mos6507

The DPC chip in Pitfall II is as far as you can go when it comes to extending the audio and video capabilities of the 2600 via the cart port. If you could mix the DPC with cart-RAM ala the Supercharger maybe you could go even further than we've seen to date. With this kind of hardware you bring the 2600 really close to the Atari 8-bit in capabilities, but still with limitations in the playfield department. Remember, memory only gets you so far with the 2600. You really need more processing time. Being able to store graphics data in RAM and do self-modifying code and stuff can help there, but the DPC goes even further in being able to auto-index through data without CPU intervention, very much like a coprocessor. It's a miracle that such a device was even possible given the important signals that are missing from the 2600's cart port. I think the guy who is doing the 2600-on-a-chip should see if he can clone the DPC too. Then we'd be able to do new DPC-enabled games which would really be something to see (and hear, with the multiplexed audio). Activision planned to eventually do more DPC games than Pitfall II but the crash put an end to that.

I'm pretty sure this chip would draw too much power for a handheld.

If this is true it might explain who came up with this technique first, as Al Miller used it for the free tank indicator in Robot Tank. Had he done it first Dave would have known about it.

It's really too simplistic to pin the videogame crash on just one factor... It was many things and many things would have had to have been different to avoid the crash entirely. It's like any crash. There is an artifical boom period and then a correction (or an over-correction at first). Just like what's happening with the stock market. The problem was that since the videogame industry was new, people didn't realize that it was truly the start of a new medium and that the crash was just a correction, not the end of some kind of passing fad. That's what Nintendo surfed on.

When it comes to classic-style hardware architectures, the Amiga was the machine that took it to the limit. The AGA chipset was the final evolution of that style of system, I think. It gave you all the flexibility to control the raster beam on every scanline or even in the middle of the scanline, while still maintianing a full framebuffer. The only thing the Amiga lacked was chunky graphics modes and hardware text modes. Text scrolling in higher color modes was notoriously slow on the Amiga due to having to shift multiple bitplanes. If you are going to design an all new system I'd try to target a particular base-level CPU and clock speed and use that as your challenge. The Amiga started with a 68000 architecture so memory footprint was no longer a problem. It would be more challenging to see how far you could go with an 8-bit CPU like a 6809 or something. There were some very powerful arcade systems in the mid 80s that were still using 6809 CPUs that looked like they were using 68000s.

David has been to every CGE as far as I know. He's always been very supportive of classic gaming. He was one of the most articulate interviewers during the Stella at 20 sessions. He isn't what I would call warm, but he's not nasty or anything. He's very stuffy and formal. But down underneath that, he really does have a warm place for classic games, and he's always very accessible. Not only does he come to CGE, he casually walks the room signing autographs, and not just immediately before and after his keynote. He's very generous in that respect. When I was giving copies of Stella at 20 1 and 2 to atari Veterans David insisted on paying for his copies (which include a copy for his friend Al Miller). There probably is no other figure who can be more directly responsible for the golden age of console gaming. David's breakthroughs in coding more than anything else were what allowed the 2600 to have such a long lifespan. Now bear in mind that it's been 5 years since Stella at 20 and even if David is proud of his past work, you can't blame him for burning out on the nostalgia and feeling at a loss if asked repetitive questions after a while. I'm not sure how many new people are going to CGE but if it's a lot of repeat guests then I would expect them to run out of questions pretty soon

The problem with 2600 I/O peripherals is a lack of available CPU time. In order to make this valuable as an in-game peripheral the interface has to really offload the CPU almost completely. That means a really large FIFO buffering system and maybe two reserved bytes of address space. Every time the 2600 reads from one of the address locations, the FIFO auto-increments. Every time it does a "fake" write to the memory location (ala Starpath RAM) and it pushes the byte onto the outgoing FIFO buffer. Something like that where at no time is the 2600 stuck not being able to read or poll the interface fast enough. Remember that there are no interrupts on the Atari. It has to get to the data when it feels like it.

Pesco only has 3 enemies and the Ebivision Pac Man has 4. So it couldn't just be a graphical hack.

There is also METEROIDS, the Suicide Mission beta that plays just like Asteroids, which is on the Stella CD. I'd consider that almost a separate game in and of itself vs. Suicide Mission.

Maybe he's decided to write a real 2600 game. That takes a while longer than finishing a hack.

>> What exactly did the 1090 get the _average_ user? Nothing. So in other words it would be used by the hobbiest and fringe. That's unlikely to do a lot for the _platform_ as a whole. << Faster floppy drives, hard drive expansion, and a serial port that could be used simultaneously with disk access (unlike the 850 interface). Atari was already planning to offer parallel floppy drives in the 1400 series. Sure, there were Happy and USDoubler solutions, but these were hot rod bandaids over the limitations of the SIO, not really solutions. It could also have been used for graphics and audio cards. A better 80 column solution would have been the key item to get for those interested in word processing. (Tthe XEP80 was basically a glorified VT100 terminal in a box with a slow serial interface.) It could also be used for expanded memory without having to do any internal soldering. Most of these things were provided via the Black Box/Floppy Board, but many years later than they could have been.

That's a rather loaded argument. One could also say "what good is having 16 colors available on each scanline if you only have 16 basic and rather garish-looking colors to work with for your entire screen??" The C=64 is basically like CGA graphics. Pretty ugly if you ask me. Dithering winds up being used to simulate missing colors. At least with the 8-bit and the 2600 you _can_ create displays which appear to be close to 8-bit color through palette shifting. That's why 2600 and 8-bit emulators on the PC require at minimum 8-bit color depth screens. Games like Enduro and Archon take full advantage of Atari systems' wide color palette for gameplay features.

I have always thought that the Atari brand should not just be a symbol but it should represent a kind of special wing of a company like what GM did with Saturn. It should represent an entirely different way of doing things in the industry, and it should be filled with really bright people who are not being smothered by the typical game industry beaurocracy. The entire ORG structure would have to be different. It has to be a return to a more laid back anything goes atmosphere that was symptomatic of the mid 70s. The way the game industry works now just isn't conducive to the creation of games that resonate the same way the classic Atari games do. That being what it is, I'm sure Neverwinter Nights will be no disgrace to the Atari name. But even then, NWN was created by Bioware and it just happens to have the Fuji on it. The whole deal with Atari was that the games reflected the consistent spirit of the programming teams inside Atari at that time. It wasn't until close to the crash that Atari Inc. started contracting out games to 3rd parties. Atari's titles were a highly personal expression of the people at Atari at the time through the silicon. That's what made Atari games (and the systems themselves of course) so different in look and feel from the O^2 or the Intellivision, as all of these companies had their unique way of doing things. The games were not created in committees to appeal to some kind of global lowest common denominator. The games were quirky and ideosynchratic. The only way to get that back is for a corporation like Infogrames or Sega to deliberately separate Atari out into its own subsidiary and let them do what they want. I think that Sega is probably one of the more innovative companies out there making games. Typing of the Dead, for instance, is probably a good example of something that might make sense coming out of a modern Atari thinktank.

>> The problem with levels 6 and 7 is, that the game is "cheating" (moving pieces). I think this is not intentional and only a bug in the chess algorithm, but it prevents you from really using thoses levels (someone should try to fix that ). << What you can do in the meantime is if you know the correct board position, if Video Chess leaves a piece in the wrong place, change the difficulty setting to put the game into board-setup-mode and remove the piece and set one up back where it belongs, then continue from there. I used to always play Video Chess with a real chess board in sync with the game because it's easier to visualize the board and it has the added perk of being able to detect the cheats. BTW, I've always thought that the highest setting had an artificial delay in the think. It seems way too long. I didn't ask Larry Wagner about this when I had the chance, though. If you really wanted to hack the game, I might be able to contact him again regarding the sourcecode.

Someone was working on a 5200BAS sort of utility for the 2600 but he never finished it. I believe he could have gotten it to work, though, although certainly it would limit the kind of game you could write. I'd like to see him finish it.

I've heard that most of the games that won't work are those that use the hires interlaced mode. Fortunately, most games don't feature this in anything besides menu screens.

My problem with hacks is about the nature of authorship in the internet age of file trading. The irony here is that most 2600 programmers never got any visible credit on the packaging of their games. For a hacker to claim authorship of his modification is a slap in the face of these poor guys who were typically underpaid, anonymous, and unappreciated. I don't think it is ethical to "publish" a hack without prominently including credit for the original title, publisher, and author (if known). Even if you do this, since only the raw files are going to circulate the internet, not the metadata, over time the authorship issue will become increasingly confusing. If not for definitive sites like AtariAge that set the facts straight, the average 2600-emulator user who may never have lived through the original 2600 era is not going to know what the original versions of these games are let alone who wrote them. It's similar to the debate over colorization, although worse because it's so much easier to make derivitave 2600 works than it is to release altered movies. It's also similar to the use of samples in pop music. So many of today's hits are recycled hooks from the 70s that today's kids don't associate those hooks with the originals anymore. It took a lot of effort, for instance, to create the deep resonant drum tone in Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks. It took a lot less work to drop the sample into your song. I think some hacks are great, but I do think they get spoiled when the hack creator seems more interested in the recognition that comes from passing himself off as a videogame auteur crediting the original creators who did all the hard work for them. They can never be anything more than co-creators, even if they modify the code rather than just the data. If they are looking for more than that, they should write a game from scratch. Then they will gain more of an appreciation for what the original programmers went through, even more so due to the primitive tools they had to use back then.

The only things game companies really have to protect these days are the raw sourcecode files. There isn't a lot of innovation going on in the gameplay itself anymore. Someobody finding out you are doing yet another RPG or driving or fighting game isn't any kind of trade secret.

While this may be true for the modern games, Infogrames seems more protective of bootleg Atari T-shirts than prototype releases for Atari hardware systems. With high-profile releases of protos going on at conventions and the like for which Infogrames (or Hasbro before it) can NOT claim ignorance, there seems to be tacit approval of this activity.

The Atari floating point routines are notoriously slow. If I were you I'd rewrite them.

>> BTW: I'm making progress with the tanks. Until now, I can make them only visible after the bridge is destroyed. Maybe I find a solution for that, but I'm not sure. << You could probably add the balloons but I doubt you could add the tanks because the tanks need to be able to shoot and no other object in River Raid can shoot projectiles other than the plane. So that would probably require some radical changes to the kernel to pull off, and might not be possible without flicker due to timing although you might otherwise have the free missile for this.

That's because it's based on an even simpler game, Space Race, from 1973, which only allowed you to go up and down. This adds to the challenge, I think. Timing becomes that much more critical when you are on rails.

I think the problem with history is that textbooks emphasize stuff from 30+ years ago. Especially when dealing with the history of inventions, when they get to computers you'll be lucky if any textbooks even mention the microcomputer revolution. It will be all stuff about mainframes. Sure, a lot of textbooks are old, but there is also this notion that a significant amount of time has to pass before we can write about it. Like it has to ferment or something. But there has been SUCH an acceleration in technological development in the last 30 years that you need to cover the major milestones completely regardless of how closely-spaced they are. These milestones change the way we live as much if not more than the bread and butter geopolitical history topics. Maybe to the textbook authors 20years ago is still strong in memory but not to today's kids. Today's kids live on top of the foundation of history and they deserve to know how we got here instead of just taking it all for granted. I think GenXers (as most of us here on AtariAge are) must feel this sense of responsibility more than others due to the particular timing of our agegroup in relation to these events. We've had several revolutions in high tech since I was born in 1970. The introduction of the microprocessor, the initial exploitation of that in the first wave of home computers and video games, the second wave of PCs which have revolutionized the office, and now the internet (in addition to the modern sub $1000 PC) which has broken down the final barriers that prevented the PC from becoming a mainstream household appliance. I'm not saying Atari should be a whole chapter, but it did have an important role to play in all this. People forget how radical a concept videogame consoles were in the early days, and how Sears put the 2600 into sporting goods. There was a shift in mindthink in the late 70s and early 80s. The videogame revolution was the training wheels where us kids acclimated ourselves to the growing pervasiveness of computers in our lives, and many of us then went on to be the programmers and the dot commers of today. Unfortunately even computer history books that do cover recent history tend to mention Steve Jobs and MAYBE the C=64 but never write a word about Atari. That's the reason why I did Stella at 20. Since at the time nobody was really treating this stuff as history worth researching.

The 7800 only has 4K of RAM. However, it uses a full 6502 so it could support 64K, depending on the limitations of how the memory map is applied of course. If it were possible to make the RAM a full 64K then you could use it like a Cuttle Cart sort of thing. While in 7800 mode you load games through the joystick port, then it somehow softkicks into 2600 mode and uses the RAM as cart ROM (or RAM for Starpath, superchip, etc.. emulation). This would also allow for new homebrews to be higher quality. You'd have enough RAM to store entire screens of blittable bitmap data instead of only a few lines at a time. POKEYs should still be available in ample supply from Best electronics. You could add multiple pokeys on board if needed and have Tempest-grade audio. Plus High Score Cart built-in.

Something can be checkbook-successful and still disappointing at the same time. Star Wars Episode I is a perfect example.