The guys developing Strike Zone Bowling accepted some of my feedback and released a 2nd Beta recently. I just played it, and these are minor improvements but polish is everything once you have the core game defined, and these definitely improve the game.
They fixed the arrows on the lane, so that they are drawn like a real bowling lane.
Corrected lane arrows for a more authentic experience.
They also added a scaling effect so that the ball shrinks slightly as it moves down the alley, adding to the faux 3D effect. I guess you’d call this a 2D perspective game, rather than a 3D game?
The visually shrinking ball really adds to the feeling of depth.
Anyway, I had only the tiniest part in these improvements, but I DID suggest them and they DID implement them, and that makes me feel fantastic. It’s already a gift that these homebrew developers are giving the Atari community new games to play 45 years on after the 2600 was new. These tiny little changes are almost like a personalized gift to me. Thanks to easmith and kevinmos3 for their excellent work on this game.
Playing the Atari 2600 as much as I did as a kid, I never thought that its graphical capabilities were amazing. I could see arcade games from 19879-82, and tell that the Atari 2600 wasn’t capable of the same graphics, even if I didn’t really know why. It just seemed to make sense that a bigger machine that probably cost a lot more and only did one thing would be capable of doing it better than a smaller, less expensive machine that didn’t take up as much space and could do seemingly anything.
Comparing arcade ports to the 2600, we knew to expect that the graphics wouldn’t be as good, but usually the gameplay was just as good, if not better. It seemed like the difficulty was tuned to be a little bit more fun, a little less punishing, on the home console. And that made sense, too. In the arcade, the business model was to suck quarters out of pockets as quickly as possible, and that meant high difficulty, while at home they wanted you to enjoy playing the game for extended periods, so that you would want to seek out more games to buy.
Some arcade ports were more disappointing than others, and that was usually due to ROM space limitations preventing full featured ports. It might be a missing level, or it might be some other compromise, something they had to leave out because they couldn’t fit everything in. Sometimes it was limitations imposed by the single-button joystick being unable to replicate all the control options on the arcade cabinet.
A game like Strike Zone Bowling, a work-in-progress homebrew game for the Atari 2600, would have blown our young minds back then. It’s still fantastic now. Look at these screen captures:
I love this shifty-eyed shoe rental guy. With the mustache and red hat, he kindof reminds me of someone…The main action happens on this screen, which gives a convincingly realistic representation of a real bowling alley.Celebration screen animations for strikes and spares take the game to a new level.You can even select your bowler’s gender.After the game, depending on your score, you can hang out by the restrooms, the snack bar, pool hall, or video arcade.When you get “in the zone” it becomes easier to hit strikes and get a higher score.Anybody got a quarter?
The developer of this game has brilliantly worked within the 2600’s limitations. If you know how the 2600 draws graphics, it’s easy to see that. The 2600 does not have a screen buffer, so it draws its graphics to the display in real-time. That is, while the electron beam of the television is traversing the screen to excite the phosphors of the cathode ray tube, the Atari 2600 is sending data out the video cable to generate the signal the TV turns into a picture, generating it just in time. Sprite objects, stored in the ROM data on the cartridge as 1-bit bitmaps, are drawn one horizontal row at a time, and between each row the programmer can do clever things like change the drawing color, change the scale, mirror the image, and draw duplicates. The hardware can only draw two sprites to the screen, but if the programmer wants, they can reposition those sprites during draw time, and change the bitmap data used to draw them, to create the effect of more than two sprites. The hardware also supports the ability to draw two additional “missile” objects and a “ball” — but with even more limitations. And finally, the hardware can support drawing background graphics, meaning a background color plus a playfield. The playfield graphics are lower-resolution than the sprites for Player 1 and Player 2. And that’s it.
These limitations make the Atari much better at drawing graphics that are composed of vertically stacked rows of horizontal data.
You’ve come a long way, baby
We had a commercially-released Bowling game for the 2600 — it was called Bowling. And it was, if you can believe it, good.
Fun to play, decently challenging, especially if you were trying to score above 200, the 1978 Bowling game was perfectly acceptable, and well within expectations for what a video game was at the time. And 45 years later, Strike Zone Bowling absolutely blows it away.
If you look at the screen of Bowling, we can see that the developer was working “against the grain” when it came to drawing the screen. The player, ball, and pin graphics are all in the same horizontal row, and this necessitates use of the available hardware sprites on each row. It seems that the playfield graphics aren’t used here, and that the sprites are used to draw the scores for each player, the on-screen bowler, and and the bowling ball, while the pins and gutters might be drawn using the “missile” or “ball” graphics — to know for sure, we’d need to decompile the ROM and read the assembly code.
The designer of Bowling made the decision that because bowling alley lanes are long and narrow, using the longer horizontal axis of the TV screen’s 4:3 display made the most sense.
This new Strike Zone Bowling takes a more sophisticated approach, and presents the game from the bowler’s POV, or rather from behind the back of the bowler, looking down the lane. Use of perspective and foreshortening enables the full length of the alley to be compressed visually to fit in the screen. By doing this, the programmer is able to use row-by-row color changes to give an enhanced illusion of depth, creating a 3D-like effect. This also has the benefit of having fewer objects to draw at each horizontal row, meaning that the hardware sprites, missiles, and balls, can all be used together to create composite images that are composed of more colors than would otherwise be possible.
The game is also a lot larger, 32KB of ROM as opposed to the 2KB of the 1978 Bowling. This additional space is used to create a more full experience of going to a bowling alley, renting shoes, celebrating strikes and spares, and chilling out after the game by the pool table or at an arcade game. This gives the game more narrative elements and almost a story as opposed to simply simulating the game of bowling, it aims to simulate the total experience of going to a bowling alley.
As amazing as this beta is, it could be even better. The bowler is always right-handed, but it seems like it could be fairly simple to add left-handed bowlers by mirroring the graphics and the controls. Graphically, the ball could scale slightly smaller as it moves further away from the bowler, to create a better simulation of 3D. The title screen music is a bit basic, and could be improved. That’s about it. There could be additional controls and simulation for ball weight and velocity, but I think it would take away from the simplicity of the game, and it doesn’t really need those things to feel complete and like a good challenge.
As is, the game is already a solid A-level effort.
Atari Age, the fan-operated homebrew operation that holds the most legitimate claim to the legacy of Atari-that-was, has opened up pre-orders for a new batch of games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, and 400/800/XE systems, and even the Atari Jaguar.
Zoo Keeper (2021, Champ Games) – Atari 2600
I’m most excited about Zoo Keeper, a faithful port of the early 80’s arcade classic to the 2600 developed by Champ Games — who have been killing it with their talented Atari 2600 ports of classic arcade games like Galaga and the upcoming Robotron 2084 — and Ninjish Guy in Low-Res World, a homebrew platformer for the 2600 in the vein of Super Meat Boy. I’ve been looking forward to playing a 2600 homage to one of my top early 80’s arcade classics Zoo Keeper for quite some time.
Ninjish Guy in Low Res World
Also-worth-a-look releases are Deepstone Catacomb, a zelda-like adventure game, which looks really well done for an Atari 2600 title. Venture Reloaded, another early dungeon crawler, finally does justice to the classic arcade game Venture, should appeal to fans of the original.
Deepstone Catacomb
Fans of the maze genre should find Hugo Hunt and Robot City to their liking. Dare Devil shows off some impressive chiptune chops and parachuting action reminiscent of classic games like Frogger, Freeway, and of course Sky Diver. But it appears to be an update or direct sequel to 1983 release, Parachute. Cannon Head Clash is a really fun-looking 2p artillery duel with destructive terrain and frantic action. If you enjoyed games like Outlaw/Gunslinger, and Combat on the 2600, this is one to check out. It’s even available for SECAM60 television sets, which is amazingly rare for a homebrew. Avalanche should appeal to fans of Activision’s classic paddle game, Kaboom!Tower of Rubble features fantastic audio, and super-slick animation and platform-edge hanging action as you struggle to stay atop a crumbling tower of falling blocks.
All of these new games show that the Atari 2600, released now 43 years ago back in 1977, still has many extra lives nearly half a century later, and nearly three decades after the last Atari 2600 rolled off the assembly line. The dedication of the programmers who pull off these minor miracles to their craft is astounding. The fact is that every produced by the homebrew community these days are among the best ever released on their platform. While the prices might seem steep at $40-50 apiece, the games are produced by hand in small batches, and are every bit as professionally presented as the best games produced by top industry developers during the system’s heyday. If you’re a fan of the system and still have working hardware hooked up in your house, they are absolutely worth their price.
I haven’t even looked at the titles for the other systems yet, because my budget frankly can’t take it. Just about every game I have looked at looks like a game worth playing, with most of them being must-buys.
I have seen some of Champ’s other Atari 2600 homebrew projects, and they’re very impressive. They did a version of Scramble which is virtually indistinguisable from the arcade, which is an incredibly impressive accomplishment on hardware as limited as the Atari 2600.
Galaga is a classic arcade game, one of the most successful of its era, and can still be found in bars and arcades all over. It was one of my favorite arcade games as a kid, and I’ll still drop a quarter in one when I find one and have some time to kill.
I owned the Atari 7800 port of Galaga, and was glad I could play a version of it at home, even if it wasn’t quite exactly the same experience as playing the arcade version. What Champ has come up with, from what I can see in their video, it appears it feels closer to the arcade than the 7800 port, although the graphics are slightly inferior to the 7800 version.
Galaga (Champ Games) title screen
The motion of the incoming wave is stunning!
Fighter capture looks impressive!
Here’s a preview video showing the game in action and talking about some of the technical details:
As a Galaga fan, I really want a copy. As a game developer, I’m impressed with the effort and execution it takes to get a game looking and playing this good on such limited hardware. It simply shouldn’t be possible on an Atari VCS, which only has 5 hardware sprites plus backgrounds, and nowhere near enough CPU or memory to handle all the complex movement that is required to accurately re-create a Galaga experience.
How do they do it? Well, I asked them. And they were nice enough to answer: they build a cartridge with an ARM CPU in it, and it augments the Atari’s built-in hardware, and this is how they’re able to create games that are vastly superior to what should normally be possible with the 2600 console alone.
My response to this was disappointment, and I said as much. But I think it came off the wrong way and more than one person jumped on me for saying something negative about what is otherwise an exciting project for fans of the Atari and of Galaga. No one was particularly brutal toward me, but the creators behind the project were a bit nicer than their fans, and engaged with me and we had an interesting conversation on the philosophy of homebrew, and how their technology works. I want to thank them for that, and for creating such great games for the Atari 2600 in 2019, and keeping the system alive more than 40 years after it launched. I have a copy of Scramble and am really looking forward to playing Galaga and Zookeeper (another favorite classic arcade game) when they’re ready.
So, first things first, from a gamer’s standpoint, the only thing that truly matters is the game experience itself. It doesn’t matter what technology is inside of it, or how amazing, complicated, or messy the engineering is. The only thing that matters is the experience you have when you play the game. If it’s fun, if it’s polished, it’s a good game. End of story. And that’s exactly why I’m excited about buying a copy of this when it’s ready for release.
Now, as to my disappointment. At first I thought I was seeing something impossible, and I was really keen to hear how they had managed it. The solution of adding an ARM to the system architecture of the VCS is fine, nothing wrong with it. But it’s not amazing. My disappointment was from the vantage point of the programmer, who was mind-boggled at how this team had managed to get so much performance out of a 6507 CPU backed by 128 bytes of RAM. Well, they didn’t. They bolted on a 70 MHz ARM CPU, and got it to talk to the rest of the system, and while that also requires some neat engineering, it’s not magical in the way that somehow figuring out how to get 3x Zilog Z80’s worth of performance (which is what powered the original arcade Galaga machines) out of a MOS 6507.
That’s really all I meant by what I said. I don’t consider it “cheating” to augment the console hardware by packing in additional chips on the ROM cartridge circuit board. This was done back in the day, and was very necessary in order to extend the life of the Atari. All cartridge-based consoles that had a market life of more than a few years needed to use such tricks in order to keep their hardware competitive and relevant as computer technology doubled in speed every year.
The only real difference is that these augmentations were done using chips that were comparable (or at least within 1 generation) of the capability of the original hardware. They truly did augment the system. Whereas, with a 32-bit ARM CPU, you really could build a system around that chip alone, and do more than you could by interfacing it to a 40-year old Atari system architecture that forces it to slow down and work within the constraints of its design. I mean, with a 70MHz 32-bit ARM CPU, it should be possible to do an arcade-perfect emulation of the original arcade hardware, or if not then to certainly come much closer to that than what you can get by running the I/O and video drawing through an Atari VCS. So, rather than the ARM augmenting the Atari, the Atari is kindof bringing down the ARM. This doesn’t matter if you’re nostalgic for the Atari and like the feel of a CX40 joystick in your hands and the crude graphical style just barely possible with the 6507-driven TIA. If you don’t know or don’t care about the engineering, it just looks and feels like the best damn Galaga port you could imagine, running on an Atari 2600, and actually quite a bit better looking than anything you would have thought possible if you did know the system’s capabilities.
But really, it’s almost all due to the ARM chip’s capabilities, which are many times the power of the rest of the system.
I suppose one could take an Atari 2600 controller, put a wifi chip in it, and have it interface with Google’s Stadia console-in-the-cloud, and run Assassin’s Creed, downsampled and graphically degraded, through the Atari, as well. And… actually hell yes, that would be cool as fuck. I want to buy that too. But it’s a different kind of cool to hook an Atari up to a cloud supercomputer platform than it would be to somehow squeeze Assassin’s Creed into 4 KB of ROM, if that were even possible.
If he had somehow teleported the Statue of Liberty, and then brought it back, or if he had somehow made the Statue of Liberty disappear, how awesome would that have been? Whether by real “magic” or by some super-advanced technology that no one else had yet heard of, that would have been beyond amazing. It would have changed the world we lived in, in untold ways. But it didn’t. He just set up some elaborate rotating stage, hid everything behind curtains for over an hour while everything was being moved into position.
Eight year old me was captivated by the idea of a giant statue disappearing and reappearing, whether through magical or advanced technological means. A couple years later, though, I was old enough to realize it wasn’t “real” magic, and that it was some kind of “cheap” trick (well, relative to the cost of really doing it, anyway), and wasn’t as impressive as I had thought, and as a kid you really hate being lied to, you hate being fooled. It makes you feel embarrassed and dumb, and you want to hide the fact that you ever thought it was cool.
So for a long time after that, I kindof had this grudge against David Copperfield, and stage magic, and whenever I’d see someone pulling off some sleight of hand or optical illusion trick, I’d get annoyed and impatiently insist that magic is bullshit, and refuse to be impressed by it, because I wasn’t some fool. For maybe a year or two, I had believed that we were on the cusp of a Star Trek-promised future, with instant teleportation, or at least invisibility shields. That would have been so cool. But no, we didn’t get that.
Well, now that I’m 43, I’m back to being impressed at how convincing an optical illusion David Copperfield could create with just some lights, scaffolding, cranes, and a rotating stage that moved slowly and gently enough that an entire audience didn’t notice they were moving. Even if the entire trick required the cameras filming it to be positioned just right. That still took some serious engineering effort, and even for as limited as the result was as compared to true invisibility or teleportation, when you realize all the work and planning that had to go into it, that’s still pretty damn impressive — just in a different direction completely than I had been (mis)lead in the first place.
So this is what I meant by “disappointed” when I found out that Champ Games puts an ARM CPU in a cartridge and through some impressive engineering hacks gets it to talk in sync with the console and run a game that blows most other Atari 2600 cartridges away. Sure, the game is impressive and it’s certainly going to be fun to play. On the other hand, a ARM CPU is in a different “weight class” from a typical ROM cartridge with perhaps a little extra RAM or a sound chip soldered onto the board. This isn’t to take anything away from the experience of the game, or the technical wizardry required to build it.
But it’s a bit like putting a 1000cc engine into a go kart and then winning a go kart race with it against a bunch of stock go karts. It’s still a pretty cool project to put a 1000cc engine in a go kart, but when you find out that’s why that kart was so much faster than the others, it’s hard not to be a little disappointed that the secret wasn’t some method of suping up a 50cc lawnmower engine to get the performance of the 1000cc engine. And then you realize that the chassis of the go kart really limits how much performance you can actually get out of that 1000cc engine, compared to something engineered to get the most out of it, like, say a state of the art motorcycle chassis, transmission, wheels, etc. And then the super kart seems, well, it seems pretty fun still, but kinda wasteful of the potential of that engine.
When it comes to chip enhanced ROM cartridges, I think it’s fair to say that, at least from an engineering standpoint, once you get to the point where the enhancement hardware is not only more capable than the console itself, but is actually held back by the restrictions imposed by having to interface with the console, such that you’re exceeding the console’s limits, but not able to push the expansion hardware anywhere close to its limits, you’re at a cutoff point. While it’s entirely possible to create an awesome game experience this way, you’re really at a point where you’re well beyond the capabilities of the console, and the console is holding you back. At that point, you might as well engineer a new system.
The only practical reason not to engineer a new system would be if the existing install base for the obsolete console is still a viable market; the work it takes to establish such an install base with a next-generation system is considerable. But this is a business consideration, not an engineering consideration. And business considerations aren’t less legitimate than engineering considerations, but obviously businesses do at some point make the decision to roll out a new generation of console hardware. Which is why we’ve had several of those in the intervening 40 years.
And of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing it “just to do it”, in the way mountaineers climb the tallest mountain they can find “because it’s there”.
Update: ROMs for Galaga are now available for download.
