Why did Ms Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 use lines instead of dots? Wouldn’t it have saved the developers more memory by making them dots?
In: Technology
An Atari 2600 have a very strange graphics system. It does not as a computer today have a frame buffer that contains all of the screens. The resolution is 320×200 and with 1 bit per pixel you need 320*200/8=8000 byes and at the time the cost of that would be too much. The system has a total of 128 bytes of ram. 8kb cost $250 back then and the Atari 2600 introduction price was $199
One result of that is that the labyrinth on each line is mirrored so the left side mirrored tot the right side.
So the likely result is that long line is the only way that is was possible to do
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor)
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