[The 8-Bit Guy] tells us how 8-bit Atari computers work. The first Atari came out in 1977, it was originally called the Atari Video Computer System. It was followed two years later, in 1979, by the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The Atari 800 had a music synthesizer, bit-mapped graphics, and sprites which compared favorably […]
It is easy to port C compilers to architectures that look like old minicomputers or bigger CPUs. However, as the authors of the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) found, pushing C into a typical 8-bit CPU is challenging. Lessons learned from SDCC inspired a new 8-bit architecture, F8. This isn’t just a theoretical architecture. You […]
[James Sharman] designed and built his own 8-bit computer from scratch using TTL logic chips, including a VGA adapter, and you can watch it run a glorious rotating cube demo in the video below. The rotating cube is the product of roughly 3,500 lines of custom assembly code and looks fantastic, running at 30 frames […]
It takes a lot of work to build a modern video game. Typically an entire company will spend months (at least) developing the gameplay, selecting or programming an engine, and working out the bugs. This amount of effort isn’t strictly necessary for older video game systems though, and homebrew developers are quite often able to […]
Creating a game from scratch can be hard work. There are concepts to be designed, coding to be done, and art to be created to make it all happen. However, it doesn’t always have to be quite so difficult. There are a variety of development tools that allow budding game designers to get started with […]
Arduinos are a handy tool to have around. They’re versatile, cheap, easy to program, and have a ton of software libraries to build on. They’ve only been around for about a decade and a half though, so if you were living in 1989 and wanted to program a microcontroller you’d probably be stuck with an […]