![]() (#) Unless the manufacturer wanted to pay extra for bank switching hardware in the cartridge, which Atari notably didn't do for the infamous VCS Pac-Man, even though it was available by that point. ![]() Ironically, its limitations were also a strength you needed to control the VCS at a very low level, because there was nothing above that- but being able to do so also gave a massive amount of flexibility that allowed very talented programmers to push it way beyond anything the original designers had probably intended.īut I'd guess programming it was still many times more difficult than programming early 80s home computers, even in machine language. No text facility, a limit of 4KB ROM program space (#), and just 128 bytes of RAM (yes, bytes, not kilobytes). All one dimensional graphics had to be generated on-the-fly by changing the background/sprite/colour data when the output reached the desired scan line (else you'd just have a bunch of variously striped vertical bars). Five weeks for a VCS game is an incredibly short period of time.įor example screen memory? One line of the stuff a 40-pixel wide background, two 8-pixel wide players, two single-pixel missiles and a single-pixel ball. ![]() More importantly, the VCS (AKA 2600) was far more primitive- and difficult to develop for- than most computers of the early 1980s. ![]()
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