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A review by willia4
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost, Nick Montfort
4.0
I was non-existent to being in diapers during the days of this story, so I can't speak to the historical accuracy or the even just the feels of the time. But my parents had an Atari 2600 and this book accurately captures the wonder caused the little colored boxes that would appear on their big wooden console television when it was plugged in.
As a professional programmer, I was particularly fascinated by the technical details of this little machine. In my world, displays are driven by framebuffers and backed by rectangular arrays of RAM. The idea of lighting up a point on the screen is, at its heart, synonymous with writing some bytes to the correct memory location. Turning the bytes in RAM into glowing points on the screen is handled by dedicated hardware that is mostly abstracted away for today's programmer.
But the 2600 doesn't have anything like that. It was designed in concert with the display hardware of its day: an electron beam that scans back and forth, back and forth. To draw on the screen, the programmer has to carefully turn the beam on and off timed precisely with each cycle of the CPU.
I am an Apple fan. I believe that the best software is written in concert with the hardware it will be running on so that each can take advantage of the other. The 2600 completely embodies that philosophy: its software is completely harmonized with the way that television and video signals worked at the time. So much so, that it's basically impossible to completely emulate the experience on modern displays. Our screens just don't allow for pixels bleeding in to one another or for phosphors to slowly dim once the beam has been turned off.
There's more to this story, of course. The way that most games were written by a single developer who owned every aspect of it (from concept to playability to music and art) is an interesting contrast to today's multi-million dollar development teams. The rivalry between Atari and Activision, whose original logo is still recognizable to all gamers today, is of note. And, of course, there's the way that women's struggle to gain respect in the industry is basically mirrored in today's software industry.
This book checked several boxes for me: as a modern programmer who enjoys history, I enjoyed reading the accounts of this pivotal project. As a lover of quality products, I enjoyed reading about the development of this seminal consumer offering. And as a gamer, I loved the nostalgic look at the console I first started growing up with.
And ultimately, as a reader, I enjoyed a well-written account of days of long ago.
As a professional programmer, I was particularly fascinated by the technical details of this little machine. In my world, displays are driven by framebuffers and backed by rectangular arrays of RAM. The idea of lighting up a point on the screen is, at its heart, synonymous with writing some bytes to the correct memory location. Turning the bytes in RAM into glowing points on the screen is handled by dedicated hardware that is mostly abstracted away for today's programmer.
But the 2600 doesn't have anything like that. It was designed in concert with the display hardware of its day: an electron beam that scans back and forth, back and forth. To draw on the screen, the programmer has to carefully turn the beam on and off timed precisely with each cycle of the CPU.
I am an Apple fan. I believe that the best software is written in concert with the hardware it will be running on so that each can take advantage of the other. The 2600 completely embodies that philosophy: its software is completely harmonized with the way that television and video signals worked at the time. So much so, that it's basically impossible to completely emulate the experience on modern displays. Our screens just don't allow for pixels bleeding in to one another or for phosphors to slowly dim once the beam has been turned off.
There's more to this story, of course. The way that most games were written by a single developer who owned every aspect of it (from concept to playability to music and art) is an interesting contrast to today's multi-million dollar development teams. The rivalry between Atari and Activision, whose original logo is still recognizable to all gamers today, is of note. And, of course, there's the way that women's struggle to gain respect in the industry is basically mirrored in today's software industry.
This book checked several boxes for me: as a modern programmer who enjoys history, I enjoyed reading the accounts of this pivotal project. As a lover of quality products, I enjoyed reading about the development of this seminal consumer offering. And as a gamer, I loved the nostalgic look at the console I first started growing up with.
And ultimately, as a reader, I enjoyed a well-written account of days of long ago.