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".You had to keep track of where the light gun of the tv 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 ...This is why all Atari 2600 games (like Pac Man) have graphics that seem weirdly, horizontally distended - the CPU wasn't fast enough to change color before the light gun got to the next pixel ...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.