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Atari's Quadrascan Explained

Retro Game Mechanics Explained · 239.6K views · 2021-01-27 · 20:57

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Overview

Retro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.

On Hacker News

Recommended whenever Atari vector games come up as an excellent, deep technical explanation of how they worked.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2021–2026

Topics

Game history & retro gamingComputer graphics & renderingAudio & video engineering
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quadrascanvector monitorsataritempestretro hardware

What people said

Bluecobra · 2023-02 · Strong recommendation

I love the Atari vector games! There’s an excellent video by Retro Game Mechanics Explained on how they work: [VIDEO] Recently I stumbled on some Tektronix videos on YouTube. Those vector displays are even more mind blowing than Atari’s arcade games. I hope I can get to see one in person someday.

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aquova · 2023-08 · Recommendation

If anyone is interested further in how vector effects were achieved, there is a good video showing the rendering of frames of Tempest in slow motion [0]. And if you're really interested in how vector effects were achieved, here's another that goes into the nitty gritty of how Tempest encoded point, line, color, etc. data in RAM and then rendered those images [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

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Bluecobra · 2022-08 · Recommendation

Also the Retro Game Mechanics Explained channel on YouTube has a very well put together video about this as well: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Retro Game Mechanics Explained, played through YouTube.

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