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.
Another winner from the 6502 family (Score:5, Funny)
Atari 400 and 800 were just plain fun. Yeah, plastic cases, and ROM cartridges, but what fun those arcade games were. The Apple II guys would say: PR#6. We'd say: PR pound sand.
Re:Another winner from the 6502 family (Score:5, Interesting)
I upgraded to an Atari 7800 "prosystem" which also had a Commodore Semiconductor 6502.
Ordered it online! (Yes kids Atari had an online store in the 80s.) That was a really nice system with great near-arcade perfect games..... 128 sprites (no damn flicker)..... 256 colors at 320x240..... too bad it barely sold.
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The Lynx was too expensive for the time, and I belive it was the last Atari game system made.
Forgetting the Jaguar, aren't we?
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"The 7800 was an improved 5200, a succesful game system."
Not really. (1) The 7800 used the 2600 as its base, for backwards compatibility, and then added a better graphics chip with faster CPU. (2) As for games, the 7800 ports outshine the 5200 ports in every way. Not only do they look better (virtually identical to the arcade), but they have digital controls rather than the analog controls that made 5200 games a pain-in-the-ass to play.
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Tramiel killed the 7800. When originally launched in 1984, its library was full of the best arcade conversions ever seen. Robotron, Ms Pac Man, Galaga, etc. However, it was also in the middle of the video game crash, and Tramiel fell into the "video games are a fad" camp. He yanked the 7800 from the market before it got any traction.
After Nintendo and Super Mario showed that video games were still a hot commodity, Tramiel decided to re-enter the video game market. But instead of spending money to desig
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I had a 7800 and an x86 PC concurrently (before that a c64). At the time I sort of loathed not having different console, but now I look back wanting to recreate my whole library. There's been many discussions on AtariAge about whether or not the 7800 could have handled a Super Mario Bros. platformer, and the consensus was generally yes.
Here's the cool thing about the 7800. NES games were about $30-40 back then. 2600 games could be had for $3-5 at that point, and 7800 titles eventually dropped to like $1
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"The moral of this story? People who own 7800s are assholes."
That's nice.
I had both the 7800 for the classic 70s/80s arcade games, plus an Amiga, so I was playing 16 bit games like Populous in the 80s, while everyone else was still doing the shitty-looking NES or SMS.
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Please. Real players played the Action Maxx.
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One day he was talking shit and I hit him in the back with a broomstick.
Nice move, Malfoy!
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Yow, I know I'm getting older; put enough quarters into Pong, etc. (Only program I sold was written on an 800 for a corporation in MIchigan, '82.) More stuff's been inspired from the Atari than you can shake a stick at. Happy Birthday Atari, and thanks, Nolan and Jay!
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The Atari 400 was the first computer I owned, purchased with money saved from my job delivering magazines (a glorified paperboy). The TRS-80 didn't do color, the Apple ][ was too expensive, the C=64 didn't exist yet, and IBM's new Personal Computer - no sound, no graphics, no effing way - was ridiculously overpriced. But the Atari 400 could play Asteroids and Star Raiders, and opened the door to printers and modems and bears, oh my! It was oh so much more than the Atari 2600 game machine that every upper
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I was a systems guy, but the 400 and 800 were more like fun. Hook it to a color TV, get the joysticks, and have a blast. It kept me sane while compiling crap in 64K of memory on "larger" systems. It gave birth to ideas that made the C64, the Playstation, and even things like the Xbox. What fun!
Happy birthday Atari! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure, just like I "figured out" when you're playing Minesweeper and you enter xyzzy and hold down shift while you mouse over the minefield, one pixel in the top left corner of the screen lights up on a safe square.
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I used to allow the invaders to wipe-out my shields (they disappear when the invaders move to row 3), because the shields just got in the way of my firing. If you want a REAL challenge, try the version with invisible invaders. Getting that last invisible guy is nigh impossible (I never got past wave 2). 128 games in one cartridge! ;-)
One flaw with Atari games is that they were often too easy. I could play Invaders and Missile Command for hours & hours and not die. I was annoyed when they started e
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Yeah, We used to play space invaders with the TV turned off to see how many levels we could get through without looking. One person would play, and the other one would turn the TV on about every 2-3 minutes just long enough to see if the game was over.
Wouldn't it have been easier and more fun (for the people not playing) to leave the TV on and have the player turn around?
2600 power switch cheat (Score:2)
I still remember it to this day (I had the 6 switch VCS, family got it in December '79):
Atari 2600/VCS + Space Invaders cart - turn the power off and on rapidly until you get a screen with out the invaders and only the mothership travelling across the screen at the top. Once you see that, start the game and you will fire two shots at a time instead of only.
My dad would get pissed if we did it 'cause he swore we were going to destroy the console.
I always like to point out that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I always like to point out that (Score:5, Interesting)
Never thought of it that way. You think we'll see a Linux distribution that fits on 128 bytes? ;-)
Of course the Atari didn't actually run on just 128 bytes. It was hard-programmed with 4K of internal ROM commands, plus the 2 or 4K in the cartridge that the programmer had full control over. The biggest cartridge ever made was 32K (Jr.PacMan; a great game). ----- The 128 byte RAM limitation meant the background was only 40 pixels wide! That same resolution was later used in their 1979 computers: 40x240, 80x240, and so on.
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I suggest reading this. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11696 [mit.edu]
Not only was the memory limited but they didn't even have enough memory for a frame buffer so they used a line buffer. You had to make the program fast enough to write the data into the register before it was scanned to the screen. What is crazy is that even though there were only two bit mapped sprites, two 2 pixel missiles, and a one pixel ball you could really do a lot more by changing the colors and locations
Re:I always like to point out that (Score:4, Funny)
So 4GB is enough for EVERYONE?
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I remember hunting down a copy of Rogue from DOS days and the realization that the PDF version of the manual was larger than the game executable and even the simple webpage was many times as large as the game it hosted.
Ran across a similar situation when perusing sites dedicated to Turbo Pascal. Documentation and web pages have a larger foot print than most of the machines many of us grew up with. I still remember my favorite PC game; Star Flight; fit on two 360k diskettes.
Turns 40? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Atari turning 40 implies that it's still alive
No it doesn't. [google.com]
Atari Greatest Hits (Score:5, Informative)
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Crap. If only I had an iPhone so I could download..... wait I already did that twelve years ago. (Thank you Stella emulator.) I prefer playing the console versions since you only need one joystick & one button vs. the 10 confusing buttons needed to play Missile Command Arcade or Defender Arcade.
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There's a shareware game called "Gauntlet" (no relation to the dungeon arcade game) I like to play from time to time on my emulated Atari. I used to play it for hours, back in the olden days. Absolutely superb game. I wish I'd had the money to buy the full version, but I was always spending it on tabletop wargame/RPG stuff.
Heh, it even has a Wiki page [wikipedia.org] now.
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All 100 Atari Greatest Hits games are free on iOS today. Link Here [apple.com]
Awesome, i can't wait to relive the joystick era on a touchscreen. (seriously, how does one play oldschool arcade style games on an iOS device?)
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seriously, how does one play oldschool arcade style games on an iOS device?
A Joystick-It [thinkgeek.com], of course!
Or you can go all out hardcore with an iCade [thinkgeek.com]
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All 100 Atari Greatest Hits games are free on iOS today.
Actually, it is 1 Atari game for free (Missile Command)
Quote:
Buy additional games in 2 unique ways:
1. 25 separate packs available for download at $0.99
2. Buy all 100 games for a discounted price of $9.99 (basically the price of a movie ticket)
Not a bad price at all though, and in fact I bought the full 100 set too. I just wanted to point out they aren't free however.
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Actually, while that's normally true, TODAY, if you download the game and run it (very
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I paid for all 100 last year or so. What sucks is that every time there's a minor update to the app you have to download all 100 games again, and it happens somewhat frequently.
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Nope. Download the game and all further downloads are free for 24 hours. The web page hasn't been updated.
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missle command is free, the rest are in app-purchases (25 packs @$0.99 or all 100 for $9.99). fuck your referral!
I downloaded it a few hours ago. Got a screen that said "It's our anniversary, all 100 games are free until you delete the game from your device". I've downloaded 6 different games so far and there weren't any in-app purchases involved. If you've already got the game I imagine you need to delete it and re-download.
Membrane switch panels (Score:3)
At last (Score:5, Interesting)
Real News for Nerds!
# 1 console and computer (Score:3)
Atari is barely remembered by today's 20-somethings, but back in the 70s and early 80s they were # 1. They had the number one console (Atari VCS/2600) from 1977 to 84, and the number one computer (Atari 800) in 1981 and 82.
I still love those old Atari 2600 games better than many modern games. Point, shoot, rack-up a million points. Brag to your friends.
Pole position?? (Score:2)
Pole position was Namco's.
Just like Xevious which had some Atari built cabinets floating around.
Now, get off my lawn or i'll xevious-bomb your balls - with just one shot in the middle, of course :)
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Pole Position is one of many games that Atari had the exclusive rights to sell in North America. They even went so far as to add an "atari banner" flying over the racetrack.
ATARI FORCE - In the year 2005 Earth is facing ecological devastation and Atari is the savior of the world, and so too are their "Atari Force" superheroes! Try not to laugh too much. I literally bought the game just so I could read the comic (the game was not bad either). I was also a loyal reader of Atari Age which was just a
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Warlords Ghost (Score:2)
I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
The best part of Warlords was when one someone "died" - they were still there as a mostly invisible ghost and could affect the trajectory of the fireball if it hit them. So if you died, you could really mess with the remaining players anytime the fireball came near your corner of the screen.
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To the people I see poo-poohing this.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you mind terribly if I ask what your problem is?
I mean, what difference does it make to you if somebody likes something that you don't?
Do y'all really have nothing better to do than criticize somebody's passion just because it isn't all shiny and new?
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CGR's On This Day In Gaming - June 27, Atari Found (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umnyVPgWE3g [youtube.com] for a video.
Icons on Atari (Score:3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFrhkC4Xuw4 [youtube.com]
Star Trek on Atari (Score:2)
I remember star trek on the atari 800. It took over 20 minutes to load from the cassette drive. You got to shoot at Klingons. It seemed so cool back then.
Ahhhh ... Tempest (Score:4, Insightful)
Tempest is by far my favorite video game of all time. No video game since has come close to holding my attention like Tempest. The simplicity of the game, the rhythm of the game, the invisible levels, the chip glitch that enabled you to do weird things to the game depending on the last two digits of your score. I still dream about the game, and I haven't played it in 20 years.
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.
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Logitech wingman... extreme? I think that's the one. Serial/gameport stick. Has a rotary controller on it. Available at flea markets with busted joysticks. You're welcome.
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kudos to TFA's author (Score:2)
WOULD have been.... (Score:2)
Atari would have been 40 today... IF it still was something more than just a trademark. Infogrames in France is not Atari. It's a trademark holder. Remember "Is it live or is it Memorex"? Those mediocre DVD-Rs you bought last month aren't coming from the same company as those cassette tapes you used to record KROQ tunes.
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Wizards of Wor? (Score:2)
Friend of mine had an atari and a set of wireless controllers. We could play that game for hours, we made a very good team.
Video games suck... (Score:2)
Computer games rule, Spacewar motherfuckers! YEAH. PDP11 in-da-lab!
Or just love the Ur-Quan
Id take an atari today (Score:2)
for my computer collection ... its a pretty interesting computer ... though more of a games machine than serious stuffyness computer (we were an Apple II family) Though probally one of the XL series if it dropped in my lap that way. Definitely any of the 16 bit machines ..
My cousins had a 2600, I at one point had a 5200 with one working joystick, pac mand and pole position (still one of my favorites), though I never really cared for the consoles as much, I just about bought a 2600 till the old lady went fro
Old hardware (Score:2)
Just fired up my 2600 only to find out it no longer works.. at least I still have Stella (2600 emulator). My Atari 130XE with 1050 disk drive still works and the floppies from 1980s are still booting... amazing.
Memories (Score:2)
Re:frosty (Score:5, Interesting)
Until Commodore produced the Amiga.
Of course the Amiga really had Atari blood running through it, having been designed by Jay Miner -- the same man that help design previous Atari machines.
I can't believe Atari let the Amiga design get away from them.
Instead they came out with a machine that had a dumb frame buffer and simple syth chip attached to a CPU. The ST was more Radio Shack Color Computer than a next generation Atari machine.
I guess I can blame Commodore for that since they gave Atari Jack Tramiel. That guy seemed obsessed with undermining his old company. He basically helped Atari and Commodore destroy each other while IBM PC compatibles slowly took over.
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, Interesting)
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.
Interesting, I remember when laser disc arcade games like "Dragon's lair" [wikipedia.org] came out. They were supposed to revitalize a slumping arcade industry. I just looked it up and Dragon's Lair came out in 1983. I was an arcade addict at the time and remember it well, arcade games had stagnated and computers lacked the "horse power" to get to the next level of visual effects. I believe it was Gauntlet [wikipedia.org] that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. It didn't need great graphics (although we all thought it was really cool at the time), it just needed to be massively addicting and awesome to play. I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
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I believe it was Gauntlet that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. [...] I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
Was it even possible to play that game without shoving in another quarter every 30 seconds? IIRC it was an endless war of attrition...
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My friends and I would have marathon games of Gauntlet, seeing how far we could play on just one quarter. My record was seven hours, using the Warrior. I think Gauntlet was the last great arcade game to allow near-infinite play time for people who had mastered of the game.
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I think myself, my brother and a friend were able to play for over a minute before one of us had to put in another quarter.
It's been a (long) while but I think we got to the third screen/level/whatever once or twice.
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Back in the Usenet days, someone wrote up a Gauntlet FAQ. It was pretty interesting - If I remember right, the key to long play times was keeping your score low, because the game spawned food at a rate inversely proportional to your score. ... Found it. Actually it's for Gauntlet 2. Dates to 1993.
I'd post the two parts of the FAQ as a journal entry, but Slashdot is giving me "Could not initialize the editor" :-(.
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The videogame "crash" was really only a crash for arcades and consoles. Computer gaming continued through 1983-86 without hardly a slump (some of my favorite games are from that era). Nintendo recognized this and shipped their NES over to America to take-advantage of the vacuum Warner Communications/Atari had left behind.
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Amiga is a bigger Atari (Score:2)
Amiga was really the next generation Atari machine, the guy who designed it was the same guy who worked on the Atari 400/etc. I have written code for Atari 8bit/16bit, Commodore 8bit/16bit and I can tell you that Atari 8bit -> Amiga and Commodore 64 -> Atari ST from the architecture and hardware design point of view.
Check out the history of Atari on WIkipedia, interesting read.
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:frosty (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Amiga sprites were primarily meant for things like mouse pointers.
The Amiga had a very good blitter coprocessor which was able to move around much larger chunks of pixels at high speed.
But these machines are from a different generation altogether, so no fair comparison.
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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.
I wasn't aware of the C64's ability to do a scanline interrupt. You learn something new...
Vertical movement was an issue on the Atari, simply because the sprites/PMGs did not move vertically. They were objects that spanned the entire vertical height of the display. To get vertical movement, you had to redraw the graphic, moving the data in the PMG bitmap area.
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"The Atari didn't have sprites, as such. It had a system called Player Missile Graphics"
Same thing. The "player" is an 8x8 sprite and the missile is a 2x2 sprite. One trick was to "stretch" the missile sprite into a vertical line, as was done with Pitfall's swinging vines. ------ In any case the C64 had more "player" sprites than the Atari, so it was more flexible. It could create some awesome shooter games, that were not possible with the Atari 800 or console.
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The 800 had 128 colours until GTIA came out (1980?) and 256 thereafter. It had 4 sprites plus 4 missiles and the missiles could be combined into a 5th sprite.
Re:frosty (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as I was a chickenhead in my youth, I gotta say that the Atari 8 bit family had better video. I think. I haven't thought much about it in ages. If I had the room, I'd get an Atari 800 to play with.
I don't know how the Atari 800 compared to the Commodore 64, but when I was a kid my parents got me a used 800XL originally owned by possibly the biggest pirate ever. I've yet to find a video on Youtube of a game on that machine that I haven't played!
It was great machine to have at the age of 10. I remember some of the games I had were written in BASIC, I had fun going in and editing them. Heh.
Recently I went on a Youtube spree to check out some of the games I used to play, and I gotta say I was impressed with what I found. Check out this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh5b8jcwLk&feature=related [youtube.com]
This is Goonies, I suppose you'd call it either an adventure or possibly a puzzle game. I remember firing that one up over and over again and spending all this time trying to figure out how to progress to the next screen. I can't think of a modern day equivalent of that game.
Fun stuff. I really don't regret that this is the machine I had while all my friends had NES. (Although I was perturbed at the time...)
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Goonies for the Atari 800 is reminiscent of Conan on the Apple II, at a glance anyway.
There was a pretty cool Goonies game on the NES...
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There was a pretty cool Goonies game on the NES...
That was actually the second Goonies game, which was a sequel to the first.
Even though the first didn't come out on the NES outside of Japan...
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Swings and roundabouts. Atari had better colour and probably scrolling and a far batter OS (loadable device drivers, drivers that auto loaded from peripheral's ROMs (in 1979!) and things like display list interrupts and display lists - it was an Amiga lite in effect. The C64 had better sprites and some nifty colour modes making for some better looking arcade games. But then it came out 4 years later so ought to have bee much better.
Goonies (Score:2)
I spent many an afternoon/weekend playing Goonies on my old 800XL. I loved that game!
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Did you have a moment of 'HOLY CRAP!?" when you figured out how to get the printing press going?
I can't believe how long that took for me. Actually.. that makes me remember Zorro, too. It was even harder to work out how to use the various elements in the game properly.
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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".
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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).
Perhaps you meant 15 years ago? Or are you seriously suggesting that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (released 10 years ago in 2002) couldn't do real-time 3D?
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Just wanted to add that this is a very good description of how the real hardware works. And the problems of non-realtime determinism is one of the major issues I face in developing Stella (http://stella.sf.net). For a system so rudimentary, you'd never believe how hard it is to accurately emulate it. You basically need to emulate a TV as well; the system was tied so closely to it.
Thank You Very Much for Stella (Score:2)
If you are, indeed, one of the Stella team, then I thank you for the years of enjoyment that Stella has brought me and my friends. It gave us a chance to relive the old battles of Combat, Air-Sea Battle, and the like as adults.
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Yes, it is indeed me. I say 'me', since for the past several 5 years or so, the Stella team is just one person. Thanks for the support.
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Ya think? I would have thought the phrase "a quality game like Call of Duty " would have been a dead giveaway.
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The games that aged well were the ones that were games first, and graphics demos as an afterthought... Warlords, Circus Atari, Space Invaders, Asteroids, er... well, you know what I mean. What's kind of sad is that the games that IMHO aged the best were the ones I got for Christmas along with the 2600 itself. It seems like almost every game I got between Christmas 1981 and the arrival of my Vic-20 a year later was a disappointment and letdown, partly because Atari's ad agency was too good at hyping them up