Author Topic: "Entombed: An Archaeological Examination of an Atari 2600 Game"  (Read 5273 times)

David-2

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"Entombed: An Archaeological Examination of an Atari 2600 Game"
« on: November 10, 2018, 12:40:04 PM »
In the face of all the concerned shitizens who insist they know everything about video game development and you don't, and who are sure the ground-breaking Star Citizen will run great but requires cutting-edge top-of-the-line 2025 technology, here's a fascinating paper for those programmers who are interested in knowing how video games were written in an era where your console was an 8-bit-wide microprocessor that had only 8Kbytes of addressable memory (you read that right: not 8Gb, or even 8Mb, but only 8192 distinct bytes) of which only 128 bytes were writable RAM (!!!!), that 128 bytes meant that there was no frame buffer so the program had to render each frame line-by-line in real-time (!!!!), and game cartridges had only 4096 bytes of ROM for the program - which had to include absolutely everything since there was no BIOS (don't even speak of an OS, that's a ridiculous idea).

Check it out: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035

dsmart

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Re: "Entombed: An Archaeological Examination of an Atari 2600 Game"
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2018, 04:45:53 AM »
Yeah, I remember reading that when it was first published.
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

 

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