ATARI’S SEVENTIES CONSOLE MIGHT HAVE BEEN A SMASH HIT WITH PLAYERS, BUT ITS UNIQUE HARDWARE AND SEVERE LIMITATIONS POSED A NOTORIOUSLY TRICKY CHALLENGE FOR DEVELOPERS. WE SPEAK TO CODERS PAST AND PRESENT TO EXPLAIN JUST HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS
True revolutions in the field of gameconsole engineering are a rarity, but there’s no doubt that the Atari 2600 fits the bill. The earliest home consoles had been dedicated Pong consoles and similar devices, which were designed to play only the games that they were built for, with no capability for expansion. The Atari 2600 was a completely different proposition, with its use of a programmable CPU and ROM cartridges allowing for a theoretically unlimited number of games. Though Atari’s console wasn’t the first to offer this capability – the Fairchild Channel F claimed that distinction in 1976 – it did popularise the concept, selling millions of units and setting the standard for how future gaming hardware worked.
The concept for such a console originated at Atari’s subsidiary Cyan Engineering, but the hardware required to create it as a consumer product didn’t become affordable until the mid-Seventies. In September 1975, a team at MOS Technology headed by former Motorola engineer Chuck Peddle introduced the affordable 6502
CPU, which cost just $25 ($143, adjusted for inflation). As well as being more affordable than competing processors from Intel and Motorola, which had been introduced at $360 each ($2,060 today), it was more capable. However, even at $25 the 6502 was too expensive for a home console, and Atari ultimately negotiated for the cost-reduced variant 6507 CPU and 6532 RIOT chips at $12 a pair.
The graphics hardware, originally codenamed Stella after Joe Decuir’s bike, was also developed at Cyan. Jay Miner ultimately finished this while Joe Decuir worked on the rest of the system, and it was named the Television Interface Adapter. Due to the high price of RAM – $195 ($1,116 today) for four kilobytes in October 1975 – this chip doesn’t include a framebuffer, which is memory that graphics are typically written to before being drawn to the screen. This allowed for a high level of flexibility, but also placed a major burden on programmers. The Atari 2600 launched in September 1977, at a price of $199 ($1,011 today).
