DigiBeatz
This is a game for the Atari 2600. To play it on PC you'll need an emulator such as Stella.
DigiBeatz is a rhythm game for the Atari 2600 that features software-generated sound to split the console's 2 audio channels into 5. It contains 7 originally composed tracks, each with 5 charts of varying difficulty. All this in only 4 kilobytes.
After selecting a chart, notes will begin falling from the top of the screen towards the targets at the bottom. Before the note reaches the target, position the joystick so the corresponding target is highlighted - left, right or center. Then press fire right when the note overlaps the target. If the note is hit successfully, a color will flash at the bottom indicating how well the note was timed. Green means perfect timing: +100 points, +1 health. Yellow means good timing: 50 points, +1 health. Red means poor timing: 20 points, -2 health. If your health flashes red, it means the note was missed: 0 points, -4 health. If your health reaches 0, it's game over.
Setting the Player 1 difficulty switch to A increases the tempo of all songs.
Setting the Player 2 difficulty switch to A changes the game to work with the Track and Field controller. When a note reaches the targets, the corresponding button on the controller should be pressed.
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pretty please open source this, the audio code would be incredibly useful
Can you please explain how you did the sound for this? I was under the impression that this kind of thing was impossible on stock hardware. It's super super impressive!
The Atari 2600 is able to output 4-bit sampled audio by setting one of the 2 audio channels to have a constant-value waveform, and having the CPU update the volume for every sample. This game spends a little over half of its time generating samples programmatically to emulate 4 square wave channels. Because there are no interrupts, the entirety of the gameplay code has to be interleaved with calls to update the audio at regular intervals.
Never thought a second generation console would be able to run a game of such genre, impressive
Nice game but how you can put that many charts and music on a 4kb rom.
Can you publish the source code? I'm interested in how you fit all the data into a small space.