How to create a animation and draw a picture on Atari 2600?

[DerekAutista]

Is there a program to draw a picture, convert pics and animate on Atari 2600 and save it to ROM (.bin or .a26)?

[+Andrew Davie]

Is there a program to draw a picture, convert pics and animate on Atari 2600 and save it to ROM (.bin or .a26)?

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/22242-build-your-own-greeting-cart-can-you-type-make/

 

No animation, though - not enough room in a 4K cart for that

I think you need to be more specific as to your needs. I doubt that what you think is possible... is possible.

Cheers

A

 

[gliptitude]

I'm guessing he just wants to play around and see his own creations on a 2600. I want to do this too. I can't know what a reasonable goal is until I know what is generally possible. If it was doable for me at all then i would be doing it over and over again and flashing to my Harmony cart. If DerickAutista is asking for .bin or .a26 end result I assume he is also using a flash cart.

 

Why limit to 4K? Isn't 32K the limit?

 

.. Andrew Davie, when i looked at your greeting card thread it looked like you were setting up for a relatively large image, like a very low resolution photo. .. I wouldn't expect to be able to animate bitmaps of that size on 2600. But something more like game sprites is what i was thinking. .. Some joystick input functionality would be cool too.

 

There was a really neat Vectrex template along these lines called I think VecDraw, made by Vectorzoa years ago. You edit the two sprite sections of code and compile a new ROM, (all necessary files and utilities included in .zip download). Two joystick buttons make each sprite visible or not visible. The other buttons scale the sprites up or down. The sprites can be moved around the screen with the stick.

 

On VCS the scaling wouldn't make as much sense. But the sprite could be animated. Maybe button starts and stops animation. Or maybe button advances frame by frame of the animation.

[+Andrew Davie]

Things get a bit more tricky on the '2600.

If you're talking *a* sprite, then you are limited to 8 pixels wide, as deep as you like, and a single colour for the pixels you see.

So, that's pretty small. You can put sprites side by side, and nowdays we can put 6 of them together.

That forms the basis of the '48 pixel' routine you may have read about.

But *still* a single colour for the pixels.

So the greeting cart used the 48 pixel routine, but interleaved red/green/blue to give a faux-colour image.

Even so, at just 48 pixels x something like 96 pixels deep -- that's ALL of your 4K cartridge used right there.

You could theoretically use a bankswitch scheme and use extra large ROMS... but it doesn't really give you THAT much more.

So, back to 'game sprites' - yes you could get a lot of animations, but only the one colour.

To do better than that, you have to do something lateral; overlay the two sprites and/or flicker them and/or change colours on successive scanlines and/or change pixels on successive frames. These have all been tried over the years. But for a basic "animate my sprite" cart, well I'm not aware of anyone providing that service.