Watch Movies On Your Atari 2600
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ก.พ. 2024
- That title is not clickbait, it is real. The Atari 2600 finally gets capabilities to play media like movies and television shows. I could easily see this being something Sheldon would do on Big Bang Theory if that show was still going. What is amazing here is, this seems to really work on real hardware.
Read the rest of my article on Hive.blog - hive.blog/hive-140217/@triver...
Please check out the creator of the Movie Cart - / @lodefmode
All my other links - linktr.ee/triverse
Video sources -
Atari 2600 Pac-Man - @worldoflongplays • Atari 2600 Longplay [0...
MovieCart - @lodefmode • Real TV + Atari test - เกม
Feels like the right format to finally watch Morbius
Could you imagine watching classic slashers with this? I think suspense would definitely be heightened.
It would sell a morbillion
It's Morbin Time!!!
Morbillions must watch.
I feel like this would be the only way to watch the hit classic 1989 film, Begotten
From someone whose bedroom tv as a child was a portable black and white television with a 5"ish screen and the antenna duct taped to the cable wire this is perfectly acceptable.
I grew up with a 13 inch black and white TV until a year before I moved out of my parents house. It was 1994 before I saw Asteriods and Missile Command on Atari 2600 in color. I agree with you, I see nothing wrong with this style - heck, I want to get the software setting and start encoding movies and public domain content in this format for people that have this cart and want content for it just to show support for this project.
I also was a part of the "small black and white tv in the bedroom" clan (my beloved rat-ass Philco tv with the messed up and dented bunny rabbit antenna to be precise lol).
All those years of playing games on a black and white TV I thought I was the only one in the world "how mean my parents were" etc 😂
@@RetroGamingMag My parents believed it would ruin 'the good tv'.
Jesus Christ mate THANK YOU!!! My father was convinced that my 2600 and/or Coleco would "ruin the colour tv" in the living room. We had one of those big-ass Zenith tvs that was more furniture than a tv lol@ode
Genuinely almost as amazing as that madman who put doom on a Vic 20
I remember that one. I covered it on a website here - hive.blog/hive-140217/@triverse/vicdoom-comes-to-atari-xl-xe-computers Impressive.
Wow
SegaCD: FMV games are the future!
Atari 2600: Hold my cartridge
I was all about Dracula Unleashed on Sega CD. I wish they would have done more FMV games like that instead of more and more light gun crap.
Thanks for covering my project! It's been alot of fun so far. The audio is in fact generated from the Atari, just like the video. I modulate the 4-bit volume register once per scaline (15 KHz), resulting in not bad sound I'd say. Cheers
You are welcome, thank you for putting all this together and hopefully creating a new angle for fans of the Atari 2600 to find even more enjoyment from the console. Impressive does not begin to convey how cool your work is.
I'm curious, can this be used in gameplay? Theoretically, could this be used to make Dragon's Lair for the Atari 2600?
@@bubbythebear6891 Several people have been asking, and some have started investigating tbh. Technically possible, as it just playing video clips at watching the joystick + switch inputs now. Would require firmware changes.
@@lodefmode Cool! Don't mean to bug you, but could whatever technique you're using to make video appear on the 2600 be used to theoretically play emulators on the 2600? Some guy got the NES to play Doom by putting a Raspberry Pi in the cartridge and intercept the video. I have no idea if what I am saying applies to the 2600, I just thought it would be interesting to play the original arcade versions of games on the 2600.
@@bubbythebear6891 The biggest bottle neck would be encoding the frames. The NES has a lot more freedom in coloring + placing pixels, where this needs frames to be pre-calculated beforehand for the most part. So its fine for pre recorded video clips, but would need some serious horsepower for dynamic content. @andrewdavie386 has some interesting moviecart renderings of a couple arcade clips though. Cheers
I’d like to think there’s an alternate universe where this had a hilariously bad trial run in several markets as a low-cost competitor to VHS and Beta
I think something like this would have found a place in the market, much like it is today, that is niche but still amazed those that saw it in action. Maybe as a store kiosk instructional center advertising products.
I'm sorry.. but If I saw full motion video on the 2600 back in the day I would have lost my shit.
This is amazing that it can actually be done.
I am sure you would not be alone in causing a cleanup in the videogame section had this been done back in the day. Could you imagine literally an Atari 2600 series of videotapes at a lower price than VHS or Betamax tapes? I wonder if it would have taken off?
I know Hitclips and such had moderate success in the late 90's and early 2000's with low resolution media players for kids - in the early 80's I think it would have been far more impactful though.
@@RetroGamingMag Hit clips was a success, but literally EVERYONE already had an Atari somewhere. It would have exploded.
Man, imagine Dragon's Lair on 2600? lol
I was far beyond the age Hitclips was aiming for so most news about it went under my radar. I know I saw it all over Walmart, hanging on the end of aisles, various music and later a few TV shows (stores seemed overrun with Spongebob or NSYNC videos).
This, back in the day, could have easily changed the future of gaming. Dragon's Lair on the Atari 2600 would have been mind blowing and easily a seller for this hardware.
Now you got me wondering if that would be possible with this cart... That would be stupidly amazing, animated/live action Choose Your Own Adventures, on an Atari 2600. 🤯
@@RetroGamingMag Now I'm wondering if the video quality could be increased using the Super Charger.
They could have put videos on cassette tape.
Side note, before I got the 77, I used my Super Charger to run roms on OG hardware.
Ooh, that would indeed be interesting to see if it was possible. I know the information to build your own MovieCart is freely available, maybe someone will take on this task one day? I would love to see it.
Its so wild that we are still pumping every bit of efficiency and effectiveness out of our past gadgets that are long outdated, imagine what future generations will do with our tech....
Honestly, I believe they are able to do things like this with old Atari hardware like this because it is pretty much open to development. I can only imagine what will come of more powerful hardware getting the last bit of power eeked out of it, as best it can anyhow. The more powerful the console, it seems the more locked down the hardware is.
I could see people doing amazing things with other mostly open hardware though - Commodore 64, Intel and AMD chips, etc. Not so much with say, an original PlayStation or Super Nintendo (though I would love to see what could be done).
Not much given global warming will annihilate us
They’ll just port Doom to a PlayStation 5 and make a clickbait video on OnlyFans about it.
@@stringercorrales6627 realest comment
Imagine if they had done this back in 1977, it would have been even MORE mind blowing!
I agree, 100%
I cant even comprehend how this is possible at all, let alone look and sound so good. Some brilliant people out there.
It is amazing what awesome people are able to do. Definitely a wonderful time to be a gaming fan.
It's because memory was a huge limitation on old hardware like this.
Use modern memory sizes and you get magic that would never be possible back in the day.
It's super cool.
Legitimately impressed. Just goes to show you that these machines can still surprise us 40+ years later.
I definitely agree.
Finally, I can watch movies on my Atari 2600. The circle is now complete.
😂😂😂 Talk about a dream we never realized we wanted to come true, coming true.
It can show a whole film? That's pretty impressive! And Westworld is a great movie!
I believe your only restraint on length is your micro SD card size. I could be wrong though.
This and Science Elf's Floppy disk allowing playback of Toxic are very impressive formats of old limits but possibilities being pushed to amazing results. Creative this team. Seen the article, got the TH-cam recommendation.
I don't know enough about this era of PCs and video but its still impressive what can be done (saw the Apple 2 commenter so interesting stuff on such old hardware, probably fair bit rate but understandable aspect ratio and scale/detail for the time).
The subtle colour surprised me I assumed different shades of grey. I know the 2600 does colours but wasn't sure if it was too complex for it with that of video scale even at that size it's playing, some good brightness/audio too.
It truly is amazing what fans with the know how are able to make these classic platforms do. Utterly 1000000% impressive.
Congrats on saying "props" for the first time. It really IS like living in the 80s!!
If you saw the early days of "FMV" or full motion video on platforms like the Apple 2 - this actually seems comparable. Of course those videos were some form of dithered tiles, while this presentation seems to be bands of color. But, it does seem to take up more screen real-estate than was possible with the Apple's FMV.
I doubt this would be possible back in the day even with the software encoding. The memory size required would have probably put you in the poor house even to finance and I assume that there's some form of bank swapping on the "cart" side to stream new bands to the OS ... the "cart" most likely functions in orders of magnitude higher than the clock speed of the system itself (meaning the "cart" is actually acting as a super computer in comparison to the OEM hardware it's "running on".)
I was not aware they were able to pull off FMV on the Apple II, was that back in the day when Apple was marketing that computer? I remember the fanfare when they had, I believe, a Macintosh talking. That seemed so futuristic.
Oh yeah, back in the day, the required memory would be stupidly cost prohibitive. If someone were to attempt this back then, at best we might have gotten a single frame from the movie and even then, it would surely be via a bored computer science student at some university. I just cannot see the average consumer, nor third party game developer of the time, having the hardware and finances to do this.
Still quite impressive. I am wondering if there is a menu system or is it sequential file viewing?
@@RetroGamingMag You're right. I just started looking into the software/programs I thought we had running on the Apple 2 (maybe even the 2GS). I thought the Encyclopedia Britannica was, then later Dinosaur Adventure ... but it turns out those weren't on either platform.
I'm quite sure my memory got blurred with early 486s! Sorry for the confusion (I was still a kid, born in 1980, with a dad that adopted new computers and tech ASAP)!
@@RetroGamingMag Oh, but YES. For sure the Apple 2GS had speech synth and even early audio recording bundled with the Sound Blaster (PRO?)...
And, I think the Apple 2 had something called SAM - (an acronym for Speech Automated Mouth?) that was able to push text to "speech" to the on board speaker (no external hardware needed).
I am right there with you, I was born in 1976 and been gaming since the Pong days. Memory can be faulty sometimes, I know I have stopped making many a piece of content once I researched an angle I KNOW happened but nope, it was bad memories on my part and I lot my angle for what I thought would be a great news story (I refuse to do clickbait).
That is so cool! I never knew they had speech back then like that. I was only exposed to the Apple II line when in middle school in, I believe 1988 to 1990 while in "computer lab" classes. Nowadays, students come home with Chromebooks and Android tablets to do homework on. They will never know the struggle us old timers went through.
This opens a whole new door in the Atari 2600 saga!! Not just video, but games with cutscenes!! And with sufficient advancement, this could play anything from Doom to Dragons Lair. Kudos to the developer!!! Now THIS is preservation done right!!! Thank you for the demo!!
Make sure to check out the developer on his channel - www.youtube.com/@lodefmode Tons of great stuff over there, including getting to hear just how good the MovieCart sounds.
Using Westworld was oddly appropriate, as its "robovision" scenes are often quoted as some of the earliest CG in movies... And it was... Basically just a veeeeeery compressed veeeery low resolution digitized video clip.
I suspect it's inclusion here was very intentional. :)
I did not catch that reference when I chose pieces from the original video for this news piece. Good eye and a really neat piece of trivia. I know the developer of the Movie Cart is active in the comments, hopefully they will drop by and let us know if it was intentional.
@@RetroGamingMag It was intentional! Ironically you can't tell its using the ground-breaking digital effect in those scenes, because *everything* looks course and pixelated :)
This is pretty incredible. I mean, I wouldn't really want to watch movies like this but I can see it being really cool as like, a video effect or filter.
A full movie, yeah, no. Used as an eye catcher at a retro gaming convention? Absolutely. A novelty to blow people's minds as to what the Atari 2600 is capable of now? Absolutely. Fun as all get out? Hell yeah!
Pro-tip: Put this video on 144p and the image from the Atari video doesn't look all that bad. Kind of like a 60s CRT.
I did not think about that, changing the resolution here on TH-cam for a similar experience. I wonder if adding scanlines in a video editor as well as lowering resolution could improve it a bit?
There also are similar video players for the Master System and NES, but this one is probably the most impressive.
Really? I never knew about those, either back in the day or indie developed more recently. I have to look those up. Thanks for the tip!
So happy what has been happening with retro gaming in terms of homebrew stuff, indy devs, digital availability of rare carts etc...
Me too, it is an amazing time to be a fan of retro gaming
Very cool video, keep up the good work, my friend.
All credit needs to go to the creator of this marvel - www.youtube.com/@lodefmode
Sick
Right?!? For what it is running on, this is beyond impressive.
It's running in 2600a resolution!
this would be a cool effect to use in like a music video, or in a retrofuturistic sci-fi movie as maybe a broken transmission from a spaceship or something.
Ooh! That would be a really cool use of this tech, great idea! It would fit so well too!
Gives you those feels of the good old analog days where we would fiddle with rabbit ears trying to get the snow to clear enough to see the cartoon that was preempted for local sports on a second fox affiliate station
Talk about unlocking a memory, those rabbit ears never worked well for me, I grew up in a mobile home with metal siding so the front door had to be open to get any kind of signal. 😂
Yes, I can picture it now. People renting Atari Video Cartridges from your local video store.
I would so own Friday the 13th and Raider of the Lost Ark on an Atari Video Cartridge.
@@RetroGamingMag Only thing comparable to this would be those GBA video cartridges.
The only real way to watch Skinamarink.
A movie cartridge sounds like something in a 70s scifi film set in the distant future of 2009.
Right?!? It just feels futuristic even though it is old.
Very cool to watch a movie from the 70s on a 70s device
I did not even think about that. There is something wholesome about it for sure.
That's impressive, considering even a Super Nintendo didn't have enough power to play a modern MP3 file.
I wonder if someone made an MP3 cart that worked like the MovieCart does, at least how I think the MC works. Feeding just a tiny bit of the MP3 to the SNES CPU/sound chips could understand and easily through out the speakers? Course, then it would not be a "real" MP3, it would be the other format at that point.
This is similar to watching HBO or Starz back in the day when we didn't have a subscription, but you could still sometimes get the audio and some garbled visuals through the scrambler.
I definitely watched X-rated content and saw my first scrambled pixelated nipple with this method.
I think most of us had the cable channels we weren't supposed to be listening to memorized and frantically tapped that channel up button on that tiny cable box when we heard our parents pull up.
No? Just me? 😂😂😂
On an old 14" crt this would probably look pretty good especially because of how much interference the rf output would get.
I agree, an old CRT would definitely blend things giving it a better appearance.
This tech would be neat for making homebrew atari games with full motion cutscenes.
Oh yeah, all those movie licenses would be next level with FMV cutscenes from the movies.
Yeeeaaah!!! This is awesome!!
It definitely is. I am amazed at how well it runs
I want to watch E.T. and Back To The Future this way! This looks so cool!
Oh man, I can only imagine how cool E.T. would look on this. Back to the Future would absolutely rock as well. Ghostbusters and Poltergeist would be mazing as well.
I would watch vintage animated movies this way, myself. Titles like -
Yellow Submarine
Twice Upon a Time
The Point
Felix the Cat: The Movie
Rainbow Brite and the Star Steeler
My Little Pony the movie (1980's)
Care Bears movie
Gumby 1
Jetsons the Movie
Sonic the Hedgehog OVA
FernGully: the Last Rainforest
Raggedy Ann & Andy - A Musical Adventure
Wizards (1977)
The Flight of Dragons
The Last Unicorn
...
Love to see youtube try and copyright ID this
😂😂😂Might be a new way to upload movies, legally of course 🤭
Anyone else getting vibes from back in the day when you tried, REALLY tried to watch the scrambled channels on cable in hopes of catching a glimpse of something that you were not supposed to be watching in the first place? With that said, this pretty impressive. I didn't even think it possible to see ANYTHING other that very simple pixels or hear something other than screeches, beeps and boops out of a 2600.
What was wild about those channels was the sound was perfectly fine. 😂
The graphical prowess of the Atari 2600 is what makes this so much more impressive, I have no idea how they are doing this but I am glad they figured out how to do it.
Of course I want one and am considering converting anime or other lower color cartoons and animated movies to try. What would black and white shows look like and how does one convert a video to play on it? Does it just support AVI or some other format?
I would love to see stuff released during the commercial life of the Atari 2600 encoded - like a re-imagined history as if this was released back then and these TV shows/movies saw release. Black and white is an interesting option, I am curious how the Atari would displya that.
The developer has an encoding instructional video available here - th-cam.com/video/jZnwe9a1FfA/w-d-xo.html
You don't need the cart to create encoding and play them back on a PC emulator (Gopher, and soon Stella) if you're curious what it would look like. I found cartoons didn't encode as well, as the sharp regions of distinct color didn't mesh well with the strict columns of color the moviecart breaks things into. Black+white is okay, and is actually supported by the 'b/w color' switch on the 2600 during playback.
Thank you for the heads up on how cartoons come out, a shame as I would love to see classics like Thundarr the Barbarian playing on this, or Johnny Quest or Visionaries. That is even better news about black and white content - there is an abundance of public domain content that is black and white classics that would probably help create an even stronger retro vibe.
this is amazing we finally watch shrek
It gives me *Atari Video Music* vibes.
How much module ram it need ? Can guess it need much ram and ram was very expensive in 1977 like bytes not terrabytes.
Back in the day, this would have been impossible. A 5 megabyte hard drive in 1980 was $1,500 - archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-12/page/n384/mode/1up
That is over $5,600 in 2024 money. It would clearly be cost prohibitive for the consumer but for entertainment studios, stores looking for advertising measures, etc, it would have been a taste of the future and get people talking as who else would have this?
Finally something to take advantage of its large color pallet.. but what about the sound? Is this really running off of the systems sound chip, or any of the system's hardware? Or is the cartridge doing the work?
This is wild
Intellivision can't produce enough colors for this but I'd like to see it try
I intentionally left sound out in hopes viewers would head over to the creators channel - www.youtube.com/@lodefmode and show him some amazing support for this.
I would love to see any new developments on these classic consoles, let alone FMV based stuff. It all blows my mind sometimes.
Should try this on an old smallish CRT and see how the quality changes
Ooh, good idea, I bet it would improve a bit, maybe add in stepping back a bit from the TV to help.
I would watch Shrek on the Atari 2600.
Make a cart that has a modern android processor in it, this as the output to the display, then you can pretty much do anything with it, load youtube etc.
I saw a video the other day showing someone having put a Raspberry Pi into a NES cart to play Doom. It was impressive but it didn't seem as big an accomplishment to me as, say, a Doom-like running on the NES hardware itself.
This is still limited by the Atari 2600 hardware, it is not bypassing the console but passing along the encoded media at a rate the console can understand/display.
I am not saying anything bad at the Doom thing, I don't know the inner workings of how they did it, I just know it has a ton of assistance to make those things happen.
Wow, a first-generation 2600 with the curved corners! Peace.
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time
Right? Freaking amazing. Please go check out the full video and the other content by the creator when you get a chance. He has a lot of great content around the Movie Car available.
www.youtube.com/@lodefmode
So, the video playback is processed by Atari 2600 CPU right? Not another ARM computer connected to the cartridge slot?
No ARM computer in the cart, I believe there is a data controller sending just the right amount of data at just the right time for the Atari to display it properly.
The video must be encoded properly before loading onto an SD card though (check out the creators TH-cam channel - www.youtube.com/@lodefmode for more detailed information on how this is done).
I bet that looks *much* better in a CRT
Oh yeah, for sure. Especially one from the 80's, I bet this would look even more impressive.
That's incredible.
Hell yeah it is. I am still floored at what the creator has been able to do here.
OK... now who''s going to make the Atari 2600 Dragons Lair port?
That would be freaking awesome if it could be done
This is unbelievable!
I agree, it blew me away when I saw it in action.
Finally get to watch Tenet on my Atari 2600
Heck yeah!
First thought: Dragon's Lair port.
Have you seen the one on the Ti-99/4a? It's beyond impressive and apart from the cartridge size, requires nothing that couldn't have been done back when the system (and my first computer) was contemporary
I believe another TH-cam creator, @andrewdavie386 has uploaded a short video showing Dragon's Lair using the Movie Cart - th-cam.com/video/wLDmmKBWWkc/w-d-xo.html
It is a recording, not interactive, but still impressive to see how animation could look.
For us non-technical people all of this is super impressive. To some it is simple, to others, it is magic and fun.
Next Console for Full Motion Video the NES.
I would love to see that, with MMC add-ons, the NES was quite capable of many interetsing things.
Back in the day if this would have ben a thing just think how many billions it would have made
Oh I agree, this would have definitely been a game changer for Atari, even if they weren't the ones to create this cart. Just having this on their console would be enough to make people take notice and potentially want an Atari 2600.
*2600 + something to try it on!!* 💡
I wonder if it would be compatible. Video quality would probably not improve much as the video is being encoded a certain way but it will be cool to know if this was compatible.
Unfortunately the 2600+ is just a rom dumper (grabs 4k off the cart and emulates). Wouldn't work in this case as the moviecart streams hundreds of megabytes of data using careful bankswitching. But there's some talk of hack the 2600+ to act 'live' just like a real Atari, so maybe!
Interesting, WestWorld on the atari 2600.
Right?!? www.youtube.com/@lodefmode Has other content shown, he is the creator of this bad boy.
Holy shit that's impressive!
Took the words right out of my mouth there 😂
how's it even possible that how old TH-cam is no ones used that name for a channel yet when there's countless retro gaming channels?
There are so many wonderful names for channels still available that no one has taken yet. Especially in the retro gaming community.
pretty amazing
I agree 👍
Very cool, seems like it buffers alot less than youtube!
Right? Here lately, TH-cam has been buffering A LOT for me.
Someone should use the tech to port Dragons Lair / Space Ace / Road Blaster! 😜
That would be absolutely amazing if it was possible. I have given up saying imposible with regard to the Atari 2600 at this point.
Wonder if displaying it on an old CRT would make it look better.
I am sure it would. CRT's hid so much making things look better than they really were, things digital TVs display in your face with sharp pictures.
Has anyone tested this with the colecovision adapter that lets you play most atari carts?
Ooh, that would be interesting to know. As of right now, I do not think anyone has, if they have they have not discussed, or posted, results.
It worked on a friends with no issues that I could see.
geenuinely shocked the test movie wasn't shrek
I am out of the loop on why Shrek would be used. Mind filling me in?
@@RetroGamingMag short answer: it's a meme. long answer: it's a meme, and the intro sequence is iconic in general
Thank you, I agree the intro is iconic, I somehow have missed the meme though 😂
This is so cursed…I love it! 😎
Someone load up the Exorcist on this or an 80s slasher!
Haven't been this impressed since seeing Dragon's Lair on a TI-99/4A. But in a way this is dumb. Your TV is right there. Why watch TV through a device which makes the image so much worse? But for proof of concept, amazing.
I had to look up the Dragon's Lair on TI-99/4A when I remembered covering it on the website we had for Retro Gaming Magazine. This is not watching TV via the Atari 2600 but I understand what you mean - there are other means to enjoy the content in better quality. The same could be said for Dragon's Lair on TI-99/4A too though - a few bucks and you can play a near perfect, visually, port on your phone, why bother playing it on an old computer with worse graphics? It is a novelty that some will get more mileage out of than others.
I love seeing these projects, showing older hardware still has something to give to fans.
Hilarious! I love it!
It is pretty damn impressive. I can see people's jaws dropping seeing this in action.
Hey! That's a heavy sixer!
Good eye there!
@RetroGamingMag I got one too. I saw a 2600 at goodwill for ten bucks. Almost walked past cuz I didn't really want a 6th 2600. Yours is better. My woodgrain is pretty rough.
@@dripfreefpv9695 Oh no, that is not my Atari, that is video from www.youtube.com/@lodefmode I edited and did the voice over for the video to raise awareness of this amazing creation.
Making a puppet master 2600 game using the film for cut scene
That would be an interesting development if it could be done. I would love to see FMV cut scenes in Atari 2600 games, especially before GTA 6. 😂
So.... Dragon's Lair 2600 When?
Oh man, that would be simply amazing if it was possible. I wonder if there is a menu option for this? If so, games like Dragon's Lair could be a possibility.
@@RetroGamingMag I mean in theory, since the movie cart can handle simultaneous playback of the source and controller input (as demonstrated with the control for brightness and volume), then it should be doable to make a port of the game to at least some degree.
Interesting.
Right?!?
I got the same tv :)
My 10 year old self is going insane just imagining how much fun this would have been
Oh man, back in the day, this would have been even more shocking to see in action. Could you imagine walking into a Sears, K-Mart, or Montgomery Ward and seeing this running?
@@RetroGamingMag
People would be blown away!!
I want to watch Toys-Ŕ-Us Christmas commercials on it!! 😆
I could easily see this being used for in store promotions more than consumer level sales.
like, an entire movie?
I believe the only constraint on length of the video is your SD card. I could be wrong but that is how I understand everything I have seen so far.
@@RetroGamingMag An Atari can read an SD card?!?
I don't think it can read directly, I believe the creator mentioned in a reply elsewhere in these comments that the video feed is fed to the the Atari rather than the Atari reading the SD card directly.
seems very obsolete to me. but i bet youtube will eat this up because thats how attention spans are today.
With consideration of more modern options to watch movies, yeah, it is obsolete. That was never the intention here, I don't think. This is more a novelty, a "can it be done" then doing it kind of thing.
Like porting Halo to the Atari 2600 - it is a novelty and there is a core group that would enjoy it.
How long is the movie?
Do you mean how long of a movie can this play? I believe that is only limited by your micro SD card and other storage limits.
Westworld 1973
The creator made a great choice with that one to show the MovieCart off.
What movie is that?
Westworld
are yee focken keedeen mee
😂😂😂 I had to pick my jaw up off the floor to write the article and make this video 😂😂😂
I would probably watch good old Animanicas or play Nintendo 64 lol on that lol.
Playing N64 might be a rough attempt, this is not a live video option though you could watch some N64 gameplay videos on this bad boy - really mess with your friends. 😂
... this looks stupid and dumb and I love it...
😂😂😂 Ran the gamut in one comment 😂😂😂
Yeah, no. I'll stick with my DVD player.
This is definitely a novelty item. Quite cool to show that one person we all know that knows EVERYTHING that the Atari 2600 can do.
Someone HAS to travel back to 1983, and salvage Atari by putting this glorious piece of tech onto one of the developers’ laps!
Probably get burned at the stake for this witchcraft 😂😂😂
@@RetroGamingMag Nah, man. It was the late '70's/early '80's. It wasn't the time of the Salem Witch Trials in 1619.
I know, just making a joke about how programmers back then might have perceived this kind of accomplishment.
Could you imagine how it might change the direction of gaming though? Depending on time frame we are talking, it could have major ramifications on the direction gaming would take.
Could you imagine a world without Activision, or Bushnell not selling out to Warner for capital? So much disruption could occur if this was taken back then.
I will take off my Harry Turtledove hat now. 😂
@@Gecko1993HogheadIncOfficial/whoosh
Those vertical lines are the reason why analog video tape is the only choice to watch video during Atari console era.
Tech wasn't ready for all digital video back then.
Ehhh...this is the same as "I PLAY DOOM ON A TI-34!" And then you find out somebody gutted a TI-34 and stuffed it with modern hardware
Actually, it would be tantamount to to the Doom running on a NES cart where they put a Raspberry Pi in the NES cart to handle the major workload. That is what is done here, they did not gut the Atari 2600 and replace it with modern parts, this cart works with the original Atari 2600, even back to original models from what I have seen from others. This is literally running within the limitations of the originalhardware.
You are talking about replacing the original hardware, which again, was not done here. This is like Nintendo adding a Super FX chip to make Star Fox run, still has to operate within the confines of the original hardware in many respects.
Finally, we can get Homestar Runner on Atari.
Hardware accelation inside cardridge whatever.
Thanks for swinging by
"I could easily see this being something Sheldon would do on Big Bang Theory if that show was still going." - I certainly agree with *that* ...
This peripheral should've been made by Atari themselves back in the *really early* 1980's, around 1981...
If only they could have done this back in the day. The programming prowess and hardware stuff just wasn't available back then. I imagine it would have changed the direction of gaming had it been something theey could have done though. It would have had to be done with either cassette tapes or VHS to store the media as digital would not have been possible (cost alone would have been prohibitive).
Westworld noice
The developer made a great choice for sure.
This time... this time humanity has gone TOO FAR... we reached for the stars, only to be cast back down...
😂😂😂 This is probably the best tech to send into space, it is so dependable. Imagine being on a multi billion dollar space ship, waking up and the only way to watch movies is on an Atari 2600.
Honestly, I'm not too impressed. Nothing to do with the video quality - just that it's 100% modern technology in that cart.
No way a 1970s cart could do that with a max of 64kb of rom available (with bank switching). Even 144p video in the most compressed format possible uses a bandwidth of ~300kbps=less than 2 seconds of 'video' on a 64kb cart (~37kb/s). And that's assuming zero space for all the code to get that to run.
True, it is nothing more than modern tech in the cart but it is still running within the limitations of what the Atari 2600 can do as far as processing that data.
It is on par with adding more memory as prices came down with all platforms that used cartridges. The same as using MMC add-ins on the NES and Super FX chips on the SNES, it was modern (for the time) tech inside that cartridge but they all still had to work within the limitations of the hardware they plugged into. Same here.
You are looking at it as this option but limited by early memory constraints on the cartridges. That would be tantamount to saying Super Mario Bros 3 was not impressive because it used more memory in the cart than that of the average NES game at launch.
Sorcery....
Right?!?
Ok so the Atari 2600 of all things looked over at the IBM PC running real-time video and figured "I can do that too"...despite the fact that it is literally more primitive than every other computer in existence?!
It's simplicity is a great factor in most of the amazing things we have seen done with the Atari 2600. No OS, working directly with the silicon saves a lot of processes and such, overhead, computers deal with.
Simply amazing regardless. What a time to be a retro gaming fan.
@@RetroGamingMag forget working directly with the silicon, if I remember how that system works correctly, it has to assemble the video frame using precision timed 6502 assembly code. I don't think the Z80 could easily do that.
Programming, beyond a generic "Hello World" is beyond my understanding though I love seeing what others can accomplish with "limited" hardware like the Atari 2600. I know the 2600 is finicky but in the right hands, can do amazing things.
The inventor would have been a billionare in the 70's.
Could you imagine how this would have changed the direction of gaming?
@@RetroGamingMag That, and the movie rental industry as well. It's hard to say with this style of technology, if it would have been cheaper or more expensive to transfer a movie to a cartridge than a VHS or Beta tape.
Oh man, I didn't even think about the movie rental business. VCRs were not yet prevalent in homes in either format (Beta or VHS) in the late 70s to early 80s so this could disrupt more than one industry.
@@RetroGamingMag I think it would be a good thing for people who spent their money on the 2600 who would have to save again for a tape playing video system.
I believe I mentioned Hitclips in the video, if this was released back in the day, and the price was lower and more affordable, I think it would have been a hit with consumers (regardless of picture quality as TVs back then were not "great"). Done right, this could have decimated Beta and VHS (laserdisc, CED, VideoDisc, etc weren't ever really competition anyhow).
It's not amazing, it's rebuilt..
Tartaria?
The first thing I thought was WHAT!! The second thing I thought was WHAT!! Then I thought, I want one.
You have summed up the reaction I had when I saw this for the first time. 😂
What I would’ve given for this encoding software back in the day!
How would you have spent your millions if you had it back in the day? This is mindblowing today but back in the early 80's or later 70's this could have been Earth shattering.
@@RetroGamingMag oh I’m really not a capitalist at heart. I would’ve been over the moon to just watch movies through my Atari 😆