Re: [stella] Stella sequencing

Subject: Re: [stella] Stella sequencing
From: Nick S Bensema <nickb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 17:00:11 -0700 (MST)
> > Well, in the aspect of this question of yours, since emulators probably provide
> > "unlimited" resources, such as RAM (if need be), it may obscure (or even cover
> > up) blatant programming mistakes that would seize fast on a real VCS.  (I
> > actually don't have the data to say for certain, however, since so many
> > incarnations of VCS runtime envrionments exist, I imagine Stella and other
> > emulators "can provide" tons more than 128 bytes of RAM and 4k of ROM, etc.
> 
> Most of the emulators do support up to 32k bankswitched ROM images, but
> then so does the real VCS.  But they won't supply any more than that or
> 128 bytes of RAM to the program code - that's the point of emulation.

I imagine the emulator could be reprogrammed to have addressable RAM
at, say, $0400-$0FFF, just so that programmers could experiment with
what would be possible if the 2600 had that much memory.

But, come on, how useful would that be?  It would become an emulator
for a system that does not exist, and is still a pain to program
for.  Even if one could modify existing 2600 machines to do the same
thing, that would probably too huge of a hardware project to become
widespread.

It would be easier to enhance the 2600's capabilities based on the
ingenious things people have done with the cartridge port, such as
the Pitfall II custom chips, Supercharger RAM, or that little
squitch of RAM included in some 16K cartridges.  And current
emulators already support all of these enhancements, though nobody
right now is programming new games with them (especially the Pitfall
II chip), probably because it's so hard to make a physical cartridge
with more than the stock 4K in one's garage.


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