Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released 153
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the good-way-to-start-an-education dept.
from the good-way-to-start-an-education dept.
jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced. "Remember Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron? They used to be favorites when Atari's 7800 series was still around. Since the era of those consoles is over, and a different world of interactive reality gaming has taken over, Atari has unofficially released source code of over 15 games for the coders and enthusiasts to admire the state-of-the-art (because this is what it was back then). During those times, nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams the games that Atari's developers floated into the gaming thirsty market and instantly swept across continental boundaries. But things changed soon after that and a company once regarded as one of the most successful gaming console manufacturers and developers faded away in the pages of our technology's hall-of-fame."
Is there a cross assembler? (Score:1, Interesting)
Whatever the ATARI used for a processor, I don't recognize this ....
main: ;lock in 7800 mode
;
; initialize hardware
;
lda #$7
sta PTCTRL
sei ;block interrupts ;clear decimal mode
cld
lda #0 ;future expansion ;avoid joystick freeze
sta OFFSET
sta PTCTRL
ldx #$FF ;init stack ;clear score to zero ;clear hi sc
txs
;
; init high score
;
jsr initscore
jsr newhiscore
Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
After some thinking I came to the conclusion that it means you can download the code, but without an open source license applied to it, such that if someone tries to buy the code from them (or the company), they can just stop giving away the files, state that it's still propietary and then still have the ability to sue someone who develops something based on those files. That's the only logical explanation I can come up with.
Like saying "here, I'll give you my car as a gift" but not transfering the ownership via legal papers. If at some point someone wanted to buy my car I can just tell you "hey, that car I gave you for free....it's no longer yours, it's mine to sell now" and you would have (I presume...IANAL) no legal way of claiming otherwise.
No?
Anyone notice... (Score:1, Interesting)
Some fun stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)
2600/7800 DEVELOPMENT KIT<br>
CARE AND FEEDING INSTRUCTIONS<br>
[...]
Feel free to telephone John Feagans at Atari (U.S.) at area code
(408) 745-xxxx any time you have a question about using the
software. He wrote the download program and the transfer rom
code. He's the one who did not write any support documentation
to go with his software.
* From the base sw:
CPX #1 ;HACK: WE STOP AT 1
BEQ SELRTS
INX ;BIGGER HACK: PUSH X INTO RANGE.
LDA ZHACKMOD+2,X ;BIGGEST HACK: TABLE LOOKUP NEXT MODE.
* Ofcourse, we have explicit words:
CMP #$FF ;SEE IF ANY INPUT
BEQ FUCKYOU
JMP GOTOSEL
FUCKYOU BIT INPT4
BMI ATIT4
LDA #0 ;ENOUGH TIME HAS ELAPSED TO ALLOW CAPS
STA $1 ;TO DISCHARGE SO CONTINUE FUCKING WITH
LDA #$14 ;IO HARDWARE
STA AUDC0,X ;GO POUND SAND IN YOUR ASS
* Citizen Kane anyone?
LDA INPT0,Y
;THE FINAL VERSION
AND INPT1,Y
BMI FUCKBAR
* In Galaga, at 'a boss hit':
JSR ABOSSHIT ; HOW YOU PRONOUNCE IT IS YOUR OWN
;BUSINESS
* Liek wtf?
* GROUND TARGET SECRET CODES (SSHHHH!)
* 0 regular dome logram
* 1 regular pyramid barra
* 2 detector dome zolbak (and your mama, too)
*And finally, an original comment which couldn't be more to the point in 2009:
*PROGRAMMERS BEWARE: THIS CODE IS OLD AND VERY UGLY! TAMPER AT YOUR OWN RISK
It looks like Hattrick is written mostly in Forth btw. I personally didn't know they wrote games in that language!
Re:Great! (Score:2, Interesting)
Ms. PacMan (Score:5, Interesting)
DB $08,$00,$0A,$50,$A5,$54,$25,$D5,$17,$55,$15,$50
DB $15,$00,$15,$50,$15,$55,$05,$54,$01,$50,$00,$00
All the pixelfonts are in there too offcourse. If you're into remaking arcade classics, there's a lot of picture and sound data there just waiting to be recycled.
More in the well of Atari nostalgia (Score:5, Interesting)
I quite like the way this blog [dadhacker.com] by an old time Atari employee recalls the when and how of Atari developement. Something (Donkey Kong port [dadhacker.com] on Atari consoles) that read
I should explain how Atari's Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari's marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp's "Foobar Blaster" on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal.
made it clearer with :
We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing.
but, wait... there was even less:
In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel our copy of the game hadn't even been delivered yet).
was for me a sure way to a plentiful of nostalgiaholic reading.
Al.
Re:This is great (Score:1, Interesting)
MECC
Well their logo was quite prominent. The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, IIRC. Almost anyone my age in the US remembers things like Number Munchers. Unfortunately "carpet munchers hack" doesn't show up on google.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
However, did they ever register the copyright for the source code?
If not, then any damage awards for this "publication" won't amount to a hill of beans.
Furthermore, who really owns the copyright on that source? The original Atari has been bankrupted and merged and reverse-merged a number of times to the point where the current "Atari" is really nothing more than a company that bought the trademark 2nd or 3rd hand.
Without a clear owner to file a copyright infringement case, this simple free distribution isn't likely to get anyone in trouble.
Re:Do it the hard way! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:score tables (Score:2, Interesting)
It indeed is packed BCD. Some processors of that time have special instructions for that kind of notation, which makes calculating with them not much more difficult than normal binary. (Dunno if the 6502c has these kinds of opcodes, though; the Z80 for example does.) The advantage is that it makes blitting to screen really easy: instead of constantly dividing by 10, which is a processor-intensive task, you could just bitshift the number, which is much easier.
Re:More in the well of Atari nostalgia (Score:2, Interesting)