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Remember when a single byte was a treasure, and a few kilobytes of memory felt like a luxury? Most of us don’t—but in the world of Atari 2600 development, this was the brutal reality. Creating games on this primitive hardware required an almost prehistoric level of ingenuity, where developers wrangled every cycle of the processor like hunters stalking mammoths. With just 128 bytes of RAM (yes, bytes), programming felt less like coding and more like chiseling gameplay onto the side of a cave wall.
Fast forward to 2024, and we live in a world of multi-core processors, terabytes of memory, and frameworks so forgiving that even a monkey could make a halfway decent app. While these advances have made our lives easier, have they also dulled the edge of our technical creativity? Are we living large on the riches of modern tooling while forgetting the hard-fought lessons of the past?
In this fun and nostalgic talk, we’ll explore what the gritty, resource-constrained programming of the Atari 2600 can teach us about creativity, discipline, and the raw joy of solving problems with just enough. Along the way, we’ll examine whether our modern conveniences might actually make us a bit... la
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2025/06/05
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