Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
A fact that I still can’t entirely wrap my head around, after reading this book, is that the Atari 2600 had only a few hundred bytes of RAM. It had little enough RAM that the programmer had to very carefully time his graphics operations so that characters got drawn to the screen before the monitor’s electron gun arrived. Unlike other game systems, the 2600 wasn’t “frame-buffered”: you couldn’t draw an entire screen’s worth of data, then push it to the screen all at once when the display refreshed.
This design limitation led to all manner of digital hacking, which somehow, miraculously, allowed the game industry — and Atari in particular — to flourish. Montfort and Bogost do a decent job explaining the technology, at a level somewhat above what most computer users can be expected to have; if you don’t grok the concept of a CPU register, a good bit of Racing the Beam will be tough going for you.
Their larger project is to view the whole world of gaming — from the code up to the artwork, to actually playing the game, to the social world around game consoles — with an understanding of how the technology limits and frees all the layers above it. What significance is it, from the game player’s perspective, that the Atari had special registers to render sprites? In what way did this free game designers? In what ways did it constrain them? The authors view videogames the way that many view art generally: as the act of overcoming the limitations of a medium. They believe that the lowest level of a game’s design has largely been left out of discussions of the larger game story.
They manage to bring all the layers of gaming together reasonably well, but the book didn’t wow me: I’d be unlikely to pursue any future books in the “Platform Series,” of which Racing the Beam is the first.
Yeah, no framebuffer, only a linebuffer! But there was also the paucity of RAM in general. The code was run straight out of the cartridge’s ROM. The ROM address space was too small in some cases, so they had to do things like have multiple banks of ROM on the cartridge and switch between them at a special address in the cartridge’s space. Good times!
Comment by mrz — June 10, 2009 @ 8:32 pm
By the way, in case you were interested in programming such a beast, or at least trying to understand how one would do so, check out these resources: http://stella.sourceforge.net/homebrew.php
Heck, download stella and try out a few things!
Comment by mrz — June 12, 2009 @ 4:39 pm
Related (somewhat… I am not a programmer, so bear with me) is a push to bring back simulated phosphor CRT effects in old-school re-releases and 8-bit style games, as seen here:
http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/660 http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/661
The argument is that the original designers relied on the fuzzy warmth and image delay of the old TVs to give the games a warmth that a flat pixel-per-pixel re-release on modern screens completely destroys, resulting in a comparatively sterile visual experience.
Comment by chris r — June 26, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
[...] Nick and Bogost, IanRacing the Beam: the Atari Video Computer System (finished 10 [...]
Pingback by Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker » Lists of previously-read books — June 28, 2009 @ 12:17 pm
I just finished a review of Racing The Beam – it was a fun book to read too, even if I never owned one – got a C64 a few years later. The lack of a frame buffer was interesting, personally I don’t know you’d write a game like that, but that’s probably because I never worked on a system like that – by the time the C64 came around computers just had them – there was still the idea of the vertical bank, but it was used for other tricks like getting more sprites on the screen or changing colours – easy way to create water effects.
I liked how it talked as much about the environment (cultural, business practises) of the time as well as the technology. There’s some interesting trivia here too: like Atari setting up different companies to avoid regulations.
btw: “… Unspecified Bunker” – great name for a blog :)
Link: http://www.yyztech.ca/reviews/book/racing-the-beam-the-atari-video-computer-system
Comment by Zoltan H — July 1, 2009 @ 6:40 pm