Gadget Factory

Video: David Crane On Designing Pitfall For Atari 2600

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hoppasaurus


We found a great vid of Pitfall designer David Crane giving a talk about designing and writing the Activision-published game for the Atari 2600 all the way back in the early 1980s. This video is from the 2011 GDC (Game Developers Conference). In it, David gives a great deconstruction of the development process for writing games within the suffocating constraints of retro hardware. It’s a bit long, but if you have the time to watch it’s worth it.

From the related article over at Hackaday:

This was a developer’s panel so you can bet the video… digs deep into coding challenges. Frame buffer? No way! The 2600 could only pump out 160 pixels at once; a single TV scan line. The programs were hopelessly synced with the TV refresh rate, and were even limited on how many things could be drawn within a single scan line. For us the most interesting part is near the end when [David] describes how the set of game screens are nothing more than a pseudo-random number generator with a carefully chosen seed. But then again, the recollection of hand optimizating the code to fit a 6k game on a 4k ROM is equally compelling.

So, this all brings to mind something that Papilio users can have some fun with on the Arcade MegaWing – we have Atari 2600 code ready and waiting for you to dive into! Papilio user Retromaster has got some 2600 code up and running – please note that it is experimental code and has not been published, but it should be a good starting point nonetheless.

You can find the Atari 2600 code at the link below.  This is Retromaster’s A2601 HDL code that re-creates an Atari 2600 that Pitfall can be run on. Don’t be shy, give it a whirl! It’s always a nice, nostalgic trip down memory lane every time I load up one of these retro classics!

(via Hackaday, and thanks again to Retromaster)

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