
Bang – An Atari 2600 VCS Demo - apaprocki
http://xayax.net/bang!/
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raldi
Reminds me of this prediction from longbets.org: “A machine capable of passing
the Turing Test will be made in 2075 using only hardware that was available in
2005.”

[http://longbets.org/172/](http://longbets.org/172/)

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nine_k
My favorite thought experiment is building telephone and radio in Ancient
Egypt, sometime ~1000 BC.

Silver / zinc batteries can work an acetic acid, easily distillable from
vinegar. With some luck, alkaline batteries are also doable (IDK if Egypt had
any sources of manganese). With some effort, sulfuric acid can be produced,
allowing lead-based batteries. Two of the three are rechargeable, but having
the acid and zinc as consumables is also OK.

Copper wire is perfectly doable; copper was produced in mass quantities,
drawing it through a ceramic die should do the trick. Producing cheaper brass
(copper + zinc) is also not a problem.

For magnets, we'll need some iron. It can either be produced from ore, or
taken (as an alloy with nickel) from meteorites that Egyptians also found. We
don't need much.

Insulation can be made from canvas and oil (like oil painting, but without the
picture). Wood can be the non-conducting construction material instead of
plastic.

With this, we can easily build telegraph and telephone. With some high-voltage
coils, we can build a radio transmitter capable of Morse code transmission.
This all would look like pure magic and would have immense military value.

Note that it would take nothing extraordinary technologically: most things are
readily available, no need to build machines to build machines, etc. It would
only take a much larger body of _knowledge_ about the world.

~~~
gaius
Also see
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)

Imagine steam powered Roman legions... It could have happened.

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ssdsa
"Only legal opcodes were used in this demo" \- Great! Some information on
'illegal' opcodes for the 6502 CPU:
[http://www.pagetable.com/?p=39](http://www.pagetable.com/?p=39)
[http://www.oxyron.de/html/opcodes02.html](http://www.oxyron.de/html/opcodes02.html)

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minikomi
Also related - Ctrix's Guitari
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8e7g8kJIlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8e7g8kJIlo)

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lubilubilubi
He will give a Talk [0] at Hackover 2014[1]on how he did the Demo and explains
some of the tricks he used. The talk will be recorded and maybe even streamed
(for those of you who are interested)

[0]
[https://hackover.de/fahrplan/events/6046.html](https://hackover.de/fahrplan/events/6046.html)
[1] [https://hackover.de/](https://hackover.de/)

~~~
jamiesonbecker
I saw a lot of SLI and mixed modes. I'm guessing the helix animation was done
with sprites (full screen height). But there are a lot of things that just
seemed beyond what's possible on that platform. No idea how the Coca-cola logo
was done (sprites moving together? but how the curves?), or how any of this
was so smooth and fluid. Simply mind-blowing.. especially on a 2600, which
IIRC have less capabilities than even a XL/XE (POKEY/ANTIC/etc).

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beagle3
The 2600 had a 1D display buffer. You would rewrite the contents of that
buffer at the end of every scanline to actually get a 2D image. Game logic
would usually only run during flyback.

(Yes, that's why atari chess did not show the board while thinking, and why if
there was a bug you'd get a 1D horizontal image all over the screen)

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tluyben2
It's been on my bucket list a long time; making a demo for one of my 70-80s
systems and running it on the actual hardware. Won't be a 2600 (although I
have some very old working ones). This kind of things inspires me to get
cracking on that.

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venti
I really like the references to the German sci-fi cult classic "Space Patrol"
at the end of the demo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I)

~~~
ZenoArrow
Never seen Space Patrol, so missed that, but I liked the references to the
Amiga, C64 and the game Impossible Mission... [http://www.ohgizmo.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/09/impossible...](http://www.ohgizmo.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/09/impossible_mission_2.jpg)

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guidedlight
Great demo. Working with the Atari 2600 is extreme. It only has enough memory
to hold one row of pixels. So at every scanline it would need to compute the
gameplay and on-screen elements on its 8bit 1.19Mhz CPU and 128 bytes of RAM.
Insane!

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drudru11
jaw dropping incredible. i've never seen any body pull off that much on the
2600. respect!

