Atari VCS/2600 - 10 TECHNICAL Things You Didn't Know
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 มิ.ย. 2024
- "The tricks we were pulling were truly insane!" - David Crane. In my original Atari VCS/2600 video, I had way more to talk about than 10 things. This time I cover some of the technical oddities of programming games and why some quirks of the system came into being.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:55 - 128 Bytes
05:49 - Racing The Beam
07:44 - Blinking, Blinds, And Bars
11:57 - It's Not A Bug. It's A Feature!
13:04 - Pseudo Random Numbers
16:01 - Two Minutes Sixteen Seconds
17:24 - Speakers And Sounds
18:29 - Loading From Cassette
20:02 - Pausing Your Game
21:18 - Flat Music Notes
22:54 - Pitfall II
25:33 - What Is A Heavy Sixer?
Original "10 Things" video: • 10 Things You Didn't K...
"Stella At 20" playlist: • Playlist
Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained: • Racing the Beam Explai...
Music used by permission:
“Rise And Shine” by Malmen
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"Frappe Snowland - Smooth McGroove Remix" by Tee Lopes
music.gamechops.com
"City Limits" by Lakey Inspired
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"Ice Cleam" by CL Collaboration
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Other music from the TH-cam Audio Library
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#Retro #Computers #atari #atari2600 #videogamehistory - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
That feeling you get when watching people responsible for a half of your childhood... wow.
When I was a kid and received my Atari as a Christmas gift in 1983 (sure it was late but not for us in Brazil), the first thing that came to my mind when I looked the device was that its grilled shape must hide a speaker. Well, now I know that I was not completely wrong! Thanks for the video, Aaron!
Anytime i see a grill shape, I assume speaker as well LOL boy how wrong we are.
I remember taking apart a broken one in the 90s and wondering if those speakers were an option or something.
13:22 Cartuchinho da CCE!
These guys were literal programing gods. Would love to see what they could do with modern hardwear
This type of coding is a lost art. Also shows how intelligent you had to be and how well you had to know your job.
I agree, limitations is the mother of all inventions. ;)
Nobody misses this. I coded on the 6502, and all the limitations was just frustrating. I'd never want to go back to the bad old days. There's plenty of really difficult problems NOW, without having to figure out how to fit a routine into X amount of memory, or clever ways to save memory.
@@fuzzywzhe speed, the smaller your code, the quicker it going to run? and as the frustrating code bugs, the code is less code, to check for bugs? the programs here, could, possibly, where written out 1 to 2 sheets of copier paper, in regular sized text? anything modern, you could not put all the code printed out in 500 copier paper pages? where would even start looked an undocumented bug that auto correct could not fined?
@@dh2032 OK, this is what I was taught, smaller code, faster execution, and it was true for a long time, it's not now. Optimizers are amazing and we have cache and pipelines. Clarity of code is now the goal.
As we progress, you have to drop old thinking. Old thinking is useful to know where we are, but you're using old tools.
Clarity of thought is where we have to go with coding. The optimizer will take care of it. Believe, I used to do optimization, that job is obsolete.
We don't code for chips anymore, we code for routines. It's frustrating that people worry about "which algorithm is better for sorting for this condition?" - who cares? The compiler picks it, and it's right more often than any human being is. QSort BSort - whatever, it will know.
This is not a lost art. Anyone who programs 8 bit microcontrollers still deals with this today. I write software for PIC micros that have 14kB of ROM and only 368 bytes of RAM.
Pitfall II was among one of my favorite Atari games while growing up. It was so much more amazing than anything that came before it. The "Open" world design with depth, swimming and balloons. These were all new experiences on the 2600.
Now that I'm older, I continue to be amazed at just how many new techniques were introduced with just that one game.
Yep
They're were not programmers, they were magicians! It's just amazing what they could do with such limited resources.
Would love to see them max out the specs of modern hardware, would have some amazing shit
Just imagine what they could do with modern machines without all those limitation. ;)
Still love video games and started with the 2600 as a child, hours of fun playing Defender, Asteroids, River Raid, Skyjinks, Pitfall, Adverntur and so many other fun carts, they did it with so little resources its incredible what the programmers accomplished.
Atari 2600 such good times, David Crane was a programming god
Programmed Ghostbusters in just 6 weeks from what I've heard
Yea, he was, Pitfall 2 was mind blowing at the time. Nothing like that on the 2600 has ever been seen. I remember getting day one and blown away. Other time in eary gaming, was N64 and a 3-D Mario
Pitfall was also a great port on the C64, I remember tying to avoid those dam gators for hours of fun. heh
I still remember the Space Invaders trick where you would hold down the select and reset buttons while turning on the system to activate auto fire.
It's amazing they managed to get anything done with the VCS.
For sure
The machine was quite quickly outpaced by other systems. The VCS came out in 1977 but it took a good 6 years or so before it was absolutely obsoleted, but that's an eternity for anybody under 30.
I was programming by 1980, going back to these systems, would be a NIGHTMARE today. Being limited to 32K was frustrating
F-14 Tomcat used EVERYTHING switch-wise, I seem to remember - even the reset button had a game function, you had to do it quick tho.
@@fuzzywzhe Yet today, developers have created games that are simply stunning and inconceivable on such limited hardware.
@@ridiculous_gaming like what? What games have been created on the 2600 which are ACTUALLY playable, much less "incredible"?
I've seen the Sonic game on the 2600. It was a good effort, but it's not playable.
Space Invaders exploit: turning the console on while holding the Reset button down would immediately start a game giving the player two shots on screen at the same time. Only drawback was you could only play variation no. 1 of the game. My friends and I loved this bug! My brother bought the system in 1978 and, after hearing your explanation, it was light sixer.
Nice one!
Atari was a Huge Sucess in Brasil during 80s....and surpassed the crash and entered the 90s as cheap videogame console
That's awesome. I was going to ask if they translated the text in the games back then, but I guess there wasn't a lot of text actually in the games 🙂
@@RetroHackShackone company called "CCE" used to change the name of developer that usually apears on the botom of screen. I think there are some ROMs with this mod on the Internet. Sorry about my english.
I'm Uruguay and i still have and run my original old *Atari" CCE. Was much lees expensive buy a CCE and was native "Pal".
Good memories.
That's awesome. I wish I still had my original.
The video game crash only effected North America
I will never forget how cool it was to be 8 years old in 1984 post video game crash and seeing Pitfall II advertised and then being able to buy it for like five bucks! That and HERO are the best games on the system!
The ingenuity of the folks programming for this platform is just amazing. Of course, it had to be.
Absolutely amazing the amount of functionality they were able to squeeze out of the 2600.
I loved that game system as a kid.
Especially the Activision games. Which seemed to really push the limits of the console.
Yeah. The folks who left Atari and started Activision were some of the best programmers.
Combat is one of my favourite games because of the quirks like blasting your opponent through walls.
Yeah. It made the game even more fun. I am glad they didn't fix that.
I remember playing on my father's Coleco telstar combat system. It was the first game I ever played.
Was that the one with the revolver in it? I picked one of those up for a video recently.
@@RetroHackShack revolver? The Telstar combat has 4 sticks (two sticks per player) to control the tanks
@@RetroHackShack No, that's a Coleco Telstar Arcade. Paddle knobs, a steering wheels and a gun, on the three sides.
I had one of those. The pack-in cartridge never worked properly. My parents had gotten me a second cartridge, but it didn't have any driving games on it., so I never got to use the steering wheel. Then after a couple months, the gun stopped working properly. It would register a hit no matter where it was pointed. You could leave it in the console and get a perfect score.
I also had a Coleco Telstar Combat, which was a tank game. The video never worked properly. The image was distorted and the picture rolled.
Coincidentally, several years ago, I found a box of old video games in the trash, including a Colecovision and three Atari 2600s. Two of the Ataris worked, but the Colecovision didn't. I forget exactly what problem it had, but while it would turn on, it had something wrong with it. Ironically, it had the Atari expansion module with it and that DID work.
Fascinating to hear about the byte saving tricks and creative genius methods developers came up with.
Yeah. Really amazing.
I have a starpath supercharger, pretty much used it as a flash cart. Quite a few games have been converted into a sound file, and you can load up a cheap MP3 player to act as the cassette/cassette player.
Yeah. Works great from my phone too.
Really interesting stuff! I love hearing about all the corner cutting techniques the programmers utilised to get their projects working with their restrictions. Subd! 😁
Thanks!
I once had a VCS that had the speaker holes.
I mounted a small speaker and amp inside.
With the availability of small good sounding speakers and small amplifiers today, it would be much easier to do that and get much better sound than what I did back in the late 90's
For those familiar with the Commodore 64, saving every character on the screen (40 across x 25 down) takes 1000 bytes, or 1K. 2 screenshots would fill up an entire 2K Atari cartridge!!
Or 1 screenshot with colour per character!
@@infindebula I remember the C64's screen, because I created a utility program that would save whatever you typed into it as a "machine lauguage program" loading into 1024 to 2023 of memory. I then created a simple snake game and to load the next level, the program would just LOAD"level #",8,1 (replacing the # with the current level). It would only take about 3 seconds off of a 5.25" floppy!
I love this! This is the 'OG' "It's not a bug it's a feature" excuse haha or rather "It's totally a feature and not a limitation" Perfect!
Yeah. Given the ROM space limitations it's almost a necessity.
I just can't imagine how hard it was for developers to work with such resource limits, they were and always will be the legends of game development.
Looking forward for your next video(s)
Thanks Aaron!
That's for sure
@@RetroHackShack Dev on Atari was like do Magick recepies
Heck and people in the homebrew community and the demoscene are still finding ways to push the 2600.
@@madmax2069 prince of persia demo was amazinh
@@fabricio4794 I mean that's cool and all, but that demo is definitely not the best of what I've seen the 2600 do.
The Polynomian Counter thing was pure genius.
I love that after 24:00, as David Crane is explaining the mind-bending cartridge chipset enhancements and features, the camera pans out to all the other developers, slack-jawed, hanging their heads in acknowledgement of Crane's next-level skills. (I'm not suggesting even for a moment that they didn't all accomplish amazing things, of course.)
Maybe sacrilege here, but I think it's a shame more customers didn't embrace the competing Intellivision, which had the computing resources to get around most or all of these limitations.
Yeah. Pretty crazy stuff he pulled. Also, I love Joe Decuir's smile after explaining his bug in the system at 11:46. Proud bug papa!
@@RetroHackShackThey earned every bit of respect. The amount of knowledge required to get use the system and then bend the rules is impressive.
Equally impressive is their technical recall. It’s been a few years and they are talking like it was last week.
Yeah. I can't remember those kind of details from my job 20 years ago.
MAN I loved my Intellivision. I played it to peices, plus the voice modulator for it?
I had an Atari. My best friend had an Intellivision. We were set for many years until the NES.
I used to use that bug to my advantage on the tank game. If you are against a wall turning the tank will allow you to flip to the other side of the wall.
The Starpath was AMAZING in comparison to regular Atarci VCS games!
Hats off to these trailblazers in their day. Crazy what they delivered with such finite resources. But also thank heavens this is history and hardware is so much more robust.
Yay! A man that calls a VCS a VCS 😊👍
That's because he is in the 70's area. In the 80's area he calls it the 2600
Because of the extremely limited memory size of the Atari VCS/2600 there were multiple technical tricks which the game programmers had to develop for the Atari VCS/2600.
Bumming byte's in the 70's. These guys pushed the VCS hardware *way* beyond belief. These days you'd be hard pressed to find programmers of this caliber. Much respect
Great video! Really need to see that video about the speaker mods, *sounds* awesome to do!
Thanks. I am excited about that one too. I think combat makes use of them for each player's sounds.
What a fun video. You sure have pulled the curtains back on this great system.
Thanks!
The big problem with music on the 2600 wasn't so much the primary frequency generator, which has a five-bit range from 1 to 32 counts, but rather the fact that the polynomial function generator which followed it was limited to dividing its output by 2, 6, 31, or 93 when producing square waves, or 15 when producing a buzzy "saw" wave sound. If the TIA had happened to include an extra "divide-by-two" control bit that would drop one of the phi1 or phi2 clocks from each scan line, that would have improved things enormously, but I don't think music was really a design consideration.
In the theme for my game Toyshop Trouble, which is in the key of C, I used the saw wave for the bass part, with divide values of 32, 24, 22, 16, 12, and 11, yielding overall divide ratios of 480, 360, 330, 240, 180, and 165. The mathematically-correct divisors for the G notes would have been 320 and 160, but those aren't multiples of 15.
In the lead part, the C, and F notes use divide values of 20, and 15, yielding overall divide ratios of 120, and 90, both of which are almost perfect and coincide with the pitches for C and F in the bass part. The G note, however, uses a divisor of 27 for a divide ratio of 162, which is quite a bit off from the 330/165 used in the bass. The B note is a bit interesting; mathematically, it should use a divisor of 21.18 for a divide ratio of 127.13, but the available options are to use a divisor of 21 (which is about 1% sharp) or 22 (which is about 3.8% flat). For the measures where I'm playing a G in the bass, I use the lower pitch (which is flat by the same amount as the G), but for other measures I use the higher pitch.
Fun little bit of audio trivia: the 4-bit digital-to-analog converers for the Atari's audio circuits are just about the smallest things on the TIA. If you call up die photos, each ADC is a tiny little assemblage of four different-sized transitors that looks like the "signal bars" display on a cell phone.
Thanks for sharing that example. So complicated!
I got to meet David Crane, Garry and Daniel Kitchen at a retro game event a few years ago. Great moment in my life.
Nice!
Thank you for bringing back good memories of the warmth look wood-paneled house interior and glass TV with ATARI 2600 🕹
🙂 That was my childhood
My favorite "FEATURE" in combat was - If you got 1 tank behind the other and you made it look like it was ":DOING THINGS" you could get both tanks to then move in fast circles hooked together on the screen...
DAMMIT I just posted this myself without reading other comments - I thought I discovered this. I seem to remember if the front tank fires, the shot also loops.
this was a challenge pretty much on every computer and console from the early 70s all the way till the late 90s, ram and storage was always a premium on many of these systems and being able to squeeze every last bit of detail and sound out of a limited space was truly an amazing endevor.
For sure
Hy, that interview of the program team is amazing!!! 🤩, you have a new suscriptor now 👍
Greetings from Buenos Aires
Thanks
A great video as usual. I wondered about the apparent "speaker" position in the case, but never heard why it was like that. I'd like to look in trying out getting the split audio out setup.
Thanks!
Pitfall I&II / River Raid / Yars Revenge / Megamania / Kaboom / Night Driver / Demon Attack 🔥
Just checked the one I currently own. It has 4 switches but with a thick bezel and feels pretty heavy.
In Space Invaders I discovered that if I held down the reset button and toggled the on/off switch it would shoot twice with each button press. I love that old tech.
Yes, you could trick the game into allowing 2 of your shots on the screen at the same time! Made it much easier that way… really odd bug, or maybe it was an Easter egg type deal? With mine, anyway, you had to jiggle the switches just right to get that setup…
When memory got cheaper, I often wondered what games could have been had the high order bit pins not be disabled.
Great video. Shows how programmers had to be really creative in coding. Nowaways, sadly, coders are lazy and you get highly bloated programs that run poorly. Programs are getting bigger and bigger just to do the same thing. Imagine if you had this style of coding on windows programs and games!?
Also reminds me of the 64k pc demo challenges out there that proves efficiency can still exist today and the amazing things that can be accomplished.
Thanks. Yeah. I think there are some circles of programmers who are returning to this idea these days.
"Nowaways, sadly, coders are lazy and you get highly bloated programs that run poorly"
Such as Microsoft Windows.
" Imagine if you had this style of coding on windows programs and games!"
Hardware wouldn't need to be nearly as powerful to do the same things.
They did it out of necessity. If today's programmers were required to program like that even though it is not really necessary these days, our software would cost 10x what it costs today. I'm not condoning what happens today. I'm just saying that there is a spectrum and these guys were on one end of it. Not all software written today is on the other end of the spectrum. Some is but most is somewhere in the middle which is often a reasonable tradeoff for cost.
@@mtslyh
Software might actually cost less and work much better as there wouldn't be as many bugs to fix nor updates needed. Plus said programs would be more malware resistant.
Computer hardware also might not need to be as powerful.
@@ikonix360 Not sure where you come up with the correlation between squeezing every ounce of performance/space out of code and having fewer bugs. I don't think those things necessarily always occur together. Let's remember that these applications were relatively small back in the day. So by their very nature there was less "code" and therefore less chance of there being bugs in the first place. Plus, these programmers were not your average run of the mill programmer. Most highly skilled programmers create relatively bug free code. But we don't always have the option of being able to get all of the highly skilled coders for our projects which is another good reason why the proposed solution simply doesn't work in real life. Thanks for the discussion.
Thank you! A memory from my childhood: I almost beat the Atari 2600 Chess game. IT CHEATED! Stopped playing about then... :)
WOW, and you included the Starpath Supercharger! Owned one back then; LOVED the Dragonstomper game!
I just released my followup video on the supercharger.
Big motivator for buying the 5200 was it's TV advertising that showed that the game can be PAUSED! That was SO amazing to kids back then! We could PAUSE our new high-score personal record game to take out the trash whenever our parents demanded NOW, not later.
Yes. It was sorely needed.
I remember playing Combat and figuring out if I drove the tank into a corner just the right way, it could teleport to another part of the screen! I thought that was awesome!
Great video. And love that shirt, too. It almost looks like the colors are moving.
Thanks!
First time on your channel and I love the editing and story telling. Cheers! Subbed, Liked and commented! 👌
Thanks!
Thank you for such useful information, I will use it in my work.
So interesting to see these early designs that came out so functional even when there was no path to follow.
A backward-forward symmetrical pseudo-random byte generator with bit groups in that byte describing screen contents for forward and backward game screens. Brilliant.
David Crane, Larry Kaplan, are geniuses. They made some sweet Activision games!
Great video, really teaches you the true nature of the atari
Thanks
Can we talk about the background though??? Way to commit to a theme, super rad
Great stuff, love those oldskool techies.
Funny how it took them a bit before they blacked out a part of the screen to hide some of their tricks.
Racing the beam more refers to the game often having to make changes to the TIA registers while a given line of the screen was being drawn. For example the TIA background registers were only enough for the left half of the screen with the right half being either a duplicate or a mirror. If the game needed the two sides to be different then the game needed to "race the beam" to update the background registers after they were used for one side but before they were used for the other! (Note: I created the homebrew game Skeleton/Skeleton+ for the 2600.)
I got a summer job loading pulp wood by hand as a kid to buy an intellivision. Afterwards I wished I had bought a 2600 which I later did. I loved them both
Awesome. I picked up brush in a local apple orchard to raise funds.
First game console I've seen with wood paneling. Definitely a product of the 70's.
16:00 - Something like this trick was also used much later to procedurally define the solar systems in Star Control 2. Each system took its location on the starmap as a seed and PRNG-ed up its planetary statistics. Then all they needed to store for map data was the list of star locations and a few plot-relevant overrides, down from of over 10 000 planets and moons and hundreds of thousands of mineral deposits. I note that the treasures in Pitfall weren't listed as part of the PRNG determined data, so it seems they did that too?
I don't remember playing Star Control 2. I will have to check that out.
My family may have had a heavy sixer. It had the six switches but I don’t remember any of the other details. Not long after getting the VCS, my family had to move suddenly and the VCS and games were packed into a black trash bag as that's all we had to work with. It was never seen again. Suspect one of the move helpers took it or thought it was trash and put it outside where someone else took it. But that thing vanished instantly. We were devastated. It was basically our whole entertainment. I learned from it to never, ever put anything you want to keep in a trash bag. Odds are, anyone else will think it IS trash and take it as a freebie or throw it into the actual trash.
What a sad story 😭
lol, thought the holes were for heat ventilation. I'm betting it didn't hurt. Seems like my dad's Atari VCS lasted forever, we just got tired of it, as more powerful computers and consoles hit the market. River Raid and Frogger and Pitfall and Space Invaders were my favorites before Super Mario and Zelda and Metroid and Contra came out on the Nintendo. Of course, as a kid, I really had no idea they were doing so much with so little back when that was all there was to work with, they were just magic boxes to me.
Whenever I played Computer Chess on my VCS, my mother would jokingly call it "the long, drawn out ordeal" 😂
Ha
Great, informative video, keep them coming 🙂
Thank you!
Growing up with a massive 16kb of memory to work with as a young programmer I was spoiled.
I remember having the SuperCharger! it was awesome! it came with Phaser Patrol and I also had Killer Satellites. Sadly I broke the headphone wire jack because the tapedeck I used at the time had a recessed plug receptacle that restricted me from plugging it in all the way.
Tod Frye, who programmed Pac-Man for the VCS, talks about why it came out the way it did, with the flickering etc, in the documentary "Stella at 20": th-cam.com/video/UTDUB_GiTKA/w-d-xo.html and here he is admiring a modern homebrew version of Pac-Man: th-cam.com/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/w-d-xo.html He's very humble about it.
AMAZING DETAILS. AWESOME
When it was release 128 bytes of ram was more then they every expected to need. the program was on the cart so all the ram was used for was to store stuff that had to be updated, location of 2 players and 1 missle sprite and scores. But as we seen with later games 128 bytes could be used to do a lot of stuff.
That's right! I covered this on the original 10 things video.
"End of Line." -MCP from TRON
Nice reference my friend 🙂
Ha. Finally someone watched till the last second and commented on this! Thanks for noticing.
@RetroHackShack I always watch to the very end, to ensure TH-camrs get paid the full amount. I also try to watch the ads in full for the same reason, but some of the ads are irritating.
I love TRON.
What an amazing video!
Thanks!
Cool followup!
Thanks
A Combat bug I discovered ; load an early tank game (non-bouncing shots, can't remember if guided or straight shots - guided I think,) position the gun of one tank into the gap at the back of the other, as close as possible without bouncing out. Then do the smallest rotate with the back one. Ha! With luck you can get a continuous effect. BONUS ; fire a shot from the front one. This is all from memory as a kid, late 70's, so I THINK it's right.
I'll have to check that out.
@@RetroHackShack In fairness, I just noticed allwaizeright9705 posted this same bug 2 weeks ago, so I guess I'm not the only one to discover this. Interesting video, btw, and your previous one. You mentioned switching, I recall F-14 Tomcat used the reset button for some game function, it had to be quick though.
So sad most of those systems were the toast during 70s, 80s, up to late 80s. I am not only pertaining to Atari System but other popular names also. They work perfectly then, and anyone can easily program, without all those brain busting designs and technicalities. So sorry and sad that their wasn't a continued Legacy or comeback. It was fun then, and hanging was lesser unlike those so called Blue You Know What Blue Screen, what a laugh. I miss those golden years. I was a fan of Atari, Commodore, Amiga, Tandy TrS Radio Shack and other later hardware and system. Thank you for posting this. I hope you could also cover other retro stuffs.
Thanks
I've long known the 2600 had 2 sound voices but it blew my mind a couple years ago when I was watching a video of an Atari 2600 game played on an emulator and it was in stereo. Partly because I had never realized that the sound chip output the two voices separately, and partly because I didn't realize my new phone had stereo! Of course, the 2600 combined them into a mono output, and stereo TV wasn't even a thing back then. Consoles with built in speakers were however quite common at the time, and to realize that Atari contemplated stereo is amazing. In retrospect, I do remember observing those speaker slits in the case as a kid.
There was a game with track and field events and we broke a couple joysticks playing them because you ran moving the joystick back and forth. I loved that joystick.
Definitely good for durability.
decathlon is to be played with your fingers fastly, not your fist strongly - this is why a lot of people broke them..... xD
David Crane = GOD
Before Bobby Kotick got his fingers on it and *absolutely gutted it of 100% of its value* Activision was a great game company, and their 2600 titles were reliably the best games in anyone's collection. You could spot the labels from across the room and everyone knew them by the colors.
Cool video.keep up the good work...
Thanks!
Great video,, thank you!
Does anybody remember the magic dot in Adventure? When placed with other objects near a wall you could pass through and see the designers name..
That gives me a whole new respect for Adventure with its easter egg!
Fantastic video. fascinating stuff, thank you! Makes me want to crack a beer and fire up my light sixer...
Thanks!
The Supercharger version of Frogger, at least, is very VERY good.
Yeah. Better than the original 2600 for sure.
Great video. My dad had the starpath super charger. I only remember him playing that Mind Master game.
Yeah. That's a good one.
Fantastic. All the old systems required these workarounds to achive nasic functionality... Oh and no IDE for your code back then.
I have that exact TV. It’s so beautiful. Unfortunately the tube is bad on mine, so I took it out and put some emulator hardware and LCD screen in it.
I remember the chess game! The computer opponent would take upwards of 10 HOURS to make a single move!
I can remember David Crane being used in the advertising for river raid
For nostalgia I read "Racing the Beam" on programming the Atari 2600 a few years ago. I had known nothing about it and everything about it surprised me. I mean surely there was 1K of video RAM or something in there, right? Nope! I never imagined the poor 6502 was busting its ass drawing everything on the screen nonstop with momentary respites during the blanking intervals.
Oops, I've already typed 400 bytes here so I better stop typing.
LOL. This comment would not have run on an Atari 2600. Yeah. I have the book right here next to me. Also, Atari, Business Is Fun.
I have an Atari 800XL that I used when I was in high school in the early 2000s. It has a pause button, but I can't remember any game ever using it.
None of the computers had a pause button. Were you perhaps thinking of the Break key?
Mind you, as computers, the software could make any key a pause key, much like the VCS.
@@slightlyevolved Whoops; it must have been the 'Help' key that I was thinking of - which never did anything.
13:34 Repeatable pseudo-random number sequences weren't "developed" for this purpose. That's just how ALL pseudo-random number generators work. If you seed them with the same value, you get the same "random" number sequence back out. That's what makes them "pseudo" random number generators, and not random number generators.
With the Super Charger, you can hook up a cd Walkman to play those cassette games as in the 90s I believe there was a compilation disc that had all the Super Charger games on it as well some bonus games I believe.
Another sub man.
Thank you
On some of the older games you could create a few screens, along with a double buffered screen. With that you could use colors and pixels for math, scripts, variable, arrays and more. You could even do this with one screen and some over lap on the edges.
That's cool
@@RetroHackShack This stuff is no joke about saving space. It become natural to use the variables the way they said in the video. For one thing a lot of that was done in assembler and that is general practice with assembler. There is a video that shows that pixel trick on the border of the screen, I was waiting for it to come up ...
It's worth noting that there were several games that added additional RAM via the cartridge. From 128 bytes all the way up to 2 kilobytes. So it's not _quite_ true that this system was so limited by RAM. I found a good article named The Secrets to the VCS's Longevity By Scott Stilphen on Atari compedium that goes over this.
Atari did this via a chip called SARA which added 128 bytes, and there's a dozen or so games that use this.
CBS electronics had a special chip called Ram Plus which added 256 byes. I think only three games used this chip.
Mattel apparently had a chip that could add 2kb of RAM, but the only game that used this was burgertime.
Great video,
Thanks!
The Heavy Sixer also had thicker metal shielding around the main motherboard due to the US regulations for accepting and blocking RF (radio frequency) signals. The easiest solution was heavy metal shielding. As regulations for such devices was finalized, lighter shielting was sufficient for the new rules.
Separately, the early joysticks had the word Atari on the top of the sticks to indicate hot to hold the joystick. It's materials were more durable and were consistent with the joystick of Tank in the arcade. The newer ones (part CX-40 versus CX-10 on the original) used lighter, cheaper components and added the word TOP to the sundial , making it easier to know how to handle it. The joystick lost the Atari text and used cheaper plastic to make the internal connections. This was unchanged throughout the 1980s until manufacturing ceased. The Flashback consoles use a simplified design, with the carbon pads and contacts like most controllers since the NES. The stick is hard plastic and unscrews from the base, while the earlier ones were a rubber sleeve over a sturdy stick, with the rubber ribs at the base as a part of the sleeve and assisting with the centering of the joystick. On the FB sticks, the rubber ribbing at the base is cosmetic. The hard sticks have no rubber to make the grip easier.
I was a commodore kid never had a VCS but I remember clearly what you are talking about those OG Atari joysticks carried a premium in my time. If you had one they were worth their weight in GOLD
i originally had a 6-switch wood grain version when it first came out but it went belly-up and then procured one of the "Darth Vader" VCS2600s later on.
I wish I had the broken one. I can't find any that are broken to repair. 😀
Back in my first year of uni with Java, I remember looking at the inefficiency of my code and saying to a second or third year that I wasn’t happy with said inefficiency, they said ‘it doesn’t matter’.
IDKW but I just felt a bit dirty, probably because of my casual knowledge of games, especially retro ones where every byte counts.
Yeah. A lot of folks are going back to C now it seems since it is closer to bare metal.