On 2015-29-01, I've given a presentation during the event night at the Digital Retropark in Offenbach/Germany. The event was recorded and is now available as a video with German audio. I've created this tutorial page for the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS) to host the related information. The purpose of the tutorial is to show interested people the history of the Atari 2600, explain the hardware design decisions, and how they impacted the way of programming - making programming the Atari 2600 a unique experience and challenge. And I describe examples illustrating how programmers adopted the machine's limitations and strengths to create better graphics over 30 years. The following material is available for you:
- Slides & Source Code used for the presentation.
- English video, recorded at the "plugIn - Geek out" event at SAP in January 2014. This video is 35 minutes long and consists of two parts. The first part gives a short overview of the history and inner workings. In the second part, I show how to code for the Atari 2600 using WUDSN IDE. Changing a single line of code and seeing immediately what happens brings you as close as possible to the machine.
- German video, recorded during the event night at the Digital Retropark in January 2015. This video is 1:15 hours long and entirely focuses on explaining the inner workings and how better code makes better graphics possible. This video does not contain any coding parts.
