This is a course devoted to making the development of games on the Atari 2600 into a semester's worth of content. For the first 12 weeks, we will:

• go through source code and annotate it,
• read Racing the Beam
• develop a prototype and coding assignments
• spend the last five weeks alone or in a group making your own game

By the end of class, if you are happy with your game, I will pay for you to:

• Print your game to cartridge (If I can get the equipment, i'll do this for you but I need to practice soldering a bit more)
• Print an instruction manual
• Make a game box (i'll provide some links and what materials and can help)

Important Resources

This is an Obsidian Instance. If you want to view it all, please download the repo and open it in Obsidian.

IDEs, Useful Webpages, and Other Tutorials

I am one person who himself is still learning the finer points of Assembly 6502. I'm also teaching in a classroom in a college and as such, I have to make sure that certain bureaucratic requirements are met. In recognition of that, i'm going to include a variety of resources.

Development Environments, Emulators, and IDEs

Development Environments

• 8 Bit Workshop - This is the IDE i'll be using in class. It is fantastic and the tie-ins to Github make it far more worthwhile. It additionally has capacity to develop for Batari Basic as well as the NES.

Emulators,

IDEs

This course owes a tremendous amount of thanks to:

1. Atari Age
2. Steven Hugg and 8BitWorkshop
3. Oscar Toledo Gutierrez
4. 8Blit
5. Retro Game Mechanics Explained
6. Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort

...And so many more.

This course will first be run in the Spring of 2025 and if successful, will be pitched as a course called, "Vintage Game Development" where it will be able to be split among all the 6502 systems or later, given that Vintage is probably up to around the 360 at this point.

Now that i've made you feel old, enjoy!