What's sad is that this simulation is superior to anything I've seen on the 2600, except for maybe number of colors on screen :D
It does look great for the 2600.. perhaps he used a custom CD-ROM attachment to overcome the limitations of the system... maybe next he can remake Sonic!!!
If atari had things like that back in the day it might lived a few years longer
This isn't a hoax - it was actually scheduled for I Am 8-Bit but wasn't finished in time.
That may sound retarded, but I never played any Atari console ever (not even emulated or shown any screenshots).
Did it REALLY look that bad ?? I usually don't care how few colors the graphics have, because I play NES games just like I play PS2 games, but I'm really surprised they looked THAT bad. I wouldn't suspect systems that much inferior to the NES were arround.
No, some games actually look pretty good, even if you take away the fact that this console was introduced in 1977 and is very primitive when compared to the NES.
Bregalad, the Atari 2600 can display many colors, even more than the NES (emphasis bits aside), there are 128 to pick from. However, it's "PPU" (called TIA - Television Interface Adapter) is very primitive.
Working with the TIA is the opposite of working with the NES PPU. With the NES, you mess with the PPU while the frame is not rendering, so that later it renders a frame based on the data video memory. But the Atari 2600 has so little video memory (if you can even call it that), only enough to represent one scanline (sometimes not even that), that you have to manipulate it as the frame renders in order to show different things on the screen, or else you'll only see colored bars.
Atari 2600 programmers are true masters, because it's very hard. So that you have an idea, all the video memory it has is 20 bits(!) for drawing background patterns (if you want the left and right sides of the screen to be different you have to modify these mid-scanline), 2 "players" that are 8-bit patterns used to draw one scanline of the sprite (if you don't modify these, the pattern for the sprite will be repeated for all scanlines). These are the only entities that can have a pattern, the others (2 missles and a ball) are either enabled or disabled (meaning they are 1-bit only)
Also, the sprites can not be positioned with coordinates, as we do on the NES. To position a sprite horizontally, you have hit a register at the exact time as the TV beam is at the position where you want the sprite to be, and to position it vertically, you have to set it's pattern to 0's in scanlines where it doesn't show, and set it to the proper pattern on each scanline it should be visible.
This design is great in the sense that you have all the freedom to change whatever you'd like during rendering (patterns, colors, positions), and sometimes make amazing things with that, but the time may not be enough to do it all, because of the slow CPU. And then you only have the time of VBlank to do game logic.
I'm telling you, it's a miracle they managed to make games that way. For this Mega Man game, I'm sure they had to sacrifice some color detail in order to achive movement so similar to the NES. There's only so much one can do every scanline (they got 76 CPU cycles per scanline) and they chose smoother movement (as an effect of good physics) instead of more detailed backgrounds and different colors every scanline. Most older Atari games had really crappy physics (if any).
I have a huge respect for Atari 2600 programmers. I'd like to make a game for it myself someday (that's the reason I studied it a bit), but only after I finish something for the NES.
Ah, it has only 128 bytes of built-in RAM, and only 4KB of addressable ROM space. It's CPU is a 6502 with smaller addressing space to reduce pin count and costs (the 6507, I think). I'm surprised they can even make games with that, it's fascinating.
Yeah, Atari programmers are like the Ancient Gods of game programming. Anybody who can pull off a Battlezone or Moon Patrol (WITH parallax scrolling intact!) on that hardware is more than human.
Anyway, those graphics are middling for 2600. Not quite Battlezone nice, but certainly better than Boxing or other early titles. I'd guess that's due to one of two things: programmer inexperience with the Atari (hardly surprising, as very few people homebrew for it) or lack of CPU time/memory to do nice graphics (also not surprising when you consider how much stuff is going on at once in Mega Man.)
commodorejohn wrote:
programmer inexperience with the Atari (hardly surprising, as very few people homebrew for it)
I don't know, they seem to release much more games than us, NES people. Maybe because the games are usually quite simple... But this Mega Man is a very ambitious project, if it has all the levels and all that.
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or lack of CPU time/memory to do nice graphics (also not surprising when you consider how much stuff is going on at once in Mega Man.)
I think this is more like it. Older Atari games usually had pre-defined areas where certain characters could be, their movement was very restricted, so there was some free time to make things prettier. But in this game, there are two characters that move a lot, and shoot things. That's a lot of stuff to keep track of, so there might not be any extra time to mess with the colors or the background.