21–25 of 25 posts
This is mindblowing. Just check out how the original Pacman port looked on the 2600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4
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…
On a modern PC, this takes seconds; my fingers and brain are the bottleneck, which is how it should be.
This is mindblowing. Just check out how the original Pacman port looked on the 2600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4
Speaking of which, forget how the original port "looked", listen to the amazing things DINTAR816 is doing with his roms.
This is mindblowing. Just check out how the original Pacman port looked on the 2600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4
This is mind blowing... I'de say about 7 million people who purchased Pac Man for the Atari 2600 were ripped off. (Myself included.)
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…
It read a single byte from those buffer at the end of each horizontal scan line, and fed it into the sound system/as a PWM signal for the motor of the floppy drive (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K/512K_technical.... I think the section on the floppy drive is incorrect; the original Mac didn't have a IWM; it was all done in software)
If you wanted to generate continuous, non-repetitive sound, you had to fill the sound buffer with new values at the end of each vertical blank interrupt.
Quite a bit easier than on the 2600, as the update frequency is only 60 Hz and the CPU a lot faster, but the same principle, and still quite a challenge at the time, if you wanted to do something in the screen at the same time.