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Salvaging E.T. In Software, Instead of New Mexico
Yesterday, we mentioned a just-approved effort to uncover the remains of goods dumped by Atari in New Mexico decades ago.
New submitter Essellion writes "Among the games that legend has it are there is the Atari 2600 E.T. game, infamous for how bad it was. However, an excavator of another kind has cast doubts on how bad it was by exploring in depth the E.T. ROM, how it played and why, and designing some bug fixes for it."
yeah, but for what I had as a kid, it was the most complex game available (to me) at the time, and was a sink for MANY hours at a time (until I would inevitably hit into one of the bugs that caused you to be unable to continue). I can't recall if I ever finished it or not, but I doubt it. It's still in my parent's garage somewhere, probably right behind my C64 stuff.
Pac Man wasn't 8K. It was 4K, which is one reason it sucked so badly. Tod Frye begged for 8K but Atari wouldn't let him have it. Ms Pac Man got an 8K ROM.
And they gave him FIVE WEEKS to go from nothing to RTM! I'm sorry but they could have chosen any killer dev and it wouldn't have mattered with that time table, no way in hell.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm sorry but you are wrong and here is why...it wasn't a horrible port, in fact it was a miracle, because you are taking a system designed to play pong and managing to get all that shit on the screen and actually get it to WORK.
Imagine being given an arcade game of Crysis level graphics and being told you have to port that to a 100MHz Pentium I with a 4Mb Matrox card, because THAT is what we are talking about here. Pac Man ran on arcade hardware that frankly was a decade ahead of what the 2600 had under the hood, it had a lot faster CPU, more memory, not to mention all the custom hardware that was the order of the day back then. The 2600 as you noted only had TWO sprite registers, that's it, and the reason for that is when it was cooked up in 1976 the rage was Pong so it was designed to play those types of games, a little block being hit back and forth by little paddles, and that was pretty much it. That is why so many of the early games were like combat, with no real "enemies" to speak of, just two players, each controlling a little pile of blocks that shot a little block at each other.
I mean when you look at the actual specs of the hardware with a cut rate version of the MOS 6502 only capable of accessing a MAX of 4kB of RAM, a truly pathetic 128 BYTES of game RAM, and no frame buffer at all, the fact that they were able to make an actual playable version of such an advanced game that had came out years later is frankly a miracle and I think the dev really deserves credit for that, for this really was no minor feat.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.