Do i give up my Xbox for the Atari 2600?

[Gothic Sponge]

All my old Atari 2600 stuff has been sitting for years in my mother's basement. I'm thinking of bringing it home. I've been in a very nostalgic mood lately. I've tried the Atari emulators, but nothing beats the old joystick!

[skooooo]

1. Nah, get the Coleco 2000

[MidwestTransplant]

2. Combat requires more pure skill than any other video game IMO!

[Gothic Sponge]

3. I loved Combat!

[frylock]

4. this is a miracle..

two Moon Masters in one household!

[TransitJohn]

6. The best is

the three biplanes versus the big dumb slow bomber. The bomber just spins around and around the entire game. Fun fun fun.

[localroger]

5. Maybe not give up Xbox, but hook up the 2600

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.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

7. Quite probably the big 2600 developers had some kind of hardware emulator

I worked with one of those beasts in college, not for the 6502 but for the 8051. Imagine a PC with a flat cable coming out of it and something that looks like an IC chip at its end. You plug it on the "real" machine in place of the processor, then develop and test in the "PC" with all the debugger niceties developers are used to.

[localroger]

8. Actually, they didn't

The original games like COMBAT were written with the prototype which was essentially a 2600 console where the custom TIA chip was breadboarded, and which had no debug facilities. Later Atari development was done on standard 2600 consoles. There have been quite a few interviews with those principals who can be found, it is really quite amazing what they did in the time frame they had with the resources that were available.