Ataventure - Atari 2600 demo by KK/DMA

[@alexanderwingeskog758]

Truly Amazing! 1980 and playing Combat was just awesome, I could not even imagine stuff like this was possible... Love fixed hardware and the evolution of software on it.

[@fuzz11111111]

Well done to whoever did the music in this. I'm aware of how limited the audio on this console was and it must've been hard trying to get anything sounding like music from it

[@wichtelchen]

That catchy music is the best part of this program^^. It is damn hard to produce such music when two basic frequency dividers with a few waveform choices designed for shoot-em-up-game-sound is all you have for that ^^... It is actually better than the music from Pitfall II. I can't believe this is playing flawless through all the "video" stages without an extra chip driving the audio registers asynchronously (like Pitfall II does). An I can't believe that all fits into the cartridge. It must made out of many different kernels. At least one for each stage. But it fits... oO ^^

[@nebular-nerd]

Impressive stuff, always have a soft spot for a 2600, can you imagine showing this to the people who designed the system.

[@GenMaster]

cracking tune and beautiful graphical effects

[@sa3270]

The parts of this that impress me are the spinning and zoom effects.

[@terryrussell8527]

The demo nailed it with the tune.

[@MoonSarito]

It is hard to believe that this song came from a console with only 2 channels of audio.

[@KKAltair]

You can play very short sound over a long one just by ignoring the start of the latter. I've got 4 virtual channels this way by managing sound priorities and keeping drums short. :)

[@Null42x86]

0:34 Nothing is more ATARI than that square note

[@DexrexxMedia]

HOLY SHIT IS THAT A 3D CUBE ON A 2600 FI PEOPLE LIKE YOU EXISTED BACK THEN GAMES WOULD HAVE ADVANCED SO MUCH MORE

[@soldierofjudgement0477]

What I find weird is that, developers and even the manufacturers underestimate the hardware. But yet, a ton of years later, we get something that looks like it belongs on a Commodore 64 or an Atari 800, yet, it's being run on a Atari 2600. Think about it. Why?

[@soldierofjudgement0477]

And some people think that if you see a pixel, throw out your console nowadays. Don't

[@one_step_sideways]

Because of 128 bytes of RAM.

[@tonmaster189]

@@one_step_sideways you can add ram in cartridge through bank switching

[@tonmaster189]

SoldierOfJudgement04 This is due to cost reducing in cpu which is cheap version of one 16 bits address bus...so it implies cheap and low rom to work. It is not about underestimating but cost...Today it is easy to overcome limitation through bank switching emulation or flashcart with this feature and more memory

[@jamesdeen8158]

​@@tonmaster189 Cost reduction is what really caused issues. The 6507 has less address space and no interrupts - which means that when the TIA is done rendering a line there's no way for the CPU to know and send the data for the next line. The TIA is incredibly capable, especially for the era in which it was released. Had the CPU *at least* had some real interrupts, programming for the system would have been fantastically easier to manage.

[@inphanta]

That music is the best thing I've ever heard from an Atari 2600. Love it!

[@user-wg5oq5od1v]

Great demo, I really love the music. :D

[@chrisandrea4963]

Wow this music is violent and great

[@KKAltair]

Thanks! :)

[@samplesmasher]

very nice! now on the top of my favorite 2600 demos

[@RainbowiaPS3]

THIS IS AMAZING

[@greenaum]

I was thinking... "that's nice the way the smiley face scrolls like that, but shame there wasn't a zoomer". Then I thought "clever... of course there couldn't be a rotozoomer". Then "There CAN'T be a rotozoomer! My eyes are lying to me!".

[@greenaum]

Is it pre-calculated? Or really zoomy rotey on the poor overloaded 6507?

[@tr1p1ea]

Yeah that was very impressive!

[@гксгк]

it uses predefined sin/cos tables for these effects@@greenaum

[@JankPods0201]

THIS HITS HARD!!!

[@amigaatai]

wow amazing!

[@rafotat5798]

Masteriepiece

[@Hologhoul]

Superb!

[@KKAltair]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@hpw-dev]

Мощно

[@thehaigu321]

fcuking amazing!

[@axemanracing6222]

Fucking incredible. I had to download the image to see it myself. Can't believe anyways lol.

[@psovegeta]

It looks pretty cool but does this program run like this on the actual atari 2600 hardware?

[@MarcinJuszkiewicz]

Yes, it does.

[@soldierofjudgement0477]

Well, look at the overdrive 2 demo for the Sega Genesis. People say the demo cripples emulators, but works fine on actual hardware.

[@bastardferret869]

I don't know if you're a programmer... If not, you'd be surprised at how shitty, inefficient, and incorrect most code is at just about every level. It's almost unfathomable even to developers. But when you see things like this, it puts it into perspective. Devs are told to make things "good enough to release." Dissenters are told they are wasting company time and to stop fetishizing. Then of course, your (and millions of others') identities get hacked and it's, "*gasp* how could this have happened!?!?" from both policy makers and massive corporations. Then you're given (expensive) options about what YOU can do to protect the data on these systems that you never really asked to use, as they give you platitudes about how careful they are with your data. And tomorrow the next dev asks if he can rework that module before release. Take a guess at what they tell him... So yes, it's likely the Atari 2600 is capable of running such code in real time. However antiquated it seems today, it was, in the end, a system designed specifically to display computer graphics. Kinda cool, huh? :)

[@vappyenjoyer24]

Veeeeery impressive. It looks like Genesis Techdemos.

[@miketate3445]

How?!

[@greenaum]

Is this all running on base 2600 hardware? No Harmony cart or whatever adding 100x the processing power? If so, bravo! Personally I think demos on Harmony, that basically do everything on a 32-bit ARM at 70MHz then blast it onto the poor dumb bus of the 2600, are cheating and not really impressive like bare-hardware demos. From looking at the website though this is all 2600-based genius! Nice! I liked the gray bars too. Nice version of the tune, too, even on TIA's awful flat sound generators. One day a 2600 will hit a note that's actually known to the world of music.

[@KKAltair]

Thanks! And yes - it's all running on pure 2600 with classic F4 (32k) bankswitching.

[@greenaum]

@@KKAltair Great! Doing more with less, the 6507 rather than an ARM more powerful than the Nintendo DS, is where the genius is! I know a lot of the tables are precomputed, but you could've done that on a C64 or a Vax or something! Good work, keep it up. The grey boxes particularly look good. Horizontal effects are cheaper than vertical ones on the 2600, so you're really playing to the machine's strengths. Same thing with the rainbow bars that've been Atari hallmarks since the beginning. Indeed on the Atari 8-bit computers rainbows are basically free. But the public love 'em, and why wouldn't they? Actually your grey boxes remind me a bit of the Atari official Robot Demo.

[@eightbitguru]

Witchcraft! 😎🔊

[@scalliano]

Mode 7 on a 2600 - WHAT KIND OF WITCHCRAFT IS THIS

[@KKAltair]

Careful timing and usual TIA stuff. :)

[@dr.jan.frankinschtein7935]

А что, на атари 2600, так можно было?

[@Null42x86]

I downloaded the rom thinking that this was a prank or something i used the atari 2600 emulator and it worked!

[@KKAltair]

On top of that - it doesn't use ARM acceleration.

[@manuell3505]

It's not entirely native A2600. The movement is beyond the pixels...

[@patrickmcgee8556]

i miss the days of when ppl had to program around what the hardware was and not just throw hardware at it

[@novostranger]

Sounds like ricardo milos music

[@Ama-hi5kn]

128 bytes of RAM. Man, you gotta do some creative coding.

[@ChristmasEve777]

There was no screen RAM. You could use the TIA chip to draw whatever you like as the TV's electron bean scans across and down. You can actually create something really cool without even using any RAM.... just all code on the ROM manipulating the TIA registers. I'm not saying I know how THIS demo worked. :) Just saying what's possible in general....

[@TheFellerHasAChannelGodDamnIt]

I want someone to remix the music.