EtanSivad

Understood. This makes a lot more sense. Thanks for all the info.

Ahh, gotcha. So this is a progressive signal. Does that mean that half the lines are skipped in the signal? Or does it output really tall lines? The thin space you show in that image doesn't look like an entire scan line.

The overscan bit I understand. Makes sense. The piece I don't understand is where the extra vertical space comes from for the TV. Is the screen displaying an extra tall vertical scan, or does it draw the same image twice with an interlaced image?

Ahh, so is it because the signal is interlaced? I assume it would happen that the display would change between the drawing of the Even fields and the drawing of the Odd fields? Either way, the 2600 is painting the screen 60 times / second, correct?

I'm going through the Stella programming guide, and I hit one point that confuses me just a bit. This is less about programming and more about the hardware, so if this topic should be moved please let me know. Anyway, in looking at the documentation the Atari has an display resolution of 192 lines, and including the vertical sync and overscan, that's 226 lines. On physical TVs of the time, was that the actual vertical display resolution? Or was the TIA able to adjust the vertical resolution the TV was using? I could have sworn that the NTSC signal standard / VHS was closer to 480 vertical lines. Thanks, -Etan

Ahh, thank thank you very much. I finished the book "racing the beam" a while back and wanted to illustrate the chapter on pitfall by rending a short CG sequence of it. This helps out immensely. Of interesting note, the ball sprite in Pit fall goes all the way to the top of the screen, but isn't visible normally as it's the same color as the trees:

Does anyone know of an emulator that lets you disable/enable the visibility of the 5 sprite objects (Sprite 1/2, Missile 1/2, Ball object) on the fly? I know that in games like Pitfall, the game uses the Pong ball sprite adjusted every line to draw the swinging vines. I'd be curious to see what other odd little hacks like that are in games. Thanks,