The Atari Video Computer System was, in fascinating ways, unlike any other videogame console.
As the first wildly successful home game machine, the VCS, also known as the Atari 2600, was in millions of homes for well over a decade after its 1977 release. Even after Atari fell out of favor and
Nintendo took over the 8-bit game business, the company continued to produce VCS games and hardware until 1992. (Let’s see if Nintendo is still manufacturing Wii consoles in 2021.)
The VCS’ unrivaled longevity is all the more astounding when one considers that the hardware itself was nearly obsolete even when it was first released. The VCS’ unique hardware limitations forced game designers to jump through all sorts of hoops to squeeze more complex game designs out of the VCS. In a new book from MIT Press titled Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, media studies professors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost present an engaging, fascinating look at the VCS platform and how it changed the nature of game design.
“The minimal but exploitable design of the VCS showed how long unexpected tricks and techniques could continue to be developed on a platform, over more than a decade. It showed that there’s more to a console than is understood when it’s first released,” says Bogost.
In the book, Montfort and Bogost explain that the primary difference between the VCS and most every other game console is the machine’s lack of a “frame buffer.” This is the section of a system’s RAM that saves the image data for each successive screen that the game displays. The programmer writes each image to RAM, and they are flashed up onto the television screen in succession.
The Atari VCS had a miniscule 128 bytes (that’s bytes) of RAM, not nearly enough for a frame buffer. So programmers had to generate graphics literally in real time, drawing on the screen as the television screen’s electron gun was passing over the tube.
As illustrated in this image from Racing the Beam, the electron gun’s movement included three large spaces where it was not drawing on the screen: the vertical and horizontal “blanks” on the top and left, and the “overscan” on the bottom. These blind spots were crucial for Atari programmers, as these were the only times they could do anything that didn’t involve drawing graphics on the screen, such as computing joystick inputs, player movements, scoring, etc.