Home

VCS Game Maker Documentation

_{Version 0.52.23}

VCS Game Maker is a visual environment for building Atari 2600 games. Build your game's logic with Blockly blocks, and behind the scenes VCSGM generates batari Basic source code (along with a bit of assembly), compiles it into an Atari 2600 ROM, and runs that ROM in a built-in emulator preview, using either 6502.ts or Gopher2600.

This wiki documents what each tab in the app does.

Tabs

The top toolbar shows each tab's name under its icon, and the left sidebar can be dragged between a wide size (names beside the icons) and a narrow one (names under the icons). Expert mode takes the names away and leaves just the icons. The sidebar, emulator and console edges can be dragged to resize them; the handle shows the outline color at rest and a stronger one when the pointer is over it.

• Actions — every Blockly block available for building your game's logic, organized by toolbox category.
• Title — full-screen bitmap title screen pages, drawn with the Titlescreen Kernel.
• Sprites — the shared pool of Player 0/Player 1 sprite animations.
• Playfield — playfield graphics your game can display (this tab was called Background in earlier versions).
• Sound — sound effect presets your game can play, or use as Music tab instruments.
• Music — songs, patterns, and instrument tracks your game can play.
• Score — the six-digit score display's font and background color.
• Text — text messages your game can display in place of the score, using the Text Minikernel.
• Data — fixed, read-only lookup tables your game logic can read from at runtime.
• Generated — the batari Basic source code the app has generated from your project.
• Options — project-wide settings: ROM size, kernel features, compiler tuning, and app preferences.
• Project — saving, loading, and starting projects, plus the project's title/version/description metadata.
• About — what VCS Game Maker is, who develops it, and what it supports.

Other pages

• Graphic Editor Toolbar — the drawing tools shared by every pixel grid.
• Hotkeys — every keyboard shortcut in the app, tab by tab.
• Emulator — a collapsible emulator preview pane: playback controls and ROM capacity info.
• Console — the compile log/console pane along the bottom: build progress and error messages.