Any suggestions for "How'd they do that?" ?

[+SpiceWare]

8 hours ago, Colmino said:

I admit I tend to hope the answer is something more elaborate than the obvious, arbitrary guess that "they literally cared so little about accuracy that they were effectively working from either a vague familiarity or a one-paragraph description of the arcade original".

 

You may find this video with Tod Frye talking about the homebrew Pac-Man 8K interesting as he wrote the 2600 version of Pac-Man port back in the day.  A few things mentioned:

• 0:14 - 0:41 - he'd started on a flicker manager, but ran out of time
• 0:56 - 1:10 - 2 line kernels were still the norm
• 1:24 - 1:37 - his maze is simpler, takes less ROM

So basically time, still learning the hardware, and ROM were design constraints at the time. As the ROM sizes increased they could make things more arcade accurate - Pac-Man was 4K, Ms. Pac-Man was 8K.

 

 

 

[+Nathan Strum]

There's an interview with the programmer for 2600 Space Invaders (Rick Maurer) on Archive.org.

 

There's some of it here at 17:18:

https://archive.org/details/StellaAt20/Stella+at+20+-+tape+09+-+David+Crane%2C+Al+Miller+-+Rick+Maurer.mp4

 

And here at 7:12:

https://archive.org/details/StellaAt20/Stella+at+20+-+tape+12B+-+Bob+Smith+Rick+Maurer+Tod+Frye+-+Rick+Maurer.mp4

 

He talks about sound, developing the graphics, and how these were effectively one-person games at the time. He sought out people to help with the graphics, and got no response, so he did the best he could. Also he mentions something particularly insightful that at the time these were only the second generation of games for the 2600 (4K), and while more advanced than the previous generation of 2K games, were still early and that future games would each bring new discoveries of how to make the 2600 do more things.

 

There wasn't a mandate from Atari that stated "This has to be as close to the arcade game as possible". They were under the gun to try to figure out how to program something that approximated the original arcade games on wildly different hardware (that was designed basically just to play Pong and Combat), get it done as fast as possible, and fit it into 4K. In its own way, 2600 Space Invaders graphics became as iconic as the arcade game. It became the killer app for the system.

 

At the time, I was disappointed that 2600 Space Invaders didn't look like the arcade game, but the gameplay made up for it. Pac-Man missed the mark in part because of the graphics, but the bigger problem was that it missed the "feel" of the arcade game. It felt clunky, imprecise and crude, and lacked the fun of the original. 2600 Space Invaders managed to retain the fun, despite looking different. But some early ports got much closer, notably Berzerk and Missile Command, and as time went on, and the programmers learned more about how to push the system (and Atari allowed for larger ROMs), the ports got better and better. They didn't have to spend as much time just figuring out how to display something, and could build upon previous work and focus more on refining and polishing the end result.

[Colmino]

4 hours ago, SpiceWare said:

 

You may find this video with Tod Frye talking about the homebrew Pac-Man 8K interesting as he wrote the 2600 version of Pac-Man port back in the day.  A few things mentioned:

 

I thought about bringing up Pac-Man as a counterexample, but I figured everyone here would already be familiar with that effort's unique genesis.  (In that it was basically a proof-of-concept which found itself being used as a final product by a hasty Atari.)  But it would still be an interesting discussion.  For example, we all know that the arcade Pac-Man played a two-voice jingle at the start of a new game.  And we understand that the Atari 2600 Pac-Man was not originally intended to be what ended up on a cartridge.  With those stipulations in place, it remains difficult to account for the very, very odd (unique in all of gaming) snippet of music that Tod Frye came up with.  My headcanon explanation for its inexplicable quality is that Frye elected to reuse a short preexisting sequence of ROM, rather than attempt to hand-compose the actual tune or indeed any tune.

[Colmino]

3 hours ago, Nathan Strum said:

> He sought out people to help with the graphics, and got no response, so he did the best he could.

I recall watching a different interview in which he recalled being sheepish over being called out on his unnecessary visual reinventions with Space Invaders.  (This was leading up to where he was explaining why he left Atari after subsequently producing the, as you point out, far more accurate Missile Command.)  I admit to being unconvinced about needing to seek help in creating graphics for enemies whose total resolution was 8x8.  If he were concerned about it as much as that, then even a cursory consultation of the arcade original would easily have resulted in something much closer, even with the same resolution, as illustrated here.  I am saying that legitimate artistic skill should be a non-factor at such limited and easily-accessible levels of detail.  And indeed, the aliens he came up with were creative enough to make it all the more easy to dismiss this thought.

[DragonGrafx-16]

What I want to know about the games not being arcade accurate... is why the default game for 2600 Asteroids did not include the UFOs. It's so boring. You'd think that you'd want the default game (game 1) to be most like the arcade with variants being higher. It's hard when you don't have the manual. I know know you can just look at the manual database.

[Colmino]

1 minute ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

What I want to know about the games not being arcade accurate... is why the default game for 2600 Asteroids did not include the UFOs. It's so boring. You'd think that you'd want the default game (game 1) to be most like the arcade with variants being higher. It's hard when you don't have the manual. I know know you can just look at the manual database.

This feels like a casualty of limited ROM.  Combined perhaps with a lack of engineering skill to pull off stuffing more features into said ROM.  Similar to how the asteroids themselves only travel along certain vectors that are mostly vertical and slightly horizontal -- the result of an inability on the designer's part to envision a way of doing this better.  Unlike the various Asteroids homebrews that came later.  (Footnote: Asteroids was one of many games that served up an uncannily cheat-mode glitch if one undertook to "fry" their 2600 with it: It would result in a game mode where all asteroids came from the right side only, requiring the player to shoot in only one direction forever.)

[DragonGrafx-16]

5 minutes ago, Colmino said:

This feels like a casualty of limited ROM.  Combined perhaps with a lack of engineering skill to pull off stuffing more features into said ROM.  Similar to how the asteroids themselves only travel along certain vectors that are mostly vertical and slightly horizontal -- the result of an inability on the designer's part to envision a way of doing this better.  Unlike the various Asteroids homebrews that came later.  (Footnote: Asteroids was one of many games that served up an uncannily cheat-mode glitch if one undertook to "fry" their 2600 with it: It would result in a game mode where all asteroids came from the right side only, requiring the player to shoot in only one direction forever.)

Oh I just read the manual... it seems I had no UFOs because it was in easy mode (difficulty switch)... heh No Ufos, I love that track:

 

Anyway, I'll have to try the game again with the switch flipped. lol

Edited November 9, 2019 by DragonGrafx-16

[Colmino]

2 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Oh I just read the manual... it seems I had no UFOs because it was in easy mode (difficulty switch)... heh No Ufos, I love that track:

Ah.  Come to think of it, I don't think I ever saw UFOs back in the day when I played the game, so I guess I always picked that mode one way or another.

[Omegamatrix]

How about Robot Tank? Disable the playfield when it starts to see how many tanks it displays.