Hmmm... going by this video, the Fairchild games (and controllers) were impressively innovative for the day, considering that Pong-like games ruled at the time. Unfortunately, it appears that with the Atari 2600 being released less than a year later, Channel F's thunder was essentially stolen, and rightly so because of the A2600's superior complexity and innovaton. So close, and yet so far!

[–] tal@lemmy.today 5 points 6 months ago (7 children)

the A2600's superior complexity

Now there's a phrase that I didn't expect to see. :-)

I do think that the console's controllers look kind of interesting. I've never seen them before, sort of an alternate fork in console controller design that we didn't go down. A handle with a six-degrees-of-freedom thumbstick on top.

[–] f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (1984) is pretty wild for being on a console from 1977 with 128 bytes of RAM. Clearly some fun programming tricks were learned in those seven years.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

Fun fact: altho the early (and average) A2600 carts were 4k, they could actually be much larger, such as 16k, or even 64k, as with the later "Megaboy" by Dynacom. The key factor of course was the cost of memory at the time, and with more memory, that's how you get more sprawling games like Pitfall 2.

So yeah, Pitfall 1 was 4k, while Pitfall 2 lazily only used 11k of it's physical 16k or ROM size.

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