Given its age and limited capabilities compared to more modern consoles, you might think the Atari 2600 would be little more than a footnote in gaming history. Turns out the 2600 could handle far larger cartridges via bank switching though, so this wasn’t actually a problem. He needed to remove the surprisingly complex engine sounds to free up some resources, and had to bump the 2 KB cartridge up to 4 KB to hold the new code and data. That mean’s the original game logic is now only running 27 frames out of the 30 per second, but he says you can’t really tell in practice. Unfortunately that didn’t give him enough free cycles, so he had to split his code up to run across three frames instead of just one.
For example, the console has no video buffer, so everything needs to be done during the VBLANK period where the game doesn’t need to be drawing to the screen. But does a great job of explaining not just what he did, but why it was so hard to pull off in the first place. If you’ve never worked on such a constrained system, this might not seem like a big deal. The true aficionados can marvel at the snippets of source code he’s provided, but the rest of us can just watch the video below the break and marvel at the accomplishment. What’s more, the game still runs on the stock 2600 hardware - no emulator tricks required. While some concessions had to be made, he has succeeded where the original developers failed, and added a computer-controlled enemy to Combat. The two-player warfare game not only came with the console but was actually one of the more technically impressive titles for the system, offering nearly 30 variations of the core head-to-head gameplay formula.īut unfortunately, none of those modes included single player.
If you ever spent some time playing on the Atari 2600, there’s an excellent chance you went through a few rounds of Combat.
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