Programming Games for Atari 2600 | Hacker News Reader

Programming Games for Atari 2600

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79 pointskgwxd35 comments

For people interested in the Atari history, then the following might be interesting "Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration" at GOG [0]

> Join the celebration! Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration takes you on an interactive journey through 50 years of video games.

> At the heart of Atari 50 are the Interactive Timelines, which combine historical trivia, digital artifacts, over 60 minutes of new interviews, documentary footage, and playable games into one cohesive experience. When you encounter a game in the Timelines, you can immediately play it without losing your place.

> The massive selection of over 100 games spans seven different platforms: Arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari 8-bit computers, and, for the first time ever on modern consoles, Atari Lynx and Jaguar! Play the classics like Tempest 2000, Asteroids, and Yars' Revenge, or dive into some deeper cuts.

> Behind every game are the stories of Atari, what was happening at the company, and what went into the creation of the games and the hardware on which they ran, all told by the people who were there.

---

[0]: https://www.gog.com/en/game/atari_50_the_anniversary_celebra...

I really want to play Haunted House 3D and modernized Yars'. $40 seems a tad high but, it's GOG, I might go for it.

If it helps, modernized Yars’ is exactly the same game with a new graphical overlay. I played for two levels and then turned the overlay off. (And then played for another hour.)

VCTR-SCTR is the standout ”reimagined” entry in the collection I think.

Not a problem for Yars’ obviously but a lot of the games suffer from missing a nice paddle. (I’m playing on Switch.)

A bit off topic, but I’ve always thought that relative to consoles that succeeded it, the Atari 2600 hasn’t aged well. The games just aren’t fun to play these days.

Compared to the NES, there’s something about the advancements made in tech those few years — and probably even more so game design — that makes many of those games still fun today.

Granted, not many younger generations will find the appeal, but as someone that grew up with both Atari 2600 and NES, I still enjoy playing the NES games, where the most I get out of playing Atari 2600 games is a few minutes of nostalgia.

To me, the Atari 2600 is where video games hit mainstream, but the NES is where it really took off and solidified video games a place in history.

I personally enjoy all kinds of ambitious / flawed arcade ports on consoles so to me Berzerk, Defender and Joust still are worth playing on the VCS at least from that perspective.

I would characterize them more as "foundational" and "genre-creating" -- modern games build on top of their gameplay. Some classics (often played on cell phones today): space invaders, asteroids, pitfall (side-scroller), and numerous procedurally-generated games which form the basis of roguelikes!

I would keep in mind that much of the fun was the controllers, which are all essentially obsolete today (paddle controllers and stiff joysticks). Most atari games feature a "high score" goal due to the limitations of the architecture, which makes you replay the same level over and over -- modern games can have more variety. And, many atari games are _solely_ designed for multiplayer (aka someone sitting next to you!).

Adventure does not meet many of the criteria you mention, and yet is one of the best games for the 2600. It also happens to date from the 1970s!

The 2600 is undoubtedly a pivotal console in the history of video games, but you're right that it's a foundation more than anything. Few people would want to drive a Model T to work every day but skip forward a few decades and you have the type of classic car that most people would want in their garage. For a lot of us the 2600 is something to be admired from a distance, I suppose

The model-T is an amazing car even today. It had no oil/water-pump that could fail.

This is the reason you go back to simpler things, everything today is over engineered.

That said the C64 is a better device to learn for since it matches the NES in more domains and is a real computer with a keyboard!

And now it's easy to connect it to the internet for multiplayer games!

If you really need to go Atari then 7800 is the way.

The versions of Space Invaders and Asteroids people remember nostalgically are not the 2600 versions, for good reason. Neither are the 2600 versions the original.

I think Space Invaders actually is most known and played on the 2600, at least in the US. It didn't quite have the same reach in arcades outside of Japan, compared to the biggest titles like Missile Command, Galaga, [Ms.] Pac-man. It was the big system-selling killer app for the 2600 before Pac-man came out.

I wrote a more arcade-accurate Space Invaders port for the 2600 (in 1997, when homebrew games were getting started): https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=283

The tell for me is that when asked to describe the first/preferred version they played, most people will eventually mention multicolored invaders. So either they're falsely projecting today's images back (possible but I think unlikely if they don't regularly see it still today) or they're remembering an arcade version with an overlay.

This may be true, but think about Asteroids, which is the converse. Most people will also mention multicolored asteroids, which was true on the 2600 but not the arcade. They will remember whichever version is more vivid, even if it wasn't what they experienced more.

Right. For decades I thought I had played Space Invaders on the Arcade machine while I discovered later it was Space Invaders Part II (Taito). Also, with a similar color palette, Space Panic.

Space Invaders was by far the most played cart on my 2600. It was so faithful to the original arcade game and the difficulty ratcheted up just right.

I hadn't seen your version until now (wow!) but it does a great job of contrasting the trades that the designers of these games had to make when the resources they had to work with were so limited: here, a lot more invaders vs. substantially less resolution on each.

The NES was a much more capable console, and offers many games that are a lot richer and deeper.

But, if you're in the right mood, and have a screen with low input lag, the Atari 2600 offers a more immediate and direct feel. I think my favorite game is the progressive mode in Super Breakout; when you get going and the field moves toward you everytime you bounce the ball back, wham. And the paddle controllers feel connected in a way that joysticks don't (although, if your paddle controllers don't work well, then that's dissonant)

There's a lot of games where you can (hopefully) get into the zone and have a somewhat meditative experience in a way that gets harder when games get more complex. But you do also have to be ok with losing, a lot of the better games are either arcade ports or arcade like.

OTOH I haven't played all the sports games, but the ones I played are rather abstract, the NES offered sports that felt more like sports. Of course, 16-bit sports were much better again. Atari Basketball is not something you could play for hours, but the NBA Jam port for the Genesis (and even the GameBoy) got a lot of playtime for me.

Yeah, the paddle controller on a zero-lag CRT offers an incredible experience that no modern hardware does. Super Breakout's progressive mode is still amazing today. Kaboom is the other big one, also Video Olympics in the higher speed modes. There are rotary controllers to work with Mame but they're a pale imitation of the real thing.

For sports, there's one surprisingly good (American) football game on the 2600: Super Challenge Football. You invent your own play calls every down by instructing each player individually. It's quite unknown, as it's only playable 2-player (no computer AI), and came out late in the system's life as a port from an Intellivision game. There's also a Super Challenge Baseball, also 2P only. Both games use weird control schemes that you'd never figure out without the manual, but do a decent enough job of controlling the sport with only one button.

One interesting thing about the Atari 50 collection is to really see the games laid out on a timeline to see how the design sensibility and technical knowledge advances over time. As they point out in the interviews, this was the first ever "console lifecycle" and nobody really had any idea how things would change or eventually end. Stuff like Demons to Diamonds really is a huge step above Canyon Bomber despite being the same shooting gallery idea. And Solaris, which I hadn't played before, was just unbelievable - the gap between Combat and it dwarfs even the gap between e.g. FantaVision and God of War 2, if you know a bit about the 2600's technical design.

> To me, the Atari 2600 is where video games hit mainstream, but the NES is where it really took off and solidified video games a place in history.

This, I think, is pure recent bias. Nintendo is still around and Atari isn't, but Atari was massive in pop culture in their day.

> This, I think, is pure recent bias

I don’t believe so. The Atari almost killed the VG industry until the NES revived it. [1] I think a big reason for this is how much better the games on NES were vs. the 2600 (but also the business and market saturation).

Some of the ports were just awful. I particularly remember how disappointed I was when I played Pac-Man, thinking it felt nothing like the arcade version. I had fond memories of going to Service Merchandise playing Donkey Kong on the Colecovision, amazed at how much better a port it was vs. Atari 2600.

Also, it’s hard to claim recency bias when you’re looking at 37 vs. 41 years ago — those periods blur together for me at this point. :)

A lot of NES games I still enjoy today are long dead and irrelevant today (Guardian Legend, Willow, Destiny of an Emporor, Crystalis, Faxanadu, just to name a few).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

> The Atari almost killed the VG industry until the NES revived it.

This is... not really an accurate way to describe the crash. Primarily overenthusiastic retailers, secondarily low-quality non-Atari developers, thirdly Atari itself tripping over itself to react to both, almost killed the industry. That's not really "the Atari [VCS]" - 15 million people still wanted Atari games, they just didn't want rushed licenses and cash-ins.

> it’s hard to claim recency bias when you’re looking at 37 vs. 41 years ago

It's not 37 vs. 41 years old, it's Nintendo last week vs. Atari 41 years ago - even if you followed it all the way through the mess of the Jaguar years (which I won't defend), still 20 years ago. Meanwhile you can't not know what Mario or a pokémon is even if you never played the games.

> A lot of NES games I still enjoy today are long dead and irrelevant today (Guardian Legend, Willow, Destiny of an Emporor, Crystalis, Faxanadu, just to name a few).

These games regularly top "best NES games" lists, LotW as a sequel to Faxanadu also. (Except maybe Willow, which is a little more polarizing - but in part because everyone compares it to Crystalis...) There a ton of genuinely forgotten NES games; you didn't name them because you've forgotten them.

FWIW, there is also this online course:

https://www.udemy.com/course/programming-games-for-the-atari...

You can also try your hand at programming a virtual 2600 at 8bitworkshop, along with other consoles and platforms. With my interest in this area, I can't believe I hadn't heard about 8bitworkshop until just the other day: it is amazing!

https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.0/?platform=vcs&file=examples...

Updated this month? Incredible that people still see value in this so many years later!

Pikuma also has a course on Atari and NES programming

Must read article if you like the Atari 2600

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_2600

I thought there were going to be Atari 2600 games to teach programming concepts but this is pretty close so upvote

This is the only one unfortunately…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming

The Atari VCS's RAM size of 128 bytes restricts the possibilities for writing programs.

That’s not a typo, and also a severe limitation.

"Program is where instructions are typed. It has a maximum of eleven lines of code."

Egads.

I had this as a kid. It was very difficult to enter text. The whole experience was underwhelming, unfortunately. Thank you to my parents who bought it for me. I’m a programmer to this day.

In modern time people use Batari BASIC which allows relatively sophisticated programming for the VCS.

AFAIK this is the only programming game on the Atari 2600, so I was excited for a bit reading the plural in the post's title.

BTW that cover image is epic.

Steve Hugg has a few nice books on the topic https://8bitworkshop.com/ Like "Making 8-Bit Arcade Games in C" and "Making Games For The Atari 2600"

That's the book that got me to deep dive into this world. I never made anything interesting or fun for the 2600 (though I'm hoping nanochess' book will inspire me to) but I'm quite happy to watch, support and enjoy the work the massive community is doing.

Imagine if we had something like this[0] in 80's. That's just one of dozens of excellent 2600 games that have come out of the homebrew scene. AtariAge's next batch of releases alone has 24 new games for various Atari system. This weekend ZeroPage Homebrew [1] is playing all of them, while interviewing the developers for every one. It's such a great community.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWtN3bm_Hfw (Galagon)

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1650921299

Just bought it. At least I know what I will do if I retired or in my spare time.

Any way to get the ebook without using paypal?

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