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Racing the Beam Explained - Atari 2600 CPU vs. CRT Television

Retro Game Mechanics Explained

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  • Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

400K views5 years ago3 recommendations

Graphics and audioGame developmentRetro games and consolesRenderingGame programming

An explanation of how the Atari 2600 renders graphics by having the CPU synchronize directly with the CRT electron beam.

How does the Atari 2600 display images to the screen with so little memory dedicated to video graphics? It's all explained right here. LINKS Twitter (updates): twitter.com/RetroGameMechEx Patreon (support): patreon.com/rgmechex SubscribeStar (support): subscribestar.com/rgmechex Discord (discussion): discord.rgmechex.com PATRONS Special thanks to everyone who makes this channel possible! Anthony Losego, Dan Salvato, F. Murmel, Jonathan Aldrich, Ange Albertini, Mark Canlas, Avi Drissman, Steven, Mike Gerow, Larry Koubiak, Tina Wuest, Owen Christensen, Buddy, Brandan Lennox, Jason Hughes, Diamond Ice, Chris Post, Cypher Signal, Rupix, krivx, Xkeeper, Walter Huf, David Spalding, Acceleration Shark, Rory Kelly, Joe Mecca, Ginger Spice, Kefen, Heptonion, leftler, Scott Beca, 19day, Michael Dragone, John Losego, Travis, Arthur Kunkle, Jordan Wright, Stephan Hennion, node1729, Andrea, Michael Cafarelli, KieferSkunk, James Church, Rad, John Kreitlow, Vladimir Kirov, Tromodolo, Zhongchao Qian, Cobalt, Kang Seonghoon, Exani Momeo, Nudelreaktor, tripper, Sten, 333Rich333, The Revd. Juli Mallett, Glenn hEADcRASH Sugden, David Mazarro, null, Ryan, Corey Ogburn, Martin Trozell, Garret Kelly, Joel Kuhn, Dan Shedd, Sembiance, Xander479, 4F Panda, David, Alec Johnson, Brian Henriquez, Travis Nellor, Zach Hugethanks, Oxygen Chen, RetroReversing.com, Ceres, Diego Santos Leão, Jeremiah, Chris Connett, Mark, Matthew, sapslaj, Bjoern Hansen, ers35, Pixy011, Daniel Bernard (ReckedCat), Lukas Kalbertodt, Vier Ladair, Bwangry, iPaq, Metlwing, David Johnson, Matt Shepard, Felix Freiberger, Sypwn, Niles Rogoff, Reflet, Eugene Bulkin, Walter Weaver, Articate, Julien Oster, Steve Losh, Samuel Stoddard, HattyJetty, Paige ? Hex, Yeero, Cruz Godar, Linh Pham, Noah Greenberg, Nick Rogers, Sean Nelson (audiohacked), Bryce, Andrew Yukhymchak, Sean Bryant, John Gabriel, BazBadger, Kyle, Master Knight DH, Tim Romero, Michael B., Eric Loewenthal, Adrian Haslinger, Proxy, Nolan Varani, Daniel Robinson, Hans Jorgensen, Daniel A.A. Pelsmaeker, Aaron, Max Gartung, Nicolas Dohrendorf, ei, Chaz Serir, derHinek, Myriad, samfu, Dominic Wehrmann, André Greubel, Urda, AA, Joseph Torres, Daniel Hug., Audio, Rodrigo Monteiro, Punchmaster, Stephen Bank, Dasterin, Matthew Yu, Alice Hartley, Marcus N., Agoaj, Nicholas Carhuff, Epsilion, bob johnson, Permian Strata, supergtt, Alex Berliner, Sean Coates, Eniplay, iWasHere, Alex, Dominic Cerquetti, Adam Streeter, Eric Romero, Clyde Shaffer, Oast, Esme, FinalQuark, Stefan Eisenreich, pagetable.com, Anthony McNamara (ekinsthepokemon), Keithius, Marius Schoof, Joe Sewell, Rafael De Los Santos, orgamecha, Brandon Stansbury, Steven Foley, ???? ????, & John Bruce!

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a detailed demonstration of how retro game developers worked around extreme hardware constraints.

h3mb3on Hacker News • Recommends

On “The man who made the “worst” video game in history (2019)”

Keeping in mind how ridiculously primitive and cumbersome Atari 2600 was to program on, I think it's actually remarkable how functional E.T. is (adding in the time pressure and all). I never got around to read Racing the Beam 1 but Retro Game Mechanics Explained on YouTube has a good demonstration 2 on how the graphics programming seemed like a nightmare compared to later computers and game consoles. Just positioning things on screen required calculating machine cycles of other preceeding instructions. Refactoring must've been fun. 1 link 2 link to this video
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ant6non Hacker News • Recommends

On “Atari 2600 Hardware Design: Making Something Out of (Almost) Nothing”

Here’s a detailed video by retro game mechanics that shows how the logo graphics of the infamous E.T. game is rendered: link to this video It seems incredible, very difficult. And remember, back then cartridges only had 8KB of memory. This means even more hacks are required, if your game needs more than a few levels. Theres a recurring hn post how jungle hunt encoded levels in a single byte (bitfield), then used some sort of sequence generator to allow going back and forth among the 255 levels.
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lorddimwiton Lobsters • Recommends

Racing the Beam Explained - Atari 2600 CPU vs. CRT Television
2View on Lobsters

derefron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Insecure Features in PDFs (2021)”

…remium. So your printer might have had a CPU as powerful as your computer's in it, to crunch PostScript — but definitely wouldn't have had the memory to buffer a full rasterized page. --- To put that last constraint another way: PostScript was designed to be rasterized in a way that enabled printers to do something much akin to "Racing the Beam" ( link to this video ). In both the display-rendering and printing cases, this was done in 1980s hardware, because 1980s memory was too expensive for most systems to be dedicating it to hold a buffer to asynchronously pre-render into and then read from when drawing. So instead, in both cases, you must render+rasterize in one motion, programmatically and extreme…
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zackmorrison Hacker News • Mentions

On “Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)”

Kinda cool, I've never seen these techniques all in one place before. Growing up, I thought that SNES mode 7 scaling was so cool: link The article mentions about halfway down the page that what made the 80s road rendering technique possible was racing the beam. Where say an Atari 2600 would toggle the color at certain pixel counts as the TV's electron beam swept the screen, producing graphics that seemed otherwise impossible from such underpowered hardware: link link to this video Some engines allowed for say 8 hardcoded sprites this way by toggling colors at each sprite's position, with various rules about overlapping, so sprites would flicker sometimes when they were next to each other.
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dejobaanon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64”

While I'm really happy we have faster systems now, there was something fun about about having to subvert constraints in games, and so satisfying and lovely when you did it right. HN folks are probably familiar with raster interrupts ( link ) and "racing the beam." I always associated this with the Atari 800. You weren't "supposed" to be able to do stuff like link , but Display List Interrupts made that possible. What I didn't know until recently was how much Atari 2600's games owed to this kinda of craziness: link to this video It's stuff like this that makes me think that if hardware stopped advancing, we'd still be able to figure out more and more interesting stuff for decades!
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