Atari VCS/2600 - 10 TECHNICAL Things You Didn't Know

[@MrROTD]

Still love video games and started with the 2600 as a child, hours of fun playing Defender, Asteroids, River Raid, Skyjinks, Pitfall, Adverntur and so many other fun carts, they did it with so little resources its incredible what the programmers accomplished.

[@thorstenkrug144]

The best game was STAR-RAIDER, Defender, Asteroids, Pitfall, Pacman and Space Invaders. We played Space Invaders with 3 ppl for over a day until it started again from level 1 😅😊

[@BryanChance]

They're were not programmers, they were magicians! It's just amazing what they could do with such limited resources.

[@alfsleftnut9224]

Would love to see them max out the specs of modern hardware, would have some amazing shit

[@BillAnt]

Just imagine what they could do with modern machines without all those limitation. ;)

[@markfrombriz]

Atari 2600 such good times, David Crane was a programming god

[@alansmithee183]

Programmed Ghostbusters in just 6 weeks from what I've heard

[@TheCoolDave]

Yea, he was, Pitfall 2 was mind blowing at the time. Nothing like that on the 2600 has ever been seen. I remember getting day one and blown away. Other time in eary gaming, was N64 and a 3-D Mario

[@BillAnt]

Pitfall was also a great port on the C64, I remember tying to avoid those dam gators for hours of fun. heh

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@TheCoolDave But I still prefer pitfall 1 and 2 on C64.

[@igorperuchi2114]

When I was a kid and received my Atari as a Christmas gift in 1983 (sure it was late but not for us in Brazil), the first thing that came to my mind when I looked the device was that its grilled shape must hide a speaker. Well, now I know that I was not completely wrong! Thanks for the video, Aaron!

[@RyonMugen]

Anytime i see a grill shape, I assume speaker as well LOL boy how wrong we are.

[@KW160]

I remember taking apart a broken one in the 90s and wondering if those speakers were an option or something.

[@raposonanquim7987]

13:22 Cartuchinho da CCE!

[@timothyvandenberg2905]

The Starpath was AMAZING in comparison to regular Atarci VCS games!

[@Jerkwad152]

It's amazing they managed to get anything done with the VCS.

[@RetroHackShack]

For sure

[@fuzzywzhe]

The machine was quite quickly outpaced by other systems. The VCS came out in 1977 but it took a good 6 years or so before it was absolutely obsoleted, but that's an eternity for anybody under 30. I was programming by 1980, going back to these systems, would be a NIGHTMARE today. Being limited to 32K was frustrating

[@fritzthedog007]

F-14 Tomcat used EVERYTHING switch-wise, I seem to remember - even the reset button had a game function, you had to do it quick tho.

[@ridiculous_gaming]

@@fuzzywzhe Yet today, developers have created games that are simply stunning and inconceivable on such limited hardware.

[@fuzzywzhe]

@@ridiculous_gaming like what? What games have been created on the 2600 which are ACTUALLY playable, much less "incredible"? I've seen the Sonic game on the 2600. It was a good effort, but it's not playable.

[@alfsleftnut9224]

These guys were literal programing gods. Would love to see what they could do with modern hardwear

[@bellissimo4520]

I won't argue with them being programming gods; but the point is that that old hardware was super-limited, meaning one person could still juggle all its technical aspects in his mind. A modern CPU alone is so complex that programming it directly down to the hardware better than a compiler does it is very difficult... not to mention a complete PC with graphics card etc.

[@StrengthFromGiving]

It's actually quite interesting. Many of the older programmers (That are still alive and working today) struggle with the levels of abstraction in modern day code and some are* still brilliant programmers. The reality is that some people shine in certain scenarios, and some shine seemingly all the time. And that can be seen today with younger programmers that go back and work in/on these old code bases with very little help and produce amazing products. The main thing.. just respect the product, and the devs, no need to compare because we really have no basis to do so.

[@dmac7128]

The sentiment is appreciated, but modern hardware is vastly more complicated than the relative simplicity of the 6502/7 architecture. Plus with respect to software, its one thing to write and debug a few thousand lines of assembler code, its another matter with todays software that runs with millions of lines of code. But there are best practices that do translate to writing modern computer code in higher level languages that allow for writing very efficient machine code in small subroutines.

[@telengardforever7783]

@@bellissimo4520 Exactly. That's my problem. I am an embedded systems developer. I can do amazing things if I am allowed to talk to the chips, ports, memory, etc., directly. But when it comes to dealing with frameworks like .NET, DirectX, etc., I bomb hard. The hardware is now so complex, and it changes so often that no single human can truly understand a system's complete architecture. Hell, with the hardware I used to work on, I could get a complete schematic of the system and chip architecture in a single spiral-bound 200-page book. If I were to get something similar on a modern system, it would be several 100's of thousands of pages long. And then it would be all worthless within 5 years.

[@przemekkobel4874]

That feeling you get when watching people responsible for a half of your childhood... wow.

[@mindcrome]

I will most likely cry when Shigeru Miyamoto passes away. Just typing about it makes me misty eyed. Nice to see these guys from Atari. My first system was a VCS, and the first video game I ever played was Combat. (my Grandfather gave it to me and about 80 games, after he got board with it. His all time favorite game is still Super Mario Bros. After the NES came out, I was hooked. I thought the VCS was cool, but the NES was really in another league. Hell I still have dreams the first time I saw Metroid. On a Playchoice 10, in a empty dark clubhouse room, blaring out the glorious title screen music. )

[@horusfalcon]

The ingenuity of the folks programming for this platform is just amazing. Of course, it had to be.

[@fabricio4794]

Atari was a Huge Sucess in Brasil during 80s....and surpassed the crash and entered the 90s as cheap videogame console

[@RetroHackShack]

That's awesome. I was going to ask if they translated the text in the games back then, but I guess there wasn't a lot of text actually in the games 🙂

[@stg80]

​@@RetroHackShackone company called "CCE" used to change the name of developer that usually apears on the botom of screen. I think there are some ROMs with this mod on the Internet. Sorry about my english.

[@andrescorcoll1477]

I'm Uruguay and i still have and run my original old *Atari" CCE. Was much lees expensive buy a CCE and was native "Pal". Good memories.

[@RetroHackShack]

That's awesome. I wish I still had my original.

[@onecreativecriminal]

The video game crash only effected North America

[@stephenmartin8331]

This type of coding is a lost art. Also shows how intelligent you had to be and how well you had to know your job.

[@BillAnt]

I agree, limitations is the mother of all inventions. ;)

[@fuzzywzhe]

Nobody misses this. I coded on the 6502, and all the limitations was just frustrating. I'd never want to go back to the bad old days. There's plenty of really difficult problems NOW, without having to figure out how to fit a routine into X amount of memory, or clever ways to save memory.

[@dh2032]

@@fuzzywzhe speed, the smaller your code, the quicker it going to run? and as the frustrating code bugs, the code is less code, to check for bugs? the programs here, could, possibly, where written out 1 to 2 sheets of copier paper, in regular sized text? anything modern, you could not put all the code printed out in 500 copier paper pages? where would even start looked an undocumented bug that auto correct could not fined?

[@fuzzywzhe]

@@dh2032 ​ OK, this is what I was taught, smaller code, faster execution, and it was true for a long time, it's not now. Optimizers are amazing and we have cache and pipelines. Clarity of code is now the goal. As we progress, you have to drop old thinking. Old thinking is useful to know where we are, but you're using old tools. Clarity of thought is where we have to go with coding. The optimizer will take care of it. Believe, I used to do optimization, that job is obsolete. We don't code for chips anymore, we code for routines. It's frustrating that people worry about "which algorithm is better for sorting for this condition?" - who cares? The compiler picks it, and it's right more often than any human being is. QSort BSort - whatever, it will know.

[@stargazer7644]

This is not a lost art. Anyone who programs 8 bit microcontrollers still deals with this today. I write software for PIC micros that have 14kB of ROM and only 368 bytes of RAM.

[@robpuchyr7407]

Space Invaders exploit: turning the console on while holding the Reset button down would immediately start a game giving the player two shots on screen at the same time. Only drawback was you could only play variation no. 1 of the game. My friends and I loved this bug! My brother bought the system in 1978 and, after hearing your explanation, it was light sixer.

[@RetroHackShack]

Nice one!

[@kvlteacher5911]

I remember playing that game literally forever using that hack

[@rogergagne3970]

I still remember the Space Invaders trick where you would hold down the select and reset buttons while turning on the system to activate auto fire.

[@jnnx]

How come nobody ever told me this?

[@a70duster]

Double fire...

[@bltvd]

I will never forget how cool it was to be 8 years old in 1984 post video game crash and seeing Pitfall II advertised and then being able to buy it for like five bucks! That and HERO are the best games on the system!

[@zzstoner]

Pitfall II was among one of my favorite Atari games while growing up. It was so much more amazing than anything that came before it. The "Open" world design with depth, swimming and balloons. These were all new experiences on the 2600. Now that I'm older, I continue to be amazed at just how many new techniques were introduced with just that one game.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yep

[@clxmasisland6724]

But that stupid song drove me nuts.

[@DocMicrowave]

Absolutely amazing the amount of functionality they were able to squeeze out of the 2600. I loved that game system as a kid. Especially the Activision games. Which seemed to really push the limits of the console.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. The folks who left Atari and started Activision were some of the best programmers.

[@papasivir4241]

Oh how things have changed LOL

[@darkally1235]

Racing the beam more refers to the game often having to make changes to the TIA registers while a given line of the screen was being drawn. For example the TIA background registers were only enough for the left half of the screen with the right half being either a duplicate or a mirror. If the game needed the two sides to be different then the game needed to "race the beam" to update the background registers after they were used for one side but before they were used for the other! (Note: I created the homebrew game Skeleton/Skeleton+ for the 2600.)

[@dawnmitchell8213]

Combat is one of my favourite games because of the quirks like blasting your opponent through walls.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. It made the game even more fun. I am glad they didn't fix that.

[@madmax2069]

I remember playing on my father's Coleco telstar combat system. It was the first game I ever played.

[@RetroHackShack]

Was that the one with the revolver in it? I picked one of those up for a video recently.

[@madmax2069]

@@RetroHackShack revolver? The Telstar combat has 4 sticks (two sticks per player) to control the tanks

[@lurkerrekrul]

@@RetroHackShack No, that's a Coleco Telstar Arcade. Paddle knobs, a steering wheels and a gun, on the three sides. I had one of those. The pack-in cartridge never worked properly. My parents had gotten me a second cartridge, but it didn't have any driving games on it., so I never got to use the steering wheel. Then after a couple months, the gun stopped working properly. It would register a hit no matter where it was pointed. You could leave it in the console and get a perfect score. I also had a Coleco Telstar Combat, which was a tank game. The video never worked properly. The image was distorted and the picture rolled. Coincidentally, several years ago, I found a box of old video games in the trash, including a Colecovision and three Atari 2600s. Two of the Ataris worked, but the Colecovision didn't. I forget exactly what problem it had, but while it would turn on, it had something wrong with it. Ironically, it had the Atari expansion module with it and that DID work.

[@mchenrynick]

For those familiar with the Commodore 64, saving every character on the screen (40 across x 25 down) takes 1000 bytes, or 1K. 2 screenshots would fill up an entire 2K Atari cartridge!!

[@infindebula]

Or 1 screenshot with colour per character!

[@mchenrynick]

@@infindebula I remember the C64's screen, because I created a utility program that would save whatever you typed into it as a "machine lauguage program" loading into 1024 to 2023 of memory. I then created a simple snake game and to load the next level, the program would just LOAD"level #",8,1 (replacing the # with the current level). It would only take about 3 seconds off of a 5.25" floppy!

[@SusanAmberBruce]

Fascinating to hear about the byte saving tricks and creative genius methods developers came up with.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. Really amazing.

[@RemoWilliams1227]

Boy this was just an excellent video. Listening to the Atari programmers talk about coding for the vcs was beyond cool.

[@madmax2069]

I have a starpath supercharger, pretty much used it as a flash cart. Quite a few games have been converted into a sound file, and you can load up a cheap MP3 player to act as the cassette/cassette player.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. Works great from my phone too.

[@OsoDeAnteojos]

Remember, the key to squish code is to have some wine or beer! I'll take that approach from now on! Great video by the way.

[@paypercutts]

Really interesting stuff! I love hearing about all the corner cutting techniques the programmers utilised to get their projects working with their restrictions. Subd! 😁

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks!

[@flatfingertuning727]

The big problem with music on the 2600 wasn't so much the primary frequency generator, which has a five-bit range from 1 to 32 counts, but rather the fact that the polynomial function generator which followed it was limited to dividing its output by 2, 6, 31, or 93 when producing square waves, or 15 when producing a buzzy "saw" wave sound. If the TIA had happened to include an extra "divide-by-two" control bit that would drop one of the phi1 or phi2 clocks from each scan line, that would have improved things enormously, but I don't think music was really a design consideration. In the theme for my game Toyshop Trouble, which is in the key of C, I used the saw wave for the bass part, with divide values of 32, 24, 22, 16, 12, and 11, yielding overall divide ratios of 480, 360, 330, 240, 180, and 165. The mathematically-correct divisors for the G notes would have been 320 and 160, but those aren't multiples of 15. In the lead part, the C, and F notes use divide values of 20, and 15, yielding overall divide ratios of 120, and 90, both of which are almost perfect and coincide with the pitches for C and F in the bass part. The G note, however, uses a divisor of 27 for a divide ratio of 162, which is quite a bit off from the 330/165 used in the bass. The B note is a bit interesting; mathematically, it should use a divisor of 21.18 for a divide ratio of 127.13, but the available options are to use a divisor of 21 (which is about 1% sharp) or 22 (which is about 3.8% flat). For the measures where I'm playing a G in the bass, I use the lower pitch (which is flat by the same amount as the G), but for other measures I use the higher pitch. Fun little bit of audio trivia: the 4-bit digital-to-analog converers for the Atari's audio circuits are just about the smallest things on the TIA. If you call up die photos, each ADC is a tiny little assemblage of four different-sized transitors that looks like the "signal bars" display on a cell phone.

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks for sharing that example. So complicated!

[@timothyvandenberg2905]

Big motivator for buying the 5200 was it's TV advertising that showed that the game can be PAUSED! That was SO amazing to kids back then! We could PAUSE our new high-score personal record game to take out the trash whenever our parents demanded NOW, not later.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yes. It was sorely needed.

[@ahmad-murery]

I just can't imagine how hard it was for developers to work with such resource limits, they were and always will be the legends of game development. Looking forward for your next video(s) Thanks Aaron!

[@RetroHackShack]

That's for sure

[@fabricio4794]

@@RetroHackShack Dev on Atari was like do Magick recepies

[@madmax2069]

Heck and people in the homebrew community and the demoscene are still finding ways to push the 2600.

[@fabricio4794]

@@madmax2069 prince of persia demo was amazinh

[@madmax2069]

@@fabricio4794 I mean that's cool and all, but that demo is definitely not the best of what I've seen the 2600 do.

[@infindebula]

I love that after 24:00, as David Crane is explaining the mind-bending cartridge chipset enhancements and features, the camera pans out to all the other developers, slack-jawed, hanging their heads in acknowledgement of Crane's next-level skills. (I'm not suggesting even for a moment that they didn't all accomplish amazing things, of course.) Maybe sacrilege here, but I think it's a shame more customers didn't embrace the competing Intellivision, which had the computing resources to get around most or all of these limitations.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. Pretty crazy stuff he pulled. Also, I love Joe Decuir's smile after explaining his bug in the system at 11:46. Proud bug papa!

[@rahulshah1408]

@@RetroHackShackThey earned every bit of respect. The amount of knowledge required to get use the system and then bend the rules is impressive. Equally impressive is their technical recall. It’s been a few years and they are talking like it was last week.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. I can't remember those kind of details from my job 20 years ago.

[@RionWulfe]

MAN I loved my Intellivision. I played it to peices, plus the voice modulator for it?

[@RetroHackShack]

I had an Atari. My best friend had an Intellivision. We were set for many years until the NES.

[@gextreme2381]

Hats off to these trailblazers in their day. Crazy what they delivered with such finite resources. But also thank heavens this is history and hardware is so much more robust.

[@ikonix360]

I once had a VCS that had the speaker holes. I mounted a small speaker and amp inside. With the availability of small good sounding speakers and small amplifiers today, it would be much easier to do that and get much better sound than what I did back in the late 90's

[@xodiaq]

I legitimately never knew they were basically painting the screen using hardware specs. I knew they were brilliant and innovative, but I had no idea to just what level. They used everything they had, and when that ran out, they figured out how to play the system against itself to do more. 🤯

[@ButterSpider3]

This is a fantastic video. I have seen tons of various videos on the 2600. I am a huge fan of the platform. This video has so much information that I never knew. It was sooo interesting! Thanks!

[@bokami3445]

Bumming byte's in the 70's. These guys pushed the VCS hardware *way* beyond belief. These days you'd be hard pressed to find programmers of this caliber. Much respect

[@mikeyoung9810]

There was a game with track and field events and we broke a couple joysticks playing them because you ran moving the joystick back and forth. I loved that joystick.

[@RetroHackShack]

Definitely good for durability.

[@nitrofurano_]

decathlon is to be played with your fingers fastly, not your fist strongly - this is why a lot of people broke them..... xD

[@MousePotato]

I used to use that bug to my advantage on the tank game. If you are against a wall turning the tank will allow you to flip to the other side of the wall.

[@andrewgordon235]

First game console I've seen with wood paneling. Definitely a product of the 70's.

[@dstevans]

I used to repair Atari 2600's. Most of the ones with an all-black screen had a damaged RIOT (Ram / IO / Timer) chip, probably from kids rubbing on the carpet then touching the metal joystick prongs. Didn't even have to solder; the RIOT's have modular sockets, just pry up, throw away, and push in the new one (with a grounding strap on the wrist). The second-most common problem was an all-gray game with no colors due to a corroded color potentiometer. This was a bit more involved, requiring soldering and adjustment, but it was rewarding getting it working again. Paddles also failed due to oxidized potentiometers. Electronics cleaning solvents frequently fixed the paddle problem. The last problem was scratchy-sounding static noise and no other sound. This was resolved by replacing the polystyrene capacitors, which required a heat sink or else the polystyrene would melt while soldering. Using any other type of capacitor (particularly ceramic) would still cause a scratchy sound in the background.

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks for sharing. Fun times! Was this at a store or just out of the house?

[@zeybutzei]

Hello! We are working on a project focuses on a retro product that we’ve never had the chance to use due to our age. In this context, we’d like to hear your thoughts about the "Original Oldschool Atari 2600 Video Computer System". Did you ever encounter any issues with it? For example, were there moments when you thought, "It would have been better if it had/it was..."? Do you think there were aspects, such as the material quality or technical features, that needed improvement? Considering today’s technology and expectations, how could this product be enhanced or reimagined? Your insights would be incredibly valuable for our project!

[@Jolt7800]

I got to meet David Crane, Garry and Daniel Kitchen at a retro game event a few years ago. Great moment in my life.

[@RetroHackShack]

Nice!

[@ScrapKing73]

My first console was an Intellivision (1 kb of RAM)*, and my first microcomputer was a VIC-20 (5 kb of RAM). Old as I am, I struggle to imagine being limited to 128 bytes! *Well, in truth my first console was a first-gen system, a home Pong clone. But the Intellivision was my first cartridge-based system.

[@android584]

I wish a more advanced console had become popular as the 2600 was very limited and we all got stuck playing crappy games. The upside is it was hard to get addicted to 2600 video games as they got boring quick. But it was probably inexpensive compared to the NES or Commodore 64. I still remember the 2600 being sold as late as the late 80s, when 16 bit systems were around.

[@brichan1851]

The VCS is a strange animal for me. We had one when I was 5, back in 1983. I couldn’t figure it out because gaming was so new, I had no frame of reference. To compare it to, or learn from. It helped prepare me for my gaming love, which came to fruition in 1987 with the NES and The Legend of Zelda. Try as I might, I just cannot go back the 2600 to play. It’s a system (with games) that I WISH that I liked, but I don’t. I do, however, have a tremendous amount of respect for Atari and what they brought to the table. This is a wonderful video that breaks down many of the technical aspects of the VCS and is utterly fascinating. Thank you for your hard work. Instant like and instant subscriber.

[@jnnx]

You couldn’t figure it out, because you were FIVE.

[@brichan1851]

@@jnnx yeah, that too

[@zeybutzei]

Hello! We are working on a project focuses on a retro product that we’ve never had the chance to use due to our age. In this context, we’d like to hear your thoughts about the "Original Oldschool Atari 2600 Video Computer System". Did you ever encounter any issues with it? For example, were there moments when you thought, "It would have been better if it had/it was..."? Do you think there were aspects, such as the material quality or technical features, that needed improvement? Considering today’s technology and expectations, how could this product be enhanced or reimagined? Your insights would be incredibly valuable for our project!

[@brichan1851]

@ the controller. I always had troubles with the controller. It was SO cheaply built. The stick, itself, often broke, as did the rubber/plastic cover over the stick. It was the worst thing about the Atari 2600 VCS. Games were a dime a dozen. There were so many games; many being clones of other games. With no regulation, or quality control, games were out to make a quick buck, and were often low quality. On top of that, we never knew what we were getting, as box art was often all we had to go on while choosing what to purchase.

[@wallacelang1374]

Because of the extremely limited memory size of the Atari VCS/2600 there were multiple technical tricks which the game programmers had to develop for the Atari VCS/2600.

[@kennethbeal]

Thank you! A memory from my childhood: I almost beat the Atari 2600 Chess game. IT CHEATED! Stopped playing about then... :) WOW, and you included the Starpath Supercharger! Owned one back then; LOVED the Dragonstomper game!

[@RetroHackShack]

I just released my followup video on the supercharger.

[@ExMachina70]

They certainly don't look it, but these guys are the pioneers of the gaming industry. Thank you for all those wonderful years.

[@retroatx]

I got a summer job loading pulp wood by hand as a kid to buy an intellivision. Afterwards I wished I had bought a 2600 which I later did. I loved them both

[@RetroHackShack]

Awesome. I picked up brush in a local apple orchard to raise funds.

[@unitedstatesirie7431]

Thank you for bringing back good memories of the warmth look wood-paneled house interior and glass TV with ATARI 2600 🕹

[@RetroHackShack]

🙂 That was my childhood

[@JanaBuvari]

I love this! This is the 'OG' "It's not a bug it's a feature" excuse haha or rather "It's totally a feature and not a limitation" Perfect!

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. Given the ROM space limitations it's almost a necessity.

[@sa3270]

I've long known the 2600 had 2 sound voices but it blew my mind a couple years ago when I was watching a video of an Atari 2600 game played on an emulator and it was in stereo. Partly because I had never realized that the sound chip output the two voices separately, and partly because I didn't realize my new phone had stereo! Of course, the 2600 combined them into a mono output, and stereo TV wasn't even a thing back then. Consoles with built in speakers were however quite common at the time, and to realize that Atari contemplated stereo is amazing. In retrospect, I do remember observing those speaker slits in the case as a kid.

[@JerryCalvert-x9u]

Seriously impressive. Im beyond thrilled to see the actual people who litetally helped shape my childhood. Ill never forget when I got my Atari. Joust was my favorite game. The commercial was intense too. Atari had very good commercials back then too. I had no idea what went into these games and consoles from their perspective, but it is extremely fascinating and to me these people truly are some of the best there ever was and ever will be. Theyre basically a national treasure. I could listen then talk and pick their brain endlessly for years. I hope they know how loved they are. Your videos are great. I subscribed and will watch more. Cheers!

[@allwaizeright9705]

My favorite "FEATURE" in combat was - If you got 1 tank behind the other and you made it look like it was ":DOING THINGS" you could get both tanks to then move in fast circles hooked together on the screen...

[@fritzthedog007]

DAMMIT I just posted this myself without reading other comments - I thought I discovered this. I seem to remember if the front tank fires, the shot also loops.

[@aegisofhonor]

this was a challenge pretty much on every computer and console from the early 70s all the way till the late 90s, ram and storage was always a premium on many of these systems and being able to squeeze every last bit of detail and sound out of a limited space was truly an amazing endevor.

[@RetroHackShack]

For sure

[@curiousottman]

Simply fascinating. Really enjoyed your take on the VCS and the interviews from the original developers. Very satisfying. Thank you.

[@drkr]

Great video! Really need to see that video about the speaker mods, *sounds* awesome to do!

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks. I am excited about that one too. I think combat makes use of them for each player's sounds.

[@tixeright9120]

lol, thought the holes were for heat ventilation. I'm betting it didn't hurt. Seems like my dad's Atari VCS lasted forever, we just got tired of it, as more powerful computers and consoles hit the market. River Raid and Frogger and Pitfall and Space Invaders were my favorites before Super Mario and Zelda and Metroid and Contra came out on the Nintendo. Of course, as a kid, I really had no idea they were doing so much with so little back when that was all there was to work with, they were just magic boxes to me.

[@MisterSplendy]

What a fun video. You sure have pulled the curtains back on this great system.

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks!

[@filipe.estima]

Where can I watch the complete video of these old school Atari VCS programmers reunion? Those are legendary people. Was that Carol Shaw that I saw at 07:06?

[@roboknight]

The 2600 was an awesome system. I don’t know how many people know that, in Combat, if you take the joystick apart and use it like a D-pad, you could slow the jets down to “ultra slow” and speed the biplanes up to “ultra fast”. Unfortunately, I didn’t try this trick with enough games, but it added a little something to Combat. It required pressing left/right simultaneously. Up/down worked for the biplanes, I think, and left/right for the jets.

[@stefanocrespi5424]

The Polynomian Counter thing was pure genius.

[@anthonylosego]

It's nice to see my nephew get a shout out for his incredible deep dives on Retro Game Mechanics! I feel like I know a celebrity! 😀

[@MettleHurlant]

In Space Invaders I discovered that if I held down the reset button and toggled the on/off switch it would shoot twice with each button press. I love that old tech.

[@karlkoenigstein4138]

Yes, you could trick the game into allowing 2 of your shots on the screen at the same time! Made it much easier that way… really odd bug, or maybe it was an Easter egg type deal? With mine, anyway, you had to jiggle the switches just right to get that setup…

[@Muldrf]

A great video as usual. I wondered about the apparent "speaker" position in the case, but never heard why it was like that. I'd like to look in trying out getting the split audio out setup.

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks!

[@enfieldjohn101]

The holes in the top piece of the console chassis that would have let sound out for the two speakers wound up being handy air vents for heat dissipation. However, they also were unfortunately easy inlets for dust and even liquid from spills when players made the mistake of having drinks handy while playing on the system. I worked in a family owned game store in the early 2000's. They bought and sold used video games and consoles and were one of the few stores left that still did console and game repair. We had customers bring in a lot of consoles that wound up needing to be cleaned more than anything. One of the consoles we got in frequently were Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800's that people were trying to get working again. Very often, the 2600's had residue from spilled drinks inside them along with layers of dust. :) I didn't notice how 'odd' the sound was for Atari games at first until I got Empire Strikes Back. It's a game I loved then and still do, but even as a little kid, I noticed that the wonderful Star Wars theme song that plays when you start 'feeling the force' didn't sound quite right. This video explains why very well. Gee, if only they could have made the sound chips just a bit better....but that probably would have bumped up the cost of the console and it was already on the verge of being too expensive for most people in 1977 as it was. I love watching videos and reading articles like this! This is one of the best series of videos on the subject. I love them because they remind me and educate those who didn't know yet, about how incredibly difficult it was to design and program these consoles and games that we take for granted today. Full fledged computers were incredibly expensive up until the early 90's. The companies like Atari, Coleco, etc. had to cut as many corners as they possibly could to bring game consoles and games down to prices that were even remotely affordable to the average family. The Atari originally sold for around $180 in the late 70's. Doesn't sound like much today thanks to inflation, but back then, $180 had the buying power of almost $1,000. It was still a big purchase at the time. My Atari VCS that I got from 'Santa' in 1978 was, I found out later, a joint effort by my parents and both sets of grandparents in order to get me the console and two extra games to go with the pack-in game Combat: Blackjack and Breakout. What an epic Christmas present that was! Yes, the advances towards the 'end' of the VCS' life were simply amazing and most of them had to be made inside the cartridges since it was unreasonable at the time to expect families to go out and buy a new and improved Atari VCS to play the newest games. The leaps in graphics and sound from Pitfall to Pitfall II is a great example of what they were able to pull off. As I recall, the Heavy Sixer also had a bit better shielding from electromagnetic radiation than the later consoles did.

[@davy_K]

That polynomial counter in Pitfall is extremely clever.

[@ArkadiaII]

My word! The sour notes of the games of my youth tuned my ear for jazz and jungle. I love music in a blue note. Modern games with their sweet sounds have a lot to answer for! 😂

[@TahoeMtnMan]

Thank you so much for sharing this! Trying to get my son who is starting his coding journey to understand the past need to conserve memory and write efficient code!

[@LatitudeSky]

My family may have had a heavy sixer. It had the six switches but I don’t remember any of the other details. Not long after getting the VCS, my family had to move suddenly and the VCS and games were packed into a black trash bag as that's all we had to work with. It was never seen again. Suspect one of the move helpers took it or thought it was trash and put it outside where someone else took it. But that thing vanished instantly. We were devastated. It was basically our whole entertainment. I learned from it to never, ever put anything you want to keep in a trash bag. Odds are, anyone else will think it IS trash and take it as a freebie or throw it into the actual trash.

[@RetroHackShack]

What a sad story 😭

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Tod Frye, who programmed Pac-Man for the VCS, talks about why it came out the way it did, with the flickering etc, in the documentary "Stella at 20": kzbin.info/www/bejne/i4WnhnWVfM6HgaM and here he is admiring a modern homebrew version of Pac-Man: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iKLIq3mVgdtja7s He's very humble about it.

[@grandadgamer8390]

Yay! A man that calls a VCS a VCS 😊👍

[@SoulforSale]

That's because he is in the 70's area. In the 80's area he calls it the 2600

[@DanyTV79]

Wow! These guys were really great at their job!

[@fahlmancomputing8628]

100%, that first video was awesome and ought not to be missed!!

[@markcrites7060]

Nobody ever called it anything besides just the Atari until very late in its life cycle when other Atari products were being released.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yep

[@pathead]

Just catching this now, but what a GREAT video!

[@BryonLape]

When memory got cheaper, I often wondered what games could have been had the high order bit pins not be disabled.

[@tehScribbles]

I remember plugging in a Sega Genesis controller to the Atari 2600 in the 1990s and it worked, albeit with inverted up and down buttons. That's my contribution to the technical discussion.

[@winstonsmith478]

A backward-forward symmetrical pseudo-random byte generator with bit groups in that byte describing screen contents for forward and backward game screens. Brilliant.

[@jibberism9910]

Great stuff, love those oldskool techies. Funny how it took them a bit before they blacked out a part of the screen to hide some of their tricks.

[@AloanMoreira1]

Great video! love to hear about the technical stuff behind the audio visuals of the 2600. I have a webpage showing detailed info on that as well. I made a 2600 flavor game too. It´s my favorite console. I first saw one here in Brazil in the early 80s. But I bought one also in the US in 1985. But one day I thought I must be dreaming: cartridge prices on this certain store I went to were like a dollar or 99 cents!! I was like: no way! and bough a bunch! little did I know that was the crash!

[@phlack1001]

Great video. And love that shirt, too. It almost looks like the colors are moving.

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks!

[@ChristiRich]

Whenever I played Computer Chess on my VCS, my mother would jokingly call it "the long, drawn out ordeal" 😂

[@RetroHackShack]

Ha

[@codelinx]

Omg that wolf picture is famous lol...I remember that it was awesome

[@George0674]

I remember playing Combat and figuring out if I drove the tank into a corner just the right way, it could teleport to another part of the screen! I thought that was awesome!

[@dmac7128]

One impression I have of the 2600, is the ingenuity of some of its programmers especially at Activision. They were all former Atari programmers that left that company because of the hostile corporate culture. Had Atari given more resources to push the hardware beyond its limits and fostered a creative, dynamic, and open environment to put out more high quality games, the system would have remained more viable until the NES came around.

[@danielschiavo5371]

Hy, that interview of the program team is amazing!!! 🤩, you have a new suscriptor now 👍 Greetings from Buenos Aires

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks

[@Peremptor]

So interesting to see these early designs that came out so functional even when there was no path to follow.

[@drachefly]

16:00 - Something like this trick was also used much later to procedurally define the solar systems in Star Control 2. Each system took its location on the starmap as a seed and PRNG-ed up its planetary statistics. Then all they needed to store for map data was the list of star locations and a few plot-relevant overrides, down from of over 10 000 planets and moons and hundreds of thousands of mineral deposits. I note that the treasures in Pitfall weren't listed as part of the PRNG determined data, so it seems they did that too?

[@RetroHackShack]

I don't remember playing Star Control 2. I will have to check that out.

[@fritzthedog007]

A Combat bug I discovered ; load an early tank game (non-bouncing shots, can't remember if guided or straight shots - guided I think,) position the gun of one tank into the gap at the back of the other, as close as possible without bouncing out. Then do the smallest rotate with the back one. Ha! With luck you can get a continuous effect. BONUS ; fire a shot from the front one. This is all from memory as a kid, late 70's, so I THINK it's right.

[@RetroHackShack]

I'll have to check that out.

[@fritzthedog007]

@@RetroHackShack In fairness, I just noticed allwaizeright9705 posted this same bug 2 weeks ago, so I guess I'm not the only one to discover this. Interesting video, btw, and your previous one. You mentioned switching, I recall F-14 Tomcat used the reset button for some game function, it had to be quick though.

[@victorc2869]

Great video. Shows how programmers had to be really creative in coding. Nowaways, sadly, coders are lazy and you get highly bloated programs that run poorly. Programs are getting bigger and bigger just to do the same thing. Imagine if you had this style of coding on windows programs and games!? Also reminds me of the 64k pc demo challenges out there that proves efficiency can still exist today and the amazing things that can be accomplished.

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks. Yeah. I think there are some circles of programmers who are returning to this idea these days.

[@ikonix360]

"Nowaways, sadly, coders are lazy and you get highly bloated programs that run poorly" Such as Microsoft Windows. " Imagine if you had this style of coding on windows programs and games!" Hardware wouldn't need to be nearly as powerful to do the same things.

[@mtslyh]

They did it out of necessity. If today's programmers were required to program like that even though it is not really necessary these days, our software would cost 10x what it costs today. I'm not condoning what happens today. I'm just saying that there is a spectrum and these guys were on one end of it. Not all software written today is on the other end of the spectrum. Some is but most is somewhere in the middle which is often a reasonable tradeoff for cost.

[@ikonix360]

@@mtslyh Software might actually cost less and work much better as there wouldn't be as many bugs to fix nor updates needed. Plus said programs would be more malware resistant. Computer hardware also might not need to be as powerful.

[@mtslyh]

@@ikonix360 Not sure where you come up with the correlation between squeezing every ounce of performance/space out of code and having fewer bugs. I don't think those things necessarily always occur together. Let's remember that these applications were relatively small back in the day. So by their very nature there was less "code" and therefore less chance of there being bugs in the first place. Plus, these programmers were not your average run of the mill programmer. Most highly skilled programmers create relatively bug free code. But we don't always have the option of being able to get all of the highly skilled coders for our projects which is another good reason why the proposed solution simply doesn't work in real life. Thanks for the discussion.

[@PeteRondeau]

I keep looking but I haven't found any mention of this. Back in the day, in the back of electronics magazines they used to advertise a cartridge that allowed you to program the VCS. you used keypad controllers and programmed in some sort of machine or assembly language. I got it one year for Christmas and it came with sample code that would play the game of life. Does anyone besides me remember this cartridge?

[@bmag4368]

Great video. My dad had the starpath super charger. I only remember him playing that Mind Master game.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. That's a good one.

[@johnchase7667]

When it was release 128 bytes of ram was more then they every expected to need. the program was on the cart so all the ram was used for was to store stuff that had to be updated, location of 2 players and 1 missle sprite and scores. But as we seen with later games 128 bytes could be used to do a lot of stuff.

[@RetroHackShack]

That's right! I covered this on the original 10 things video.

[@joseeliasmartinez9023]

Great Technical video!

[@SupaBuma]

I remember having the SuperCharger! it was awesome! it came with Phaser Patrol and I also had Killer Satellites. Sadly I broke the headphone wire jack because the tapedeck I used at the time had a recessed plug receptacle that restricted me from plugging it in all the way.

[@jasonsdodd]

I've only come across two heavy sixers in the wild. The first was in the early 90s and I didn't know it was different and passed on it because we didn't have enough room in the car. In those days it was not too hard to find an Atari system for $5 or maybe $10 if it had games et al. The 2nd was a Sears version. Ended up selling it because while it wasn't as valuable as the Atari version, it still sold for more than I could afford to not sell it.

[@CreampuffgameZ]

Great video, really teaches you the true nature of the atari

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks

[@TheSocialGamer]

First time on your channel and I love the editing and story telling. Cheers! Subbed, Liked and commented! 👌

[@RetroHackShack]

Thanks!

[@matthewhussey4523]

Intellivision was my first console in the 80s, it was all i had until 1989 when i got a game boy, I was blown away and a Nintendo game boy man for life

[@Knome-Ansland]

David Crane, Larry Kaplan, are geniuses. They made some sweet Activision games!

[@bryede]

8:24 Actually, there are 60 fps. An NTSC TV needs the beam to return to the top at 60 times a second. If the video is interlaced (as broadcast TV generally was) then you got one pass of even lines and then one pass of odd lines spaced between them, resulting in the whole picture being drawn at 30 fps but with the beam going back to the top twice. Since the 2600 doesn't know anything about interlacing, it draws the same lines (call them even or odd) at 60 fps. This also means there's a slight noticeable gap between the lines compared to broadcast TV.

[@RetroHackShack]

This is a good explanation.

[@stickyfox]

Before Bobby Kotick got his fingers on it and *absolutely gutted it of 100% of its value* Activision was a great game company, and their 2600 titles were reliably the best games in anyone's collection. You could spot the labels from across the room and everyone knew them by the colors.

[@JCCyC]

The Supercharger version of Frogger, at least, is very VERY good.

[@RetroHackShack]

Yeah. Better than the original 2600 for sure.