Ben Fry, creator of Processing, writes about data visualization projects such as Atari 2600 code maps, zip code maps and road maps.
HN commenters call his visualizations beautiful and his PhD dissertation a helpful, easier-to-read alternative to Tufte for information design.
Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history.
The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600.
The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM.
But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat…
Ben Fry (of Processing fame)'s PhD thesis: "Computational Information Design".
Abstract:
The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, but
our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain
better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization,
data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated
part of the specifi c problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are
too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a
solution, this dissertation proposes that the individual fi elds be brought
together as part of a singular process titled Computational Information
Design.
This dissertation first examines the individual pedagogies of design,
information, and computation with a focus on how they support one
another as parts of a combined methodology for the exploration,
analysis, and representation of complex data. Next, in order to make the
process accessible to a wider audience, a tool is introduced to simplify
the computational process for beginners, and can be used as a sketching
platform by more advanced users. Finally, a series of examples show
how the methodology and tool can be used to address a range of data
problems, in particular, the human genome.
http://benfry.com/phd/
Ah, yes, in the days of yore when the code could fit in an 8k memory chip! :D https://benfry.com/distellamap/
Sorry to hear it was not an enjoyable evening.
With the higher resolutions many TVs support, there's only so much bandwidth and memory headroom to support textures that big, and DVD drives just don't have the seek speed to support. Heck, in the 360 generation we were carefully laying out files broken apart and spaced so the platter would be under the read head at just the right time to reduce that latency.
As for the updates... well, I'm intimately familiar with why patching the four concurrent titles is they way it is. I have hear our feedback was incorporated into a new update system. It's been personally frustrating, when Microsoft/Bungie pioneered the Play-While-Install concept all the way back in Halo 2 Vista. We'll see!
The feedback in this post is my own, and is not meant to reflect that of my employer 343 Industries.
I would highly recommend learning R (http://www.r-project.org/). It is very easy to directly query databases and R has many visualisation packages, including the awesome ggplot2 (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/) based on the grammar of graphics. I'm writing an R graphs cookbook and my startup's visualisation product is also built on R (see profile and feel free to email me if you need any help).
Also, look at Ben Fry's Processing books (http://benfry.com/). Here's an introductory tutorial - http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getting-started-with-processing-and-data-visualization).
If you're familiar with Python, check out Matplotlib (https://www.packtpub.com/matplotlib-python-development/book).
Ben Fry, the creator of Processing, created a beautiful visualization of the disassembled machine code of Super Mario Bros with arrows representing jump instructions:
http://benfry.com/dismap/mario-large2.jpg
via: http://benfry.com/dismap/
I've always loved this as a visualization of machine code. It's simultaneously amazing how complex it is and yet how simple it is when you consider that it represents the entire game all in one graphic. This is from 2007 I believe. I love that 10 years later the machine code is now fully annotated and understood.
The thing is, there's no "right format" for sprites, as they're used in the game. See http://benfry.com/deconstructulator/ for an example of how sprites are handled by the NES for Super Mario Bros. Mario is split into 8x8 pieces that are swapped out as needed: how do you determine which pieces are "Mario's sprite" and which are "that coin's sprite"? Remember that some pieces will change while others won't.