A game that has a special place in my memories. The console, Combat and Space Invaders were the family Christmas present 1980. My mother became addicted to Space Invaders and was sitting up at night playing it until my father got sick of the noise and disconnected the electricity at the mains one night
Just looking at what the homebrew community has achieved with the VCS/2600 is pretty amazing, champ games pushing the system with the games he releases. Then you have all the others that have done the same. Just check out "wen hop"
Indeed, the homebrew community has pushed the VCS/2600 well past what most thought its limits was, Just check out wen hop, and lord of Biscay as example.
Not only was it a huge challenge, but the tools that were available for game development on the system back then amounted to not much more than some graph paper and a calculator!
What a real miracle was just how much better the games got over time. You should see the modern homebrew Mappy game. But even back then, games just got better and better looking and playing. Compare the original Video Pinball to Midnight Magic released a few years later. The Atari games got MUCH, MUCH better than the Intellivision games did over time. Same with the Colecovision and frankly even the NES. The difference between the early NES games and the late NES games is much smaller than the difference between early 2600 games and late ones. The 2600 is unique in game consoles in a peculiar way. It is a real time computer. Plus the way the screen is drawn allowed for huge upgrades in graphics.
@@tarstarkuszVery true, and it makes sense because as time goes on, programmers learn more ways to take advantage of each system's hardware sometimes in ways unforeseen by the original hardware designers. The 2600 demonstrates this extremely well because its design was so open. That is, it already required much more from the programmer in the first place to tell it where to draw what for each scanline (no video memory to speak of) and this "limitation" became its saving grace in the end. Scene coders have REALLY pushed hardware to the Nth level. As you say, "Mappy" for the 2600 is amazing, as is Donkey Kong VCS and Pac-Man 8K: - 2600 Mappy: th-cam.com/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=oQCJDZzLVQ41W7WR - 2600 Donkey Kong (homebrew): th-cam.com/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IV1dC0eVNcUSaMqc - 2600 Pac-Man 8K (homebrew): th-cam.com/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=jmOvzo4oIIghppjh BONUS: Here's Todd Frye, the programmer of the original Atari 2600 Pac-Man admiring the homebrew version: th-cam.com/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Bhr9KdSUbK3lcPQ8
@@JustWasted3HoursHere To be fair, Mappy has a processor on it that could probably emualate a 2600. OTOH, no other system would ever benefit from that chip the way the 2600 does. A lot of the 2600's CPU cycles are used in the kernel drawing the screen. I believe it is only about 40% of the cycles are actually available to run the logic of the game during the period where the beam reaches the last line of the graphics and when the line returns back to the first scanline.
Something else to keep in mind that the speed-up behavior of the aliens had to be intentionally coded into the game in this version. In the arcade version it was a side effect of how inefficient the hardware was at moving all those aliens around without hardware sprites; the more of them you killed, the faster it could move around what was left. On the Atari, it was already possible to move them all at max speed, and precise timing was required to draw them at all, so you needed to dedicate some of the ROM to a routine that would count the surviving aliens and adjust the speed accordingly.
Something that's always made me laugh is that the QBasic Nibbles that Microsoft published uses a for loop to 1000 as a delay to slow down the game. When I tried to use it on my computer at home, as opposed to the dinosaurs we had at school, it ran so fast as to be unplayable. I fixed it to use the timer function instead and adjusted the amount of delay dynamically, and it was unplayable on the school computers because of how slow it was to check the timer function in a loop, yet ran perfectly at home.
I read the Aliens speeding up was a bug due to less processing required for less Aliens but Taito noticed it made the game more exciting so they left the bug in. With all that empty space they could have easily fixed the bug but they certainly made the right choice letting them speed up.
@@anon_y_mousse There was literally a button labeled turbo and if you pushed it the game would have played perfectly fine. Unlike a car where turbo speeds up the machine on a computer turbo slows it down. Unless you got very unlucky and you had one of the rare computers that actually were the opposite way around but you know.
I never really thought about it before, but when you think about the number of things the game had to keep track of (especially the destructible bases), how to fit all of that into 128 bytes had to have been a serious challenge. Even keeping a score is an achievement on that hardware.
Yep! And the hardware designers had to fight management to even get that! They originally wanted the system to have only 64 bytes. The numerous ways that game designers found to "cheat" the hardware and do things that the designers had never envisioned, are really impressive. The system's limitations actually became its saving grace because it made the system extremely flexible. Game creators like David Crane ("Pitfall!") figured out how to do lots of things that didn't seem possible.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yeah it's pretty crazy. We take all this for granted today because we have dozens of gigabytes of RAM and VRAM, and terabytes of storage. For all the flak it gets, ET was a seriously damn impressive game on that hardware. It wasn't the reason for the video game crash, Atari just happened to produce double the number of carts as there were 2600's, expecting to literally double their install base overnight. That was unfathomly stupid, I don't care how good the game was they still would've had to throw out a lot.
@@StormsparkPegasusI think the game can be quite frustrating at first, if you haven't learned the method to easily get out of those darn pits! And I believe that is a large part of the reason that people say it is "terrible". If you fall into a hole, if you push the joystick up immediately E.T. will stop falling and you save time. Once you are out of the hole (the "above ground screen" is showing) move left or right ONLY until you are clear of the hole and you are good to go. Mastering this will make the game a lot more fun to play, but still a challenge.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Try playing that game with a Sega Genesis controller and it's 100x easier. Most of the issues with games like that on the 2600 were due the awful controller.
@@StormsparkPegasusInteresting! Yeah, that original Atari controller is extremely rugged, but also a wrist breaker after hours of playing. The Colecovision controller is worse though, IMO. It's kind of funny, if you think about it, that so many consoles and computers decided to adopt the Atari's controller port configuration and that they can work without modification: C64, Vic-20, Amiga even! And others too.
4:40 It's hard to do space invaders justice on any modern screen or system. It had booming analog sound only really capable of being reproduced in an arcade cabinet. But the real trick is the pepper's ghost trick of the machine. The space invaders are very ghost like and superimposed on a physical drawing. The pepper's ghost aspect is responsible for this. There is a new handheld of the space invaders arcade cabinet that reproduces the trick with a pepper's ghost trick built into the cabinet.
Without reading your comment until just now, I commented on the exact same things. The Atari version was good..........for an Atari cartridge, but still inferior to the original arcade game from 1978. Some of the later versions like arcade "Silver anniversary" edition of the early 2000s was no where near the audio/visual magic of the arcade game.
This was one of the first games we got with our first 2600 in 1982 (along with Pac-Man and Defender). Truly a great port which did not lose the essence of the original.
I bought Pacman for it and don't remember being overly disappointed with it. Too young and not as cynical as I am today to realise the company pencil necks might have had anything to do with it 😂
1:10 Actually, the game combat had a similar earlier game that was part of a pong-on-a-chip included in several pong machines. Breakout is another example of pre-gen 2 games released by Atari itself. They (Atari) also released a hard coded version of Stunt Driver in a dedicated motorcycle jumping game. There were also driving games in the first generation pong-on-a-chip dedicated games machines. But where I think Atari excelled in their 2nd gen 2k games was the sheer variety these games offered. This became less and less prevalent over the 2600's lifespan. Where early games had sometimes over 100 variations of a single game, late 2600 games often had only 1 variation and not even a 2nd player was available. This drive for game variation is one of the things that held back the pac man port. To have a 2 player pac man, serious downgrading of the game became necessary. When player 2 is playing, player 1's screen configuration along with score, level, lives remaining and other things must be kept in RAM. This is why the awesome new versions of Pac Man for the 2600 do not offer a 2nd player option or any other options.
Notice how the later port of Ms. Pac-Man is strictly single player, and it's CONSIDERABLY more faithful to the source material... And actually fun to play, too.
@@video-luver769 The "Progressive" variation of Super Breakout is another one without a second player option because of memory limitations. Super Breakout is a lot of fun, especially the progressive variation, which is game 7 IIRC. The bars start moving their way down the screen. That means that you would need a whole bitmap of the screen saved while the other player was playing.
I suppose that in between you not being used to holding an object for so long (and probably very hard as the fever grips you and you get really into the game) and older controllers not being very ergonomically designed, things were bound to get crampy? Because that's my memory from the console of my childhood, the NES.
Nice video, that’s for making it. Couple of thoughts, firstly the 2k of blank ROM in the space invaders arcade might just be empty addressing space but there were no actual ROM chips corresponding to those addresses. Because of the need to separate chips in powers of 2 of addressing space. And secondly, the concept of lives maybecame across from pinball, as I think that is also where the terms 1UP and 2UP came from.
You almost had it right. The Atari 2600 TIA chip has registers for sprite attributes. Each sprite had its own set. One of them allowed you to make up to 3 copies of a sprite on one line. This was used to get 6 aliens on one line for two sprites.
Anyone else get aggravated at that awful Space Invaders gameplay? Who leaves the exterior sides for last? Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Re-using "sprites"/player objects horizontally is a hardware feature of the VCS hardware. It can make two or three copies of a player object on a line with a few options for how much empty space is shown between each object. Yeah, Space Invaders was the killer app for consoles at the time. It was epic. I probably invested a whole year of my time that should have been used doing homework.
I was actually done with a hack to retrigger the spites each time. The built in sprite multiplying wouldn't have quite worked to allow all sprites to be shot down individually.
COMBAT itself showed one of the issues with repeating the player sprite -- there were several modes which gave one (or both) players a formation of three vehicles, but on close inspection it was easy to tell it was really just the same sprite rendered 3 times.
If they had used a 1 frame flicker they could have had the original amount of invaders on screen. It's also possible to change the color of the different rows of aliens, and to have all 4 bunkers. It would have been more complicated to program, but I'm guessing that it was released this way because of a time limit imposed on the programmers. It would have been nice if there was a re-release a couple years later.
@@Sharopolis Although the hack you refer to is a valid possibility (the RESPx trick), nobody was thinking along those lines in 1980 and it was first demonstrated in the _Galaxian_ port years later. The aliens in the 1980 port were drawn using the repeat options, and these were reconfigured and horizontally offset as needed to account for killed aliens. You can pick from several different patterns, from doubling to tripling a given sprite, and one final "fat" sprite version. Many simple games abused this convenient tweak to achieve easy patterns in sprite formation, with _Combat_ and _Journey Escape_ being good examples. This is also why there are only six aliens per row-at the time, this was understood to be the max available from the two "player" sprites.
I've always wondered that too, especially since Atari only has literally two sprites, player 1 and player 2 (not counting ball/missile, because it's not really a sprite, just a rectangle you can change the size of).
It would be interesting to see what those guys would have been able to come up with if they'd had access to today's resources. I feel a lot of today's developers and programmers have become lazy. As the saying goes "necessity is the mother of invention".
Space invaders, Asteroids, and Missile Command were my favorite 2600 arcade ports. I can't even imagine how many hundreds of hours I logged playing them.
These were games I grew up with. Space Invaders got tons of play time in my house. My first game was Air-Sea Battle, but Space Invaders was the first one I got hooked on. There was a time when "Space Invaders" was a slang term for all video games (usually used by adults). Another interesting fact is that it was the first game with increasing difficulty as it played on. As you play and eliminate the aliens, they get faster and faster. That last one moved so fast that things got tense, then when you finally got it, you breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The Atari Logbook expected you to get a high score on invisible mode: 4500, then 6700, then 9000. I could beat several invisible levels in a row, but not enough times to beat their high score. My best is 7150.
Nice video, and here's a trick: hold down the Reset switch at the same time you power on the Atari. Now, release the Reset switch, and you immediately start playing Game 1, but with double firepower! You can have two missiles in flight at the same time! This is an example of a bug (an uninitialized variable controlling who's player turn it is to shoot the missile) cleverly becoming a killer Easter Egg.
It's too bad nobody thought to use that for say the extra-wide cannon. Next time I saw something like that was in Galaga when you get your captured ship back.
Really interesting. I saw interviews with the original VCS devs and they were saying how astonished they were when Rick Maurer showed them his version. A pity that Rick seems to have disappeared.
When i was a kid I always thought the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders was the actual version. Its still an amazing game and one the first to have 2 player co-opt play where both players are working together.
This game was probably the transition from Atari (and consoles) being a 2-player game machine, to 1-player games. The co-op modes sound like they thought they had to have both players do something at the same time instead of taking turns. They still couldn't give up taking turns for Pac-Man in 1982 which took RAM space to hold the other player's score and dots on the map to the detriment of making a better game for just one player.
Small clarification: you only have to position the objects once per frame so long as they're not being repositioned. Thankfully because you basically eat a line for full positioning of a single object. Once you properly time shift the object state machine it goes on drawing again one full scanline later repeatedly, maintaining the same offset each line.
The 2K of "empty space" in the original Invaders ROM was used for testing code during development. It was removed in the commercial ROMs though. It did waste a lot of video RAM though. The game could be written using a tilemap (I've done it) so would only need 1K of tilemap RAM, plus a small custom buffer for the destructible bases, saving a lot of money on the old machines. An interesting fact is that the game has no random elements at all - it's all deterministic. Even the alien bombs (positions, and bomb type), and saucers are determined by the player position, player shots fired, and number of remaining invaders during the game.
Another great vid! I never realized how difficult it was to bring arcade games to the ATARI 2600. Our first home game console was actually the Intellivision.
Intellivision seemed to have its own problems. There was something funny about making A.I. for a computer player, so the sports games didn't have a 1-player option. Also, a video I just watched suggested it had trouble with action games, but they got AstroSmash to work. Apparently, the Atari license for Space Invaders wasn't comprehensive, so other systems could make their own versions as long as they didn't call them "Space Invaders." Intellivision's was Space Armada, although over a year later. Still, one wonders how things would have been different if Mattel's Intellivision launched in 1980 with a licensed Space Invaders as its packed-in game instead of Black Jack & Poker. Maybe Atari would have retired the VCS and launched another system of the same level as their computers, but earlier and more successfully? Mattel then missed their chance to get another killer app, or must-have game: Pac-Man.
I got the Atari Logbook which said to play that variation to beat their challenge scores of 4500, 6700, then 9000. I could beat a few waves but not enough to beat the top score challenge, with my best being 7150.
The most impressive thing is the bases. The aliens are just using a feature that let you duplicate a player 3 times. This is a feature I wish they kept for the Atari 800 series, which was my first computer. The fundamental difference between “Player Missile” graphics and normal sprites is Atari Players are effectively the height of the screen. On the 800 each player used 256 byte of ram, and you moved up and down by copy the character data to a different vertical position. On the 2600 you wrote directly to a shape register for each player on a line by line basis. I think it would keep that value until you changed it, so you could write an 8 bit pattern at the top of the screen and it would make a stripe from that scan line til you cleared it. Each 3 columns sets of aliens is effectively just one player, using the built in features in the Stella chip. The aliens could be read directly from the cartridge rom. And only had to be read once per line for each player. You just told the Stella chip to duplicate the sprite and updated the dup register the turn off aliens that died. The bases had to use some of that precious 128 bytes of ram. Which was unusual for 2600 games.
Truly awesome console at the time. Lost many an hour playing Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Dig Dug and Galaxian on the Woody, well into the mid 80s 👍🏼
My Atari came with Centipede, which was also a pretty impressive port! Space Invaders was the first game I got for it, and I spent hundreds of hours playing it. What you didn't mention wasn't just how impressive it was, but how smooth it ran too.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 People say Millipede is really good, but after getting Centipede I didn't feel the need for Millipede, which I never played in the arcade. I wanted Star Gate even though I had Defender, but never got that one either. They came out with the Trakball controller which worked for the computers, but the Atari 2600 games weren't set up for it.
@sandal_thong8631 Centipede is way behind Millipede. Millipede has more enemies, bonus rounds, and the TNT dynamite explosions. It's far more advanced than it's predecessor and faster.
I always felt they did a fantastic port of this game. It took me awhile to actually own the cartridge. I'd go down to a friend's house down the street and play. The two player versions were really welll done too. To this day I still love playing it.
My first Console was the intellivision in 1981 but we did get a 2600 in 1982 and our favorite 2600 games were Asteroids, Missile Command then my cousin who had over 100 games gave me Dragonfire which instantly became my favorite. Dragonfire was also ported to Intellivision and Colecovision but they weren't as good. The 2600 was capable of displaying more colors on screen at the same time then either Intellivion or Colecovision so the treasures in the Dragon Treasure room were much much nicer.
We already had an Atari that we may have gotten that Christmas when we saw Space Invaders at the store. I think I was allowed to get that and Dodge 'Em for my birthday. The Atari Logbook Challenge says to play with invisible aliens and score 4500, 6700, then 9000. My best is 7150.
If you are going to do any more arcade Space Invaders stuff in future running in MAME remember to NOT use the Midway version because the player ship fire sound is broken due to an inability by emulation developers to understand how the real hardware works which uses poorly written discrete audio coding that does not create the correct fire sound. For an alternative use one of the b/w versions that supports samples or if you want to show the later color version use the Taito sicv version which is correct and also uses samples. You will need to get the separate sample file otherwise there won't be any sound at all. The discrete audio issue in Midway Space Invaders has been there for around 15 years and is unlikely to be fixed any time soon as almost no one knows anything about coding discrete audio circuits.
The empty ROM space is probably to do with the fact ROMs would've been either 1kbit, 2kbit, 4kbit or 8kbit and would need to be present in groups of 8. If the game was more than 4kbytes in size, you'd need 8x8kbit ROMs giving you 8kbytes of ROM and whatever wasn't used would just be left blank.
It uses 4 16kbit rom chips and two of them have 8 kbits blank in each, but yeah it's the same thing. I didn't really want to go into speculative detail in the video, but I'm sure you're right.
@fattomandeibu You're mixing up kbits and kbytes because you clearly don't understand what they are. 1kbit is 128 bytes (the same amount of RAM in the A2600). 8kbit is 1024 bytes or 1kByte.
@@Sharopolis Not quite accurate. The real arcade uses 6x 1kByte mask ROMs and the ROMs are memory mapped. There's no blanks in the middle. Those blank areas are actually not populated ROM sockets on the board. There are 3 ROMs, then 2 spaces then 3 more ROMs. ROMs with blank areas in the middle are hacks for use when converting a real board to use 2716 EPROMs. I know this because I just documented repairing 5x Space Invaders boards and converted them to use EPROMs. The 2kB blank area in the ROM images is to allow for 2x 1kB ROMs that are not populated on the real board.
It's crazy how even such a simple game like this pushed the 2600 well past its limits. Really puts into perspective how absurd it's lifespan was and how much more powerful systems like the colecovision really were. Especially since the 2600 barely had access to any sort of enhancement chips that helped other systems like the nes maintain their comparably impressive lifespans
In 1987 Activision filed a patent for the Display Processor Chip or DPC. It was a full 10 years after the console was released. The chip greatly improved the audio to 3 channels (plus drum) but sadly it came out so late only one game used it Pitfall: Lost Caverns. What wild is Pitfall II was much better in graphics, gameplay and music than Super Pitfall on NES. So heads up Atari 2600 could beat the NES if the 2600 used the DPC Chip. But again sadly it was too little too late.
@Wallyworld30 while pitfall 2 is awesome and very impressive I really don't think it would have been impossible to do on the nes or that the dpc puts it ahead of the other consoles even default capabilities
7:48 The arcade version had 64 times as much RAM as the Atari VCS, not 8 times as much (8192 bytes / 128 bytes). Later on you say that the arcade version had 1k of "work RAM", so maybe that's what you meant, which actually is 8 times as much memory. The VCS's limitations were also what gave it its extreme flexibility and some pretty impressive things could be done in the right hands.* Rick Maurer, the programmer of the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders, had actually been working on his own version of the game on his own without Atari's knowledge and had it mostly working when the news came that arcades were massively cashing in on the craze for this game. Atari executives decided to get in on the action and became the first company ever to license an arcade game for a home market. It ended up quadrupling the sales of the console. Here's Rick talking about this: th-cam.com/video/UTDUB_GiTKA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=m5VOY9xklyqE2tcp&t=497 * Some examples of games that far exceeded what the hardware designers thought might be possible include: - The homebrew version of Pac-Man, called "Pac-Man 8K": th-cam.com/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=myotmIjKwqaFfjb2 - Homebrew Donkey Kong VCS: th-cam.com/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Nv9-eeH2SS6FhvrE - Homebrew Mappy: th-cam.com/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=KuthwzCGv70Ugxbp
Good catch! Yeah I confused myself there in talking about the VRAM and the general purpose RAM. The total amount is of course 64 times more. I haven't done a video about Atari 2600 homebrew yet, but it's one my list of things to do definitely.
@@Sharopolis When you do, be sure to show off the extremely impressive Space Invaders version that came with the Atari Flashback X that is a near identical port of Taito's color version. i.e. th-cam.com/video/TB1m9rRxD1M/w-d-xo.html
@@SharopolisRetro gaming in general is really popular right now, so a video on the homebrew scene would be great! I think the reason it's so popular right now is because the kids of the late seventies and early eighties who had these systems back then are now adults with some disposable income and tons of nostalgia. Yeah, modern consoles are literally thousands of times more powerful, but are the games thousands of times more fun? [I would say, no!] Just about any platform you can think of from that time period is getting modern games (and hardware too in some cases), from the 2600 to the ZX Spectrum to the C64 to the Amiga and everything in between. Even obscure systems like the Tiki 100 are getting some love.
@@madmax2069Just goes to show what is possible when there are no pressures to release by a specific date and you can work on it until it's as good as it can be.
What blows my mind about the VCS graphics is not just that you need to draw objects as the electron beam reaches them; rather, it's that you need to draw them slightly *before* the electron beam reaches them, because the CPU instructions necessary to draw the objects will actually take so long that the beam will move an inch across the screen while executing them! It's a backwards way of drawing compared to later systems. The VCS composes the graphics as the beam is drawing, and processes game logic during the vertical blanking interval. The NES does game logic while the beam is drawing, and composes graphics during the vertical blanking interval (due to having VRAM).
My cousin was ten and had a 2600. We thought his dad was rich, but I was informed he came from a "broken home" (an 80s phrase) and it was bought by his dad out of guilt. If the 2600 did a decent version of "defender" I could have lived with that, and just one parent 😂
It kinda blows my mind it took 6 years for video games to evolve from pong to space invaders. Technological advancements in the arcade seems so much slower than what we got in the 80s and 90s, it must have been amazing to see stuff like galixian and donkey kong come out after so many years of primitive distractions
Honestly did not know Superman was the first license-game, but man if it doesn't fit. Videogames and superheroes really have been tagteaming since almost the very start... now if only Superman could get the love Spider-Man has.
As extremely primitive as the Atari VCS is, it's actually significantly more powerful then the Fairchild VES which was released only a year prior. Crazy to think that a game console could be any less powerful, and yet there was one. Yes, I know there was the Odyssey even before that, but it doesn't really qualify as a console the way we know them today. It didn't even have a CPU, so I put that one in sort of it's own unique category as something like a board game/game console hybrid. It was more like a precursor to the game console.
The Interton VC 4000, the only German console ever, might even go under the Atari VCS specs. Launched 1978, one year after the Atari VCS, it featured a whopping 37 bytes of RAM. It introduced analogue joystics to the home computing world and thus it is a part of my collection.
You'll notice that in the Atari version of Space Invaders, the aliens all move exactly at the same time. In the arcade version you can see some moving before others as the system is redrawing the screen in real time. P.S: Combat was a 2 Kb cartridge, not 4Kb.
Yep in the arcade Space Invaders there is only ever 1 invader moving per frame. That's why they speed up the less there are left on screen. This was a hardware limitation - the player, and player missiles were updated every frame, but nothing else was. Even the invader bombs had to share time - each bomb type (only ever up to 3 on screen at once) each updated every 3 frames, interleaved. And if the saucer was active, it took the place of one of the bombs (so there are never more than two invader bombs while the saucer is visible)...
You'll notice that each digit only has half of the scan lines drawn (like venetian blinds). I *think* that shift is so that they only have to draw half of the score digits on any given scan line, which helps with the player multiplexing involved in drawing them.
Video Chess uses the same effect to draw the pieces. Also amazing they fit a version of chess into 4K. Actually, they made chess for the ZX-81 in *1K*, but I think that might have been slightly later not sure; the systems were contemporary. @@MattMcIrvin
My father loved the arcade version and this home version. I had to buy it with my allowance money. He said I had to buy the VCS from DJ's TV Repair. He was their CPA. Joel told me I'd get a $30 discount on the system if I bought Space Invaders lol. I was 7 at the time. I played the heck out of it, so all good. My father also joked that the box art looked like a Boston album cover.
As a small child, I played Space Invaders in the arcade when it was new. When I got an Atari, the first game i played was Space Invaders. I have a Space Invaders tattoo. I tell you this so you have the full context when I i say this: WHY THE HELL DO YOU KEEP SHOOTING THE INVADERS IN THE MIDDLE BUT NOT THE ONES IN THE COLUMNS ON THE ENDS?!? Are you messing with us?? 😂😂😂
The way you play is just killing me! Shooting out just the middle of the invader block is, like, the scientifically worst way to play the game! My eyes! Hahahahaa...
Good question. My guess is a timing issue. Like if your missile collides with the alien at the wrong moment as the raster is drawing the next line or such.
tbh...and i know not everyone feels the same way, i liked the Atari video computer system Space Invaders port better than the Arcade version. I liked the alien sprite designs better, i liked the fact it had colors, and the sound effects, and the game variations. it was probably one of the best arcade to home console ports of all time...if not the best. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (the NES versions) were really good ports too, but were on a system that could easily handle older arcade games (although not so much with ones that were current, like TMNT...which they called TMNT II the arcade game, as to not confuse it with the earlier platformer game) But...I digress.
Well, they didn't really fit the arcade mega hit into the Atari, but for it's time it was a decent port....when considering the 2600's limited hardware, and also the extra game variations they added made playing the cartridge not get boring too quickly. The arcade machine is still superior however. The TTL sounds were much better, the games graphics were better, and the super bright arcade quality b&w image mirror reflected gave the game a ghosted image that was stunning to look at with theater gels for color with a unique look, and amazing black light lite florescent artwork as you looked into the monitor bezel of the game. Also the arcade cabinet speakers really made the sounds great, and you could "feel" the explosions. I bought the 2600 port with in the first couple days it became available. And I loved it, but I still continued to pop coins in the amazing arcade machine because......the 2600 wasn't an equal experience to the arcade machine. So naturally when I started eventually collecting arcade machines, I bought a Space Invaders & a Deluxe Space Invaders.
@sharoplis I noticed you like to make video's on how a weaker console made a certain game better than a more powerful console. I recommend doing a video of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns on Atari 2600 and compare it directly to NES's Super Pitfall both games . I've played both games extensive hours since I was a massive Pitfall fan back in the day. The 2600 version had a Display Processor Chip added inside the cartridge giving it 3 channel music (plus drums) and more graphic capabilities. Pitfall II blows Super Pitfall's door off in graphic, music and gameplay. Crazy a console that came out in 1977 was still making games that could compete with modern consoles ten years later.
I think those Atari games that said "Special Edition" on the box in 1979 may have been 4K ROMs: Superman, Backgammon, Casino, Video Chess. Maybe they cost more than other carts, so this was needed? Hangman may have been the first 4K game in 1978, but didn't have that label.
@@sandal_thong8631 Good call. All the games you listed are 4k, at least the rom versions I have. It is rather surprising they used 4k for these games except Superman and chess. I'm hazy on the details, but I think the lawsuits forced Atari to produce the Chess cartridge. I think they promised a Chess cartridge in 77 when they released the VCS. When no chess was forthcoming, a lawsuit was filed. It probably never went to court, because that would have dragged into 1990. It is kind of surprising they never came out with a Chess 2 later when using 16k cartridges with an extra kilobit on them like millipede. They could have made a better version. Blanking the screen gave basically (not really) 100% of the CPU clock to the program, but extra RAM and a larger ROM could have made it better. By 1984 Chess programs were getting pretty good for the average player. Superman, OTOH, was likely an expensive license and they would have to sell a lot of copies to make money.
If you want to be really blown away, there's an abandoned proof of concept Space Invaders homebrew for the 2600 which has almost every element from the arcade game: bullets, bonus saucer, scoreboard, player 1, and all 55 aliens. The only thing not sorted out was that there are 3 shields instead of 4. All of that and zero flicker. Keep in mind, as this video explains, that the 2600 was designed with only 5 sprites, so it could run "tank game" and "super Pong" and have a shelf life of perhaps 3 years by Atari's estimation. It is the system's unique architecture which makes it possible to do so much more. Even the NES can't display that much sprite data without flickering. For your perusal: th-cam.com/video/GBROohTGBb0/w-d-xo.html
@@g4z-kb7ct I just checked that out. That is 100% not running in an Atari VCS emulator. Almost everything it does is impossible for the VCS, starting with its resolution of 320x240 which vastly outpaces the VCS's 160x192. I think I read somewhere that Atari Flashback stopped being real hardware after #2. I sure found the reprogrammed, simulated Atari 2600 games pretty fascinating in Flashback 3 when I saw it in action once.
Evidently the person playing Space Invaders didn't know how to play Space Invaders, as they're more concerned with getting each column that they are with the progressively sinking bottom rows.
Asteroids was a vector game . Perfectly crisp flat 2d polygons that can scale and rotate with no loss in quality... and converting a vector game not just to a raster game, but an Atari VCS game... that ups the translation difficulty 10 fold.
I actually prefer the Atari 2600 version of space invaders. Maybe it's because I played it as a kid, and only ever played the arcade version as an adult.
It was the side effect of a bug in one of the chips, which caused the first part of the scan line to blank out when you did a certain sprite repositioning operation (HMOVE). But since Space Invaders had a black background anyway, you only really saw them during the screensaver attract mode. Some games worked around it by just doing an HMOVE operation on every scan line, so that the whole left edge of the screen was blacked out, which was less noticeable. Since that area was partly in the TV overscan area anyway, it wasn't as if you could do much with it.
Space Invaders is actually one of the easiest games to code, which is why it's one of the earliest games, because the hardware was so primitive. Other games were much more impressive. Pitfall, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pacman. 4K isn't as small as you think either. It IS small, but only to people that have never worked in assembly. Witting 4K of code will easily take you a month in assembly unless you're using macros. It's actually kind of a pity that the Atari 2600 even did well. Every other console of that time was vastly superior.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 The Atari wasn't widely adopted in 1977, only the wealthy bothered with that, same with the Odyssee. I'm talking about Colecovision, Mattel Intellivision, and Magnavox Odyssey 2 which were it's true contemporaries.
@@fuzzywzhe they were all next generation consoles you named aside from the Odyssey 2. As for the Odyssey 2 being vastly superior to the 2600, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 Engh. I don't particularly want to argue this. My point is that the 2600 took away the steam from a lot of better consoles at the time in the 1980s. It was a major system so all stops were pulled out to make games work on it, but there were severe limitations of what could be done. Pitfall II actually had a computer chip on the cartridge to make it playable. Look at the Starpath Supercharger, that's what the 2600 SHOULD have been from the start. The 2600 was just so FREAKING cheaped down, that nothing much could be done with it.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 Right. Only two Odyssey² games beat Atari's: Baseball! and Football! (Atari duplicated their 1978 Computer Golf! in 1980). It had the same limitations being a 1-button joystick. Because one programmer made at least half of its games it never got better until Parker Bros. and Imagic made games for it in 1983. It sold 1 million consoles (same as the 5200 in 1982-3). I thought I wanted an Intellivision (which sold 3 million consoles), but it had some problem with A.I. so all its vaunted sports games had to be two-player. There was also problems with its controller and making action games. You can see that its version of Space Invaders (Space Armada) is not superior to Atari's. Colecovision was impressive with its initial titles, including a packed-in Donkey Kong (a killer app or must-have game) which helped sell 2 million consoles. But then they decided to make an adapter (really just their 2600) to play Atari games, and not Atari 400/800 games which were of the same level. Not getting Pac-Man and people buying the 2600 and its version set up the industry for a crash. I think I was happier with all the one-player arcade ports to the Atari that I got and played than what the Intellivison got. Each year (1980-1983) Atari games and graphics got better. I heard it sold 16 million consoles by the end of 1982.
A game that has a special place in my memories. The console, Combat and Space Invaders were the family Christmas present 1980. My mother became addicted to Space Invaders and was sitting up at night playing it until my father got sick of the noise and disconnected the electricity at the mains one night
"That's what's known in the trade as a lie." Excellent line!
Anyone who managed to make a halfway decent game on the Atari 2600 deserves respect.
100% agree. If people knew what is required to just move things on the screen and draw a simple background, they would give it a lot more respect.
Just looking at what the homebrew community has achieved with the VCS/2600 is pretty amazing, champ games pushing the system with the games he releases. Then you have all the others that have done the same.
Just check out "wen hop"
Indeed, the homebrew community has pushed the VCS/2600 well past what most thought its limits was,
Just check out wen hop, and lord of Biscay as example.
Lords of Biscay and wen hop are two great examples of pushing the system well past what people thought was possible
The 2600 had a ton of really decent games, and a few stinkers like ET as well.
The 2600 was a miracle machine... it was miracle that the people who programmed for it could make it do anything at all. Absolute sorcery.
Especially once you get to much later games like Solaris or Secret Quest.
Some TRULY impressive games were created for that system.
Not only was it a huge challenge, but the tools that were available for game development on the system back then amounted to not much more than some graph paper and a calculator!
What a real miracle was just how much better the games got over time. You should see the modern homebrew Mappy game.
But even back then, games just got better and better looking and playing. Compare the original Video Pinball to Midnight Magic released a few years later.
The Atari games got MUCH, MUCH better than the Intellivision games did over time. Same with the Colecovision and frankly even the NES. The difference between the early NES games and the late NES games is much smaller than the difference between early 2600 games and late ones.
The 2600 is unique in game consoles in a peculiar way. It is a real time computer. Plus the way the screen is drawn allowed for huge upgrades in graphics.
@@tarstarkuszVery true, and it makes sense because as time goes on, programmers learn more ways to take advantage of each system's hardware sometimes in ways unforeseen by the original hardware designers. The 2600 demonstrates this extremely well because its design was so open. That is, it already required much more from the programmer in the first place to tell it where to draw what for each scanline (no video memory to speak of) and this "limitation" became its saving grace in the end. Scene coders have REALLY pushed hardware to the Nth level. As you say, "Mappy" for the 2600 is amazing, as is Donkey Kong VCS and Pac-Man 8K:
- 2600 Mappy: th-cam.com/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=oQCJDZzLVQ41W7WR
- 2600 Donkey Kong (homebrew): th-cam.com/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IV1dC0eVNcUSaMqc
- 2600 Pac-Man 8K (homebrew): th-cam.com/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=jmOvzo4oIIghppjh
BONUS: Here's Todd Frye, the programmer of the original Atari 2600 Pac-Man admiring the homebrew version: th-cam.com/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Bhr9KdSUbK3lcPQ8
@@JustWasted3HoursHere To be fair, Mappy has a processor on it that could probably emualate a 2600. OTOH, no other system would ever benefit from that chip the way the 2600 does. A lot of the 2600's CPU cycles are used in the kernel drawing the screen. I believe it is only about 40% of the cycles are actually available to run the logic of the game during the period where the beam reaches the last line of the graphics and when the line returns back to the first scanline.
C'mon! Get rid of those aliens on the edge columns!
I was thinking the same thing! That is the worst possible strategy for the game.
This player has no technique!
It’s seriously painful to watch.
I died watching this!
Maybe it's more engaging to watch a game played poorly...
the binary code visuals were an eye-opener. amazing what they accomplished with so little back in the day.
No Man Sky VS Starfield is also a great example.
@@MarquisDeSanghow so? Both of those are modern games.
Go look up Elite. It was programmed originally for the Acorn I believe in 32 K. THAT was an amazing feat of coding.
@@fuzzywzhe The most impressive thing about Elite is the hidden line removal algorithm.
@@MarquisDeSang I vaguely know about it, it may have been a new concept at the time, but it's not new now.
Something else to keep in mind that the speed-up behavior of the aliens had to be intentionally coded into the game in this version. In the arcade version it was a side effect of how inefficient the hardware was at moving all those aliens around without hardware sprites; the more of them you killed, the faster it could move around what was left. On the Atari, it was already possible to move them all at max speed, and precise timing was required to draw them at all, so you needed to dedicate some of the ROM to a routine that would count the surviving aliens and adjust the speed accordingly.
Something that's always made me laugh is that the QBasic Nibbles that Microsoft published uses a for loop to 1000 as a delay to slow down the game. When I tried to use it on my computer at home, as opposed to the dinosaurs we had at school, it ran so fast as to be unplayable. I fixed it to use the timer function instead and adjusted the amount of delay dynamically, and it was unplayable on the school computers because of how slow it was to check the timer function in a loop, yet ran perfectly at home.
I read the Aliens speeding up was a bug due to less processing required for less Aliens but Taito noticed it made the game more exciting so they left the bug in. With all that empty space they could have easily fixed the bug but they certainly made the right choice letting them speed up.
@@anon_y_mousse There was literally a button labeled turbo and if you pushed it the game would have played perfectly fine. Unlike a car where turbo speeds up the machine on a computer turbo slows it down.
Unless you got very unlucky and you had one of the rare computers that actually were the opposite way around but you know.
@@Wallyworld30Yes it's the original "It's not a bug it's a feature"
I never really thought about it before, but when you think about the number of things the game had to keep track of (especially the destructible bases), how to fit all of that into 128 bytes had to have been a serious challenge. Even keeping a score is an achievement on that hardware.
Yep! And the hardware designers had to fight management to even get that! They originally wanted the system to have only 64 bytes. The numerous ways that game designers found to "cheat" the hardware and do things that the designers had never envisioned, are really impressive. The system's limitations actually became its saving grace because it made the system extremely flexible. Game creators like David Crane ("Pitfall!") figured out how to do lots of things that didn't seem possible.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yeah it's pretty crazy. We take all this for granted today because we have dozens of gigabytes of RAM and VRAM, and terabytes of storage.
For all the flak it gets, ET was a seriously damn impressive game on that hardware. It wasn't the reason for the video game crash, Atari just happened to produce double the number of carts as there were 2600's, expecting to literally double their install base overnight. That was unfathomly stupid, I don't care how good the game was they still would've had to throw out a lot.
@@StormsparkPegasusI think the game can be quite frustrating at first, if you haven't learned the method to easily get out of those darn pits! And I believe that is a large part of the reason that people say it is "terrible". If you fall into a hole, if you push the joystick up immediately E.T. will stop falling and you save time. Once you are out of the hole (the "above ground screen" is showing) move left or right ONLY until you are clear of the hole and you are good to go. Mastering this will make the game a lot more fun to play, but still a challenge.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Try playing that game with a Sega Genesis controller and it's 100x easier. Most of the issues with games like that on the 2600 were due the awful controller.
@@StormsparkPegasusInteresting! Yeah, that original Atari controller is extremely rugged, but also a wrist breaker after hours of playing. The Colecovision controller is worse though, IMO. It's kind of funny, if you think about it, that so many consoles and computers decided to adopt the Atari's controller port configuration and that they can work without modification: C64, Vic-20, Amiga even! And others too.
4:40 It's hard to do space invaders justice on any modern screen or system. It had booming analog sound only really capable of being reproduced in an arcade cabinet. But the real trick is the pepper's ghost trick of the machine.
The space invaders are very ghost like and superimposed on a physical drawing. The pepper's ghost aspect is responsible for this.
There is a new handheld of the space invaders arcade cabinet that reproduces the trick with a pepper's ghost trick built into the cabinet.
Without reading your comment until just now, I commented on the exact same things. The Atari version was good..........for an Atari cartridge, but still inferior to the original arcade game from 1978. Some of the later versions like arcade "Silver anniversary" edition of the early 2000s was no where near the audio/visual magic of the arcade game.
This was one of the first games we got with our first 2600 in 1982 (along with Pac-Man and Defender). Truly a great port which did not lose the essence of the original.
Where you disappointed with pac man at the time or did it seem par for course?
I bought Pacman for it and don't remember being overly disappointed with it. Too young and not as cynical as I am today to realise the company pencil necks might have had anything to do with it 😂
1:10 Actually, the game combat had a similar earlier game that was part of a pong-on-a-chip included in several pong machines.
Breakout is another example of pre-gen 2 games released by Atari itself. They (Atari) also released a hard coded version of Stunt Driver in a dedicated motorcycle jumping game. There were also driving games in the first generation pong-on-a-chip dedicated games machines.
But where I think Atari excelled in their 2nd gen 2k games was the sheer variety these games offered. This became less and less prevalent over the 2600's lifespan. Where early games had sometimes over 100 variations of a single game, late 2600 games often had only 1 variation and not even a 2nd player was available.
This drive for game variation is one of the things that held back the pac man port. To have a 2 player pac man, serious downgrading of the game became necessary. When player 2 is playing, player 1's screen configuration along with score, level, lives remaining and other things must be kept in RAM. This is why the awesome new versions of Pac Man for the 2600 do not offer a 2nd player option or any other options.
Notice how the later port of Ms. Pac-Man is strictly single player, and it's CONSIDERABLY more faithful to the source material... And actually fun to play, too.
@@video-luver769 The "Progressive" variation of Super Breakout is another one without a second player option because of memory limitations. Super Breakout is a lot of fun, especially the progressive variation, which is game 7 IIRC. The bars start moving their way down the screen. That means that you would need a whole bitmap of the screen saved while the other player was playing.
I was a kid at the time and loved this version of Space Invaders. It’s still fun to play even now IMO.
My father borrowed a console and this game from the shop he managed and I had access for one glorious day. My hands were like claws the day after.
I suppose that in between you not being used to holding an object for so long (and probably very hard as the fever grips you and you get really into the game) and older controllers not being very ergonomically designed, things were bound to get crampy? Because that's my memory from the console of my childhood, the NES.
I was curious how they did this. Thanks for the video!
Nice video, that’s for making it.
Couple of thoughts, firstly the 2k of blank ROM in the space invaders arcade might just be empty addressing space but there were no actual ROM chips corresponding to those addresses. Because of the need to separate chips in powers of 2 of addressing space.
And secondly, the concept of lives maybecame across from pinball, as I think that is also where the terms 1UP and 2UP came from.
What about 7UP?
You almost had it right. The Atari 2600 TIA chip has registers for sprite attributes. Each sprite had its own set. One of them allowed you to make up to 3 copies of a sprite on one line. This was used to get 6 aliens on one line for two sprites.
Anyone else get aggravated at that awful Space Invaders gameplay? Who leaves the exterior sides for last? Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Re-using "sprites"/player objects horizontally is a hardware feature of the VCS hardware. It can make two or three copies of a player object on a line with a few options for how much empty space is shown between each object.
Yeah, Space Invaders was the killer app for consoles at the time. It was epic. I probably invested a whole year of my time that should have been used doing homework.
I'm pretty sure that's how it was done, using the player "repeat" options, rather than some kind of multiplexing.
I was actually done with a hack to retrigger the spites each time. The built in sprite multiplying wouldn't have quite worked to allow all sprites to be shot down individually.
COMBAT itself showed one of the issues with repeating the player sprite -- there were several modes which gave one (or both) players a formation of three vehicles, but on close inspection it was easy to tell it was really just the same sprite rendered 3 times.
If they had used a 1 frame flicker they could have had the original amount of invaders on screen. It's also possible to change the color of the different rows of aliens, and to have all 4 bunkers. It would have been more complicated to program, but I'm guessing that it was released this way because of a time limit imposed on the programmers. It would have been nice if there was a re-release a couple years later.
@@Sharopolis Although the hack you refer to is a valid possibility (the RESPx trick), nobody was thinking along those lines in 1980 and it was first demonstrated in the _Galaxian_ port years later. The aliens in the 1980 port were drawn using the repeat options, and these were reconfigured and horizontally offset as needed to account for killed aliens. You can pick from several different patterns, from doubling to tripling a given sprite, and one final "fat" sprite version. Many simple games abused this convenient tweak to achieve easy patterns in sprite formation, with _Combat_ and _Journey Escape_ being good examples. This is also why there are only six aliens per row-at the time, this was understood to be the max available from the two "player" sprites.
The wood age
I've always wondered that too, especially since Atari only has literally two sprites, player 1 and player 2 (not counting ball/missile, because it's not really a sprite, just a rectangle you can change the size of).
It's amazing what some of these programmers did with so little. Mind blowing actually.
It would be interesting to see what those guys would have been able to come up with if they'd had access to today's resources.
I feel a lot of today's developers and programmers have become lazy. As the saying goes "necessity is the mother of invention".
Always a pleasure to see the inner workings described. Top work.
Space invaders, Asteroids, and Missile Command were my favorite 2600 arcade ports. I can't even imagine how many hundreds of hours I logged playing them.
Seriously good summary of a game that needs to be talked about.
These were games I grew up with. Space Invaders got tons of play time in my house. My first game was Air-Sea Battle, but Space Invaders was the first one I got hooked on. There was a time when "Space Invaders" was a slang term for all video games (usually used by adults). Another interesting fact is that it was the first game with increasing difficulty as it played on. As you play and eliminate the aliens, they get faster and faster. That last one moved so fast that things got tense, then when you finally got it, you breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The Atari Logbook expected you to get a high score on invisible mode: 4500, then 6700, then 9000. I could beat several invisible levels in a row, but not enough times to beat their high score. My best is 7150.
Nice video, and here's a trick: hold down the Reset switch at the same time you power on the Atari. Now, release the Reset switch, and you immediately start playing Game 1, but with double firepower! You can have two missiles in flight at the same time! This is an example of a bug (an uninitialized variable controlling who's player turn it is to shoot the missile) cleverly becoming a killer Easter Egg.
It's too bad nobody thought to use that for say the extra-wide cannon. Next time I saw something like that was in Galaga when you get your captured ship back.
Great! One of the best and simpliest explanation of the beauty and challenge of 2600, including a beam racing. Thx
Really interesting. I saw interviews with the original VCS devs and they were saying how astonished they were when Rick Maurer showed them his version. A pity that Rick seems to have disappeared.
That was a very good video, congratulations
When i was a kid I always thought the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders was the actual version. Its still an amazing game and one the first to have 2 player co-opt play where both players are working together.
This game was probably the transition from Atari (and consoles) being a 2-player game machine, to 1-player games. The co-op modes sound like they thought they had to have both players do something at the same time instead of taking turns. They still couldn't give up taking turns for Pac-Man in 1982 which took RAM space to hold the other player's score and dots on the map to the detriment of making a better game for just one player.
Man, it's hilarious how small the games are in size. You showed a literal "image" of the rom onscreen!
Small clarification: you only have to position the objects once per frame so long as they're not being repositioned. Thankfully because you basically eat a line for full positioning of a single object.
Once you properly time shift the object state machine it goes on drawing again one full scanline later repeatedly, maintaining the same offset each line.
Oh I didn't realise that.
I just checked the docs, yes that makes sense!
Great video, one of your very best! Thank you!
The 2K of "empty space" in the original Invaders ROM was used for testing code during development. It was removed in the commercial ROMs though. It did waste a lot of video RAM though. The game could be written using a tilemap (I've done it) so would only need 1K of tilemap RAM, plus a small custom buffer for the destructible bases, saving a lot of money on the old machines. An interesting fact is that the game has no random elements at all - it's all deterministic. Even the alien bombs (positions, and bomb type), and saucers are determined by the player position, player shots fired, and number of remaining invaders during the game.
Another great vid! I never realized how difficult it was to bring arcade games to the ATARI 2600. Our first home game console was actually the Intellivision.
Intellivision seemed to have its own problems. There was something funny about making A.I. for a computer player, so the sports games didn't have a 1-player option. Also, a video I just watched suggested it had trouble with action games, but they got AstroSmash to work.
Apparently, the Atari license for Space Invaders wasn't comprehensive, so other systems could make their own versions as long as they didn't call them "Space Invaders." Intellivision's was Space Armada, although over a year later. Still, one wonders how things would have been different if Mattel's Intellivision launched in 1980 with a licensed Space Invaders as its packed-in game instead of Black Jack & Poker. Maybe Atari would have retired the VCS and launched another system of the same level as their computers, but earlier and more successfully?
Mattel then missed their chance to get another killer app, or must-have game: Pac-Man.
Those 2600 Space Invaders sprites are still so iconic.
Invaders on the VCS was my first ever video game experience. I still remember trying to play with the invisible invaders!
I got the Atari Logbook which said to play that variation to beat their challenge scores of 4500, 6700, then 9000. I could beat a few waves but not enough to beat the top score challenge, with my best being 7150.
This video checked all the boxes of awesomeness for me!
Great video! I always appreciate that your explanations are easy to follow.
8:40 That is actually mind-blowing!
The most impressive thing is the bases. The aliens are just using a feature that let you duplicate a player 3 times. This is a feature I wish they kept for the Atari 800 series, which was my first computer. The fundamental difference between “Player Missile” graphics and normal sprites is Atari Players are effectively the height of the screen. On the 800 each player used 256 byte of ram, and you moved up and down by copy the character data to a different vertical position. On the 2600 you wrote directly to a shape register for each player on a line by line basis. I think it would keep that value until you changed it, so you could write an 8 bit pattern at the top of the screen and it would make a stripe from that scan line til you cleared it. Each 3 columns sets of aliens is effectively just one player, using the built in features in the Stella chip.
The aliens could be read directly from the cartridge rom. And only had to be read once per line for each player. You just told the Stella chip to duplicate the sprite and updated the dup register the turn off aliens that died. The bases had to use some of that precious 128 bytes of ram. Which was unusual for 2600 games.
Truly awesome console at the time. Lost many an hour playing Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Dig Dug and Galaxian on the Woody, well into the mid 80s 👍🏼
The Space Invaders gameplay strategy on display in this footage is so unbelievably poor it has to be for the meme
My Atari came with Centipede, which was also a pretty impressive port! Space Invaders was the first game I got for it, and I spent hundreds of hours playing it. What you didn't mention wasn't just how impressive it was, but how smooth it ran too.
Centipede not bad but Millipede was a top 5 Atari port imo
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 I heartily agree.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 People say Millipede is really good, but after getting Centipede I didn't feel the need for Millipede, which I never played in the arcade. I wanted Star Gate even though I had Defender, but never got that one either.
They came out with the Trakball controller which worked for the computers, but the Atari 2600 games weren't set up for it.
@sandal_thong8631 Centipede is way behind Millipede. Millipede has more enemies, bonus rounds, and the TNT dynamite explosions. It's far more advanced than it's predecessor and faster.
I always felt they did a fantastic port of this game. It took me awhile to actually own the cartridge. I'd go down to a friend's house down the street and play. The two player versions were really welll done too. To this day I still love playing it.
My first Console was the intellivision in 1981 but we did get a 2600 in 1982 and our favorite 2600 games were Asteroids, Missile Command then my cousin who had over 100 games gave me Dragonfire which instantly became my favorite. Dragonfire was also ported to Intellivision and Colecovision but they weren't as good. The 2600 was capable of displaying more colors on screen at the same time then either Intellivion or Colecovision so the treasures in the Dragon Treasure room were much much nicer.
We already had an Atari that we may have gotten that Christmas when we saw Space Invaders at the store. I think I was allowed to get that and Dodge 'Em for my birthday.
The Atari Logbook Challenge says to play with invisible aliens and score 4500, 6700, then 9000. My best is 7150.
Incredible job as always! More Atari content is always awesome!
If you are going to do any more arcade Space Invaders stuff in future running in MAME remember to NOT use the Midway version because the player ship fire sound is broken due to an inability by emulation developers to understand how the real hardware works which uses poorly written discrete audio coding that does not create the correct fire sound. For an alternative use one of the b/w versions that supports samples or if you want to show the later color version use the Taito sicv version which is correct and also uses samples. You will need to get the separate sample file otherwise there won't be any sound at all. The discrete audio issue in Midway Space Invaders has been there for around 15 years and is unlikely to be fixed any time soon as almost no one knows anything about coding discrete audio circuits.
The empty ROM space is probably to do with the fact ROMs would've been either 1kbit, 2kbit, 4kbit or 8kbit and would need to be present in groups of 8. If the game was more than 4kbytes in size, you'd need 8x8kbit ROMs giving you 8kbytes of ROM and whatever wasn't used would just be left blank.
It uses 4 16kbit rom chips and two of them have 8 kbits blank in each, but yeah it's the same thing. I didn't really want to go into speculative detail in the video, but I'm sure you're right.
@fattomandeibu You're mixing up kbits and kbytes because you clearly don't understand what they are. 1kbit is 128 bytes (the same amount of RAM in the A2600). 8kbit is 1024 bytes or 1kByte.
@@Sharopolis Not quite accurate. The real arcade uses 6x 1kByte mask ROMs and the ROMs are memory mapped. There's no blanks in the middle. Those blank areas are actually not populated ROM sockets on the board. There are 3 ROMs, then 2 spaces then 3 more ROMs. ROMs with blank areas in the middle are hacks for use when converting a real board to use 2716 EPROMs. I know this because I just documented repairing 5x Space Invaders boards and converted them to use EPROMs. The 2kB blank area in the ROM images is to allow for 2x 1kB ROMs that are not populated on the real board.
It's crazy how even such a simple game like this pushed the 2600 well past its limits.
Really puts into perspective how absurd it's lifespan was and how much more powerful systems like the colecovision really were.
Especially since the 2600 barely had access to any sort of enhancement chips that helped other systems like the nes maintain their comparably impressive lifespans
Yeah. Apparently the hardware designer was blown away when he saw Night Driver running on the 2600. "How'd you do that?"
In 1987 Activision filed a patent for the Display Processor Chip or DPC. It was a full 10 years after the console was released. The chip greatly improved the audio to 3 channels (plus drum) but sadly it came out so late only one game used it Pitfall: Lost Caverns. What wild is Pitfall II was much better in graphics, gameplay and music than Super Pitfall on NES. So heads up Atari 2600 could beat the NES if the 2600 used the DPC Chip. But again sadly it was too little too late.
@Wallyworld30 while pitfall 2 is awesome and very impressive I really don't think it would have been impossible to do on the nes or that the dpc puts it ahead of the other consoles even default capabilities
Whoever is playing doesn't know how to play Space Invaders. You never leave an entire column of invaders on the opposite side of the screen.
Brilliant! I do enjoy watching how they made these games back in the day.
aaah you didn't mention 2600 hidden feature to enable double firing! perhaps the first hidden feature in a game!
More like one of the few positive benefits for "frying."
7:48 The arcade version had 64 times as much RAM as the Atari VCS, not 8 times as much (8192 bytes / 128 bytes). Later on you say that the arcade version had 1k of "work RAM", so maybe that's what you meant, which actually is 8 times as much memory.
The VCS's limitations were also what gave it its extreme flexibility and some pretty impressive things could be done in the right hands.* Rick Maurer, the programmer of the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders, had actually been working on his own version of the game on his own without Atari's knowledge and had it mostly working when the news came that arcades were massively cashing in on the craze for this game. Atari executives decided to get in on the action and became the first company ever to license an arcade game for a home market. It ended up quadrupling the sales of the console. Here's Rick talking about this: th-cam.com/video/UTDUB_GiTKA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=m5VOY9xklyqE2tcp&t=497
* Some examples of games that far exceeded what the hardware designers thought might be possible include:
- The homebrew version of Pac-Man, called "Pac-Man 8K": th-cam.com/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=myotmIjKwqaFfjb2
- Homebrew Donkey Kong VCS: th-cam.com/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Nv9-eeH2SS6FhvrE
- Homebrew Mappy: th-cam.com/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=KuthwzCGv70Ugxbp
Good catch! Yeah I confused myself there in talking about the VRAM and the general purpose RAM. The total amount is of course 64 times more.
I haven't done a video about Atari 2600 homebrew yet, but it's one my list of things to do definitely.
@@Sharopolis When you do, be sure to show off the extremely impressive Space Invaders version that came with the Atari Flashback X that is a near identical port of Taito's color version. i.e. th-cam.com/video/TB1m9rRxD1M/w-d-xo.html
@@SharopolisRetro gaming in general is really popular right now, so a video on the homebrew scene would be great! I think the reason it's so popular right now is because the kids of the late seventies and early eighties who had these systems back then are now adults with some disposable income and tons of nostalgia. Yeah, modern consoles are literally thousands of times more powerful, but are the games thousands of times more fun? [I would say, no!]
Just about any platform you can think of from that time period is getting modern games (and hardware too in some cases), from the 2600 to the ZX Spectrum to the C64 to the Amiga and everything in between. Even obscure systems like the Tiki 100 are getting some love.
Lords of Biscay and wen hop are two great examples
@@madmax2069Just goes to show what is possible when there are no pressures to release by a specific date and you can work on it until it's as good as it can be.
What blows my mind about the VCS graphics is not just that you need to draw objects as the electron beam reaches them; rather, it's that you need to draw them slightly *before* the electron beam reaches them, because the CPU instructions necessary to draw the objects will actually take so long that the beam will move an inch across the screen while executing them!
It's a backwards way of drawing compared to later systems. The VCS composes the graphics as the beam is drawing, and processes game logic during the vertical blanking interval. The NES does game logic while the beam is drawing, and composes graphics during the vertical blanking interval (due to having VRAM).
My cousin was ten and had a 2600. We thought his dad was rich, but I was informed he came from a "broken home" (an 80s phrase) and it was bought by his dad out of guilt. If the 2600 did a decent version of "defender" I could have lived with that, and just one parent 😂
Next step - porting OpenLara to the Atari 2600
Always good! You're the best!👍👍👍
Great video
I see you are a man of taste. All caps, much missed.
It kinda blows my mind it took 6 years for video games to evolve from pong to space invaders.
Technological advancements in the arcade seems so much slower than what we got in the 80s and 90s, it must have been amazing to see stuff like galixian and donkey kong come out after so many years of primitive distractions
Honestly did not know Superman was the first license-game, but man if it doesn't fit. Videogames and superheroes really have been tagteaming since almost the very start... now if only Superman could get the love Spider-Man has.
As extremely primitive as the Atari VCS is, it's actually significantly more powerful then the Fairchild VES which was released only a year prior. Crazy to think that a game console could be any less powerful, and yet there was one.
Yes, I know there was the Odyssey even before that, but it doesn't really qualify as a console the way we know them today. It didn't even have a CPU, so I put that one in sort of it's own unique category as something like a board game/game console hybrid. It was more like a precursor to the game console.
The Interton VC 4000, the only German console ever, might even go under the Atari VCS specs.
Launched 1978, one year after the Atari VCS, it featured a whopping 37 bytes of RAM.
It introduced analogue joystics to the home computing world and thus it is a part of my collection.
You'll notice that in the Atari version of Space Invaders, the aliens all move exactly at the same time. In the arcade version you can see some moving before others as the system is redrawing the screen in real time.
P.S: Combat was a 2 Kb cartridge, not 4Kb.
Yep in the arcade Space Invaders there is only ever 1 invader moving per frame. That's why they speed up the less there are left on screen. This was a hardware limitation - the player, and player missiles were updated every frame, but nothing else was. Even the invader bombs had to share time - each bomb type (only ever up to 3 on screen at once) each updated every 3 frames, interleaved. And if the saucer was active, it took the place of one of the bombs (so there are never more than two invader bombs while the saucer is visible)...
Something I've wondered about is why the score numbers are not all at the same vertical position.
You'll notice that each digit only has half of the scan lines drawn (like venetian blinds). I *think* that shift is so that they only have to draw half of the score digits on any given scan line, which helps with the player multiplexing involved in drawing them.
Video Chess uses the same effect to draw the pieces. Also amazing they fit a version of chess into 4K. Actually, they made chess for the ZX-81 in *1K*, but I think that might have been slightly later not sure; the systems were contemporary. @@MattMcIrvin
This was the first cart i bought. I had it even before i had the console...
Space invaders on the Atari 2600 was my main game in the 80's
My father loved the arcade version and this home version. I had to buy it with my allowance money. He said I had to buy the VCS from DJ's TV Repair. He was their CPA. Joel told me I'd get a $30 discount on the system if I bought Space Invaders lol. I was 7 at the time. I played the heck out of it, so all good. My father also joked that the box art looked like a Boston album cover.
As a small child, I played Space Invaders in the arcade when it was new.
When I got an Atari, the first game i played was Space Invaders.
I have a Space Invaders tattoo.
I tell you this so you have the full context when I i say this: WHY THE HELL DO YOU KEEP SHOOTING THE INVADERS IN THE MIDDLE BUT NOT THE ONES IN THE COLUMNS ON THE ENDS?!? Are you messing with us?? 😂😂😂
The way you play is just killing me! Shooting out just the middle of the invader block is, like, the scientifically worst way to play the game! My eyes! Hahahahaa...
Alright, so do we know why some aliens explode (animation) while others just vanish when they're shot?
Good question. My guess is a timing issue. Like if your missile collides with the alien at the wrong moment as the raster is drawing the next line or such.
tbh...and i know not everyone feels the same way, i liked the Atari video computer system Space Invaders port better than the Arcade version. I liked the alien sprite designs better, i liked the fact it had colors, and the sound effects, and the game variations. it was probably one of the best arcade to home console ports of all time...if not the best.
Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (the NES versions) were really good ports too, but were on a system that could easily handle older arcade games (although not so much with ones that were current, like TMNT...which they called TMNT II the arcade game, as to not confuse it with the earlier platformer game)
But...I digress.
You haven't played Combat until you've played two players with invisible tanks.
Well, they didn't really fit the arcade mega hit into the Atari, but for it's time it was a decent port....when considering the 2600's limited hardware, and also the extra game variations they added made playing the cartridge not get boring too quickly.
The arcade machine is still superior however. The TTL sounds were much better, the games graphics were better, and the super bright arcade quality b&w image mirror reflected gave the game a ghosted image that was stunning to look at with theater gels for color with a unique look, and amazing black light lite florescent artwork as you looked into the monitor bezel of the game. Also the arcade cabinet speakers really made the sounds great, and you could "feel" the explosions.
I bought the 2600 port with in the first couple days it became available. And I loved it, but I still continued to pop coins in the amazing arcade machine because......the 2600 wasn't an equal experience to the arcade machine. So naturally when I started eventually collecting arcade machines, I bought a Space Invaders & a Deluxe Space Invaders.
Looking at versions of Space Invaders for other machines, like Intellivision, this one is superb.
@ That part is true. But it pales next to the real arcade machine.
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@sharoplis I noticed you like to make video's on how a weaker console made a certain game better than a more powerful console. I recommend doing a video of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns on Atari 2600 and compare it directly to NES's Super Pitfall both games . I've played both games extensive hours since I was a massive Pitfall fan back in the day. The 2600 version had a Display Processor Chip added inside the cartridge giving it 3 channel music (plus drums) and more graphic capabilities. Pitfall II blows Super Pitfall's door off in graphic, music and gameplay. Crazy a console that came out in 1977 was still making games that could compete with modern consoles ten years later.
I played it first time in early 1990s. A fun port to this day.
The bases only disappear when the aliens get to them - they break down bit by bit if you defend them from the lines of aliens.
How to fit a mega hit into a tiny space..... I'm pretty sure Space Invaders was the first (or at least one of the first) 4k game.
I think those Atari games that said "Special Edition" on the box in 1979 may have been 4K ROMs: Superman, Backgammon, Casino, Video Chess. Maybe they cost more than other carts, so this was needed? Hangman may have been the first 4K game in 1978, but didn't have that label.
@@sandal_thong8631 Good call. All the games you listed are 4k, at least the rom versions I have. It is rather surprising they used 4k for these games except Superman and chess. I'm hazy on the details, but I think the lawsuits forced Atari to produce the Chess cartridge. I think they promised a Chess cartridge in 77 when they released the VCS. When no chess was forthcoming, a lawsuit was filed. It probably never went to court, because that would have dragged into 1990. It is kind of surprising they never came out with a Chess 2 later when using 16k cartridges with an extra kilobit on them like millipede. They could have made a better version. Blanking the screen gave basically (not really) 100% of the CPU clock to the program, but extra RAM and a larger ROM could have made it better. By 1984 Chess programs were getting pretty good for the average player.
Superman, OTOH, was likely an expensive license and they would have to sell a lot of copies to make money.
If you want to be really blown away, there's an abandoned proof of concept Space Invaders homebrew for the 2600 which has almost every element from the arcade game: bullets, bonus saucer, scoreboard, player 1, and all 55 aliens. The only thing not sorted out was that there are 3 shields instead of 4. All of that and zero flicker. Keep in mind, as this video explains, that the 2600 was designed with only 5 sprites, so it could run "tank game" and "super Pong" and have a shelf life of perhaps 3 years by Atari's estimation. It is the system's unique architecture which makes it possible to do so much more. Even the NES can't display that much sprite data without flickering. For your perusal: th-cam.com/video/GBROohTGBb0/w-d-xo.html
Just watched it... yeah impressive. The near arcade-perfect color version on Atari Flashback X is also impressive.
@@g4z-kb7ct I just checked that out. That is 100% not running in an Atari VCS emulator. Almost everything it does is impossible for the VCS, starting with its resolution of 320x240 which vastly outpaces the VCS's 160x192. I think I read somewhere that Atari Flashback stopped being real hardware after #2. I sure found the reprogrammed, simulated Atari 2600 games pretty fascinating in Flashback 3 when I saw it in action once.
6:01" el Space Invaders mas ADICTIVO...el de ATARI FOR EVER
You forgot how the score was written to the screen, as you can see it's not straight and uses lines instead of solid numbers.
The three lives thing wasn't that unique. You got 3 balls on most pinball machines- the better you played, the longer you played.
Ah memories.I owned this,along with the Commodore 64.The 80s was EPIC🎉
4:20
Neat video, but this is some of the worst gameplay footage of Space Invaders I've ever seen. Like what the hell is this strategy lol
Evidently the person playing Space Invaders didn't know how to play Space Invaders, as they're more concerned with getting each column that they are with the progressively sinking bottom rows.
Great video but watching you play space invaders is stress inducing. :P :/
Who was playing Space Invaders, and why do they not know How to play Space Invaders? 😂❤
Expanding on topics from older videos, or just felt like talking about space invaders?
MF DOOM! totally unexpected =D
That part really cracked me up.
"Even if you're writing in all caps" 🤣🤣
Someone needs to learn to play space invaders. Hehehehe
You have to convince me Atari 2600 Astroids really couldn’t had been done in 4k of ROM. It seemed on-par primitive at the time
Asteroids was a vector game . Perfectly crisp flat 2d polygons that can scale and rotate with no loss in quality... and converting a vector game not just to a raster game, but an Atari VCS game... that ups the translation difficulty 10 fold.
@@DanJackson1977 Yeah, the console was definitely not designed to have that many independently moving objects on screen.
I actually prefer the Atari 2600 version of space invaders. Maybe it's because I played it as a kid, and only ever played the arcade version as an adult.
The more I learn about the Atari 2600, the more I'm convinced its games are powered by witchcraft
It has those annoying black lines at the left hand side they couldn't programme round that could they? Megamania doesn't have them.
It was the side effect of a bug in one of the chips, which caused the first part of the scan line to blank out when you did a certain sprite repositioning operation (HMOVE). But since Space Invaders had a black background anyway, you only really saw them during the screensaver attract mode.
Some games worked around it by just doing an HMOVE operation on every scan line, so that the whole left edge of the screen was blacked out, which was less noticeable. Since that area was partly in the TV overscan area anyway, it wasn't as if you could do much with it.
Nice MF Doom reference, mate
Ants
Doggets
Jumping Jacks
Helmets
Cheerios
Jellyfish
Space Invaders is actually one of the easiest games to code, which is why it's one of the earliest games, because the hardware was so primitive. Other games were much more impressive. Pitfall, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pacman.
4K isn't as small as you think either. It IS small, but only to people that have never worked in assembly. Witting 4K of code will easily take you a month in assembly unless you're using macros.
It's actually kind of a pity that the Atari 2600 even did well. Every other console of that time was vastly superior.
Every console of that time? What other consoles existed in 1977? Maybe the Odyssey 2? That certainly wasn't vastly superior. You don't make sense.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 The Atari wasn't widely adopted in 1977, only the wealthy bothered with that, same with the Odyssee.
I'm talking about Colecovision, Mattel Intellivision, and Magnavox Odyssey 2 which were it's true contemporaries.
@@fuzzywzhe they were all next generation consoles you named aside from the Odyssey 2. As for the Odyssey 2 being vastly superior to the 2600, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 Engh. I don't particularly want to argue this.
My point is that the 2600 took away the steam from a lot of better consoles at the time in the 1980s.
It was a major system so all stops were pulled out to make games work on it, but there were severe limitations of what could be done. Pitfall II actually had a computer chip on the cartridge to make it playable.
Look at the Starpath Supercharger, that's what the 2600 SHOULD have been from the start.
The 2600 was just so FREAKING cheaped down, that nothing much could be done with it.
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 Right. Only two Odyssey² games beat Atari's: Baseball! and Football! (Atari duplicated their 1978 Computer Golf! in 1980). It had the same limitations being a 1-button joystick. Because one programmer made at least half of its games it never got better until Parker Bros. and Imagic made games for it in 1983. It sold 1 million consoles (same as the 5200 in 1982-3).
I thought I wanted an Intellivision (which sold 3 million consoles), but it had some problem with A.I. so all its vaunted sports games had to be two-player. There was also problems with its controller and making action games. You can see that its version of Space Invaders (Space Armada) is not superior to Atari's.
Colecovision was impressive with its initial titles, including a packed-in Donkey Kong (a killer app or must-have game) which helped sell 2 million consoles. But then they decided to make an adapter (really just their 2600) to play Atari games, and not Atari 400/800 games which were of the same level. Not getting Pac-Man and people buying the 2600 and its version set up the industry for a crash.
I think I was happier with all the one-player arcade ports to the Atari that I got and played than what the Intellivison got. Each year (1980-1983) Atari games and graphics got better. I heard it sold 16 million consoles by the end of 1982.
ALL CAPS
This gameplay must be a troll. Who shoots all the centre aliens first in Space invaders? It's literally the worst possible strategy 🤣🤣
Did this nerd just drop a MF Doom reference lol... I saw what you DID there.