So, I got an idea. Anyone can make a pac-man clone. They are easy. But then I saw a video here. They explain that at the time they had a limited amount of memory to work with. They had to fit an arcade game on a home console cartridge. So I thought. Some people find the 4k hard. What if someone tried to make a game on the limits that atari cartridges had at the time? I think it would be a cool challenge, assuming it is possible… Granted, it’s probably harder to do since you have to limit the graphics as well as processing. I want to try this though. If it is possible, how do I do it?
EDIT:
Also, what were they limited to specifically? Like, how much ram? How many megabytes?
ANOTHER EDIT:
After some googling, I found this document: http://nocash.emubase.de/2k6specs.htm
It explains that atari was:
CPU: 8 bit 1.19MHz
Ram: 128 Bytes
Resolution: 160x192
Pallette: 128 colors (NTSC), 104 colors (PAL), 8 colors (SECAM)
I have no idea what halve of these things mean, but I get the ram. So I could do some benchmarking to see if java alone takes up >=128. If so, this project is impossible. 160x192 will be an easy thing to do. Just scale down the graphics. As for the cpu, I never got what MHz means. So I googled it and found it is the number of cycles a proccesser does in a second. so it does 1,190,000 cycles in a second. Wow, for the 80’s. I expected more 780,000-ish. The pallette, I have no idea what NTSC, PAL, or SECAM means. I googled, and saw that NTSC is just a television used a lot. So I can assume that the rest are too. So just to list off, to meet the challenge, the game must:
[b]- Be a game
- Have 8-128 Colors
- Be 160x192
- Take up 128 bytes of ram[/b]
(I would have the megahertz thing, but that would mean I need a system with that many megahertz…)
Well, benchmark time!