this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reminds me of one of my all-time favorites: Snorpung's Oh! (Video, Another on real hardware)^1^

Of course, the Atari 2600 (née VCS) makes even the venerable DMG look like a spaceship^2^. The sound chip can't even reproduce a full 12-tone equal temperament scale without complicated tricks and the base box has 128 bytes of RAM available. One eighth of a kibibyte. I probably know people who can hold more than that in their head while doing mental math.

Compare the Bad Apple port on the 2600's close relative, the 800 series 8-bit micro to see what fully tricked-out $1000 box from 1979 can do compared to the humble VCS, a $190 box from 1977.

Kind of considering posting a Bad Apple demo megathread. That's a fun rabbit hole to dive into, but I'm not sure if there's audience here that's interested yet doesn't already know all about it.

1: I love all Snorpung's Game Boy demos, but this old one is the one that made me fall in love with the DMG.

2: Indeed, the DMG features a 4 MHz CPU and 8K working RAM, roughly double the Apollo guidance computer's 2 MHz 15-bit CPU and two Kwords of RAM.

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

Kind of considering posting a Bad Apple demo megathread. That’s a fun rabbit hole to dive into, but I’m not sure if there’s audience here that’s interested yet doesn’t already know all about it.

fuck yes I’m down