I read a thing.
I read a book called "Racing the Beam" about the Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 was the first successful home game console and it was hugely successfully in the USA. I'm old enough to remember when Americans who didn't play computer games called everything "Nintendos", before that the same sort of people called everything "Ataris". It was first released in 1977 and stayed in production until 1992, but the USA sales collapsed in 1983. The sales in the rest of the world where never as impressive, you needed to make a different version of the every game for it to run on a PAL TV, so most of Europe only got a subset of the games. In Japan, which does use NTSC, they only officially released the console after the Nintendo Entertainment System, a much more powerful console, had already come out.
The book is published by MIT press and is part of it's "Platform Studies". As I understand it platform studies is the argument that to understand a peice of digital media, like a game, you need to understand the limitations and strengths of the platform that it's running on. In this book that means a fairly detailed technical discussion of the Atari 2600's hardware, and then looking at multiple individual games from 1977 through to 1983. Looking at both how the games play, and how they got around the limitations of the hardware.
And the hardware is very limited. There is only 128 bytes of RAM and the game cartridges were designed to have up to 4k of ROM. There are two ways to draw to the screen and both have problems. You can uses the 5 sprites and a background built into the hardware, or you can control the CRT ray as it goes across the screen in real time. So you need to know how far the cathode ray has gone across and down the screen and try and do all your calculations in the time it takes to move back to the start of the line or the start of the screen. It's this that gives the book it's title "Racing the Beam". Nolan Bushnell (one of the founders of Atari) was arguing that the console was out of date and needed an updated replacement in 1979
The hardware was clearly designed to play two games, Video Olympics (basically Pong) and Combat. Combat is a two player game where you move tanks around a maze and try and shot the other player. The 5 hardware sprites are referred to as the two player sprites, two missile sprites, and the single ball sprite. The background has to be mirrored. Something limiting for most games, but expected for Combat to keep the game balanced. So every other game had to push the hardware to do things unexpected by the hardware designers. The programmers managed to push the hardware far beyond anything that would seem sane. Ranging from fitting an simple AI into the Video Olympics, to the parallax full-screen scrolling in The Empire Strikes Back and the recognisable platform game-play of Pitfall.
So the book is highly recommended as is reading it with an emulator and playing the games described in the book. I used the Stella emulator and the Atarimania ROM collection . If you have a high def screen launch it with stella -hidpi 1. Manuals for most of the games have been uploaded to the excellent Atari Age site .
I did a thing
I went for a walk and found a new way (or at least new to me) to get from Rock Edge in Headington into Oxford city centre. This is almost all parks or off road paths, ending with a walk along the Thames path.
This would be a very good Slow Way except they don't think that Headington is a place.
I made a thing
I made this website. At some point I might put something useful here. Until then hello to all the hacking bots and AI scrapers that are the only people reading this.
This is based on Better Mother Fucking Website. So it looks like there's swearing in the first ever post.