That screenshot is specifically from the Atari 2600. You can tell because sprites that are next to each other are offset by one vertical pixel, which was a common effect used to help with hardware limitations.
It has the TIA, which is as close to a picture processor (and also audio synthesizer) as you can get, but due to the 128 bytes of RAM, there was not enough RAM to form a framebuffer, hence the need to race the beam.
That screenshot is specifically from the Atari 2600. You can tell because sprites that are next to each other are offset by one vertical pixel, which was a common effect used to help with hardware limitations.
IIRC, the 2600 didn’t have a graphics processor. So, you had to “chase the ray” with CPU instructions, which made for some interesting limitations.
It has the TIA, which is as close to a picture processor (and also audio synthesizer) as you can get, but due to the 128 bytes of RAM, there was not enough RAM to form a framebuffer, hence the need to race the beam.
Thanks for the clarification. I was too young to program the 2600. I started programming on PC-compatible.