Atari 7800 Source Code | Hacker News Reader

Atari 7800 Source Code

atarimuseum.com

85 pointselwell9 comments

Ha! In DIGDUG/DIGDUG.S:

    1950-          LDA     ROCKSY,X
    1951-*         SEC               ; CARRY IS CLEAR HERE
    1952:          SBC     #$06-1    ;MIGHT NEED TO TWEAK THIS

I'm guessing it never got tweaked.

I wonder what the world's oldest TODO comment is...

I don't think it's the oldest by a longshot, but check this one out, from the Apollo 11 software: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...

Wow, they all seem to be fully commented too! I remember when I first found out about the Atari homebrew scene for the 2600... I was so excited by the idea you could make your own game the first console I ever experienced as a kid. It made me learn 6502 assembler and discover the insane world of Atari development. "Racing the beam" still blows my mind.

I did kind of follow through and made "sort of a game" for it: https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops Though it lacks polish, it does have a theme tune!

Comments in games varied a lot. The coin-op folks did pretty well, and most of the systems code for the computers was well commented.

Lots of game cartridges had very few comments. While this was in an era where comments would slow down your turnaround time, I think much of it was the fast development pace and the fact that once a game had shipped, it was done. It was in ROM, real mask ROMs that were not patchable, and no one would ever be going back to that code again.

After reading through the src for Dig Dug, I have to confess that I'm jealous of the awesome variable names in gaming.

Didn't see a lot of things like 'DETHWISH', 'FLEE', 'ROCKDETH', or 'VICTIMX' writing FPGA SW.

Variable names likely had to be uppercase, and there likely was a limit on variable name length (either hard or of the “you can use lowercase/more than eight, but we will ignore case/all but the first eight” variety).

Depended on the assembler. Some let you have 8 characters, internally uppercased and silently truncated. Others let you have 16 chars, others were effectively unlimited.

I wrote a bunch of assemblers, each one better than the last, ending in the one that Atari used for Atari ST, 7800 and Jaguar development. It's the assembler included in the 7800 tools archive. Someone cleaned it up a bunch and put it on github a few years ago.

Folks like yourself are one of the big draws of HN for me. It's awesome to hear the perspective of people who created aspects of the things I was in awe at growing up (in this case I'm thinking of the Jaguar).

It kind of sickens me that we only have this because some smart person dumpster dived behind the building of a bankrupt game company...

Who threw this stuff out?!

How much other irreplaceable source code has been lost because some janitor threw out some boxes of "old floppy disks" or whatever when everything was getting cleaned out...

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