5 ms·

New Pacman for Atari 2600

86 points by shawndumas 12y ago

JoeAcchino 12y ago
I didn't know that there are homebrew games for Atari 2600. They also assembled a tutorial for beginners: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-contents/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-conte...
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Oh, there are new homebrew games being made for a lot of the major 8-bit machines, still today. Myself, I've been enjoying the revival immensely, especially since the 8-bit machine of my youth rarely got much attention at all from the major industry developers (Oric-1/Atmos), yet today - in the 21st Century - its getting a regular stream of releases from the die-hard holdouts .. and some of them are absolutely amazing products which would have been huge hits back in the day. (See http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150gamesoverall http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150game...) We got Space:1999, 1337 (Elite clone), SchoolDaze, Impossible Mission, Oricium, 4K Kong .. a lot of really awesome titles .. in the last few years. Also, new techniques have been discovered and continually refined by the core die-hards, meaning we're seeing things on the platform that we in the 80's could only ever have dreamed of seeing .. new color modes, new ways of handling animation, etc. It really is astounding to return to these platforms, 30 years later, and see new titles being pushed out by the ever-eager hackers who are keeping the platforms alive. Heck, we even got new hardware for the Oric-1/Atmos platform in the form of a dedicated disk emulation system, whose microcontroller alone, itself, is more powerful than the Oric ever was, but which nevertheless is being pressed into the disk-emulating duties that makes the Oric-1, at last complete. ;) So if you've got an old 8-bit machine in your closet, get it out, wire it up, dust if off, and get out there on the 'net to find the elite groups keeping these systems alive. And remember: old computers never die - their users do!
  - RodgerTheGreat 12y ago
    The surplus of resources on modern PCs makes it possible to make development tools which would have been positively indulgent by the standards of their day- sophisticated debuggers, the ability to pause, freeze and replay execution while inspecting every byte of memory at will, fancy languages that remove tedium, etc. For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-ide.com http://octo-ide.com
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      Wow, looks really useful! Its amazing to think how far we've come, and yet return to these limited machines and push them as far as possible. Something we have to keep future generations of developers enlightened about, I think.
    - kabdib 12y ago
      Yeah, I used to wait 45 minutes for our overloaded department minicomputer to assemble my cartridge, then download it at 9600 baud (only 16K, so not too bad). At night the assembly times took a few minutes. On a modern PC, this takes seconds; my fingers and brain are the bottleneck, which is how it should be.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Here is a video review of "Retro Fever," a 2014(ish) game for the Apple II.
sandebert 12y ago
"Currently the rom is about 120 bytes free, so I'm trying to add other things." It's so easy to love old-school programming. (For comparison, my comment here is 178 characters.)
flohofwoe 12y ago
I always wondered how the video output was controlled without video memory. Do you have some sort of 'current color' register which need to be set to different values during video output, timed with nop loops? I have coded on several 8-bit machines in 80s, but never on one without video memory. I stumbled over this curious property of the Atari 2600 when Ed Fries wrote 'Halo 2600' a couple of years ago (boss of the Microsoft games business during the late 90' and early 00's).
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  "I always wondered how the video output was controlled without video memory." There's masses of information explaining how it works on the Internet. I think this is the interesting video that I found out about from a HN post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNyebnxV9R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNyebnxV9R8
- mjn 12y ago
  More or less yes, but it's more than one register. The video output as the scanlines go across is built up from a number of registers. Three registers encode a 20-bit "playfield graphics" layout (blocky background graphics) for half of the current scanline; four registers are higher-res sprite-like things (2 "sprites", 1 "ball", and 1 "missile"), which also do other things like collision detection; etc. You typically do useful work rather than a NOP-loop, though, and just carefully arrange it with cycle-counting, since there aren't many cycles to spare. An even more minimalist design where you just have one register, the next pixel to output, wouldn't work because the CPU isn't fast enough to update it: the electron beam outputs 3 pixels per CPU cycle, and of course many instructions take more than one cycle, too. Instead an auxiliary microprocessor, the TIA, is clocked 3x as fast as the main CPU and does the real-time compositing of these various registers into the one value to output. All the details you could want are in the Stella Programmer's Guide, a 1979 guide/manual that resurfaced on the net: http://alienbill.com/2600/101/docs/stella.html http://alienbill.com/2600/101/docs/stella.html There is also an interesting book looking at a few case studies (one per chapter) of how the Atari's weird hardware influenced the design of some of its games: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
- 12y ago
apunic 12y ago
This is mindblowing. Just check out how the original Pacman port looked on the 2600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  2600 Pacman sure does suck, but to be fair, that video was recorded on a potato at 14hz, making the flickering ghosts inscrutable instead of just annoying. Here's one that seems to have been recorded at 60hz then downsampled to 30hz with frame interpolation for Youtube. Still shit, but at least you can tell what's going on. Kinda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYE1iZOTeI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYE1iZOTeI8
- lowlevel 12y ago
  This is mind blowing... I'de say about 7 million people who purchased Pac Man for the Atari 2600 were ripped off. (Myself included.)
  - Someone 12y ago
    Think of it this way: you paid for a Kickstarter project to be delivered in 40 years time, got an early proof of concept showing game play and a nice display box, and the real thing was finished before those 40 years were up.
- SquidMagnet 12y ago
  Oh, man, those sounds! Brings back a lot of memories. Speaking of which, forget how the original port "looked", listen to the amazing things DINTAR816 is doing with his roms.
certainly_not 12y ago
The embedded video is not showing up for me. I believe this is the one though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clddb79LQcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clddb79LQcM
- danielweber 12y ago
  I think the embedded one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tFhEQFs7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tFhEQFs7I but your link is of better quality.
mlrtime 12y ago
The same guy did Mario Bros for Atari 2600 http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229153-a-better-mario-bros-for-atari-2600/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229153-a-better-mario-bros-... demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYIDR4CMu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYIDR4CMu0
- danielweber 12y ago
  to compare to the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GouYMH1K4nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GouYMH1K4nE
acomjean 12y ago
Wonder if how close they managed to make the ghosts move like the arcade version. Someone reversed engineered how the ghosts chase you, each one chases using a different algorithm which ends up making the game really interesting to play. http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html#Chapter_4 http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...
- bitwize 12y ago
  Actually all four of the ghosts have different chase algorithms: Blinky aggressively chases you, Pinky and Inky try to get in front of you (setting you up for a pincer attack with Blinky), and Clyde chases you until he gets within a certain distance, then makes a break for the lower left. (Hence why he's considered the stupid one.)

86 points by shawndumas 12y ago

I didn't know that there are homebrew games for Atari 2600. They also assembled a tutorial for beginners: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-contents/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-conte...

fit2rule 12y ago
Oh, there are new homebrew games being made for a lot of the major 8-bit machines, still today. Myself, I've been enjoying the revival immensely, especially since the 8-bit machine of my youth rarely got much attention at all from the major industry developers (Oric-1/Atmos), yet today - in the 21st Century - its getting a regular stream of releases from the die-hard holdouts .. and some of them are absolutely amazing products which would have been huge hits back in the day. (See http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150gamesoverall http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150game...) We got Space:1999, 1337 (Elite clone), SchoolDaze, Impossible Mission, Oricium, 4K Kong .. a lot of really awesome titles .. in the last few years. Also, new techniques have been discovered and continually refined by the core die-hards, meaning we're seeing things on the platform that we in the 80's could only ever have dreamed of seeing .. new color modes, new ways of handling animation, etc. It really is astounding to return to these platforms, 30 years later, and see new titles being pushed out by the ever-eager hackers who are keeping the platforms alive. Heck, we even got new hardware for the Oric-1/Atmos platform in the form of a dedicated disk emulation system, whose microcontroller alone, itself, is more powerful than the Oric ever was, but which nevertheless is being pressed into the disk-emulating duties that makes the Oric-1, at last complete. ;) So if you've got an old 8-bit machine in your closet, get it out, wire it up, dust if off, and get out there on the 'net to find the elite groups keeping these systems alive. And remember: old computers never die - their users do!
- RodgerTheGreat 12y ago
  The surplus of resources on modern PCs makes it possible to make development tools which would have been positively indulgent by the standards of their day- sophisticated debuggers, the ability to pause, freeze and replay execution while inspecting every byte of memory at will, fancy languages that remove tedium, etc. For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-ide.com http://octo-ide.com
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Wow, looks really useful! Its amazing to think how far we've come, and yet return to these limited machines and push them as far as possible. Something we have to keep future generations of developers enlightened about, I think.
  - kabdib 12y ago
    Yeah, I used to wait 45 minutes for our overloaded department minicomputer to assemble my cartridge, then download it at 9600 baud (only 16K, so not too bad). At night the assembly times took a few minutes. On a modern PC, this takes seconds; my fingers and brain are the bottleneck, which is how it should be.
danielweber 12y ago
Here is a video review of "Retro Fever," a 2014(ish) game for the Apple II.

sandebert 12y ago

"Currently the rom is about 120 bytes free, so I'm trying to add other things." It's so easy to love old-school programming. (For comparison, my comment here is 178 characters.)

flohofwoe 12y ago

I always wondered how the video output was controlled without video memory. Do you have some sort of 'current color' register which need to be set to different values during video output, timed with nop loops? I have coded on several 8-bit machines in 80s, but never on one without video memory. I stumbled over this curious property of the Atari 2600 when Ed Fries wrote 'Halo 2600' a couple of years ago (boss of the Microsoft games business during the late 90' and early 00's).

nmeofthestate 12y ago
"I always wondered how the video output was controlled without video memory." There's masses of information explaining how it works on the Internet. I think this is the interesting video that I found out about from a HN post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNyebnxV9R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNyebnxV9R8
mjn 12y ago
More or less yes, but it's more than one register. The video output as the scanlines go across is built up from a number of registers. Three registers encode a 20-bit "playfield graphics" layout (blocky background graphics) for half of the current scanline; four registers are higher-res sprite-like things (2 "sprites", 1 "ball", and 1 "missile"), which also do other things like collision detection; etc. You typically do useful work rather than a NOP-loop, though, and just carefully arrange it with cycle-counting, since there aren't many cycles to spare. An even more minimalist design where you just have one register, the next pixel to output, wouldn't work because the CPU isn't fast enough to update it: the electron beam outputs 3 pixels per CPU cycle, and of course many instructions take more than one cycle, too. Instead an auxiliary microprocessor, the TIA, is clocked 3x as fast as the main CPU and does the real-time compositing of these various registers into the one value to output. All the details you could want are in the Stella Programmer's Guide, a 1979 guide/manual that resurfaced on the net: http://alienbill.com/2600/101/docs/stella.html http://alienbill.com/2600/101/docs/stella.html There is also an interesting book looking at a few case studies (one per chapter) of how the Atari's weird hardware influenced the design of some of its games: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
12y ago

apunic 12y ago

This is mindblowing. Just check out how the original Pacman port looked on the 2600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4

ANTSANTS 12y ago
2600 Pacman sure does suck, but to be fair, that video was recorded on a potato at 14hz, making the flickering ghosts inscrutable instead of just annoying. Here's one that seems to have been recorded at 60hz then downsampled to 30hz with frame interpolation for Youtube. Still shit, but at least you can tell what's going on. Kinda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYE1iZOTeI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYE1iZOTeI8
lowlevel 12y ago
This is mind blowing... I'de say about 7 million people who purchased Pac Man for the Atari 2600 were ripped off. (Myself included.)
- Someone 12y ago
  Think of it this way: you paid for a Kickstarter project to be delivered in 40 years time, got an early proof of concept showing game play and a nice display box, and the real thing was finished before those 40 years were up.
SquidMagnet 12y ago
Oh, man, those sounds! Brings back a lot of memories. Speaking of which, forget how the original port "looked", listen to the amazing things DINTAR816 is doing with his roms.

certainly_not 12y ago

The embedded video is not showing up for me. I believe this is the one though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clddb79LQcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clddb79LQcM

danielweber 12y ago
I think the embedded one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tFhEQFs7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tFhEQFs7I but your link is of better quality.

mlrtime 12y ago

The same guy did Mario Bros for Atari 2600 http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229153-a-better-mario-bros-for-atari-2600/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229153-a-better-mario-bros-... demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYIDR4CMu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYIDR4CMu0

danielweber 12y ago
to compare to the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GouYMH1K4nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GouYMH1K4nE

acomjean 12y ago

Wonder if how close they managed to make the ghosts move like the arcade version. Someone reversed engineered how the ghosts chase you, each one chases using a different algorithm which ends up making the game really interesting to play. http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html#Chapter_4 http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

bitwize 12y ago
Actually all four of the ghosts have different chase algorithms: Blinky aggressively chases you, Pinky and Inky try to get in front of you (setting you up for a pincer attack with Blinky), and Clyde chases you until he gets within a certain distance, then makes a break for the lower left. (Hence why he's considered the stupid one.)