Re: C16 played Atari 2600?

Bill H wrote:

Now Basic would be too slow to emulate a 2600
(IMO), but I believe you could use ML to do it, it may crawl, but
since the emulation overhead is so low (you are only emulating the
video hardware, sound and joystic/paddle input) it "should" be doable.
Since the program you are emulating is already mapped into the memory
space, you don't need any Ram to hold it and accessing it would be
fast. As a "thought-experiment" it would be an interesting concept, if
not for the C16, then for the C64.

As others have pointed out, the possibility of emulating a 2600 on a C16 is so far from feasible it's not even worth wasting your brain cells on a "thought experiment". As Per pointed out, think about the fact that it takes a P166 - with megabytes of RAM - to emulate a 2600... and you want the C16/64 to do it? Dreaming...

Speed issue aside, there's plenty of other hardware compatibility problems. The video generation on the 2600 is so f***ed^H^H^H^H^H^H tightly coupled to timing and interrupts that without a virtual machine framework you've absolutely no hope of reproducing the video on another machine via "translation". You can't emulate hardware - registers and ports - without virtualising the whole machine. And emulating CPUs and video takes a sh*t-load of CPU time - many many cycles per emulated machine cycle.

I can't vouch for the rumoured hardware adapters, but even those I'd tend to dismiss without concrete proof. You basically need a 2600-in-a-cart to run a 2600 game on a C16/64, with the latter doing little more than "screen scraping" and providing joystick input.

Regards,

--
| Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> | with less resistance!"
.

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