Post B2nq4h37H6KAhVL16W by mogwai_poet@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by mogwai_poet@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #B2nq4h37H6KAhVL16W by mogwai_poet@mastodon.social
       2026-01-30T05:49:55Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       The Magnavox Odyssey 2 (released 1978, a year after the Atari VCS) could have 16 sprites onscreen at once. Four of them were "user-defined sprites," meaning the game designer could draw them. 12 had to pull from the pool of 64 preset characters in the BIOS ROM.The intention seems to have been that you would do the gameplay with the custom sprites, and draw text, the score, etc. with the ROM sprites, but a lot of games relied heavily on the ROM art. It's an interesting design constraint.
       
 (DIR) Post #B2nq4hoGRo2R3jOfaq by foone@digipres.club
       2026-01-30T07:01:05Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @mogwai_poet god, I love the idea of having walk-sprites burnt into the console's ROM
       
 (DIR) Post #B2nq4l9I25dhPoG0HY by mogwai_poet@mastodon.social
       2026-01-30T06:20:29Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Something like half the games on the Odyssey 2 were made by one guy, Ed Averett. He churned out a game every couple months for years. My favorite of these is "Computer Intro." It came with a thick manual detailing the history of computers, how they work, how your game console is a tiny computer, how to program it, the CPU opcodes and display registers.The game itself was just a hex editor allowing you to write arbitrary bytes into RAM, then transfer execution to them.
       
 (DIR) Post #B3XA6VESvFQ1pJz1qy by mogwai_poet@mastodon.social
       2026-01-30T19:42:58Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @mdhughes Yeah, very different GPU from the 2600. Very interesting set of capabilities.I was never able to make head or tail of Quest for the Rings back in the day. Wasn't there supposed to be a board game component? A wildly ambitious idea for the time