Reminds me of this prediction from longbets.org: “A machine capable of passing the Turing Test will be made in 2075 using only hardware that was available in 2005.”<p><a href="http://longbets.org/172/" rel="nofollow">http://longbets.org/172/</a>
"Only legal opcodes were used in this demo" - Great!
Some information on 'illegal' opcodes for the 6502 CPU:
<a href="http://www.pagetable.com/?p=39" rel="nofollow">http://www.pagetable.com/?p=39</a>
<a href="http://www.oxyron.de/html/opcodes02.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oxyron.de/html/opcodes02.html</a>
Also related - Ctrix's Guitari <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8e7g8kJIlo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8e7g8kJIlo</a>
He will give a Talk [0] at Hackover 2014[1]on how he did the Demo and explains some of the tricks he used.
The talk will be recorded and maybe even streamed (for those of you who are interested)<p>[0] <a href="https://hackover.de/fahrplan/events/6046.html" rel="nofollow">https://hackover.de/fahrplan/events/6046.html</a>
[1] <a href="https://hackover.de/" rel="nofollow">https://hackover.de/</a>
It's been on my bucket list a long time; making a demo for one of my 70-80s systems and running it on the actual hardware. Won't be a 2600 (although I have some very old working ones). This kind of things inspires me to get cracking on that.
I really like the references to the German sci-fi cult classic "Space Patrol" at the end of the demo: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I</a>
Great demo. Working with the Atari 2600 is extreme. It only has enough memory to hold one row of pixels. So at every scanline it would need to compute the gameplay and on-screen elements on its 8bit 1.19Mhz CPU and 128 bytes of RAM. Insane!