emulators
I’ve always loved emulators – ever since my first exposure to the concept back in the early Amiga days. I especially love the idea of running emulators inside emulators, kind of like those nested egg things.
I recently downloaded a couple of C64 emulators and a number of d64 images, and was amused to note that many of the C64 games still retain their playability, and the C64 sound is still amazingly good. Actually, what really blew my mind was discovering people were stripping SID chips out of C64s in order to make synthesizers..
Anyway, as part of the searches that turned up said emulators and disk images, I discovered http://stella.sourceforge.net/ which is a Atari 2600 emulator – which has features that are being added for 2600 ROMs that are still being developed. Yes, people are still writing 2600 games.
Actually, after looking at the capabilities of the 2600, it amazes me that anyone ever managed to write games for it. According to the wikipedia, the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM.
April 24th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Yea, the 128b of ram has always fascinated me.
I thought they apparently managed to push this by storing game data in the video state at points. i.e. I think you could read what color a pixel was, and color a pixel, without using any memory. so they would store extra data past 128b in the screen pixels themselves (probably in the non-displayable area closed captions come in on, or something liek that).v
Stella is a good site.
One of the few times I was ever hacked, the end result was some 8,000 C64 music files being uploaded to c:\recycler\. But I was running 2K which uses c:\recycled\, so I knew something was up. I assumed it was the german word for recycled (later learned that they changed the stupid folder name with XP; i had it hard-coded in lots of scripts so nowadays I have to create a junction so that there is 1 of each name pointing to the same folder)… because they also uploaded 12G of German divx dvd-rips.
(Culprit: MS Sql Server)