Atari VCS Programming Demo

These are the supporting files for the lightning talk I did on Atari VCS (2600) programming for the Open-Source, Open-mic meetup on November 5th 2015

The slides are available on speakerdeck

Demo

The demo itself is a simple example of creating asymmetric playfields. The intent is to show the precise timing needed for atari scanline kernels (for fun change the SLEEP 6 on line 53 of demo.asm to SLEEP 7 and reload the binary)

Compiling and installing

You'll need to install Stella to run the demo You'll also need a copy of DASM (this was written against 2.20.11)

the command line I used (mac/linux) to compile (assumes your default roms directory for stella is at ../roms):

prog=demo; dasm ${prog}.asm -s${prog}.sym -l${prog}.lst -o${prog}.bin -f3 -v5 && cp ${prog}.{bin,lst,sym} ../roms/

Links

At the end of the talk I provided some links to further information, here they are:

• Atari for Newbies Tutorial. Excellent Introduction by Andrew Davie
• Easy 6502 Nice intro to 6502 programming; in browser emulator; shows registers memory, etc
• 6502.org: Great 6502 resource site; link is to a handy opcode reference
• Atari Color Chart: Colors are tricky on the VCS; this will help a lot
• Support Source code for this presentation
• Slides The slides used for presentation
• Atari: Game Over Great documentary to get a sene of the history. Plus, the mystery of ET cartridges solved!
• Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System: In depth, and fairly technical book about how games for the platform were written