Video computer system
by Nick Montfort · first published 2009
5mentions
1recommended by
4HN commenters
2018–2022first – last mentioned
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Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System Is a good read about the Atari 2600 and how the devs were able to fight within the limitations of 1970s and 1980s hardware to develop a gaming platform. https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies...
on “Ask HN: Fun Tech Book Recommendations?” ↗The book "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System" is a pretty interesting overview of the technical challenges they had to overcome. The racing part comes to having to have the frame ready to paint before the CRT beam drew them.
on “The Atari 2600 Webserver” ↗"By paring back the hardware, the designers of the Atari Video Computer System gave game programmers room to be creative" That's some rose-coloured glasses right there if there ever were any. "You know, we COULD give this thing hardware sprites, independent video and audio chips!" "No!…
on “Inventing the Atari 2600 (1983)” ↗Here's a description from wikipedia: The book's title comes from the fact that the Atari 2600, initially branded the VCS (Video Computer System), did not have a video frame buffer, and required the programmers to write each line of video to the television, one line at a time. As there were only a limited number of machine cycles in which to do…
on “Making of “Logon's run – 3D meets the aging bits”” ↗…Atari 2600 games always have a horizontally stretched look to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam "The book's title comes from the fact that the Atari 2600, initially branded the VCS (Video Computer System), did not have a video frame buffer, and required the programmers to write each line of video to the television, one line at a time. As there were only a limited number of machine cycles in which to do…
on ““Pitfall” for the Atari describes its whole world in a single byte” ↗