Atari Graphics - How did they work?

[@AloanMoreira1]

3:14 - actually it´s 20 pixels instead of 24 that were mirrored or repeated or assymetrically put that totalled 40 pixels which then were stretched to fill the 160 pixel screen. Very interesting indeed hahah -that´s why they looked like colorful LEGO blocks. I still love it to this day just for what it is as nothing IS like it after it! other bits: the 2 missiles and the ball could be stretched to a factor of 8 while the 2 sprites to a factor of 4. Missiles and ball no matter how thick they were drawn (up to 8) could leave a trail behind them, thus painting the screen. This was used in the tank wheels as shown. Great video btw! Love the 2600 charm and exotic uniquenesses hahaha!

[@markrotondella4689]

Oh whoops you are right. I've ordered two sets of the paddles for the 2600+ I can't see new paddles coming out again anytime soon - I'm going to wait to see on the plus to see if it is any good. I have been obsessed with a finding a reasonable way of playing 4 player video olympics and war lords on modern tv. It is actually quite bizarre how limited modern computers are in terms of input. Thanks for the feedback. :D

[@johneygd]

That’s something interesting about the atari 2600,being able to stretch sprites wich even the nes and snes doesn’t support in hardware,heck the atari 2600 even has a waaay higher colorpallet then the nes and master system🤣

[@AloanMoreira1]

@@johneygd yeah, I keep saying that if the SNES was the power behind the original NES games, wow, how much more amazing would they have been! all those colors!

[@RibbonPL]

Fascinating! Modern programmers should learn.

[@markrotondella4689]

Some programmers are still making games for the system - some are amazing although there are tools now to make it easier.

[@MarquisDeSang]

They don't teach real programming anymore, only scripting like javascript and python.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

Modern programmers aren't programmers, they are framework-users. Literally building with pre-made blocks for everything.

[@AloanMoreira1]

4:19 - I guess the left most sprite (bird) with divided color is due to joining player0 with player1 sprite, so that is still One color per horizontal line(per sprite) ;) -btw, I don´t remember seen an easier to understand video on the subject! great job!

[@markrotondella4689]

Thanks :D That's correct the large birds are both sprites joined together. They all stay at their own level so there is only two sprites per line. There is flicker when they dive to the player level because then there are then too many sprites.

[@jinchoung]

lmfao - "the senselessness of war" thing is brilliant.

[@markrotondella4689]

thanks :D :P

[@ZardChari]

There is something that I can't stop noticing, the difference of animations between atari and nes, atari game animation are so much more fluid than the nes ones! I wonder why?

[@AloanMoreira1]

a similar thing happens between American vs Japanese cartoons!

[@toniee98]

@@AloanMoreira1 That would be culture

[@run2thestore]

If my understanding of it is correct, because the Atari has no frame buffer, it’s truly locked at 60 fps out of necessity.

[@markrotondella4689]

That make sense :D

[@Sinn0100]

I don't know if I agree with this post. You may not know this, but there were rotoscoped games on the Nes. The Nes had a damn good port of Prince of Persia that had animation that easily stood up to 4th generation games that preceded it. Some of the later Disney games were like that as well. Ninja Gaiden was another game that pushed the Nes to its absolute limits that had animations beyond anything before it. For reference- Ninja Gaiden frames: 41954 / 60 = 699.233 or 60FPS. It just really depends on what we're comparing. However, there is one huge category, the Atari 2600 reigns supreme in. That would be its ability to display 128 colors per screen. Now, I started gaming in 1986 with the Nes and Master System. Meaning, I don't have much experience with their older hardware. When I found out the Atari 2600 could outpace a Sega Genesis in colors on screen, I was shocked. I believe it's 128 colors vs. 63+1 without any color limitations trickery...that's just nuts. Way too, go Atari.

[@gibsonflyingv2820]

You deserve a HELL of a lot more subscribers and viewers. Who else is covering how this works?? No one.

[@markrotondella4689]

I know right!? :P ;) Thanks. I just made these for fun.

[@ChadWoolley]

This was fascinating, thanks

[@markrotondella4689]

Your welcome :D :D

[@chestergeo]

The ball was included because it needed to have its own color, as opposed to the missiles, which have the colors of the players. This gives an important visual clue that, in video olympics, the ball does not belong to any particular player, whereas a missile in Combat was fired by a specific player.

[@chestergeo]

(or, to be precise, the ball has the playfield color, which again makes more sense than it having a specific player’s color)

[@markrotondella4689]

Ah that makes sense. Thanks. :D

[@120diasdecine4]

first theme video ?

[@markrotondella4689]

might seem that way based on production values :P

[@static-san]

There's a website that teaches you how to program for a 2600, including the very important task of counting processor instruction cycles. Most of the CPU's time was spent juggling the screen - something like 70%. Game logic had to fit into a scant fraction of time. Fun fact! An upgraded version of the TIA video chip in the 2600, called the CTIA and later GTIA, was used in Atari's home computers but because they were later and had a much more significant about of RAM, Atari added the ANTIC chip to convert a frame buffer into CTIA/GTIA instructions.

[@markrotondella4689]

I've toyed with the idea of making an Atari game although making an "in the style of" would be less time consuming. They were lucky the processor was actually pretty powerful for the time. I missed the Atari computer I immigrated to Commadore.

[@dmac7128]

And all of this was done before developer tools and kits were around and programs were written in assembler code.

[@markrotondella4689]

they needed to understand the nuts and bolts of the cpu to get it to do the simplest task

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Indeed! They were literally using graph paper and calculators (for display critical timings) primarily. It's truly amazing that they were able to get it to do anything beyond "Pong".

[@tardiscommand1812]

In another universe, a universe that is one dimension, would be like an Atari game.

[@markrotondella4689]

______________________ :P

[@rezterralico4369]

So in the battlefield it's kinda like the colour changing in that sonic the hedgehog 1 waterfall section.

[@markrotondella4689]

They both are taking advantage of the characteristics of CRT screens of the time. The Atari knew where the scan line was on the screen so although it only could actually display one screen colour at at time if it changed the screen colour at the end of a scan line it could create lines on the screen. The Genesis used the fact that there is some softness on those screens to create the illusion of more detail or effects like transparency you see in the water fall. The genesis wasn't actually capable of displaying transparent images. The Battle field in Battlezone benefited from this as well. If you play it on and old CRT the ground looks more complicated than the clear lines you see when you emulated it. If you play the video in 240p it kind of looks like it did back in the day.

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

The seemingly limited requirement of putting all of the load on the programmer to do the graphics actually ended up being its saving grace, as it allowed WAY more flexibility to do things that the system designers had not even envisioned. For proof of this, have a look at some of the homebrew games that have come out in recent years, such as Pac-Man 8K, Mappy and Donkey Kong VCS: - Pac-Man 8K: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gHKWnnyNr9ylkM0si=7e2-gLee43Yptn6_ - Mappy: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rV6bqYF7lLChrposi=spZXcqaZ7sK3Vs4E - Donkey Kong VCS: kzbin.info/www/bejne/lYqZp5uCebNmmqssi=knSkmQpAcgr7zAZI - BONUS #1: Here's Tod Frye, the guy who made the original Pac-Man for the VCS, admiring the homebrew version: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iKLIq3mVgdtja7s - BONUS #2: Here's a much younger Tod Frye talking about how and why his version of Pac-Man looks the way it does: kzbin.info/www/bejne/i4WnhnWVfM6HgaM

[@markrotondella4689]

For sure. Elevator Agent and Aardvark are amazing too but there was plenty of blank magic even from some of the games back in the day that defy logic in being able to run on a 2600. The Starparth super charger showed how much more could be done on the system if you just gave it a sane amount of ram. They really should have made a pass through cart like sega's 32X that added some ram, a sound chip, and perhap a chip to add a couple more sprites. The system would have would have been able to give the NES a run for it's money.

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

@@markrotondella4689I had a Supercharger for a while. I bought it when they went on sale at KB Toys for a quarter of their original price, not knowing that the product (and company) had been discontinued. Anyway, yeah, it had 6k of RAM, of which 4K would usually be used to store the game loaded from cassette and the remaining RAM used for other things Not only could you have a larger game in memory at once and 2K to use for whatever you need, but games could even be multi-load which gives them even more space to expand into. Several add-ons were planned for the 2600 but I don't think any of them sold well (or at all). In fact, I can't think of a single successful console add-on for any console, other than perhaps the Sega CD add-on, but primarily in Japan only. Other ones just didn't do well, were canceled or were disappointing. Hard to believe that the bean counters at Atari originally only wanted to give the engineers 64 bytes of RAM instead of what they got (128 bytes)! If anyone wants to see a really in-depth discussion of how the Atari 2600 works, I recommend the following video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p6fTqJlrZcZnbqcsi=-afqlrBkTUCdvgBa And this 20th anniversary of the VCS (from 1997) video series is excellent, for top geeks only! kzbin.info/www/bejne/eX-tZmSloLN-p6s Nolan Bushnell (Atari's founder) and many engineers and game designers (including David Crane and others from Activision, Imagic and so on) are featured.

[@rondamon4408]

It seems to be too complex. I'd assume that at that time, stack overflow works be full of questions which were hard to find the answer

[@markrotondella4689]

you mean the stack overflow website?

[@thedinobros1218]

What song is at the start, I love it!

[@markrotondella4689]

It's the starting tune from Parker Brothers Atari VCS Frogger but the actual tune is a Japanese children's song called "Inu No Omawarisan". kzbin.info/www/bejne/paXLdWmCZ6yHrbM

[@hallomeinnameistkarl216]

i‘d like to lock in „Barely“

[@markrotondella4689]

Barely graphics?

[@lunarmodule6419]

Interesting thx

[@markrotondella4689]

:D

[@cblizz730]

Regular Nintendo couldn't display the colors in battlefield. The horizon gradation.

[@markrotondella4689]

it was weirdly flexible system - if it had a couple more sprites and a little more RAM it probably would have lasted another 10 years :P

[@Lightblue2222]

I love how Atari 2600 has more available colors than NES. 5200 has even more. Yet NES has better graphics.. just less available colors.

[@ecernosoft3096]

7800 has more colors too! AND better graphics!

[@Lightblue2222]

@Ecernosoft true. & 7800 holds more sprites than NES. 7800 never has to do sprite flicker tricks, always a solid image.

[@markrotondella4689]

Yeah it was actually quite a while before a console beat it.

[@datacipher]

No not always. The NES of course has many big advantages over the old 5200 architecture, but the architecture was so brilliant that an incredibly good programmer could in some cards turn out graphics an nes could never do. Check out Atari Blast, rainbow walker, the Lucasfilms games… space harrier (find the true color version not the many bad emulation videos)… and others!

[@Lightblue2222]

@@datacipher awesome. I'm so going to check those out. Another that comes to mind is Ballblazer. The 5200 version looks and sounds better than Famicom. That and Rescue on Factalus is very impressive. Both Lucasfilm games!