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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).

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