When bytes still counted for something – Atari 2600

Atari 2600 from the year 1977 also know in its first iteration as the Atari VCS is a second generation home console from the 70ties and the first really successful gaming console with games on cartridges

By: Evan-Amos – Own Work, Public Domain

The Atari VCS wasn’t the first console that used ROM modules, the Fairchild came with that one year earlier, but the cartridges were a big revolution. The first generation of consoles had one universal chip for all games, but here we have the more classical model of a console with a CPU and a game on an exchangeable module.

The CPU used – MOS 6507 – is a simplified version of the popular MOS 6502 running at 1.19 MHz. The simplification comes in the memory bus, that could address only 13 bits, meaning the CPU can adress only 8 KB of memory. And if you think that is too much for game developers, there is one bit missing on the address bus meainng that each modul can have only 4 KB of ROM. But in the year 1997 memories were very expensive and so the creators said to themselves that “4 KB must be enough for everyone”

By: Konstantin Lanzet – CPU collection, CC BY 3.0

Even more a more radical concept was the RAM that has 128 Bytes. Yes! Bytes, not KiloBytes and these 128 Bytes had to be enough for gaming data and the buffer at the same time.

However I respect the programmers who were capable of creating games for only 128 Bytes of RAM, the gallery of Atari 2600 games is a collection of wierd blocky things. Some games like Atlantis, Frog Pond or Solaris don‘t look that bad, but most of them are just big one-colored areas and the player character is just a…. point.

This may have been impressive in 1978, but as 8-bit computers came in the 80ties, graphics of Atari 2600 seemed suddenly very primitive. It couldn‘t compete just for the reason that those computers had their own video-memory and thus the graphics could have been much more complex.

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Games for Atari 2600 were usually like this: They were made very quickly and were very primitive. You couldn‘t do much more with the hardware you were given. Over 550 games were created for the platform, some good, same legendary. But most of them very pretty generic and not that good.