Atari 2600 Game Development 317
gjb6676 writes "An article over at ExtremeTech is covering recent game development projects on the Atari 2600. The amount of cartridge space they have to work with is a sobering thought:
'A two-word file in Word 2002, for example, requires 20 Kbytes. "That's 20 Kbytes, five times the amount of (ROM) space developers had to work with in the 2600.'"
That's ongoing development, not news (Score:5, Informative)
And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer (Score:5, Informative)
It allowed the system to extend its usable life of the platform after developers got familiar with how to work with it.
Memory switching (Score:2, Informative)
They had more than 1 memory chip in there and they could switch to another chip.
Was it Activision that started using that trick? I remember that they had the shweetest games. A friend of mine got the first "extra memory" game, although I don't recall what it was. The one with chopper flying down the river, maybe?
And it was cool the first time I heard my Atari talking to me...(not imagined, really!)
Rom Size (Score:5, Informative)
Initially, games were 4KB. But there were also 8KB games (I believe on a single ROM, but I may be wrong) and with an extra chip in the cartridge to handle addressing games of 16KB could be squeezed in.
For instance, Solaris, which was the best gane ever. http://skintigh.tripod.com/atari/solaris.html
Less related: there were cartridges that I assume had 64 4KB roms. The first was a menu to select which of the games to play. I also assume this was done without permission of the copyright holders. Then there were tape drives...
You can if you're careful! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer (Score:5, Informative)
Now, this all had to be done just to keep the background of the display intact. The programmer also got 2 player objects and 2 missile objects to work with... basically primitive sprites. 'course, with such limited resources, writing any kind of advanced game is a challenge. As they mention in the article, the Defender! programmer(s) tried to get around the sprite limitation by changing the sprite objects during even/odd frames to simulate more of them.
RTFA. (Score:1, Informative)
Incidentally, it's 128 bytes of RAM, not 256 bytes, and 4 KB of ROM. Though you could use bankswitching to get around the latter, and some carts had extra RAM chips to get around the former.
Second article on ExtremeTech--wireless Atari! (Score:3, Informative)
2600 Homebrew Games Already Released (Score:5, Informative)
2600 Homebrew Search Results [atariage.com]
And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):
Titles In Development [atariage.com]
A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!
Atari 2600 Hacks [atariage.com]
And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart [schells.com]) to play these binaries on a real television:
Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions [atariage.com]
Enjoy!
Re:4K (Score:3, Informative)
maybe some ascii pr0n [asciipr0n.com]
Re:what id like to see (Score:3, Informative)
Even more development system for Atari 2600 (Score:2, Informative)
Retro (Score:3, Informative)
The current issue has a truckload of "The making of..." articles from Edge, covering a lot of games up to the early 90's, including: Space War, Asteroids, Battlezone, Civilization, Carrier Command, Populous and many others
I bought it today and it's excellent, IMHO
Re:Rom Size (Score:1, Informative)
If you like Solaris, try out Radar Lock by the same author (and with similar gameplay, but more accessible).
The ROM constraint wasn't half as big an issue as the RAM constraint IMO - that's why the Supercharger games could be so good.
I wrote a newbie's guide for Atari 2600 dev... (Score:3, Informative)
Good place to get a feel for the basics.
Re:Blah blah blah, 20KB my ass (Score:3, Informative)
I just typed Hello world. and saved the file using Word XP. Windows reports the filesize as 23.5 KB (24,064 bytes), with size on disk being 24.0 KB (24,576 bytes).
Now I typed Hello world. in Notepad and saved that. Windows reports the filesize as 12 bytes (12 bytes), with size on the disk being 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes).
I'd be happy to email you the files if you still aren't convinced.