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Remembering the good ol' days
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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Close but no cigar on that Genesis/Megadrive controller, there.
The original Atari VCS/2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. It is astonishing what programmers were eventually able to achieve on it with basically nothing. Although additional memory could be included on cartridges, and many games did so. Or had to do so, I imagine.
i once met the dev team of the "stella" atari 2600 emulator at a C3 conf. they were competing to make the smallest possible demo for the console, and they'd made a thing that fit into 14 bytes. it just drew some colors, nothing fancy, but still. to demo it there was a real 2600 and a pcb with a compatible edge connector. the only thing on the board was sixteen 8-position DIP-switches, which the dev set by hand to the code of the demo. ran exactly as well on actual hardware.
sidenote, stella is a neat little emulator because not only can you see and edit all those 128 bytes of ram at once during runtime, it also has a "beam display" that shows you where the electron gun in the actual tv would be pointing at any moment in your program. since the 2600 is so barebones you basically have to compute pixels on the fly exactly when the beam passes over the correct position on the tv. they call it "racing the beam". there's a whole book about it.
Holy crap, I haven't thought about Stella in probably 25 years. Thanks for the flashback!
The release of the first version of Stella (1995) is closer in time to the release of the 2600 (1977) than it is to today.
14 byte demo what the actual shit? Im going investigating after work thanks
i think the smallest possible valid program on the 2600 is like 9 bytes, but it doesn't draw anything. with 14 they got a few static coloured pixels in a corner. don't know if they ever uploaded it.
Edit: there are nome 16-byte demos for the 2600 that fill the screen, so it makes sense that skipping that step would make it smaller.
There's multiple consoles which were nothing but a display and controller adapter for the cartridge which needed to have all the smarts
And in the middle to end of the Gameboy Color era and Gameboy Advance era most game cartridges had extra processing power internally.
Do you have any link regarding this? I knew of this kind of trick for NES, SNES and Mega Drive games, but other than memory swapping in the GB, I had no idea there was any additional computing trick?
I don't think there was anything beyond SRAM for save games for the GB/GBA. There was a number of cartridges with sensors or rumble packs but I can't find any details about extra computational power on the cartridges.
I would also be interested if there's some exceptions that I didn't know about.
I guess the real time clock on Pokémon games is technically extra computational power 🤓
https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2024/02/every-epoch-cassette-vision-game-preserved-and-emulated/
After looking closer it looks like the Gameboy ones with CPU were mostly unofficial like media player cartridges
Honestly it kinda looks more like a North American Saturn than a Genesis/MegaDrive or Master System. In which case the batarang controller would be slightly more accurate.
Sidenote: I still haven't sorted out what the difference is between the three-button and six-button controllers.
I didn't have a Genesis as a kid so I only occasionally got to use them.
Not much, other than the handful of games that are specifically compatible with the 6 button pad. Street Fighter 2 is the only one I had any direct experience with back in the day.