There is something that I can't stop noticing, the difference of animations between atari and nes, atari game animation are so much more fluid than the nes ones! I wonder why?
3:14 - that´s 20 pixels instead of 24. Btw, most games were in 160x192 res. So 20 pixels then mirrored or repeated or assymetrically put totalled 40 pixels which then were stretched to fill the 160 pixel screen. That´s why the playfield pixels take 4 pixels each, but due to the screen stretching they look 8 pixels wide, just as normal sprites all look like they´re 2x1. I actually love the exotic way the 2600´s graphics are for they are unique hahaha. other bits: the 2 missiles and the ball could be stretched to a factor of 8 while the 2 sprites to a factor of 4. Missiles and ball no matter how thick they weer drawn (up to 8) could leave a trail behind them, thus painting the screen. This was used in the tank wheels as shown. Great video btw! Love the 2600! I am thinking about buying the 2600+ but the carts are still too expensive for their simple nature. But I understand it´s also because of their physicalities (manuals, box art, printing, cardboards, plastics, circuits, etc)!
Oh whoops you are right. I've ordered two sets of the paddles for the 2600+ I can't see new paddles coming out again anytime soon - I'm going to wait to see on the plus to see if it is any good. I have been obsessed with a finding a reasonable way of playing 4 player video olympics and war lords on modern tv. It is actually quite bizarre how limited modern computers are in terms of input. Thanks for the feedback. :D
That’s something interesting about the atari 2600,being able to stretch sprites wich even the nes and snes doesn’t support in hardware,heck the atari 2600 even has a waaay higher colorpallet then the nes and master system🤣
@@johneygd yeah, I keep saying that if the SNES was the power behind the original NES games, wow, how much more amazing would they have been! all those colors!
Indeed! They were literally using graph paper and calculators (for display critical timings) primarily. It's truly amazing that they were able to get it to do anything beyond "Pong".
The seemingly limited requirement of putting all of the load on the programmer to do the graphics actually ended up being its saving grace, as it allowed WAY more flexibility to do things that the system designers had not even envisioned. For proof of this, have a look at some of the homebrew games that have come out in recent years, such as Pac-Man 8K, Mappy and Donkey Kong VCS: - Pac-Man 8K: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-JA3mIWzwrZk.htmlsi=7e2-gLee43Yptn6_ - Mappy: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-w-8xNE_Knx8.htmlsi=spZXcqaZ7sK3Vs4E - Donkey Kong VCS: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_Y6vhLDN3dI.htmlsi=knSkmQpAcgr7zAZI - BONUS #1: Here's Tod Frye, the guy who made the original Pac-Man for the VCS, admiring the homebrew version: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RqezF_Lv05Y.html - BONUS #2: Here's a much younger Tod Frye talking about how and why his version of Pac-Man looks the way it does: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UTDUB_GiTKA.html
For sure. Elevator Agent and Aardvark are amazing too but there was plenty of blank magic even from some of the games back in the day that defy logic in being able to run on a 2600. The Starparth super charger showed how much more could be done on the system if you just gave it a sane amount of ram. They really should have made a pass through cart like sega's 32X that added some ram, a sound chip, and perhap a chip to add a couple more sprites. The system would have would have been able to give the NES a run for it's money.
@@markrotondella4689I had a Supercharger for a while. I bought it when they went on sale at KB Toys for a quarter of their original price, not knowing that the product (and company) had been discontinued. Anyway, yeah, it had 6k of RAM, of which 4K would usually be used to store the game loaded from cassette and the remaining RAM used for other things Not only could you have a larger game in memory at once and 2K to use for whatever you need, but games could even be multi-load which gives them even more space to expand into. Several add-ons were planned for the 2600 but I don't think any of them sold well (or at all). In fact, I can't think of a single successful console add-on for any console, other than perhaps the Sega CD add-on, but primarily in Japan only. Other ones just didn't do well, were canceled or were disappointing. Hard to believe that the bean counters at Atari originally only wanted to give the engineers 64 bytes of RAM instead of what they got (128 bytes)! If anyone wants to see a really in-depth discussion of how the Atari 2600 works, I recommend the following video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qvpwf50a48E.htmlsi=-afqlrBkTUCdvgBa And this 20th anniversary of the VCS (from 1997) video series is excellent, for top geeks only! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CNJ51okNKqI.html Nolan Bushnell (Atari's founder) and many engineers and game designers (including David Crane and others from Activision, Imagic and so on) are featured.
There's a website that teaches you how to program for a 2600, including the very important task of counting processor instruction cycles. Most of the CPU's time was spent juggling the screen - something like 70%. Game logic had to fit into a scant fraction of time. Fun fact! An upgraded version of the TIA video chip in the 2600, called the CTIA and later GTIA, was used in Atari's home computers but because they were later and had a much more significant about of RAM, Atari added the ANTIC chip to convert a frame buffer into CTIA/GTIA instructions.
I've toyed with the idea of making an Atari game although making an "in the style of" would be less time consuming. They were lucky the processor was actually pretty powerful for the time. I missed the Atari computer I immigrated to Commadore.
They both are taking advantage of the characteristics of CRT screens of the time. The Atari knew where the scan line was on the screen so although it only could actually display one screen colour at at time if it changed the screen colour at the end of a scan line it could create lines on the screen. The Genesis used the fact that there is some softness on those screens to create the illusion of more detail or effects like transparency you see in the water fall. The genesis wasn't actually capable of displaying transparent images. The Battle field in Battlezone benefited from this as well. If you play it on and old CRT the ground looks more complicated than the clear lines you see when you emulated it. If you play the video in 240p it kind of looks like it did back in the day.
No not always. The NES of course has many big advantages over the old 5200 architecture, but the architecture was so brilliant that an incredibly good programmer could in some cards turn out graphics an nes could never do. Check out Atari Blast, rainbow walker, the Lucasfilms games… space harrier (find the true color version not the many bad emulation videos)… and others!
@@datacipher awesome. I'm so going to check those out. Another that comes to mind is Ballblazer. The 5200 version looks and sounds better than Famicom. That and Rescue on Factalus is very impressive. Both Lucasfilm games!
It's the starting tune from Parker Brothers Atari VCS Frogger but the actual tune is a Japanese children's song called "Inu No Omawarisan". ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-othD6L2GTwQ.html
Where did you hear that the designers only expected the VCS to last a few years before being replaced by a newer system? That's the most ludicrous thing I've heard in ages. I had to shut the video off.
Yeah I have over stated that but they were going from the pong consoles that were replaced regularly and if you look at how they organised their release titles they were grouping them in types of games so 1-10 were combat games, 11-20 driving games, 21-30 sports etc they were planning on a hundred or so game which would have been huge compared to the pong generation but much less that was created for they system.
The Player objects are red and yellow. The missiles are orange (well a browny orange) and def green I checked in photoshop. They might come out red and yellow if your monitor is favouring red.
