Atari 2600 Plus Coming in November 2023 (3 Viewers)

[LeoA]

Stock firmware is 720p, but beta firmware has pushed that to 1080p and the developers are hopeful that they'll be able to include that in an official firmware update soon.

There's some bottlenecks with some of the more intensive 2600 games that can cause some missed frames that they're working on resolving right now before clearing the feature.

 

[John*Wells]

Just as a quick tip, if you find that Moon Patrol lacks the background music that you may remember, just slide the left difficulty switch.

Quite a few folks never realized that it serves as a mute button for the music (which also is the case with Phoenix, another great coinop port from Atari on the system).

Thank you Leo. I’ll remember that. I still have not found my original box of cartridges but I know they are somewhere in my house

 

[Jeff Cooper]

There's some bottlenecks with some of the more intensive 2600 games that can cause some missed frames that they're working on resolving right now before clearing the feature.

Understandable. Today's technology stands little chance against the sheer computing might of the 2600!

 

[LeoA]

It does sound funny, I'll admit. But the 2600 is a complex and strange piece of hardware. Further, 2600 games sometimes pushed the hardware in unusual ways which requires utmost accuracy with the emulation. The end result is that Stella (the world's premier 2600 emulator) can push fairly modest hardware like the gut's of the 2600+.

Jeff Vavasour, the president of the original incarnation of Digital Eclipse (and the founder and president of the current Code Mystics studio, the main western competitor to the reincarnated Digital Eclipse studio), gave a great interview 20 or so years back that went into some detail on this topic when Atari Anthology came out for Xbox and Playstation 2.

Back To The Classics: Perfecting The Emulation For Digital Eclipse's Atari Anthology

Vavasour discusses the complex issues, problems, and pitfalls inherent in the surprisingly difficult task of emulating an Atari 2600 on current game hardware, explaining the steps the Digital Eclipse team took to ensure the Atari Anthology titles were as perfectly recreated as possible for PS2...

www.gamedeveloper.com

I think the biggest problem the 2600+ is having is caused by whatever's running alongside Stella or the 7800 Pro System emulator. Basically at 1080p with more complex games, problems happen when the CPU or GPU is running at a 99% utilization rate. Much like your desktop PC when it maxes out like that, issues start happening.

I think if they can optimize something like their Linux kernel, they'll get enough head room to skirt around this. And the Stella team is cooperating and were able to do some optimization to get around the similarly weak guts of Hyperkin's Retron 77 (a device much like the 2600+ from a few years ago), so a 2600+ specific build of Stella is another possibility.

 

[John*Wells]

I don’t use windows. Is it true that the update can only be done through windows OS? I’m on Mac

 

[Greg.K]

I don’t use windows. Is it true that the update can only be done through windows OS? I’m on Mac

As of now, yes.

I've updated mine to the latest, still have the disappearing sprite issue but it sounds like they plan to address that later. It did fix the 7800 switched button issue.

Stock firmware is 720p, but beta firmware has pushed that to 1080p and the developers are hopeful that they'll be able to include that in an official firmware update soon.

There's some bottlenecks with some of the more intensive 2600 games that can cause some missed frames that they're working on resolving right now before clearing the feature.

I'm not sure I see any real benefit to running this at higher than 720p anyway.