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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."
How has the Atari gaming platform affected Linux?
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
bi-otch
First 64-bit UT2003 and now Unreal for the Atari 2600?!
Don't know what I'd do with a 1st post if I had one, but wouldn't it be nice if this wasn't the 57th first post comment in here?
haha
The /. effect seems to have knocked the servers down to 2600-like performance...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Why would anyone wanna go through the trouble to fake those?
2 posts and it's Slashdotted already.
I find it amazing that with only three replies posted, this site is already slashdotted.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
...must be Atari 2600, too.
Probablly being hosted on a 2600 and just melted down. I was rather curious, I guess I will have to wait.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
...That was over 20 years ago. You could probably plant fake memories of my ZX-81 having color and
sound into my head.
plz dose anyone know of a mirror server to this site, i already checked the google cache not there. plz plz plz, i'm a big fan i MUST see this site!
Ever see this one? Custer gets revenge and tears off a "piece" of injun maiden in the process.
Hot stuff! ROM image is floating around the internet. Check it out.
Atari 2600
;-)...
Other so-so units came before it, though this was the gaming system that started it all. In the '70s, this was such an original concept, it became a whole fad. Parents and kids would actually play video games together, if you can believe that. Even more startling, was how much was given "free" with the original system; no less than four controllers! The system my family bought came with two joysticks with the classic single red fire button, and a pair of PC mouse-sized "wheels" for racing games. Let the gaming revolution begin!
Blow the dust off the old Atari system and show it to the kids, and be ready to accept understandable laughs. As the vanguard of game systems, graphics were pretty awful. The first shooting game of all time, Outlaws (shown here), had two cowboys who simply shot at each other from opposite sides of the screen! In the original graphic adventure (video game) of all time, simply called Adventure, your character was a SQUARE dot (!), whose sword was a mere arrow. However, as the first games, they were a cute start.
In time, third-party game companies popped up, pushing 2600's envelope. The best of them was Activision; what they were able to do with so little to work with is what made them a major gaming force to this very day. Pitfall (shown here) is irrefutably one of the top ten classic video games of all time. Other Activision games may not have been as classic, though were certainly unique. MegaMania was a hilarious target game; one of my favorites. An intriguing anecdote; I won 2nd place at a local rental store's Megamania contest, and used the money to buy a Colecovision and a few games. I don't know if buying a rival system was the premise of the contest, though
There was another top-notch, third-party worth mentioning, called Imagic, whose games were quite inspired (so inspired, that the now-defunct company has warranted a separate web page, to talk about it). Dragonfire had you first dodge fireballs to reach the dragon's castle, then plunder treasure while dodging the dragon itself! Cosmic Ark put you in charge of a space age Noah's Ark; you'd take a mini UFO and capture aliens via a tractor beam, all while protecting the mother ship from asteroids. Demon Attack was their best work, though, and much like Pitfall, is among the best classic video games of all time.
This isn't to say that these two companies were the only third-parties making video games for the Atari 2600. There were probably dozens of them, at the system's peak. Some such games were more than worth a look, and were often even astounding sneak peeks of gaming genres to come. Tunnel Runner (shown here) put you in a colorful 3D maze which was mapped-out at random when the game was turned on. The objective? Dodge monsters that resembled Pac-Man with rabies! Other third-party games included underdog classics like Montezuma's Revenge, movie tie-ins like Empire Strikes Back, and numerous first attempts at arcade game translations.
Third parties also provided amusing add-ons. One of them was The Supercharger by Arcadia, whose audio cord connected to any tape recorder, with games sold on audio tapes. This allowed each level of the game loaded one at a time; any game level could be as large as one whole reusable game cartridge, with other levels loaded later. Some unique games were released for the unit, including the RPG Dragonstomper, the underdog classic, Communist Mutants From Space, and the impressive maze game, Escape from the Mindmaster.
Atari's own games were not always shabby, either. Ask any Atari fan to list their favorite 2600 games and Yar's Revenge is sure to be near the top. While not graphics-intense, their "Haunted House" was still rather inspired; in it, you were only a pair of eyeballs, in the dark, dodging various bats and ghouls in a darkened maze of rooms.
There were intriguing sales gimmicks as well. An alliance with DC comics spawned a mini-comic book series, "Atari Force," with each issue included in separate Atari game releases (issues 2-4 were included in Berserk, Star Raiders, and Phoenix, respectively). Similar comic book introductions to games were included in Yar's Revenge and EarthQuest.
All was not a cyber bed of roses; among so many titles were a few really, truly bad games. E.T. was one of the first movie-turned-game licenses, and is rarely left out of any list of worst classic video games. Then there was Swordquest, a game/contest consisting of perplexing, obscure video game puzzles that were supposed to be solved for actual golden chalices and crowns. As pretty as the prizes were, they were out of place in a video game player's world. They also cost Atari a lot of money, with very little to show for it. The intended four-part Swordquest game contest wasn't even finished, showing how much of a bust the plan truly was. If they had only spent as much effort creating decent games...
Even the goliathan sales of this premiere multi-game console could not save it from the video game world's economic crash in 1984. On the other hand, nostalgia often kept it attached to a house's oldest tv set for a few more years. Meanwhile, Atari constantly attempted to re-sell the system until as late as 1989, with a "The Fun Is Back" sales pitch and a $50 price tag. However, the people who felt nostalgic about the system felt so because of the systems they already owned. The "brand new" system choice, as of 1989, was arguably the NES.
Atari released a few other systems during later 2600 days, including the 5200 ("twice the power of the 2600!") and 7800 ("three times...!"). However, the popularity of these systems was minor, possibly due to their release so close to the '84 crash. Through it all, though, the 2600 will always leave a fond memory in the minds of any 30-something game fan; the multi-game system whose infamous reputation started it all...
"...Even the goliathan sales of this premiere multi-game console could not save it from the video game world's economic crash in 1984. On the other hand, nostalgia often kept it attached to a house's oldest TV set for a few more years." -- courtesy of techtite.com/Features/Atari2600.html
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Stay tuned, bitches!
I was sitting here scratching my head thinking "They had Unreal for the Atari 2600?"
ping....
Pong!
Ahkay, that was weak...:)
You betcha! I'm ready to roll .. errr troll.
What on earth would you do with the low-level code for a 2600 game? Answer: nothing.
Calling all trolls! Let's make this Troll Tuesday something worth writing home to your whore mothers about!
IIRC, the Atari was a game console/simple computer of the early 80's. What's the relevance today, apart from nostalgia?
10 PRINT "BITE ME, ATARI!"
20 GOTO 10
Was that a nightmare or did that actually happen?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
for what it is worth.. here ;)
check your flash
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
i agree. and that's the exact same thing you do with the low level code of the linux OS. So hey, why not?
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.
best web host ever
I think strong bad speaks for all us classic Atari fans when he say's "Somebody get this freakin duck away from me!"
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
there isnt even a google or archive.org cache. Slashdot should create mirrors to all the sites they link atleast for the first hour
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
no...
Here is a Mirror.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I think those are called sugar cubes
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
How fucking stupid are you people???
MODERATE THE POST UP.
Yeah, cause those 20 year old games would be way too complex to create from scratch in a day or two.
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.
You don't need the source code for much. Just get them to release the ROMs into the public domain. If you can.
> Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?
Think they still have it?
I work for a Fortune 500 company, and we can't find the source code to some of our production systems.
Wait, I shouldn't admit that, should I?
After the review of my novel on Friday, it got over 20,000 hits per hour for the next four hours, and over 200,000 hits by the end of the day. Good thing I didn't try using my Bellsouth Personal Webspace to host it ;-)
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Funny enough, you can find the source for many games on the web, which have been reverse engineered by enthusiast. There is still a vivid scene of hobbyist developers hacking games for the vcs 2600.
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).
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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..."
i was able to get just a few...site seems to have completely died now. i have typing tutor, hands across america, ms. paul's fish stock hunter, and part of emett-otter's jug-band motorcross.
here's my partial mirror
Atari is still making money off of a number of those games. I agree it would be incredibly cool, but from their perspective, why on earth would they want to give the source away to the public?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Slashdot's the place!
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?
*Blink* *Blink*
Do you really believe that the source code to the original atari 2600/5200/7800 and arcade games were anything other than assembler? I'd be surprised if they even had development tools that matched our asm dev tools. Basically, just disassemble the code and you've for the source that they used.
Because they're nerds? I thought that was bloody obvious from the site's subtitle/motto.
Maybe it's just me then.
KFG
It's cool beans that people post links to web tidbits that the collective might find interesting, but why the farg don't people contact the sites owners to verify that either they can handle the ensuing trafic of a ./ reference, or if the site in question is mirrored elsewhere. I think this should be a requirement before people post links - especially to non-commercial sites.
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.
Most 2600 games were written in assembly. And I believe some 2600 developers used some Fortran in writing games (I'm not positive on this). If you download the ROMs and change it from machine code to assembly (easy) you have the source.
Yeah, get my broker on the phone, I'm dumping all my stock in "a Fortune 500 Company."
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.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?
They already do.
All the games from that era were written in assembly. Get a reader for the cartridge and a dissasembler and you got it.
The 2600 reset did not actually reset the CPU, it was just an input that the cart could read and act upon. I know this well since I've written a couple of 2600 demos, and I've used it.
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Homestar says the same thing is this deleted scene from Yellow-Dello. :)
I remember doing a report on Gunther Gabel Williams back in the late 80s for school and bringing in "Cage Cleaner" for everyone to play. Nobody believed it existed back then either.
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.
whoa! it's been so long since i've seen a screenshot of that classic atari game, "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable." i feel overcome with feelings of nostalgia and wonder at times past.
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]
Assembler. We were gods back then, but not idiots. :)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
In Apple's latest numbers released in January for its fiscal first quarter of 2003, revenue fell from a year earlier and all of the company's major computer lines saw diminished numbers. PowerMac sales were down 20%, while iBook sales fell 8%.
At the same time Apple's sales were falling, PC sales rose, though just slightly, according to figures from IDC released last month.
The last time Apple was in this state, it brought back co-founder Steve Jobs to fix its issues. He fostered the development of the iMac and secured a US$150-million investment from Microsoft. But there aren't any new iMacs in Apple's future and Microsoft, bolstered by its victory over the U.S. Department of Justice, is clearly not going to help the beleaguered computer maker this time.
So what have you got left? Apple is a company that controls around 3% of the computer market, has recently undergone a restructuring and is slowly fading into nothingness. Software makers don't even have Mac users on their radar and it's not like Apple can bring Mr. Jobs back to right the ship this time -- he's already there.
Stick a fork in 'em -- this Apple is cooked.
Now that I didn't know.
Very cool (redundant post from me yes, but I had to say it) that's just immensly cool.
Ahhhh google, I think I know what I'm about to search for next.......
That "MOD PARENT UP" trick is stupid and it's nice to see it fail miserably.
actually it's alternate history is the groundbreaking "Page cannot be displayed" game where you have such mind boggling gameplay choices as "Click the Refresh button, or try again later." or even running your secret weapon known as the "Network Setup Wizard". Ah, those were the days...
What might have not been clear from your post was that bank switching was game vendor specific and not part of the 2600 itself.
As you said, some cartridges had RAM but accessing it was strictly based on addresssing since the R/W line from the processor was not brought out to the cartridge interface. So you'd have an address space for reading from RAM and a different address space for writing to it.
I recall I once had a bug on an indexed read (the index was incorrect) that ended up reading from the wrong location. It turned out the location it read from was in the RAM write address space. So I read an incorrect value and at the same time wrote an incorrect value all in one instruction.
As a young Geek, but avid follower of Geek history... I feel cheated out of the times of pure DOS-run PC's, Atari game systems, and especially BBS's! I love hearing stories of how the average geek was raised from the earliest of machines. Makes me wonder if my kids will think the same way about me and my experiences with technology today. Sigh... I want to go back and see those glory days you all seem to remember of so fondly.
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
Humans code in ASM, machines read machine language. Obviously, you don't know what the hell you're talking about, because it's been a very long time since most of us actually written out the 1's and 0's instead of using the convenient mneumonics assemblers give us.
Yes, my teacher once made us compile a few things by hand, but normal people still write in ASM first, even then, rather than writing out the hex of the opcodes, since it's harder to see if you've made a mistake if you don't have some kind of meaninful source code to look at...
Well, I know I would buy Emmet Otter's Jug Band Motocross if there was such a product. That Christmas special ruled!
Sounds like you need the proper motivation! You're in ther perfect position to add your company's data to the global archive. Don't whine about how hard it is to do, just do it! What a great weekend project than to get all of that code out in the open! I'm envious.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
Dude, you are assuming that there is source. With only 4k on the smaller cartriges, you were coding assembly. So the source is 'open'. Get the ROM and look at the bytes.
Just look how many people can't see the fnords!
And how many people have they convinced that they haven't been abducted by aliens?!!! Billions!
(see sig.)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wow! Free the Faulklands- Two islands that are NOT a mirror image of each other! And look at how many multi-colored sprites are present in "Hands across America" and "Punch buggy", they don't even seem to be flickering!
Not bad for a system that had no video memory.
Why did I ever put up with games with crap graphics like Night Driver, Adventure and Outlaw when I could've had these?
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
I still remembering toggling the boot code in to an Altair 8800 with the front panel toggle switches. That and writing Z80 assembler in the back of my math exercise book before hand assembling it and 'poking' it in to memory.
Those were the days. These younguns haven't been born.
Send it out for "archival" to someone who will "accidentally" leak it to the Internet, then never get around to hassling anyone who shares it. Licensing problems solved, code made public as it should be.
Or just "accidentally" leak it to the Internet yourself. (Put it on a public web/ftp server until people start downloading it, then "realize" what happened and take it down. Oops!)
The only promotion rules I can think of are that a sense of shame is to ... whenever you think
be avoided at all costs and there is never any reason for a hustler to
be less cunning than more virtuous men. Oh yes
you've got something really great, add ten per cent more.
-- Bill Veeck
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