I dabbled with Atari 2600 game programming. I can appreciate how the frugality of the VCS design put really tight constraints on game devs and in hindsight the

I dabbled with Atari 2600 game programming. I can appreciate how the frugality of the VCS design put really tight constraints on game devs and in hindsight the VCS could’ve been worlds better if a bit more was invested in hardware. As a game dev on VCS, the kernel of your game loop is essentially drawing each horizontal scanline (on a CRT screen) in realtime, so you have a budget of about 20 assembly instructions (during the hblank at the start of each scan line) to describe what gets drawn on that line as it’s being drawn, including players and missles, and playfield. Then between each frame (during the vblank and overscan) you have a budget of about 30 assembly op codes to detect collisions, change the playfield graphics, adjust the sound, check paddle/joystick inputs, etc. It’s a crazy tight clock cycle budget to work with. I honestly struggled with writing a simple game that could use so few machine op codes per frame, I couldn’t stay in budget so my frames were a mess. I wonder what could’ve been if Atari invested a bit more in giving developers a little bit more to work with. Nintendo NES came out soon after and seemed to learn from Ataris mistakes with the VCS.