https://evoniuk.github.io/posts/pitfall.html
Games for the Atari 2600 were quite constrained. When Warren Robinett first pitched the idea that would become Adventure, a game where you would explore a world with many rooms and pick up items to help you along the way, he was denied because it wasn't thought feasible. And it made sense to do so. This was the late 70s; there had never been a game with multiple screens before. This was in the days of Space Invaders and Pac Man, when everything in a game was in front of the player at all times, so the fact that Adventure was able to have 30 rooms when it was finally released in 1980 was quite impressive.
The manual for adventure even had to explain the concept. It read
Each area shown on your television screen will have one or more barriers or walls, through which you CANNOT pass. There are one or more openings. To move from one area to an adjacent area, move "off" the television screen through one of the openings, the adjacent area will be shown on your television screen.
It was quite an innovation to have multiple rooms, and the fact that Adventure managed to have 30 was revolutionary. But Pitfall!, made by David Crane and released in 1983, had 255, all of which were much more elaborate (graphically speaking) than anything in Adventure. In this article we'll talk about how this was done.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 25, @12:16AM
Many games were highly optimized assembly that is good, tight code that didn't need improving. But some games were written in BASIC, and were slow and even buggy.
Dark Forest, a computer version of an old Avalon Hill game, Wizard's Quest, was one such. It was a simple turn based territorial conquest game. On your turn, you got one army per territory you owned that could trace a route to a castle you owned. You'd think it'd be a simple matter to implement an algorithm to do that, but the programmer screwed it up. If you had a string of territories in reverse alphabetic order, you'd get armies for only 4 of those territories. Territories 5 or more away were not counted, and should have been. I hacked in, found the routine that computed the number of armies, and replaced it with a much better one that was correct and a lot faster.
Another game, Galaxy, a simple space conquest sort of game, text screen based and also written in BASIC, had a dreadfully slow galaxy generation method. Was a terrible algorithm. I replaced it with a much better method.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25, @01:22AM (1 child)
It's impressive and an innovation for the Atari 2600 due to the hardware constraints (e.g. 128 bytes of RAM).
But having multiple rooms and generated maps was not a major innovation especially for more capable home computers of that time. There was multi-room generated stuff like Beneath Apple Manor (1978 https://youtu.be/w5iWJfUbQoY?t=48 [youtu.be] ), Aztec (1982 https://youtu.be/1JSAhXYENHE [youtu.be] ) and Bolo (1982 https://youtu.be/1jMFITP_i5E [youtu.be] ) for the Apple II.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 27, @06:47PM
The Apple II had a lot more memory. Beneath Apple Manor generated locations in an entirely different manner than Pitfall, employing the comparatively copious amounts of memory available. Simply no reason to turn to pseudorandom number generator trickery, it could be done in a straightforward manner.
Minetest (Minecraft clone) is actually a closer fit to what Pitfall does. A world in Minetest is 30k^3, far too large a space to assign memory to each location, even if only 1 bit, and even with today's modern computers with 16G RAM. No, in that game, the world is generated in small chunks as needed.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25, @01:26AM
Pitfall Classic Postmortem With David Crane Panel at GDC 2011 (Atari 2600)
https://youtu.be/MBT1OK6VAIU?t=225 [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday December 26, @10:01AM (1 child)
Could they not put more RAM on those cartridges, along side the ROM? Cartridges were always quite expensive, compared to software on cassette, because they had expensive chips in them. Was the cost prohibitive?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, @03:38PM
Apparently the Pitfall 2 cartridge had a custom chip which increased the graphics and sound capabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall_II:_Lost_Caverns [wikipedia.org]
Compare Pitfall 2: https://youtu.be/ZZIMaJnzPzw [youtu.be]
Pitfall: https://youtu.be/pslbO6Fddhw [youtu.be]