3 ms·
I will be honest and admit that I don’t find most Atari 2600 games to actually be fun; there’s a few gems like Warlords and and Pitfall and Pitfall 2, but I don
by tombert 7mo ago
I will be honest and admit that I don’t find most Atari 2600 games to actually be fun; there’s a few gems like Warlords and and Pitfall and Pitfall 2, but I don’t think that home console games started getting really good until the Colecovision.
That said, I am perpetually amazed at what some people have been able to pull off on such a weak device. 120 bytes is nothing for memory compared to anything I have written on a modern computer; I worked very hard to optimize the shit out of my custom Swaybar, and that still took about 500kb.
The fact that games on the 2600 could even be playable is sort of an achievement in its own right, and when you see games that are actually legitimately decent (like the cassette tape version of Frogger, for example), I feel a bit of envy that I will never be that good at software.
BASIC Programming on the 2600 is similarly impressive to me. It’s not “fun” in any kind of objective sense, you can’t really do a lot with it, but the fact that there exists a programming environment in any capacity running directly on there is an impressive bit of engineering.
- userbinator 7mo agoLooking at it another way, 128 bytes gives you 1024 bits of state, or roughly 2^1024 (10^308) distinct states, still far more than the number of observable atoms in the universe. 128 bytes may be a tiny amount, but the real skill is in finding how to represent the necessary states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess provide some interesting background reading.
- throwaway94275 7mo agoSome games had an additional 128 or 256 bytes of RAM bult in. Mountain King being one of those I think.
- kgwxd 7mo agoYou should check out what the homebrew scene has made. I bought an old system, and garbage picked a CRT, just to play them. Started with Medieval Mayhem, a Warlords remake closer to the arcade version. Then I went on a years long obsession. Champ Games makes great stuff and has taken over distribution of some games AtariAge doesn't do since "Atari" bought them.
- forinti 7mo agoSomeone ported Thrust in 2002: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeQCIDCod8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeQCIDCod8c It's quite a feat.
- kgwxd 7mo agoI have that one. Even got the foot pedal, I have no other use for it :) That dev is still petty active, he helped me with a few dev things in the AA forums. Him and a ton of other devs are active in the chat during episodes of ZeroPage Homebrew on Twitch. Nanochess is here on HN quite often too.
- tombert 7mo agoOh I have. I find the homebrew and demo scene for the Atari to be extremely impressive. I don’t think it works on real hardware but I’m quite partial to Bad Apple : https://youtu.be/Ko9ZA50X71s?si=Ds7WuMgPHeubBNNz https://youtu.be/Ko9ZA50X71s?si=Ds7WuMgPHeubBNNz