of it - I haven't seen a truly original game since Populous - but, ironically, I don't think that today's games capture the imagination half as much as the games of yesteryear.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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!
I was the co-developer on the Atari 2600 versions of Jungle Hunt and Pole Position.
... but oh, what memories.
Yes, there were two players (8 pixel sprites) and two missiles (1, 2, 4, or 8 pixels wide, if memory serves.) And the "easy" way to set up a display line was to write the bitmap and position of the players and missiles during vblank.
However, there was an underhanded way of getting more than two players on a line, if they were separated by enough space (~12 pixels, if memory serves.) While the line is drawn, you keep track of where the "currently drawn pixel" is. When that location is just past the end of a player, you reposition the player to ~12 pixels ahead of the current position, and rewrite the bitmap. We (General Computer Company, a captive developer for Atari) could get up to 6 players on a line, if they were separated by enough distance.
Yes, I am dating myself
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.