![]() ![]() This is also what makes the Atari such a fascinating console it’s limited, but it gives wide, wide latitude to what programmers can do with it. All your code has to work while the TV is being drawn scanline by scanline, sometimes in the middle of a scanline this is why they call it “racing the beam”. The Atari was an anemic machine with some maddening tradeoffs: at its heart is a custom chip called the TIA that doesn’t work in pixels or in frame buffers, but in a ball sprite, two missile sprites, two player sprites, and a 160 pixel across playfield which can’t even be drawn all the way across the screen normally. 128 bytes of RAM, a 6502 with some of the address lines lopped off like unwanted fingers, and a miserable 4K of max addressable ROM without bankswitching. What compounds my interest in the console (and what this book’s based around) is its utterly bizarre architecture. No one quite knew what would be a success on a home console yet, so if it wasn’t a very abstract Star Wars tie-in or an arcade conversion, it was probably a game about trying not to eat yourself to death when your Italian mother won’t stop making you food. ![]() I’ve loved the Atari ever since I was a little kid watching way too much Classic Game Room and getting lost in quirky titles like Demons to Diamonds and Surround, the real oddities of the Atari’s library. Two Ataris, one the rebadged Sears Tele-Games model, and a collection of controllers and hookups. ![]()
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