How Pitfall builds its world (2021)

The 2600 is before my time. I grew up with the NES and its library. I do see 2600 nostalgia in older generations, but for me, Pitfall is pretty much the only title worth playing.

Fun Copyright Fact: This website is violating Atari's copyright and will do until the year 2072!

"For a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication" https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

This was also a time (1982) when arcade games (Star Wars, Tron, Zaxxon, etc.) and their graphics were an order of magnitude more impressive than home console games, but Pitfall still had enough playability and complexity to keep it interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

It is a fascinating book - and not just for the pitfall chapter.

It had 32 bytes of RAM. The IDE and educational materials were very heavy handed about encouraging you to split them up into very small variables, only as big as needed. Think of all the 8 bit ints that fit into 32 bytes!

PBASIC was actually pretty cool.

They had to "race the beam" ... but the VCS was not as fast as the beam, which is why Atari 2600 games always have a horizontally stretched look to them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam

"The book's title comes from the fact that the Atari 2600, initially branded the VCS (Video Computer System), did not have a video frame buffer, and required the programmers to write each line of video to the television, one line at a time. As there were only a limited number of machine cycles in which to do this, the programmers were literally racing a high speed electron beam across the screen."

From 2000 to 2002 I worked as a QA engineer at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley. We tested the chips using all sorts of software. My boss loved dumpster diving at software companies, and probably half of our lab’s software came from stuff she found in the trash. My favorite find was Risk (the board game) for Windows 3.0.

Then in my 30s I found a group of retro enthusiasts that were still hacking on the little oddball computer I'd had as a kid. It became a hobby for a few years, and coming back to the platform with a couple decades of experience programming was truly a revelation. Fitting the whole machine in your head, knowing what every byte in the memory map and every cycle of the CPU are doing.. its an experience I don't think is really possible on modern hardware. Maybe with a microcontroller or arduino type device, but even these are much more complex than the old 80s microcomputers.

And I don't think Xcode Playgrounds or various Programming Environment For Babies applications draw as much attention and spark as much imagination as learning to mod infinite lives into a game you already play, or even something as simple as modifying an ini file for a mod you found online.