Other 8bitDev communities like this one

[Petruza]

Hi, do you know any other 8bit computer/console developers communities so great as NesDev or at least similar?
I mean, I've searched for, but can't find any.
I'm specially looking for commodore 64, but others will do also.

[Celius]

I seem to recall AtariAge being good for 2600dev. Though I haven't looked into it much, as the 2600 is a little TOO limited for my tastes. Just imagine trying to get into Magnavox Odyssey dev (Oh wow, I don't even want to know).

[Petruza]

Yep, when I digged a little about Atari 2600 development, I got astonished...
5 sprites, one 15 bit background tile, no VRAM... original 2600 developers had to be heros.

[Celius]

Wow... Those are really awful sounding limitations. One 15 bit background tile? How the heck does that even work? I do remember hearing that it was horrible trying to develop for it.

I'd say the developers of Pitfall were heroes. Most games on the 2600 I find to be complete crap with like no gameplay. Perhaps if there were MMCs like with the NES there could have been better games. Then again, I probably don't have nearly enough exposure to 2600 games to fully appreciate it.

[Bregalad]

There is a great C64 communauty here.

[BMF54123]

Yep, when I digged a little about Atari 2600 development, I got astonished...
5 sprites, one 15 bit background tile, no VRAM... original 2600 developers had to be heros.

Don't forget the 128 bytes of RAM!

(And I thought 2K was tiny...)

[Petruza]

One 15 bit background tile?

If I got it right, for the background there's one 15 bit register, you have to right to it in the exact moment the scanline is being rendered. You can double it horizontally by a factor of 2, 4 ... and that's for the left half of the screen, the right half gets a mirror of the left, or an exact copy, I guess that information is in the bit after the other 15. That's why backgrounds tend to look too symmetrical, also, of the 5 sprites, two are for players, and are single byte registers, and the other 3, two missiles and a ball, are just one pixel each.

I'd say the developers of Pitfall were heroes. Most games on the 2600 I find to be complete crap with like no gameplay.

I agree, but I think they're heroes just to get some f*n colors on the screen alone. After all, they were coding for a machine that was intended for no more than some Pong variations.

Don't forget the 128 bytes of RAM!

Damn... Super heroes.

[Zepper]

- What about Keystone Kappers?

[Petruza]

Yes, that game defies Atari 2600 graphics limits

[Celius]

Well it does look like it took a large amount of skill and patience to program for this system! It also looks like only game logic can happen when the screen isn't being drawn, because the whole time you have to reset the BG info for the current scanline. At least each scanline is exactly 76 scanlines, so they are much easier to work with for timed code than the NES is.

I can also see that the 2600 would be the perfect console to develop for if you want to submit something to the MiniGames Competition. They have 1, 2, and 4k categories (I think they may have added an 8k). So any game you make for the 2600 will at the very least qualify for the 4k category.

And 128 bytes of RAM... Wow. you can keep track of like... 8 different people's names with that.

I looked into it and it actually sounds like it'd be interesting to program for. I wouldn't really start anything you could classify as a "project" with it, as 4k is pretty much just enough to hold a small minigame. But it'd definitely be a sort of "boot camp" to my programming/optimization skills.

[Jeroen]

You need to know exactly how many cycles each instruction takes to. It really is a bitch.

[Memblers]

There are some things on the 2600 that help it out, such as the registers being in zero-page. Also the HSYNC register, which will halt the CPU until the next hblank period. If the NES had those 2 features, it would sure help out a lot.

[tokumaru]

One 15 bit background tile?

If I got it right, for the background there's one 15 bit register, you have to right to it in the exact moment the scanline is being rendered. You can double it horizontally by a factor of 2, 4 ... and that's for the left half of the screen, the right half gets a mirror of the left, or an exact copy, I guess that information is in the bit after the other 15.

It's actually 20 bits. If you don't change the background registers (2 8-bit and 1 4-bit) in the middle of a scanline, the second half will be either a copy or a reflection of the first half (you select this with another register). And you can't double it. That's the resolution, 40 (really wide) pixels.

The 2600 is actually pretty fun to work with. The real challenge is that it doesn't have a PPU, like the NES, that does graphics processing, so you have to do it yourself with 6502 code. This means you need a very specific piece of code, the kernel, to work with the few video registers available during rendering and simulate a PPU. And then you have only VBlank available to run your game logic, so it's pretty much the opposite of how we do with the NES.

But yes, I do find AtariAge a good place to discuss 2600 programming. They've been very helpful everytime I asked something.

[Bregalad]

Oh my it really sounds terribly limitating. I can't understand how people could have fun with so crude systems back then, I'd sure not want to develop for it. Then again, some people don't see how I can have fun with a crude NES, but many NES games have some okay graphics and very smooth gameplay.

[Roth]

You can find some cool people that develop for the Sega Master System over at http://smspower.org , too.