dragging through the retro streets at dawn

Yep, as long as the game is fun, user friendly, and as polished as possible, that's all I care about. If a programmer wants to cut himself with razorblades and roll around in salt, that's his problem.

 

For me, the simplest things can be as hard as a 'normal' person trying to do advanced calculus while juggling chainsaws, so I'll use every tool, trick, and shortcut I can get my hands on.

I understand the desire to add constraints... the added challenge makes the task more interesting, and I wouldn't be programming for the 2600 if I wanted to take the easiest route to creating games.

 

But any self-imposed challenges need to take a backseat to the game being fun, and when a coder decides his own constraints need to apply to others then he's lost touch with reality.

None of that applies only to the 2600

 

Well said!

I understand the desire to add constraints... the added challenge makes the task more interesting, and I wouldn't be programming for the 2600 if I wanted to take the easiest route to creating games.

There seems to be three main reasons why people make Atari 2600 games:

 

1. They want to do something hard to challenge themselves, so they use assembly language.
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2. They're doing it for school.
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3. They had an Atari 2600 as a kid and always wanted to make their own Atari 2600 games because there's something special and magical about the graphics and sound effects that other consoles don't have.
   

 

The third type of person will usually want and need every tool, trick, and shortcut they can get. That's why they use batari Basic, Visual batari Basic, and various kernels, minikernels, modules and enhancements.

When I programmed Skeleton, bB didn't exist - so the only way was handcoded 6502 assembly. Stellalist was fairly active, although the amount of reusable code available was a lot less than exists now. But the main constraint was 4K ROM size. Although bankswitching was understood and handled by emulators, physical cart manufacture was done by salvaging a 4K game PCB and adding an inverter to A12 for the EPROM. So if you wanted to sell games, you had to stick to 4K ROM (and 128 bytes of RIOT RAM).

 

Nowdays I think the main split is ASM versus bB, although I suspect Harmony/ARM might become another division in the future.