was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games

[was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games]

Perhaps being screwed over one too many times also plays a bit on this lack of sentiment toward the 2600?

 

That might be true of someone like Bob Whitehead who appears to have a lot of bitter feelings about the industry in general and never wanted to be involved with any of the revivalism.

 

It's more to do with the fact that when an engineer creates something they know it is ultimately limited by the context in which it was built. With technology always a moving target, the second you ship something, there is something else you could have added. So your focus shifts to the next big conquest. I definitely got that vibe from the Amiga convention talk that Jay Miner gave. The 2600 was just a compartmentalized piece of history to him and his attention was focused on the present and future tense. Joe Decuir, on the other hand, has enjoyed all of the renewed attention in the VCS.

 

Someone like David Crane, however, seemed to be more sentimental about the 2600. There is no way you would put the amount of effort he did into the DPC for Pitfall II had he not wanted to keep the 2600 alive. Doug Neubauer was also certainly sentimental about the 2600 to develop Solaris on his own. I don't think he was living off of the proceeds from the three post-crash games he did. It was a paid hobby, basically.

 

For those who have stayed in the industry, a certain amount of detachment with any particular era sets in so you can move ever onward. I got that vibe from Dennis Koble in particular. Even though he appeared in my documentary, when I was having trouble finishing it and soliciting for donations Dennis wrote me something kind of nasty. I don't remember the particulars but it was something along the lines of nobody should give a crap about the 2600 anymore and I should move on as everyone else has. David Crane took up my banner and spoke with some of the others until Joe Decuir ponied up the money to finish the documentary. So I take the tapes to the CG Expo and guess who is walking the floor but Dennis Koble! Talk about an awkward moment. Mea culpas were on order from him, since he didn't realize at the time that retrogaming was on the verge of mainstreaming, but the damage was done. I'll never get over that one.

 

It's kind of the equivalent to Nimoy writing I Am Not Spock and then I Am Spock.

[technically, was et really that bad?]

ET is okay. As a kid I saw it as the lesser cousin of Raiders which is one of my favorites. So back in the day ET used to get a fair amount of play time. But to an adolescent boy, ET just doesn't make the best protagonist. He's just too wimpy. I think Pac-Man is a bigger sin than ET. If Atari had just made fewer ET carts and not hyped it so much it would not have been the posterchild for Atari's downfall. Atari had other movie-based games that came and went without causing so much controversy, like Krull. I think the tendency of the industry to look to movies, TV, and other properties for inspiration for games is kind of sad. It's understandable, and perhaps unavoidable, but I much prefer original game ideas.

[Nolan Bushnell blogs for Inc. magazine]

But seriously, the software totally sucked. The games were just awful.

 

I did eat at the Bistro in Hollywood once for the sake of posterity. The games definitely don't appeal to classic gamers. No touchscreen game can, even if they had capacitive multitouch. You really need a joystick or a trackball for some genres.

 

Really, technology has moved on. The novelty is not there anymore. Computing is already ubiquitous. If you want to play games in a restaurant you can whip out a Nintendo DS, iphone, or netbook and there is now free wifi at many restaurants.

 

The only thing that would be cool would be a

sort of experience where the whole table is an interactive display. Like one giant multitouch iPhone. Obviously that would cause some problems with actually eating on it, but still. Having the kiosk over to the side is just not the right placement.

[Nolan Bushnell blogs for Inc. magazine]

Atari was his one good idea....everything else since then has been notable (by numerous commentators) by their remarkable lack of success (perhpas he left his atari sucess book at atari and forgot to take it with him, assuming that warners would let him do so)

 

Lightning rarely strikes twice.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

I demonstrated an early board running Pitfall II+ at NWCGE 2008. Don't know if anyone realized what it was though, as it was unnamed at that point, it was a hacked board with a glob of hot glue to keep some components in place, and no SD card support yet.

 

Cool. Would very much like to see that on Youtube.

[8bitdomain - money down the drain!]

Another one? What's different in this new one versus Longhorn's?

 

 

For one, it requires no soldering and so should be easily installed by the layman. It also has an Atarivox mixer circuit so you can just send the stereo outs to your amp without having to have a dedocated speaker for the Atarivox. And then there is the VGA version which is a first.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

Other than that, you could write your own DPC game using the queues for your graphics and have in-game music using the music fetchers.

 

How did you do the music stuff? Delicon was going to try to use the PWMs. I don't know if the ARM you're using has those.

 

Anyway, I'd be surprised if Pitfall II was done before. Can you find a link or discussion about this?

 

I think it was discussed here, I dunno, about 5 years ago. There were a few concurrent attempts to do FPGA 2600s leading up to Flashback, some commercial, some open-source. That was one of them. I didn't see it in action, so it's hearsay.

 

 

You do realize what you have to do next, don't you?

 

Record Harmony running Pitfall II+ on real hardware!

[was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games]

Atari floundered because they lost their in-house R&D team so they had no direction anymore. If they had direction they wouldn't have to have contemplated warming over the old hardware to milk it a little more. They would have just leapfrogged over the competition. There was talent in the company, still, but not being applied in the right place. Just look at what the coinop division continued to do in the early 80s, culminating with stuff like the polygons in I Robot. Really, it's all about braintrust.

[was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games]

I don't think inty's problems revolved around the processor, it was more to do with the marketing and getting 3rd parties to produce software

 

There is more to a game machine than the processor. The entire gfx architecture of the Intellivision is not that all it's cracked up to be. It had a smaller color palette, and based on my recollections, difficulty moving sprites around very fast. The games for the INTV played to its strengths and I admit some envy back in the day for things like AD&D or B-17 bomber, but the 2600 still had the lead in twitch-style action gaming.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

So cool seeing Pitfall II run on the 2600 without the physical cart. That's something I never thought I'd see. Must have been a lot of work. I think the only other time that's been done was in an FPGA implementation of the 2600 (a flashback sort of thing) that kind of came and went without turning into anything.

 

Is the DPC support generalizable or is it all hardwired for Pitfall II?

[was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games]

If you really wanted an updated system that was heavily derived from the 2600 hardware you'd add a decent amount of RAM, and most importantly, a dedicated chip to drive TIA's graphics. (equivelent to ANTIC in the 8-bit computer line

 

That's exactly what the A8 was, though. The designers took everything they learned from the 2600 and improved it with the A8. The only features that were dropped with the A8 was the sprite copies and mirroring. Otherwise it could do just about anything the 2600 could do as you can see with the near 1:1 ports of Activision 2600 titles to the A8/5200.

 

 

 

In theory they could have made something like a 7800 architecture with the A8, so that it could play both 2600 games and A8 games. I think by and large hardware designers are not fans of backwards compatibility. It's out with the old, in with the new, and certainly the thinking at atari circa 1978 when the A8 was in R&D was that the 2600 wasn't going to build up such a huge following and catalog that such backwards compatibility would be desirable. That's something that only became evident after the 3rd party boom, which is what led to the 7800 project that Atari conspicuously said was guided by consumer feedback from the 5200 flopping.

 

The problem in those early years was cost. In the early 80s it was Commodore that really innovated on the cost reduction front. The A8 and the Amiga after that were much more bleeding edge architectures compared to the 2600 and therefore the ability to package them at a console pricepoint was next to impossible.

[What makes the 2600 such an icon in gaming?]

That being said, the 2600 would have been as much of a footnote as the Channel F if not for Space Invaders and Activision blowing the doors open. Those first few years of the 2600 were nothing to write home about. It was only after 1980 that things really took off. I don't think any consoles ever languished that long before catching a 2nd wind. If you were to constrain the 2600 catalog to games prior to 1980 it would not have close to the reputation it does today. I mean, I do have a soft spot for some of the early titles but it's the stuff after 1980 that is really timeless.

[Things you should have known, but didn't...]

I thought the 4-switch case was smaller than the 6-switcher.

 

I, like a lot of technologically naive people, used to think that there was magnetic tape underneath the dustcover. The way carts mated to the VCS meant you never really saw what was inside them. Kind of the light going off in the fridge syndrome... Many people called games "tapes" instead of carts, confusing them with 8-tracks or maybe mainframe reel to reels or early home computer cassette drives. Of course by the time Activision and others came around with no dustcovers on the edge connector it was obvious.

[Things you should have known, but didn't...]

Going by reviews, I thought Pitfall II: Lost Caverns was going to be an actual adventure game. I thought it was going to be like Pitfall! mixed with Adventure level 3 where treasure was in random places and the enemies were 'smart'. Wrong! I hated being young and gullible.

 

I felt that way more with the Swordquest games. I thought the Swordquest games would be kind of like Raiders and have some actual play value other than the puzzles you had to figure out with the comic and the lame minigames. (I mean, jeez, dodge rotating lines. How exciting.) The swordquest games were really a terrible waste of a good adventure/RPG style game engine. I'd love to see someone tear Earthworld or Fireworld apart and make a real game out of them.

[Things you should have known, but didn't...]

I was almost fooled into thinking the Sears versions of Atari games were actually originals, something complicated further by the fact that they did have originals like Stellar Track, Steeplechase, and Submarine Commander.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

I can picture some nerds playing Doom with pen and paper.

"You press the keypad and the door hisses open, bringing you face to face with a pink, slavering demon! It's rotten breath courses over you as it snarls angrily in your face. Roll 1d20 for initiative."

 

Didn't the babylonians have to deal with demons in real life anyway? You know, Nephilim and Cthulu and all those guys.

 

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

That's a nice idea, but it would only work with some controller autodetection or a database, right?

 

Yeah. That's a fringe benefit if it can be done. Of course, it's not a tragedy to have to swap controllers because that's what you have to do when you swap physical carts. It's just that you always need a convenient way to navigate through the menu system otherwise people are going to have to plug in a joystick all the time just to pick games. It might be cool for single players to just always keep a joystick connected to the other port for that purpose I suppose. It just seems like the best lowest common denominator is to really get a clean debounce routine going on the console switches and work out the combos and the "key repeat" delays etc... Maybe make it so that if you hold down both switches for over a second that constitutes "enter" kind of like when you hold your finger on the iPhone it brings up the context menu.

[Who here in Atari Age has received the 7800 adapter from 8bit-domain?]

At least that provides some closure.

[was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games]

64k and larger games with oodles of RAM are not that hard to make inside the cartridge, from a hardware standpoint.

 

If you want to talk historically, it was a big leap at the time. I don't think anyone really knew you could manage to get RAM in a cart without the read/write lines back in '77. And based on what Larry Wagner said, I think the general thinking at the time was that banking hardware was going to be too tricky to implement until he came up with a way to do it with a "couple of ICs" as he said. So what seems obvious to us now required some technical breakthroughs.

[was there a reason why atari limited the memory size of 2600 games]

I was thinking just a plain vanilla flavoured 2600 but with a 6502 and 64k games (or 48k even)

 

They could have done that in 1980 or 81. That would have been a wise move, probably, however it would have alienated the original installed base of 2600 users. Remember that videogames were really just out of the starting gate by then. Even the 2600 was a big purchase decision. People were not really ready for the hardware upgrade treadmill which is so routine today. If they were going to offer a next gen system it was going to have to be truly next gen and we all know how that played out.

 

The funny thing when interviewing the Atari guys is how many of them (thought not all) don't really have the same sentimental attitude towards the 2600 that we do. We look at the 2600 as an icon of success but to them it was also an icon of mismanagement. That's because they saw all the great stuff that was on the horizon that didn't come out. The 2600 wasn't supposed to be Atari's best foot forward in 1982 or 1983. It just wound up that way by default since Warners had no good strategy for how to follow it up. Companies like Activision and Imagic made lemons into lemonade which everyone else just surfed on.

[What makes the 2600 such an icon in gaming?]

Those early versions of football and baseball were 2k. You don't get much of a sports game in 2k. I don't know how big the later versions were.

 

Right, but ROM size can only do so much. If the GFX chip has fixed limits, it has fixed limits. For instance, you were never going to see something like a Solaris for the O^2.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

So it autodetects the controller type?

Yup, like the Krokodile Cart does too.

Hmm, how does it do this? Technically, the KrokCart doesn't autodetect the controller type; it looks up the info in a stella.pro file. I don't really consider this 'autodetection', since you still have to keep that properties file up-to-date. If you've found a way to autodetect controller type without a lookup table (ie, by inspecting the ROM code itself), I'd be very interested in adding it to Stella.

 

I was really referring to the menu engine on powerup. It has to allow navigation through the menu regardless of which controller is hooked up. For Chimera we were intending to allow menu navigation solely through the select and reset switches in case you didn't have joysticks plugged in. We were going to trap the switches on up rather than on down so we could have combinations. Like hold down reset and then toggle select could be page back, or hold down select and toggle reset could be page forward.

 

Once you select a game if it knows you don't have the right controller presumably it could have an interstitial warning message to prompt the user to put in whatever controller it needs.

[Fighting game with monsters/mythological creatures]

I'm probably off on this but you aren't thinking about Rastan are you?

 

For my quarter, the animations and artwork blow those other two games away. It was really slick for the late 80s.

 

[What makes the 2600 such an icon in gaming?]

The funny thing about the 2600 is that, in the end, the impression people had of the console had more to do with the games that were written for it than the hardware specs. If you wanted to trash the 2600, as George Plympton did, then you line up the original sports games like the flickery baseball with the Intellivision offerings. But then you had Realsports Baseball (or M-Network) and then Pete Rose Baseball.

 

 

So even when the competitors like Mattel or Coleco were trying to trash the 2600 as dead and gone, new games were coming out for it that were truly competitive with them.

 

I don't think we've ever seen a console since then that had worse specs on paper that held its own for so long in which first and last gen games for it look so radically different.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

Thomas Jentzch (optimisation and paddle/dc controls). The flicker is barely noticeable on a real TV and looks much better than the screen capture.

 

So it autodetects the controller type?