Atari 2600 with super charger or harmony cartride ALMOST as powerful as the atari 5200?

[johannesmutlu]

While it’s is true that the atari 2600 was a primitive system,in fact you might think that it was only designed with a colorized version of pong in mind,

BUT with both the super charger and harmony cart in mind along with ram expansion,bankswitching and clever programming tricks in mind etc,,, you might think that the atari 2600 all the sudden became ALMOST in terms of performances just as powerful as the atatri 5200,look at homebrew versions of donkeykong,galagon,pac man 8K,mariobros demo,and official frogger on super charger etc,,,

those games do show what the 2600 is really capable off,who had ever tout that the atari 2600 could ever do more then square graphics and square wave audio?

but all those games i mentioned do show how close atari 2600 games can look & sound compared to the atari 5200 and standard nes,this is no exaggeration you have to see to believe it???

 

also the harmony does support super charger games as well,but if you do own a super charger i highly suggest you to use an old mp3 player nobody cares about it,store super charger games on it and load them that way into your super charger,no more worrying  about degrading cassette tapes anymore and with such untappible potential and a much more modern look of the atari 2600 jr,the atari 2600 hardware could,ve fit well into late 80’s 8bit standards?

[MrTrust]

18 hours ago, johannesmutlu said:

While it’s is true that the atari 2600 was a primitive system,in fact you might think that it was only designed with a colorized version of pong in mind...

 

That's because that is what it was designed for.  Two sprites, two missiles, one ball, two-color playfield; that's what it does.  People figured out how to play Galaxian; but that is not what it was designed to do.  Nobody would design a system the way the 2600 was designed if they wanted to do anything else.

 

18 hours ago, johannesmutlu said:

BUT with both the super charger and harmony cart in mind along with ram expansion,bankswitching and clever programming tricks in mind etc

 

You keep talking about bank switching like it's magic.  Bank switching allows you to use a bigger ROM for your games, that is, more code.  More RAM allows you to keep track of more stuff.  You can take advantage of memory to have better graphics, but nothing in the Supercharger or Harmony cart gets you around the restrictions of the TIA chip.  You still get a 40-pixel, two-color playfield on each scanline, two sprites, two missiles, and a ball.

You can do a lot of cleverness re-arranging and re-coloring those objects and pixels, but you can't get more of them, and you can't go beyond their limits.  Even with the co-processor in the Harmony cart, you're stuck with the TIA no matter what.  There are things that the 5200's CTIA/GTIA can do that the TIA simply cannot do ever.  Same with NES' PPU.  Same with 7800's Maria.  Same with everything.

 

18 hours ago, johannesmutlu said:

but all those games i mentioned do show how close atari 2600 games can look & sound compared to the atari 5200 and standard nes,this is no exaggeration you have to see to believe it

 

On the 5200, maybe.  On the NES, I wouldn't say it's even close.  But hey, that's great that you're excited about what people are able to get the 2600 to do.  I would keep expectations realistic if I were you, though.  It's not like you can just keep adding more RAM to the cart and do more cleverness and end up with something that looks like an NES game no matter how hard you bank switch.
 

[johannesmutlu]

2 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

That's because that is what it was designed for.  Two sprites, two missiles, one ball, two-color playfield; that's what it does.  People figured out how to play Galaxian; but that is not what it was designed to do.  Nobody would design a system the way the 2600 was designed if they wanted to do anything else.

 

 

You keep talking about bank switching like it's magic.  Bank switching allows you to use a bigger ROM for your games, that is, more code.  More RAM allows you to keep track of more stuff.  You can take advantage of memory to have better graphics, but nothing in the Supercharger or Harmony cart gets you around the restrictions of the TIA chip.  You still get a 40-pixel, two-color playfield on each scanline, two sprites, two missiles, and a ball.

You can do a lot of cleverness re-arranging and re-coloring those objects and pixels, but you can't get more of them, and you can't go beyond their limits.  Even with the co-processor in the Harmony cart, you're stuck with the TIA no matter what.  There are things that the 5200's CTIA/GTIA can do that the TIA simply cannot do ever.  Same with NES' PPU.  Same with 7800's Maria.  Same with everything.

 

 

On the 5200, maybe.  On the NES, I wouldn't say it's even close.  But hey, that's great that you're excited about what people are able to get the 2600 to do.  I would keep expectations realistic if I were you, though.  It's not like you can just keep adding more RAM to the cart and do more cleverness and end up with something that looks like an NES game no matter how hard you bank switch.
 

Yes that’s true, the atari 2600 is still a very weak system in terms of graphics,sound,rom and ramcompared to the nes & atari 5200,but it still just blows my mind how frogger on the super charger looks,how homebrewed donkeykong,pac man and galagon looks trough the harmony,

i really wonder how they did all this, did they manually timed the electron beam’s spead to do all this crazy sruff or did they use modern software to help automatically convert graphics into timed co’ordinated signals for the tia chip?

i don’t know but i can imagine that these day’s it should be much much easier to program for the tia chip unlike back then,when they had to know the exact location from the electron beam for each pixel,i can imagine that it must have be a nightmare for game developers to program for and in such regards, i do have respect for the programmer who had only a few weeks to create ET & pac man for the 2600,so it’s no surprise most atari 2600 games looked squarish but those modern homebrew games just really shocked me sooo much at what can be done on the atari 2600 that i almost did fall from my chair.

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, johannesmutlu said:

Yes that’s true, the atari 2600 is still a very weak system in terms of graphics,sound,rom and ramcompared to the nes & atari 5200,but it still just blows my mind how frogger on the super charger looks,how homebrewed donkeykong,pac man and galagon looks trough the harmony,

 

Well, if I'm not mistaken, Galagon actually uses a 32-bit co-processor on the cart, so sometimes it isn't just a matter of more memory, and some of this stuff would simply not have been possible in the 80s, or economically feasible.

 

1 hour ago, johannesmutlu said:

i really wonder how they did all this, did they manually timed the electron beam’s spead to do all this crazy sruff or did they use modern software to help automatically convert graphics into timed co’ordinated signals for the tia chip?

 

Somebody smarter than me can probably answer this better, but loosely, when the beam starts, it's turned on and drawing current, and when it's going back to start the next line, it's turned off and not.  TIA gets these signals and when a new line starts, it executes the code you wrote for that line.  That is, which playfield pixels you have turned on, what color they are, where to draw the ball, Player 1, etc.  And you have to code every individual line because the system has no frame buffer.

 

Why not?  Because that would be RAM, and RAM was expensive back then.  So this thing was made as bare bones as possible.  For instance, you don't even really get all 40 pixels.  You get 20 that you have to re-use in reverse on the right half of the screen.

 

1 hour ago, johannesmutlu said:

i don’t know but i can imagine that these day’s it should be much much easier to program for the tia chip

 

Yeah, it's not.

 

Batari basic will let you program the 2600 without having to worry about write your kernel line by line.  It's very easy and intuitive, but it's limited, and most games written in it have a very same-y look and feel to them.  You can do neat stuff with it, but not Galagon or Donkey Kong-tier stuff.  For that, you're stuck with 6502 assembly (and I guess C if you're using a co-processor), line by line, which is extremely tedious even today.

 

The big difference is the tools.  Having the ability to write your code, then compile, run, and debug it with one click is huge.  That, and there's resources like this site, where you can get help and tips quickly and easily.

 

But in terms of having to "race the beam"?  Nope.  No getting around that.  

[Fort Apocalypse]

On 6/23/2022 at 1:15 PM, MrTrust said:

 

That's because that is what it was designed for.  Two sprites, two missiles, one ball, two-color playfield; that's what it does.
 

I believe it was also built to handle Tank.

 

From the Tank page at Wikipedia:

Quote

A dedicated console version of Tank II was announced by Atari at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1977, but was cancelled by the end of the year; the joysticks for the game, designed by Kevin McKinsey, became the standard joystick controllers for the Atari 2600 (1977).^[23] The Atari 2600 game Combat, released in 1977, includes several variations of Tank, including ones with bouncing shots or invisible tanks. Combat was initially developed as a console version of the arcade game, like the cancelled dedicated console version, with additional plane-based game modes added during development. Despite Atari's cancellation of the dedicated console version of Tank, a dedicated console game inspired by Tank was still released in 1977 by Coleco: the Telstar game Telstar Combat! plays four variations of Tank, and was released prior to the Atari 2600 and Combat.^[8]

The Tank series is an interesting topic.

Edited July 2, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[Keatah]

I'm fairly certain, yes, that the VCS was originally made for pong and tank. And only those I also seem to recall they had plans for only 8 cartridges. It would be interesting to learn about what changed their collective minds that the machine could do so much more. What was this tipping point.

 

Programming it today may or may not be any different than in 1979, but there is Stella with its interactive debugger.

 

The TIA is wonderfully limiting and enforcing. It sets a high bar for programmers - as only the best get good results. And this "best" lot brings a level of creativity and gaming insight that is lacking in "other" programmers. It's a rather small and exclusive club. It has been said that the only other system more convoluted, restrictive, and versatile, would be the Apollo AGC.

[+Gemintronic]

Probably someone has already said it better here.  But, the only thing the SuperCharger brings to the table is extra RAM and cheaper media.  That extra RAM seems to already be taken up by things needed by the SuperCharger to do its job.. I think?  So, a little extra memory for beefier display kernels.  I think a normal 32k ROM with SARA RAM cart could outstrip a SuperCharger game.

 

That's my hot take

[Keatah]

19 hours ago, Gemintronic said:

That extra RAM seems to already be taken up by things needed by the SuperCharger to do its job.. I think?

Not really. There's gotta be stuff left over to actually make the games, like frogger, as good as it is.

 

19 hours ago, Gemintronic said:

I think a normal 32k ROM with SARA RAM cart could outstrip a SuperCharger game.

It probably would, as there is simply more space for more program.

[Keatah]

On 6/23/2022 at 3:20 PM, johannesmutlu said:

i really wonder how they did all this, did they manually timed the electron beam’s spead to do all this crazy sruff or did they use modern software to help automatically convert graphics into timed co’ordinated signals for the tia chip?

In general terms, yes, that's how it'd be done. But the speed of the beam doesn't really change. There's a good book called Racing The Beam. It's not very long either and quite understandable for the layperson. Like me! Woot!

[BIGHMW]

I proudly have both a 5200 and also a 2600 adapter (and also a Flashback 9) and a Harmony Encore cart and once upon a time in 1982 I remember that after seeing the disaster that the original 1981 Pac-Man for the 2600 looked like I wrote off the 2600/VCS altogether, and waited for the 5200 to come out (and I'm glad I did!!!).

 

But lo and behold, in 2016, I saw a video on YouTube on Dennis @DEBRO's Pac-Man 4K, in which I thought was an absolute stroke of genius, that, and also later on @DINTAR816's Pac-Man Arcade brought me back into the 2600 fold and I promptly got a Flashback 9 (with built-in SD card slot) and my 2600 adapter and the (my first) Harmony Encore and discovered all the fantastic games that folks were now able to create on her. John Champeau's @johnnywc's Champ Games' Scramble, LadyBug, Qyx, Galagon, Wizard of Wor Arcade and Gorf Arcade, along with @splendidnut's Chaotic Grill! nearly made me think of ditching my 5200 after seeing the fantastic things people can do with what was once written off by many hardcore gamers like myself BITD. If it weren't for the fact that AtGames doesn't even give a shit let alone care enough about its FB9 userbase enough to warrant putting out a firmware upgrade so we can play ARM-based games on her is about the only thing that holds me back from just ditching everything else and simply going with just a FB9 or a 4-switch Woody with Harmony Encore cart.

[BIGHMW]

....and speaking of Pac-Man 4K and Pac-Man Arcade, now that we know that the 2600 CAN handle 32K programs easily through either the FB9 or Harmony cart, since Pac-Man 4K was only 4K and Pac-Man Arcade was only 8K, I wonder now what Pac-Man COULD look (and play) like if a 32K version of it was ever put out, we saw what Qyx, Gorf Arcade, Galagon, and Scramble looked and played like with 32K, so some of us would to see a bit of that love for that proverbial world's favorite power pill popper!!!

[MrTrust]

6 hours ago, BIGHMW said:

....and speaking of Pac-Man 4K and Pac-Man Arcade, now that we know that the 2600 CAN handle 32K programs easily through either the FB9 or Harmony cart, since Pac-Man 4K was only 4K and Pac-Man Arcade was only 8K, I wonder now what Pac-Man COULD look (and play) like if a 32K version of it was ever put out, we saw what Qyx, Gorf Arcade, Galagon, and Scramble looked and played like with 32K, so some of us would to see a bit of that love for that proverbial world's favorite power pill popper!!!

 

But, again, having more ROM or RAM does not change the fundamental architecture of the 2600.  The TIA can still only do what it can do.

 

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but you can't, for instance, get around having black lines through the maze on the lines where the dots are.  It takes, what, 15 pixels' time to change playfield colors, and then change them back, and you've got to do this 2, 3, 4 times on one line?  That's not enough time to draw the blue maze and the white dots on the same line.  You can juggle sprites around and try to cover that up, but in a game like Pac-Man, where all characters have full vertical freedom of movement and can intersect, you're going to have to flicker the maze.  You can have a gigabyte of ROM and it's not going to change the way the game gets drawn.

 

I don't know; maybe with the ARM you can toggle the color registers every other pixel, but other than adding 2-player support, it's hard to imagine what more memory is supposed to do to improve a game like Pac-Man.

 

 

[BIGHMW]

....and, we DO have to note here, that the operative word, is the same as in the title of this thread in all caps, and that is, the word "ALMOST", meaning that even the OP himself knows that the 2600 will never really equalize the capabilities of Big Sexy nor any other 8-bit system for that matter..... but then again when you see what can be done with technology from 1982 here in 2022, it can be quite convincing to ditch and/or not even consider getting/owning a 5200 or other 8-bit gaming console because of those advances in R & D in the retrogaming world and the knowledge of what can and cannot be done within the limits of both the TIA chip and the mere 128 bits of RAM the 2600 gives us to work with.

[+johnnywc]

2 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

 

But, again, having more ROM or RAM does not change the fundamental architecture of the 2600.  The TIA can still only do what it can do.

This is correct.  As of now, the fastest way to update a TIA register is 5 cycles (2 to load, 3 to store), and you still only have 76 cycles per line.  The DPC+ bank switching scheme allows for the load # to be from a dynamic data stream (you can think of this as a large array or buffer) and the ARM processor is powerful enough to fill these buffers during vertical blank and overscan, allowing for very flexible kernels and more complex dynamic backgrounds and sprite re-use, etc. 

2 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but you can't, for instance, get around having black lines through the maze on the lines where the dots are. 

There is a way, using the TIA trick of an 'early HMOVE' that occurs on cycle 73 or cycle 74 (normal HMOVE is usually done at the start of a scanline).  The only drawback is that an early HMOVE can only shift objects to the left; this is fine for repositioning objects but does takes away the ability to use HMOVE for complex sprites drawn using the missiles and ball since you can't shift to the right line-by-line).  Champ Games using early HMOVE on full screen games like Qyx, Wizard of Wor Arcade, Turbo, Lady Bug Arcade etc.   Other games like RobotWar, Scramble, Super Cobra Arcade, etc. we use a regular HMOVE (since the background is black and we don't use all of PF0 so the lines don't show).  This allows us to use the ball and missiles in RobotWar to draw some missiles and enemies with line-by-line shifting.

2 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

It takes, what, 15 pixels' time to change playfield colors, and then change them back, and you've got to do this 2, 3, 4 times on one line?  That's not enough time to draw the blue maze and the white dots on the same line. 

That is correct.  There is an experimental technology called 'BUS stuffing' that allows for 3-cycle TIA updates (you just store to the TIA register and the lda is implied/mapped) for 9 pixel updates, but unfortunately this has proven to be unstable on some hardware and is currently on hold.

2 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

You can juggle sprites around and try to cover that up, but in a game like Pac-Man, where all characters have full vertical freedom of movement and can intersect, you're going to have to flicker the maze.  You can have a gigabyte of ROM and it's not going to change the way the game gets drawn.

True.  Lady Bug Arcade gets around this by using a technique called 'color blending' which uses purple (red and blue) for the maze and green for the doors, and mixes them (red, blue, green) to get white for the dots:

 

 

There is a slight 'shimmer' effect (not quite flickering) on the maze, but you can disable it using one of the difficulty switches.  In this case, it uses one PF color per line and the two colors adjacent to each other give the illusion of a third color (especially on a CRT):

 

 

2 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

 

I don't know; maybe with the ARM you can toggle the color registers every other pixel, but other than adding 2-player support, it's hard to imagine what more memory is supposed to do to improve a game like Pac-Man.

 

 

You were correct above; the ARM does not enhance the TIA functionally (it doesn't have direct access to it); it does helps immensely with data preparation executing game logic during VB and OS.  As for Pac-man, except for some more bells and whistles, I don't see it getting much better than DEBRO's 4K and DINTARI's 8K versions.  

 

Hope that helps!

John

 

[Mr SQL]

30 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

 

But, again, having more ROM or RAM does not change the fundamental architecture of the 2600.  The TIA can still only do what it can do.

 

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but you can't, for instance, get around having black lines through the maze on the lines where the dots are.  It takes, what, 15 pixels' time to change playfield colors, and then change them back, and you've got to do this 2, 3, 4 times on one line?  That's not enough time to draw the blue maze and the white dots on the same line.  You can juggle sprites around and try to cover that up, but in a game like Pac-Man, where all characters have full vertical freedom of movement and can intersect, you're going to have to flicker the maze.  You can have a gigabyte of ROM and it's not going to change the way the game gets drawn.

 

I don't know; maybe with the ARM you can toggle the color registers every other pixel, but other than adding 2-player support, it's hard to imagine what more memory is supposed to do to improve a game like Pac-Man.

 

 

 

Because of the open architecture of the Atari 2600 having more RAM available enables much more complex custom graphics cards to be created as display kernels.

 

batari BASIC offers a very good example where the virtual graphics chip offers 32x11 semigraphic pixels when using only the built in 128 bytes in the console. 

 

With the Sara superchip's extra 128 bytes of RAM available it triples the graphics resolution of the virtual chip to 32x32. 

 

likewise the virtual graphics chip in SuperCharger BASIC needs only an extra 256 bytes of RAM so is capable of interoperating with CBS RAM and increases graphics resolution to 96x20 tile pixels with horizontal scrolling and tile mapping functions added.

 

Home computes had more RAM so the 6K RAM board of the SuerCharger made the Atari 2600 programmability more comparable to contemporary home computers.

 

[MrTrust]

2 hours ago, johnnywc said:

There is a way, using the TIA trick of an 'early HMOVE' that occurs on cycle 73 or cycle 74 (normal HMOVE is usually done at the start of a scanline).

 

Ah, I see...

 

Just kidding.  I have no idea how this would affect the playfield, or would this be a method for using a missile to plug the holes in the maze?  

 

2 hours ago, johnnywc said:

Lady Bug Arcade gets around this by using a technique called 'color blending' which uses purple (red and blue) for the maze and green for the doors, and mixes them (red, blue, green) to get white for the dots:

 

Very neat, but if I'm understanding this correctly, you need an extra line for each dot to get that artifact, and that's going to mess with your vertical resolution in Pac-Man, no?  You're already lacking 9 dots vertically in the 8k version and that only uses one line.

 

2 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

Because of the open architecture of the Atari 2600 having more RAM available enables much more complex custom graphics cards to be created as display kernels.

 

I understand that, but it's beside the point.  When somehow says, as someone did say "Hey, 8k Pac-Man looks and plays great, think of how good 32k Pac-Man would look and play!", that ain't how it works.

 

Is any of what you just listed going to get you to display 29 vertical dots and 26 horizontal ones in Pac-Man?  Is it going to fill in the empty lines of the maze?  Is it going to stop the ghosts from flickering while on the same line?

 

Yes, more memory can get you better graphics, obviously, but you're eventually going to hit a ceiling with how good you can get Pac-Man to look on the 2600 and the 8k version is probably it is it not?

[MrTrust]

3 hours ago, BIGHMW said:

....and, we DO have to note here, that the operative word, is the same as in the title of this thread in all caps, and that is, the word "ALMOST", meaning that even the OP himself knows that the 2600 will never really equalize the capabilities of Big Sexy nor any other 8-bit system for that matter..... but then again when you see what can be done with technology from 1982 here in 2022, it can be quite convincing to ditch and/or not even consider getting/owning a 5200 or other 8-bit gaming console because of those advances in R & D in the retrogaming world and the knowledge of what can and cannot be done within the limits of both the TIA chip and the mere 128 bits of RAM the 2600 gives us to work with.

 

Okay, but 2600 Super Breakout looks ALMOST as good as 5200 Super Breakout and you don't even need a Supercharger for that, right?  But since a potato glued to a piece of quartz can run Super Breakout almost as well as the 5200, who cares?

 

Now, Frogger's not Super Breakout, but it ain't exactly a hardware-intensive game.  Only one object travels vertically, there's rarely more than two unique objects on one row, the logic is very simple even by the standards of it's day.  So, yeah, give it more memory for a beefier kernel, and you can make it look almost as good as 5200 Frogger and, like Pac-Man, you're probably getting pretty close to the upper limit of how good you can get Frogger on the 2600 now.

 

Now, can the Supercharger or even the Encore "almost" do Gremlins, Joust, Mario Bros., Robotron 2084, Zone Ranger, Vanguard, or The Dreadnaught Factor as well as the 5200?  I'll believe it when I see it.

 

I suppose you could make a case that Robot War 2084 almost as good as the 5200.  It's smoother, for sure, and might even play better (I haven't tried it with two sticks), but it's a small playfie ok d, the grunts are blocks, and it flickers enough to induce seizures.  No disrespect intended there; it's an amazing achievement, but there are just certain things TIA can never do that GTIA can.

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

But, again, having more ROM or RAM does not change the fundamental architecture of the 2600.  The TIA can still only do what it can do.

That is important because it enforces and maintains the original flavor & ambiance. I also believe that the Harmony platform is one of the few¹ modern-day hardware add-ons that enhances the 2600 experience in a meaningful, state-of-the-art, yet vintage, manner. All the ARM games I've played still scream Atari 2600 to me. No mistaking it for any other console. The 2600 (if it were alive) would see Harmony as an intelligent ROM that changes its output in a very tricky way. Laymanspeak of course, forgive me.

 

The same holds true for modern flash storage devices, like disk emulators and SD cards. The vintage system sees them as more capacious devices. Cassette -> Disk -> 10MB HDD -> 8GB Flash. All the same. All have to go though the system's "natural" storage interface bus, at vintage speeds.

 

I've read about things like a dual-6502 2600. I don't like stuff like that because the base architecture deviates way too much from the original. And software doesn't seem to be written for it - because no one seems to have one in their gameroom. Software availability is huge

 

Harmony has become an established standard over the past 10 years. Mainly because of stability, versatility, and availability. I also see little need to go beyond its capabilities either. Maybe more memory. But more speed? naw!

 

(1) SaveKey, AtariVox, Quadtari, SuperCharger, and many controller mods and enhancements are also good things.

Edited July 4, 2022 by Keatah

[+johnnywc]

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Just kidding.  I have no idea how this would affect the playfield, or would this be a method for using a missile to plug the holes in the maze?  

Oops, my bad - I thought you were talking about the HMOVE bars that appear in the first 8 far left pixels when an object is repositioned.  I think Pacman 4K and 8K already use the early HMOVE trick to suppress this; you were talking about the black lines in the maze itself.  

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

Very neat, but if I'm understanding this correctly, you need an extra line for each dot to get that artifact, and that's going to mess with your vertical resolution in Pac-Man, no?  You're already lacking 9 dots vertically in the 8k version and that only uses one line.

Yes it takes 2 lines to get this effect. Worked great in LB:A (it has the correct # of dots, same as the maze) but not so much for Pac-man.

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

I understand that, but it's beside the point.  When somehow says, as someone did say "Hey, 8k Pac-Man looks and plays great, think of how good 32k Pac-Man would look and play!", that ain't how it works.

 

Is any of what you just listed going to get you to display 29 vertical dots and 26 horizontal ones in Pac-Man?  Is it going to fill in the empty lines of the maze?  Is it going to stop the ghosts from flickering while on the same line?

 

Yes, more memory can get you better graphics, obviously, but you're eventually going to hit a ceiling with how good you can get Pac-Man to look on the 2600 and the 8k version is probably it is it not?

I think we're both in agreement here, I was more or less explaining how I've used the ARM to get *other* games I've made to be closer to the arcade, but as far as Pac-man is concerned:

 

8 hours ago, johnnywc said:

As for Pac-man, except for some more bells and whistles, I don't see it getting much better than DEBRO's 4K and DINTARI's 8K versions. 

 

[MrTrust]

3 hours ago, johnnywc said:

I think Pacman 4K and 8K already use the early HMOVE trick to suppress this; you were talking about the black lines in the maze itself.

 

Yes, that's what I was talking about.  I think you're going to be stuck with those no matter what you do, right?

 

Doing it with playfield looks to be impossible.  You'd have to be able to update the TIA up 12 times on one line, even if you got the 3-cycle update to work, that's hogging up half of your cycles just to draw the playfield.  Okay, so use players/missiles?  Maybe with adroit NUSIZ and RESM0 you could make it work, but what happens when a character moves next to a wall on a dot line?  You're back up against the same timing issue getting the sprite color switched back to match the ghost or pac-man, and then back again in time.  The ball could probably be used to cover the line in the three-clock-witdh walls, but I don't think you can stretch or reposition it enough to cover the long horizontal walls.

 

Or maybe you can, I don't know.  I'm not trying to get hung up on the empty lines in the maze, necessarily.  Just pointing out there's a hard limit with certain things, even something as simple as the maze in Pac-Man when you've using the TIA.  Things that would be trivial to do on the 5200, that is.

 

3 hours ago, johnnywc said:

I think we're both in agreement here, I was more or less explaining how I've used the ARM to get *other* games I've made to be closer to the arcade, but as far as Pac-man is concerned:

 

And to impressive effect it must be said.

 

My point is just that people seem to have misconceptions about what it is things like the Supercharger and Harmony actually do, as if there's a linear relationship between adding memory and improving the graphics or gameplay. I would say it is fundamentally a different thing to have a bit of hardware that makes Galagon or Mappy thinkable on the 2600 than it is for it to be "more powerful".  That, to me, would mean having an extra set or two of PF/player/missile/color registers, or more cycles per line, to say nothing of, say, built-in character graphics or something like that.

 

 

[Mr SQL]

14 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

Ah, I see...

 

Just kidding.  I have no idea how this would affect the playfield, or would this be a method for using a missile to plug the holes in the maze?  

 

 

Very neat, but if I'm understanding this correctly, you need an extra line for each dot to get that artifact, and that's going to mess with your vertical resolution in Pac-Man, no?  You're already lacking 9 dots vertically in the 8k version and that only uses one line.

 

 

I understand that, but it's beside the point.  When somehow says, as someone did say "Hey, 8k Pac-Man looks and plays great, think of how good 32k Pac-Man would look and play!", that ain't how it works.

 

Is any of what you just listed going to get you to display 29 vertical dots and 26 horizontal ones in Pac-Man?  Is it going to fill in the empty lines of the maze?  Is it going to stop the ghosts from flickering while on the same line?

 

Yes, more memory can get you better graphics, obviously, but you're eventually going to hit a ceiling with how good you can get Pac-Man to look on the 2600 and the 8k version is probably it is it not?

In this example the Monsters do not flicker when they on the same line:

 

13 hours ago, MrTrust said:

there are just certain things TIA can never do that GTIA can.

Soft ANTIC uses 256 bytes of RAM to bring Display List Technology to the 2600:

 

 

[MrTrust]

5 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

In this example the Monsters do not flicker when they on the same line:

 

Bully.  Can it do the things with Pac-Man that I asked about?

 

5 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

Soft ANTIC uses 256 bytes of RAM to bring Display List Technology to the 2600:

 

Well, that is powerful.  I'd be interested in reading more about that, but I could not find anything about it in particular on your site.

 

[Mr SQL]

10 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Well, that is powerful.  I'd be interested in reading more about that, but I could not find anything about it in particular on your site.

Thanks! Here's a thread with more information:

Display List Interrupt Demo - Atari 2600 Programming - AtariAge Forums

 

[johannesmutlu]

Galgon on the atari 2600 absolutely just blows my mind,lots of colors,sprites and moving backgrounds,it looks,sounds and plays close to the arcade version,hack it even has a save option trough an external memory card and a 2 player mode as well among other things, i bought the digital copy for $20 bucks for my harmony cart,it’s well worth it and it definitely pushes the atari 2600 to it’s limit?

 

Edited July 7, 2022 by johannesmutlu