Just out of curiosity?

[COMTARI]

I know that there are 2600 games that have different levels (usually 2 0r 3 per cart)...but would it have been possible to have designed the 2600 to take advantage of more rom space on the cartridge?

 

For example...on the cartridge of combat, there are 27 games...you can choose tank games, bi planes and jets in various configurations. These games are stored on the cart chip.

 

The 2600 can process I guess 4k at a time...could it have been designed to load say the tank game to play...you beat that level...then the 2600 dumps it from memory and loads the bi-plane game automatically...you beat that level...the 2600 dumps that info from memory and loads the jet level automatically from the cart...and so on.

 

If that was possible, could you have 10, 20, 30 levels in one game creating a large multi-level game stored on the cart chip and thus load them as they are beaten??

 

I know that the real 2600 could not do this, but I didn't know if it could have used such a technique when it was designed through some internal programming?

[CPUWIZ]

It could have been done then, now and in the future, it's called bankswitching.

[NE146]

Try out Marble Craze or Thrust if you want to try a 2600 game with lots of levels

[D.Yancey]

Some older games did this like Megamania/Plaque Attack, Double Dragon, H.E.R.O., Kung Fu Master, and the list goes on...

 

Supercharger games did exactly what you mention with the multi-load games.

[+kisrael]

I think the poster might have a misconception about how cartridges work....

 

it's not like the old computers, where you had a certain amount of RAM, and you loaded stuff from tape or disk and it sat in RAM and then you played. The Atari only has 128 bytes of RAM, but it doesn't use it to store the game logic... that fits in the cartridge , which can be from 2K to...I dunno, 32K? something like that. It's using the game logic directy in "ROM" so to speak.

 

Now there is a limitation to how of that ROM an Atari can address at once (i.e. a limit to how much ROM it thinks it can see, small but much greater than 128 bytes of RAM) which is where bankswitching comes in, which lets the cartridge see a huge-ish amount of ROM in one little bitesized piece at a time.

[DanBoris]

If that was possible, could you have 10, 20, 30 levels in one game creating a large multi-level game stored on the cart chip and thus load them as they are beaten??

 

I know that the real 2600 could not do this, but I didn't know if it could have used such a technique when it was designed through some internal programming?

1021525[/snapback]

 

This actually could have been done quite easily in Combat (and other games) on ther 2600. As someone else pointed out it really doesn't load seperate games for each variation, they are all available at one time from the cartridge. This is especially the case with Combat since it has one main game loop that runs every variation of the game, with a few branches in the code here and there to handle the variations. Pretty amazing piece of programming and all done in only 2K or ROM.

 

Dan

[Shark05]

 

 

In the game Haunted House,I was wondering. If you play the game for 2 hours,& you have the scepter with you & you hassle the ghost,the bat & the spider,like follow them whereever they go,will something happen to you like will you evidently die in the game or what?

 

 

Shark05