2048 game to the Atari 2600 VCS

by postit on 3/25/2014, 2:39 PM with 22 comments
  • by jasonkester on 3/25/2014, 4:42 PM

    Wow, programming in Assembly is so much easier now than it was then. Imagine the luxury of having source files that you could modify in a text editor. Joy.

    I remember my first LDA's on the Commodore 64, directly in the console, having to assign a memory location to each and every line as you went along, and woe unto you if you didn't NOP yourself out enough extra space from time to time to be able to insert code (or at least JMPs) as you added features. I'm not complaining, mind you. At least we had 3 letter codes we could use for instructions instead of having to memorize hex codes for everything.

    But yeah, even a simple assembler that handled the line numbers for you would have made me the happiest 13 year old around.

  • by unwiredben on 3/25/2014, 4:39 PM

    Very impressive, I'd been thinking of something similar.

    In playing it in Stella, I frequently get into a "no move" situation where the grid looks like

      2   8   16    2
  4 128    2    4
 16  64    8    8
  4  16    4    _
    Based on this config, I should be able to move right to collapse the two 8s, but no input it being allowed. I suspect it's a bug in the "NEW RANDOM TILE" code not allowing that last cell to be selected for a new item, since in the Stella debugger, memory at A8 is stuck with value 3.

    Update: https://github.com/chesterbr/2048-2600/pull/2

  • by mambodog on 3/25/2014, 4:13 PM

    For anyone who wants to try it out in their browser: http://jamesfriend.com.au/2600/2048/

    (give it time to load, there's about 7mb of JS)

  • by T-hawk on 3/25/2014, 5:30 PM

    Love the sprite work to fit each of the numbers into 8-pixel-wide sprites. (The sample screenshot lacking what would be a rather chunky 256 may not be a coincidence.) The 2600 has no text or character capabilities, so the only way to display numbers is to use its very few hardware sprites, and there aren't enough to write out each digit in its own sprite.

  • by raldi on 3/25/2014, 3:46 PM

    The mobile version of the site hides the screenshot, so here's a direct link:

    https://camo.githubusercontent.com/14454ebb4fa0b959a20b15f8a...

  • by rglullis on 3/25/2014, 3:58 PM

    I'm waiting for the Kinect version of the game, so I can play it Minority-Report style.

  • by postit on 3/25/2014, 7:03 PM
  • by boomlinde on 3/26/2014, 2:33 PM

    This is excellent! Hav you considered using hardware the hardware acceleration available in the Pitfall II mapper to get enough raster time for colors?

  • by OneOneOneOne on 3/25/2014, 3:58 PM

    It would have been wonderful if this had been released back in the day.

  • by LanceH on 3/25/2014, 3:25 PM

    This is better than an interactive fiction version for me.

  • by evo_9 on 3/25/2014, 5:12 PM

    When's the Apple Lisa port coming?