This Atari 2600 Game Has 2 Extra Sound Channels...But How?
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- čas přidán 6. 08. 2024
- When you think of Atari 2600 sounds, you might be imagining basic calculator or pong noises. The sound capabilities were super limited, and very few games had background music during gameplay. But one company wanted to produce great tracks on the limited hardware.
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Display Processor Chip in Pitfall II:
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:01 Music in Arcade Games
2:40 Atari 2600 Music
4:03 Birth of Activision
5:34 Activision Games
7:16 Pitfall
8:42 Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
11:52 Outtro
Special thanks to the following users from pexels.com for the stock footage:
84LENS, 霍天赐, A frame in motion, Ahmet Akpolat, Andrew Hanson, Anna Hinckel, Anvar Tushakov, Artem Podrez, Caleb Oquendo, Cottonbro, Cristian Dina, Curtis Adams, DAV Grup 1, David McBee, Distill, Drones Scot, Edward Jenner, EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA, Ekrulila, Evgenia Kirpichnikova, Free Videos, George Morina, Glen McBride, Jack Sparrow, Joseph Redfield, Kampus Production, Karolina Grabowska, Kelly, Kindel Media, Ksenia Chernaya, MART PRODUCTION, Mikhail Nilov, Miguel Á. Padriñán, Mike B, Monstera, Nazim Zafri, Nicole Michalou, Pavel Danilyuk, Pete Wales, pickarick, Pixabay, Polina Tankilevitch, Pressmaster, Ricky Esquivel, RODNAE Productions, Ron Lach, Sora Shimazaki, Steve B, Thirdman,Tiger Lily, Tima Miroshnichenko, Tom Fisk, Tony Schnagl, Vlada Karpovich, Yan Krukov, Yaroslav Shuraev
Special thanks to streambeats.com for the music used in this video.
#atari #activision #activisiongames - Hry
You can control your direction when falling, it's just slow and you have to keep your joystick in the position you want to go.
Came here to mention this too. It really makes you take care to land correctly, but you can indeed pixel-inch your way back to the edge by holding the joystick in a direction.
Plaque Attack. Not “Plague” Attack
Great idea for a game though! You play Dr. Faustus, who cooks up a bioweapon in a Chinese lab.
😅 I was going to say something similar
POGR
Pitfall II also had another trick up it's sleeve: The level design. Rather than storing levels in the traditional sense, every scene in the game was based on a math calculation. I.E. every scene had a number that would generate what was supposed to be there rather than storing tiles in memory. By using a calculation to draw the scenes, less data was required to draw out every scene. The game would simply go, "what number does this room have?" Then, using that number, it would generate the scene based on very simple graphics data. David Crane was a genius in so many ways.
Excellent Atari channels video
After listening to Pitfall II's music, there are some similarities between that and the music for the NES version of A Boy and His Blob. I have to wonder if it's because both games were designed by David Crane.
David Crane was in fact the lead programmer and producer for the classic NES Game A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia." As for Super Pitfall for the NES, David Crane had nothing to do with that craptacular game.
With that said, Pitfall II for the Atari VCS (2600) was ahead of its time and did things that nobody thought were possible with the hardware of the console. One primary thing about this classic game, it was the first game to have checkpoints.
Underrated channel, deserves more recognition
he's getting there. He only had like a thousand in january
Am glad it’s underrated because it’s already old news and it’s already sooo many times told before on other youtube channels and so it becomes to me predictible as well for what he would say about those stuff like this,i hate how everyone tries to take a piece of the pie and do the same thing all over again.
I know right?
Agreed
Extra trivia for Pitfall 2 - for the 5200 and Atari 8-bit versions of the game, there is an entirely new world to play after you defeat the first level. Anyway, really enjoying the videos POJR, keep up the great work!
I remember when I first unlocked that second game, the drunk bats and fire ants scared me lol
So sad that no one can get the rights to the original Frogger music to release the arcade version as it originally was. :(
Frogger for the Starpath Supercharger.
@@Mrshoujo Oh sure. I've got plenty of ways to play the original. Just a shame that future generations and casual players on modern consoles won't be able to hear that weird Japanese folk song. Cheers. :)
Also, the Supercharger version is fantastic.
7:19 Hey! It's Jack Black!
Oh, and it is _kinda_ possible to control your fall in Pitfall II, but it's extremely slow, like 1 pixel per floor. You'll still fall several floors before you can steer yourself back to a ledge, but at least you can stop yourself from falling all the way do the bottom.
Actually, you *can* steer which direction you fall toward in Pitfall 2. Push left or right and you'll drift until you hit a ledge.
Hey, POJR!
The first Pitfall actually has an "ending", so to speak... If u manage to get ALL the treasures, the game screen will actually freeze, showing how much time u had left and ur score... not an easy thing to accomplish, though...
Anyways, great video, as always... cheers!
I truly look forward to your videos Pojr. Always great content!
Smurf Rescue in Gargamel's Castle and Dig Dug had good music in them.
You deserve more than 10K subs POJR. 🙂🙂🙂🙂
I remember the game Haunted House winning awards for sound effects (not music).
Pitfall 2 music is really awesome
1:57 Venture, an arcade game released just four months after Rally-X, had _much_ more sophisticated music than both Rally-X and Donkey Kong. It was the first arcade game that used three voices for BGM, and there really weren't other contenders for years.
10:48 I think you can control your movement as you fall, it's just a minute amount though. Only around a pixel or two per floor. I haven't played it in a while, so I may be wrong, but I owned this as a kid, and I distinctly remember holding the joystick to the left or right and eventually hitting an actual floor. Sometimes if you're too centered in the fall, it will take a while or you won't make it before hitting the water below though.
Pitfall 2 was one of my favorites. Mountain King had some kick-ass music also
I still play MK on my 2600! I was going to mention it, but you took care of that.
it's "Plaque Attack"; (plack - attack) it rhymes.
Moon patrol is another game that has background music. Its only one channel but its pretty decent considering its atari. You may need to play with the difficulty switches to get the music to play. Its a decent rendition of its arcade music
Awesome video! You covered all the bases on this great game. Having somebody from your generation cover these older games is interesting because you are most likely experiencing them for the first time. Thanks for taking time to make all these wonderful videos!!! Oh, and if you have access to some of the various joysticks for the Atari 2600, I would love to see your reaction to some of them. There were some very unique 3rd party options back in the 80's, and none of them resemble the modern controllers.
This was a great video. You have a really relaxing way of talking and going through the history of things. I like to watch your videos before bed to clear my mind and de-stress.
I am sure that you will hit 10k subs before the end of the year, your content is great! Thank you! ❤
For real, this is the best video game music of all time.
I just found your channel in my feed. Fascinated as I am with classic video game consoles, I think I'll stick around. It's 'Plaque Attack', not 'Plague Attack'.
Hey Pojr, love your channel sir, keep up the good work.
great job man. seems like just yesterday I remember you hitting 1k subs and you're almost at 9k! That's awesome man. Keep up the great content.
Keep up the good work Pojr, enjoying your videos.
The tune from Moon Patrol gets stuck in my head to this day.
Another and more important reason why it’s so rare for an atari 2600 to have any music is because each channel in the TIA only uses a 30 kHz 5-bit frequency divider (31~32 different frequencies), in contrast to the 11-bit, 10-bit and even the 8-bit frequency dividers used for the NES’ 2a03, SMS’ SN76489 and Atari’s POKEY respectively.
You are brilliant, Pojr! 😃👍
Actually when you are falling in Pitfall II you absolutely can move your joystick and holding it to the left or right will drift Pitfall Harry in the direction you hold the joystick in and he will drift and land on a platform before reaching the water at the bottom.
The 2600 has so many cool stories and interesting trivia like this. Good Video POJR!.
Little trivia: the Display Processor Chip was actually named after David Crane's initials. As far as Pitfall I, the original game was 6 Kb large, so David Crane had to shave off bytes here and there to cram it into a 4 Kb cartridge... and was then told by his colleagues that one life was not enough!
At the time, Atari2600 games had artwork representing the games, not screenshots. The technology to screen capture wasn't there yet, unless you were a major studio.
Also, you CAN control your player falling in Pitfall II. It's very slow, but there is a tiny bit of what today is called "Mario Physics".
I had no idea that Activision made a Pitfall 2. I feel like I missed out on a great game!
You did! It's really solid! Maybe a bit thin by today's standards, but you should grab an emulator and give it a go. :) It does have a specific set of treasures you must collect, not just the gold bars. Music is catchy too ;)
small note,.. pitfall 2 had an ending, if you get to the scared 'dog' on the first screen under the initial spawn point, one of the few games the was not just a competition of getting the high score like in the arcade, but actually had a sense of accomplishment because it could be beat , the player could win,...
Good stuff, keep it up.
Another limitation with the 2 sound channels is their frequencies don’t align well to typical notes. I watched an Activision postmortem talk about this. For one of their games they had a musician design an opening melody and they marked which keys he could use because they could play the frequency within a certain percentage.
As I understand it, the DPC chip didn’t add two channels but played and mixed 4 channels and output the level to an address and it had to be copied to the volume register. I’m not sure if this blocked one of the two sound channels, but they still had one because it was used for jumping and touching checkpoints.
As David Crane put it in his postmortem, he’s a chip designer by trade so he “cheated” by putting in an extra chip.
Btw, I recommend the GDC postmortems.
⚡Awesome video, as always, POJR! 👍😁 You deserve way more than 🔟k subscribers... 👊😎 Shoutout, for another Activision classic, on Atari 2600: H.E.R.O...! 🎮😉
But how did it do the extra sound channels, Pojr? BUT HOW???
It's better than you think. The DPC chip has 3 sound generators of it's own. They generate values, according to which channels are currently "on" at that moment. The channels switch on and off rapidly to create the square-wave sound. Each generator has it's own value and all 3 are added together.
Then those values are sent to the 2600's own sound chip, and control the volume register. So they're played like primitive samples! The TIA chip's sound circuits supported 16 volume levels, so you could play 4-bit samples through them if you kept blasting those samples through the chip fast enough. Pitfall II did that on every scanline, so 15KHz, 4-bit sampled sound! Works pretty well for square waves.
So, one of the two sound channels built into the console is playing samples from the 3 square-wave generators. The other sound channel plays the drums, and that's 4.
Other games, Quadrun being the obvious one, also played samples the same way. And actually Quadrun might be the only one, can't think of another. Ghostbusters, on some 8-bit computers (but not the 2600) used the same technique for it's "GHOSTBUSTERS!!! AHAHAHAHA!" sample. You just set the sound channel to output a continuous output, then change the volume level a few thousand times a second to play your sample.
The DPC chip also allowed for the scrolling graphics. It would calculate what background to display, for each scanline, and send that to the console. So the console didn't have to bother working it out, it just accepted it straight from the cart and put it into the video chip. David P Crane describes it here -
forums.atariage.com/topic/28149-pitfall-2-how-does-the-sound-travel-from-the-cart/
I mention the "sound" and "video" chips, they're the same chip. The 2600 only had 3 proper microchips, and a couple of simple logic chips just to stick stuff together.
Plague attack? Ohhh Plaque (plack) attack. Got me to switch tabs to see what game we were talking about. Also, it looks a lot like Megamania (or vice versa - not sure which came out first)
I was thinking the same thing. Q not a G ^_^
I had braces until I was 34! Stay strong ❤️✊
I didn't get Pitfall 2 till recently and it made me wish I had it back in the day. I like seeing Jack Black in that old Pitfall commercial
Thanks for the video. I still have my Pitfall patch
New Pojr!
the music at 9:42 sounds soooo good!
amazing what a difference 2 extra channels make! it has very "sega master system" esque vibe which i love
cool content..keep up
I don't know about everyone else, but I was always super pissed when I got a home port of an arcade game and stuff was missing. Like music, or animations.....etc. I got Shinobi for the C64 and it was pretty good but I was so mad that the music didn't play during the gameplay. The boss didn't appear at the end of the levels to taunt you either, and Joe didn't have the walking animation when you enter a door/cave. I was like ten years old so I didn't understand hardware limitations but I hated the missing stuff.
Also, when you say "They," Pitfall II was actually made by David Crane. He designed the DPC and made everything except the music. Crane was well known to all gamers during that era.
I was hoping to hear an elaboration on what was actually accomplished with the chip in Pitfall II. Here's a nutshell: The Atari 2600 does not provide a lane that allows game developers to tap directly into the console's sound output. The thing was developed in 1976, and had an expected shelf life of 3 years. Just having more than one voice was already revolutionary. So you can't just drop a chip in that "adds two voices." It doesn't work. What happens instead is the chip generates *FOUR* voices, and then provides 4-bit digital data reconstructed from mixing all those voices together. The cartridge's software then needs to plug that 4-bit digital data into the _volume register_ of one of the 2600's two native voices, in realtime, i.e. dozens of times per frame. In short, you can get the 2600 to play pretty much anything in one of its voices if you use this technique, but it does require an on-cartridge chip to provide the digital data, and a fair bit of the 2600's CPU time to perpetually tweak the volume to render that digital data. You can plainly hear that the music has a harsh, lo-fi quality to it-the consequence of it being only 4-bit audio.
The other 2600 voice-the one not taken over by the music-is free to provide the various jumping, etc. sound effects.
It would be nice to be able to say that what they came up with for this cartridge was revolutionary, but really the only revolutionary thing about it is that gives the effective result of a 2600 with 5 simultaneous voices. Something that was not repeated until the homebrew scene of the 2010s+. An earlier game, Quadrun, had already demonstrated the "tweaking the volume register" trick before Pitfall II. Quadrun plays a short digital sample of the developer saying "Quadrun", and because it's just data read from the cartridge, no special chip was needed. And before Quadrun, the very concept of accomplishing digital audio with this kind of trick was already old hat on 8-bit computers.
Sega's Super Locomotive and Konami's Gyruss are where game music started to actually be good.
Skateboardin' on the 2600 is the first memory I have of music in a home game. I'd run the game just to listen to the song loop, good memories
7:50 "They reuse a lot of the same screens to save space"
Sort of. The trees and some other things might exist on multiple screens, but none of the screens are identical if you count what type of pit is present, whether there's a fire or alligators in the pit, logs etc and the way David Crane was able to do this is very clever in itself. Here he is explaining how he was able to do it: czcams.com/video/MBT1OK6VAIU/video.html
I LOVE the hit sound in Combat! Blam you are outta here then your tank spins I loved it
AtariAge makes a DPC-like board that allows games made in BASIC to have capabilities similar to Pitfall II. Anyone who wants to make their dream game has a fighting chance :)
There's a little more detail in Pitfalls single map.
There's 256 individual screens (8 bit bytes can be 0-256)
The game looks at the level numbers bits within the byte with each bit signifying a game element/feature on or off.
It’s also one of the rare cases where an Atari 2600-title received an arcade-port. I played it a lot on my C64 and in the arcade.
9:08 DSP is not for display processor chip, but "Digital signal processor"
One of the best games for the VCS! To bad we didn't see more from this very special chip :(
you're wrong. You in fact can steer while falling. You just move really slowly. You might still fall five or six levels before hitting the side of the hole.
The fun is back, oh yes siree, it's the 2600 from Atari! It's the video system with games galore, from space invaders, to cars that roar. Now one more thing, it's got a really great price: under £50 - £50?! Well isn't that nice! The fun is is back, oh yes siree, it's the 2600 from Atari!
At 4:09 trust me the Activision crew didn't have the hotties as in that stock video. lol
This was Activision in its full glory.. before Bobby Kotick waltzed in and destroyed it.
BTW I didn't hear it mentioned in the video, did I miss it? the Pitfall II cartridge has a custom oscillator chip in it that makes the extra tones available to the CPU as a stream of data. The 2600 isn't fast enough to *generate* those tones using calculations, but if the data is available on the bus, it is fast enough to pass it right to the TIA to play as sound.
Maybe that is why there are a few places in PItfall 2 where the music slows down slightly when there's a lot of moving things on the screen at once.
The Atari 2600 is a performing machine. I don't know why the Intellivision has poor scrolling performances.
Wait you have to do second smile. I have learned it was an very impressive feat to make the games for Atari years
Pitfall II was and is indeed an incredible piece of work. I’m more fond of the arcade and C64 versions though (the latter I owned. It was so great).
It's a little vague in the video how a display chip results in more sound channels.
Sad to say I never owned the Pitfall games back in the day. I love the ambition Activision had back in the Atari days.
"this add-on could have been a game changer" (stealth dad joke)
Another thing that pissed off David Crand and his fellow programmers ia when they asked if they could be given credit on the packaging or the manual for their work, the CEO of Atari/Warner Communications said, and I am paraphrasing "You are no more important than the people who put the cartridges in the boxes. Activision was the very first third-party game developer in the world.
On a different note, when Atari published the game Adventure, the programmer, Warren Robinet, created the very first secret in a video game. Which are now commonly known as "Easter Eggs." What he did is he programmed a secret room in the game and upon finding it, you were presented with his name. This went right under his boss('s) nose(s) This secret room was not discovered until long after he left Atari. A then 15-year-old Adam Clayton was credited as being the first person to find the secret room containing Roninet's name.
I heard in another video that Frogger's music included copyrighted children's tunes so that's why it was missing from the ports.
Can anybody guess who the kid is in the Pitfall commercial? Let me know if you do.
7:18 A very young Jack Black!
Hi 😀 my partner really enjoys your videos and I am intrigued at your channel name. Is it short for Porick Jeremiah? 🙏
I've watched a few of your videos and I'm now on a binge. Smashed that subscribe button 👍
That's cool, did not know the Atari allowed an hardware expansion chips beyond the ROM. Thought it's NES that started it.
The super charger increases RAM size to 16KB if I am not mistaken. He have video about it too :)
Pojr reacts - great video thumbnail
This game, Megamania and Frostbite were my favourite 2600 games growing up.
The arcade version is awful though.
Your videos are great and I learn something new each time.
I played this once on Atari, a visitor had it. Years later I rented "Super Pitfall" for Nintendo from the video store, SO DISAPPOINTED that it was the 1st Pitfall, no balloon. Super lame
Yeah it's weird much of a contrast Super Pitfall is. Activision made fantastic games on the 2600, but not so much on the NES.
They used this same music for Pitfall for the Tandy Colour Computer 3! The CoCo 3's version was much better of course.
I loved Pitfall II the arcade game.
Why it is called "display processing chip" when it only increase the sound channels 😅 ?
It does do a bit more stuff, mainly to do with graphics, which wasn't mentioned here'. Is kinda technical though.. So generally it's thought of as 'that extra sound chip!' DPC are also the initials of the creator David Patrick Crane so that probably influenced the naming of it.
@@tonyduffy7441 so what are the additional graphic capabilitys of that chip ?
I think the chip Is mostly involved with reading/writing data to offload effort from the 2600's CPU so it can perform more. Means enhanced detail per line - sharper resolution graphics (as opposed to Combat blocky) and better sprite and backgrounds management. It doesn't increase the standard colour/resolution of the console or anything. AtariAge has a thread 'How exactly does the Pitfall 2 DPC work?' but is a bit too technical for me..
could you talk about the N64 version of Resident Evil 2/Biohazard 2 someday
Journey Escape had bgm
I liked the background music for a boy and his blob nes when I first heard it but after a while it gets really annoying
Click 9:04 to get to the meat and potatoes.
pojr
leave it to a pojr video to have great editing, research, and visuals but also have one of the most cringy and uncomfortable intros on modern youtube lmao. video's worth it though
Please buy a pop filter and make some attempt to normalize your audio.
It was better on the Commodore 64.
What is it that POJR's obsession with Atari?
Why not? Everyone has their own history and passions.
Different system entirly but I was blown away back in the day with the music of the original Gyroscope on the original 48K ZX Spectrum.
czcams.com/video/gyIpK_1d7HA/video.html