Atari 2600 Manual: Basic Programming (1979) | Hacker News Reader

Atari 2600 Manual: Basic Programming (1979)

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88 pointsmarcodiego24 comments

I love this. This was my introduction to programming. Got this cartridge on my 10th birthday almost 40 years ago. I stayed awake until 4:30am typing some of the programs in the manual. I have been in love with computation since then. This cartridge changed my life.

I loved it too

I have this cartridge for my Darth Vader VCS as well. It's remarkable what it managed to do with so little, largely because it emphasized what it would actually be good at. (And thus you didn't need to type a lot to make it do something!)

I wasn't aware of this cartridge until now... so back then, not only did every home computer come with a BASIC interpreter as a matter of course, but Atari also felt the need to provide some programmability for their consoles. I wish this mentality would have stuck around... nowadays, everyone has a computer in their pocket, but there is no beginner-friendly way to develop apps for it.

Check out iOS "Shortcuts" if you have an iPhone. It's... visual-ish programming, a bit buggy, very incomplete, poorly supported by third party apps, slow, evolving quickly and lots of fun. Control Apple's core apps, bang on internet APIs, incorporate NFC tags, it's fun.

And if you have an ipad check out Swift Playgrounds

The Basic Programming cart for the 2600 was made mostly to satisfy an advertising promise. Atari had advertised the console as expandable into a programmable computer, but there wasn't any way for a user to do it. There were threats of a class-action lawsuit, so Atari made that cart to head that off. (I remember this from years ago, though can't find a cite for it now, the search terms are too vague and wikipedia doesn't mention it.) It wasn't really intended to be a usable programming environment for anything useful.

This list of Basic/keyboard expansions for early videogame consoles mentions Mattel getting fined by the Federal Trade Commission until it delivered the promised computer module to clients:

https://lady-eklipse.livejournal.com/6081.html

Ah, thanks for the pointer. I wonder if I'm misremembering Mattel's threat as Atari's, or if Atari also had a similar problem.

iOS has apps like Pythonista, limited compared to a computer but leagues ahead of 2600 BASIC. Android of course has Termux and so gcc or anything else is available. And the last few Nintendo consoles have had SmileBASIC letting you program on your 3DS, Wii U or Switch.

I love BASIC Programming. One of the most captivating things about it for me is the box art: a 1970s future man at some sort of futuristic control panel -- I dunno, maybe he's programming the weapons or climate systems of his domed bubble city. And the message is, BASIC Programming puts the power of what he's doing into YOUR hands. All richly detailed and painterly, like D&D art or other contemporary video game box art. Because the packaging for video games had to provide fuel for the imagination in those days... ultimately you were just guiding a blob of pixels around the screen, your brain had to fill in the rest. The fact that BASIC Programming was so limited, even compared to contemporary alternatives like a VIC-20, just makes the presentation more compelling.

I played around with it a few years ago: <https://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1> On the bad side: it's nearly unusable without the pads, you're restricted to 64 bytes for everything (program and variables) and it leaks memory. On the plus side, it's insane they packed an IDE into 4K with features I've never seen elsewhere.

How did the 2600 host any programming language at all? It only had 128 bytes of RAM!

By severely limiting what you could do, it seems. From the Wikipedia [1] page:

Programs are restricted to 64 characters in size and normally 9 lines of code, limiting the programs that can be written (users can disable all windows except Program and keep selecting "New Line" until 11 lines of code are present).

Is there a special class of code golfing for the 2600? :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming#Details

The thing I appreciate in retrospect is how different the basics were, which led to an early exposure to porting code and learning the underlying platform. So many systems relied on peeking and poking it was also a junior level intro to assembly.

Assembly was where you really learned to program since most of the basics took too much memory and were too slow. Basic was still an awesome thing at the time.

Thanks for this post, having a VCS at the time, I was aware of the existence of this cartridge but never get a chance to had one. Today I can finally have a taste of it.

What was great with all those Atari cartridges, was the illustrations. I wonder who was the artist(s). Always inspiring sketches and the guy which is drawn in this manual is not out of place. A real piece of art.

The artist for the image on the basic programming cart was Rick Guidice. He did a lot of art for Nasa in the same style. [1]

A big reason video artwork from that period is so interesting is that the game graphics were limited, forcing a lot of artistic interpretation. Semi related, I recently found this, which seems like a futuristic reimagining of the original Atari style. [2]

Atari was a real pioneer in this space. They got their start doing arcade games for the midway. Which necessitates having eye popping attraction art to draw in players and collect their quarters. The quickly developed their own style which was pretty much copied all over the industry.

There's a great book called Art of Atari which is I highly recommend if you are interested in the history of this stuff. [3]

[1] https://www.rickguidice.com/nasaart/nasaarti.html

[2] https://arcadeblogger.com/2022/12/04/what-if-ataris-pong-was...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Atari-Tim-Lapetino/dp/1524101036

As a six year old I dreamed of building AGI on Atari Basic. Clearly I had a few things to learn about resource constraints in addition to having no actual theory of AGI but kudos to a cool product for its time. I think it’s hard for people today to realize how much access to computers cost back in 1980 and why stuff like this was so vital.

This brought me to my first programming experience (outside of college computer labs while on field trips) - the VIC-20.

http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Commodore/VIC-20%20User%27s%2...

The VIC-20 was the first computer I could call my own. It was a near perfect toy for a kid, just the way it worked when you were entering text seemed to encourage exploration. You could use the cursor keys, color control keys, and graphics keys to paint a picture without actually programming and when you did want to write a program, you could workshop your PETSCII on the screen before coding it in.

I love how the manual encourages you to experiment, and how it portrays error messages as the computer helpfully flagging up mistakes so you can fix them.

Ditto. If it weren't for my Vic-20 and Compute magazine, I might not have embarked on my career in software development.

I have fond memories of Atari Basic. It even came with its own keyboard.

Same here, Atari Basic with the kind of Chicklet but round keys IIRC. There are still people playing with Atari Basic today. Atariage.com in the forums.

Moved from that to Timex Sinclair 1000 then Atari 800 then Tandy 1000 EX because it looked like the PC approach wasn't going away unfortunately.

just spotted

    Note <- If Note > 4 then Note - 11 Else Note + 1

If-else as an expression, that's pretty ahead of its time:)

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