Hi!
Sorry If m last posts were aggressive or just have'nt done anything in a while.
Atari, Being a low level game console, I was wondering If that could happen In P-8.
Does anyone know if this is possible?
There have been a few people who have remade Atari games in PICO-8 (me included), but you have to make some compromises - the resolution & frame rates are a lot different, the Atari actually had more colors available in the NTSC color palette, etc. But certainly many of the gameplay aspects work well in PICO-8.
So assuming that we had Infinite tokens, And didn't have to worry about colors, (Which we don't) it is possible?
@Proatwork456, Pico-8 has enough CPU to emulate the processor and controls, but the screen is just a terrible fit :
The Atari has to directly feed the CRT TV with a valid stream line by line without buffer. This means that you can change the timings between two frames, as long as you stay withing the tolerance of the TV. On the other hand, pico-8's refresh resolution is in 1/60s of a second.
TV has greater resolution and more colors than pico-8, so there again you can't fit the TV screen into the PICO-8 screen.
You have to redesign the graphics for each atari game you'll want to de-make.
What could be done is sending the video output through GPIO, but that means you need to program a GPIO to TV image outside of pico-8. That's 50% of the Atari emulator. At that point, just use an atari emulator altogether...
@RealShadowCaster Ah. I see. Would it work if we just draw each frame with a pen so we could intercept it real time, and find some equation to crunch the screen?
& by pen, I mean we run a pixel thing across the screen updating all the colors as it goes.
I made two Atari 400 demakes... Adventure Creator and Star Raiders (the latter being very faithful)
@gradualgames Maybe offtopic for this thread, but I love your Star Raiders. I only ever had the 2600 version, but the nostalgia bomb hits the same :).
@2bitchuck Thanks!! Yep it's one of the first video games I ever played probably in 1988 or 1989, on my older sisters' Atari 400.
@Proatwork456 there's nothing particularly special about either of the Atari 400 demakes I made with regards to Atari 400 hardware specifically. I imitated each game graphically and with audio using the tools and capabilities of PICO-8. In Star Raiders, I made some changes to the original game just due to the better capabilities of Pico 8. Atari 400 version does not scale sprites very well; Pico 8 does. I debated whether to make it perfectly imitate the scaling of the original and felt the better scaling was a quality of life improvement rather than something that detracts from the authenticity of the gameplay or look and feel. I could go into more detail on any aspect of how either game was programmed if you wish; but they're not related to the Atari system per se just imitating the look and feel of the games if that makes sense.
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