Hello, Brazilian here. The reason for the "Portable Atari" being an "Educational Vídeo Game" (Like that, in English) was actually a trick to avoid higher taxes. At the time, video games were considered toys under the market laws, and toys paid A LOT in taxes. So they released it as an Educational device, which had very low taxes.
From what I gather that was also how it was marketed in the Philippines due to the video game ban in place during the Marcos dictatorship. Or at least that was what I saw on an old Readers Digest ad on Flickr.
Homebrew developer here. Nowadays 32k is what I'm most comfortable working with: especially when trying to fit in high res title screens, password systems and ginormous levels. Been working on a 128k title but lots of moving parts to think about. Videos like this help keep me motivated!
A ton of Atari 2600 games REQUIRED the manual to play. They couldn't teach you through tutorials since there wasn't enough space. FatalRun has its flaws but with the manual at your side you can have a lot of fun. I have an old tablet with manuals loaded up to help play first and second gen games.
Yeah you're right about that one. I don't know what I was thinking with that complaint lol. It was a 32 KB game, but the extra space went to other things.
I think the pre-Nintendo collective mindset was pick up and play. Even reviewers today rarely read the manual. So, it keeps me on my toes as a 2600 developer. No room for built in tutorials :)
The folks who made games for the 2600 back then were absolute wizards, the things they pulled off on a machine that was basically just designed to "play a mean game of Pong" are nothing short of amazing and I think that's the beauty of that console. Solaris is practically put together with nothing but visual trickery, probably more than any other 2600 game.
Fatal Run: "You really just gotta figure this all out on your own" or, you could just read the manual that was included with the game! That's why they made it. Scans of it are easily found online nowadays too.
Back in 2016, I was inspired by Secret Quest, and showed off a proof of concept on AtariAge for a more detail-rich Zelda clone, running in only 4KB. The dungeon had a simple 3D perspective, complete with a proper brick texture on the walls. I had also done some mockups for an overworld, but they never made it into the ROM. Unfortunately, my publisher at the time wasn't interested in the project, and the display kernel that I had developed, was used for a totally different game...
Grew up with Solaris. The levels and universe to explore were huge for it's time, even compared to a lot of NES games that were released during that time. Never finished it, as it is kind of convoluted. But still, lot's of great memories with that game!
I grew up with a 2600. I remember finding Solaris in the discount bin at the toy store in the mall. The game blew me away. Played it all the time. It had everything and I'm still shocked at how this was done. Excellent programming!
For a 70s-era console with a stripped-down version of the MOS 6502 CPU, and only 128 bytes of RAM, it sure got a lot of mileage. And even today, people still using it to make new games and impressive demos. This little machine accomplished so much.
Its possible palette was unmatched by consoles from decades later. You'd need a lot of extra RAM in the cartridge, but once you have that, you could display a seriously impressive number of colors.
Yeah you're right about that one. I don't know what I was thinking with that complaint lol. It was one of those things that was too late for me to correct.
Audacity Games (founded by the legendary David Crane & Garry Kitchen) released Circus Convoy, a Pitfall-like game that weighs in at 128k, for the Atari 2600. It was released digitally and on physical carts, which work on any stock 2600 or 7800 console.
The most technically impressive 2600 game is Pitfall 2: Lost Caverns. It used an extra chip that allowed it to have a music soundtrack while you played. It also had very beefed up graphics compared to Pitfall. Matter of fact Pitfall 2 on 2600 is a much better game then Super Pitfall on NES which is wild. It's the only game that looks and sounds better on Atari than on NES. This just shows what a great game designer David Crane was. I played a ton of hours of all 3 games Pitfall, Pitfall 2 and Super Pitfall. Yes, I actually loved Super Pitfall on NES even though most people hate the game but I have to admit the 2600 Version is better.
It might not have been the biggest in terms of file size, but _by far_ the most complicated At2600 game I can think of, would be Space Shuttle. So many mechanics, and it literally uses every button and switch on the console deck (except for the On/Off switch of course) for actual in-game controls. It was just simply crazy.
Crazy enough that I had to make a paper "overlay" to sit atop my Colecovision expansion-module "2600" in order to label the switches needed to play the game.
I still think Jr. Pacman is one of the Atari 2600's best releases. The graphics, music, and scrolling are impressive👍 The only difference from the Jr Pacman arcade is the Atari version scrolls North and South opposed to Left and right. I still think it deserves a mention up there with Solaris and fatal run.
I was watching your Atari/Sears Telegames video, and I remembered a jingle from an Atari commercial out of nowhere. I started singing the line “Under 50 bucks (50 bucks?!). Now isn’t that nice?” I clicked on this video, and you included a clip from that very song/ad. Well done sir! You’ve blown my mind (and you make great content.
The homebrew community and the demoscene community has pushed the VCS/2600 to new levels of what we thought was previously impossible to do with the visuals and in sound on the 2600. Heck elevator action is now on the VCS/2600 in the form of elevator agent, mappy is impressive, and theres quite a few more.
I think the Tapper port by Sega is one of the best arcade conversions I've played on the 2600. Given it has music and almost all the levels from the arcade game *plus* the minigame and Mountain Dew product placement, I'm curious how big the ROM is. lol
I really enjoyed this video. I'm a big fan of retro games, and I feel like I've learned about something that I've never thought about before. I'm going to subscribe and check out some of your other videos. I'm glad the algorithm brought me to your channel!
i had expected to see pitfall II on here, as a non programmer, it impressed me what they were able to achieve with that title back in the day great video btw.. . like & subscribed!
The multi-coloured opposition cars in Fatal Run are a step up from the single colour blocks in Pole Position. And the lack of flicker when you are overtaking is impressive too. But apart from that it doesn't really achieve much technically with all that extra ROM space. Solaris probably the most advanced game which actually has a proper ending AND replay value.
If you look closely, Fatal Run also has hills and dips in the road. Not too dissimilar to Out Run and Rad Racer. I don’t think that any other commercially released game for the 2600 has this effect.
Something that always amazed me with the 2600, is how they managed all this with only 128 bytes of RAM to work with, and no frame buffer for the screen displays. AFAIK the RAM on the 2600 was always 128 bytes.
_Solaris_ is unquestionably the greatest _contemporaneous_ achievement in the history of the console, even though it did after all get released in the 11th hour of the system's sales lifespan. The impressive thing about it is that it manages to be both the most technically impressive game _and_ something that's legitimately fun to play. The brutal truth is that this is not easy to say about very many Atari 2600 games, even taking into account the entertainment standards of its proper era (1977-1985ish). I wouldn't rate _Secret Quest_ as something actually fun to play, for example. In any event, the majority of the Champ Games homebrew library is superior to basically the entire 2600 library, both technically and in terms of fun factor.
Champ Games and many other recentish homebrews are making use of the ARM MCU built into the Melody cartridge PCB, though. So, not exactly a fair fight with the original games. But, yeah, Champ Games are great. And so are many other homebrews.
@@RetroDawn Oh sure, it's not a completely fair fight, but I still sort of count it because 2600 games did after all have a history (invented the whole idea, you could legitimately say) of on-cartridge hardware innovations that expanded the capabilities of the console well beyond what was intended, and the crutch included in Champ Games carts is fundamentally of the same ilk. I'll add that, yes, it's possible to cross a line with such things. Good example being the NES cart that kinda sorta runs an entire video feed (with considerable corruption) for things like a SNES emulator.
@@Asterra2not completely fair?? 😂😂😂. The arm cpu has thousands of times the power of the arcade CPU’s of the time. Technically one could run multiple arcade emulations simultaneously with that chip.
@@RetroDawn i knew there was an arm chip on the carts. but at the end of the day, homebrews like galagon arent even doing as much visually as the 1981 arcade games theyre trying to approximate, so like even if its a million times more powerful, theres only so much help you can filter down to the 2600 lol. take this other bozo who suggests you could straight up emulate the arcade games with the arm chip. yeah? lol! i dont think the 2600 gives a sh--. sounds more like a case of "we dont really need all this power, its this powerful because its 2023 and it would probably cost more to make a chip that was slower"
The switch on the Dynacom cartridge - that's obviously pulling an address pin or a gate to select between two different ROM's (or two different address blocks), right? so does that cartridge have 2 x 32MB or 2 x 64MB of space?
That Dynacom controller for its Atari 2600 clone on 9:22 (in both colours) was THE BEST joystick for the 2600 ever assembled. Since it used the same connector as Atari's, you could just plug it into a 2600 and start playing. It was very sturdy and the controller of choice for most Brazilians while playing Decathlon. I still have mine to this day.
All 2600 pinouts I know of show the 2600 as having a 13 bit address bus (A0 to A12) which would be 8KB addressable space, not 4KB, but maybe they are using A12 or something as a multiplex line for bank switching as 4KB Roms where much cheaper than 8KB Roms at that time.
The available ROM space is limited because of two things, the first is that although the 6502 has 16 address lines the 6507 variant use in the 2600 only has 13, so the entire address space is mirrored 8 times, the second is that it uses very simplified address decoding, based on A12, with A12 = high enabling the ROM and A12 = low enabling the other chips (all of which are also mirrored), so although there are less than 256 bytes of actual RAM/registers they end up occupying pretty much the whole of the lower 4k of address space. Similarly the ROM occupies every odd 4k page of the address space - $1xxx, $3xxx, $5xxx, up to $fxxx
@@TrimeshSZ My bank-switching circuit for the cartridge Toyshop Trouble exploits the fact that there is no need for the internal hardware to read addresses $0800-$0FFF, so reads of addresses 0 1xxx x0xx xxxx can be used to switch to bank 0, and reads of 0 1xxx x1xx xxxx can be used to switch to bank 1, while ignoring most of the address bits. My most interesting non-ARM-based bank scheme supports 32K of RAM and 64K of flash, with a unique banking approach that allowed for a prototype Boulderdash clone called Ruby Runner.
Nobody who talks about Fatal Run seems to realize its other innovation over Pole Position: that you can shoot the other cars and blow them up! In some ways, Fatal Run was one of the first "combat racers" (though I think the NES had a few games you might argue would fit that description before Fatal Run's release in the late '80s!). But yeah. You can shoot the other cars in Fatal Run. It's pretty cool. ;)
Don't forget Atari Games relied on gamers reading the manual before playing. They assumed players read them and knew what all the level bars were beforehand.
I was watching from bed as I was going to sleep. When the Pac-Man Arrangement music came on at the end, I had to get up, walk across the room, sit down and my computer and hit subscribe. The video was great too, but your choice in end theme was the finishing touch that got me out of bed to sub.
Megaboy was a cool concept for a portable. Hook up to any TV wirelessly and portable. I wonder why Nintendo and Sega never tried something like this? I suppose they didn't want to hurt their Gameboy and Gamegear sales but in many ways the Megaboy ability to wirelessly hook up to a TV would make for a better gaming experiance. Imagine if you could do the same thing with a Sega Nomad? Instead of playing on a lousy little 2 inch LED screen you'd be able to play you genny/game gear games from any TV? It could have been pretty cool.
Gotta be careful with the KB/KiB distinction. You say kilobytes while referring to 4 KiB (kibibyte) games, which is fine, until you reference Super Mario Bros as 41 KB which is correct, but confusing since you were actually sitting KiB before.
When the 2600 and 7800 and Lynx and Jaguar discontinued in North America they continued a little longer elsewhere. I remember Big W in Australia were still selling Atari 7800 units in 1994 the same year I got the 2600 Klax game and Toy World in Australia were still selling Atari Lynx units in 1996 the year I got mine with Crystal Mines II.
gonna go out on a limb and say that all of your NES rom sizes are incorrect, as Super Mario Bros is an even 40 KB rom (assuming KB is 1024 bytes). The discrepancy is due to raw rom dumps being converted to the .nes format (originally developed for the iNES emulator sometime around 1996) which appends a header to the start of the real rom data in order to gives emulators information on the cartridge's supported hardware, instead of relying on a master rom table like what you see in N64 emulators.
@@Andros2709 No, the Supercharger was just a 6KB RAM cartridge with an input for a tape recorder. It could thus load up to 6KB from a tape at a time. Dragonstomper was only 25.3KB, which makes it all the more impressive.
Fatal Run is actually an impressive achievement. It's a game with a long single-player campaign with stats you have to worry about and a story that unfolds. The racing engine looks like Pole Position, but it has much more content than Pole Position. Increased content doesn't necessarily translate into better graphics. The robot in the MegaBoy cartridge is Socrates, shamelessly pirated from another educational gadget: Vtech's Socrates computer console.
It's a lot more involved and complex than Moonsweeper (which I'm also a fan of), but, yes, seems inspired by it. It was developed by the same guy who developed Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800, and designed the POKEY sound/paddle ADC/keyboard interface chip. It was a spiritual successor to Star Raiders.
I remember that Atari 2600 Jr commercial when it aired on TV. When that commercial aired in 1986 I already had a Vader 2600, Intellivision, ADAM Colecovision Computer. All I could think about was my cousin's NES that lived across town from. I played Super Mario Bro. for the first time and it blew my 10 year old self's mind. My grandmother surprised the family with an NES for us kids in Christmas of 1987. In 1986 she bought us the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier for Christmas so she was really spoiling us kids. The 2600 Jr wasn't competing with NES that's what 7800 was trying to do. Atari Jr was targeting families that couldn't afford an NES console. When that commercial aired in 1986 I already had a Vader 2600, Intellivision, ADAM Colecovision Computer. The reason it didn't sell that great is because anyone that wanted an Atari 2600 in 1986 already owned one. No point in buying another one no matter how cheap it is.
I Know What makes Atari cartridges bigger for less-quality image games. Since Atari have a very low video buffer and no way to handle bitmaps, a program that made this almost at "real-time" spend too much more memory. It was a good trick, but since the result are poor compared to new platforms, making games for that console was less viable after the launch of Nes or Master System. And thanks for this video.
Weird how some of the later 2600 games used more available memory than some notable SNES games, yet they never stopped looking like 2600 games. There's no 2600 game that I would ever mistake for an SNES game.
Here in Brazil we had a good amount of consoles the size of a controller, which could be used with batteries or an external power source, and an antenna (avoiding the use of TV cables). I believe this was a success around here, as there was a myth that video games spoiled the TV.
I bought Secret Quest. I saw Nolan Bushnell on the package, recognized him, and was intrigued. Later I learned that Bushnell had nothing to do with the game, and Atari just put him on the box to trick people like me. It really changed my opinion of a company that inspired me throughout most of my life. I like to think that it wasn't originally all about making money, even if that's all there is to gaming now.
Congrats on your subs! I've received 4 or 5 orders so far. Seems like a low number, but I wasn't expecting to profit all that much. It doesn't hurt to have it on there because Teespring is free. Just wanted to give my fans the option to have the pojr merch lol.
Even not being a remarkable game in the technical aspect, Fatal Run created this milestone in official Atari ROMs, which would serve as the basis for many homebrew developments, since it is the highest capacity ROM in a single block. The 64k ROMs use two blocks, and the 128k ROMs need additional RAM in the cartridge, resources that somehow extrapolate the capacity of the system. We can see now incredible releases that at the time we would have thought impossible thanks to all this memory capacity available for the VCS 2600 system.
@@charliekahn4205 I think all cartridge consoles have DMA. This has always been the great advantage over optical media models that depended entirely on the capacity of the disk used and the speed of the driver that would run it. In a cartridge you can do everything from using more local memory and even inserting special chips for more features and Nintendo did a lot of this. The cartridge itself is the upgrade of the videogame, which in an optical media model, would only be possible by opening the console. Have already been made cartridges with 128k ROMs in the Atari 2600 which is only possible using additional memory.
I can't believe my country (Brazil) was able to make the biggest Atari 2600 game, and it is (technically) a bootleg. Just an curious fact: The official Atari 2600 was released in Brazil in 1983, our first contact with the 2nd generation consoles, and after that, CCE, Dynacom and Milmar made several 2600 clones (as consoles were considered just a machine that plays the games, like any VHS player can play any VHS), so it was technically legal to make clones of the consoles (but not the game softwares, or else it is piracy). It continued being normal to have multiple consoles that played the same games until the Master System came out in 1989, by the official Sega representant: TecToy. Nobody was authorized to clone the Master System, and so the Mega Drive, released in 1990. But the Atari and NES clones (wich starting popping the market in 1989) were still cheaper options for the most part of the consumers, as Brazil was never a country with good economy and polictics, so most of the population got cash power that was (and still is) way below US standards, so it took a long time to Brazilian gamers and general consumers to leave the "videogames are all the same thing" type of thinking about games. Loved your video! :)
I wonder how big Kung-Fu Master was, packed with graphics and sound to mimic the arcade version. There where only 5 levels, but very difficult to complete 😕
You're right, 8KB-16KB was even a feat for many NES games back in the day at first. The issue with the Atari was the limited colors/resolution, so even with a 256KB ROM, it wouldn't be able to surpass hard limits.
@@NoMore12345-z They incorrectly described them as 25KB and 41KB only because Windows was rounding up the added bytes from the ROM header in the iNES format that describes the cartridge type.
The Atari VCS actually had a 128 color palette, which is more than double the palette of the NES. But, yes, the sprites (players, missles, ball) and playfield could only be one color each; however, the color for each could be changed on every scanline.
Funny you mention the Brazilian case. That alone says it all, you are a hardcore gamer/connisseur. Anyway, what about the Raiders of the Lost Ark? Besides all, you had to.use both joysticks to play the game alone. IMHO, there should have a whole documentary dedicated to that one crazy game.
Pitfall II not only used bankswitching, but it also had a "DPC" (David Patrick Crane) chip which could precompute values that needed to be fed to the CPU to play 3-voice audio and sprite loading/masking.
Really good take, enjoyed your viewpoint and learned from you big chap! Brought up on the orignal VCS and poor thing got left behind when we the 800XL moved in... Bro did go mad for collecting few years back. backintheday... it was Hero and Pitfall II and the four renegades from Atari and the real Activision that did it!
"Super Mario Bros." is NOT 41. It is 40KB. The data in ROM above 40KB mark is a little bit of info required by iNES format about mapper, header. The data itself is 40 (8 for graphics, 32 for everything else).
Hello, Brazilian here. The reason for the "Portable Atari" being an "Educational Vídeo Game" (Like that, in English) was actually a trick to avoid higher taxes. At the time, video games were considered toys under the market laws, and toys paid A LOT in taxes. So they released it as an Educational device, which had very low taxes.
From what I gather that was also how it was marketed in the Philippines due to the video game ban in place during the Marcos dictatorship. Or at least that was what I saw on an old Readers Digest ad on Flickr.
Brasil is Huge Atari Sucess,im from Brasil and i know about it...
Homebrew developer here. Nowadays 32k is what I'm most comfortable working with: especially when trying to fit in high res title screens, password systems and ginormous levels. Been working on a 128k title but lots of moving parts to think about. Videos like this help keep me motivated!
I actually checked out your channel, I'm really impressed with your work. Really cool to see what you're doing with old hardware.
》Awesome! 🫵🇧🇷✌️
》prof.brunotsouza》The best ones among the best.
🕹
I want to make an Atari 2600 game, what tools are you using?
A ton of Atari 2600 games REQUIRED the manual to play. They couldn't teach you through tutorials since there wasn't enough space. FatalRun has its flaws but with the manual at your side you can have a lot of fun. I have an old tablet with manuals loaded up to help play first and second gen games.
Yeah you're right about that one. I don't know what I was thinking with that complaint lol. It was a 32 KB game, but the extra space went to other things.
I think the pre-Nintendo collective mindset was pick up and play. Even reviewers today rarely read the manual. So, it keeps me on my toes as a 2600 developer. No room for built in tutorials :)
I had Radar Lock😊
The folks who made games for the 2600 back then were absolute wizards, the things they pulled off on a machine that was basically just designed to "play a mean game of Pong" are nothing short of amazing and I think that's the beauty of that console. Solaris is practically put together with nothing but visual trickery, probably more than any other 2600 game.
Agreed. 2600 fans should read "Racing the Beam" for an in depth look at the challenges the devs had to overcome. 😊
Fatal Run: "You really just gotta figure this all out on your own" or, you could just read the manual that was included with the game! That's why they made it. Scans of it are easily found online nowadays too.
I was a programmer assistant for Fatal Run 2600 and 7800, brings back a lot of memories :)
Solaris was so impressive to me. I never got tired of seeing the warp sequence and I loved how big the world map was.
Back in 2016, I was inspired by Secret Quest, and showed off a proof of concept on AtariAge for a more detail-rich Zelda clone, running in only 4KB.
The dungeon had a simple 3D perspective, complete with a proper brick texture on the walls. I had also done some mockups for an overworld, but they never made it into the ROM.
Unfortunately, my publisher at the time wasn't interested in the project, and the display kernel that I had developed, was used for a totally different game...
Grew up with Solaris. The levels and universe to explore were huge for it's time, even compared to a lot of NES games that were released during that time. Never finished it, as it is kind of convoluted. But still, lot's of great memories with that game!
Yeah it was a hard game for me to figure out. I didn't cover it in as much detail as I did radar lock.
I grew up with a 2600. I remember finding Solaris in the discount bin at the toy store in the mall. The game blew me away. Played it all the time. It had everything and I'm still shocked at how this was done. Excellent programming!
For a 70s-era console with a stripped-down version of the MOS 6502 CPU, and only 128 bytes of RAM, it sure got a lot of mileage. And even today, people still using it to make new games and impressive demos. This little machine accomplished so much.
Its possible palette was unmatched by consoles from decades later. You'd need a lot of extra RAM in the cartridge, but once you have that, you could display a seriously impressive number of colors.
Woa I've never guessed the 64KB Atari 2600 game was a Brazilian game.
Btw Hello from Brazil 😂👋
But could that game run on a real atari 2600 system or only on that clone system?
@@johneygd On Real VCS,duh,im from Brasil (brasil is with S,no Z)and i always have to Explain this all the time.....
Lucky you guys.
@@fabricio4794 in English Brazil is written with Z bro, in Portuguese is write with S. Get used to it bro
I definitely feel like Fatal Run expected you to have the manual on hand - MANY old games did! Saves space on the cartridge for more game.
Yeah you're right about that one. I don't know what I was thinking with that complaint lol. It was one of those things that was too late for me to correct.
it was twofold: hard to represent objects and most 2600 games didn't have a lot of space for text.
100% facts.
Audacity Games (founded by the legendary David Crane & Garry Kitchen) released Circus Convoy, a Pitfall-like game that weighs in at 128k, for the Atari 2600. It was released digitally and on physical carts, which work on any stock 2600 or 7800 console.
Thanks for taking the time to show and explain.
The many many limits of the 2600 caused some real challenges for programmers!
And many programmers absolutely love that challenge.
As many games of that era, Fatal Run had a manual. So those bars are perfectly described there.
Solaris is a Masterpiece. I was so impressed when i first saw it.
The most technically impressive 2600 game is Pitfall 2: Lost Caverns. It used an extra chip that allowed it to have a music soundtrack while you played. It also had very beefed up graphics compared to Pitfall. Matter of fact Pitfall 2 on 2600 is a much better game then Super Pitfall on NES which is wild. It's the only game that looks and sounds better on Atari than on NES. This just shows what a great game designer David Crane was. I played a ton of hours of all 3 games Pitfall, Pitfall 2 and Super Pitfall. Yes, I actually loved Super Pitfall on NES even though most people hate the game but I have to admit the 2600 Version is better.
It might not have been the biggest in terms of file size, but _by far_ the most complicated At2600 game I can think of, would be Space Shuttle. So many mechanics, and it literally uses every button and switch on the console deck (except for the On/Off switch of course) for actual in-game controls. It was just simply crazy.
Crazy enough that I had to make a paper "overlay" to sit atop my Colecovision expansion-module "2600" in order to label the switches needed to play the game.
I still think Jr. Pacman is one of the Atari 2600's best releases. The graphics, music, and scrolling are impressive👍 The only difference from the Jr Pacman arcade is the Atari version scrolls North and South opposed to Left and right. I still think it deserves a mention up there with Solaris and fatal run.
I actually talk about Jr Pac-Man in my "Impressive Title Screen on Atari 2600…How is this Possible" video.
I was watching your Atari/Sears Telegames video, and I remembered a jingle from an Atari commercial out of nowhere. I started singing the line “Under 50 bucks (50 bucks?!). Now isn’t that nice?”
I clicked on this video, and you included a clip from that very song/ad.
Well done sir! You’ve blown my mind (and you make great content.
The homebrew community and the demoscene community has pushed the VCS/2600 to new levels of what we thought was previously impossible to do with the visuals and in sound on the 2600.
Heck elevator action is now on the VCS/2600 in the form of elevator agent, mappy is impressive, and theres quite a few more.
If I hear KEELOBYTES one more time, I am going to scream.
Imagine thinking literally EVERY OTHER PERSON ON THE PLANET is pronouncing it wrong
I think the Tapper port by Sega is one of the best arcade conversions I've played on the 2600.
Given it has music and almost all the levels from the arcade game *plus* the minigame and Mountain Dew product placement, I'm curious how big the ROM is. lol
I actually own Tapper on the 2600 and I love it. Also I consider it my favorite Arcade game of all time.
It’s 16k
I really enjoyed this video. I'm a big fan of retro games, and I feel like I've learned about something that I've never thought about before. I'm going to subscribe and check out some of your other videos. I'm glad the algorithm brought me to your channel!
i had expected to see pitfall II on here, as a non programmer, it impressed me what they were able to achieve with that title back in the day
great video btw.. . like & subscribed!
It's amazing that Pitfall II was even possible on the 2600... it still holds up well today.
@@JustMe99999 I find the c64 versions of both 1 and 2 much better than the 2600 versions.
@@maxxdahl6062 Obviously. But to get a game like Pitfall to work on the 2600 is an incredible feat.
@@JustMe99999 Yeah, they had to do some expansion chips for 2 I believe in the cart for audio and maybe stuff like scrolling the stages, etc.
Considering the Atari 2600 was made way back in 1977, it's larger games were indeed quite impressive for that vintage hardware.
I love how MegaBoy's cart just rips off Socrates the robot from Vtech's Socrates "console".
The multi-coloured opposition cars in Fatal Run are a step up from the single colour blocks in Pole Position. And the lack of flicker when you are overtaking is impressive too. But apart from that it doesn't really achieve much technically with all that extra ROM space. Solaris probably the most advanced game which actually has a proper ending AND replay value.
This channel is underrated! Keep up the good work!
Thank you!
Yikes, I didn't know the first batch of NES games were so small.
Yeah I never really thought about it until recently. I decided to look at the amount of space it takes off, and was genuinely surprised.
When you mentioned games with large file sizes, I had a feeling you'd talk about Solaris, and I'm glad to see it here!
Interesting video but I found the closing segment to be repetitive. Definitely wasn’t necessary but interesting video thank you
If you look closely, Fatal Run also has hills and dips in the road. Not too dissimilar to Out Run and Rad Racer. I don’t think that any other commercially released game for the 2600 has this effect.
Something that always amazed me with the 2600, is how they managed all this with only 128 bytes of RAM to work with, and no frame buffer for the screen displays. AFAIK the RAM on the 2600 was always 128 bytes.
_Solaris_ is unquestionably the greatest _contemporaneous_ achievement in the history of the console, even though it did after all get released in the 11th hour of the system's sales lifespan. The impressive thing about it is that it manages to be both the most technically impressive game _and_ something that's legitimately fun to play. The brutal truth is that this is not easy to say about very many Atari 2600 games, even taking into account the entertainment standards of its proper era (1977-1985ish). I wouldn't rate _Secret Quest_ as something actually fun to play, for example. In any event, the majority of the Champ Games homebrew library is superior to basically the entire 2600 library, both technically and in terms of fun factor.
Champ Games and many other recentish homebrews are making use of the ARM MCU built into the Melody cartridge PCB, though. So, not exactly a fair fight with the original games. But, yeah, Champ Games are great. And so are many other homebrews.
@@RetroDawn Oh sure, it's not a completely fair fight, but I still sort of count it because 2600 games did after all have a history (invented the whole idea, you could legitimately say) of on-cartridge hardware innovations that expanded the capabilities of the console well beyond what was intended, and the crutch included in Champ Games carts is fundamentally of the same ilk. I'll add that, yes, it's possible to cross a line with such things. Good example being the NES cart that kinda sorta runs an entire video feed (with considerable corruption) for things like a SNES emulator.
@@Asterra2not completely fair?? 😂😂😂. The arm cpu has thousands of times the power of the arcade CPU’s of the time. Technically one could run multiple arcade emulations simultaneously with that chip.
@@RetroDawn i knew there was an arm chip on the carts. but at the end of the day, homebrews like galagon arent even doing as much visually as the 1981 arcade games theyre trying to approximate, so like even if its a million times more powerful, theres only so much help you can filter down to the 2600 lol. take this other bozo who suggests you could straight up emulate the arcade games with the arm chip. yeah? lol! i dont think the 2600 gives a sh--. sounds more like a case of "we dont really need all this power, its this powerful because its 2023 and it would probably cost more to make a chip that was slower"
The switch on the Dynacom cartridge - that's obviously pulling an address pin or a gate to select between two different ROM's (or two different address blocks), right? so does that cartridge have 2 x 32MB or 2 x 64MB of space?
Activision s HERO,is 8k But it was one of the Best Plataform Games of All Time,aside with Atari s Frostbyte.....
That Dynacom controller for its Atari 2600 clone on 9:22 (in both colours) was THE BEST joystick for the 2600 ever assembled. Since it used the same connector as Atari's, you could just plug it into a 2600 and start playing. It was very sturdy and the controller of choice for most Brazilians while playing Decathlon. I still have mine to this day.
All 2600 pinouts I know of show the 2600 as having a 13 bit address bus (A0 to A12) which would be 8KB addressable space, not 4KB, but maybe they are using A12 or something as a multiplex line for bank switching as 4KB Roms where much cheaper than 8KB Roms at that time.
The available ROM space is limited because of two things, the first is that although the 6502 has 16 address lines the 6507 variant use in the 2600 only has 13, so the entire address space is mirrored 8 times, the second is that it uses very simplified address decoding, based on A12, with A12 = high enabling the ROM and A12 = low enabling the other chips (all of which are also mirrored), so although there are less than 256 bytes of actual RAM/registers they end up occupying pretty much the whole of the lower 4k of address space. Similarly the ROM occupies every odd 4k page of the address space - $1xxx, $3xxx, $5xxx, up to $fxxx
@@TrimeshSZ My bank-switching circuit for the cartridge Toyshop Trouble exploits the fact that there is no need for the internal hardware to read addresses $0800-$0FFF, so reads of addresses 0 1xxx x0xx xxxx can be used to switch to bank 0, and reads of 0 1xxx x1xx xxxx can be used to switch to bank 1, while ignoring most of the address bits. My most interesting non-ARM-based bank scheme supports 32K of RAM and 64K of flash, with a unique banking approach that allowed for a prototype Boulderdash clone called Ruby Runner.
Nobody who talks about Fatal Run seems to realize its other innovation over Pole Position: that you can shoot the other cars and blow them up! In some ways, Fatal Run was one of the first "combat racers" (though I think the NES had a few games you might argue would fit that description before Fatal Run's release in the late '80s!).
But yeah. You can shoot the other cars in Fatal Run. It's pretty cool. ;)
Don't forget Atari Games relied on gamers reading the manual before playing. They assumed players read them and knew what all the level bars were beforehand.
I was watching from bed as I was going to sleep. When the Pac-Man Arrangement music came on at the end, I had to get up, walk across the room, sit down and my computer and hit subscribe. The video was great too, but your choice in end theme was the finishing touch that got me out of bed to sub.
Megaboy was a cool concept for a portable. Hook up to any TV wirelessly and portable. I wonder why Nintendo and Sega never tried something like this? I suppose they didn't want to hurt their Gameboy and Gamegear sales but in many ways the Megaboy ability to wirelessly hook up to a TV would make for a better gaming experiance. Imagine if you could do the same thing with a Sega Nomad? Instead of playing on a lousy little 2 inch LED screen you'd be able to play you genny/game gear games from any TV? It could have been pretty cool.
Glad you mentioned Brasil lol
Thanks for the video !
He-man and Burgertime from M Network claim 128K on their PCBs.
That would be in bits, then. So 16KB.
Gotta be careful with the KB/KiB distinction.
You say kilobytes while referring to 4 KiB (kibibyte) games, which is fine, until you reference Super Mario Bros as 41 KB which is correct, but confusing since you were actually sitting KiB before.
Pitfall II is the most impressive 2600 game to me.
That and H.E.R.O.
You should look at many of the homebrew games being made for the 2600 today
When the 2600 and 7800 and Lynx and Jaguar discontinued in North America they continued a little longer elsewhere. I remember Big W in Australia were still selling Atari 7800 units in 1994 the same year I got the 2600 Klax game and Toy World in Australia were still selling Atari Lynx units in 1996 the year I got mine with Crystal Mines II.
Pitfall, double dragon and and Karate were the most impressive Atari 2600 games for me.
gonna go out on a limb and say that all of your NES rom sizes are incorrect, as Super Mario Bros is an even 40 KB rom (assuming KB is 1024 bytes). The discrepancy is due to raw rom dumps being converted to the .nes format (originally developed for the iNES emulator sometime around 1996) which appends a header to the start of the real rom data in order to gives emulators information on the cartridge's supported hardware, instead of relying on a master rom table like what you see in N64 emulators.
4:17 no way its golden freddy from fnaf minigame 🤓
*"DRAGON STOMPER"* is the 1st RPG and is huge in kilo bites or whatever you weigh these games by.
True, but it required the Supercharger, which is considered a different hardware.
@@Andros2709 No, the Supercharger was just a 6KB RAM cartridge with an input for a tape recorder. It could thus load up to 6KB from a tape at a time. Dragonstomper was only 25.3KB, which makes it all the more impressive.
@@RetroDawn Do you mean it was also available on cartridge? Awesome, I didn't know it, thanks for the info
how big was pitfall 2?
Fatal Run is actually an impressive achievement. It's a game with a long single-player campaign with stats you have to worry about and a story that unfolds. The racing engine looks like Pole Position, but it has much more content than Pole Position. Increased content doesn't necessarily translate into better graphics.
The robot in the MegaBoy cartridge is Socrates, shamelessly pirated from another educational gadget: Vtech's Socrates computer console.
cool hairdo man! like the style.
oh dang, solaris looks cool. a lot like moonsweeper, which is one of my childhood favorites. I should check it out.
It's a lot more involved and complex than Moonsweeper (which I'm also a fan of), but, yes, seems inspired by it. It was developed by the same guy who developed Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800, and designed the POKEY sound/paddle ADC/keyboard interface chip. It was a spiritual successor to Star Raiders.
Key-low byte
Oops lol.
@@pojr The correct pronunciation is more low-key.
Don't forget the 32-in-1 cartridge from Atari. That was 64KB in total. Though it was only released in Europe.
This was an excellent documentary 👍. I like how your able to explain complex topics
*you're (contraction of "YOU aRE")
your = possessive
*topics.
I remember that Atari 2600 Jr commercial when it aired on TV. When that commercial aired in 1986 I already had a Vader 2600, Intellivision, ADAM Colecovision Computer. All I could think about was my cousin's NES that lived across town from. I played Super Mario Bro. for the first time and it blew my 10 year old self's mind. My grandmother surprised the family with an NES for us kids in Christmas of 1987. In 1986 she bought us the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier for Christmas so she was really spoiling us kids. The 2600 Jr wasn't competing with NES that's what 7800 was trying to do. Atari Jr was targeting families that couldn't afford an NES console. When that commercial aired in 1986 I already had a Vader 2600, Intellivision, ADAM Colecovision Computer. The reason it didn't sell that great is because anyone that wanted an Atari 2600 in 1986 already owned one. No point in buying another one no matter how cheap it is.
really cool video I would love to see emulation that took advantage of larger storage we have today on original hardware
Circus Convoy is 128KB and it does make good usage of that. Closest to the commercial games from the 80's.
I Know What makes Atari cartridges bigger for less-quality image games. Since Atari have a very low video buffer and no way to handle bitmaps, a program that made this almost at "real-time" spend too much more memory. It was a good trick, but since the result are poor compared to new platforms, making games for that console was less viable after the launch of Nes or Master System. And thanks for this video.
My all time fav Atari games are berserk ,pitfall and Jungle Hunt among others
Weird how some of the later 2600 games used more available memory than some notable SNES games, yet they never stopped looking like 2600 games. There's no 2600 game that I would ever mistake for an SNES game.
I came to see if Solaris is mentioned, video did not disappoint.
And what about those 8/16/32 in 1 Cartridges? How big where those?
Add up each game individually
@@patsfan4life So are there 6/16/32 Chips inside each with a single Game or what?
@@retroprogamer7009 no, there's just one ROM with all the games on it
@@patsfan4life well and how big is this? Is it bigger than the biggest game ?
@@retroprogamer7009 bigger than any of the original Atari releases anyways
Here in Brazil we had a good amount of consoles the size of a controller, which could be used with batteries or an external power source, and an antenna (avoiding the use of TV cables).
I believe this was a success around here, as there was a myth that video games spoiled the TV.
I've heard of a few of these, and they seem really cool, even if cheaply made.
I bought Secret Quest. I saw Nolan Bushnell on the package, recognized him, and was intrigued.
Later I learned that Bushnell had nothing to do with the game, and Atari just put him on the box to trick people like me. It really changed my opinion of a company that inspired me throughout most of my life.
I like to think that it wasn't originally all about making money, even if that's all there is to gaming now.
So why did Pacman, one of the larges releases only use the cheapest 4K ROM format? Greedy bastards as Pacman can be made very playable on the 2600.
I'm going to have to look up what the Demoscene has pulled off with the 2600. They're constantly doing impressive stuff in a matter of kilobytes.
How is your merch doing. I have about the same number of subscribers as you (different topic) and wasn't sure it it was time yet.
Congrats on your subs! I've received 4 or 5 orders so far. Seems like a low number, but I wasn't expecting to profit all that much. It doesn't hurt to have it on there because Teespring is free. Just wanted to give my fans the option to have the pojr merch lol.
And what about the Super Charger, the Atari 2600 expansion cart?
I have a supercharger, pretty impressive kit for when it was released.
KEE-LOW-BYTE?? Silly pronunciation lol
Even not being a remarkable game in the technical aspect, Fatal Run created this milestone in official Atari ROMs, which would serve as the basis for many homebrew developments, since it is the highest capacity ROM in a single block. The 64k ROMs use two blocks, and the 128k ROMs need additional RAM in the cartridge, resources that somehow extrapolate the capacity of the system. We can see now incredible releases that at the time we would have thought impossible thanks to all this memory capacity available for the VCS 2600 system.
Did Atari's standard cartridge bus have DMA?
@@charliekahn4205 I think all cartridge consoles have DMA. This has always been the great advantage over optical media models that depended entirely on the capacity of the disk used and the speed of the driver that would run it. In a cartridge you can do everything from using more local memory and even inserting special chips for more features and Nintendo did a lot of this. The cartridge itself is the upgrade of the videogame, which in an optical media model, would only be possible by opening the console. Have already been made cartridges with 128k ROMs in the Atari 2600 which is only possible using additional memory.
"...and size isnt everything." Probably the only UA-camr who wouldn't make a d**k joke here. This Pojr guy seems like a class act. Subscribed.
What's a keelo?
Nice stuff man! keep up!
So there was an ATARI 2600 GAME that used the same space as an n64 memory pack could hold? Dang...
1989 game on atari 2600 2 years before snes wow 14 years of existence.
Radar Lock is a game I've heard of but never played. And it's an Atari 2600 clone of Afterburner. You can't get much more ambitious than that.
Yeah I was blown away by Radar Lock.
@@pojr Radar Lock and Solaris was the creme de la creme for me...
bad apple for atari 2600 is 480k with alot of bank switching shenanigans
I can't believe my country (Brazil) was able to make the biggest Atari 2600 game, and it is (technically) a bootleg.
Just an curious fact:
The official Atari 2600 was released in Brazil in 1983, our first contact with the 2nd generation consoles, and after that, CCE, Dynacom and Milmar made several 2600 clones (as consoles were considered just a machine that plays the games, like any VHS player can play any VHS), so it was technically legal to make clones of the consoles (but not the game softwares, or else it is piracy). It continued being normal to have multiple consoles that played the same games until the Master System came out in 1989, by the official Sega representant: TecToy. Nobody was authorized to clone the Master System, and so the Mega Drive, released in 1990. But the Atari and NES clones (wich starting popping the market in 1989) were still cheaper options for the most part of the consumers, as Brazil was never a country with good economy and polictics, so most of the population got cash power that was (and still is) way below US standards, so it took a long time to Brazilian gamers and general consumers to leave the "videogames are all the same thing" type of thinking about games.
Loved your video! :)
Holy shit it's Socrates the Robot! If you ever do a review of the Socrates game console this Megaboy game will make more sense!
I wonder how big Kung-Fu Master was, packed with graphics and sound to mimic the arcade version. There where only 5 levels, but very difficult to complete 😕
I predict that someday in the future, there will be a game that requires *megabytes*
You're right, 8KB-16KB was even a feat for many NES games back in the day at first. The issue with the Atari was the limited colors/resolution, so even with a 256KB ROM, it wouldn't be able to surpass hard limits.
Without a mapper NES games had 16 or 32KB ROM chips for the program and 8KB for the graphics tiles.
@@soundspark Ah, fair enough, forgot about the non-mapper stuff.
@@NoMore12345-z They incorrectly described them as 25KB and 41KB only because Windows was rounding up the added bytes from the ROM header in the iNES format that describes the cartridge type.
@@soundspark Interesting. I wonder if the iNES 2.0 format has this issue too.
The Atari VCS actually had a 128 color palette, which is more than double the palette of the NES. But, yes, the sprites (players, missles, ball) and playfield could only be one color each; however, the color for each could be changed on every scanline.
Face masks? Is it 2020? 😂 anyway, glad to be here!
Funny you mention the Brazilian case. That alone says it all, you are a hardcore gamer/connisseur.
Anyway, what about the Raiders of the Lost Ark? Besides all, you had to.use both joysticks to play the game alone.
IMHO, there should have a whole documentary dedicated to that one crazy game.
What about Activision titles? Did they use bank switching? H.E.R.O and Pitfall II both looked amazing
I like both Pitfall games because the have endings.
Pitfall II not only used bankswitching, but it also had a "DPC" (David Patrick Crane) chip which could precompute values that needed to be fed to the CPU to play 3-voice audio and sprite loading/masking.
Really good take, enjoyed your viewpoint and learned from you big chap! Brought up on the orignal VCS and poor thing got left behind when we the 800XL moved in... Bro did go mad for collecting few years back. backintheday... it was Hero and Pitfall II and the four renegades from Atari and the real Activision that did it!
It's weird to think that the console industry is half a century old
"Super Mario Bros." is NOT 41. It is 40KB. The data in ROM above 40KB mark is a little bit of info required by iNES format about mapper, header. The data itself is 40 (8 for graphics, 32 for everything else).
ok im subscribed
The green screen is having a hard Tim with your hair!
😂
9:57 Compare that Mega Boy robot with the VTech Socrates robot. Very similar.
BRASILLLLLLLLLLLL PORRAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
I remember the mega boy.
I skipped the video and googled it. TLDR: It's the Brazilian Mega Boy Education cart.
But are you correct? Find out in the video!
10:55
"Size isn't every thing "
That's what my wife tells me
I'd love to know the outro music if you don't mind sharing, thank you!