David Crane

That is a funny way to look at it. Some of the earliest games were only 2K bytes for every game instruction, every pixel of art, and every user interaction! It sometimes amazes even those of us who made them.https://twitter.com/JVerne86/status/1346554264336945152 …

Adding a resistor cost a nickel (not to mention the extra circuitry in the ROM). Once Atari somehow got a patent on the use of bank switching in a game cartridge they offered it for a nickel per cartridge royalty. That made it cheaper for all of us and SCABS was abandoned.

SCABS could automatically access 8 banks of 4K, bringing the total memory from 4K to 32K bytes. We used this system briefly for (I think) Robot Tank and Decathlon. It required an external timing resistor on the PC board, so you can tell by looking at the board.

All other bank switching systems require overhead processing that made them a pain to use. For example, every bank of the ROM has to have a small area of duplicate code to jump into, change banks, and jump out of so that the CPU is not executing code that switches with the bank.

SCABS (I know, disgusting acronym) stood for Subroutine Controlled Automatic Bank Switching. The game code could make subroutine calls between banks, and the circuit detected the operation and performed a bank switch between the JSR instruction and arrival at the destination.

The Atari 2600 could access 4K bytes natively. Bank selecting multiple (or larger) ROMs was known in the industry, although Atari was the first to do it in a game cartridge. At Activision I developed a pretty cool automatic bank switching system I called SCABS.https://twitter.com/GameResearch_E/status/1346513304542470144 …

I think it is fair to say that video games have had a huge impact on every nerd* born in the last half of the 20th century (*a group that I proudly claim to be a part of). I was just one of the lucky few who got to enjoy both making and playing them.

The early video games definitely had an impact on a lot of people, and I enjoy hearing the stories. I'm glad you have fond memories of those times.https://twitter.com/FilesGuy/status/1333962216547168258 …

Maybe you can share how and where you were able to play it, and if you have found any more of the original Candystand games from the 1990s and early 2000s. When Garry and I sold the company, sadly we were prohibited from preserving the source code, even for historical purposes.

One of my biggest disappointments was that unlike boxed games I made in the past, online games come and go, and once taken down cannot be played by the next generation of players. I am surprised you found a way to play BMW X3 Adventure - I thought that game was lost years ago.

At Skyworks we created hundreds of games, limited only by download speed. At that time fewer than 3% of America had broadband and downloading a game over a modem could take many minutes. We had to be VERY efficient, but we were good at that having made 4K byte Atari games.

That term was coined after the creation of The Candystand when the advertising media started to realize how effective games could be at reaching people. (You know you are doing something right when the industry has to come up with a new term to describe it.)

One of our first and biggest sponsors was the Lifesavers Candy Company and we created The Candystand, a destination site for free games. At the time there was no such thing as an 'Advergame.'

That was a time for pioneering online content, and in that way very much like the earliest days of television when the content for TV was directly paid for by sponsors (Colgate, Palmolive, Lucky Strike, etc.)

In 1995 @kitchengarry and I set out to use the Internet as the next 'game console'. We created Skyworks Technologies, and in the process found that the only way to make high-quality online gaming economically viable was to use advertising sponsors to support the development.

The game could be played online, but BMW also put up kiosks in their showrooms to play the game. It was intended to show off the off-roading capabilities of BMW's line of XUVs.

@ sonminianti1 For the whole development team, I thank you. BMW X3 Adventure was a game commissioned by BMW and made by a team of technical and creative people at an online publishing business I co-founded in the 1990s. https://twitter.com/sonminianti1/status/1325100468700327942 …