Just looking at what the homebrew community has achieved with the VCS/2600 is pretty amazing, champ games pushing the system with the games he releases. Then you have all the others that have done the same. Just check out "wen hop"
Indeed, the homebrew community has pushed the VCS/2600 well past what most thought its limits was, Just check out wen hop, and lord of Biscay as example.
A game that has a special place in my memories. The console, Combat and Space Invaders were the family Christmas present 1980. My mother became addicted to Space Invaders and was sitting up at night playing it until my father got sick of the noise and disconnected the electricity at the mains one night
Not only was it a huge challenge, but the tools that were available for game development on the system back then amounted to not much more than some graph paper and a calculator!
What a real miracle was just how much better the games got over time. You should see the modern homebrew Mappy game. But even back then, games just got better and better looking and playing. Compare the original Video Pinball to Midnight Magic released a few years later. The Atari games got MUCH, MUCH better than the Intellivision games did over time. Same with the Colecovision and frankly even the NES. The difference between the early NES games and the late NES games is much smaller than the difference between early 2600 games and late ones. The 2600 is unique in game consoles in a peculiar way. It is a real time computer. Plus the way the screen is drawn allowed for huge upgrades in graphics.
@@tarstarkuszVery true, and it makes sense because as time goes on, programmers learn more ways to take advantage of each system's hardware sometimes in ways unforeseen by the original hardware designers. The 2600 demonstrates this extremely well because its design was so open. That is, it already required much more from the programmer in the first place to tell it where to draw what for each scanline (no video memory to speak of) and this "limitation" became its saving grace in the end. Scene coders have REALLY pushed hardware to the Nth level. As you say, "Mappy" for the 2600 is amazing, as is Donkey Kong VCS and Pac-Man 8K: - 2600 Mappy: ruclips.net/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/видео.htmlsi=oQCJDZzLVQ41W7WR - 2600 Donkey Kong (homebrew): ruclips.net/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/видео.htmlsi=IV1dC0eVNcUSaMqc - 2600 Pac-Man 8K (homebrew): ruclips.net/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/видео.htmlsi=jmOvzo4oIIghppjh BONUS: Here's Todd Frye, the programmer of the original Atari 2600 Pac-Man admiring the homebrew version: ruclips.net/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/видео.htmlsi=Bhr9KdSUbK3lcPQ8
@@JustWasted3HoursHere To be fair, Mappy has a processor on it that could probably emualate a 2600. OTOH, no other system would ever benefit from that chip the way the 2600 does. A lot of the 2600's CPU cycles are used in the kernel drawing the screen. I believe it is only about 40% of the cycles are actually available to run the logic of the game during the period where the beam reaches the last line of the graphics and when the line returns back to the first scanline.
Something else to keep in mind that the speed-up behavior of the aliens had to be intentionally coded into the game in this version. In the arcade version it was a side effect of how inefficient the hardware was at moving all those aliens around without hardware sprites; the more of them you killed, the faster it could move around what was left. On the Atari, it was already possible to move them all at max speed, and precise timing was required to draw them at all, so you needed to dedicate some of the ROM to a routine that would count the surviving aliens and adjust the speed accordingly.
Something that's always made me laugh is that the QBasic Nibbles that Microsoft published uses a for loop to 1000 as a delay to slow down the game. When I tried to use it on my computer at home, as opposed to the dinosaurs we had at school, it ran so fast as to be unplayable. I fixed it to use the timer function instead and adjusted the amount of delay dynamically, and it was unplayable on the school computers because of how slow it was to check the timer function in a loop, yet ran perfectly at home.
I read the Aliens speeding up was a bug due to less processing required for less Aliens but Taito noticed it made the game more exciting so they left the bug in. With all that empty space they could have easily fixed the bug but they certainly made the right choice letting them speed up.
@@anon_y_mousse There was literally a button labeled turbo and if you pushed it the game would have played perfectly fine. Unlike a car where turbo speeds up the machine on a computer turbo slows it down. Unless you got very unlucky and you had one of the rare computers that actually were the opposite way around but you know.
4:40 It's hard to do space invaders justice on any modern screen or system. It had booming analog sound only really capable of being reproduced in an arcade cabinet. But the real trick is the pepper's ghost trick of the machine. The space invaders are very ghost like and superimposed on a physical drawing. The pepper's ghost aspect is responsible for this. There is a new handheld of the space invaders arcade cabinet that reproduces the trick with a pepper's ghost trick built into the cabinet.
Without reading your comment until just now, I commented on the exact same things. The Atari version was good..........for an Atari cartridge, but still inferior to the original arcade game from 1978. Some of the later versions like arcade "Silver anniversary" edition of the early 2000s was no where near the audio/visual magic of the arcade game.
I never really thought about it before, but when you think about the number of things the game had to keep track of (especially the destructible bases), how to fit all of that into 128 bytes had to have been a serious challenge. Even keeping a score is an achievement on that hardware.
Yep! And the hardware designers had to fight management to even get that! They originally wanted the system to have only 64 bytes. The numerous ways that game designers found to "cheat" the hardware and do things that the designers had never envisioned, are really impressive. The system's limitations actually became its saving grace because it made the system extremely flexible. Game creators like David Crane ("Pitfall!") figured out how to do lots of things that didn't seem possible.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yeah it's pretty crazy. We take all this for granted today because we have dozens of gigabytes of RAM and VRAM, and terabytes of storage. For all the flak it gets, ET was a seriously damn impressive game on that hardware. It wasn't the reason for the video game crash, Atari just happened to produce double the number of carts as there were 2600's, expecting to literally double their install base overnight. That was unfathomly stupid, I don't care how good the game was they still would've had to throw out a lot.
@@StormsparkPegasusI think the game can be quite frustrating at first, if you haven't learned the method to easily get out of those darn pits! And I believe that is a large part of the reason that people say it is "terrible". If you fall into a hole, if you push the joystick up immediately E.T. will stop falling and you save time. Once you are out of the hole (the "above ground screen" is showing) move left or right ONLY until you are clear of the hole and you are good to go. Mastering this will make the game a lot more fun to play, but still a challenge.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Try playing that game with a Sega Genesis controller and it's 100x easier. Most of the issues with games like that on the 2600 were due the awful controller.
@@StormsparkPegasusInteresting! Yeah, that original Atari controller is extremely rugged, but also a wrist breaker after hours of playing. The Colecovision controller is worse though, IMO. It's kind of funny, if you think about it, that so many consoles and computers decided to adopt the Atari's controller port configuration and that they can work without modification: C64, Vic-20, Amiga even! And others too.
I suppose that in between you not being used to holding an object for so long (and probably very hard as the fever grips you and you get really into the game) and older controllers not being very ergonomically designed, things were bound to get crampy? Because that's my memory from the console of my childhood, the NES.
This was one of the first games we got with our first 2600 in 1982 (along with Pac-Man and Defender). Truly a great port which did not lose the essence of the original.
I bought Pacman for it and don't remember being overly disappointed with it. Too young and not as cynical as I am today to realise the company pencil necks might have had anything to do with it 😂
1:10 Actually, the game combat had a similar earlier game that was part of a pong-on-a-chip included in several pong machines. Breakout is another example of pre-gen 2 games released by Atari itself. They (Atari) also released a hard coded version of Stunt Driver in a dedicated motorcycle jumping game. There were also driving games in the first generation pong-on-a-chip dedicated games machines. But where I think Atari excelled in their 2nd gen 2k games was the sheer variety these games offered. This became less and less prevalent over the 2600's lifespan. Where early games had sometimes over 100 variations of a single game, late 2600 games often had only 1 variation and not even a 2nd player was available. This drive for game variation is one of the things that held back the pac man port. To have a 2 player pac man, serious downgrading of the game became necessary. When player 2 is playing, player 1's screen configuration along with score, level, lives remaining and other things must be kept in RAM. This is why the awesome new versions of Pac Man for the 2600 do not offer a 2nd player option or any other options.
Notice how the later port of Ms. Pac-Man is strictly single player, and it's CONSIDERABLY more faithful to the source material... And actually fun to play, too.
@@video-luver769 The "Progressive" variation of Super Breakout is another one without a second player option because of memory limitations. Super Breakout is a lot of fun, especially the progressive variation, which is game 7 IIRC. The bars start moving their way down the screen. That means that you would need a whole bitmap of the screen saved while the other player was playing.
Nice video, that’s for making it. Couple of thoughts, firstly the 2k of blank ROM in the space invaders arcade might just be empty addressing space but there were no actual ROM chips corresponding to those addresses. Because of the need to separate chips in powers of 2 of addressing space. And secondly, the concept of lives maybecame across from pinball, as I think that is also where the terms 1UP and 2UP came from.
Space invaders, Asteroids, and Missile Command were my favorite 2600 arcade ports. I can't even imagine how many hundreds of hours I logged playing them.
Really interesting. I saw interviews with the original VCS devs and they were saying how astonished they were when Rick Maurer showed them his version. A pity that Rick seems to have disappeared.
It would be interesting to see what those guys would have been able to come up with if they'd had access to today's resources. I feel a lot of today's developers and programmers have become lazy. As the saying goes "necessity is the mother of invention".
You almost had it right. The Atari 2600 TIA chip has registers for sprite attributes. Each sprite had its own set. One of them allowed you to make up to 3 copies of a sprite on one line. This was used to get 6 aliens on one line for two sprites.
Re-using "sprites"/player objects horizontally is a hardware feature of the VCS hardware. It can make two or three copies of a player object on a line with a few options for how much empty space is shown between each object. Yeah, Space Invaders was the killer app for consoles at the time. It was epic. I probably invested a whole year of my time that should have been used doing homework.
I was actually done with a hack to retrigger the spites each time. The built in sprite multiplying wouldn't have quite worked to allow all sprites to be shot down individually.
COMBAT itself showed one of the issues with repeating the player sprite -- there were several modes which gave one (or both) players a formation of three vehicles, but on close inspection it was easy to tell it was really just the same sprite rendered 3 times.
If they had used a 1 frame flicker they could have had the original amount of invaders on screen. It's also possible to change the color of the different rows of aliens, and to have all 4 bunkers. It would have been more complicated to program, but I'm guessing that it was released this way because of a time limit imposed on the programmers. It would have been nice if there was a re-release a couple years later.
@@Sharopolis Although the hack you refer to is a valid possibility (the RESPx trick), nobody was thinking along those lines in 1980 and it was first demonstrated in the _Galaxian_ port years later. The aliens in the 1980 port were drawn using the repeat options, and these were reconfigured and horizontally offset as needed to account for killed aliens. You can pick from several different patterns, from doubling to tripling a given sprite, and one final "fat" sprite version. Many simple games abused this convenient tweak to achieve easy patterns in sprite formation, with _Combat_ and _Journey Escape_ being good examples. This is also why there are only six aliens per row-at the time, this was understood to be the max available from the two "player" sprites.
I've always wondered that too, especially since Atari only has literally two sprites, player 1 and player 2 (not counting ball/missile, because it's not really a sprite, just a rectangle you can change the size of).
When i was a kid I always thought the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders was the actual version. Its still an amazing game and one the first to have 2 player co-opt play where both players are working together.
These were games I grew up with. Space Invaders got tons of play time in my house. My first game was Air-Sea Battle, but Space Invaders was the first one I got hooked on. There was a time when "Space Invaders" was a slang term for all video games (usually used by adults). Another interesting fact is that it was the first game with increasing difficulty as it played on. As you play and eliminate the aliens, they get faster and faster. That last one moved so fast that things got tense, then when you finally got it, you breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Another great vid! I never realized how difficult it was to bring arcade games to the ATARI 2600. Our first home game console was actually the Intellivision.
Small clarification: you only have to position the objects once per frame so long as they're not being repositioned. Thankfully because you basically eat a line for full positioning of a single object. Once you properly time shift the object state machine it goes on drawing again one full scanline later repeatedly, maintaining the same offset each line.
7:48 The arcade version had 64 times as much RAM as the Atari VCS, not 8 times as much (8192 bytes / 128 bytes). Later on you say that the arcade version had 1k of "work RAM", so maybe that's what you meant, which actually is 8 times as much memory. The VCS's limitations were also what gave it its extreme flexibility and some pretty impressive things could be done in the right hands.* Rick Maurer, the programmer of the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders, had actually been working on his own version of the game on his own without Atari's knowledge and had it mostly working when the news came that arcades were massively cashing in on the craze for this game. Atari executives decided to get in on the action and became the first company ever to license an arcade game for a home market. It ended up quadrupling the sales of the console. Here's Rick talking about this: ruclips.net/video/UTDUB_GiTKA/видео.htmlsi=m5VOY9xklyqE2tcp&t=497 * Some examples of games that far exceeded what the hardware designers thought might be possible include: - The homebrew version of Pac-Man, called "Pac-Man 8K": ruclips.net/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/видео.htmlsi=myotmIjKwqaFfjb2 - Homebrew Donkey Kong VCS: ruclips.net/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/видео.htmlsi=Nv9-eeH2SS6FhvrE - Homebrew Mappy: ruclips.net/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/видео.htmlsi=KuthwzCGv70Ugxbp
Good catch! Yeah I confused myself there in talking about the VRAM and the general purpose RAM. The total amount is of course 64 times more. I haven't done a video about Atari 2600 homebrew yet, but it's one my list of things to do definitely.
@@Sharopolis When you do, be sure to show off the extremely impressive Space Invaders version that came with the Atari Flashback X that is a near identical port of Taito's color version. i.e. ruclips.net/video/TB1m9rRxD1M/видео.html
@@SharopolisRetro gaming in general is really popular right now, so a video on the homebrew scene would be great! I think the reason it's so popular right now is because the kids of the late seventies and early eighties who had these systems back then are now adults with some disposable income and tons of nostalgia. Yeah, modern consoles are literally thousands of times more powerful, but are the games thousands of times more fun? [I would say, no!] Just about any platform you can think of from that time period is getting modern games (and hardware too in some cases), from the 2600 to the ZX Spectrum to the C64 to the Amiga and everything in between. Even obscure systems like the Tiki 100 are getting some love.
@@madmax2069Just goes to show what is possible when there are no pressures to release by a specific date and you can work on it until it's as good as it can be.
The empty ROM space is probably to do with the fact ROMs would've been either 1kbit, 2kbit, 4kbit or 8kbit and would need to be present in groups of 8. If the game was more than 4kbytes in size, you'd need 8x8kbit ROMs giving you 8kbytes of ROM and whatever wasn't used would just be left blank.
It uses 4 16kbit rom chips and two of them have 8 kbits blank in each, but yeah it's the same thing. I didn't really want to go into speculative detail in the video, but I'm sure you're right.
@fattomandeibu You're mixing up kbits and kbytes because you clearly don't understand what they are. 1kbit is 128 bytes (the same amount of RAM in the A2600). 8kbit is 1024 bytes or 1kByte.
@@Sharopolis Not quite accurate. The real arcade uses 6x 1kByte mask ROMs and the ROMs are memory mapped. There's no blanks in the middle. Those blank areas are actually not populated ROM sockets on the board. There are 3 ROMs, then 2 spaces then 3 more ROMs. ROMs with blank areas in the middle are hacks for use when converting a real board to use 2716 EPROMs. I know this because I just documented repairing 5x Space Invaders boards and converted them to use EPROMs. The 2kB blank area in the ROM images is to allow for 2x 1kB ROMs that are not populated on the real board.
I always felt they did a fantastic port of this game. It took me awhile to actually own the cartridge. I'd go down to a friend's house down the street and play. The two player versions were really welll done too. To this day I still love playing it.
My first Console was the intellivision in 1981 but we did get a 2600 in 1982 and our favorite 2600 games were Asteroids, Missile Command then my cousin who had over 100 games gave me Dragonfire which instantly became my favorite. Dragonfire was also ported to Intellivision and Colecovision but they weren't as good. The 2600 was capable of displaying more colors on screen at the same time then either Intellivion or Colecovision so the treasures in the Dragon Treasure room were much much nicer.
The 2K of "empty space" in the original Invaders ROM was used for testing code during development. It was removed in the commercial ROMs though. It did waste a lot of video RAM though. The game could be written using a tilemap (I've done it) so would only need 1K of tilemap RAM, plus a small custom buffer for the destructible bases, saving a lot of money on the old machines. An interesting fact is that the game has no random elements at all - it's all deterministic. Even the alien bombs (positions, and bomb type), and saucers are determined by the player position, player shots fired, and number of remaining invaders during the game.
Truly awesome console at the time. Lost many an hour playing Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Dig Dug and Galaxian on the Woody, well into the mid 80s 👍🏼
It's crazy how even such a simple game like this pushed the 2600 well past its limits. Really puts into perspective how absurd it's lifespan was and how much more powerful systems like the colecovision really were. Especially since the 2600 barely had access to any sort of enhancement chips that helped other systems like the nes maintain their comparably impressive lifespans
In 1987 Activision filed a patent for the Display Processor Chip or DPC. It was a full 10 years after the console was released. The chip greatly improved the audio to 3 channels (plus drum) but sadly it came out so late only one game used it Pitfall: Lost Caverns. What wild is Pitfall II was much better in graphics, gameplay and music than Super Pitfall on NES. So heads up Atari 2600 could beat the NES if the 2600 used the DPC Chip. But again sadly it was too little too late.
@Wallyworld30 while pitfall 2 is awesome and very impressive I really don't think it would have been impossible to do on the nes or that the dpc puts it ahead of the other consoles even default capabilities
If you are going to do any more arcade Space Invaders stuff in future running in MAME remember to NOT use the Midway version because the player ship fire sound is broken due to an inability by emulation developers to understand how the real hardware works which uses poorly written discrete audio coding that does not create the correct fire sound. For an alternative use one of the b/w versions that supports samples or if you want to show the later color version use the Taito sicv version which is correct and also uses samples. You will need to get the separate sample file otherwise there won't be any sound at all. The discrete audio issue in Midway Space Invaders has been there for around 15 years and is unlikely to be fixed any time soon as almost no one knows anything about coding discrete audio circuits.
My Atari came with Centipede, which was also a pretty impressive port! Space Invaders was the first game I got for it, and I spent hundreds of hours playing it. What you didn't mention wasn't just how impressive it was, but how smooth it ran too.
As extremely primitive as the Atari VCS is, it's actually significantly more powerful then the Fairchild VES which was released only a year prior. Crazy to think that a game console could be any less powerful, and yet there was one. Yes, I know there was the Odyssey even before that, but it doesn't really qualify as a console the way we know them today. It didn't even have a CPU, so I put that one in sort of it's own unique category as something like a board game/game console hybrid. It was more like a precursor to the game console.
The Interton VC 4000, the only German console ever, might even go under the Atari VCS specs. Launched 1978, one year after the Atari VCS, it featured a whopping 37 bytes of RAM. It introduced analogue joystics to the home computing world and thus it is a part of my collection.
My father loved the arcade version and this home version. I had to buy it with my allowance money. He said I had to buy the VCS from DJ's TV Repair. He was their CPA. Joel told me I'd get a $30 discount on the system if I bought Space Invaders lol. I was 7 at the time. I played the heck out of it, so all good. My father also joked that the box art looked like a Boston album cover.
My cousin was ten and had a 2600. We thought his dad was rich, but I was informed he came from a "broken home" (an 80s phrase) and it was bought by his dad out of guilt. If the 2600 did a decent version of "defender" I could have lived with that, and just one parent 😂
The most impressive thing is the bases. The aliens are just using a feature that let you duplicate a player 3 times. This is a feature I wish they kept for the Atari 800 series, which was my first computer. The fundamental difference between “Player Missile” graphics and normal sprites is Atari Players are effectively the height of the screen. On the 800 each player used 256 byte of ram, and you moved up and down by copy the character data to a different vertical position. On the 2600 you wrote directly to a shape register for each player on a line by line basis. I think it would keep that value until you changed it, so you could write an 8 bit pattern at the top of the screen and it would make a stripe from that scan line til you cleared it. Each 3 columns sets of aliens is effectively just one player, using the built in features in the Stella chip. The aliens could be read directly from the cartridge rom. And only had to be read once per line for each player. You just told the Stella chip to duplicate the sprite and updated the dup register the turn off aliens that died. The bases had to use some of that precious 128 bytes of ram. Which was unusual for 2600 games.
Anyone else get aggravated at that awful Space Invaders gameplay? Who leaves the exterior sides for last? Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Honestly did not know Superman was the first license-game, but man if it doesn't fit. Videogames and superheroes really have been tagteaming since almost the very start... now if only Superman could get the love Spider-Man has.
If you want to be really blown away, there's an abandoned proof of concept Space Invaders homebrew for the 2600 which has almost every element from the arcade game: bullets, bonus saucer, scoreboard, player 1, and all 55 aliens. The only thing not sorted out was that there are 3 shields instead of 4. All of that and zero flicker. Keep in mind, as this video explains, that the 2600 was designed with only 5 sprites, so it could run "tank game" and "super Pong" and have a shelf life of perhaps 3 years by Atari's estimation. It is the system's unique architecture which makes it possible to do so much more. Even the NES can't display that much sprite data without flickering. For your perusal: ruclips.net/video/GBROohTGBb0/видео.html
@@g4z-kb7ct I just checked that out. That is 100% not running in an Atari VCS emulator. Almost everything it does is impossible for the VCS, starting with its resolution of 320x240 which vastly outpaces the VCS's 160x192. I think I read somewhere that Atari Flashback stopped being real hardware after #2. I sure found the reprogrammed, simulated Atari 2600 games pretty fascinating in Flashback 3 when I saw it in action once.
Good question. My guess is a timing issue. Like if your missile collides with the alien at the wrong moment as the raster is drawing the next line or such.
You'll notice that in the Atari version of Space Invaders, the aliens all move exactly at the same time. In the arcade version you can see some moving before others as the system is redrawing the screen in real time. P.S: Combat was a 2 Kb cartridge, not 4Kb.
Yep in the arcade Space Invaders there is only ever 1 invader moving per frame. That's why they speed up the less there are left on screen. This was a hardware limitation - the player, and player missiles were updated every frame, but nothing else was. Even the invader bombs had to share time - each bomb type (only ever up to 3 on screen at once) each updated every 3 frames, interleaved. And if the saucer was active, it took the place of one of the bombs (so there are never more than two invader bombs while the saucer is visible)...
The way you play is just killing me! Shooting out just the middle of the invader block is, like, the scientifically worst way to play the game! My eyes! Hahahahaa...
Well, they didn't really fit the arcade mega hit into the Atari, but for it's time it was a decent port....when considering the 2600's limited hardware, and also the extra game variations they added made playing the cartridge not get boring too quickly. The arcade machine is still superior however. The TTL sounds were much better, the games graphics were better, and the super bright arcade quality b&w image mirror reflected gave the game a ghosted image that was stunning to look at with theater gels for color with a unique look, and amazing black light lite florescent artwork as you looked into the monitor bezel of the game. Also the arcade cabinet speakers really made the sounds great, and you could "feel" the explosions. I bought the 2600 port with in the first couple days it became available. And I loved it, but I still continued to pop coins in the amazing arcade machine because......the 2600 wasn't an equal experience to the arcade machine. So naturally when I started eventually collecting arcade machines, I bought a Space Invaders & a Deluxe Space Invaders.
As a small child, I played Space Invaders in the arcade when it was new. When I got an Atari, the first game i played was Space Invaders. I have a Space Invaders tattoo. I tell you this so you have the full context when I i say this: WHY THE HELL DO YOU KEEP SHOOTING THE INVADERS IN THE MIDDLE BUT NOT THE ONES IN THE COLUMNS ON THE ENDS?!? Are you messing with us?? 😂😂😂
@sharoplis I noticed you like to make video's on how a weaker console made a certain game better than a more powerful console. I recommend doing a video of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns on Atari 2600 and compare it directly to NES's Super Pitfall both games . I've played both games extensive hours since I was a massive Pitfall fan back in the day. The 2600 version had a Display Processor Chip added inside the cartridge giving it 3 channel music (plus drums) and more graphic capabilities. Pitfall II blows Super Pitfall's door off in graphic, music and gameplay. Crazy a console that came out in 1977 was still making games that could compete with modern consoles ten years later.
Asteroids was a vector game . Perfectly crisp flat 2d polygons that can scale and rotate with no loss in quality... and converting a vector game not just to a raster game, but an Atari VCS game... that ups the translation difficulty 10 fold.
Evidently the person playing Space Invaders didn't know how to play Space Invaders, as they're more concerned with getting each column that they are with the progressively sinking bottom rows.
The problem I had with Space Invaders on the 2600 was that it offered no challenge to people who had more than a couple of hours practice in the arcade with the real thing. I played it once. The game lasted hours and I think I lost one life. I was by no means good at the real Space Invaders… this version was just stupidly easy.
I actually prefer the Atari 2600 version of space invaders. Maybe it's because I played it as a kid, and only ever played the arcade version as an adult.
It was the side effect of a bug in one of the chips, which caused the first part of the scan line to blank out when you did a certain sprite repositioning operation (HMOVE). But since Space Invaders had a black background anyway, you only really saw them during the screensaver attract mode. Some games worked around it by just doing an HMOVE operation on every scan line, so that the whole left edge of the screen was blacked out, which was less noticeable. Since that area was partly in the TV overscan area anyway, it wasn't as if you could do much with it.
Anyone who managed to make a halfway decent game on the Atari 2600 deserves respect.
100% agree. If people knew what is required to just move things on the screen and draw a simple background, they would give it a lot more respect.
Just looking at what the homebrew community has achieved with the VCS/2600 is pretty amazing, champ games pushing the system with the games he releases. Then you have all the others that have done the same.
Just check out "wen hop"
Indeed, the homebrew community has pushed the VCS/2600 well past what most thought its limits was,
Just check out wen hop, and lord of Biscay as example.
Lords of Biscay and wen hop are two great examples of pushing the system well past what people thought was possible
The 2600 had a ton of really decent games, and a few stinkers like ET as well.
A game that has a special place in my memories. The console, Combat and Space Invaders were the family Christmas present 1980. My mother became addicted to Space Invaders and was sitting up at night playing it until my father got sick of the noise and disconnected the electricity at the mains one night
"That's what's known in the trade as a lie." Excellent line!
C'mon! Get rid of those aliens on the edge columns!
I was thinking the same thing! That is the worst possible strategy for the game.
This player has no technique!
It’s seriously painful to watch.
I died watching this!
The 2600 was a miracle machine... it was miracle that the people who programmed for it could make it do anything at all. Absolute sorcery.
Especially once you get to much later games like Solaris or Secret Quest.
Some TRULY impressive games were created for that system.
Not only was it a huge challenge, but the tools that were available for game development on the system back then amounted to not much more than some graph paper and a calculator!
What a real miracle was just how much better the games got over time. You should see the modern homebrew Mappy game.
But even back then, games just got better and better looking and playing. Compare the original Video Pinball to Midnight Magic released a few years later.
The Atari games got MUCH, MUCH better than the Intellivision games did over time. Same with the Colecovision and frankly even the NES. The difference between the early NES games and the late NES games is much smaller than the difference between early 2600 games and late ones.
The 2600 is unique in game consoles in a peculiar way. It is a real time computer. Plus the way the screen is drawn allowed for huge upgrades in graphics.
@@tarstarkuszVery true, and it makes sense because as time goes on, programmers learn more ways to take advantage of each system's hardware sometimes in ways unforeseen by the original hardware designers. The 2600 demonstrates this extremely well because its design was so open. That is, it already required much more from the programmer in the first place to tell it where to draw what for each scanline (no video memory to speak of) and this "limitation" became its saving grace in the end. Scene coders have REALLY pushed hardware to the Nth level. As you say, "Mappy" for the 2600 is amazing, as is Donkey Kong VCS and Pac-Man 8K:
- 2600 Mappy: ruclips.net/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/видео.htmlsi=oQCJDZzLVQ41W7WR
- 2600 Donkey Kong (homebrew): ruclips.net/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/видео.htmlsi=IV1dC0eVNcUSaMqc
- 2600 Pac-Man 8K (homebrew): ruclips.net/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/видео.htmlsi=jmOvzo4oIIghppjh
BONUS: Here's Todd Frye, the programmer of the original Atari 2600 Pac-Man admiring the homebrew version: ruclips.net/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/видео.htmlsi=Bhr9KdSUbK3lcPQ8
@@JustWasted3HoursHere To be fair, Mappy has a processor on it that could probably emualate a 2600. OTOH, no other system would ever benefit from that chip the way the 2600 does. A lot of the 2600's CPU cycles are used in the kernel drawing the screen. I believe it is only about 40% of the cycles are actually available to run the logic of the game during the period where the beam reaches the last line of the graphics and when the line returns back to the first scanline.
the binary code visuals were an eye-opener. amazing what they accomplished with so little back in the day.
No Man Sky VS Starfield is also a great example.
@@MarquisDeSanghow so? Both of those are modern games.
Go look up Elite. It was programmed originally for the Acorn I believe in 32 K. THAT was an amazing feat of coding.
@@fuzzywzhe The most impressive thing about Elite is the hidden line removal algorithm.
@@MarquisDeSang I vaguely know about it, it may have been a new concept at the time, but it's not new now.
Something else to keep in mind that the speed-up behavior of the aliens had to be intentionally coded into the game in this version. In the arcade version it was a side effect of how inefficient the hardware was at moving all those aliens around without hardware sprites; the more of them you killed, the faster it could move around what was left. On the Atari, it was already possible to move them all at max speed, and precise timing was required to draw them at all, so you needed to dedicate some of the ROM to a routine that would count the surviving aliens and adjust the speed accordingly.
Something that's always made me laugh is that the QBasic Nibbles that Microsoft published uses a for loop to 1000 as a delay to slow down the game. When I tried to use it on my computer at home, as opposed to the dinosaurs we had at school, it ran so fast as to be unplayable. I fixed it to use the timer function instead and adjusted the amount of delay dynamically, and it was unplayable on the school computers because of how slow it was to check the timer function in a loop, yet ran perfectly at home.
I read the Aliens speeding up was a bug due to less processing required for less Aliens but Taito noticed it made the game more exciting so they left the bug in. With all that empty space they could have easily fixed the bug but they certainly made the right choice letting them speed up.
@@anon_y_mousse There was literally a button labeled turbo and if you pushed it the game would have played perfectly fine. Unlike a car where turbo speeds up the machine on a computer turbo slows it down.
Unless you got very unlucky and you had one of the rare computers that actually were the opposite way around but you know.
@@Wallyworld30Yes it's the original "It's not a bug it's a feature"
4:40 It's hard to do space invaders justice on any modern screen or system. It had booming analog sound only really capable of being reproduced in an arcade cabinet. But the real trick is the pepper's ghost trick of the machine.
The space invaders are very ghost like and superimposed on a physical drawing. The pepper's ghost aspect is responsible for this.
There is a new handheld of the space invaders arcade cabinet that reproduces the trick with a pepper's ghost trick built into the cabinet.
Without reading your comment until just now, I commented on the exact same things. The Atari version was good..........for an Atari cartridge, but still inferior to the original arcade game from 1978. Some of the later versions like arcade "Silver anniversary" edition of the early 2000s was no where near the audio/visual magic of the arcade game.
I never really thought about it before, but when you think about the number of things the game had to keep track of (especially the destructible bases), how to fit all of that into 128 bytes had to have been a serious challenge. Even keeping a score is an achievement on that hardware.
Yep! And the hardware designers had to fight management to even get that! They originally wanted the system to have only 64 bytes. The numerous ways that game designers found to "cheat" the hardware and do things that the designers had never envisioned, are really impressive. The system's limitations actually became its saving grace because it made the system extremely flexible. Game creators like David Crane ("Pitfall!") figured out how to do lots of things that didn't seem possible.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yeah it's pretty crazy. We take all this for granted today because we have dozens of gigabytes of RAM and VRAM, and terabytes of storage.
For all the flak it gets, ET was a seriously damn impressive game on that hardware. It wasn't the reason for the video game crash, Atari just happened to produce double the number of carts as there were 2600's, expecting to literally double their install base overnight. That was unfathomly stupid, I don't care how good the game was they still would've had to throw out a lot.
@@StormsparkPegasusI think the game can be quite frustrating at first, if you haven't learned the method to easily get out of those darn pits! And I believe that is a large part of the reason that people say it is "terrible". If you fall into a hole, if you push the joystick up immediately E.T. will stop falling and you save time. Once you are out of the hole (the "above ground screen" is showing) move left or right ONLY until you are clear of the hole and you are good to go. Mastering this will make the game a lot more fun to play, but still a challenge.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Try playing that game with a Sega Genesis controller and it's 100x easier. Most of the issues with games like that on the 2600 were due the awful controller.
@@StormsparkPegasusInteresting! Yeah, that original Atari controller is extremely rugged, but also a wrist breaker after hours of playing. The Colecovision controller is worse though, IMO. It's kind of funny, if you think about it, that so many consoles and computers decided to adopt the Atari's controller port configuration and that they can work without modification: C64, Vic-20, Amiga even! And others too.
I was a kid at the time and loved this version of Space Invaders. It’s still fun to play even now IMO.
My father borrowed a console and this game from the shop he managed and I had access for one glorious day. My hands were like claws the day after.
I suppose that in between you not being used to holding an object for so long (and probably very hard as the fever grips you and you get really into the game) and older controllers not being very ergonomically designed, things were bound to get crampy? Because that's my memory from the console of my childhood, the NES.
This was one of the first games we got with our first 2600 in 1982 (along with Pac-Man and Defender). Truly a great port which did not lose the essence of the original.
Where you disappointed with pac man at the time or did it seem par for course?
I bought Pacman for it and don't remember being overly disappointed with it. Too young and not as cynical as I am today to realise the company pencil necks might have had anything to do with it 😂
1:10 Actually, the game combat had a similar earlier game that was part of a pong-on-a-chip included in several pong machines.
Breakout is another example of pre-gen 2 games released by Atari itself. They (Atari) also released a hard coded version of Stunt Driver in a dedicated motorcycle jumping game. There were also driving games in the first generation pong-on-a-chip dedicated games machines.
But where I think Atari excelled in their 2nd gen 2k games was the sheer variety these games offered. This became less and less prevalent over the 2600's lifespan. Where early games had sometimes over 100 variations of a single game, late 2600 games often had only 1 variation and not even a 2nd player was available.
This drive for game variation is one of the things that held back the pac man port. To have a 2 player pac man, serious downgrading of the game became necessary. When player 2 is playing, player 1's screen configuration along with score, level, lives remaining and other things must be kept in RAM. This is why the awesome new versions of Pac Man for the 2600 do not offer a 2nd player option or any other options.
Notice how the later port of Ms. Pac-Man is strictly single player, and it's CONSIDERABLY more faithful to the source material... And actually fun to play, too.
@@video-luver769 The "Progressive" variation of Super Breakout is another one without a second player option because of memory limitations. Super Breakout is a lot of fun, especially the progressive variation, which is game 7 IIRC. The bars start moving their way down the screen. That means that you would need a whole bitmap of the screen saved while the other player was playing.
Nice video, that’s for making it.
Couple of thoughts, firstly the 2k of blank ROM in the space invaders arcade might just be empty addressing space but there were no actual ROM chips corresponding to those addresses. Because of the need to separate chips in powers of 2 of addressing space.
And secondly, the concept of lives maybecame across from pinball, as I think that is also where the terms 1UP and 2UP came from.
What about 7UP?
Space invaders, Asteroids, and Missile Command were my favorite 2600 arcade ports. I can't even imagine how many hundreds of hours I logged playing them.
The wood age
Really interesting. I saw interviews with the original VCS devs and they were saying how astonished they were when Rick Maurer showed them his version. A pity that Rick seems to have disappeared.
Those 2600 Space Invaders sprites are still so iconic.
It's amazing what some of these programmers did with so little. Mind blowing actually.
It would be interesting to see what those guys would have been able to come up with if they'd had access to today's resources.
I feel a lot of today's developers and programmers have become lazy. As the saying goes "necessity is the mother of invention".
You almost had it right. The Atari 2600 TIA chip has registers for sprite attributes. Each sprite had its own set. One of them allowed you to make up to 3 copies of a sprite on one line. This was used to get 6 aliens on one line for two sprites.
Re-using "sprites"/player objects horizontally is a hardware feature of the VCS hardware. It can make two or three copies of a player object on a line with a few options for how much empty space is shown between each object.
Yeah, Space Invaders was the killer app for consoles at the time. It was epic. I probably invested a whole year of my time that should have been used doing homework.
I'm pretty sure that's how it was done, using the player "repeat" options, rather than some kind of multiplexing.
I was actually done with a hack to retrigger the spites each time. The built in sprite multiplying wouldn't have quite worked to allow all sprites to be shot down individually.
COMBAT itself showed one of the issues with repeating the player sprite -- there were several modes which gave one (or both) players a formation of three vehicles, but on close inspection it was easy to tell it was really just the same sprite rendered 3 times.
If they had used a 1 frame flicker they could have had the original amount of invaders on screen. It's also possible to change the color of the different rows of aliens, and to have all 4 bunkers. It would have been more complicated to program, but I'm guessing that it was released this way because of a time limit imposed on the programmers. It would have been nice if there was a re-release a couple years later.
@@Sharopolis Although the hack you refer to is a valid possibility (the RESPx trick), nobody was thinking along those lines in 1980 and it was first demonstrated in the _Galaxian_ port years later. The aliens in the 1980 port were drawn using the repeat options, and these were reconfigured and horizontally offset as needed to account for killed aliens. You can pick from several different patterns, from doubling to tripling a given sprite, and one final "fat" sprite version. Many simple games abused this convenient tweak to achieve easy patterns in sprite formation, with _Combat_ and _Journey Escape_ being good examples. This is also why there are only six aliens per row-at the time, this was understood to be the max available from the two "player" sprites.
Seriously good summary of a game that needs to be talked about.
I've always wondered that too, especially since Atari only has literally two sprites, player 1 and player 2 (not counting ball/missile, because it's not really a sprite, just a rectangle you can change the size of).
Invaders on the VCS was my first ever video game experience. I still remember trying to play with the invisible invaders!
Great! One of the best and simpliest explanation of the beauty and challenge of 2600, including a beam racing. Thx
When i was a kid I always thought the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders was the actual version. Its still an amazing game and one the first to have 2 player co-opt play where both players are working together.
Always a pleasure to see the inner workings described. Top work.
That was a very good video, congratulations
These were games I grew up with. Space Invaders got tons of play time in my house. My first game was Air-Sea Battle, but Space Invaders was the first one I got hooked on. There was a time when "Space Invaders" was a slang term for all video games (usually used by adults). Another interesting fact is that it was the first game with increasing difficulty as it played on. As you play and eliminate the aliens, they get faster and faster. That last one moved so fast that things got tense, then when you finally got it, you breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Another great vid! I never realized how difficult it was to bring arcade games to the ATARI 2600. Our first home game console was actually the Intellivision.
I was curious how they did this. Thanks for the video!
Man, it's hilarious how small the games are in size. You showed a literal "image" of the rom onscreen!
The Space Invaders gameplay strategy on display in this footage is so unbelievably poor it has to be for the meme
Great video, one of your very best! Thank you!
Small clarification: you only have to position the objects once per frame so long as they're not being repositioned. Thankfully because you basically eat a line for full positioning of a single object.
Once you properly time shift the object state machine it goes on drawing again one full scanline later repeatedly, maintaining the same offset each line.
Oh I didn't realise that.
I just checked the docs, yes that makes sense!
7:48 The arcade version had 64 times as much RAM as the Atari VCS, not 8 times as much (8192 bytes / 128 bytes). Later on you say that the arcade version had 1k of "work RAM", so maybe that's what you meant, which actually is 8 times as much memory.
The VCS's limitations were also what gave it its extreme flexibility and some pretty impressive things could be done in the right hands.* Rick Maurer, the programmer of the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders, had actually been working on his own version of the game on his own without Atari's knowledge and had it mostly working when the news came that arcades were massively cashing in on the craze for this game. Atari executives decided to get in on the action and became the first company ever to license an arcade game for a home market. It ended up quadrupling the sales of the console. Here's Rick talking about this: ruclips.net/video/UTDUB_GiTKA/видео.htmlsi=m5VOY9xklyqE2tcp&t=497
* Some examples of games that far exceeded what the hardware designers thought might be possible include:
- The homebrew version of Pac-Man, called "Pac-Man 8K": ruclips.net/video/JA3mIWzwrZk/видео.htmlsi=myotmIjKwqaFfjb2
- Homebrew Donkey Kong VCS: ruclips.net/video/_Y6vhLDN3dI/видео.htmlsi=Nv9-eeH2SS6FhvrE
- Homebrew Mappy: ruclips.net/video/w-8xNE_Knx8/видео.htmlsi=KuthwzCGv70Ugxbp
Good catch! Yeah I confused myself there in talking about the VRAM and the general purpose RAM. The total amount is of course 64 times more.
I haven't done a video about Atari 2600 homebrew yet, but it's one my list of things to do definitely.
@@Sharopolis When you do, be sure to show off the extremely impressive Space Invaders version that came with the Atari Flashback X that is a near identical port of Taito's color version. i.e. ruclips.net/video/TB1m9rRxD1M/видео.html
@@SharopolisRetro gaming in general is really popular right now, so a video on the homebrew scene would be great! I think the reason it's so popular right now is because the kids of the late seventies and early eighties who had these systems back then are now adults with some disposable income and tons of nostalgia. Yeah, modern consoles are literally thousands of times more powerful, but are the games thousands of times more fun? [I would say, no!]
Just about any platform you can think of from that time period is getting modern games (and hardware too in some cases), from the 2600 to the ZX Spectrum to the C64 to the Amiga and everything in between. Even obscure systems like the Tiki 100 are getting some love.
Lords of Biscay and wen hop are two great examples
@@madmax2069Just goes to show what is possible when there are no pressures to release by a specific date and you can work on it until it's as good as it can be.
Next step - porting OpenLara to the Atari 2600
The empty ROM space is probably to do with the fact ROMs would've been either 1kbit, 2kbit, 4kbit or 8kbit and would need to be present in groups of 8. If the game was more than 4kbytes in size, you'd need 8x8kbit ROMs giving you 8kbytes of ROM and whatever wasn't used would just be left blank.
It uses 4 16kbit rom chips and two of them have 8 kbits blank in each, but yeah it's the same thing. I didn't really want to go into speculative detail in the video, but I'm sure you're right.
@fattomandeibu You're mixing up kbits and kbytes because you clearly don't understand what they are. 1kbit is 128 bytes (the same amount of RAM in the A2600). 8kbit is 1024 bytes or 1kByte.
@@Sharopolis Not quite accurate. The real arcade uses 6x 1kByte mask ROMs and the ROMs are memory mapped. There's no blanks in the middle. Those blank areas are actually not populated ROM sockets on the board. There are 3 ROMs, then 2 spaces then 3 more ROMs. ROMs with blank areas in the middle are hacks for use when converting a real board to use 2716 EPROMs. I know this because I just documented repairing 5x Space Invaders boards and converted them to use EPROMs. The 2kB blank area in the ROM images is to allow for 2x 1kB ROMs that are not populated on the real board.
Great video! I always appreciate that your explanations are easy to follow.
I always felt they did a fantastic port of this game. It took me awhile to actually own the cartridge. I'd go down to a friend's house down the street and play. The two player versions were really welll done too. To this day I still love playing it.
My first Console was the intellivision in 1981 but we did get a 2600 in 1982 and our favorite 2600 games were Asteroids, Missile Command then my cousin who had over 100 games gave me Dragonfire which instantly became my favorite. Dragonfire was also ported to Intellivision and Colecovision but they weren't as good. The 2600 was capable of displaying more colors on screen at the same time then either Intellivion or Colecovision so the treasures in the Dragon Treasure room were much much nicer.
How to fit a mega hit into a tiny space..... I'm pretty sure Space Invaders was the first (or at least one of the first) 4k game.
Incredible job as always! More Atari content is always awesome!
This video checked all the boxes of awesomeness for me!
Brilliant! I do enjoy watching how they made these games back in the day.
Always good! You're the best!👍👍👍
This was the first cart i bought. I had it even before i had the console...
The 2K of "empty space" in the original Invaders ROM was used for testing code during development. It was removed in the commercial ROMs though. It did waste a lot of video RAM though. The game could be written using a tilemap (I've done it) so would only need 1K of tilemap RAM, plus a small custom buffer for the destructible bases, saving a lot of money on the old machines. An interesting fact is that the game has no random elements at all - it's all deterministic. Even the alien bombs (positions, and bomb type), and saucers are determined by the player position, player shots fired, and number of remaining invaders during the game.
I see you are a man of taste. All caps, much missed.
Truly awesome console at the time. Lost many an hour playing Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Dig Dug and Galaxian on the Woody, well into the mid 80s 👍🏼
It's crazy how even such a simple game like this pushed the 2600 well past its limits.
Really puts into perspective how absurd it's lifespan was and how much more powerful systems like the colecovision really were.
Especially since the 2600 barely had access to any sort of enhancement chips that helped other systems like the nes maintain their comparably impressive lifespans
Yeah. Apparently the hardware designer was blown away when he saw Night Driver running on the 2600. "How'd you do that?"
In 1987 Activision filed a patent for the Display Processor Chip or DPC. It was a full 10 years after the console was released. The chip greatly improved the audio to 3 channels (plus drum) but sadly it came out so late only one game used it Pitfall: Lost Caverns. What wild is Pitfall II was much better in graphics, gameplay and music than Super Pitfall on NES. So heads up Atari 2600 could beat the NES if the 2600 used the DPC Chip. But again sadly it was too little too late.
@Wallyworld30 while pitfall 2 is awesome and very impressive I really don't think it would have been impossible to do on the nes or that the dpc puts it ahead of the other consoles even default capabilities
If you are going to do any more arcade Space Invaders stuff in future running in MAME remember to NOT use the Midway version because the player ship fire sound is broken due to an inability by emulation developers to understand how the real hardware works which uses poorly written discrete audio coding that does not create the correct fire sound. For an alternative use one of the b/w versions that supports samples or if you want to show the later color version use the Taito sicv version which is correct and also uses samples. You will need to get the separate sample file otherwise there won't be any sound at all. The discrete audio issue in Midway Space Invaders has been there for around 15 years and is unlikely to be fixed any time soon as almost no one knows anything about coding discrete audio circuits.
My Atari came with Centipede, which was also a pretty impressive port! Space Invaders was the first game I got for it, and I spent hundreds of hours playing it. What you didn't mention wasn't just how impressive it was, but how smooth it ran too.
Centipede not bad but Millipede was a top 5 Atari port imo
@@pinebarrenpatriot8289 I heartily agree.
my first console game, had played atari 800xl before that though.
As extremely primitive as the Atari VCS is, it's actually significantly more powerful then the Fairchild VES which was released only a year prior. Crazy to think that a game console could be any less powerful, and yet there was one.
Yes, I know there was the Odyssey even before that, but it doesn't really qualify as a console the way we know them today. It didn't even have a CPU, so I put that one in sort of it's own unique category as something like a board game/game console hybrid. It was more like a precursor to the game console.
The Interton VC 4000, the only German console ever, might even go under the Atari VCS specs.
Launched 1978, one year after the Atari VCS, it featured a whopping 37 bytes of RAM.
It introduced analogue joystics to the home computing world and thus it is a part of my collection.
My father loved the arcade version and this home version. I had to buy it with my allowance money. He said I had to buy the VCS from DJ's TV Repair. He was their CPA. Joel told me I'd get a $30 discount on the system if I bought Space Invaders lol. I was 7 at the time. I played the heck out of it, so all good. My father also joked that the box art looked like a Boston album cover.
My cousin was ten and had a 2600. We thought his dad was rich, but I was informed he came from a "broken home" (an 80s phrase) and it was bought by his dad out of guilt. If the 2600 did a decent version of "defender" I could have lived with that, and just one parent 😂
Great video
The most impressive thing is the bases. The aliens are just using a feature that let you duplicate a player 3 times. This is a feature I wish they kept for the Atari 800 series, which was my first computer. The fundamental difference between “Player Missile” graphics and normal sprites is Atari Players are effectively the height of the screen. On the 800 each player used 256 byte of ram, and you moved up and down by copy the character data to a different vertical position. On the 2600 you wrote directly to a shape register for each player on a line by line basis. I think it would keep that value until you changed it, so you could write an 8 bit pattern at the top of the screen and it would make a stripe from that scan line til you cleared it. Each 3 columns sets of aliens is effectively just one player, using the built in features in the Stella chip.
The aliens could be read directly from the cartridge rom. And only had to be read once per line for each player. You just told the Stella chip to duplicate the sprite and updated the dup register the turn off aliens that died. The bases had to use some of that precious 128 bytes of ram. Which was unusual for 2600 games.
aaah you didn't mention 2600 hidden feature to enable double firing! perhaps the first hidden feature in a game!
Anyone else get aggravated at that awful Space Invaders gameplay? Who leaves the exterior sides for last? Some people just want to watch the world burn.
The three lives thing wasn't that unique. You got 3 balls on most pinball machines- the better you played, the longer you played.
The bases only disappear when the aliens get to them - they break down bit by bit if you defend them from the lines of aliens.
You haven't played Combat until you've played two players with invisible tanks.
Honestly did not know Superman was the first license-game, but man if it doesn't fit. Videogames and superheroes really have been tagteaming since almost the very start... now if only Superman could get the love Spider-Man has.
Space invaders on the Atari 2600 was my main game in the 80's
If you want to be really blown away, there's an abandoned proof of concept Space Invaders homebrew for the 2600 which has almost every element from the arcade game: bullets, bonus saucer, scoreboard, player 1, and all 55 aliens. The only thing not sorted out was that there are 3 shields instead of 4. All of that and zero flicker. Keep in mind, as this video explains, that the 2600 was designed with only 5 sprites, so it could run "tank game" and "super Pong" and have a shelf life of perhaps 3 years by Atari's estimation. It is the system's unique architecture which makes it possible to do so much more. Even the NES can't display that much sprite data without flickering. For your perusal: ruclips.net/video/GBROohTGBb0/видео.html
Just watched it... yeah impressive. The near arcade-perfect color version on Atari Flashback X is also impressive.
@@g4z-kb7ct I just checked that out. That is 100% not running in an Atari VCS emulator. Almost everything it does is impossible for the VCS, starting with its resolution of 320x240 which vastly outpaces the VCS's 160x192. I think I read somewhere that Atari Flashback stopped being real hardware after #2. I sure found the reprogrammed, simulated Atari 2600 games pretty fascinating in Flashback 3 when I saw it in action once.
Alright, so do we know why some aliens explode (animation) while others just vanish when they're shot?
Good question. My guess is a timing issue. Like if your missile collides with the alien at the wrong moment as the raster is drawing the next line or such.
I played it first time in early 1990s. A fun port to this day.
You'll notice that in the Atari version of Space Invaders, the aliens all move exactly at the same time. In the arcade version you can see some moving before others as the system is redrawing the screen in real time.
P.S: Combat was a 2 Kb cartridge, not 4Kb.
Yep in the arcade Space Invaders there is only ever 1 invader moving per frame. That's why they speed up the less there are left on screen. This was a hardware limitation - the player, and player missiles were updated every frame, but nothing else was. Even the invader bombs had to share time - each bomb type (only ever up to 3 on screen at once) each updated every 3 frames, interleaved. And if the saucer was active, it took the place of one of the bombs (so there are never more than two invader bombs while the saucer is visible)...
The way you play is just killing me! Shooting out just the middle of the invader block is, like, the scientifically worst way to play the game! My eyes! Hahahahaa...
Well, they didn't really fit the arcade mega hit into the Atari, but for it's time it was a decent port....when considering the 2600's limited hardware, and also the extra game variations they added made playing the cartridge not get boring too quickly.
The arcade machine is still superior however. The TTL sounds were much better, the games graphics were better, and the super bright arcade quality b&w image mirror reflected gave the game a ghosted image that was stunning to look at with theater gels for color with a unique look, and amazing black light lite florescent artwork as you looked into the monitor bezel of the game. Also the arcade cabinet speakers really made the sounds great, and you could "feel" the explosions.
I bought the 2600 port with in the first couple days it became available. And I loved it, but I still continued to pop coins in the amazing arcade machine because......the 2600 wasn't an equal experience to the arcade machine. So naturally when I started eventually collecting arcade machines, I bought a Space Invaders & a Deluxe Space Invaders.
As a small child, I played Space Invaders in the arcade when it was new.
When I got an Atari, the first game i played was Space Invaders.
I have a Space Invaders tattoo.
I tell you this so you have the full context when I i say this: WHY THE HELL DO YOU KEEP SHOOTING THE INVADERS IN THE MIDDLE BUT NOT THE ONES IN THE COLUMNS ON THE ENDS?!? Are you messing with us?? 😂😂😂
@sharoplis I noticed you like to make video's on how a weaker console made a certain game better than a more powerful console. I recommend doing a video of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns on Atari 2600 and compare it directly to NES's Super Pitfall both games . I've played both games extensive hours since I was a massive Pitfall fan back in the day. The 2600 version had a Display Processor Chip added inside the cartridge giving it 3 channel music (plus drums) and more graphic capabilities. Pitfall II blows Super Pitfall's door off in graphic, music and gameplay. Crazy a console that came out in 1977 was still making games that could compete with modern consoles ten years later.
6:01" el Space Invaders mas ADICTIVO...el de ATARI FOR EVER
Ah memories.I owned this,along with the Commodore 64.The 80s was EPIC🎉
You forgot how the score was written to the screen, as you can see it's not straight and uses lines instead of solid numbers.
Whoever is playing doesn't know how to play Space Invaders. You never leave an entire column of invaders on the opposite side of the screen.
You have to convince me Atari 2600 Astroids really couldn’t had been done in 4k of ROM. It seemed on-par primitive at the time
Asteroids was a vector game . Perfectly crisp flat 2d polygons that can scale and rotate with no loss in quality... and converting a vector game not just to a raster game, but an Atari VCS game... that ups the translation difficulty 10 fold.
@@DanJackson1977 Yeah, the console was definitely not designed to have that many independently moving objects on screen.
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Evidently the person playing Space Invaders didn't know how to play Space Invaders, as they're more concerned with getting each column that they are with the progressively sinking bottom rows.
The problem I had with Space Invaders on the 2600 was that it offered no challenge to people who had more than a couple of hours practice in the arcade with the real thing. I played it once. The game lasted hours and I think I lost one life. I was by no means good at the real Space Invaders… this version was just stupidly easy.
MF DOOM! totally unexpected =D
That part really cracked me up.
"Even if you're writing in all caps" 🤣🤣
Expanding on topics from older videos, or just felt like talking about space invaders?
8:40 That is actually mind-blowing!
The more I learn about the Atari 2600, the more I'm convinced its games are powered by witchcraft
I actually prefer the Atari 2600 version of space invaders. Maybe it's because I played it as a kid, and only ever played the arcade version as an adult.
Great video but watching you play space invaders is stress inducing. :P :/
Nice MF Doom reference, mate
Ants
Doggets
Jumping Jacks
Helmets
Cheerios
Jellyfish
It has those annoying black lines at the left hand side they couldn't programme round that could they? Megamania doesn't have them.
It was the side effect of a bug in one of the chips, which caused the first part of the scan line to blank out when you did a certain sprite repositioning operation (HMOVE). But since Space Invaders had a black background anyway, you only really saw them during the screensaver attract mode.
Some games worked around it by just doing an HMOVE operation on every scan line, so that the whole left edge of the screen was blacked out, which was less noticeable. Since that area was partly in the TV overscan area anyway, it wasn't as if you could do much with it.
Who was playing Space Invaders, and why do they not know How to play Space Invaders? 😂❤
4:20
Neat video, but this is some of the worst gameplay footage of Space Invaders I've ever seen. Like what the hell is this strategy lol
ALL CAPS
For me, home gaming began with the commodore 64.
Someone needs to learn to play space invaders. Hehehehe
This gameplay must be a troll. Who shoots all the centre aliens first in Space invaders? It's literally the worst possible strategy 🤣🤣
Well then you could make emulators that use a screenshot of this video as the ROM, so copyright violation! 😅
Odyssey2 was better (VideoPac in EU) and Atari sued over a PacMan clone, KC Munchkins and the Great Video Game Crash happened soon after.
BUT CAN IT PLAY DOOM?!?!?!?
Just a constructive criticism: A normal speaking style would be preferred.