atari-2600breakout
Is the paddle speed unlimited in the Breakout port for Atari 2600?
This video illustrating this paper seems to show that the paddle speed is unlimited but I'd like to confirm.
In many such games the paddle speed is limited (e.g. Moraff's Super Blast I).
The teddy bear sticker:
This indicates that the game contains special modes to help younger children get more enjoyment out of the game.
From the Warlords manual:
CHILDREN'S VERSIONS
GAMES 21, 22, and 23 are special versions for young children. The game play is slowed down considerably. All three games feature ricochet(rather than CATCH), and all three have fireballs(slow balls). The only difference in the three games is the number of players(4, 3, or 2). Check the GAME SELECT MATRIX.
Atari did this with several other games including Berserk, Missile Command, Asteroids, and Yars' Revenge/Return.
If you can find an Atari Hangman or Surround cartridge, you may want to see what happens when you play those. I would not expect that the memory within a 2600's RIOT (RAM+I/O+Timer) chip would be likely to go bad, but if those games exhibit "stuck" pixels, bad memory would be the only likely explanation. I suggest those games in particular because they use a significant portion of the system's RAM to display a bitmap, and any problems in those portions of the RAM would manifest themselves as stuck pixels without any other side-effects.
Best Answer
I doubt it. Breakout on the Atari 2600 used analogue paddle controllers, which means the input from the controller itself is unlimited. There'd have to be code in the game to interpolate a slower speed and it's hard to see why the developers would want to allocate some of the very limited memory available for 2600 games on something like this. It also would imply that the authors of the paper cheated and modified the game to remove that hypothetical code. Given their goal isn't to beat Breakout but have a program learn to play Breakout cheating like this would be self defeating. If anything they should be adding code to limit the paddle speed and accuracy to what would be physically possible for a human.
I also vaguely remember paddle games of the era not being speed limited, but I don't think I ever played Atari 2600 Breakout. I don't think speed limiting became a thing until digital controls starting being used to for these games, which are inherently limited to whatever speed the developer chooses.