October 2004
Beginner
464 pages
13h 42m
English
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Play Atari ROMs Without the Atari
Can’t find your 20-year-old 2600? Your desktop machine will do.
Chances are, you own a computer with slightly more graphics, CPU, and processor power than an Atari 2600. (Chances are, you can buy a graphics card with better specs for a nickel or so.) Is this a sign of bloat, waste, and the decline of Western civilization into conspicuous consumerism? Perhaps. Of course, it also means that emulating a 2600—imitating the exact hardware of the 2600 to run its games—is practical.
If you have a pile of 2600 cartridges in the closet, perhaps it’s time to revisit the nostalgia of the early ’80s (though see [Hack #1] for further discussion). If you don’t have any cartridges, don’t fret. There are still programmers producing new work for the grandfather of all modern consoles (see [Hack #6] ).
Maybe you’ll join their ranks someday. Maybe you just want to play Adventure again. First, you need an emulator.
Installing Stella
Bradford Mott’s Stella (http://stella.sourceforge.net/) is a well-maintained, cross-platform Atari emulator. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows through DOS, so it’s an excellent choice.
At the time of writing, Version 1.3 is the current stable version
with 1.4 on the way. From the download link (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=41847),
grab the appropriate file for your operating system. Windows users:
download st13.zip. Unix users: fetch a binary
package or the source code in
stella-1.3-src.tar.gz ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.