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Atari Turns 40 Today
harrymcc writes "On June 27, 1972, a startup called Atari filed its papers of incorporation. A few months later, it released its first game, Pong. The rest is video game history. I celebrated the anniversary over at TIME.com by chatting with the company's indomitable founder, Nolan Bushnell. From the article: 'Like everyone else who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I played them all: Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Battlezone, Pole Position, Crystal Castles and my eternal favorite, Tempest. The first computer I bought with my own money was an Atari 400. So when I chatted with Bushnell this week to mark Atari’s 40th anniversary, I felt like I was talking with a man who helped invent my childhood.'" I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
Atari 400 and 800 were just plain fun. Yeah, plastic cases, and ROM cartridges, but what fun those arcade games were. The Apple II guys would say: PR#6. We'd say: PR pound sand.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The rest IF history?
I still remember the sense of pride I got when I figured out the Space Invaders strategy of shooting through my own shield to create a one bullet wide gap which could be used to pick off the invaders while staying relatively protected.
if you took all the ram used in every 2600 that was ever made you'd have less than 4GB of space. (128 bytes per system and about 30 million systems were made. Pretty much 4gb is standard on a laptop these days.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
get it away from me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk35EnnS53Y
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't get me wrong, I love my 7800 ProSystem, but Atari turning 40 implies that it's still alive.
All 100 Atari Greatest Hits games are free on iOS today. Link Here
Until Commodore produced the Amiga.
Of course the Amiga really had Atari blood running through it, having been designed by Jay Miner -- the same man that help design previous Atari machines.
I can't believe Atari let the Amiga design get away from them.
Instead they came out with a machine that had a dumb frame buffer and simple syth chip attached to a CPU. The ST was more Radio Shack Color Computer than a next generation Atari machine.
I guess I can blame Commodore for that since they gave Atari Jack Tramiel. That guy seemed obsessed with undermining his old company. He basically helped Atari and Commodore destroy each other while IBM PC compatibles slowly took over.
Between that, discounts on Atlantic and Elektra vinyl, and the corporate game room, I wouldn't have quit back in '82.
Atari is dead and buried. RIP.
We'll be saying the same thing about FreeBSD and OpenBSD in 40 months. RIP
I remember going over to Atari in 1979 or 1980 so we could see how they made membrane switch panels. At that time they were made pf 3 pieces of mylar sandwiched together. The center had holes and the two outer layers had silver plated pads for the switch contacts.
Real News for Nerds!
Atari is barely remembered by today's 20-somethings, but back in the 70s and early 80s they were # 1. They had the number one console (Atari VCS/2600) from 1977 to 84, and the number one computer (Atari 800) in 1981 and 82.
I still love those old Atari 2600 games better than many modern games. Point, shoot, rack-up a million points. Brag to your friends.
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Pole position was Namco's.
Just like Xevious which had some Atari built cabinets floating around.
Now, get off my lawn or i'll xevious-bomb your balls - with just one shot in the middle, of course :)
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
As much as I was a chickenhead in my youth, I gotta say that the Atari 8 bit family had better video. I think. I haven't thought much about it in ages. If I had the room, I'd get an Atari 800 to play with.
I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
The best part of Warlords was when one someone "died" - they were still there as a mostly invisible ghost and could affect the trajectory of the fireball if it hit them. So if you died, you could really mess with the remaining players anytime the fireball came near your corner of the screen.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Would you mind terribly if I ask what your problem is?
I mean, what difference does it make to you if somebody likes something that you don't?
Do y'all really have nothing better to do than criticize somebody's passion just because it isn't all shiny and new?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umnyVPgWE3g for a video.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFrhkC4Xuw4
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Jay Miner - Another guy who revolutionized computing, but Steve Jobs gets all the credit & media attention while Jay gets nothing. :-|
And don't blame Atari. Blame the idiots at Warner Communications who decided in 1983 to sell-off the company on the belief that videogaming was a "fad" whose time had passed. Warners stopped funding the Amiga company, so naturally they needed to look for new funding..... they discovered Commodore who bought them out wholesale.
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Many 2600 games are a bit... underwhelming either today or when they were new. But the best ones have aged really well. You can have a pick up game with a friend now in 2012 and still have a royal blast, something that isn't true of many newer games with infinitely better gfx.
I won't go so far as to say games were better then in general, but there was a lot of really fun stuff from that system, which had fuck-all for graphics. I'd rather have a good pick-up game of air-sea battle than Diablo III (and as a benefit, I don't need to ask them each time I want to play the damn thing. Company's history, and game still works).
I remember star trek on the atari 800. It took over 20 minutes to load from the cassette drive. You got to shoot at Klingons. It seemed so cool back then.
Tempest is by far my favorite video game of all time. No video game since has come close to holding my attention like Tempest. The simplicity of the game, the rhythm of the game, the invisible levels, the chip glitch that enabled you to do weird things to the game depending on the last two digits of your score. I still dream about the game, and I haven't played it in 20 years.
.sig
I was the VP of a large Atari club in the Seattle area back in the days. Somewhere stored away in my attic is an Atari 130XE with extra RAM and a device called a Black Box that was made by a company in Rochester, NY that allowed me to hook up a SCSI hardrive. I also have modified disk drives, as well as some of their 16-bit hardware. I fondly remember the days when the term "hacker" did not have such an bad meaning.
The Atari 800 computer had 128 colors for better still images (great for nude girls), but only 2 sprites, so it was hard for programmers to make "speedy" arcade-style games like they did for the Commodore with its 8 sprites.
The C64 was also about half the cost, so it started outselling the Atari after just six months and remained #1 from 1983 to 86.
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http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ataris-greatest-hits/id422966028?mt=8
Free Atari Games today only, got an email about it.
For iPhones and iPads only.
Be seeing you...
As much as I was a chickenhead in my youth, I gotta say that the Atari 8 bit family had better video. I think. I haven't thought much about it in ages. If I had the room, I'd get an Atari 800 to play with.
I don't know how the Atari 800 compared to the Commodore 64, but when I was a kid my parents got me a used 800XL originally owned by possibly the biggest pirate ever. I've yet to find a video on Youtube of a game on that machine that I haven't played!
It was great machine to have at the age of 10. I remember some of the games I had were written in BASIC, I had fun going in and editing them. Heh.
Recently I went on a Youtube spree to check out some of the games I used to play, and I gotta say I was impressed with what I found. Check out this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh5b8jcwLk&feature=related
This is Goonies, I suppose you'd call it either an adventure or possibly a puzzle game. I remember firing that one up over and over again and spending all this time trying to figure out how to progress to the next screen. I can't think of a modern day equivalent of that game.
Fun stuff. I really don't regret that this is the machine I had while all my friends had NES. (Although I was perturbed at the time...)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The Amiga was further ahead of the competition when it came out that probably anything has been since that time. Truly a machine ahead of its day.
Meeting the #1 influence on your childhood aspirations is indeed an amazing experience. Been there, done that, in my case with Jack Tramiel.
Atari would have been 40 today... IF it still was something more than just a trademark. Infogrames in France is not Atari. It's a trademark holder. Remember "Is it live or is it Memorex"? Those mediocre DVD-Rs you bought last month aren't coming from the same company as those cassette tapes you used to record KROQ tunes.
Friend of mine had an atari and a set of wireless controllers. We could play that game for hours, we made a very good team.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
And don't blame Atari. Blame the idiots at Warner Communications who decided in 1983 to sell-off the company on the belief that videogaming was a "fad" whose time had passed.
Interesting, I remember when laser disc arcade games like "Dragon's lair" came out. They were supposed to revitalize a slumping arcade industry. I just looked it up and Dragon's Lair came out in 1983. I was an arcade addict at the time and remember it well, arcade games had stagnated and computers lacked the "horse power" to get to the next level of visual effects. I believe it was Gauntlet that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. It didn't need great graphics (although we all thought it was really cool at the time), it just needed to be massively addicting and awesome to play. I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
LoL Jack pwned the Amiga he owned the graphic chips in the first few computers.
True, Tramiel Atari was not really Atari.
It sorta looked like Atari because there was so much left over inventory that Tramiel prostituted the 2600 & 800 computers for years afterward. But the ST and the later Jaguar console were his signature cheap junk.
Meh. I don't see how anyone could have enjoyed the Atari. I was looking at the 2600 wiki page and the graphics are SHOCKING! The pixels are huge, the refresh rate was awful, lack of color, no 3D support. With no hope of a quality game like Call of Duty, how could anyone have fun with it?
The only other video game out then was the Magnavox and Sears "Pong", which only had 4 varities of pong, and maybe a light sensing pistol with which you tried to hit a large white square bouncing around the tv screen. After playing nothing but pong, the 2600 seemed like a Cray Supercomputer to people then.
Computer games rule, Spacewar motherfuckers! YEAH. PDP11 in-da-lab!
Or just love the Ur-Quan
The Atari didn't have sprites, as such. It had a system called Player Missile Graphics. There were 4 players (8 bits wide), and 4 missiles (2 bits wide), which spanned the entire height of the screen. The 4 missiles could be combined into a fifth player. The Display List Interrupt system allowed a programmer to position the horizontal location many times during the vertical scan. On a side scroller type game, each horizontal band could have its own 5 players.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
No one gave a shit when Max Headroom turned 25 last March.
I don't know how the Atari 800 compared to the Commodore 64
The Atari 800 beat the C64 hands down when it came to color palette. The Atari had a standard palette of 128 colors while the C64 had only 16 colors. And while both systems had a total of 8 sprites, half of them on the Atari were crippled. All 8 on the C64 were fully versatile.
If you used horizontal screen resolutions of 160px, both were limited to about 4 simultaneous colors. But the Atari included a 80px horizontal screen resolution that could display 16 simultaneous colors. On the Atari, you could change those colors every scanline, while on the Commodore you could set it for each 4×8 pixel block (or 8×8 block in hi-res mode).
This image is what mode 9 looked like on an Atari. You might have been able to do something similar with the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 which had a 121 color palette, but those machines never saw widespread adoption. It wasn't until the Amiga that Commodore had something that could best it.
for my computer collection ... its a pretty interesting computer ... though more of a games machine than serious stuffyness computer (we were an Apple II family) Though probally one of the XL series if it dropped in my lap that way. Definitely any of the 16 bit machines ..
My cousins had a 2600, I at one point had a 5200 with one working joystick, pac mand and pole position (still one of my favorites), though I never really cared for the consoles as much, I just about bought a 2600 till the old lady went from 15 bucks to 75 cause her grandson looked at rapebay, hope she still has it instead of 15 bucks and one less chunk of crap in her house heh
I found out a few years ago that the dude that wrote Tempest grew up in the same town as me. Interesting career indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Theurer
> no 3D support
Good god, are you even in middle school yet? Even 10 years ago, realtime-3D was mostly sleight of hand and programming hat tricks (think: Battle Arena Toshinden, probably the best example of a game that did a spectacularly good job of pretending to be 3D).
The 2600's hardware was seriously weak, but the biggest problem with its games were the fact that it had an astronomical learning curve. Take a simple question, like "what was the 2600's resolution?" The truth is, there IS NO simple answer to it. The 2600 has different "kinds" of pixels, and different ways to express pixel hue and luminance, and few of its "rules" were hard limits so much as timing limits you ran into when you just couldn't bitbang things fast enough.
It's hard enough to explain the 2600's theory of operation to someone with an EE degree. It wasn't enough to know "how to program" -- you had to get "down and dirty" with its hardware to a degree that's almost impossible with modern PC hardware. Literally, impossible... in most cases, the OS (Windows OR Linux) won't even *let* you get that close to it. At least, not unless you tried writing your game as a loadable kernel module, or you somehow managed to pwn Windows and get it to execute your program as Ring 0 kernel code. Go ahead... open a 320x240 legacy VGA screen filled with a single color pixel, then try bitbanging raw assembly by busy-waiting and counting clock cycles to change the contents of that one color register in realtime as the imaginary CRT your LCD panel is emulating scans each line. That's basically how many of the 2600's video effects worked.
On a modern PC, it won't work. Literally, won't work. Why not? Because modern multicore x86 architecture isn't realtime-deterministic, and hasn't been for years. Oh, the OUTCOME of a given sequence of assembly language, in the form of a specific value stuffed into a specific register or stored in a specific memory location when the dust settles, is certainly deterministic... but what happens between point "a" and "b" isn't.
On the Atari 2600, you could count the number of cycles each assembly instruction took to execute, and calculate which pixel would be getting drawn on the screen at the moment it happened (I think it was 3 pixels per clock cycle). Contrast that with a modern PC, where multiple cores, pipelines, speculative and out-of-order execution, and a hybrid architecture that decomposes traditional x86 CISC operations into bundles of virtual RISC code "behind the scenes" mean that everything that happens "along the way" is subject to the CPU's "mood".
Like everyone else who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I played them all.
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I don't think it was a case of them "destroying each other" as much as it was the clones and ISA giving everyone a stable platform on which to build, combined with some serious disasters such as the 7800 at Atari and of course the big crash of 83.
I know that I hung onto my VIC for longer than most but in the end it was the abundance of ISA cards and software for IBM PC compatible that ended up getting me to take my first Compaq all those years ago, there really wasn't anything at either Commodore or Atari that got supported as well as ISA or X86. With both Commodore and Atari basically you got what was in the box and that was it, sure there were a few add ons but nothing like the huge explosion of ISA cards, not to mention the flood of games that came out for DOS. Anybody else remember those shareware discs? man those were fun, dozens of games on a floppy, later CDs with over 100, man you just can't pack 'em away like that anymore.
So happy BDay Atari, its really a shame your gone but between the 7800 and the Jaguar not really surprising. Like Sega who came after you you had a hell of a run and gave many of us some great times, I can still remember trying to sleep with a pillow over my head because when i was done gaming and had to get some sleep before school my mom would plop down in the living room for some Yar's Revenge until the wee hours. Even the Wii never got the whole family involved like the old 2600 did, hell of a machine.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Troll much? AC...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
OTOH, C64 had a vertical scanline interrupt as well, allowing the same trick to be done, but with 8 sprites, each 24 pixels wide.
The problem (on both systems) with such interrupts and sprite swapping was that is sucked away a lot of useful CPU time that could have been spent on game logic. Also, it seriously constrains vertical movement, so those sprites aren't as flexible anymore.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I believe it was Gauntlet that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. [...] I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
Was it even possible to play that game without shoving in another quarter every 30 seconds? IIRC it was an endless war of attrition...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Goonies for the Atari 800 is reminiscent of Conan on the Apple II, at a glance anyway.
There was a pretty cool Goonies game on the NES...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Amiga used a similar technique, except the Copper (graphics co-processor of sorts) handled the 'wait for line 120 and change the sprite registers' bit, leaving the CPU free. Sprites on the Amiga sucked though, as they were only 16 pixels wide (AGA used in the A1200+ improved this).
Ya think? I would have thought the phrase "a quality game like Call of Duty " would have been a dead giveaway.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Amiga sprites were primarily meant for things like mouse pointers.
The Amiga had a very good blitter coprocessor which was able to move around much larger chunks of pixels at high speed.
But these machines are from a different generation altogether, so no fair comparison.
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>The Atari 800 computer had 128 colors for better still images (great for nude girls), but only 2 sprites,
The 800 had 128 colours until GTIA came out (1980?) and 256 thereafter. It had 4 sprites plus 4 missiles and the missiles could be combined into a 5th sprite.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
>I don't know how the Atari 800 compared to the Commodore 64,
Swings and roundabouts. Atari had better colour and probably scrolling and a far batter OS (loadable device drivers, drivers that auto loaded from peripheral's ROMs (in 1979!) and things like display list interrupts and display lists - it was an Amiga lite in effect. The C64 had better sprites and some nifty colour modes making for some better looking arcade games. But then it came out 4 years later so ought to have bee much better.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Sorry for posting AC.
It seems worth noting that the Atari brand is only used by the French publisher previously named Infogrames, who bought it in 2003 and chose it as its main name in 2008. The current Atari does not have much to do with the publisher and manufacturer of which so many Slashdotters have fond memories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_SA
Also, a French satirical newspaper, Le Canard Enchaîné, recently published some facts about the poor management cribbling Atari nowaday. Most notably, the CEO Franck Angeard seems to get 500.000 €/y for 10 days of work per month, while they're struggling with economic difficulties and shutting down their only remaining development studio.
Sad, really, both for what Atari and Inforgrames have been in the past.
Amiga was really the next generation Atari machine, the guy who designed it was the same guy who worked on the Atari 400/etc. I have written code for Atari 8bit/16bit, Commodore 8bit/16bit and I can tell you that Atari 8bit -> Amiga and Commodore 64 -> Atari ST from the architecture and hardware design point of view.
Check out the history of Atari on WIkipedia, interesting read.
Just fired up my 2600 only to find out it no longer works.. at least I still have Stella (2600 emulator). My Atari 130XE with 1050 disk drive still works and the floppies from 1980s are still booting... amazing.
My friends and I would have marathon games of Gauntlet, seeing how far we could play on just one quarter. My record was seven hours, using the Warrior. I think Gauntlet was the last great arcade game to allow near-infinite play time for people who had mastered of the game.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I think myself, my brother and a friend were able to play for over a minute before one of us had to put in another quarter.
It's been a (long) while but I think we got to the third screen/level/whatever once or twice.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
There was a pretty cool Goonies game on the NES...
That was actually the second Goonies game, which was a sequel to the first.
Even though the first didn't come out on the NES outside of Japan...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Good god, are you even in middle school yet? Even 10 years ago, realtime-3D was mostly sleight of hand and programming hat tricks (think: Battle Arena Toshinden, probably the best example of a game that did a spectacularly good job of pretending to be 3D).
Perhaps you meant 15 years ago? Or are you seriously suggesting that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (released 10 years ago in 2002) couldn't do real-time 3D?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I remember getting an Atari 400 for Christmas in 79 or 80. It had two rom cartridges, BASIC and a games called something like Starcommander. I remember turning it on with the BASIC cartridge, a blue screen with the word READY in the top right. That was a bit of a letdown. It took me about an hour and a half to copy a 20 line program into it. I eventually learned to program my own simple games on that computer. I loved the way you could draw graphics in atari basic, it was so easy and intuitive. Next Christmas I got a full stroke keyboard to replace the membrane nightmare keyboard.
-- QED
OTOH, C64 had a vertical scanline interrupt as well, allowing the same trick to be done, but with 8 sprites, each 24 pixels wide. The problem (on both systems) with such interrupts and sprite swapping was that is sucked away a lot of useful CPU time that could have been spent on game logic. Also, it seriously constrains vertical movement, so those sprites aren't as flexible anymore.
I wasn't aware of the C64's ability to do a scanline interrupt. You learn something new...
Vertical movement was an issue on the Atari, simply because the sprites/PMGs did not move vertically. They were objects that spanned the entire vertical height of the display. To get vertical movement, you had to redraw the graphic, moving the data in the PMG bitmap area.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Not to be confused with the horizontal height, or the vertical width.
Just wanted to add that this is a very good description of how the real hardware works. And the problems of non-realtime determinism is one of the major issues I face in developing Stella (http://stella.sf.net). For a system so rudimentary, you'd never believe how hard it is to accurately emulate it. You basically need to emulate a TV as well; the system was tied so closely to it.
- 1 Overrated
Awwww somebody couldn't handle the facts
*pats* It's cute how you continue to ignore the real reason you get modded down and instead cling to a lie. On the other hand, I feel sorry for the life you must live that you continue to feel the need to cling to the lie.
"The Atari didn't have sprites, as such. It had a system called Player Missile Graphics"
Same thing. The "player" is an 8x8 sprite and the missile is a 2x2 sprite. One trick was to "stretch" the missile sprite into a vertical line, as was done with Pitfall's swinging vines. ------ In any case the C64 had more "player" sprites than the Atari, so it was more flexible. It could create some awesome shooter games, that were not possible with the Atari 800 or console.
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Back in the Usenet days, someone wrote up a Gauntlet FAQ. It was pretty interesting - If I remember right, the key to long play times was keeping your score low, because the game spawned food at a rate inversely proportional to your score. ... Found it. Actually it's for Gauntlet 2. Dates to 1993.
I'd post the two parts of the FAQ as a journal entry, but Slashdot is giving me "Could not initialize the editor" :-(.
The videogame "crash" was really only a crash for arcades and consoles. Computer gaming continued through 1983-86 without hardly a slump (some of my favorite games are from that era). Nintendo recognized this and shipped their NES over to America to take-advantage of the vacuum Warner Communications/Atari had left behind.
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I spent many an afternoon/weekend playing Goonies on my old 800XL. I loved that game!
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I still remember it to this day (I had the 6 switch VCS, family got it in December '79):
Atari 2600/VCS + Space Invaders cart - turn the power off and on rapidly until you get a screen with out the invaders and only the mothership travelling across the screen at the top. Once you see that, start the game and you will fire two shots at a time instead of only.
My dad would get pissed if we did it 'cause he swore we were going to destroy the console.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
If you are, indeed, one of the Stella team, then I thank you for the years of enjoyment that Stella has brought me and my friends. It gave us a chance to relive the old battles of Combat, Air-Sea Battle, and the like as adults.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
If you gave me half an hour to build up my health and collect "Extra [X] Potions", I could play indefinitely on one quarter. My record was 10 1/2 hours on the Wizard. The last half hour was spent suiciding, because the owners were trying to close the arcade.
The 8 bit machines were only 8 bits, and can't hold a candle to the 64 bit beasts we have now, but what people did with those 8 bit machines was very impressive. What they lacked in hardware, they made up for in innovative software design. You were much closer to the metal back then, so assembly was more pervasive. People did a lot with BASIC back then, and the machines turned a generation on to programming. You had no choice but to program or do nothing. There were no other options. Type it in from the magazine, change it and see what it does. Awesome. Floating pixel graphics and things moving around the screen. Now you have to get past the display managers and layers of cruft. Sure its all been put there to create for the user a comprehensive experience, but you are further from the machine. The extra layer of abstraction is enough to make a lot of peoples eyes glaze over and never try their hand at writing software. Atari, Commodore, TI, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Timex. These were the machines that the billionaire internet pioneers cut their teeth on. To the great unwashed, they are just 'toy game computers that don't do much'. To the billionaires, they were machines that opened their world and got them started making millions, then billions, one peek, one poke, one byte at a time. There is nothing to replace the 8 bit machines today. That narrow window has closed. Its like the tiny wind up toys that were popular, and the kids of the 1860's and 1870's took apart, put back together and re-jigged to work better. Later those kids started building other mechanical contraptions like cars and airplanes. They don't make wind up toys like that anymore. That window, too, has closed.
As stated above, a "Player" is 8 pixels wide, but runs the height of the screen. Each "Missile" is 2 pixels wide and also runs the height of the screen. Making a change to (IIRC) one value will turn the 4 missiles into a 5th Player, an example of which was it's use in Pac Man for the 8-bit Atari computers. The players and missiles are also a single color.
Because I used to program games my 800XL I'll throw out a few tidbits that I can vaguely remember:
If you overlap two players, there's a register that can be set that will cause any area overlapped by the two (with bits turned on) to create a third color though you can't control what the third color is.
Using a Display List Interrupt, you can change the colors of each horizontal line. This is done in many games to create a sunset. It can also be used to change the color of a Player or missile per line (think "Bounty Bob" in the Atari version of Miner 2049'er)
DLI's can also be used to chop up a Player or missile into many different objects.
Vertical scrolling is far easier to do than horizontal on the 8-bit Atari computers, plus there's a register that can be set that "smooths" vertical scrolling.
There was also a way to use 16 bits for sound by combining two of the Atari's 4 8 bit channels... I never found a use for that at all.
Because the XL/XE series of computers didn't have an internal speaker, it was possible to use the channel for the internal speaker as a fifth audio channel, though games that used that 5th channel might sound a bit weird on a 400/800. IIRC, programming this 5th channel was not done through POKEY.
The 8-bit Atari's had 256 colors, not 128 as stated earlier (16 shades of 16 colors). Displaying all of them at one time required DLI trickery.
One magazine, Antic or Analog, detailed how the DIN monitor output on the 8-bit computer could be wired for S-Video output.
That's what I can remember for right now. Almost wish I still had my 800XL.
No. Players and missiles are always the full height of the display, and are impossible to move vertically - which is why they aren't exactly sprites. They could be made double or quadruple width, and the four missiles could be ganged to form a fifth player, but they were always the full height of the display (8 bits wide by 128 bits tall, missiles are two bits wide by 128 bits tall)
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
How come nobody mentioned Star Raiders yet? The most awesome game available for home systems in 1980.
In fact any program running as the "root" user can access any I/O port and map any memory locations into it's virtual address space.
Daniel Klugh