This was my first "computer"! I begged my parents for this after getting a taste of a Vic 20 and wanting some of that for myself.
That was a false start, to say the least. There isn't a whole lot you can do with 64 bytes. After that, I begged for a Timex Sinclair 1000. 16KB of RAM isn't a whole lot, either, but it was enough to actually experiment and learn.
I will be honest and admit that I don’t find most Atari 2600 games to actually be fun; there’s a few gems like Warlords and and Pitfall and Pitfall 2, but I don’t think that home console games started getting really good until the Colecovision.
That said, I am perpetually amazed at what some people have been able to pull off on such a weak device. 120 bytes is nothing for memory compared to anything I have written on a modern computer; I worked very hard to optimize the shit out of my custom Swaybar, and that still took about 500kb.
The fact that games on the 2600 could even be playable is sort of an achievement in its own right, and when you see games that are actually legitimately decent (like the cassette tape version of Frogger, for example), I feel a bit of envy that I will never be that good at software.
BASIC Programming on the 2600 is similarly impressive to me. It’s not “fun” in any kind of objective sense, you can’t really do a lot with it, but the fact that there exists a programming environment in any capacity running directly on there is an impressive bit of engineering.
Looking at it another way, 128 bytes gives you 1024 bits of state, or roughly 2^1024 (10^308) distinct states, still far more than the number of observable atoms in the universe. 128 bytes may be a tiny amount, but the real skill is in finding how to represent the necessary states.
You should check out what the homebrew scene has made. I bought an old system, and garbage picked a CRT, just to play them. Started with Medieval Mayhem, a Warlords remake closer to the arcade version. Then I went on a years long obsession. Champ Games makes great stuff and has taken over distribution of some games AtariAge doesn't do since "Atari" bought them.
A quick search has not found any implementations of an APL-family language on the 2600, so let this comment be an inspiration for one of you madlads out there to actually do it. The 2600 has only 128B of RAM, but a lot of consoles around this era had additional bankswitched RAM on the cartridges.
If you don't want to start completely from scratch, may I recommend you take a look at the VideoBrain? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoBrain_Family_Computer (only language ever available for it was APL/S -- "structured" APL.)
Also, the "Decker" Hypercard-alike has a K-inspired language that is pretty nice. (Yes, much more modern, but still feels a bit like something "of that era".)
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That was a false start, to say the least. There isn't a whole lot you can do with 64 bytes. After that, I begged for a Timex Sinclair 1000. 16KB of RAM isn't a whole lot, either, but it was enough to actually experiment and learn.
That said, I am perpetually amazed at what some people have been able to pull off on such a weak device. 120 bytes is nothing for memory compared to anything I have written on a modern computer; I worked very hard to optimize the shit out of my custom Swaybar, and that still took about 500kb.
The fact that games on the 2600 could even be playable is sort of an achievement in its own right, and when you see games that are actually legitimately decent (like the cassette tape version of Frogger, for example), I feel a bit of envy that I will never be that good at software.
BASIC Programming on the 2600 is similarly impressive to me. It’s not “fun” in any kind of objective sense, you can’t really do a lot with it, but the fact that there exists a programming environment in any capacity running directly on there is an impressive bit of engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess provide some interesting background reading.
I don’t think it works on real hardware but I’m quite partial to Bad Apple : https://youtu.be/Ko9ZA50X71s?si=Ds7WuMgPHeubBNNz
APL: challenge accepted
https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
A quick search has not found any implementations of an APL-family language on the 2600, so let this comment be an inspiration for one of you madlads out there to actually do it. The 2600 has only 128B of RAM, but a lot of consoles around this era had additional bankswitched RAM on the cartridges.
Also, the "Decker" Hypercard-alike has a K-inspired language that is pretty nice. (Yes, much more modern, but still feels a bit like something "of that era".)