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What is the Atari 2600 capable of being tricked into doing?


K.Michael

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I think as long as there are no power or AV cables going to the cartridge it qualifies as a 2600 game. I don't think it really matters how much of the processing is offloaded onto an in cart CPU as long as the TIA is used to generate the video and audio. To me the TIA is what defines the 2600.

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If you don't use the CPU and TIA then IMO this is no 2600 anymore.

You might be right, but that kind of reasoning didn't stop SEGA from releasing the 32X, which does make use of the Genesis but overlays it's video on top of the original video signal and has its own video output and power supply. Not that the 32X was a successful product, but it shows that this is something companies make.

 

I think as long as there are no power or AV cables going to the cartridge it qualifies as a 2600 game.

I have to agree with this. A game consists of a cartridge, which contains both hardware and software. When you're making a game, you should be allowed to customize the hardware as much as you do the software. As long as you can simply plug the cartridge in and turn the power on, the experience is perfectly authentic. Players don't care about what happens on the technical side, only about how cool the games look and play.
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You might be right, but that kind of reasoning didn't stop SEGA from releasing the 32X, which does make use of the Genesis but overlays it's video on top of the original video signal and has its own video output and power supply. Not that the 32X was a successful product, but it shows that this is something companies make.

 

But 32X games aren't thought to be Genesis games, they're thought to be 32X games.

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The question is, when does it stop to be a 2600? If you don't use the CPU and TIA then IMO this is no 2600 anymore.

Well, the 2600 is designed to address 4Kb ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. So anything beyond that needs extra logic and is evil :D

 

On a serious note, 4Kb also makes cheap carts since you only need an eprom, so cheap carts for everyone.

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That's not impressive at all, it's just a mapper, allowing games to access more memory. Sure that will help improve the graphics and allow games to preserve more state, but the CPU is still a huge bottleneck, as is the primitive video hardware. Improving those is what would give interesting results.

 

Sure it is, but have you noticed the title of this thread? This is all about tricking the 2600 into doing what it wasn't designed to do, so the end result is supposed to look different from what you'd expect from a 2600. Doom doesn't look like something the SNES would be capable of doing, which is why it's so impressive on that platform.

 

Of course that now that video games have such a long history and so many consoles are available to homebrewers, there's little point in designing crazy add-ons to improve a console when you could just develop the game for a more advanced platform if you think that the other one is not capable of doing what you want. But still, it's kinda fun to think about what could have been.

 

And yes, I read the original poster's question, which is what can a 2600 be tricked into doing, which is what I was discussing.

Yeah, but if you connect an PS4 to a 2600 (let's say you could), then it's not a 2600 anymore, it just has more modern hardware hacked onto it. I think the spirit of stretching the capabilities of the 2600 would be to work within the bounds of the unit itself (which isn't much), plus any additional ram and rom you could fudge into a cartridge. I suppose it depends on what constraints you willing to live with. Personally, I'm impressed with what can be done with just the unit and a cartridge. Additional hardware beyond that means it's not a 2600 anymore, but rather a 2600 is involved.

 

The whole point is to stretch the capability of what you have to work with, not add additional modern hardware to it. The tiger vision method of extending both ram and rom was an impressive trick considering there's no chip select line to enable writing to the ram, and the trick to make it happen IS impressive (or was at the time). The original system allowed for 2k or 4k rom and that's it. What can be done with that is impressive. If you extend rom/ram using the tiger vision system, which could be done back in the day, it opens up a lot more ram and rom to work with.

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