Turbo Duo...What went wrong?

[Tatsujin]

What is a retro can?

[Arkhan]

its like a retro bottle, but a can.

[BigT]

and yes, the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man was a goddamn mess.   It's not like Defender where its like "ok, this isn't as good as the arcade but it's still pretty good."

If you guys haven't already, you should really read the book "Racing the Beam" - it's a history and in-depth study of the VCS/2600 platform. They use popular games like Combat, Pac-Man and Pitfall as case studies, including studying the assembly code used in the games and the creative thinking that had to be used to make the 2600 do anything beyond very basic Combat-type games.

I knew very little about the 2600 going into the book (I was born in 81 so I missed most of the Atari age) but I found the talks about the architecture really interesting - basically the 2600 hardware was specifically designed to run a series of VERY basic games like Pong, combat and a BASIC editor, and that was it. Atari had planned to have that hardware around for a year or two. The guys who designed it never dreamed of being able to do anything approaching games like Pitfall and others - those games were really the product of a lot of creative thinking by the programmers and the fact that the 2600 didn't have a screen buffer, so game logic had to be performed while the screen was being redrawn (hence the book title). Programmers had to be fully aware of the registers keeping track of the current scanline and how many CPU clock cycles they had to run code between scanlines. really interesting stuff.

The book also goes over the absolute corporate insanity that brought about Pac-Man - the suits basically gave the programmer like 5 weeks to create the game. It's kind of amazing he was able to do it at all.

Link to the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334075025&sr=8-1

Thanks for the recommendation.  That sounds like a book right up my alley... sadly, my programming and hacking days are likely behind me as real life and a job in a totally unrelated field takes up 99% of my time, but I always enjoy reading about clever approaches to hardware limitations...  As I was born in '81, the next generation of systems was more familiar to me... I wonder if there are any books like this pertaining to the 8/16 bit generations...

[Tatsujin]

@Tatsujin: I'm adding that slowclap animated GIF to my PWN image collection. Thank you! I guess my avatar would've worked for your purposes too, but eh, that one is kinda old.

[Tatsujin]

its like a retro bottle, but a can.

I never knew that there was a retro bottle as well, I only knew about the retro cup, cap, vase and dish.