• 2 Posts
  • 1.47K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle









  • While it wasn’t unintended, the Atari 2600 only had 39 bits of memory to draw 160x192 graphics to the screen. It accomplished that task using the fact that CRT screens displayed images by rapidly moving a beam of light across the screen. Knowing the beam could only be in one spot at any time, the Atari system held just enough space in memory to draw 20 pixels. As the beam moved across the screen, the system updated the colour of the next pixels immediately before they needed to be drawn in a method that became known as Racing the beam.

    It was built that way because having enough memory to draw the entire screen at once would have made the Atari 2600 prohibitively expensive for consumers.