4 ms·

Sorry to go off topic, but, when I started reading this response, I started thinking, "hey is this the dadhacker.com guy?". I really loved your atari st history

by beefok 8y ago

Sorry to go off topic, but, when I started reading this response, I started thinking, "hey is this the dadhacker.com guy?". I really loved your atari st history blog posts, man! I'm laughing at the extra 2 bytes of memory you just gave us! ;) IMO, the NES dev community had a better time with the 6502 -- but they definitely had far more memory to play with by then and they had (more) expensive cart mappers with RAM.

kabdib 8y ago
Writing a 2600 game was a little like a contact sport, you got beaten up a lot by the hardware ("What's wrong with this stupid register?"), got beaten up by marketing ("Can't you cram that thing into 2K of ROM? What's wrong with you? Oh, and we need it next week. What's wrong with you???"), got beaten up by management ("We gave your hot title to Joe Thumbfingers because there's nothing wrong with him") and ultimately beaten up by the market ("This game suxx, what's wrong with you?"). The payoff was good, at least for a few people. Eventually the 2600 and its team ran out of gas. I remember being called into some game brainstorming meetings, and the 2600 programmers were just utterly burned out by the platform. Someone would raise an idea and it'd get shot down by the experienced platform wizards. Not the way you want to run a brainstorming session, but everyone thought that the platform was done. In comparison, Atari 400/800 development was a doddle. You had oodles of RAM, tons of ROM (the cartridge I wrote was the first 16K ROM that Atari shipped, and I don't recall there being a huge flap about it), and the tools were pretty decent (for writing assembly language, anyway). Getting something on the screen was maybe half an hour of work, and you didn't have to count cycles or crunch code until you wanted to do optimization. The downside was that we weren't paid as much, and towards the end management started to fix that, too.

by beefok 8y ago

kabdib 8y ago

Writing a 2600 game was a little like a contact sport, you got beaten up a lot by the hardware ("What's wrong with this stupid register?"), got beaten up by marketing ("Can't you cram that thing into 2K of ROM? What's wrong with you? Oh, and we need it next week. What's wrong with you???"), got beaten up by management ("We gave your hot title to Joe Thumbfingers because there's nothing wrong with him") and ultimately beaten up by the market ("This game suxx, what's wrong with you?"). The payoff was good, at least for a few people. Eventually the 2600 and its team ran out of gas. I remember being called into some game brainstorming meetings, and the 2600 programmers were just utterly burned out by the platform. Someone would raise an idea and it'd get shot down by the experienced platform wizards. Not the way you want to run a brainstorming session, but everyone thought that the platform was done. In comparison, Atari 400/800 development was a doddle. You had oodles of RAM, tons of ROM (the cartridge I wrote was the first 16K ROM that Atari shipped, and I don't recall there being a huge flap about it), and the tools were pretty decent (for writing assembly language, anyway). Getting something on the screen was maybe half an hour of work, and you didn't have to count cycles or crunch code until you wanted to do optimization. The downside was that we weren't paid as much, and towards the end management started to fix that, too.