[Joe Musashi] was inspired by discussions about 3D engines and decided to create a first-person 3D maze of his own. The really neat part? It could have been done on vintage Atari hardware. Well, mostly.
He does admit he had to do a little cheating to make this work; he relies on code for the ARM processor in the modern Atari VCS do the ray casting work, and the 6507 chip just handles the display kernel. Still, running his demo on a vintage Atari 2600 console could be possible, but would definitely require a Melody or Harmony cartridge, which are special reprogrammable cartridges popular for development and homebrew.
Ray casting is a conceptually simple method of generating a 3D view from given perspective, and here’s a tutorial that will tell you all you need to know about how it works, and how to implement your own.
[Joe]’s demo is just a navigable 3D maze rather than a game, but it’s pretty wild to see what could in theory have run on such an old platform, even if a few modern cheats are needed to pull it off. And if you agree that it’s neat, then hold onto your hats because a full 3D ray casting game — complete with a micro physics engine — was perfectly doable on the Commodore PET, which even had the additional limitation of a monochrome character-based display.
Sadly the github tutorial link is now a 404 page.
Try this one:
https://github.com/sszczep/ray-casting-in-2d-game-engines
Howto find
search: sszczep github
open his github, go to repos, search for “ray”
Did it get slashdotted or was just taken down?
I found it at https://sszczep.dev/blog/ray-casting-in-2d-game-engines
Reminiscent of 3D Monster Maze on the Sinclair ZX81
Yes. Or Escape from the Mindmaster, a little bit.
But ZX81 has a powerful Z80 processor which could run CP/M, while VCS has a weak 6502-ish core designed for running in toy computers. ;)
If I recall correctly, there was a 3D raycast game on the Atari 800 back in the day. Unfortunately it’s way back in the far corner of my cellar.
Probably “Wayout”, by Paul Edelstein, published by Sirius Software. It was released for the 8-bit Ataris in ’82 and ported to the Apple // and C64 the following year. Full 360-degree, super fluid motion.
There was a game called Capture the Flag. Was that it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDOSZLL8qVI
Since the Commodore PET was mentioned, how about this one:
“CASTLE PETSCII-STEIN 3D v0.5 – Castle Wolfenstein 3D on a Commodore PET”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEqgtYFRWU0
Tunnel Runner, by CBS in 1983 for the Atari 2600.
This reminds me. Back around 2014 or 2015 I wrote a raycast maze. It could not have worked on an Atari 2600 because it was JavaScript powered. But it reminded me because my original goal was to make a playable 3D version of Atari’s COMBAT! Unfortunately I could not create believable (or working) tanks, so I just settled for a navigatable version of one of the COMBAT! mazes.
I’ve been working on a texture-mapped raycasting engine for the Intellivision…
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/210793-raycasting-demo/page/6/#comments
That thread is ten years old. A lot has happened since then, guys.
Runes Of Moria does this on a stock NROM cartridge:
https://youtu.be/aaqHd4kFeIY?t=6045
And if we’re tooting our own horns I’ve done quite a bit more on NES:
https://mindbleach.itch.io/slaughter