Comment by dejobaan

While I'm really happy we have faster systems now, there was something fun about about having to subvert constraints in games, and so satisfying and lovely when you did it right.

HN folks are probably familiar with raster interrupts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt) and "racing the beam." I always associated this with the Atari 800. You weren't "supposed" to be able to do stuff like https://youtu.be/GuHqw_3A-vo?t=33, but Display List Interrupts made that possible.

What I didn't know until recently was how much Atari 2600's games owed to this kinda of craziness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFnWZH5FXc

It's stuff like this that makes me think that if hardware stopped advancing, we'd still be able to figure out more and more interesting stuff for decades!