The original source for the 1981 masterpiece “Defender” is now on GitHub

Defender (1981) by Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27814341 - July 2021 (77 comments)

In the early 80s I worked at Atari in a small group doing "arcade conversion" cartridges for Atari's line of home computers. I've written about this elsewhere (not going to pimp my blog), but all this really meant was that Atari's marketing folks negotiated a license deal . . . and that was it. No technical help at all. No listings, no talking to the development team, nothing -- we just played the game a lot, got good at it, and did our own interpretation (usually it had to fit on a 16K cartridge).

While I probably would have killed for listings like this for the titles I worked on (Defender wasn't one of them, btw), it's quite possible that not having the technical help meant that we wound up doing a better job on our versions because we had to get a good feel for the original one.

This was my dads favorite video game by far. Any time we went to the arcade I’d find him with a stack of quarters at Defender.

He played at such a fast pace I couldn’t even see what was happening, it seemed superhuman lol.

> The source code can be assembled into an executable that you can then run in Windows or Linux.

Where can I find the 6809 ports of Windows and Linux, or am I missing something?