Atari how many bits

Display as a link instead. Clear editor. Upload or insert images from URL. Have You Played Atari Today? Search In. Sign in to follow this Followers 3. How many bits is a ? Reply to this topic Start new topic. Recommended Posts. Posted February 23, NES is 8-bit, does anyone ever associate bit levels with a ? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites.

I would say 8-bit, since the databus and processor of the atari is 8 bits. Definitely 8-bit. The is a price reduced Ian Primus. Officially it's a 16 bit CPU but has 10 bit hardware support The registers in the CPU are 16 bit but the instruction set and carts are 10 bits wide.

Posted February 24, Posted February 24, edited. Atari Lots of bits at least on the motherboard anyway. Nukey Shay. Posted September 13, How many bits would you like your to be? Posted September 14, Measure this AX. Posted September 16, Posted September 16, edited. All of the above. Here's why Atari didn't implement a full 8-bit system in , and what they built instead. I think most people know the Nintendo NES was an 8-bit system.

That tends to confuse people when it comes to the previous-generation system, the Atari Was Atari 8 bit? Or something else? The answer, of course, is that it depends. The problem when defining game systems is that when you talk about bit count, sometimes people are talking about the graphics chip and sometimes they're talking about the CPU.

A count of the number of visible scan lines generated is kept inside the x register, and is also used as the color value of the player sprite, creating a vertical rainbow pattern. This will cause the graphics chip to halt the CPU until the scan line has ended, and wake it up afterwards, at the beginning of the horizontal blank interval of the next scan line. This allows the CPU to be in sync with the movement of the electron beam.

The CPU and the graphic chip are constantly performing this handshake to synchronize program execution with what is displayed on the screen. The instruciton must execute at exactly the right time, when the beam is at the horizontal position where we want our sprite to appear. In the example, we use a series of nop no-operation or dummy instructions that are designed to waste two processor cycles, to position the beam towards the center of the screen.

It should be obvious now that the code that executes in the visible scan lines is very time-critical, so it needs to be really efficient. There are all sorts of tricks you can pull, and the AtariAge forums are full of priceless advice. Any game logic should reside in the vertical blank and overscan regions, where the beam is off.

To run the game on the Atari , we need to first load it onto a cartridge. I will quickly summarize how each screen is implemented. The text is stored as a bitmap towards the end of the ROM source. The scan line loop keeps the number of visible lines in the x register like in the hello world example , and an offset into the bitmap in the y register.

Every line of the bitmap is repeated overfour scan lines. The screen is dismissed when both players press their joystick button simultaneously. This is the actual game screen. For myself, this was a fun way of indulging my own nostalgia. Husband, dad, software engineer.

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