Unreal History of the Atari 2600

Such_a_geek writes "Atari fans, do you remember playing Gunther Gebel Williams' Cage Cleaner, Typing Tutor, and Peabo Bryson's Cow Tipper on your 2600? How about playing the interactive Foghat 8-track while playing with your Pong action figures? Yeah, me neither. But thanks to this totally fake but quite convincing screenshots in this alternate history of 2600 games, I almost find myself remembering these things."

Comments

Who needs those?

[immanis]

I have one of these.

Target, 15 bucks or so. Money WELL spent. How long has it been since YOU held a joystick like that?

perv.

Wrong CPU

[localroger]

The Atari 2600 used the 6507, a 24-pin packaging of the 6502. It was not a particularly low-power chip but it was considered very fast for its technology, executing many instructions in 2 clock cycles.

The 1802 was, in fact, used in quite a few space probes, including the Pioneer series, because of its reliability (it was miserably slow by contrast to the 6502 but also much simpler).

Re:From the wouldn-it-be-cool-if-Atari-went-OS dep

[cide1]

There isnt much source code per say. Most games were 4 KByte, the biggest were 32 or maybe 64. They were done completely in 6507 assembly, and can be disassembled into essentially what the programmers wrote. The hard part is making sense of it. With effort, and some experience, one can label the disassembly enough to understand whats going on. There are several games where this has been done, and are publicly available. Remember that the atari was very simple, it barely had enough power to draw the screen line by line. Their was a CPU (6507 which was a 6502 with only 13 address lines) and the TIA chip, which was what generated the scan lines for television. Their was iirc 128 bytes of memory, and if one was really sneaky, some ram could be put on the cartridge. The most complex part of atari code is bank switching, where differant segments of a rom are mapped onto the same set of addresses. Having the source would not give any benefit, as it is one step above machine code. The best way to preserve atari title is to have emulators that are as close to a 2600 as possible, thus allowing the titles to still be played.