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New Pacman for Atari 2600

atariage.com

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Re: New Pacman for Atari 2600

#11

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

fit2rule wrote: post #5
JoeAcchino wrote: post #2

I didn't know that there are homebrew games for Atari 2600. They also assembled a tutorial for beginners: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-conte...

Oh, there are new homebrew games being made for a lot of the major 8-bit machines, still today. Myself, I've been enjoying the revival immensely, especially since the 8-bit machine of my youth rarely got much attention at all from the major industry developers (Oric-1/Atmos), yet today - in the 21st Century - its getting a regular stream of releases from the die-hard holdouts .. and some of them are absolutely amazin…

The surplus of resources on modern PCs makes it possible to make development tools which would have been positively indulgent by the standards of their day- sophisticated debuggers, the ability to pause, freeze and replay execution while inspecting every byte of memory at will, fancy languages that remove tedium, etc.

For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-ide.com

Re: New Pacman for Atari 2600

#12

Post by ANTSANTS »

apunic wrote: post #8

This is mindblowing. Just check out how the original Pacman port looked on the 2600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4

2600 Pacman sure does suck, but to be fair, that video was recorded on a potato at 14hz, making the flickering ghosts inscrutable instead of just annoying.

Here's one that seems to have been recorded at 60hz then downsampled to 30hz with frame interpolation for Youtube. Still shit, but at least you can tell what's going on. Kinda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYE1iZOTeI8

Re: New Pacman for Atari 2600

#13

Post by fit2rule »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #11
fit2rule wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, there are new homebrew games being made for a lot of the major 8-bit machines, still today. Myself, I've been enjoying the revival immensely, especially since the 8-bit machine of my youth rarely got much attention at all from the major industry developers (Oric-1/Atmos), yet today - in the 21st Century - its getting a regular stream of releases from the die-hard holdouts .. and some of them are absolutely amazin…

The surplus of resources on modern PCs makes it possible to make development tools which would have been positively indulgent by the standards of their day- sophisticated debuggers, the ability to pause, freeze and replay execution while inspecting every byte of memory at will, fancy languages that remove tedium, etc. For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-i…

Wow, looks really useful! Its amazing to think how far we've come, and yet return to these limited machines and push them as far as possible. Something we have to keep future generations of developers enlightened about, I think.

Re: New Pacman for Atari 2600

#14

Post by bane »

flohofwoe wrote: post #4

I always wondered how the video output was controlled without video memory. Do you have some sort of 'current color' register which need to be set to different values during video output, timed with nop loops? I have coded on several 8-bit machines in 80s, but never on one without video memory. I stumbled over this curious property of the Atari 2600 when Ed Fries wrote 'Halo 2600' a couple of years ago (boss of the M…

The book "Racing the Beam" has a great survey of how the 2600 worked and it's a pretty quick and breezy book to read through.

But basically you set various display registers as the scan-line was being drawn. Then you have the time it takes for the electron beam to move down and across to the next scanline to do some setup and calculations and so on. And then at the bottom of the display you have the time it takes for the scanline to get back up to the start position for a frame to do more number crunching.

Basically instead of RAM, you read right out of ROM and fiddle with various display registers either between lines of while lines are being drawn.

It's an old 8-bit "trick" as most people assume the registers get set and then you do something not knowing that you can play with them while things are going on.

Re: New Pacman for Atari 2600

#16

Post by acomjean »

Wonder if how close they managed to make the ghosts move like the arcade version. Someone reversed engineered how the ghosts chase you, each one chases using a different algorithm which ends up making the game really interesting to play.

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

Re: New Pacman for Atari 2600

#20

Post by bitwize »

acomjean wrote: post #16

Wonder if how close they managed to make the ghosts move like the arcade version. Someone reversed engineered how the ghosts chase you, each one chases using a different algorithm which ends up making the game really interesting to play. http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

Actually all four of the ghosts have different chase algorithms: Blinky aggressively chases you, Pinky and Inky try to get in front of you (setting you up for a pincer attack with Blinky), and Clyde chases you until he gets within a certain distance, then makes a break for the lower left. (Hence why he's considered the stupid one.)
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