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Comment by Zetaphor | Hacker News Reader

Is there any particular reason projects like this only exist today, and not when the console was still in production?

Is it a matter of enough time passing for people to gain the full understanding of the hardware required to optimize enough to make this possible? Or are these new developments somehow made possible by access to hardware and software that is orders of magnitude more capable than the target device?

Stuff like this and the various 3D render demos always leave me wondering why we never saw anything like this in these devices primes.

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Wild guesses off of the top of my head:

* Time. A lot can happen in 40 years, new techniques are discovered and popularized, etc.

* Better tooling all around. Better languages, better IDEs, better libraries, etc. Anyone working today on a platform that has been hacked on for 40+ years is the beneficiary of all that work.

* More and better contributors. The number of people who had both the interest and the means to purchase an Atari computer in 1979 was necessarily limited. Since then, we've added another 3.7B people to the planet and a hell of a lot of them now have access to something resembling a computer. Most of them have grown up with the notion of a "programming language" being present in their world, something which wasn't necessarily commonplace 40 years back.

Back in the day the most advanced software developers used minicomputers: for instance Gates and Allen used an 8080 emulator on a PDP-10 to develop the original Microsoft BASIC. Infocom similarly used a PDP-10 to develop games like Zork.

A modern computer is a much more powerful machine than a 1970s minicomputer and would be great support for writing complex software today.

In the same vein, I believe John Carmack used a NeXTStation to develop Doom for the PC[1].

Matthew Smith also used a TRS-80 model III to develop Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom

The closest I came to this was using a PC AT clone to develop some software for a teacher at my school when I was in high school. (Unless you count using a PC today to develop for Arduino)

I thought the teacher had a PC clone so I wrote the first draft of the software in Turbo BASIC, but then I found out she had a CP/M machine but I wasn't fazed very much because there was a good Z80 emulator that ran on my machine so I was able to port the code to run under (I think) MBASIC or CBASIC in CP/M.

In this case I was using an emulator to run the same dev tools I would have used in CP/M, I just didn't have a CP/M machine. It ran considerably faster than any real Z-80 machine thanks to the power of a 12Mhz 286 with zero wait states.

> and not when the console was still in production?

The "Atari 8-bit" refers to a line of 6502 based personal computers manufactured from 1979 until 1992! There was a commercially unsuccessful video game console, the 5200, derived from this general architecture - it's wild that for their illustrious place in video game history, Atari was a one hit wonder - they never really succeeded in a console release after the 2600.

Atari also had a line of 68k based 32/16 bit computers that sadly also discontinued in 1992 so that Atari could focus on their pathetic attempts to break back into the console market.

> it's wild that for their illustrious place in video game history, Atari was a one hit wonder

They had many, many popular coin-op machines.

I think from the part of the sentence that you took out it was clear the point was about consoles.

The Atari Pong console was also successful but I tend to not count it as I was only considering programmable consoles.

From the article: "similar to GEOS on the Commodore 64". GEOS was definitely of the time. Also large memory expansion (i.e. >= 256K) kits, while available in the era, cost money and were uncommon. This system apparently runs best with 1MB of memory.

There were some cool classic demos in the prime era of the Atari 8-bit like the FujiBoink response to the Amiga bouncing ball.

Hardware documentation and developer software not generally available, and expensive.

Internally, Atari did development on minicomputers and cross-assembled the output. For me there was just (slow) BASIC. Information on low-level features (Display Lists, I/O, etc) only came out in 3rd-party magazines & books years later.

I experienced the same mindset on the Atari ST & IBM PC later. Reading about GNU was a very novel idea.

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