Playing retro video games is great! But sometimes, just playing them isn't good enough... you want to get under the hood of these old systems and see what makes them tick.
That wasn't possible in the 20th century, but thanks to BASIC compilers like Fred Quimby's Batari BASIC and Oscar Toledo's exemplary CVBasic (this thing is really good, like, you have no idea), the ability to make real retro games on real retro hardware is well within reach for the most dedicated gamers.
As it turns out, I've made games for a variety of retro game systems and computers, and these are my personal experiences coding for some of these machines. I'll warn you up front that this is going to get technical... and biased... and excessively long-winded. Also, there aren't any pictures yet. I'll add some later; probably including snapshots of games and demos I've personally made.
Atari 2600
I should preface this by saying that my development environment was Batari BASIC, which handles a lot of the heavy lifting of programming the Atari 2600 for you. You're not scrambling to stay one step ahead of a scanline... all that's handled for you in the background. This limits your horizons and tends to make games designed in Batari BASIC a little samey, but at the same time, it lowers the bar of Atari 2600 game development from "impossible" to "possible" for 99% of amateur coders.
Even with Batari BASIC, you'll get a peek behind the curtain of the Atari 2600's internal workings, and you'll quickly understand how things function. The 2600 uses an all-purpose chip called the TIA to handle both graphics and sound, and neither are particularly accommodating to the user.
Along with a simple background (typically blocky and symmetrical, to save on cartridge space), the Atari 2600 uses player-missile graphics, which can be set over the background without affecting it. Think of them as caveman sprites and you've got the right idea. The player is the larger of the two, up to eight pixels wide and as long as you need it to be. Missiles and the ball can also be eight pixels wide, but are simple lines or squares. You get two players, two missiles, and one ball... if you need more, you're going to have to find sneaky workarounds.
The fact that one of the playfield objects is literally named "ball" makes it clear that the Atari 2600 was purpose-built to play Pong and Breakout games, but clever programmers found ways to stretch the feeble hardware to its limits. The player objects can be a single color per line, resulting in added detail and definition. Activision used this all the time in its games, and visually, they're a quantum leap ahead of Atari 2600 launch titles like Street Racer and Star Ship.
Player objects can be reused for multiple characters, typically at the cost of severe flicker. One player was shared between four monsters in Pac-Man, and that rapid swapping is painfully obvious to the player. One solution is to restrict player objects to their own vertical sections of the screen. This is easily done in a shooter, but in a maze game where multiple characters close in on the player from all angles, not so much!
There's not much you can do with the Atari 2600 sound generator, baked into the TIA. Some notes are missing, so trying to play them will result in the disapproving shriek of a buzzer instead. If you have great musical aspirations, either leave them behind or add a sound chip to the cartridge, like David Crane did with Pitfall 2. Some people remain nostalgic for the digital grunts and squeals of the Atari 2600 sound processor, and it does do explosions like no other game system, but don't expect much more than that.
Expansions for the Atari 2600 are numerous, and range from the relatively minor- games like Omega Race included extra RAM on the cart, a boon when the stock system only has 128 bytes to spare- to strapping a jet engine onto a Volkswagen Bug. Many of the games released by Champ Games use an ARM CPU (yes, like the kind you find in modern smartphones) to boost the Atari 2600's abilities, and boy does it boost them! The system is still restricted to the "rules" of the TIA chip, but games like GORF, Tutankham, and Super Cobra outpace the official versions by CBS Games and Parker Brothers to an almost embarrassing degree.
The Atari 2600 is an incredibly primitive system; the absolute bare minimum for effective game development. Trying to make games with it is like planting seeds in rocky soil... but damn is it satisfying when they eventually take root and blossom into flowers. Like they say about New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
ColecoVision
You can make good games with the Atari 2600. You can make better ones, more comfortably, with the ColecoVision.
Now when I say "ColecoVision," understand that I'm talking about a wide range of game systems and computers from the early 1980s. They all use the TI9918 graphics processor, the SN76489 sound processor, and the Z80A processor, which means that you're getting roughly the same experience whether it's an actual ColecoVision, or Sega's SG-1000, or the MSX computer. There are minor differences in the formats (a new sound chip here, more RAM there), but they're largely inconsequential.
Whatever you want to call it, the ColecoVision is a solid baseline for game design. You're getting a healthy 16K of video RAM, versus the ZERO K of video RAM on the Atari 2600. This means that you don't have to babysit a scanline with the nervous fervor of a helicopter parent. Once something is on the screen, it stays there until you explicitly tell it to go away. This not only opens the ColecoVision to genres that would have been functionally impossible on the Atari 2600 (text adventures! Pretty much anything with text in it!), but takes a lot of weight off the programmer's shoulders. You're free to do the fun creative stuff, while the computer does all the tedious, computer-y stuff. As it should be!
Graphics are built from a combination of tiles (exactly what it sounds like; square chunks of graphic data, artfully combined to create images) and sprites. Sprites are 16x16 pixels in size and restricted to one of the ColecoVision's fifteen colors. Sprites can be layered for multi-colored characters, but know that putting more than four of them together in the same scanline will cause flicker.
You can technically have up to 32 sprites onscreen at once, but a good designer will recognize the ColecoVision's limitations and use sprites sparingly, and keep them at a safe vertical distance. Janelle Jaquay's ColecoVision port of Donkey Kong used three sprites for Mario, making him seem like he was pulled straight out of the arcade game, but thinned out the number of onscreen barrels to compensate, resulting in a compromised experience.
Similarly, I had to limit the output of "Plinkies" in Operation Hibernation to keep too many of them from falling on the same scanline as Byron. He's made from two sprites, in contrast to Mario's three, but there's still potential for flicker, and it does show up in the fish ladder bonus stage.
Sprites can only be one color, but a single tile can be up to fifteen! On the downside, only two of these colors can share a single eight pixel line. It's not good enough to be a good artist on the ColecoVision... you've also got to be a smart one, carefully piecing together tiles to respect the system's limitations while still effectively expressing yourself. Visually "busy" ColecoVision games tend to look very angular as a result of the 9918's limitations... which is why I suggest you should stick with black backgrounds. They're a fitting canvas for old-school video games, they use up less storage, and you can cheat an extra color out of sprites, on a system without a whole lot of sprites to spare.
Sound on the ColecoVision is provided by the SN7 chip, and is perfectly competent. The Atari 2600 squawks when you play certain notes, but the ColecoVision has a wider musical range, covering six octaves. It also has three sound channels, with a fourth noise channel providing explosions and the roar of engines. If you're a practiced musician, you can get some respectable tunes out of the ColecoVision... Spy Hunter is proof enough of that. (Frenzy's pause music is similarly impressive, but terrifying. What the hell, Coleco?) If you're me, you'll muddle through.
Do be aware that the bounty of enhancements in the ColecoVision comes with some trade-offs. Explosions on the SN7 are... fair, but don't have the raw, window-rattling impact of the bangs and booms on the Atari 2600. Also, the ColecoVision color palette is gallingly drab, with sickly yellows and almost browns that leave tarnish on Coleco's claim of the arcade experience at home.
Here's a personal example. I've been at work on a game called Lucky Stars, which mimics the fun and witty banter of the 21st century revival of Let's Make a Deal. The characters in Lucky Stars look very much like LMAD's real-life hosts, at least as much as the TI9918 will allow. However, "Way Waynee" is an off-putting bronze, while "Oneggin Megma" isn't just white... he's ghost white, as pale as Jim Gaffigan on the surface of the sun. It's just ugly, especially when you're migrating from Atari's more vibrant consoles.
Also, the ColecoVision doesn't have much in the way of hardware features. It doesn't have built-in scrolling, so any scrolling you attempt will look ugly and off-putting, like the colors. You can hit a switch to double the size of sprites (all onscreen sprites. Well, it could have been a useful feature...) but you're not going to be blowing anyone's mind with Treasure-level special effects on this hardware. Even the 2600's TIA chip let you squash, stretch, and multiply players, but you're not getting any of that here. You can't flip tiles, you can't flip sprites, you can't swap palettes... there's a lot you can't do on the ColecoVision, actually. If you design software for this barebones format, you'd better make sure the core gameplay is excellent.
Nintendo Entertainment System
I haven't done much with this system at all... just a couple of demos, including Byron freaking out at a flashing screen. Nevertheless, it's become clear to me that the NES is not the super system I believed it was in 1988.
Designed as a cost-friendly version of the arcade hardware used in Donkey Kong, the Nintendo Entertainment System does offer critical improvements over the ColecoVision and its kin. It can handle scrolling either horizontally or vertically... the ColecoVision can't. The NES can flip tiles and even sprites, conserving precious video RAM... the ColecoVision can't. Instead of 15 lousy colors, the NES has a palette of 52 moderately better ones, with about two dozen available onscreen at any given moment.
However! There's a catch. (There's always a catch with technology this early, it seems.) The NES is restricted to a "rule of fours," where no more than four colors can exist inside a tile, and no more than three colors (plus a transparency) can exist inside a sprite. Tiles must be placed strategically to make the most of these four segregated micro-palettes, an annoyance to the pixel artist. You'll notice that in official NES games, many of the tiles have three shades of the same color to boost detail. It achieves that effect, but this also makes NES games feel square, tiled, and inorganic.
Also, while the NES has double the memory of the ColecoVision, it's got a small fraction of the VRAM (2K versus 16K! Holy lobotomy, Batman!) and a slower clock speed. You really feel it when you code for the system, and have to drop a damn WAIT statement for every four lines of graphics so the little toaster that barely could can catch up. It doesn't make me eager to code games for the NES, even thought I was a card-carrying member of the Nintendo cult in the late 1980s. Who didn't want to make a Nintendo game back in 1988? Anyone who hadn't already looked under the hood of this jalopy, apparently.
Sega Master System
Oh, Sega Master System! I didn't appreciate you back in the 1980s, but looking back, I should have. This is the peak evolution of the purely 8-bit game system... it simply does not get any better than this, if "this" ends at 255.
Sega's previous console, the SG-1000, was basically a rebadge of the ColecoVision with the serial numbers filed off. However, when Sega engineer Hideki Sato got a hold of the hardware, he quickly determined, "Hey, color limitations suck ass. Color clash likewise sucks ass. Let's not have that in the sequel. Let's also have color with saturation, so yellows look bright and sunny, and not like that disgusting crust you get in your eyes when you first wake up in the morning."
And so he set about making a Sega-branded successor to the TMS9918 with all of these features. NO color clash! Put any color from a palette of sixteen hues (selected from a large, if often redundant, total of 64) anywhere you please. The world is your oyster, the display is your canvas. It makes a monumental difference in the creation of pixel artwork. Oops, I just put a brown pixel right next to a white AND a gray one! And there's a pink pixel and a blue pixel somewhere in the tile, too! Aren't the hardware cops going to take me away for that? No, not on Master System. Just relax, unclench your sphincter, and let your artistic side take over.
Sprites offer similar freedom to the user, with another fifteen colors (plus a transparency!) that can be used however and wherever you like. Genesis does what Nintendon't, even before there was a Genesis, apparently! This reaps huge benefits in games like Rampage, which approaches a near-Sega Genesis level of detail, versus the laughable NES version. Add the ability to flip tiles, and the ability to stamp tiles over tiles without leaving ugly black boxes around them, and you've got one ridiculously overachieving 8-bit machine in the Sega Master System. No wonder the Brazilians are still using it in 2026. No wonder I'm making games for it!
As a Super ColecoVision, the Master System retains some of its sire's quirks. There's no hardware sprite collision, so you're going to have to manually determine if two sprites are touching by comparing their onscreen positions. The SN7 is the same (Sega rebranded it, but there's no effective difference), and comes up a little short next to the best music on the NES. It's a bit of a soprano, so don't expect the thunderous percussion of, say, Fester's Quest or Batman. The resolution on the Master System remains the same as it was on the ColecoVision, and at a respectable 256x192, it doesn't really need to be any higher. In fact, back ports from the Game Gear to the Master System often look better because of the increased screen real estate. 256x192 starts to feel pretty luxurious next to the Game Gear's crushing resolution of 160x144...
Bottom line? The Master System is deceptively great hardware. It didn't get that kind of love in the software department, but it's getting it now. Mighty Cuphead Adventure jumped over the NES and went straight to the Master System, ensuring players a genuine 8-bit experience that doesn't skimp on the visual delights. I've already made two games for the Master System, and I literally cannot conceive a situation where I will use the full span of its power. It's the place to be if you're making a game for real retro hardware.
(Shame about the lack of buttons, though. Just two, with pause on the front of the system itself? Come on, Sega. Come oooooon.)
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