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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."
Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
I picked up the book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, last year and found it to be incredibly interesting. It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward. It goes through the rise and fall of the video game industry (which crashed hard in the early 80s), the coin shortage caused by Space Invaders, the beginnings of Atari (and their fall), Nintendo and Sega. The author interviewed countless people from that era - it has tons of first-hand information/quotes from the folks that started the industry (Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, etc) scattered all throughout the book where appropriate. And you'll find out that Atari wasn't all too squeaky clean when they started - their warehouse always reeking of recently smoked pot. ;) Oh, and that Steve Jobs actually got his start there.
This may sound like an ad, but the author deserves it. If you're interested in learning about how things began and what it was like at Atari/etc in the early days, then you'll love this book.
The Atari 2600 used the RCA 1802 CPU. This was an early low power consumption chip. A version of the using Silicon-On-Sapphire technology (SoS is used where solid-state devices need to be hardened from the gamma radiation of space) was used in various spacecraft on the 1970s. I heard, though I am unable to provide a URL as a reference, that a number of these Sos 1802 CPUs were used in the Atari 2600. Now this could be interesting, maybe you could use your 2600 in space: Space Invaders indeed!
Anyone who has further details on this, please reply.
As far as I remembber the zx81 HAD sound, only had to put it near an AM radio and generate for next loops, the CPU parasite radiation plays a siren like tune int the radio if you tune it just the right way, have to test with random numbers and complex calculations, it seems to generate more complex sounds, have fun
I almost find myself remembering these things...
This article mentions two separate research projects that examine the power of emotional belief.
One example:
"Other research, of people who believed they were abducted by space aliens, shows that even false memories can be as intensely felt as those of real-life victims of war and other violence.
The research demonstrates that police interrogators and people investigating sexual-abuse allegations must be careful not to plant suggestions into their subjects, said University of California-Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. She presented preliminary results of recent false memory experiments Sunday at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Loftus said some people may be so suggestible that they could be convinced they were responsible for crimes they didn't commit. In interviews, "much of what goes on -- unwittingly -- is contamination," she said..."
Linux is 100% C. 2600 code is probably not in even assembler. I'm pretty sure those games were coded directly in machine language. Which is what you have if you download a ROM.
I have a book called "Adventures with the ATARI" (1984 Reston Publishing Company Inc.) written by Jack B. Hardy that shows you line by line how to write "Adventure" style games in ATARI PILOT, ATARI Microsoft BASIC and ATARI BASIC "to show you the flexibility and capabilities of each language that best fits your needs"
:-D, ahh memories!
An amusing read at 356 pages
crazy dynamite monkey
This poster is right, the parent is wrong, the Atari 2600 used a variant of the 6502. I know this because (1) I've learned a little bit of 2600 assembly and read a lot about it and (2) because I've opened up my 2600 a bunch of times to fiddle and see how it works.
Target, 15 bucks or so. Money WELL spent. How long has it been since YOU held a joystick like that?
About 5 minutes... you do realize you can Ebay the real thing for not much more (if any) than that, right? (Sure, it costs a bit more to buy one with a collection of games, but not much.) I can understand the appeal of having something that takes up less space, but really, when half the games in that 10-in-1 were paddle games anyway, I'd rather have the real thing. You can never replicate the feeling of slapping a cartridge in a real 2600, switching your RF switchbox over to "game" and sitting there playing in front of that big, ugly piece of woodgrain.
I work for a company that made sixty some odd atari games. We no longer make games (quit that when atari went under in the 80s) but the source code is still in a cabinent in the offices. Besides the copyright problems (code was written for hire, subsequently licensed, etc.) the stuff is all archived on reel to reel tapes. Even if we had the correct machine to read them (I'm not sure), I don't know what kind of shape the media is in and it would be a pretty big undertaking to get it all onto a hard drive and the internet.
Seriously, those old, super-simple games like Pitfall or Chopper Command relied on raw eye-hand coordination, not some lame formula you've memorized. Partially because most of those games encompassed only one lousy screen at a time (what was that one where you use the paddles to catch bombs?), there was a high degree of randomness that didn't allow for any kind of strategy, just gut reaction.
Of course Nintendo with it's fancy amount of memory changed all that.
[pink beam of light]