> From owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx Thu Mar 4 00:12:34 1999
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> Subject: Re: [stella] Building yourself an A2600
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> At 04:14 PM 3/3/99 -0500, you wrote:
> >What Atari games used the 2600 style hardware? I have looked a a good
> number of the early Atari arcades games during my work on MAME and have not
> seen any yet that work that way.
>
> I don't think MAME emulates the games that are closest to the 2600 in
> archetecture.
>
> >There are either all discrete logic like Pong, or they are basic tile and
> sprite systems with custom logic thrown in to do scalling and such.
>
> The designers said that the way (in actual electronic components inside the
> TIA) that the 2600 generates its sprites was similar to the early coinops,
> but made generalizable.
>
> If you look at the motherboard of Space Race, you will see the actual
> shapes of the ships as diodes or resistors in a V pattern which, through
> analog logic, delay the signals in such a way as to generate that shape on
> the screen.
Can you think of any others other then Space Race? I would be very interested in looking at the schematics for some of these games.
I am amazed at how inovative Atari got with hardware in thier early games to get around the limitations of the processor. For example Sky Raider which uses an analog circuit to squeeze the display into a trapazoidal (psuedo 3D) shape, and Star Ship 1 that uses hardware based circle drawing and analog circuits to scale the sprites.
Sorry if all this is a little off topic from the list but's it's a fascinating topic for me be a hardware junky ;)
Dan Boris
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