Atari Turns 40 Today 162
harrymcc writes "On June 27, 1972, a startup called Atari filed its papers of incorporation. A few months later, it released its first game, Pong. The rest is video game history. I celebrated the anniversary over at TIME.com by chatting with the company's indomitable founder, Nolan Bushnell. From the article: 'Like everyone else who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I played them all: Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Battlezone, Pole Position, Crystal Castles and my eternal favorite, Tempest. The first computer I bought with my own money was an Atari 400. So when I chatted with Bushnell this week to mark Atari’s 40th anniversary, I felt like I was talking with a man who helped invent my childhood.'" I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
Atari Greatest Hits (Score:5, Informative)
Re:frosty (Score:5, Informative)
Jay Miner - Another guy who revolutionized computing, but Steve Jobs gets all the credit & media attention while Jay gets nothing. :-|
And don't blame Atari. Blame the idiots at Warner Communications who decided in 1983 to sell-off the company on the belief that videogaming was a "fad" whose time had passed. Warners stopped funding the Amiga company, so naturally they needed to look for new funding..... they discovered Commodore who bought them out wholesale.
Re:frosty (Score:5, Informative)
The Atari 800 computer had 128 colors for better still images (great for nude girls), but only 2 sprites, so it was hard for programmers to make "speedy" arcade-style games like they did for the Commodore with its 8 sprites.
The C64 was also about half the cost, so it started outselling the Atari after just six months and remained #1 from 1983 to 86.
Re:Ahhhh ... Tempest (Score:4, Informative)
That's a slump you've gotta break. If you can make it to the Bay Area on the weekend of July 28/29, come to California Extreme [caextreme.org] for a weekend of all the coin-op retrogaming you can handle, no quarters required.
There are usually at least two or three Tempest machines on the show floor, so not only do you not have to worry about quarters, you also won't have to worry about a line-up to play it. It's a rare year that doesn't include virtually the entire line-up of vector games from Atari, Cinematronics, and Sega. Also the only place you'll ever get to play the old laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and Cliffhanger anymore.
Re:frosty (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm too young... (Score:5, Informative)
> no 3D support
Good god, are you even in middle school yet? Even 10 years ago, realtime-3D was mostly sleight of hand and programming hat tricks (think: Battle Arena Toshinden, probably the best example of a game that did a spectacularly good job of pretending to be 3D).
The 2600's hardware was seriously weak, but the biggest problem with its games were the fact that it had an astronomical learning curve. Take a simple question, like "what was the 2600's resolution?" The truth is, there IS NO simple answer to it. The 2600 has different "kinds" of pixels, and different ways to express pixel hue and luminance, and few of its "rules" were hard limits so much as timing limits you ran into when you just couldn't bitbang things fast enough.
It's hard enough to explain the 2600's theory of operation to someone with an EE degree. It wasn't enough to know "how to program" -- you had to get "down and dirty" with its hardware to a degree that's almost impossible with modern PC hardware. Literally, impossible... in most cases, the OS (Windows OR Linux) won't even *let* you get that close to it. At least, not unless you tried writing your game as a loadable kernel module, or you somehow managed to pwn Windows and get it to execute your program as Ring 0 kernel code. Go ahead... open a 320x240 legacy VGA screen filled with a single color pixel, then try bitbanging raw assembly by busy-waiting and counting clock cycles to change the contents of that one color register in realtime as the imaginary CRT your LCD panel is emulating scans each line. That's basically how many of the 2600's video effects worked.
On a modern PC, it won't work. Literally, won't work. Why not? Because modern multicore x86 architecture isn't realtime-deterministic, and hasn't been for years. Oh, the OUTCOME of a given sequence of assembly language, in the form of a specific value stuffed into a specific register or stored in a specific memory location when the dust settles, is certainly deterministic... but what happens between point "a" and "b" isn't.
On the Atari 2600, you could count the number of cycles each assembly instruction took to execute, and calculate which pixel would be getting drawn on the screen at the moment it happened (I think it was 3 pixels per clock cycle). Contrast that with a modern PC, where multiple cores, pipelines, speculative and out-of-order execution, and a hybrid architecture that decomposes traditional x86 CISC operations into bundles of virtual RISC code "behind the scenes" mean that everything that happens "along the way" is subject to the CPU's "mood".
Re:frosty (Score:4, Informative)
OTOH, C64 had a vertical scanline interrupt as well, allowing the same trick to be done, but with 8 sprites, each 24 pixels wide.
The problem (on both systems) with such interrupts and sprite swapping was that is sucked away a lot of useful CPU time that could have been spent on game logic. Also, it seriously constrains vertical movement, so those sprites aren't as flexible anymore.