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8bit Workshop

8bitworkshop.com

281 pointstekromancr32 comments

Back in 2006 I heard about the Atari 2600 homebrew scene and was fascinated to read about the mind-boggling tricks required to write a game for the system (like, coding to the TV raster beam... madness!). I went down the rabbit hole for a while and learned 6502 asm, and ended up with this "sort of a game" - https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops.

It was a great learning experience and certainly made me respect the devs of the day - who were performing miracles given the hardware constraints, and luck of modern debugging tools!

More or less my experience with Z80 assembly in the calculator programming scene, back in ~2009 ;)

I've been into the 2600 homebrew scene since "Making Games for the Atari 2600" came out a few years ago. I haven't made anything useful yet, but the community is great and very active. There's an awesome twitch channel[1] dedicated to 2600 homebrew, ZeroPageHomebrew. They do 2 shows a week, ~2 hours each. The developers and various AtariAge people are usually active in the chat. They're doing an awards show in February for homebrews made last year.

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew

After seeing demos like Bang!/XayaX [1] and Chiphead/Altair [2], it is pretty clear that the hardware that I work on is ridiculously overpowered.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Wk9Oi_Fsk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nTRMTnTeLQ

I actually just finished reading "Making 8-Bit Arcade Games in C" in its entirety.

It definitely has a target audience: Those who know how to program in a language resembling C, who don't know assembler, don't care to learn assembler, but can understand basic syntax of assembler. And most importantly it is for people who want to gain an understanding of the internal hardware of some vintage arcade machines.

I was surprised to learn that Robotron doesn't use sprites.

I suppose I am surprised as well — but surprised too if it had. I mean, that would be a lot of sprites.

I could ask you how it was done but perhaps I should just look into it myself. Thanks.

I suppose the real clue as to the sprites is that when two objects overlap and one moves away, it briefly leaves a black spot on the other object.

> You can even write C or 6502 assembler code for Woz's creation, the Apple ][+. Thrill to the unusual frame buffer layout and one-bit speaker output!

These folks get it.

C? Pascal, maybe, Cobol, Fortran, and even some oddballs like Forth, but C didn't catch traction until the mid-80s. I remember Chuck Sommerville (author of the original Snake Byte) and his father describing this "new language" (C) which has all the speed of assembly but is much friendlier.

Applesoft Basic and 6502 ASM (thanks to the Lazer Systems Interactive Assembler -LISA) were tops in those days.

The OP was quoting the 8bitworkshop page which has an environment, now, for programming the Apple ][+ in the manner decribed.

I understand now. Thanks for that clarification!

I spent a few minutes on 8bitworkshop and honestly, it's kind of exciting to think of coding the APPLE ][ in C.

I think it was the mid 1990s before I saw my first color-coding editor (Metrowerks?). All this for an Apple is just fantastic.

Maybe this will finally satisfy the people who balk when they see chip-8 pico-8 etc. described as 8-bit. This looks REALLY cool. I would love to see something similar for 16-bit/68000 console/arcade machines.

Sweet! I love that, 30-odd-years-later, I'm actually programming for the NES and can flash my own carts. What a piece of hardware that console was. To be able to pass on this knowledge in an easy-to-digest format is really cool. Kudos to the authors!

This reminded me of an interesting gent I met at last summer's San Mateo Maker Faire. He was showing off how he'd designed a Sinclair Z80 computer running on a FPGA.

Sadly I misplaced his info and can't find any info on the interweb.

Oh well, I can have some fun with this!

The ZX80 was a truly impressive model of simplicity. A Z-80 a ROM some RAM and a handful 74 series chips.

http://searle.hostei.com/grant/zx80/zx80.pdf

If you want to understand how a bunch of chips make a computer it's a good place to begin.

8 bit games show what is possible when hard constraints are imposed on programmers. They did so much with so little. There's a great documentary about game audio, called "beep!" [1], where musician-programmers share stories about how they were given the absolute bare minimum memory to create sound effects and music. It's inspiring to hear what they managed to create.

[1] http://www.gamessound.com/

Oh man, and I just bought a bunch of stuff for my C64 to start developing games. Is the simplicity yet complexity of 8-bit coming back?

About a year ago, I used this to make a hack of the Atari game "Freeway", which is just ambient drone sounds: https://gist.github.com/rchrd2/9f4d8cedef373c05563f69486cf49...

I like how 'Making games for the Atari 2600', features a character quite obvious supposed to be Mario. I'm struggling to id the dragon though.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541021304/ref=as_li_tl?ie...

Mario Bros, the arcade game, was ported to Atari a few years prior to the release of Super Mario Bros on Nintendo.

Did not know that thanks.

The box art also explains the blue hat (on the book cover).

https://www.retrogames.cz/play_004-Atari2600.php?language=EN

This is a really neat project, I look forward to diving into it deeper.

Within the last week or two, I've (re)discovered the Game Boy homebrew scene, which seems to still be rather active. It's still quite Greek to me, but I've been attempting to learn how to make games in GBz80 assembly.

https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev

I sold my first program aged 15 back in 1981. It was a version of Space Invaders for the minimum-spec Acorn Atom squeezed into 512 bytes.

That kind of experience doesn't really go away, I still try and first find a clean minimal code before "expanding" the code to make it more easily maintainable.

how/where did one sell computer games in 1981?

By selling them to Computer Games companies who would mass produce them for sale via magazines or alongside computers in the early computer stores. In this case I remember the company was called "Bug-Byte".

I own "Making Games for the Atari 2600" which is listed on this site. It's definitely worth picking up.

Great to see this product evolve since v1.0. And a terrific tool for teaching game design and programming.

The timing of this is superb - I literally just ordered an IceStick FPGA with the intention of recreating an 8-bit gaming platform, and I was wondering if I could somehow start playing in a virtual environment first! Can't wait to try this out...

I'm impressed with the online verilog simulator. Very cool website.

https://github.com/sehugg/8bitworkshop

So gorgeous...love when these types of projects get out to the community.

Just loving this!

Where has this been all my life? Thank you HN!

This looks really cool!

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