Berta And Butterflies is a game for Atari 2600 console.

It's a remake of the LCD game from the original "Game & Watch" series from the '80. In Poland original Nintendo games were virtually unknown, but soviet clones made by Elektronika were very popular:

I wanted to write a game for Atari 2600. I know this console is extremely limited. On the other hand, this game is very simple, but still very enjoyable and fun. It looked like a good candidate to port it to Atari.

I replaced the character with my wife's Alice favorite stuffed toy from childhood - a small elephant called Berta.

Original Berta	Digital Berta

Besides the game, there are also two sub-projects within this repository:

1. A printed circut board design to create the simplest cartridge for any 4KB Atari 2600 game. (Berta And Butterflies is also 4KB game)
2. Super Nintendo controller adapter, to control Berta in a different way than with a standard joystick.

Although the game is still in development, it's already playable.

I recommend to play this game on a real console. It will work with any version, whether it is "Woody" from 1977, "Junior" from 80' or the most recent 2600+ from 2023.

If you have basic soldering skills, you can etch cartridge PCBs and make a real cartridge. There will be also a limited run of physical cartridges released at some point in the near future. If you have a "universal" cartridge like Harmony or UnoCart, you can put the ROM there and load the game from it (however, these "universal" carts don't work with 2600+, as far as I know).

If you don't have Atari console, you can use emulator. There is plenty of Atari 2600 emulators to choose from:

1. Javatari - an emulator that works in browser.
2. Stella - probably the most well-known Atari 2600 emulator. There are versions for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
3. Gopher2600 - an emulator written in Go.

You can also use a device like Anbernic handheld with built-in Atari 2600 emulator (it uses Stella emulator internally):

I started this project to take part in 100 Commits competition.

Recently I was fascinated by Atari 2600 console and I wanted to write a program for it, which is allegedly very hard. This machine has only 128 bytes of RAM (it's not a mistake!) and has no graphics memory at all. There is even no such term as 'pixel'.

I want to check how hard it really is. I have no prior experience with 6502/6507 assembler, batari Basic etc. The competition motivates me to learn it :)

More details in diary.