Atari 2600 Programming is a NIGHTMARE
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- Опубликовано: 6 фев 2025
- Have you ever wanted to program games for an old console? Hopefully the answer is no because, if the Atari 2600 is anything to go off of, it's really difficult. In the Atari's case, it's because it has a very crappy video adapter, almost like it was made in the 70s or something...
LINKS:
SOURCE CODE: github.com/Tru...
2600 101 by Kirk Israel: www.atariage.c...
Let's Make a Game by Darrell Spice Jr (NOTE: I DONT ENDORSE OR AGREE WITH THE POLITICAL CONTENT ON THIS SITE): www.randomterr...
Stella Programmer's Guide (Official Atari 2600 Documentation) by Steve Wright: cdn.hackaday.i...
Old Atari Pong and Magnavox Odyssey Commercials: www.youtube.co...
Atari: Game Over: • Video
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
I made some errors when talking about NTSC frames so here's some corrections:
-The animation at 5:26 isn't actually showing interlacing. If it were it would be sending beams to every OTHER line, and then the next pass would fill those in.
-The 262 lines drawn by the Atari in NTSC are per interlaced field. Since interlacing skips every other line, it makes sense that the vertical resolution is half as tall as the total number of scanlines.
-The vertical blank and overscan are not "intended" to provide space for game logic, but to move the beam back to the top of the screen to draw the next frame. It's just a lucky coincidence that logic can be done there.
Thanks to Ashe for pointing those errors out. I'm not an expert on Atari programming, but I wanted to try it out and share what I was able to come up with.
discord: discord.com/invite/EKPBjjUc65
hi
Hello Hello Truttle1
Ive been watching your esolang series... and encouraged me to make me own esolang... love ya videos ❤
When the Atari 2600 came out the second gen consoles like the Channel F and the Odyssee 2 were already in existance and in peoples homes and they already had swapable cartridges.
Your detraction downward from today's compute doesn't really sit well from the going from nothing to up to what was available. There was nothing. No cell phones, no PCs, no anything. You couldn't go talk to anyone unless you could walk to their house. You might be missing the results of such an incredibly restricted time. It was 10 years later before a 300 bps modem was even available commonly. You don't have to be more respectful, but at least you could understand how much this was hard given the environment it was created in. Which you seem to be using today's standard with emulators to understand it. But try turning off your internet and make a new game from scratch. While also making the game work. No help anywhere.
Though I have to admit, now that I heard your outro, it's pretty good. I give you more than a no points for that.
Truttle, I was just discussing the 2600 in college 2 hours ago. Your timing horrifies me.
imagine not having this week as spring break in college
@@Truttle1 I'm in the UK so when I say college it's more like the end of high school I think. Also we had half term last week which is like spring break I think?
@@tazgirl_ *say college
Ah, thanks
i just wolfed down [unspecified value] bagels and now i feel h
is that value an int ?
@@Lixxide i think so i forgoŧ
@@kornsuwin is that int >= 0 ?
@@Lixxideno
@@reas0 ok
The beginning of the video having one full second of silence made me think my headphones weren't on during that second. I guess that's how rare it is for a video to not immediately start with some kind of noise.
One detail people often get wrong about the ET landfill is that it was to get rid of returned ET carts. What actually happened is they were liquidating a wearhouse for tax reasons. Among the copies of ET there was other games and console parts.
The game gets a bad rep. Its not that bad... Its just not that good either.
As a kid I could never figure out what to do in ET.
Like most other kids who played it, I mostly fell in holes and tried to get out of them.
Also Atari had much more unsold copies of Pacman because they made more Pacman copies than Atari 2600, hoping it would be such great sucess people will line up to buy a 2600.
Even it was the best selling game of all time back in the day, Atari still had many copies just sitting in the warehouse
@@paradoxzee6834 that’s just a myth, Atari didn’t make 12 million copies
pac-man, they only made 8 million copies and sold 8 million copies. In fact, at that time, a lot of people liked this game.
Growing up my parents and sister were big gamers. We always had the newest systems, and got days off school for big releases. It was always a race to get to the systems after school. But one day I found an old 2600 and realized no one wanted to play it because it was ancient, so I got to see it up in my room and play when ever I wanted. It was my game console and I loved it.
My dream was to make a game for the archaic machines and I had notebooks full of tiny game ideas and sprites. I've tried so many times to make my childhood dreams a reality. And failed so many times. I'm glad to see someone explain why it's so hard.
It did lead to me make games for more modern hardware, though. So I still love my 2600.
I's not that difficult once you get your head around the basics of how it works. Look up what is refereed to as 'chasing the beam' any you learn to program in assembly. There are some good books on programming the ATARI 2600. Some things said on this video are not exactly best explained, or in some cases if not wrong then not entirely complete. I don't like the unnecessary sarcasm on this video.
1:12 the craziest thing about the Odyssey is that it was analog. The “cartridges” were just a set of jumpers that slightly altered how the console would behave.
So you can make your own games for it without programming skills?
@varganyamuvek wouldn't think there's much variety to be had, but yes
We are so spoiled these days as programmers, especially game programmers. It's good to appreciate that by looking back at these kinds of things.
Probably the most underappreciated concept is lerping. lol
The 6502 has a BCD mode, or binary coded decimal, which works VERY well in contexts like this. You can use the same display logic you have now ..... worked very well in the 2600 games I've put together.
Coding back in the 70s this was called "chasing the beam" timing for scan lines was the biggest headache.
14:20 I'm pretty sure the 2600 supports BCD mode, which automatically skips A-F for exactly this reason
It absolutely does. Unless you're programming on the variant used in the NES.
16 Kilobytes of Ram back in 1977 was around $400 or more.. and that's 1977 dollars. the atari 2600 had 128 BYTES of ram, not even 1 KB
Good thing is, you don't have to worry about going outside the zeropage. It's all zeropage!
@@cerulity32k true 8bit Computer.
Thank goodness the TIA's successor, the CTIA chip (and then GTIA) on the Atari 400 and 800 automatically DMA'd the player-missile sprite data onto the screen for you and all that was needed was setting the horizontal position register for all of them (and their DMA base address).
Just goes to show how impressive games like Yar's Revenge are.
Let alone Solaris.
Or Kung Fu Master.
Or modern homebrew like Star Castle and Pac-Man 8kb.
Raiders of the Lost Ark i firsr console with an invetory s more than 1
There are loads of accomplished games on the ATARI 2600, the original Pac-Man from ATARI was one of the worst, not the best!
A couple of my favorites are 'Smurf: Rescue in Gargamels Castle' and 'Dark Chambers' a really striped down Gauntlet, or dandy, clone.
to the beginner, it's a nightmare. Once you get used to it, the timing is accurate and it's powerful. Many tricks available.
So basically, programming an Atari game is akin to that scene from Wallace & Gromit where Gromit is building the tracks for a toy train right in front of him as the train is already going down the tracks?
It always kind of annoys me when people say "the entire" videogame industry crashed. No. No it didn't, the US industry crashed. Japan and Europe couldn't have cared less, gaming was on computers from the beginning. :P
Back in the good old CRT days, when monitors didn't have a horizontal resolution
Color displays do.
CRTs have infinite resolution.
They did, you thinking is just wrong on this. It doesn't work like a modern display.
Nintendo's Seal of Quality was also very anti-competition, particularly in North America, in that 3rd parties that wanted to develop for the NES could not develop for the competition. It's why in North America the Sega Master System had a limited, and partially what killed the Atari 7800, besides Jack Tramiel's cost and corner cutting that led to the aging Tia chip to remain for sound, rather than the much improved sound of the Pokey chip.If they were actually trying to compete with Nintendo, the 7800 was sadly tossed out to face the dragon with a wooden spoon.
4:17 I wonder if that beigeness was because the gap between ‘video game console’ and ‘professional A/V equipment’ was smaller back then.
not really, professional broadcasting equipment was typically large, heavy, mounted on 19" racks (or half-width ones) , and thus usually had metal frames.
From what I recall the Apple ][ did it first and everybody copied them.
*Lots* of stuff was beige in those days, even outside electronics.
Awesome video! And fascinating process...!
I seem to recall something about Atari programming known as racing the scanline, or something to that effect.
I've heard that term too. It makes sense since scanline timing is really important.
Though I think the actual term is "racing the beam"
I've seen Retro Game Mechanics Explained's video on racing the beam, but this was a nice refresher on how hellish it is.
Maybe it is a nightmare, but, it's one that I don't want to wake up from until my game is completed!
Just Discovered your channel, and it's uhh pretty neat!!
Never really seen programming structures for older consoles (even the NES!!)
This is apparently the channel’s 127th video according to your channel info
1111111
hey, I've discovered you a few months ago on some of your 4 years old esolangs video and was wondering if you were planing on making more esolangs videos?
Probably
the turtle sprite looks like an amongus knocking on a door
I won’t be able to unsee that now
AMORGGULUS
@@Truttle1 i see an amongus smoking a pipe
@@retroboi128thegamedev "Ce n'est pas suspect"
The truttle1 lore grows deeoer with every episode.
Also please, if you ever get the opportunity, make a creaturey plushie.
I’ll launch a Creaturey plushie campaign at 30k subs
@@Truttle1 let's gooo!
Congrats on making a game for the Atari 2600 from the creator of Skeleton/Skeleton+.
The two biggest advantages of the TIA were its flexibility and that it is tightly coupled to the CPU. Because the TIA registers could be modified during active video, it allowed for games to reuse the sprite registers rather than having a fixed number of sprites. And because the TIA and CPU were tightly coupled, game could change the TIA registers at exact times during the scanline, allowing for even more flexibility.
Yes, horizontal positioning is difficult - a side effect of the use of LFSRs instead of counters. But LFSRs require only a trivial amount of transistors to implement, so it made sense for the TIA where every transistor was precious. (This is the same reason the Apple ][ graphics layout is weird - it saved logic and therefore money.)
Note: 192 lines is what was originally suggested to ensure the all lines were visible on TVs of the era. The VCS is capable of generating more, although more than 240 typically won't be visible even on modern TVs (maybe emulators).
My heart breaks for the guy they rushed to make ET
Definitely showing my (advanced) age here; to me this video serves as a reminder that we had some pretty amazing games back then given the limitations the programmers had to deal with. Yeah, there were clunkers, but there was some darned fun gameplay in that era as well (Activision's games raised the bar, IIRC. We *ALL* wanted their games when they came out).
If you haven't already, check out "GDC Classic Postmortem: Warren Robinett's Adventure" on YT. It's a fascinating lecture where Warren talks about some of the shortcuts and concessions he had to make in order to make Adventure happen.
Nicely done - but what happens when you hit 99 (or 255) +1 points?
What other consoles will you try? I think the GameBoy (just using ASM and Z80 instructions) or Pokemon Mini (a more obscure system) would be fun ones.
Probably doing Vic-20 next
@@Truttle1thing with you could just drectly doihe onitor or tv hooked up to it. same with most 6502 computer you could just use it with a tv. And all cold be run though tape or disk drives.
@@Truttle1 Boomer-Man
Truttle Doesn't understand how to use what Jay Miner designed with the TIA.
7:18 I remember putting an Atari 8 bit game and that pooped up and i though my emulator was broken.
ten hundred billion likes on this comment and i will buy an original atari 2600 and play this game on it
first like!
@@Truttle1 Second reply
i'll do it for free when i get home from work today
done lol ruclips.net/video/nEGFmhCoa2Y/видео.html
By the end of the video I started laughing out loud at the absurdity, specifically during the segment about drawing the score. Great video!
Jeez, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Creaturey that mad, nor have I seen Obfuscate that sad. Great video!
Because some people like a challenge, or just want to prove a point, a homebrewer coded a much better Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, using the same cart size limit. It still had visible flicker, but it was much more faithful to the arcade game. They apparently went on to make an even more improved port for the Supercharger.
It's actually surprising we have any form of video games at all. I say this as a game dev. Just watching this makes me want to pull out my hair.
You should look at programming the Vectrex then. You have to move the actual CRT gun around manually, no scan lines at all!
maaaan why don't you have seventy billion subscribers? You cracked my up while delivering excellent information. Now I have even less interest in developing my own 2600 game than I had previously (which was exactly zero) :D
Well, wasn't the Channel F the first with programmable cartridges?
Yes, I believe so
And the first home game system was the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972
@@matthewrease2376well with changable gams thing like poing whuich are one game existed
@@0011peace No, the Magnavox Odyssey predated Pong (and Pong may have been lifted from a Odyssey game shown in a trade show).
@@everynametaken actully rease with in 10 wees from each otehr and Tenis for 2 was released 14 years early.
Ahhh.. the days before display memory buffering..... by the way, what happens to a CRT if you get the timings wrong? Does it do any physical damage?
I’m not sure, I was using an emulator the whole time due to not having an actual Atari 2600 or cartridge writer…
I have one of those “Atari 2600 flashback” things that have a bunch of preloaded games on it somewhere in my basement though
if your number of lines is too far off or you set some of the related registers in the wrong order it fails to vsync so you usually get a distorted video output that "rolls" up or down
that's about it
No.
Because the Atari 2600 had an MOS Technologies 6502 processor, if you programmed for the Atari 2600, then you'd require very little training to program in Machine Language for the Commodore 64! This was because the Commodore 64 also used the 6502 processor! Atari 2600 machine language and Commodore 64 machine language therefore shared many, if not all, mnemonics such as INC, INA, INX, INY, JMP, JSR, STA, STX, STY, and so on.
Was a really fun watch!
Next, you should maybe try DS development!
its honestly so sweet how obfuscate has gone from not wanting to make friends in fear of loosing them since he's immortal, to genuinely caring that creaturey accidentally insulted him.
That coding nightmare is indicative of the processor's and RAM's massive limitations. Well, I'm glad I didn't have that console for long until I got my C64 in the early 1980s! Great insight.
The 2600 was basically just a pong machine that was accidentally capable of much more, since at first glance it barely seems capable of pong at all.
The atari was also the first and last console to use this method of display, because this is insane and stupid.
If it's stupid & it works, it's not stupid.
Far from insane and stupid, it was a stroke of genius. The Channel F showed pretty much the maximum of what was possible in 1976/77 using the 'traditional' video RAM method while still being somewhat affordable, which was itself was ahead of its time with colour graphics three years before that became common place in the arcades. And that was still absolutely blown out of the water by the 2600. When games are designed specifically to take advantage of the 2600 hardware and avoid its limitations, it can do things that no other home machine could do until the Amiga arrived, and using far more colours.
It was like that to keep production cost to a minimum. (RAM for screen memory would add expense)
@@arlasoft THis was a well Written & The most understandable & Likely awnser.
there's better ways to move sprites on the x axis by using horizontal motion registers
Oof, ROM Hacking for me its a nightmare, not only its there limited support for very few games and its harder than creating a full game, but theres barely any support of ROM Hacking at all and everything's like outdated, had to make a very simple Super Mario World hack because of this.
Interesting.. so that's why all major UI information seemed to default to the top right for a while.
Of course, now there are better ways to display statistics.
and yet i still see a few(mainly retro like) games default to the top right. i mean it is a nice place to put information.
Still makes sense that it's a holdover from hardware limitations.@@kazii_the_avali
Where is the "sleep" opcode coming from
it's a macro that inserts instructions that don't do anything for x amount of cycles
So im not supposed to assemble an nes entirely on a bread board
Not unless you have all the chips, a few hundred wires, and angelic patience of wrangling the latter...
this was a really fun video!!
Ive done some NES programming. I looked into the Atari when learning that, and never made anything for the system because its specs are a Nightmare. I'm impressed you got *anything* running on it, lol
Good video. Lots of stuff covered here but I think you over did the effects a little.
Dropped everything, Truttle1 video dropped...
Every time I think the 2600 couldn't get worse, it gets worse.
Think about how hard it was for the people who made the first games
A lot of games like pac-man’s flickering ghosts weren’t flickering on TV sets at the time. Something about how analog TV’s clear images. It’s only today pac-man has a bad reputation as emulation gives you a crystal clear picture, which the flickering ghosts might of been a trick developers could get away on TV’s of its era, doesn’t work on Hd tv sets.
hell yeah, 2600 asm! I was almooost gonna learn C, but I saw a udemy course on 6502 assembly for the 2600 specifically and I went "ooo, let's do that instead" :3
c is way usefuller though
@@Truttle1 surprisingly more cursed, tho. Would've expected assembly to be the height of the "cursed build system" mountain
@@trannusaran6164 my first though on you comment was to write something cheky about hating yourself, but to be honest, I think while assembler is more niece these days, it's very useful, in particular when optimizing this or reverse engineering or some legacy code. I also want to learn it, so I would appreciate if you could point me to the course and tell me if it was good for beginners that just know python and some basic c for Arduino. That is probably the only thing that confuses me, why chose an ancient, hard to get CPU instead of let's say ann Arduino, where you can do more things with easier available.
Thank you so much! Not only was this helpful, but I think this is the best video you have made! However, it would also be cool if you covered Visual Batari Basic. I’ve been trying to compile a game on there for the longest time but with disastrous results. Maybe you can help? The only tutorial that was available by tinkernut helps only so much. Regardless, videos like these are cool! Keep it up!
You kids are funny. Everyone these days look back at the 8-bit era and think, "why were games SO BAD!?! Lazy devs!" Then toddle off to download a free engine that does all the heavy lifting, then google anything they can't figure out (which is everything) and get chatGPT to write horrible code they don't understand, and don't have to fight ANY graphic limitations or audio limitations on machines that are THOUSANDS of times faster than those 8-bit machines. Yup... lazy devs alright. LOL
Apparently the 6502 and some derivatives are still being made today by Western Design Center
Fit a 6502 program into 4k. It's fun. But that was long, long ago.
What assembler did you use to make this? You seem to have to made a much better effort to program for this deranged masochistic console than I did.
bonuspoints for the vvvvv soundtrack
i had an atari developmwnt phase like 12 years ago lmao what a throwback. I developed a whole maze game in batari basic, its MUCH easier than assembler
I remember trying to program for the Atari 2600 once. I failed miserably. Just... too much.
Your video content is amazing, but the thrusting, heaving, constant exaggerated motion is slightly jarring. Could you maybe tone it down slightly, or maybe slow down the loops?
Can you make a video about the master system? Also love your content!
10:09 why is it like this?
what's the green camel
🐢?
yayyyyy new truttle1 vid dropped!!!
Given the quality of games for the Atari 2600, if you had sold "Survive" for it back when it was still big, it probably would've become the best selling Atari game there ever was.
the ghosts flickering is probably just an emulator/modern display thing. using flickering between visible and invisible (or other methods) was a way to do transparency effects when console hardware didnt suppourt it, because the CRT display _did_ due to the phosphor's light decay not being instant (or thats how i was taught it). other games i can think of off the top of my head that did this were Sonic and Kirby (both for water). its a very nifty trick that just Does Not Fucking Work anymore v\_v
or maybe the pac man port is just bad idk
Programming for the atari truly was nightmarish.
i just opened the video and i have barely any idea of how the 2600 works but i do know it doesnt have a video chip or vram and thr cpu has to do graphics so i already think its hell
WAH! ITS-A-ME! WALUIGI ON THE ATARI 2600! (unintelligible noise)
Love your videos!
I love the characters, subed
Now make this game in malbolge and see if that’s even any harder.
Man, if you're at the level of using delay loops and counting scanlines, you only a few steps away to just implementing the game on an FPGA and doing away with a CPU. It would probably look better too.
Isn't there a game maker like program you can just use to make 2600 games???
whats with the flash dinosaurs ? so weird
The ATARI 2600 did not last? Yeh, only around 15 years. Seriously practically everything said about the 2600 in this video is wrong Why?
Why do a video that mocks something you know little to nothing about!
128 bytes of ram.
You know they make Atari 2600 games until about 1990. Here is a game from 1989- ruclips.net/video/R7yr-T6nRZE/видео.html
please release season 2 of slithers software
As a game dev, this is terrifying
E.T. and Pacman on Atari 2600 are good games, come on! I had a lot of fun with both in 80s with my friends, and played thru E.T. a lot of times no problem!
You should try a game engine for brainf
there is one if I remember correctly
Nice video. The "SLEEP #26" should actually be "SLEEP 26" @ 15:38
"And if any of that goes wrong, this is what the Atari emulator spits at you."
Atari : AÆÆ□AÆA○AÆA
How do you understand the 2600s logic
wooooo new truttle1 video! and about a 6502 based console?? amazing :))
"this is like one of the 3 things it can do"
🤣🤣
I think I'll stick to NES and PC Engine assembly, haha
AI can help now.