0:02 The 2600 is limited to 40 pixel horizontal resolution, so it was narrowed and moved around to give the illusion of a light shining on a stage. 0:35 Unless it's a still image, then it focuses all its processing power on the display. 0:52 You know how raycasting works? This is it, but flipped 90 degrees. The stars in 1:34 and 1:55 are made up of players and missiles, with 4 possible lines per scanline. Sprites can duplicate 2:00 Same thing 2:13 Lines that can be altered by different vertices moving, such as with scaling and rotation. 2:19 Classic sprite line distortion. The girl is background. 3:01 Same effect as the stars, but now a 3D cube is processed. It cuts off at the corners, indicating the needed time to stop drawing to process the 3D. 3:43 If you are careful with where the sprites are, you can make lots of firework particles.
Still surprised how rare it is to find vertical raycasting... After all, it's far more efficient on pretty much any hardware that can draw rasters directly. (or to put it differently, if built for arcade hardware, something like doom or Wolfenstein could have exploited the fact that this process is more effective in one axis than the other and got a performance boost simply by rotating the display 90 degrees)
Regardless of it's other limitations, it's still funny to me that the 2600 is a 128 colour system while many of the computers and consoles that followed it were using a lot less than that. All the popular microcomputers were 16 colour systems. The NES has only 56 colours to work with (64 technically, but several of them are duplicates)... It's not until you start to get to the late 80's that you start to see systems that can actually display a lot more colours than a 2600 can... (notwithstanding Atari's own follow-up systems)
so true, The sad part. Demo at that level is far far away from anything usefull with a similar appearance. It is like walking on a rope above a very sloppy terrain. A single step in a wrong direction and you are falling down or hitting a rock with your head.
In the era that the 2600 was the most popular video games were more simplistic and many of the more complex game concepts didn't come until later on, also, many times these sort of demos use tricks that weren't known, or wouldn't actually be possible to pull off in a game it's self due to various limitations.
The real reason why is that the CPU in the VCS wasn’t that much more powerful than the computers the programmers used to develop the games. We can take advantage of powerful hardware now to run through several assembly files at once and test in a fraction of a second, something that would take ages back then.
@@coffee115 Back in these days, also the professional programmers would develop directly on the actual machine. There were no cross-assemblers or any tools like that. There was not even something like commented source code to be compiled. Instead, the source code was identical with the executed machine code. Even on Commodre 64 we worked that way for a long time before the first cross-system development tools were introduced.
Probably because additional circuitry was extremely expensive and too slow. Now, the 2600 system bus is a joke to some communication port on some $10 single board computer.
Atari 2600 doesn't display pixels, it outputs one scan line of ntsc( us TIA 3.579MHz) or pal(tia @ 4.43MHz) analog s-video with about 192 or so "spots" the more "spots" you draw the less is looks like a pal or ntsc signal, can't over clock the tia, since it's also use to generate the actual color palette....you'd have decode and re encode the tia video output....to even display something, sound would change pitch as well, if the chip worked to spec
0:02 The 2600 is limited to 40 pixel horizontal resolution, so it was narrowed and moved around to give the illusion of a light shining on a stage.
0:35 Unless it's a still image, then it focuses all its processing power on the display.
0:52 You know how raycasting works? This is it, but flipped 90 degrees.
The stars in 1:34 and 1:55 are made up of players and missiles, with 4 possible lines per scanline. Sprites can duplicate
2:00 Same thing
2:13 Lines that can be altered by different vertices moving, such as with scaling and rotation.
2:19 Classic sprite line distortion. The girl is background.
3:01 Same effect as the stars, but now a 3D cube is processed. It cuts off at the corners, indicating the needed time to stop drawing to process the 3D.
3:43 If you are careful with where the sprites are, you can make lots of firework particles.
Still surprised how rare it is to find vertical raycasting...
After all, it's far more efficient on pretty much any hardware that can draw rasters directly.
(or to put it differently, if built for arcade hardware, something like doom or Wolfenstein could have exploited the fact that this process is more effective in one axis than the other and got a performance boost simply by rotating the display 90 degrees)
Regardless of it's other limitations, it's still funny to me that the 2600 is a 128 colour system while many of the computers and consoles that followed it were using a lot less than that.
All the popular microcomputers were 16 colour systems.
The NES has only 56 colours to work with (64 technically, but several of them are duplicates)...
It's not until you start to get to the late 80's that you start to see systems that can actually display a lot more colours than a 2600 can... (notwithstanding Atari's own follow-up systems)
Of all the demos, I enjoy the 2600 ones the most because I know how insanely limited the hardware is.
so true, The sad part. Demo at that level is far far away from anything usefull with a similar appearance.
It is like walking on a rope above a very sloppy terrain. A single step in a wrong direction and you are falling down or hitting a rock with your head.
It's a shame we never saw anything like this back in the 80's.
In the era that the 2600 was the most popular video games were more simplistic and many of the more complex game concepts didn't come until later on, also, many times these sort of demos use tricks that weren't known, or wouldn't actually be possible to pull off in a game it's self due to various limitations.
The real reason why is that the CPU in the VCS wasn’t that much more powerful than the computers the programmers used to develop the games. We can take advantage of powerful hardware now to run through several assembly files at once and test in a fraction of a second, something that would take ages back then.
@@coffee115 Back in these days, also the professional programmers would develop directly on the actual machine. There were no cross-assemblers or any tools like that. There was not even something like commented source code to be compiled. Instead, the source code was identical with the executed machine code. Even on Commodre 64 we worked that way for a long time before the first cross-system development tools were introduced.
Probably because additional circuitry was extremely expensive and too slow. Now, the 2600 system bus is a joke to some communication port on some $10 single board computer.
When I was a kid playing combat this would have blown my mind. Love the 2600.
At 0:51 it reminds me of a snes game with a super fx chip. The 2600 was impressive
wow, 160x192 pixel max resolution, IN 1080P!
I´m blown away!!!
DMA can do no wrong.
HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!?1117171717
Did they race the beam *as* it was working its way across the screen? I've never seen resolution like that from a VCS...
Why would anyone post a 1080p video of a 240p signal?
+ZylonBane Less compression artifacts
+ZylonBane Really? Sound of mind...
+ZBionicle If that was supposed to be a coherent thought, you might want to try again.
ZylonBane being everyone's Bane again? Man, remember when you said LadyBug was impossible?
AtariAge Farms remembers.
Atari 2600 doesn't display pixels, it outputs one scan line of ntsc( us TIA 3.579MHz) or pal(tia @ 4.43MHz) analog s-video with about 192 or so "spots" the more "spots" you draw the less is looks like a pal or ntsc signal, can't over clock the tia, since it's also use to generate the actual color palette....you'd have decode and re encode the tia video output....to even display something, sound would change pitch as well, if the chip worked to spec