Atari 2600 Programming Tutorial 37
An anonymous reader writes "Anyone want to learn how to program the Atari 2600? 128 bytes of RAM, and you feed the TV each scanline yourself! There's a tutorial running on AtariAge. So far, its being updated every day. Good stuff." Sure, it might not be the most practical of platforms, but what other 20 year old platform is so dear to our hearts?
Re:OK, a little nostalgia is fine (Score:1)
Re:OK, a little nostalgia is fine (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to try and program my Commodore 64. Now I sometimes develop for embedded applications. Its nice to go back to old game consoles which some people still use, and develop something for it. For our expertise, the 2600 is quite easy and a nice way to relax for embedded developers, who knows, maybe it would be incorporated into cell phones.
Re:OK, a little nostalgia is fine (Score:1)
Who are you to tell people how to better spend their time?
Nintendo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, Nintendo?
Answer to CoboyNeal's question (Score:5, Funny)
Well the NES only has two years to go and it will be 20 years old. In three years it will legally be able to drink in the US. -peel
Commodore (Score:3, Insightful)
Commodore VIC 20, 64, and 128.
Decent graphics and good sound for the times.
Re:Commodore (Score:1)
When I was a wee lad, my parents bought me a Colecovision ADAM computer. It was basically a Colecovision attached to a keyboard and tape drive, which ran a version of Apple's BASIC (called SmartBASIC, IIRC). It even had a daisywheel printer, and was a pretty nifty word processor/electronic typewriter. The case of the ADAM was pretty big. There was one tape drive included, and there was a space for an expansion drive right next to it.
The games were pretty damned good, as I recall. The graphi
How to transfer to ROM cartrige?? (Score:2)
It would be nice to find programmable ROM cartriges for the 2600. It would be great to develop new-name games for it, like Matrix, TuxRacer.
Even a PC-XT 8086 can be used to host static webpages using Minix, I wonder if a serial protocol can be used for one of the connectors (joystick? expansion slot?) and static ROM-based http pages sent out on basic requests. That would be a world record. Possibly also a record for the most slashdottable site.
Another interesting idea is for some small company to de
Re:How to transfer to ROM cartrige?? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but the Cuttle Cart [schells.com] has been discontinued. I'm sure there are alternatives, though.
Another interesting idea is for some small company to develop gameboy-size atari 2600 pads with most of the games built in. Could even be incorporated into cell phones, now that I would buy.
Go ahead. [thinkgeek.com]
But if we could only combine current media (an 8/16 MB compactflash card could hold every version of every game ever written for this machine) you'd have something. Especially now that Sean Kelly [xnet.com] doesn't seem to be able to offer his carts for sale any more. Sorry.
I should really have split this to 3 different posts to max the karma benefits. Oh, well. Maybe I'll get the rest in offline karma.
Re:How to transfer to ROM cartrige?? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it's not cheap, and it requires a much-harder-to-find Atari 7800, but it's a big step in the right direction.
Re:How to transfer to ROM cartrige?? (Score:2)
Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:5, Informative)
Bottom line: This machine is harder to program than probably anything else you've ever worked on, and not necessarily in a good way.
Even if you're interested in classic gaming, wouldn't you rather spend your own clock cycles, say, porting some classic games to your favourite current architectures? If you can really use the challenge, maybe you should study the '2600, and reverse engineer them to make sure the conversion is accurate...
Re:Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:2)
Name any other software you're aware of that requires software timing accuracy down to 1 CPU cycle (Certainly no software running on a PC since that kind of software timing accuracy is impossible). That isn't necessary for all 2600 games, but it is for some.
Remember that the system has only 128 bytes o
Re:Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:2)
Re:Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:2)
Trust me, I remember. [atariage.com]
Re:Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:2)
Re:Don't bother unless you're REALLY interested (Score:2)
I'm just saying that it wasn't Mel-like work. It helped to be clever, of course, but if I could get something to run then almost anybody could.
I mean, on the bright side, the "manual" that we used at Avalon Hill was about twenty pages long. There was no need for 500-page guidebooks that are yet incomplete for such a brutally simple platform.
Great! (Score:2)
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Too late. [atarivcs.free.fr]
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Personally I though they probably should have swallowed hard and just screen-flipped all the time. At least then the annoying flicker would have been omni-present, instead of kicking in and out.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that on any given scan line one can draw two independent objects, two players. Either can be doubled or even tripled, but then they need to be identical in color and shape (barring some very clever, very tight programming), which doesn't work for the ghosts. So, they drew two ghosts on one screen, then the remaining ghost and Pacman on the other, alternating this way and hoping that persistance of vision would make it all OK, but they only did this when the various objects fell on the same scan line. As a result, the screen will be just fine until three objects lie in the same row, and then it begins to flicker until they separate.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
As you mentioned, it might have been possible to use doubling and tripling, but I suspect that there wouldn't be enough time on the scan line to do all the repositioning (Assuming you don't want your ghosts to be limited to a fixed distance apart).
Repositioning on the current scan line for the current scan line is tough to accomplish (I used to think it was impossible until I saw Galaxian).
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Re:Great! (Score:1)
Well... (Score:2)
Ha! I spend much of my day developing software for a 26-year-old platform! Beat that!
And that's just BSD. You Linux folks could probably claim 30 years, back to ye olde UNIX.
Interesting. (Score:1)
It finally answered a question I'd been wondering.
Namely, why is it the 2600 seems to be able to display a lot more colors then the NES/Master System.
But apprently if it's drawing each line individually, as it only has one [scan] line of video memory. It would only have to hold that one palete in memory for that moment. Intersting.
Peeking and poking (Score:3, Funny)
I will never again in my life program in Assembly (Too much peeking and poking for my tastes.)
Too bad we can't get some of those Japanese subway molesters to follow your example. From what I've heard, these guys spend the entire ride peeking up girls' skirts and poking them in naughty places.
GMD
Damn... (Score:2)
This ought to be good (Score:1)
For programming mods for Duke Nukem Forever for the 2600 [3drealms.com]