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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Inside the Homebrew Atari 2600 Scene 86

Posted by simoniker from the creamy-retro-goodness dept.
angryflute writes "'Have you played Atari today?' was an ad jingle for the Atari 2600 VCS game console during its reign in the early years of the video game industry, from the late 1970s to early 1980s. That question that could apply even now, according to an O'Reilly Network article, thanks to the passion of programmers who've continued to make new Atari 2600 games for the past few years."
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Inside the Homebrew Atari 2600 Scene More

Inside the Homebrew Atari 2600 Scene

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:06AM (#9229012)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Skeleton + (Score:5, Informative)

      by jsse ( 254124 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:44AM (#9229096) Homepage Journal
      Screenshot of Skeleton+ for Atari 2600. [atariage.com] :)

      • Re:Skeleton + (Score:2, Interesting)

        by RenaissanceGeek ( 668842 )
        That reminds me SO much of "Dungeons of Dagorath" for the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo2 (Color Computer 2)

        Screenshot of "Dungeons of Dagorath" for TRS-80 CoCo2. [bestway.com.br]

        The interface was all key commands ( A L = Attack with whatever is in your Left hand) (P R WS = from your pack, Pull using your Right hand, the Wooden Sword.) However, the graphics were sufficiently detailed (using the faux-monochrome display method, and simple vector graphics.), and the game played a number of distinctive sounds at ascending volumes as ene

      • Wow, it is a really good thing the author had a short name (Eric Ball)... can you imagine trying to make a title screen with "by Michael Rosenbaum" using 80x40 graphics?
    • Speaking of good Atari games, wasn't there a Slashdot story about a Strong Bad Atari game recently?

      What ever happened with that? Last I knew they were still only a demo...

      Heh, I still remember that Mario game on Atari where you hit that POW! block to knock enemies over and there was a 2-player mode vs. each other. That was always one of my favorites (at least, among the original non-homebrew games). Ironically, when I got it, I thought that it was the same Mario game as on the NES (which I didn't have

      • Re:Strong Bad (Score:2, Informative)

        by Paul Slocum ( 598127 )
        Still working on it. [qotile.net] Should be out sometime this Summer.
      • It WAS the same Mario game as the NES - called Mario Bros. There were several versions of Mario Bros., notably for the C64 and even the Apple II. And also an arcade version (of which the second, German-only NES release even bested).

        Of course, if you were thinking of SUPER Mario Bros., then you're right.

  • If i ran a software firm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 222 ( 551054 ) <stormseeker@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:09AM (#9229022) Homepage
    i would make it a requirement to code an enjoyable 2600 rom :p
    The ammount of work that goes into creating an entertaining title while only working with 4k of rom space and 128 bytes of memory is staggering. Mind you, most of my emails are larger than 4k....
    I dunno, maybe im just being sappy, but it really brings a smile to my face to see coders throwing themselves into what i can only characterize as a digital bootcamp, simply for the love of the game.
    Long live passionate programmers :D.
    • I call it "getting back to the basics." Anybody who's successfully coding good games on the 2600 has a bright future in the embedded systems world, where limitations like that are commonplace. The current crop of small microcontrollers (PICs and the like) have similar constraints, and cleverly-designed software is landing them in all sorts of places.

      Don't take this personally, but that fact that people are staggered by things like this worries me. Limitations were what we had back then, and we dealt wit

  • Oy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NeoPotato ( 444954 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:13AM (#9229028)
    What's with people ripping off the first paragraph and submitting it as their text? Do they just assume we're not going to read the article, and are therefore being clever, or are they just lazy? That whole submission, with the exception of six words, is ripped from the top paragraph of the article.

    • Re:Oy (Score:5, Funny)

      by sporty ( 27564 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:37AM (#9229079) Homepage
      Do they just assume we're not going to read the article...


      You're new here, aren't you? ;)

      • Re:Oy (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        No, but he [slashdot.org] is!
    • "What's with people ripping off the first paragraph and submitting it as their text?"

      If I were the type to submit stories, I'd do that too for the simple reason that I have read a NUMBER of articles where the submitter of the story really didn't get the point of the article at all. Is it really so bad? (I'll concede, though, that they should at least give credit to where they got the text...)

      " Do they just assume we're not going to read the article, and are therefore being clever, or are they just la
  • Those were the simple days... here's my first game. I called it "Watch the aliens locking down your Atari" 10 PRINT " -^- " 20 GOTO 10

  • This is passion at it's finest (Score:5, Interesting)

    by beacher ( 82033 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:15AM (#9229034) Homepage
    "The system has no video buffer, the total code size cannot exceed 4K and can only use 128 bytes of RAM"... "the Atari 2600 requires 100 percent Assembler coding".. Wow. You gotta really love it or love challenges in order to constrain yourself so. In the age of bigger and faster machines, I think a lot of the bloat is due to the fact that people never understood or learned the inner workings of the processor and the code isn't as tight as it could be. I'm not recommending that assembly be required, but I think anyone that develops should be cognisant of what happens behind the curtain.

    Still- Developing and making fun games from this tiny system is incredible. I have every platform I've ever owned since the 2600/Intellivision era and the 2600 has definately sat unused in the past few years... Maybe it's time to dust it off...

    • Re:This is passion at it's finest (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stween ( 322349 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:25AM (#9229056)
      A lot of "bloat" comes from increasing levels of abstraction away from the hardware, and numerous levels of interfaces between different system layers to allow for more modular code, more reusable code, and generally, safer code. Coding an application for a modern machine with all its fancy hardware would be pretty tricky without these interfaces already written for people. Sure, somebody has got to write the low-level interaction gubbins in the first place, but once it's done, it's done. If software houses wrote for the hardware to reduce bloat, we'd never see any games or software. Praise the bloat. The bloat be praised.

      [That's not to say that an understanding of what the machine is actually doing with the code wouldn't help people when designing software systems, I agree that it would certainly be beneficial. It's just not necessarily where all the bloat comes from. The lack of understanding is probably more and more relevant as more and more layers of abstraction are added. And there's always room for one more layer of abstraction!]
      • While it's true that HALs require space they are dynamically linked in both Linux and Windows. So there goes that theory.

        In fact you can write GUI apps in Windows with menus, dialog, buttons that are smaller than a couple dozen KB.

        A lot of bloat comes from huge MFC/C++/etc libraries that get linked in [all or nothing] and serve merely as another languages wrapper around a C API.

        I recall from the Borland days [my first C compiler for Windows] a simple OWL based hello world application was 80KB lines of c
      • What I find interesting is that today's more capable hardware makes Atari 2600-style programming impossible. For example, a cache will increase average performance, but destroys timing consistency. The ability to determine exactly how many cpu cycles a section of code will use is critical to progamming the 2600.

        Today, real-time software is a fading art. The good news is that the real-time stuff has migrated to hardware so even OS's with non-deterministic timing like Windows and Unix/Linux can particpate in

    • Re:This is passion at it's finest (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, since it's so limited, you only need to write 4K of code to make a game. This very limitation makes 2600 game development a more reasonable hobby than development on anything more modern... For one, there's lot less code to write so you do not have to spend much time on a complete game. Second, since it's a challenge to make everything fit, even the boring parts of the game become challenging as you simply have to optimize them for size. Thus, you get a limited amount of highly challenging thinkin
    • The bloat problem as I see it is that disk/memory now appear to now be so plentiful that many developers think nothing of throwing Mb's of GFX and FMV into a game usually at the expense of gameplay. Am I the only person who remembers when programmers were taught to implement functionality/gameplay first and worry about tarting the user interface up later?? What happened?

      The very active C64 development scene is one place where I don't think dust has ever had a chance to settle.... amazing stuff. If you h
    • You have a point, but I have to agree with ESR when he said:

      "To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious -- so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones."

      Original reference here [catb.org]. I think this is the whole foundation behind the kind of abstraction that software development takes today. F

  • Dedication or masochism? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Xargle ( 165143 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:15AM (#9229037)
    Do they code these games sitting on broken glass whilst being branded with hot pokers whilst listening to Celine Dion?

    No accounting for taste, I suppose.

  • Good Article! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bender_ ( 179208 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:18AM (#9229044) Journal
    Good Article, seems to be quite accurate on details. And yes, I did actually read it.

    I also made some attempts on vcs2600 programming some years ago. It could not be any more different from your daily C/php/... hacking. Think of microcontroller programming with even more demanding timing.

    The machine has 128bytes (yes, bytes) of ram and 4-6kb of ROM. No video ram, everything is generated on the fly. The CPU does not support interrupts, all the timing is done by active waiting.

    • and that is no different than php hacking?

      • Re:Good Article! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by csirac ( 574795 )
        Obviously... it has no framebuffer, that's incredible. It couldn't have a framebuffer even if it wanted to, unless you only wanted 16x8 resolution.

        And I thought C64 coding was hardcore... 128 bytes of total RAM? Just writing a character generator would be challenging, let alone a game!

        • Re:Good Article! (Score:5, Informative)

          by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:52AM (#9229110) Homepage
          Note that you have 4k of ROM, that in addition can be bank-switched. "All" you need the RAM for is for changing variables, really. Not that it's not a pretty demanding limit (seeing how apparently the 6502 stack needs to fit as well), but you do have a bit more margin to play with that it seems at first. Most microcontrollers today look similar, with what seems like a ridiculously low amount of RAM compared to ROM.

          Compare to the Commodore VIC20 - precursor to the C64 (and a wonderful machine in many ways). You had 5k total, of which 1.5k went for the video buffer. That left you with about the same amount of total codespace to play with, and there were no shortage of really good games for that machine either. The defining limitation of the 2600 really seems to be the lack of a framebuffer far more than the low amount of RAM.

          • Most microcontrollers today look similar, with what seems like a ridiculously low amount of RAM compared to ROM.

            That's true, but the only MCUs I've worked with that have this little RAM is the PIC 16F/16C, and I couldn't have imagined driving a TV with one of those.

            The current MCU I'm working with is a MC9S12 with 12KiB SRAM/256KiB FLASH... I feel so dirty :-)
          • The bank-switching capability was not part of the 2600 design. It was a feature that was added to the cartridge hardware toward the end of the 2600 era. Each big-game vendor created their own unique implementation. Bank-switching was required for games larger than 4K due to the fact that the 6507 only had 13 address lines and 1/2 of the address space was reserved for hardware devices (note also that all ROM was in the cartridge, the 2600 unit has 128 bytes of internal RAM and 0 bytes of internal ROM).

            Some

        • Re:Good Article! (Score:4, Informative)

          by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @08:12AM (#9229168)
          "It couldn't have a framebuffer even if it wanted to, unless you only wanted 16x8 resolution."

          I wrote a lot of assembler on the 6809 (CoCo 3), and a few text-based games. The text-screen was 32x16, and most of my useful assembler programs that manipulated that screen came in well under 4K (2K was my average) and used well under 128 bytes for data storage.

          The machine had a video generator that could be pointed to any point in memory within the machine, regardless of what that memory area was actually used for (data storage, program execution, stack -- didn't matter).

          I empathize with the homebrew developers. Developing with limited machine capacity is very fun, and sometimes very frustrating.

          The CoCo had floppy drive support, but the read/write timing had to be exact since the drive had no interrupt support. The result being that while data were being read/written, the machine was in a very tight waiting loop to the exclusion of all else. Even system interrupts had to be turned off to get the needed clock cycles.

          Only the NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt) could be left on (it was impossible to turn off, hence "non-maskable"), but it was attached to the "failure" mode of the drive (the only actual interrupt it used, but only if the hardware failed).

          Those were the days. :)

  • The book "Hackers" (Score:4, Informative)

    by Henrik S. Hansen ( 775975 ) <hsh@member.fsf.org> on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:22AM (#9229050) Homepage
    People interested in the early days of game hacking should read "Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution" by Steven Levy.

    It also has an accurate history of the early days of the MIT AI Lab (where Stallman and others started out), and the early days of BASIC.

    It has several chapters about the birth of Sierra (then called On-Line Systems, IIRC). Great stuff, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the early days of computing. Truly great book.

  • I want an OLED for my Atari Lynx (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:23AM (#9229054)
    The resolution is great but so flickery bright that it hurts my eyes. I sure would like to have a screen upgrade to OLED so I can play it again, it would also increase battery lifetime.

    Why? Well two-player Lemmings sucked on my Atari ST, it's not available for my 2600. Wait that would also mean that I need a Lynx bluetooth module as I can't be bother to hook up wires :-)

    Dennis

  • Damn it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:27AM (#9229063)
    I've already moderated some posts here, so I have to post as AC from another machine (or else my moderations are removed)

    I've been coding some stuff on the Atari and it's an extremly cool machine.
    You can actually build one yourself, if you have a little knowledge in electronics.

    Most of my coding is done in the Atari 2600 emulator called "Stella":
    http://freshmeat.net/projects/stella/

    Worth a try if you love the 6502 and minimalism

    • Re:Damn it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by csirac ( 574795 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @07:35AM (#9229076)
      I've been coding some stuff on the Atari and it's an extremly cool machine. You can actually build one yourself, if you have a little knowledge in electronics. From the article it says that the 2600 has a custom chip - the TIA. How do you substitute that? With an MCU/FPGA?
    • I've already moderated some posts here, so I have to post as AC from another machine (or else my moderations are removed)

      They get removed anyway. Even if you post as an AC. Unless you delete your /. cookie.
      • They get removed anyway. Even if you post as an AC. Unless you delete your /. cookie.

        Wow, the cookies will follow me from machine to machine, somehow knowing that it's me that's posting? Slashdot coders are amazing!
    • Something that's always bothered me about the old "classic" video-gaming platforms (with exceptions like the Magnavox Odyssey 2 [classicgaming.com]) was that the joystick controllers were all digital, with either 8 directions or, sometimes, 16 (IntelliVision), but no control over the INTENSITY of the movement: any game that had you controlling a moving object in two dimensions (e.g. the aim-point in "Missile Command") had only one speed at which that point moved, making it difficult ot be either precise or fast in your positioning.

      Now, what is a joystick, really? It's two potentiometers: one for horizontal (x-axis), and one for vertical (y-axis.) Atari 2600 joysticks aren't built like this, instead having on/off contacts only. But joysticks aren't the only controllers available for the 2600: there are also the paddles (and the keypads and the driving controller, but I digress.) And what is a Paddle? It's a potentiometer. And the Atari paddles are only available in PAIRS, which share a common connector to the 2600. This makes it possible to have four-player games like "Warlords" or "Video Olympics" by using two sets of paddles. Why did no one ever build the two potentiometers from the paddles into a single joystick? All of the necessary functionality is present on the 2600 side for analog 2D controls, so why not? (I'll grant that writing analog-control software on such a limited platform would be taxing, to say the least, but surely it's POSSIBLE.)

      Heck, I've even soldered together a pair of capacitors into an adaptor-plug that lets you use PC joysticks on an Atari 5200 (using plans from the online Atari 5200 FAQ [atarihq.com] and an old Texas-Instruments calculator with the clicky keys for my keypad), surely such a project for the 2600 wouldn't be any harder?

      So THERE's a challenge for the modern 2600 hacker: build a game that uses an analog joystick! (for a REAL challenge, make it two-player!) Heck, I'd even be willing to build a joystick adapter for the programmer who did it! (and gave me a ROM cart of it.) (OK, that's setting myself up, I know.)

      Any takers?

      • There was a console system with analog joysticks -- the Atari 5200.

        However, they were quite horrible to use, keep centered, and had a fairly short usage period. Now, if you can get ahold of a Wico 5200 joystick (and the Y-adaptor cable to use the 5200 controller's keypad), the console was much nicer.

        In most cases, it's possible to simulate the analog movement (slow, then faster in the same direction) using digital controls and not-terribly sophisticated timing loops.

        Reading two paddle values on a 2600 m

        • Interesting: can you give me a link to more info on the functionality of the driving controller?

          (My Google-fu is low, and all I can think of is a 4-bit encoder: 16 possible positions, which would be lousy.)

          • Interesting: can you give me a link to more info on the functionality of the driving controller?

            Quadrature Encoding (complete with picture) [erols.com]

            The signals from the controller make it look like the user is pressing left, then left-down, then down, then off. In fact, in a pinch you can use the joystick to simulate a driving controller (not recommended).

            In the game, you keep the previous state of the left and down bits and compare with the current state. If the states are different, and table lookup gives t

      • So THERE's a challenge for the modern 2600 hacker: build a game that uses an analog joystick! (for a REAL challenge, make it two-player!) Heck, I'd even be willing to build a joystick adapter for the programmer who did it! (and gave me a ROM cart of it.) (OK, that's setting myself up, I know.)
        Already done. [qotile.net] Even has two-player mode.
  • If a machine has 128 Bytes of RAM, I'm wondering how one can even program a game that is remotely fun by yesterday's (1985) standards. Let's see - 1 frame on TV needs:

    - 320x240 pixel or 76800 pixels. Let's say every one of these pixels has 2 bits (acceptable by 'yesterdays' standards. So alone to hold one frame in an accepatble resolution and color depth, one needs some 19200 bytes of RAM. If one looks at the 2600, we're far away from that, even if we say we can divide that by four since the Atari most pro

    • Re:Hmmmm.....time did advance, right? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's what the ROM is for.
      You can bank-switch roms to get more than 4kb too.
    • - 320x240 pixel or 76800 pixels. Let's say every one of these pixels has 2 bits...

      320 pixels width? Area-drawing commands? You did read the article, right? Sheesh.

      The Atari 2600 does not have a display buffer! Everything is generated on-the-fly, as in, while the TV raster scanner is doing its thing. It's also apparently impossible to get anything better than 40 pixels of resolution for the "playfield" graphics (as opposed to the sprites which are finer resolution).

      Where did your "320" value for horizont

      • Actually you could get *limited* colors at 320x200. I forget what the term for it was, but I remember coding a game in 320x200. It was a matter of alternating lit pixels. If you had a run of 8 pixels, and every odd-numbered pixel was lit, then you'd have one color. If every even-numbered pixel was lit, you'd have another color. And if every color was lit, you'd have white (every color).

        Ok, ok, to it was only 4-color, but I remember creating a nifty (at the time) character-based game using those color

        • Re:Hmmmm.....time did advance, right? (Score:4, Informative)

          by phozz bare ( 720522 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @09:57AM (#9229719)
          Actually you could get *limited* colors at 320x200. I forget what the term for it was

          Yes. It was called 'artifacting', and occurred when using high resolution monochrome modes. It looked terrible, different computer models and different TV's produced different colors, and you were still stuck with 160 pixels of resolution anyway because you had to turn on every other pixel to get a certain color (an ugly khaki green or, alternatively, a shocking sky blue. or at least that's what it looked like on *my* system, depending on whether you used even or odd pixels).

          This mode wasn't available for the 2600 though, so not really on topic.

          Oh, and it's De Re Atari [atariarchives.org], reproduced in full for your pleasure.

          Slashdot is like Playboy, everyone skips the articles and goes straight for the juicy stuff.

          • Actually it wasn't so much that different TV's produced different colors, but different *TIA chips produced different colors. Specifically, some early Atari demos (I forget which one - it displayed an image of the Atari 800 and monitor) and games (Choplifter, Beneath the Pyramids) were written expecting the artifacting colors to be orange and cyan (or red and blue), which was the case on the CTIA chip. Later on Atari replaced the CTIA with GTIA, whose luminance signal differed from the former chip by 90 d
    • RTFA.

      The amount of RAM one would need for a framebuffer is immaterial: the 2600 doesn't have one. Everything is generated on the fly.

      Besides the 2600's limited amount of memory, homebrew game developers say that the most difficult aspect about writing software for it is dealing with its display kernel. Since the system lacks video RAM, each scanline must be programmed directly. The picture on the screen has to be drawn in synchronization with the video beam, which can be a tricky feat to pull off, and

  • Color pictures could revolutionize the 2600 market (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know the 2600 market collapsed in the eighties but there is a bright light on the horizon. If you read the article you'll learn that in 2003 they found a way to display color pictures on a 2600! By flickering three dithered bitmaps your eyes will blend the the red green and blue lines into a color picture. Do you know what that means? Strippoker could be released on the 2600, and we all know which industry drives sales of computer inovations!

    Color pictures will revolutionize the 2600 market. I can't wai

  • I've done this! (Score:5, Informative)

    by pngwen ( 72492 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @10:27AM (#9229997) Journal
    Of course my rom just flashes random colors and a line that remains constant going back and forth. Considering what the atari 2600 environment is like, I'm damn proud of this. It's not exactly like other architectures. Even if you are used to programming in assembly for embedded devices with tight memory constraints, the VCS is STILL a major wakeup call.

    Here are some of the challenges that you will encounter:
    • There is no interrupt vector system. System functions are accomplished by means of the stella chip, which looks like a section in RAM. writing and/or reading from certain memory locations triggers events (such as drawing to the screen and such)
    • TIMING is YOUR responsibility! You have to count clock cycles while you program, and you have to write the code to redraw your screen scan line by scanline on each electron beam pass of the TV.
    • Computation has to be performed mostly during the blanking and return phases of the electron beam. You know you have 72 clock cycles in which to operate your game logic before you have to begin drawing the screen again
    • Once your program's timing gets off, you get something that looks nothing like what you intended. My moving line example had a line that stair stepped as it moved. It wasn't until I added a sufficient amount of NOPs that it lined back up.


    All in all though, it is a rather ingenious system. Considering when it was made, and the maximum cost of each unit, I'd say kudos to those engineers! I hope to do some more meaningful stuff with it once I have more time. I've plans to hack hardware for it as well!

    -Bob

  • *sniffle* (Score:2, Funny)

    by atari2600 ( 545988 )
    I've been waiting for this article for years and now it is finally up, i am at a loss for words *sniffle*

  • Doesn't the 2600 have a line buffer? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:50PM (#9231224)
    I thought the 2600 had a line buffer. Basically a 40 or 80 bit shift register into which the pixels are written and then they are written to the video screen. This is my recollection from a presentation that the creator of the 2600 (the same guy who did the Amiga I think) had on the hardware internals.
  • but when i read lines like:

    "There's nothing like playing a game on the real hardware using real controllers -- emulators can only get you so far," says Grand.

    Get you so far where? ? ? ?

    I mean, I'm a guy who owns a damn apple newton and a next cube (anyone wanna buy a next cube?) and at least i had minorly practical reasons for getting each way past their prime, and have even gotten some use out of the newton (cube is a Damn Fine Paper Weight)

    sorry, but if it sounds to me too much like the geek version

  • True classics live forever (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:59PM (#9231286)
    Once it was thought that such old game classics, and the machines they were played on, would go out of use once the original hardware would die, waiting to be replaced by new platforms & remakes. Not so.

    Development of both hardware & software simply continues as time goes on, no matter what. If an original manufacturer pulls the hardware of the market, and games go off the shelves, development slows down, but continues anyway. If the manufacturer/copyright holders try to prevent remakes, emulators, don't release ROMs, hardware info, schematics etc, that slows things down. But they can also promote this, and enjoy having an active community further developing these old designs, like in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum case. Given enough time, all there is to know about the inner workings of these old machines becomes known, and new things are done with it.

    I think the appeal to enthousiasts results from the simplicity of these old systems. If you put in enough time, you can write code that uses every single part to the max, doing incredible things with minimal hardware.
    One of my favourites is the Sinclair ZX81. 1 KB of RAM, no sound, no colour, and: no videoprocessor. About 3/4 of CPU time is spent on directly writing black&white dot patterns to the TV screen, using some simple logic to turn it into a video signal. With only the remaining 1/4 CPU time left for doing useful things.

    With the arrival of quickly reprogammable hardware like FPGA's, the border between hardware and software blurs further, nice example is FPGA Arcade [fpgaarcade.com], where old games are rewritten in hardware circuitry. So instead of having a CPU eat through instructions coded in ROM, your joystick input directly affects the logic programmed into a FPGA. Very cool!

  • I made JoustPong 2600 and "2600 101" link (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) * on Sunday May 23, 2004 @01:06PM (#9231335) Homepage
    I actually made (and published through AtariAge) my own Atari homebrew, JoustPong [atariage.com] -- Pong with a Flap Button. I kept a developer's journal [alienbill.com] of the experiece.

    I also made a newbie's tutorial, linked to at the end of the O'Reilly article: 2600 101 [alienbill.com]. And currently I'm (slowly) working on 2600 cookbook [alienbill.com]...O'Reilly fans should find the format very familiar.

    Overall, that's a great techie introduction to the hobby.
  • I was in the Office Depot in the Jerusalem Mall the other day, and I saw what looked like an original 2600 joystick. It appears like they took an old 2600 system put it on the joystick base with a few of the old games and are selling them as is. I think it was about 150 NIS (~$3) but as I don't have TV to hook it to, and don't play many games anyhow I didn't look to closely/
    • Unfortunately, the titles on the 2600-in-a-Joystick are ports/remakes of the originals rather than the genuine article. It would've been nice if they were properly emulated for accuracy, but I suppose it's better than nothing.
  • I don't know if it's emphasized clearly enough in the article, but Homestar Runner [homestarrunner.com] has commissioned a few homebrew 2600 coders to make their own game [atariage.com]... Imagine the precedence that this could set, IMHO, this is along the same lines as the Counterstrike modders getting published by Sierra (err Valve?)..

    Imagine... homebrew people getting paid for their hobby... I think that wired magazine's mention [wired.com] of this makes it a little more interesting: homebrew games are becoming available on a grander scale than jus

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