Atari 2600 Fanatics out there?

[Dave Britten]

(01-26-2015 04:43 PM)Gene Wrote:  I don't use the original 2600 but one of the handheld android clones that can run the emulators.

The Yinlips model I have (JXD is another big supplier) can play 2600 games, gameboy, gameboy advance, N64 even, PS1, etc.

Pretty amazing. These machines can be viewed at this store (I have no connection with them other than being a previous customer).

http://willgoo.com/

The 2600 is a rather notoriously difficult-to-emulate system. Since the chip that handles video output (I hesitate to call it a graphics chip, since it's only capable of rendering a single TV scan line at a time) is so tightly tied to timing of the CPU and the executing program, the slightest emulation inaccuracy can throw the whole thing off. Plus the extensive flicker that's required to display complex sets of sprites tends to look pretty awful on an LCD; the quick response and phosphor persistence of a CRT are what makes it just bearable.

So I'll play the games from time to time on my hacked PSP if I'm desperate, but I'd rather play a real 2600 hooked up to an old TV that requires at least two people to carry.

Also, anybody on this site would probably enjoy the book Racing the Beam. It's about the hardware inside the 2600, the crazy hoops you have to jump through to program the thing, and how it factored into game design. (Spoilers: it's got a mere 128 bytes of RAM, 4 KB ROM address space unless bank switching is used, and the TIA chip can only be set up to render a single scan line at a time, requiring the game program to set a handful of registers to manipulate the few on-screen objects, one line at a time, on the fly, during the brief horizontal blanking period. Hope you can find some time to do your actual game logic during the vertical blanking!)