Mavimao
Jul 26, 2006, 10:21 AM
I was inspired by an experiment I read over at atariage.com, in which a member pitted the Atari 2600's Video Chess against GNU chess. I've decided to do the same thing but have the Atari face the source of wrath of many a mac zealot: Chess.
I opened Chess, put it on the stronger/slower setting and started a new "computer versus Human" game. The computer is white and made its first move. I then opened Video Chess with the Stella emulator, put it on the strongest setting (7) and redid the move Mac Chess made on the other screen. The process is to continue back and forth until the winner is declared.
Just a few notes to tell you what Mac Chess is facing: a 4 kilobyte cartridge created by Bob Whitehead and Larry Wagner in 1979, after a lawsuit in which a Florida man sued Atari when he discovered that even though a chess piece was drawn on the box the 2600 came in, there was no chess game available. Chess on the VCS was thought impossible due to the graphical and memory limitations of the system. But after coming up with the "Venetian Blind" technique (in which each sprite is drawn every other scan line therefore doubling the amount of sprites available per scanline) and Bank-switching to increase the maximum cartridge ROM size (4 kilobytes), they felt confident they could do it. Interestingly enough bank-switching wasn't necessary as the programmers were able to squeeze everything into 4k.
Anyway the Atari 2600 sports a 1.19 MHz MOS 6507 processor and has 128 bytes (yes, you heard me right) of RAM. Because of this, whenever the atari has to think of its next move, the screen turns colors because it doesn't have enough processing power to display graphics at the same time. Oh and it takes forever. Even after eating breakfast and writing this post, the atari is still thinking its next move, thus it might take a while. i will keep this thread updated as the game progresses.
I opened Chess, put it on the stronger/slower setting and started a new "computer versus Human" game. The computer is white and made its first move. I then opened Video Chess with the Stella emulator, put it on the strongest setting (7) and redid the move Mac Chess made on the other screen. The process is to continue back and forth until the winner is declared.
Just a few notes to tell you what Mac Chess is facing: a 4 kilobyte cartridge created by Bob Whitehead and Larry Wagner in 1979, after a lawsuit in which a Florida man sued Atari when he discovered that even though a chess piece was drawn on the box the 2600 came in, there was no chess game available. Chess on the VCS was thought impossible due to the graphical and memory limitations of the system. But after coming up with the "Venetian Blind" technique (in which each sprite is drawn every other scan line therefore doubling the amount of sprites available per scanline) and Bank-switching to increase the maximum cartridge ROM size (4 kilobytes), they felt confident they could do it. Interestingly enough bank-switching wasn't necessary as the programmers were able to squeeze everything into 4k.
Anyway the Atari 2600 sports a 1.19 MHz MOS 6507 processor and has 128 bytes (yes, you heard me right) of RAM. Because of this, whenever the atari has to think of its next move, the screen turns colors because it doesn't have enough processing power to display graphics at the same time. Oh and it takes forever. Even after eating breakfast and writing this post, the atari is still thinking its next move, thus it might take a while. i will keep this thread updated as the game progresses.
