Table of Contents
Writing A Video Kernel For The Atari 2600
| Field | Programming |
| Went Obsolete | 1984 |
| Made Obsolete By | Third-generation video game consoles |
| Knowledge Assumed | 6502 assembly programming |
| When useful | If one wanted to write a truly retro video game |
To save money, the Atari 2600 didn't include any special video hardware; when it was time to refresh the screen, a game had to drop whatever it was doing and manually control the voltage going out the back of the unit.
To make things worse, the 2600 didn't have enough memory to store a whole screen at once, so the screen image had to be generated on the fly, as the beam was moving across the TV screen. A program had only 76 cycles to generate each line of the display - no more, and no less, or the horizontal sync would be wrong.
