How Atari 2600 Game Pitfall Builds Its World
I'm surprised this article does not discuss one of the most fundamental constraints facing all Atari 2600 games - the fact that the machine had no framebuffer and every programmer had to "race the beam".<p>You had to keep track of <i>where the light gun of the tv</i> was at every moment and if your program took too much CPU time to ... compute things ... you would miss changing colors, etc., as the beam went past ...<p>This is why all Atari 2600 games (like Pac Man) have graphics that seem weirdly, horizontally distended - the CPU <i>wasn't fast enough to change color before the light gun got to the next pixel</i> ...<p>All of this is beautifully explained in the wonderful book _Racing the Beam_ which is part of the MIT platform series and is one my favorite books on any subject.