Reply #5: Maybe not give up Xbox, but hook up the 2600

[localroger]

There is something about games of that era that simply isn't found in modern games, even with their snazzy first-person 3D graphics. Maybe it's because in those days there was *nothing* for the game designer to rely on to hook you except game play. The 2600 in particular was a delight for the exact one-pixel precision of collision detection, something I didn't realize until a few years ago was in hardware.

There are some resources on the web for programming the 2600, and I've dabbled a bit. It is one of the most challenging platforms to write for that ever saw widespread use; and that's with modern emulators and debuggers to use in development. Back in the day you'd have to make a program change, spend 5 minutes burning an EPROM, and see how it played by plugging it into a 2600. Then lather, rinse, repeat. Hmmm, this build just gives a black screen? Good luck figuring out why -- there was no debugging info at all, except what the console did.

Some of the games that were made for the 2600 are truly astonishing when you realize what the programmers had to go through to get them to play. Yes they look primitive by today's standards but they were once state of the art, and a testament to what people would go through to create a playable game on hardware that was barely adequate (with a lot of help from the CPU at that) to render an NTSC video frame.