i once met the dev of the “stella” atari 2600 emulator at a C3 conf. he and a few friends were competing to make the smallest possible demo for the console, and they’d made a thing that fit into 14 bytes. it just drew some colors, nothing fancy, but still. to demo it he had a real 2600 and a pcb with a compatible edge connector. the only thing on the board was sixteen 8-position DIP-switches, which he set by hand to the code of the demo. ran exactly as well on actual hardware.
sidenote, stella is a neat little emulator because not only can you see and edit all those 128 bytes of ram at once during runtime, it also has a “beam display” that shows you where the electron gun in the actual tv would be pointing at any moment in your program. since the 2600 is so barebones you basically have to compute pixels on the fly exactly when the beam passes over the correct position on the tv. they call it “racing the beam”. there’s a whole book about it.
i once met the dev of the “stella” atari 2600 emulator at a C3 conf. he and a few friends were competing to make the smallest possible demo for the console, and they’d made a thing that fit into 14 bytes. it just drew some colors, nothing fancy, but still. to demo it he had a real 2600 and a pcb with a compatible edge connector. the only thing on the board was sixteen 8-position DIP-switches, which he set by hand to the code of the demo. ran exactly as well on actual hardware.
sidenote, stella is a neat little emulator because not only can you see and edit all those 128 bytes of ram at once during runtime, it also has a “beam display” that shows you where the electron gun in the actual tv would be pointing at any moment in your program. since the 2600 is so barebones you basically have to compute pixels on the fly exactly when the beam passes over the correct position on the tv. they call it “racing the beam”. there’s a whole book about it.
Holy crap, I haven’t thought about Stella in probably 25 years. Thanks for the flashback!
The release of the first version of Stella (1995) is closer in time to the release of the 2600 (1977) than it is to today.
14 byte demo what the actual shit? Im going investigating after work thanks