Atari 2600 Programming Tutorial

An anonymous reader writes "Anyone want to learn how to program the Atari 2600? 128 bytes of RAM, and you feed the TV each scanline yourself! There's a tutorial running on AtariAge. So far, its being updated every day. Good stuff." Sure, it might not be the most practical of platforms, but what other 20 year old platform is so dear to our hearts?

Comments

Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested

[lightspawn]

The '2600 has only one line of video memory (to oversimplify the architecture). This means that you have to count clock cycles exactly and do most of your work between the last pixel of one line and the first pixel of the next, or between one frame and the next.

Bottom line: This machine is harder to program than probably anything else you've ever worked on, and not necessarily in a good way.

Even if you're interested in classic gaming, wouldn't you rather spend your own clock cycles, say, porting some classic games to your favourite current architectures? If you can really use the challenge, maybe you should study the '2600, and reverse engineer them to make sure the conversion is accurate...

Re:How to transfer to ROM cartrige??

[lightspawn]

t would be nice to find programmable ROM cartriges for the 2600.

Sorry, but the Cuttle Cart has been discontinued. I'm sure there are alternatives, though.

Another interesting idea is for some small company to develop gameboy-size atari 2600 pads with most of the games built in. Could even be incorporated into cell phones, now that I would buy.

Go ahead.

But if we could only combine current media (an 8/16 MB compactflash card could hold every version of every game ever written for this machine) you'd have something. Especially now that Sean Kelly doesn't seem to be able to offer his carts for sale any more. Sorry.

I should really have split this to 3 different posts to max the karma benefits. Oh, well. Maybe I'll get the rest in offline karma.

Re:Great!

[david duncan scott]

Well, the ghosts, sure. Problem is that the whole screen flickers.

The thing is that on any given scan line one can draw two independent objects, two players. Either can be doubled or even tripled, but then they need to be identical in color and shape (barring some very clever, very tight programming), which doesn't work for the ghosts. So, they drew two ghosts on one screen, then the remaining ghost and Pacman on the other, alternating this way and hoping that persistance of vision would make it all OK, but they only did this when the various objects fell on the same scan line. As a result, the screen will be just fine until three objects lie in the same row, and then it begins to flicker until they separate.