Weve heard so many stories about game development in the early 80s with insanely tight deadlines and lone developer efforts to create amazing games.

Many of the Atari 2600 games I grew up with spawned from this formula and I loved every one of them.

No disrespect to the developer - the sound is really THAT good.

When I fired up Pac-Man4k in Stella, I could barely play the game.

I had a stupefied smile on my face and was fiddling with the controls to see how tightly the audio held.

Its really hard to believe this is coming from a 4K Atari 2600 game.

I included my screenshot to assuage my own disbelief:) Homebrew efforts like Pac-Man-4K make me wonder how differently the console wars of the 80s would have been if this level of quality was the standard on the Atari 2600.

Nearly every year a new console came to market with a feature or two that leapfrogged the competition.

I wonder if those competitors could have kept up with Atari if they delivered games like this Pac-Man homebrew:).

Someday this mysterious tables origins may be explained but for now, it is a work of art in its own right.

There were several hardware solutions to this, adding voices to everything from automated telephone systems to video game consoles, all the way to Steve Jobs using the gimmick to introduce Macintosh to the world in 1984.

In 1982, a software-based version of this synthesis was released for the Atari 8-bit line of computers, and ever since them rossumur has wondered whether or not it could run on the very constrained 2600.

To be able to fit such a seemingly complicated piece of software into the paltry 128 bytes (yes, bytes) of RAM, rossumur actually uses an authoring tool in order to pre-calculate the allophones, and store only those in the ROM.

This way, the 2600 alone cant convert text to phonemes, but theres enough space left for the allophones, which are converted into sound, that about two minutes of speech can fit into one cartridge.

As for why he went through the trouble, we quote the author himself: Because creating digital swears with 1982 speech synthesis technology on a 1977 game console is exactly what we need right now.

And this isnt his first time on the website either, always cramming software where it shouldnt fit, such as a Netflix-like streaming service, or 8-bit console emulators, both on nothing but an ESP32 microcontroller.

And one definitely does not think of gesture recognition running on a homebrew breadboard version of a 6502 machine, and yet thats exactly what Nick Bild has accomplished.

Hes got a pair of Raspberry Pi 3s in the mix, one to capture and downscale images from a Pi cam, and one that interfaces to an Atari 2600 emulator and sends keypresses to control games based on the gestures seen by the camera.

But the logic to convert gesture to control signals is all Vectron, and uses a k -nearest neighbor algorithm executed in 6502 assembly.

Fifty gesture images are stored in ROM and act as references for the four known gesture classes: up, down, left, and right.

When a match between the camera image and a gesture class is found, the corresponding keypress is sent to the game.

The video below shows that the whole thing is pretty responsive.

That may be true, but a machine learning system running on the Vectron is not too shabby either.

This reminded us of the ColecoVision, which started out as a video game but could expand to a pretty reasonable computer.

Not to mention, the Atari itself was a fair investment back then, too.

Unfortunately for vintage gaming aficionados, those chips are now long out of production and in many cases theres little information to be had about their operation.

They can be found alongside the rest of the Atari Museums 7800 information.

It seems that the existence of these schematics has been known within the Atari community for some time, and we expect before long this information will find its way into FPGA implementations of the 7800; especially since the system features nearly complete backwards compatibility with the massively successful Atari 2600.

In the case of Steven Sidleys 1982 game Entombed, John Aycock and Tara Copplestone found a mysterious table for generating pseudo-random mazes and wrote a whitepaper on how it all works (PDF).

The table only generates solvable mazes, but if any bits are changed, the puzzles become inescapable.

Game cart storage was desperately limited so mazes had to be generated on-the-fly rather than crafted and stored.

Entombed s ad-hoc method worked by assessing the previous row and generating the next based on particular criteria, with some PRNG in places to keep it fresh.

To save more space, the screen was mirrored down the center which doubles the workload of the table.

Atari 2600 Homebrew Bin Files