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Close but no cigar on that Genesis/Megadrive controller, there.
The original Atari VCS/2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. It is astonishing what programmers were eventually able to achieve on it with basically nothing. Although additional memory could be included on cartridges, and many games did so. Or had to do so, I imagine.
i once met the dev of the "stella" atari 2600 emulator at a C3 conf. he and a few friends were competing to make the smallest possible demo for the console, and they'd made a thing that fit into 14 bytes. it just drew some colors, nothing fancy, but still. to demo it he had a real 2600 and a pcb with a compatible edge connector. the only thing on the board was sixteen 8-position DIP-switches, which he set by hand to the code of the demo. ran exactly as well on actual hardware.
sidenote, stella is a neat little emulator because not only can you see and edit all those 128 bytes of ram at once during runtime, it also has a "beam display" that shows you where the electron gun in the actual tv would be pointing at any moment in your program. since the 2600 is so barebones you basically have to compute pixels on the fly exactly when the beam passes over the correct position on the tv. they call it "racing the beam". there's a whole book about it.
14 byte demo what the actual shit? Im going investigating after work thanks
i think the smallest possible valid program on the 2600 is like 9 bytes, but it doesn't draw anything. with 14 they got a few static coloured pixels in a corner. don't know if they ever uploaded it.
Edit: there are nome 16-byte demos for the 2600 that fill the screen, so it makes sense that skipping that step would make it smaller.
Holy crap, I haven't thought about Stella in probably 25 years. Thanks for the flashback!
The release of the first version of Stella (1995) is closer in time to the release of the 2600 (1977) than it is to today.
There's multiple consoles which were nothing but a display and controller adapter for the cartridge which needed to have all the smarts
And in the middle to end of the Gameboy Color era and Gameboy Advance era most game cartridges had extra processing power internally.
Do you have any link regarding this? I knew of this kind of trick for NES, SNES and Mega Drive games, but other than memory swapping in the GB, I had no idea there was any additional computing trick?
I don't think there was anything beyond SRAM for save games for the GB/GBA. There was a number of cartridges with sensors or rumble packs but I can't find any details about extra computational power on the cartridges.
I would also be interested if there's some exceptions that I didn't know about.
I guess the real time clock on Pokémon games is technically extra computational power 🤓
https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2024/02/every-epoch-cassette-vision-game-preserved-and-emulated/
After looking closer it looks like the Gameboy ones with CPU were mostly unofficial like media player cartridges
Honestly it kinda looks more like a North American Saturn than a Genesis/MegaDrive or Master System. In which case the batarang controller would be slightly more accurate.
No atari :(
I once found a working NES with a bunch of games in a dumpster a few years ago. It's sad to think of how many valuable and hard to find games/systems eventually found their way in the trash because their owners were too lazy to donate or sell them for others to enjoy.
I remember grabbing whole collections of NES games at yard sales for like $10-20. It's wild how much people would just let stuff go for. And the general consensus was always that they didn't know what they were worth. Like... You dropped $60 on one of these games, and now I'm buying them off you for $2 a piece? I'm just gonna hand you the money, try not to look excited, and walk away like this was a smooth drug deal...
A few months before Sony announced that they would no longer be making any more PS1 discs, I waked into my local GameStop, and found a box. Inside of the box were between 10 to 15 copies each of FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, Chrono Cross, and Legend of Mana. Every single one was marked $5. I went ahead and picked them all up figuring that having extras would be useful one day. My GF at the time thought I was crazy, but just shook her head.
Fast forward about 3-4 months, and Sony announces no more PS1 discs, and the price of every single one of those games shot up to $200 - $300 a piece on E-Bay. I left the $5 stickers on the ones I sold, but took pics of the ones I kept that I had meticulously removed the price stickers from. I got back some unique feedback for that.
I also picked up a working NES from the curb, on top of a trash can. I assume they left it on top in case anyone wanted it, but still, that thing was an hour away from going to landfill.
Lol, still playing classics using Dosbox!
No love for the Colecovision 😞
No, Atari 2600, you may not. What you do have, however, is a built-in sick af 8-bit beat generator. Take pride in that.
Finding these three outside of a dumpster..
You could ebay them and afford a small vacation
Not if they're in a poor state like from a dumpster (-:
I said small, like to a Wendys one town over.
Cheer up, guys, just look at how much you and your games cost to buy now!
Thanks to exploiters like Jim Halperin!