One of the biggest limiting factors of early computers was the cost of RAM. In the late 1970s, I remember seeing an advertisement for 64K of RAM costing $1,000. Today, you can get 64 gigs of DDR4 for under $100.
This is why the Atari 2600 video game system released in 1977 only had 128 bytes of RAM.
The first TRS-80 came with 4K. The VIC-20 had 5K.
The Sinclair ZX-81 came with 1K. Its American counterpart came with 2K. Both were expandable to 16K.
The Nintendo Entertainment System, first released in Japan in 1983, had 4.25K RAM.
By late 1983, RAM had gotten cheaper, so we saw the Commodore 64 released with 64K, and the Timex Sinclair 2068 with 48K RAM.
@john2001plus 0 seconds ago Nintendo needs to make a case with a clear window showing the cartridge. The checkout person might be required to check the game's presence. Other companies need to follow suit.
However, the industry wants to move to downloadable games only.
It seems like a large number of people have no qualms about theft.
@john2001plus 1 day ago (edited) The Scramble appears to use 8-pixel horizontal scrolling.
Roughly 40 years ago, I played a Scramble version on the Timex Sinclair 20680 computer. I remember it having smooth scrolling even though the hardware does not support scrolling, but I could be remembering it wrong. It had a nice fireworks animation when you beat the game.
I read that Tomy Tudor does not have hardware scrolling. If they move the entire screen in memory to scroll, that would be slow. A more efficient but more difficult algorithm would be to update only the tiles that change, which would only be a fraction of the screen. I notice that the star field doesn't move, which makes me think that they are doing the more efficient method. However, either way, memory copies can be expensive.
I notice some artifacts where the trailing edge of the scenery will have duplicate characters for a fraction of a second.
Each 8 horizontal pixels can have only 2 colors, although that is better than some computers like the Spectrum which have 2 colors for every 8x8 tile. This limitation would make it difficult to scroll by less than 8 pixels. It can be done, but it limits the number of colors you can use. The square blocks would have to be monochrome.
The system has an impressive 32 8x8 monochrome sprites but only 4 can be on the same line. They might be using sprites for the stars, which would explain why the stars flicker. The flickering stars might just be a feature.
Super Star Wars was developed by Sculptured Software in November 1992. I went to work for Sculptured Software in January 1993. I saw the game during my interview process and occasionally worked under the lead programmer.
Before this, I was a database programmer, but I had tried to write games on my own in the mid-1980s.
I was a grunt programmer. I did tasks on many games that the main programmers didn't want to do, like working on menu screens, converting data into a usable format, and editing levels, as I did on the 1995 release of Doom for the SNES.
The Moby Games website has an incomplete listing of games I worked on. On some games, I would do minor tasks and not end up in the credits. I don't recall if I did anything for the sequel Star Wars games, but I was friends with people who worked on them.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
P.S. I have the Aracde1up Star Wars game. It was my favorite arcade game.
Highlighted reply
@thorskywalker 2 hours ago That's awesome, and pretty crazy that you worked on Doom for SNES because I played the hell out of that game. I'm curious, how good is the Arcade1up version of Star Wars? I was very young, but I loved that game when I was a kid... every time I had an extra quarter (which wasn't all too often back then) it went to that game because, oddly enough, a gas station near our house had it.
@john2001plus 0 seconds ago @thorskywalker The Star Wars Aracade1up is very similar to the arcade game. It has a 17-inch LCD screen compared to the original 19-inch CRT, but not all the space on CRTs is used.
The Yoke controller is very good. Now that I am 64 years old, I have a problem: The game is such a button-masher that it hurts my fingers. The buttons on the Arcade1up feel a bit stiff. I don't know if the arcade had buttons with a softer feel.
P.S. I was not very good at putting together the Arcade1up cabinets. It would take me hours and the Star Wars cabinet was the most difficult out of the four that I own.
The problem with Pitfall is if you want to "beat" the game, you have to have mapped out the route to get all the treasures before the time runs out, and you have to play the game pixel-perfect on most of your jumps. If you don't play perfectly then the clock will run out before you can "win". Otherwise, there is not much point to the game other than the novelty of running and jumping.
The game is so unforgiving that I found it frustrating.
I suppose you could just play to beat your high score. However, there is a certain satisfaction to completing the game.
@john2001plus 0 seconds ago "I forgot how much this version of Doom sucks."
I'm in the credits, although Randy Linden is the genius who made the game possible.
In 1995, it was very expensive to buy a PC. My first computer was a barebones 486-33 Mhz, costing $1,200. So, for many people, this was an affordable version of Doom.
@john2001plus 25 minutes ago (edited) I played Atari 800 games at one friend's house and then went to a different friend's house to play on his Atari 5200. I immediately noticed that the games were identical to the Atari 8-bit computer. However, control with the analog joystick was terrible. This felt like a huge error by Atari. What good are the games if you can't play them?
Pac-Man is a game that requires a very good 4-way joystick to control. I can't do it well enough on a computer keyboard or a joypad. I have a Namco Joystick from over 20 years ago, but with the 8-way joystick, I keep making wrong turns. This is why I purchased the Namco Arcade1up with close-to arcade controls. It doesn't have Pac-Man but it does have Ms. Pac-Man.
I have similar problems trying to play Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man/Donkey Kong with a joypad. Joypads are great if don't have to keep switching directions but they aren't precise enough for games as rapid as Pac-Man. Console versions of these games seem to compensate for the difficulty of using a joypad.
When I first saw Space Invaders, it was obvious to me that it was moving just one invader at a time. This is why it speeds up as you eliminate invaders. This is the first game I can recall that had memory-mapped video, but apparently no sprites. So the CPU would have been limited on how many objects it could move at one time.
Atari announced the 7800 around 1984. They said that it was going to have around 128 sprites. I was excited for it. But then they delayed the release and it looked like it was never going to happen. They finally released it to compete with the NES, but by that point, it was the weaker system.
The word "sprite" is interesting. It means elf, fairy, or ghost, although it can also refer to flashes of different color lights in clouds caused by lightning. The word originated in the Middle Ages from the word "spirit". When I hear the word, I think of the Disney character Tinkerbell.
In computers and video games, a sprite is an image that can move on top of a background. Usually, these are 2D objects moving on top of a 2D background, although a game like the original Doom had 2D objects moving on top of a 3D background. The mouse pointer on a computer screen is technically a sprite.
Back in the days when computers and video games were 8-bit and 16-bit, it was helpful to have hardware support for sprites, which allowed graphical objects to move around independently of the background. The reason this was helpful was that it was more taxing for the old slow computers without hardware sprites to manipulate the graphics on the screen. When I was writing games for the Timex Sinclair 2068 and Atari ST computers, I had to write software to make all the graphics move because there was no hardware support for sprites, which made the task more technically challenging.
The early arcade video games used hardware sprites and so did all early home video game consoles. The sprites on the Atari 2600 are extremely primitive and very difficult to program, but the programmers knew how to make them work.
Many people have touted the Commodore 64 as the best 8-bit computer because it had hardware support for eight 8x8 sprites, although this is not very many compared to the Nintendo Entertainment System that came out later. I think that the Atari 8-bit computer had better graphical capabilities overall.
Once we had 32-bit processors, there was no longer a need for hardware sprites. These systems were powerful enough that it was not a huge challenge to manipulate graphics on a screen. Also, with 32-bit systems, there was a greater emphasis on 3D graphics instead of 2D graphics.
1 month ago (edited) I have played hundreds of games of Ms. Pac-Man. Once and only once the first maze came up as the Pac-Man maze. This was an odd glitch. Reportedly, the maze still exists in the ROM because Ms. Pac-Man started as a hack of Pac-Man.
Occasionally the first Ms. Pac-Man maze will appear a different color. Many people have seen this. This is a glitch.
@john2001plus Hard Hat looks interesting. I was also going to suggest that it could be a Spectrum game. It would be faster pace without the solid walls. Gobbler looks like it was written in BASIC. I think that I could do better.
@simonebernacchia5724 i suggest either basic or FP compiled (was not too performing) - HardHat i wanted a speccy port so bad! (had a speccy at that time)
@john2001plus
Back in the 1980s I noticed that Berserk had a graphics limitation similar to computers like the Spectrum. When the character gets too close to other objects it changes their color to be the same as the main character. This implies that every 8x8 group of pixels can only have one foreground color, like on the Spectrum. It either has memory mapped video with this color limitation, like the Spectrum, or it has character based graphics like the VIC-20. Berserk probably doesn't have sprites. I don't think that Space Invaders does either.
Compare this Pac-Man also released in 1980. It has 3 color sprites that can overlap each other. It apparently has a large color pallette since we see a flesh color in a cut scene. I assume that the Pac-Man video hardware was much more expensive.
In 1980 memory was very expensive, with 64K costing around a thousand dollars. Memory limitations were often the reason why graphics were more primitive The Atari 2600 is the ultimate example of this with only 120 bytes of RAM. It would have been much easier for programmers if Atari had designed the 2600 with 4, 6, or 8K of RAM. I wish they had.
By 1980 I had already written primitive games in BASIC on home computers. Later I became I video game programmer. However, I didn't know what sprites were. None of the home computers had them. So when Pac-Man came out, I was puzzled trying to understand how the game displayed its graphics. It was pretty easy to understand how Spaced Invaders worked. I assumed that each pixel was memory mapped. I made a similar assumption for Pac-Man, but I assumed that it had a 16 color screen and that it was drawing the characters to the screen. Since the characters can overlap each other, I assumed that it was drawing all the characters on each frame.
Just a side note: Due to the limited number of sprites on the Galaga game, it uses a single sprite to display the double bullets. It didn't have any sprites to spare.
There were many rumors that Nintendo was going to announce its next game system in October, which didn't happen. Nintendo fans are extremely anxious for news about the next-generation system.
@john2001plus 2 minutes ago (edited) The problem with the next-generation Switch is that Nintendo is stuck between needing to upgrade to compete with other consoles and the mobile hardware not being good enough to compete with consoles. A two-teraflop system is going to be better than the first Switch but it is nothing compared to Sony's 16-teraflop system. It is possible that AI upscaling will make it look amazing.
I am thinking of getting one.
@john2001plus 1 hour ago I've been telling poeple for months that it would not make sense for Nintendo to announce the new Switch (Super Switch?) in 2024 when they will release it in March or April of next year. They will still want to sell the existing Switch's for Christmas.
@Shany64 57 minutes ago This is 100% the right take. As alluded to in the video the Wii U was doing horribly, Nintendo needed a jump into the next cycle. If you look at every Nintendo major console release all of them had an initial release in holiday season with the sole exception being the switch.
Nintendo is willing to coast into the holiday season, it probably ends up being one of their worst (probably a lot better than MS and PS) holiday seasons and then right before they meet with investors in March, they announce the Switch 2.
@DojoPwr 41 minutes ago I agree. If I had to guess, I think Nintendo is going to milk the holiday season and announce the Switch 2 next year. Just makes more sense and aligns with how Nintendo usually thinks. They are using this time to announce all those other projects like the Alarmo Clock and whatever else they had in the closet.
China manufactures hundreds of devices that play retro video games. These are technically illegal because Chinese companies don't pay royalties for these games. These devices are a form of software piracy. However, nobody seems to care. You can buy them on the Walmart, Target, Amazon, and eBay websites. I have ordered several from the Chinese Ali Express website which has the lowest prices. (Temu sells the same stuff as Ali Express, but reportedly the Temu app spies on its customers.)
U.S. Customs could ban these devices but it doesn't. I have heard reports that the government wants to crack down on IP infringement, but so far they haven't.
I have bought several of these cheap handheld game systems and given them away as gifts.
Although they are cheaply made, they are fun to play with.
Yesterday I found out about this 5 TB hard drive that contains almost every retro video game ever made.
This is plug-and-play with a Windows PC. For more complex games it will need a cheap graphics card or APU, although the simpler 8-bit and 16-bit games will run on almost any hardware.
I was going to create my own emulation drive, which is very labor-intensive, but this drive already has everything set up. The cost is $229 on Amazon, but only $128 on the Ali Express Website. This is so cheap I ordered it. An empty 5-terabyte drive costs almost as much.
I think that Carnival is underrated by everybody. I played it throughout the 1980s and the machine was around for the whole decade. I still play it occasionally through emulation, like on my hacked NES Classic.
In terms of fun, I think that Carnival is comparable to Bezerk although most people would not agree. If you compare the 1980 arcade, which is a fixed shooter, to the 1979 Space Invaders, Carnival has more variety of play. I prefer it slightly over Galaxian, another 1980 game.
Although the 2600 version doesn't have a bonus stage, it is really impressive and fun for a 2600 game. This is one of several 2600 games that I love. The others are: Battle Zone, Pole Position, Pac-Man Jr, and Boing!
