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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Whenever this topic comes up, some inevitably points to the book "Racing The Beam". Maybe this time I'll be first? :)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam

https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies...

It goes in to deep detail on a handful of Atari games, and discusses the tricks and hacks the programmers used. If you're in development now and grew up on these games, it's a great book.

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There's also some good 2600 discussion in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Personally I found both of them sort of middle quality books even though I admit that Hackers is a kind of required reading. I think I was spoiled for all other computer writing by the extreme excellence of Soul of a New Machine. While I'm rambling on the subject I'll give quick shouts out to Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Kernighan's UNIX A History and a Memoir.

How it Happened, The Idea Factory, Dealers of Lightning, The Innovators, and Weaving the Web are still on the to-read list. If anyone has suggestions of which of those to read first I appreciate it.

If you're into mainframe systems, A Few Good Men From UNIVAC is pretty interesting.

Also recommend The Friendly Orange Glow, which is about PLATO

+1 for The Friendly Orange Glow.

Also interesting: Konrad Zuse's "The Computer, My Life".

"Whenever this topic comes up, some inevitably points to the book "Racing The Beam". Maybe this time I'll be first?"

You beat me to it :)

I had an 18-month-old and a newborn and our lives were completely upside-down ... and I could not put that book down.

At 4am ...

I had the same situation, but the book was the Masters of Doom.

Masters of Doom was similar for me - hard to put down. I seem to remember a sense of drama and a story arc. Racing the Beam was not in the same style of writing, but was still entirely fascinating to me.

The Atari age (late 70s - mid 80s) was my 'golden era' and RtB gave so much tech detail and explained the 'magic' I remembered. The doom era was... a bit beyond me. I played it a bit and I was impressed with what I saw at the time, but was working 3 jobs while going to college, so never got immersed in that world.

I always like to mention ZeroPage Homebrew too. It's a Twitch channel that usually streams twice a week that features homebrew games for the 2600 and recently branched out to other Atari consoles and 8-bit systems. The devs for the games are usually in the chat. It's my absolute favorite community on the internet today.

You beat me by 18 hours.

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