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Ah yes, Lode's raycaster tutorial, the classic writeup keeps generating interesting projects. Such as this one.

The human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. Take what's essentially a pong machine with a few extraneous bits and almost no memory, what you can do with it? Apparently racing games, building games, maze games, even honest to god space sims.

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The 2600 VCS is really interesting. It didn't even have a framebuffer, so painting pixels was done scanline by scanline and you had to be done with your scanline in a certain amount of CPU cycles, which meant you had to count them and know which instruction took how long.

It only had 128 bytes RAM, that's bytes, not KB.

A real technical marvel is the chess game for the 2600. Since the sprite capabilities were so primitive, they couldn't even draw all pieces in a single scanline, they had to alternate scanlines so that they could even draw all chess pieces, and that's not even mentioning the fact that they somehow made a chess playing algorithm work in 128 Bytes of RAM.

the 128 bytes thing breaks my brain every time. I'm building a city in three.js with ~30k buildings and I get annoyed when a frame takes 20ms on a laptop with gigabytes to spare. counting cycles per scanline is a different sport.

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