Porting 8-bit to 2600?

[rallyrabbit]

Been reading up the Atari 8-bit a little.  I see a lot of games have been ported up to the 8-bit, just curious if its possible to port 8-bit games to the 2600.  Looking at things, my gut says maybe but extremely difficult (almost like a rewrite).  But curious for the expert opinions here.

[azure]

A port is going to be a full or nearly full rewrite. Some non-graphics routines could copied over such as simple utility subroutines, but if they rely on large data structures in RAM those will be a rewrite too.

[+Andrew Davie]

I "ported" my own game, Qb (1984) from the Atari 800 to the Atari 2600 in about 2003. It was a complete rewrite. Very little shared, zero code re-use. Other than the basic game concept it was just like starting afresh.

 

[rallyrabbit]

Thanks gents.  There's an interesting 8-bit game called Atom Smasher (not like the 2600), concept is cool.  I haven't seen a 2600 version of it.  Now that I think about it, I might be able to take asteroids as a base and start gutting it.  But even then, it's going to be massive.

[Mr SQL]

15 hours ago, rallyrabbit said:

Been reading up the Atari 8-bit a little.  I see a lot of games have been ported up to the 8-bit, just curious if its possible to port 8-bit games to the 2600.  Looking at things, my gut says maybe but extremely difficult (almost like a rewrite).  But curious for the expert opinions here.

Great thread! I think there is more possiblity with the very early 400/800 games that didn't use ANTIC like Basketball,  it is possible to port these with more code reuse.

 

Does anyone know any other examples of Atari 8-bit games that don't use ANTIC or have a commented dissembly of one?  

 

[+Karl G]

From what I see on YouTube, it looks interesting, but it would be difficult to display all of the orbiting electrons once you get at all far into the periodic table.

[RevEng]

I'm not so sure. With the orbiting motion, the time each electron shares scanlines with the others is fairly limited. It probably wouldn't be too bad with an intelligent flicker routine.

[+Andrew Davie]

17 hours ago, rallyrabbit said:

Thanks gents.  There's an interesting 8-bit game called Atom Smasher (not like the 2600), concept is cool.  I haven't seen a 2600 version of it.  Now that I think about it, I might be able to take asteroids as a base and start gutting it.  But even then, it's going to be massive.

Whatever you do, the element is "Fluorine", not "flourine" as per...
 

 

[+Karl G]

10 hours ago, RevEng said:

I'm not so sure. With the orbiting motion, the time each electron shares scanlines with the others is fairly limited. It probably wouldn't be too bad with an intelligent flicker routine.

Now I want to see someone pull off 92 orbiting electrons for uranium.  

[Goochman]

I always found Atom Smasher to be a pretty good game BITD - easy to get into and fun

[carlsson]

While the same technique probably isn't applicable on the 2600, the term "unlimited bobs" on the C64 etc comes to my mind...

 

Also I realized that Atom Smasher on the Atari 8-bit is a different game than Romik Software's Atom Smasher on the VIC-20, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC, though they have some interesting similarities.

Edited March 5, 2020 by carlsson

[RevEng]

54 minutes ago, Karl G said:

Now I want to see someone pull off 92 orbiting electrons for uranium.  

I played the game BITD, and never got that far. I do recall going screen after screen, but either the difficulty eventually ramped to "none shall pass" levels, or I quit from boredom. Either method to limit the level progression could be deployed here.  

 

Maybe a mixed approach could deal with 92 - PF pixels for rounded positions, and an object or two for the non-rounded ones, with flicker where two or more non-rounded positions are on the same scanlines. With that many objects to track, and the complexity in the kernel, I think I'm talking arm-assist here.

[KevKelley]

The way they rotate kind of reminds me of Star Castle.

[+Karl G]

45 minutes ago, RevEng said:

I played the game BITD, and never got that far. I do recall going screen after screen, but either the difficulty eventually ramped to "none shall pass" levels, or I quit from boredom. Either method to limit the level progression could be used here.  

One could also take the route that is both more lame and more scientifically valid, and have only the outer valence level electrons show at any given time.  

[RevEng]

I'm assuming something has collapsed the wave function, since we're not "seeing" a cloud of possibilities, but how are we able to look at the screen and determine both the position and velocity of those electrons!!! ?

[+Andrew Davie]

On 3/5/2020 at 11:11 PM, carlsson said:

While the same technique probably isn't applicable on the 2600, the term "unlimited bobs" on the C64 etc comes to my mind...

 

That was an Apple II demo you posted a video link to, not C64