[HN Gopher] Inventing the Atari 2600 (1983)
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Inventing the Atari 2600 (1983)
Author : TheBombe
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-12-15 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| pkaye wrote:
| You can see some recent homebrew games for the Atari 2600 here.
| All are pretty impressive given the limitation of the hardware.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/AtariAge/videos
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm a little disappointed that they keep referencing the "Stella
| chip". They're referring to the Television Interface Adapter[0]
| (TIA), ancestor of the custom chips that ended up in the Atari
| 400/800 and the Amiga.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor
| djmips wrote:
| Correct, it was the project that was codenamed Stella by Joseph
| Decuir after his Stella bicycle.
| bitwize wrote:
| It's really neat to trace the origin of those custom chips.
| Descendants of the TMS9918A chip found in the TI-99/4A could be
| found in systems at least as late as the Sega Genesis.
| Someone wrote:
| It's easy to get confused about that. Reading
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600, the code name for the
| Atari 2600 was Stella.
|
| There also was a "Stella Programmer's Guide", which discussed
| how to program the TIA
| (https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1646277043401568/stella.pdf)
| jiveturkey wrote:
| needs tag [1983]
| [deleted]
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > It is popular today, not because it does an admirable job of
| playing Jet Fighter and Tank, but because its flexible design
| also allows it to play chess and baseball, as well as Space
| Invaders, Pac-Man and many of the other arcade games that have
| been invented since the VCS came on the market.
|
| Yeah, the original Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 sucked, and has
| nothing to do with why it's popular today. Any of the Atari 2600
| baseball games of its era also sucked.
|
| > its flexible design
|
| The only thing "flexible" about the Atari's video chip, the TIA,
| is that you can choose what to do with each scan line. Too bad
| you are so limited on what you can actually do on that scan line
| and need insane tricks to get things like 48 useable 160x200
| resolution pixels in a row for score display. On top of that, you
| only have 128 bytes of RAM.
|
| It's _fun_ to program if you like constraints, but programmable
| sprites, nametables, and sound channels that can play musical
| notes might be considered _funner_.
|
| The Atari 2600 has great charm because so much was done with
| something so primitive, and it's awesome to see new games
| developed with it with increased RAM and mapper chips. A new
| chess game But hardware with better capabilities may have been
| just as popular if available for $199 in late 1970's dollars.
| Arcade games of the time with much more flexible display hardware
| were also popular.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Ms. Pac Man, on the other hand, is fantastic on the 2600. It
| looks a lot like the same bad game, but it plays very close to
| the arcade.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| IIRC, it was because they opted for 8k ROM instead of 4k (or
| perhaps 4k instead of 2k?). Whatever the choice, it was
| definitely a big difference.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It was definitely a minimum viable product, but:
|
| 2600: US$190 in 1977, sold 30 million units as of 2004.
|
| Colecovision: $175, 1982. 2 million units sold.
|
| Intellivision: US$275 in 1979, sold 3 million.
|
| Pac-Man for the 2600: 1982, 8 million units sold.
|
| The 2600 was discontinued _after_ the technologically-superior
| Intellivision and Colecovision were discontinued. The
| Colecovision cost _less_ than the Atari when it came out and
| still couldn 't move more consoles than Atari moved copies of
| Pac-Man.
|
| Technically I guess the Intellivision and Colecovision were
| competing with the 5200 (1982, $270, 1 million sold) but none
| of them lasted more than a couple of years, versus the 2600
| finally going out of production for good in _1992_.
|
| (All data from Wikipedia except for the Coleco and 5200's
| launch prices, which came from an IGN page listing launch
| prices.)
| [deleted]
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Whenever this topic comes up, some inevitably points to the book
| "Racing The Beam". Maybe this time I'll be first? :)
|
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies...
|
| It goes in to deep detail on a handful of Atari games, and
| discusses the tricks and hacks the programmers used. If you're in
| development now and grew up on these games, it's a great book.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I always like to mention ZeroPage Homebrew too. It's a Twitch
| channel that usually streams twice a week that features
| homebrew games for the 2600 and recently branched out to other
| Atari consoles and 8-bit systems. The devs for the games are
| usually in the chat. It's my absolute favorite community on the
| internet today.
| dusted wrote:
| "By paring back the hardware, the designers of the Atari Video
| Computer System gave game programmers room to be creative"
|
| That's some rose-coloured glasses right there if there ever were
| any.
|
| "You know, we COULD give this thing hardware sprites, independent
| video and audio chips!" "No! Think of the game programmers! They
| thrive on constraint!"
|
| My money is on the money.. The cheapest design that still allowed
| (the best programmers to make) reasonably good games.
|
| That said, the system was enjoyable to play when I was a kid, and
| it's enjoyable to read about now, great article!
| bitwize wrote:
| The player-missile graphics _were_ hardware sprites, albeit
| more cumbersome to use. So far as I know, sprites as you know
| them -- reprogrammable two-dimensional bitmaps whose x and y
| coordinates can be set with hardware registers -- didn 't even
| come about in a non-cost-prohibitive manner until the TI-99/4
| in 1979. (Edit: The Intellivision had similar capabilities
| around the same time. The first Atari 8-bit computers were also
| contemporary, but used a more advanced variant of the 2600's
| technology involving per-scanline display lists, which approach
| would be used also by the 7800.) The designers of the TI-99/4
| and TI-99/4A certainly did coin the term "sprite" as it's used
| in the computer graphics sense.
|
| Even arcade games of the era (late 1970s) tended to use
| framebuffer displays. The mechanic of the invaders slowly
| speeding up as they were picked off in _Space Invaders_ (1978)
| stems from the fact that the fewer invaders on screen, the
| faster the CPU could blit them all.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| At the same time, the 4a didn't have Vector graphics...you
| HAD to program with sprites with the included basic.
|
| So much graph paper...so much conversions of binary to hex.
| bitwize wrote:
| The 4A did have a framebuffer graphics mode, it was just
| not available from BASIC. Vector graphics were thus
| available in software such as TI Logo II. You could even
| use sprites with it. Bitmap mode, as it was called, was
| also used for the graphics in games such as Parsec, where a
| fast software scrolling routine provided the game's smooth
| scrolling background.
|
| The 4A was a nerfed machine in general: its powerful 16-bit
| CPU could only access directly 256 bytes of RAM, with the
| rest being mediated through the video chip. Its built-in
| BASIC was both slow, being written in GPL bytecode, and
| nerfed in that it provided virtually no direct access to
| the machine's features and actually locked you out of some
| of them, like bitmap and multicolor mode and even sprites.
| Extended BASIC got you sprites and some other features, but
| you still needed the expensive PEB in order to load machine
| code routines.
|
| These limitations were tragic, as the machine itself was
| rather powerful even compared to machines from a few years
| later, and there wasn't much reason to limit it except that
| TI saw it as a giant version of their calculators and
| wanted it to be cartridge-driven with only the barest
| allowable user programmability.
| beebeepka wrote:
| All in all, yes, it was enjoyable. Except for that pacman port.
| Absolutely unplayable. Apparently I've been a high FPS bastard
| my entire life
| reaperducer wrote:
| Artists very often thrive when constrained.
|
| Programming used to be an art.
| Someone wrote:
| Indeed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600#MOS_Technolo
| gy_65...:
|
| _"Over two days, MOS and Cyan engineers sketched out a
| 6502-based console design by Meyer and Milner 's
| specifications. Financial models showed that even at $25, the
| 6502 would be too expensive, and Peddle offered them a planned
| 6507 microprocessor, a cost-reduced version of the 6502, and
| MOS's RIOT chip for input/output. Cyan and MOS negotiated the
| 6507 and RIOT chips at $12 a pair"_
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