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

"The tricks we were pulling were truly insane!" - David Crane. In my original Atari VCS/2600 video, I had way more to talk about than 10 things. This time I cover some of the technical oddities of programming games and why some quirks of the system came into being.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:55 - 128 Bytes
05:49 - Racing The Beam
07:44 - Blinking, Blinds, And Bars
11:57 - It's Not A Bug. It's A Feature!
13:04 - Pseudo Random Numbers
16:01 - Two Minutes Sixteen Seconds
17:24 - Speakers And Sounds
18:29 - Loading From Cassette
20:02 - Pausing Your Game
21:18 - Flat Music Notes
22:54 - Pitfall II
25:33 - What Is A Heavy Sixer?

Music used by permission:
“Rise And Shine” by Malmen

"Frappe Snowland - Smooth McGroove Remix" by Tee Lopes

"City Limits" by Lakey Inspired

"Ice Cleam" by CL Collaboration

Other music from the YouTube Audio Library

#Retro #Computers #atari #atari2600 #videogamehistory

[Jerkwad]

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

[przemekkobel]

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

[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.

[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.

[rogergagne]

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.

[robpuchyr]

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.

[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.

[BryanChance]

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

[stephenmartin]

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.

[MisterSplendy]

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

[drkr]

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

[wallacelang]

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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[TboneTenEighties]

Pitfall I&II / River Raid / Yars Revenge / Megamania / Kaboom / Night Driver / Demon Attack 🔥

Just checked the one I currently own. It has 4 switches but with a thick bezel and feels pretty heavy.

[AloanMoreira]

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!

[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.

[timothyvandenberg]

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.

[winstonsmith]

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