Atari VCS/2600 - 10 TECHNICAL Things You Didn't Know 

That feeling you get when watching people responsible for a half of your childhood... wow.

This type of coding is a lost art. Also shows how intelligent you had to be and how well you had to know your job.

These guys were literal programing gods. Would love to see what they could do with modern hardwear

Pitfall II was among one of my favorite Atari games while growing up. It was so much more amazing than anything that came before it. The "Open" world design with depth, swimming and balloons. These were all new experiences on the 2600. Now that I'm older, I continue to be amazed at just how many new techniques were introduced with just that one game.

They're were not programmers, they were magicians! It's just amazing what they could do with such limited resources.

Still love video games and started with the 2600 as a child, hours of fun playing Defender, Asteroids, River Raid, Skyjinks, Pitfall, Adverntur and so many other fun carts, they did it with so little resources its incredible what the programmers accomplished.

When I was a kid and received my Atari as a Christmas gift in 1983 (sure it was late but not for us in Brazil), the first thing that came to my mind when I looked the device was that its grilled shape must hide a speaker. Well, now I know that I was not completely wrong! Thanks for the video, Aaron!

It's amazing they managed to get anything done with the VCS.

Atari 2600 such good times, David Crane was a programming god

I still remember the Space Invaders trick where you would hold down the select and reset buttons while turning on the system to activate auto fire.

Space Invaders exploit: turning the console on while holding the Reset button down would immediately start a game giving the player two shots on screen at the same time. Only drawback was you could only play variation no. 1 of the game. My friends and I loved this bug! My brother bought the system in 1978 and, after hearing your explanation, it was light sixer.

The ingenuity of the folks programming for this platform is just amazing. Of course, it had to be.

Atari was a Huge Sucess in Brasil during 80s....and surpassed the crash and entered the 90s as cheap videogame console

Combat is one of my favourite games because of the quirks like blasting your opponent through walls.

I will never forget how cool it was to be 8 years old in 1984 post video game crash and seeing Pitfall II advertised and then being able to buy it for like five bucks! That and HERO are the best games on the system!

Absolutely amazing the amount of functionality they were able to squeeze out of the 2600. I loved that game system as a kid. Especially the Activision games. Which seemed to really push the limits of the console.

Fascinating to hear about the byte saving tricks and creative genius methods developers came up with.

I have a starpath supercharger, pretty much used it as a flash cart. Quite a few games have been converted into a sound file, and you can load up a cheap MP3 player to act as the cassette/cassette player.

For those familiar with the Commodore 64, saving every character on the screen (40 across x 25 down) takes 1000 bytes, or 1K. 2 screenshots would fill up an entire 2K Atari cartridge!!

I just can't imagine how hard it was for developers to work with such resource limits, they were and always will be the legends of game development. Looking forward for your next video(s) Thanks Aaron!

I love that after 24:00, as David Crane is explaining the mind-bending cartridge chipset enhancements and features, the camera pans out to all the other developers, slack-jawed, hanging their heads in acknowledgement of Crane's next-level skills. (I'm not suggesting even for a moment that they didn't all accomplish amazing things, of course.) Maybe sacrilege here, but I think it's a shame more customers didn't embrace the competing Intellivision, which had the computing resources to get around most or all of these limitations.

The Polynomian Counter thing was pure genius.

I once had a VCS that had the speaker holes. I mounted a small speaker and amp inside. With the availability of small good sounding speakers and small amplifiers today, it would be much easier to do that and get much better sound than what I did back in the late 90's

Really interesting stuff! I love hearing about all the corner cutting techniques the programmers utilised to get their projects working with their restrictions. Subd! 😁

Bumming byte's in the 70's. These guys pushed the VCS hardware *way* beyond belief. These days you'd be hard pressed to find programmers of this caliber. Much respect

Great video! Really need to see that video about the speaker mods, *sounds* awesome to do!

The Starpath was AMAZING in comparison to regular Atarci VCS games!

Hats off to these trailblazers in their day. Crazy what they delivered with such finite resources. But also thank heavens this is history and hardware is so much more robust.

Yay! A man that calls a VCS a VCS 😊👍

I love this! This is the 'OG' "It's not a bug it's a feature" excuse haha or rather "It's totally a feature and not a limitation" Perfect!

The big problem with music on the 2600 wasn't so much the primary frequency generator, which has a five-bit range from 1 to 32 counts, but rather the fact that the polynomial function generator which followed it was limited to dividing its output by 2, 6, 31, or 93 when producing square waves, or 15 when producing a buzzy "saw" wave sound. If the TIA had happened to include an extra "divide-by-two" control bit that would drop one of the phi1 or phi2 clocks from each scan line, that would have improved things enormously, but I don't think music was really a design consideration. In the theme for my game Toyshop Trouble, which is in the key of C, I used the saw wave for the bass part, with divide values of 32, 24, 22, 16, 12, and 11, yielding overall divide ratios of 480, 360, 330, 240, 180, and 165. The mathematically-correct divisors for the G notes would have been 320 and 160, but those aren't multiples of 15. In the lead part, the C, and F notes use divide values of 20, and 15, yielding overall divide ratios of 120, and 90, both of which are almost perfect and coincide with the pitches for C and F in the bass part. The G note, however, uses a divisor of 27 for a divide ratio of 162, which is quite a bit off from the 330/165 used in the bass. The B note is a bit interesting; mathematically, it should use a divisor of 21.18 for a divide ratio of 127.13, but the available options are to use a divisor of 21 (which is about 1% sharp) or 22 (which is about 3.8% flat). For the measures where I'm playing a G in the bass, I use the lower pitch (which is flat by the same amount as the G), but for other measures I use the higher pitch. Fun little bit of audio trivia: the 4-bit digital-to-analog converers for the Atari's audio circuits are just about the smallest things on the TIA. If you call up die photos, each ADC is a tiny little assemblage of four different-sized transitors that looks like the "signal bars" display on a cell phone.

Because of the extremely limited memory size of the Atari VCS/2600 there were multiple technical tricks which the game programmers had to develop for the Atari VCS/2600.

I used to use that bug to my advantage on the tank game. If you are against a wall turning the tank will allow you to flip to the other side of the wall.

What a fun video. You sure have pulled the curtains back on this great system.

A great video as usual. I wondered about the apparent "speaker" position in the case, but never heard why it was like that. I'd like to look in trying out getting the split audio out setup.

First time on your channel and I love the editing and story telling. Cheers! Subbed, Liked and commented! 👌

Thank you for bringing back good memories of the warmth look wood-paneled house interior and glass TV with ATARI 2600 🕹

I got to meet David Crane, Garry and Daniel Kitchen at a retro game event a few years ago. Great moment in my life.

Great, informative video, keep them coming 🙂

My favorite "FEATURE" in combat was - If you got 1 tank behind the other and you made it look like it was ":DOING THINGS" you could get both tanks to then move in fast circles hooked together on the screen...

Thank you for such useful information, I will use it in my work.

Hy, that interview of the program team is amazing!!! 🤩, you have a new suscriptor now 👍 Greetings from Buenos Aires

Great video. And love that shirt, too. It almost looks like the colors are moving.

What an amazing video!

AMAZING DETAILS. AWESOME

this was a challenge pretty much on every computer and console from the early 70s all the way till the late 90s, ram and storage was always a premium on many of these systems and being able to squeeze every last bit of detail and sound out of a limited space was truly an amazing endevor.

Great video, really teaches you the true nature of the atari

Cool video.keep up the good work...

Pitfall I&II / River Raid / Yars Revenge / Megamania / Kaboom / Night Driver / Demon Attack 🔥 Just checked the one I currently own. It has 4 switches but with a thick bezel and feels pretty heavy.

Big motivator for buying the 5200 was it's TV advertising that showed that the game can be PAUSED! That was SO amazing to kids back then! We could PAUSE our new high-score personal record game to take out the trash whenever our parents demanded NOW, not later.

Fantastic video. fascinating stuff, thank you! Makes me want to crack a beer and fire up my light sixer...

When memory got cheaper, I often wondered what games could have been had the high order bit pins not be disabled.

Great stuff, love those oldskool techies. Funny how it took them a bit before they blacked out a part of the screen to hide some of their tricks.

Great video,, thank you!

In Space Invaders I discovered that if I held down the reset button and toggled the on/off switch it would shoot twice with each button press. I love that old tech.

Great video. Shows how programmers had to be really creative in coding. Nowaways, sadly, coders are lazy and you get highly bloated programs that run poorly. Programs are getting bigger and bigger just to do the same thing. Imagine if you had this style of coding on windows programs and games!? Also reminds me of the 64k pc demo challenges out there that proves efficiency can still exist today and the amazing things that can be accomplished.

Great video. My dad had the starpath super charger. I only remember him playing that Mind Master game.

16:00 - Something like this trick was also used much later to procedurally define the solar systems in Star Control 2. Each system took its location on the starmap as a seed and PRNG-ed up its planetary statistics. Then all they needed to store for map data was the list of star locations and a few plot-relevant overrides, down from of over 10 000 planets and moons and hundreds of thousands of mineral deposits. I note that the treasures in Pitfall weren't listed as part of the PRNG determined data, so it seems they did that too?

Whenever I played Computer Chess on my VCS, my mother would jokingly call it "the long, drawn out ordeal" 😂

I've long known the 2600 had 2 sound voices but it blew my mind a couple years ago when I was watching a video of an Atari 2600 game played on an emulator and it was in stereo. Partly because I had never realized that the sound chip output the two voices separately, and partly because I didn't realize my new phone had stereo! Of course, the 2600 combined them into a mono output, and stereo TV wasn't even a thing back then. Consoles with built in speakers were however quite common at the time, and to realize that Atari contemplated stereo is amazing. In retrospect, I do remember observing those speaker slits in the case as a kid.

Cool followup!

Another sub man.

Great video,

Thank you! A memory from my childhood: I almost beat the Atari 2600 Chess game. IT CHEATED! Stopped playing about then... :) WOW, and you included the Starpath Supercharger! Owned one back then; LOVED the Dragonstomper game!

I remember playing Combat and figuring out if I drove the tank into a corner just the right way, it could teleport to another part of the screen! I thought that was awesome!

So interesting to see these early designs that came out so functional even when there was no path to follow.

With the Super Charger, you can hook up a cd Walkman to play those cassette games as in the 90s I believe there was a compilation disc that had all the Super Charger games on it as well some bonus games I believe.

A backward-forward symmetrical pseudo-random byte generator with bit groups in that byte describing screen contents for forward and backward game screens. Brilliant.

First game console I've seen with wood paneling. Definitely a product of the 70's.

Hi from Brazil! Great vídeo.

David Crane, Larry Kaplan, are geniuses. They made some sweet Activision games!

Growing up with a massive 16kb of memory to work with as a young programmer I was spoiled.

What a neat video.

Racing the beam more refers to the game often having to make changes to the TIA registers while a given line of the screen was being drawn. For example the TIA background registers were only enough for the left half of the screen with the right half being either a duplicate or a mirror. If the game needed the two sides to be different then the game needed to "race the beam" to update the background registers after they were used for one side but before they were used for the other! (Note: I created the homebrew game Skeleton/Skeleton+ for the 2600.)

I remember having the SuperCharger! it was awesome! it came with Phaser Patrol and I also had Killer Satellites. Sadly I broke the headphone wire jack because the tapedeck I used at the time had a recessed plug receptacle that restricted me from plugging it in all the way.

Before Bobby Kotick got his fingers on it and *absolutely gutted it of 100% of its value* Activision was a great game company, and their 2600 titles were reliably the best games in anyone's collection. You could spot the labels from across the room and everyone knew them by the colors.

I got a summer job loading pulp wood by hand as a kid to buy an intellivision. Afterwards I wished I had bought a 2600 which I later did. I loved them both

My family may have had a heavy sixer. It had the six switches but I don’t remember any of the other details. Not long after getting the VCS, my family had to move suddenly and the VCS and games were packed into a black trash bag as that's all we had to work with. It was never seen again. Suspect one of the move helpers took it or thought it was trash and put it outside where someone else took it. But that thing vanished instantly. We were devastated. It was basically our whole entertainment. I learned from it to never, ever put anything you want to keep in a trash bag. Odds are, anyone else will think it IS trash and take it as a freebie or throw it into the actual trash.

That gives me a whole new respect for Adventure with its easter egg!

"End of Line." -MCP from TRON Nice reference my friend 🙂

Can we talk about the background though??? Way to commit to a theme, super rad

lol, thought the holes were for heat ventilation. I'm betting it didn't hurt. Seems like my dad's Atari VCS lasted forever, we just got tired of it, as more powerful computers and consoles hit the market. River Raid and Frogger and Pitfall and Space Invaders were my favorites before Super Mario and Zelda and Metroid and Contra came out on the Nintendo. Of course, as a kid, I really had no idea they were doing so much with so little back when that was all there was to work with, they were just magic boxes to me.

17:40 I always wondered why the case seemed larger than it needed to be, especially as the updated silver and black case was much smaller.

Interested to see the audio processer video.

When it was release 128 bytes of ram was more then they every expected to need. the program was on the cart so all the ram was used for was to store stuff that had to be updated, location of 2 players and 1 missle sprite and scores. But as we seen with later games 128 bytes could be used to do a lot of stuff.

Isn't the heavy sixer heavier due to additional metal shielding compared to next iterations? I remember reading it was so coz they were worried of interference

I have that exact TV. It’s so beautiful. Unfortunately the tube is bad on mine, so I took it out and put some emulator hardware and LCD screen in it.

A Combat bug I discovered ; load an early tank game (non-bouncing shots, can't remember if guided or straight shots - guided I think,) position the gun of one tank into the gap at the back of the other, as close as possible without bouncing out. Then do the smallest rotate with the back one. Ha! With luck you can get a continuous effect. BONUS ; fire a shot from the front one. This is all from memory as a kid, late 70's, so I THINK it's right.

AAron - I don't want to be that guy, but you have a couple inaccuracies in racing the beam, and blinking, blinds and bars - there was "sort of" a small amount of bitmaps for graphics - 39 bits worth of 'latches' on the TIA (20 for background, 2x8 for players, 2x1 for missiles, 1 for 'ball') which persisted from scan line to scanline - think of the vertical stripes you would see when powering on without a cartridge installed. There as also 'replication' up to 2 additional times of the player graphics. You didn't have to 'race the beam' for simpler graphics like in Combat, but you did when changing the bitmap in the 2nd or 3rd copy of a player, or changing the player's X position to re-use the sprite for something else lower on the screen.

Does anybody remember the magic dot in Adventure? When placed with other objects near a wall you could pass through and see the designers name..

Tod Frye, who programmed Pac-Man for the VCS, talks about why it came out the way it did, with the flickering etc, in the documentary "Stella at 20": ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UTDUB_GiTKA.html and here he is admiring a modern homebrew version of Pac-Man: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RqezF_Lv05Y.html He's very humble about it.

Aaron, great video. Ben Heck has an interesting 2 part video on the Activision Dragster game over on Element14 you might find interesting. He was trying to see if Todd Rogers' WR was actually possible.

On some of the older games you could create a few screens, along with a double buffered screen. With that you could use colors and pixels for math, scripts, variable, arrays and more. You could even do this with one screen and some over lap on the edges.

There was a game with track and field events and we broke a couple joysticks playing them because you ran moving the joystick back and forth. I loved that joystick.

i have the 4 switch and 6 switch, one of them is setup to be used, the other came with some games i bought, but it only needs a power socket repair. both of them are the woody. but i have not thought to see if one is heavier than the other.

My grandparents on Dad's side of the family had a 2600 and I had one as well so whenever we went over I more often then not brought my games with me. Also I didn't know that the tanks passing threw walls when hit in Combat was a bug that became a feature. Edit - I think the 2600s in question were heavy 6ers, they at least had the switches like the one you had on the desk.

Great video! But your early example of a video frame shrunk to 128 bytes only works if those pixels are in an 8-bit color range (which they visibly aren't). (Not to nitpick!)

I can remember David Crane being used in the advertising for river raid

I remember the chess game! The computer opponent would take upwards of 10 HOURS to make a single move!

So sad most of those systems were the toast during 70s, 80s, up to late 80s. I am not only pertaining to Atari System but other popular names also. They work perfectly then, and anyone can easily program, without all those brain busting designs and technicalities. So sorry and sad that their wasn't a continued Legacy or comeback. It was fun then, and hanging was lesser unlike those so called Blue You Know What Blue Screen, what a laugh. I miss those golden years. I was a fan of Atari, Commodore, Amiga, Tandy TrS Radio Shack and other later hardware and system. Thank you for posting this. I hope you could also cover other retro stuffs.