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demoscene: Bang! for the Atari 2600

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

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7 comments

  • I consider getting any sort of decent music out of the TIA to be a result on its own, even before the rest of the demo.

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    • right? the demoscene is insane — this is the kind of thing that makes me want to program for a demo, but I don’t know where to start

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      • I'm still struggling through Z80 assembly language myself with an ultimate aim of programming for the Master System and then the Mega Drive using SGDK. But the demoscene regularly delves into the deep magic techniques in getting things done. And programming for the 2600 at the best of times was a whole different beast because of the lack of a framebuffer.

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      • Same here. I've tried to learn OpenGL multiple times, but keep getting distracted by the boilerplate and my distaste for C++isms.

        The nice thing about stuff like 8-bit Game Boy programming or TempleOS is a sense of immediacy. You can put pixels on the screen with just a few lines of code in a way that keeps you motivated to try more, at least relatively speaking.

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  • Reminds me of one of my all-time favorites: Snorpung's Oh! (Video, Another on real hardware)1

    Of course, the Atari 2600 (née VCS) makes even the venerable DMG look like a spaceship2. The sound chip can't even reproduce a full 12-tone equal temperament scale without complicated tricks and the base box has 128 bytes of RAM available. One eighth of a kibibyte. I probably know people who can hold more than that in their head while doing mental math.

    Compare the Bad Apple port on the 2600's close relative, the 800 series 8-bit micro to see what fully tricked-out $1000 box from 1979 can do compared to the humble VCS, a $190 box from 1977.

    Kind of considering posting a Bad Apple demo megathread. That's a fun rabbit hole to dive into, but I'm not sure if there's audience here that's interested yet doesn't already know all about it.

    1: I love all Snorpung's Game Boy demos, but this old one is the one that made me fall in love with the DMG.

    2: Indeed, the DMG features a 4 MHz CPU and 8K working RAM, roughly double the Apollo guidance computer's 2 MHz 15-bit CPU and two Kwords of RAM.

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    • Kind of considering posting a Bad Apple demo megathread. That’s a fun rabbit hole to dive into, but I’m not sure if there’s audience here that’s interested yet doesn’t already know all about it.

      fuck yes I’m down

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