Inside the Homebrew Atari 2600 Scene

angryflute writes "'Have you played Atari today?' was an ad jingle for the Atari 2600 VCS game console during its reign in the early years of the video game industry, from the late 1970s to early 1980s. That question that could apply even now, according to an O'Reilly Network article, thanks to the passion of programmers who've continued to make new Atari 2600 games for the past few years."

Comments

This is passion at it's finest

[beacher]

"The system has no video buffer, the total code size cannot exceed 4K and can only use 128 bytes of RAM"... "the Atari 2600 requires 100 percent Assembler coding".. Wow. You gotta really love it or love challenges in order to constrain yourself so. In the age of bigger and faster machines, I think a lot of the bloat is due to the fact that people never understood or learned the inner workings of the processor and the code isn't as tight as it could be. I'm not recommending that assembly be required, but I think anyone that develops should be cognisant of what happens behind the curtain.

Still- Developing and making fun games from this tiny system is incredible. I have every platform I've ever owned since the 2600/Intellivision era and the 2600 has definately sat unused in the past few years... Maybe it's time to dust it off...

Re:Damn it

[csirac]

I've been coding some stuff on the Atari and it's an extremly cool machine. You can actually build one yourself, if you have a little knowledge in electronics. From the article it says that the 2600 has a custom chip - the TIA. How do you substitute that? With an MCU/FPGA?

True classics live forever

[Alwin Henseler]

Once it was thought that such old game classics, and the machines they were played on, would go out of use once the original hardware would die, waiting to be replaced by new platforms & remakes. Not so.

Development of both hardware & software simply continues as time goes on, no matter what. If an original manufacturer pulls the hardware of the market, and games go off the shelves, development slows down, but continues anyway. If the manufacturer/copyright holders try to prevent remakes, emulators, don't release ROMs, hardware info, schematics etc, that slows things down. But they can also promote this, and enjoy having an active community further developing these old designs, like in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum case. Given enough time, all there is to know about the inner workings of these old machines becomes known, and new things are done with it.

I think the appeal to enthousiasts results from the simplicity of these old systems. If you put in enough time, you can write code that uses every single part to the max, doing incredible things with minimal hardware.
One of my favourites is the Sinclair ZX81. 1 KB of RAM, no sound, no colour, and: no videoprocessor. About 3/4 of CPU time is spent on directly writing black&white dot patterns to the TV screen, using some simple logic to turn it into a video signal. With only the remaining 1/4 CPU time left for doing useful things.

With the arrival of quickly reprogammable hardware like FPGA's, the border between hardware and software blurs further, nice example is FPGA Arcade, where old games are rewritten in hardware circuitry. So instead of having a CPU eat through instructions coded in ROM, your joystick input directly affects the logic programmed into a FPGA. Very cool!

Why were there no analog joysticks?

[RenaissanceGeek]

Something that's always bothered me about the old "classic" video-gaming platforms (with exceptions like the Magnavox Odyssey 2) was that the joystick controllers were all digital, with either 8 directions or, sometimes, 16 (IntelliVision), but no control over the INTENSITY of the movement: any game that had you controlling a moving object in two dimensions (e.g. the aim-point in "Missile Command") had only one speed at which that point moved, making it difficult ot be either precise or fast in your positioning.

Now, what is a joystick, really? It's two potentiometers: one for horizontal (x-axis), and one for vertical (y-axis.) Atari 2600 joysticks aren't built like this, instead having on/off contacts only. But joysticks aren't the only controllers available for the 2600: there are also the paddles (and the keypads and the driving controller, but I digress.) And what is a Paddle? It's a potentiometer. And the Atari paddles are only available in PAIRS, which share a common connector to the 2600. This makes it possible to have four-player games like "Warlords" or "Video Olympics" by using two sets of paddles. Why did no one ever build the two potentiometers from the paddles into a single joystick? All of the necessary functionality is present on the 2600 side for analog 2D controls, so why not? (I'll grant that writing analog-control software on such a limited platform would be taxing, to say the least, but surely it's POSSIBLE.)

Heck, I've even soldered together a pair of capacitors into an adaptor-plug that lets you use PC joysticks on an Atari 5200 (using plans from the online Atari 5200 FAQ and an old Texas-Instruments calculator with the clicky keys for my keypad), surely such a project for the 2600 wouldn't be any harder?

So THERE's a challenge for the modern 2600 hacker: build a game that uses an analog joystick! (for a REAL challenge, make it two-player!) Heck, I'd even be willing to build a joystick adapter for the programmer who did it! (and gave me a ROM cart of it.) (OK, that's setting myself up, I know.)

Any takers?