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."
Well this is really great and I thank them for finally releasing code from like 40 years ago but what does 'unofficially released source code' mean exactly???
My thoughts too. What does "unofficially released source code means" exactly?
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.
It's just like most everything else people put up on the Web. They're just saying you can download a copy and look at it but you can't distribute any copies or create any derivatives. I suppose some people might find it mildly amusing. Nothing to do with Open Source, at any rate.
Where I live, a vehicle can be considered a gift or abandon. If it's abandon and you can show that it's been on your property for such a period, you can petition the courts to title it to you. If it's a gift, you'd need to demonstrate that it was a gift. If the legal owner contests an action, then you'd be in a messy court battle. For example, they could say "I loaned him that car for a few weeks. He never returned it, and I couldn't fin
It's unofficial because it wasn't released by Atari, as the post suggests, but by the Atari Historical Society [atarimuseum.com], copied from source disks recovered from Atari's trash.
Then shouldn't it be "illegal" instead of "unofficial"?
If Atari still has the copyright on some of those games, then it would be illegal to do so, isn't it? Even when they probably won't sue or anything, how can I "unofficially" release the source code to, say, MS-DOS without MS suing (suEing? sp?) me?
Does that even apply? It's not the physical copy to which Atari has legal rights, they have the copyright to the code on the disks. And that's a huge difference, if that weren't the case then people would be perfectly free to copy disks as much as they liked, provided they could find one that had been tossed in the garbage bin.
Somehow I don't think that theory would hold up in court, well either theory.
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
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.
-1, Basic Copyright Knowledge Fail
Three smug ACs, all got it wrong.
If you do not register the copyright you can only sue for actual losses, none of this $150K per copy stuff that the MAFIAA gets away with.
Since this source code is assembly language for a decades old and long extinct game platform any actual losses due to publication and distribution of this source code won't amount to a hill of beans. The cost of the lawyer will probably dwarf any award, thus making it infeasible to file suit against the people who published it.
SCOTUS ruled that what you throw out is public property...
Right, but that just means the discs are public property (assuming the data was on disc). If I throw away a book, someone can grab that book out of the trash and claim it for themselves. However, the author does not lose the copyright (even if it was the author who threw away the book).
Isn't it more like if someone threw away the printing press used to make the book, rather than the book itself?
Um, no. The equivalent to throwing away the printing press would be throwing away the disk drive.
If they had thrown away the binaries, I would agree with your analogy.
Let's refrain from using analogies then and stick to the facts. If you throw away a piece of media, that piece of media becomes available to whoever wants to fish it out of the trash. However, copyright for any intellectual property on said media is unaffected. This is the actual legal fact, and it makes no difference whether we're talking about a novel printed on the pages of a book or source code recorded
Wheee! Poorly commented 6502 assembly with no other docs. Mildy interesting in a retro way, but I don't see any great insight being taken from this. Most of these classic games are just ports anyhow. How about Joust source for the original Williams platform?
You can be sure that the original arcade versions were written in assembly language not that different from what you see here. As a rule, nobody wrote video games in C until the mid 1980s. Assembly language was king.
I worked at a game software developer in the late 1980s, and all of the 2600 games, all of the 7800 games, all of the C-64 games, all of the Atari 800 games we developed or ported during the period were written in native assembly language. Only the Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh, and the later PC games were written in C. NES and SuperNES games were written in assembly as well.
What does unofficially open sourced mean? Sounds like an official release, since it came with an accompanying press release..
Anyway, source code is a bit of a misnomer here. All of these games were written in assembly, not any high level language. They are very well commented though, and it's more readable that most Python code I've seen...
It probably means you get no rights to it use it in any way you choose and that they won't support it for when some noob wants help turn enemies into penis shaped creatures and wants someone to tell him what to copy & paste and how to get it to run on his emulator.
... we see our first CERT advisory for a buffer overflow exploit in Dig Dug, leading to a remote execution vulnerability in your 'net-enabled MAME console.
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 ;GO TO SELECT MODE FUCKYOU BIT INPT4 ;LOOK AT FIRE BUTTON INPUT 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 ;THESE FOUR LINES MUST BE INCLUDED IN ;THE FINAL VERSION AND INPT1,Y ;REMEMBER BMI FUCKBAR ;REMEMBER,. .., ROSEBUD
* 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!
John Feagans, he was part of the original Vic20 software team. He must have jumped ship to Atari with the rest of the talent when Tramiel left Commodore.
Note: If you are going to Mirror these sources or place them onto your own site, please have the respect and courtesy to include with them - Source: www.atarimuseum.com as these wouldn't exist if I hadn't of climbed into a filthy dumpster at 3am in the morning behind the old Atari building in Sunnyvale and salvaged them and restored them from their diskettes.
I didn't see any mention of AtariMuseum.com in the ProgrammerFish article. Bastards!
Seeing how it was done old-school is always refreshing. No C++, Java, C#, just hardcore assembly.
As an anecdote, I have a friend who used to work at MECC and worked on games for the Apple II like Oregon Trail and Odell Lake (find yourself a Way-Back Machine if you aren't familiar with those games). If memory serves me right, before leaving MECC, he wrote something akin to the following in one of those two programs:
[code] ; Important. Do NOT remove this. -- username nop nop nop ; Proceed [/code]
Years later it was apparently still in the code and he'd met up with an old colleague who asked, "What was up with the three nops? We didn't remove them because we didn't know what would happen". The response being, "Nothing, I just thought it would be funny to have this conversation a few years later".
Heh, reminds me when I used to break into the built-in monitor while a disk program was loading on the Apple II (which also uses a 6502 processor) and always saw a bunch of $EA bytes. I thought it was because it was an Electronic Arts game, that they used that hex value as some kind of signature. Only later did I learn that was the opcode for NOP. It's odd as on most other 8-bit processors $00 is NOP.
I never thought about it. I think $00 is BRK on the 6502 -- that part seemed logical enough to me. Dunno why NOP would be such an odd value. Anyone?
Perhaps so that accidental execution of a cleared area of memory would break rather than silently execute until it reached something non-zero. On the other hand, the 6502 didn't have any microcode, so opcodes were laid out based on the most efficient way to decode them. This $EA triggered the right combination of steps internally to do nothing. In other words,
CMP #$FF;SEE IF ANY INPUT
BEQ FUCKYOU
JMP GOTOSEL;GO TO SELECT MODE
FUCKYOU BIT INPT4;LOOK AT FIRE BUTTON INPUT
BMI ATIT4
JMP GOTORES
ATIT4 LDA #0
STA FLAP;PREVENT FLAPPING IN LOADER
JMP TITLOOP
;MS RIGHT, HALF OPEN 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.
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.
jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced.
No, but whomever wrote that headline is making a common mistake. The use of the term "open source" tells us that "open source" is apparently no more clear to people than what that movement tried to supplant—free software. While "free software" has an ambiguity problem, that problem is easily resolved by saying the "free" refers to freedoms to run, share, and modify the software, not a reference to price. "Open source" is also widely misunderstood [gnu.org]:
The official definition of "open source software," as published by the Open Source Initiative, is very close to our definition of free software; however, it is a little looser in some respects, and they have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the users. However, the obvious meaning for the expression "open source software" is "You can look at the source code." This is a much weaker criterion than free software; it includes free software, but also includes semi-free programs such as Xv, and even some proprietary programs, including Qt under its original license (before the QPL).
That obvious meaning for "open source" is not the meaning that its advocates intend. The result is that most people misunderstand what those advocates are advocating.
but not easily cleared up. As that essay points out, "the explanation for "free software" is simple--a person who has grasped the idea of "free speech, not free beer" will not get it wrong again. There is no such succinct way to explain the official meaning of "open source" and show clearly why the natural definition is the wrong one.".
From what I can tell, there's no permission given to share any of these programs, no permission to modify any of these programs, and no permission to distribute these programs commercially.
The blog poster claims "In an official release, Atari has quoted that the purpose of the release is to give potential developers insight into the Atari's gaming platform so they may possibly build upon the 7800 series." but there is no link to the official release from the copyright holder. Therefore the provenance of this source code is unclear. I would consider these programs to be neither open source nor free software. This looks like an offer to download source code for proprietary software then make the mistake of distributing unauthorized derivative works based on these programs. It might be fun to program new Atari 7800 games, but copyright lasts a very long time and there's too little information to verify what the blogger claims.
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...
Okay, curse my failing memory, I believe I just "misremembered" that factoid. On the 6502, you couldn't push or pull X or Y from the stack, necessitating the cumbersome txa, push or pull, tax instead of simply pullings into the desired register. I don't recall now if loading immediate into X or Y worked on the 6502.
The scary thing is that I remember ANY of this shit over 25 years later...
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...
6502c, actually. It's a custom version of the 6502 that was integrated with various other system hardware and could dynamically adjust its clock depending on which memory address was being accessed. (That was how Atari gained 2600 compatibility, which was a custom 6507 chip.)
It sounded all well and good on paper, but the actual implementation of the processor was a serious PITA. If you weren't careful, you'd accidentally drop the speed to 1.19MHz and throw all your timings off. Even more annoying was that many functions required you to access hardware that dropped the clock speed. The worst offender was the TIA sound hardware because Atari was too cheap to install a POKEY chip.
Worse yet, the normal 1.79MHz was underpowered for the complex sprite hardware they'd paired it with. The sprite hardware basically processed lists of lists of sprites, requiring sophisiticated data structures to get good performance out of complex, fast moving scenes. And if that wasn't painful enough, you were wise to find a way to keep as much of the structure in ROM as possible so that you wouldn't blow through the mere 4K of RAM.
The 7800 was an interesting and potentially even useful design, but it simply wasn't practical for most developers. (Many of whom were not computer scientists.)
"The 80s called. They want their non-parallel sprite sub-processors back." "The 80s called. They want their battery-backed high score storage back." "The 80's called. They want their idiotic misused apostrophe back."
Well, if my knowledge of history by way of Hollywood is any help, that's the portion of the game that if accidentally accessed by a kid renders him in control of our nuclear arsenal.
Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well this is really great and I thank them for finally releasing code from like 40 years ago but what does 'unofficially released source code' mean exactly???
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?
Parent
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Shaking head in disbelief... Still trying to get someone to pay for Dig Dug after all these years....
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's just like most everything else people put up on the Web. They're just saying you can download a copy and look at it but you can't distribute any copies or create any derivatives. I suppose some people might find it mildly amusing. Nothing to do with Open Source, at any rate.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That would depend on where you live.
Where I live, a vehicle can be considered a gift or abandon. If it's abandon and you can show that it's been on your property for such a period, you can petition the courts to title it to you. If it's a gift, you'd need to demonstrate that it was a gift. If the legal owner contests an action, then you'd be in a messy court battle. For example, they could say "I loaned him that car for a few weeks. He never returned it, and I couldn't fin
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
If Atari still has the copyright on some of those games, then it would be illegal to do so, isn't it? Even when they probably won't sue or anything, how can I "unofficially" release the source code to, say, MS-DOS without MS suing (suEing? sp?) me?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow I don't think that theory would hold up in court, well either theory.
Parent
Re: (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
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
-1, Basic Copyright Knowledge Fail
Three smug ACs, all got it wrong.
If you do not register the copyright you can only sue for actual losses, none of this $150K per copy stuff that the MAFIAA gets away with.
Since this source code is assembly language for a decades old and long extinct game platform any actual losses due to publication and distribution of this source code won't amount to a hill of beans. The cost of the lawyer will probably dwarf any award, thus making it infeasible to file suit against the people who published it.
Capiche?
Parent
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
SCOTUS ruled that what you throw out is public property...
Right, but that just means the discs are public property (assuming the data was on disc). If I throw away a book, someone can grab that book out of the trash and claim it for themselves. However, the author does not lose the copyright (even if it was the author who threw away the book).
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't it more like if someone threw away the printing press used to make the book, rather than the book itself?
If they had thrown away the binaries, I would agree with your analogy.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't it more like if someone threw away the printing press used to make the book, rather than the book itself?
Um, no. The equivalent to throwing away the printing press would be throwing away the disk drive.
If they had thrown away the binaries, I would agree with your analogy.
Let's refrain from using analogies then and stick to the facts. If you throw away a piece of media, that piece of media becomes available to whoever wants to fish it out of the trash. However, copyright for any intellectual property on said media is unaffected. This is the actual legal fact, and it makes no difference whether we're talking about a novel printed on the pages of a book or source code recorded
Re: (Score:2)
Just disassemble the ROMs.
can't do that... violation of the DMCA!
Alas Dig Dug, i knew him well...
Re: (Score:2)
Those are completely without comments and most importantly, variable names.
MOV HEALTH, AX
is more understandable than
MOV BYTE 0xFF43, AX
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
MOV HEALTH, AX
I don't think the Atari 7800 used a x86 processor...
hmmm (Score:2)
1) Successful gaming console manfacturer posting record profit
2) . .
3) Bankruptcy!
Do it the hard way! (Score:2)
Wheee! Poorly commented 6502 assembly with no other docs.
Mildy interesting in a retro way, but I don't see any great insight being taken from this. Most of these classic games are just ports anyhow. How about Joust source for the original Williams platform?
Re:Do it the hard way! (Score:5, Informative)
You can be sure that the original arcade versions were written in assembly language not that different from what you see here. As a rule, nobody wrote video games in C until the mid 1980s. Assembly language was king.
I worked at a game software developer in the late 1980s, and all of the 2600 games, all of the 7800 games, all of the C-64 games, all of the Atari 800 games we developed or ported during the period were written in native assembly language. Only the Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh, and the later PC games were written in C. NES and SuperNES games were written in assembly as well.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Wheee! Poorly commented 6502 assembly with no other docs.
Hey! That's just like I used to write (with a little help from Lance Leventhal).
Unofficial? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, source code is a bit of a misnomer here. All of these games were written in assembly, not any high level language. They are very well commented though, and it's more readable that most Python code I've seen...
Re: (Score:2)
Great news! (Score:2)
This is great news! I've almost finished building my MAME cabinet. I wonder how this will allow the Roms of those games to be released freely.
Kudos to Atari license holders for releasing this.
15 minutes later ... (Score:5, Funny)
... we see our first CERT advisory for a buffer overflow exploit in Dig Dug, leading to a remote execution vulnerability in your 'net-enabled MAME console.
I can get the source code for JOUST!! WOOHOO!!! (Score:2)
As a video-addicted teen, so many years ago, with too much time on his hands, I never imagined I would ever be able
to get my hands on this
The Year of the Linux Gaming Platform? (Score:4, Funny)
Correct link for Sphinx (Score:5, Informative)
Should end in SPHINX.zip not Sphinx.zip. Beware the 404
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't catch the second one , PAL7800 because I had Down Them All masking only on archives and the link didn't have the ZIP extension.
Thanks.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
John Feagans, he was part of the original Vic20 software team. He must have jumped ship to Atari with the rest of the talent when Tramiel left Commodore.
Let's give credit where credit is due (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
His site says this at the bottom:
I didn't see any mention of AtariMuseum.com in the ProgrammerFish article. Bastards!
So here it is, on behalf of us g
This is great (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing how it was done old-school is always refreshing. No C++, Java, C#, just hardcore assembly.
As an anecdote, I have a friend who used to work at MECC and worked on games for the Apple II like Oregon Trail and Odell Lake (find yourself a Way-Back Machine if you aren't familiar with those games). If memory serves me right, before leaving MECC, he wrote something akin to the following in one of those two programs:
[code]
; Important. Do NOT remove this. -- username
nop
nop
nop
; Proceed
[/code]
Years later it was apparently still in the code and he'd met up with an old colleague who asked, "What was up with the three nops? We didn't remove them because we didn't know what would happen". The response being, "Nothing, I just thought it would be funny to have this conversation a few years later".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps so that accidental execution of a cleared area of memory would break rather than silently execute until it reached something non-zero. On the other hand, the 6502 didn't have any microcode, so opcodes were laid out based on the most efficient way to decode them. This $EA triggered the right combination of steps internally to do nothing. In other words,
Hmmm... (Score:2)
CMP #$FF ;SEE IF ANY INPUT
;GO TO SELECT MODE
;LOOK AT FIRE BUTTON INPUT
;PREVENT FLAPPING IN LOADER
BEQ FUCKYOU
JMP GOTOSEL
FUCKYOU BIT INPT4
BMI ATIT4
JMP GOTORES
ATIT4 LDA #0
STA FLAP
JMP TITLOOP
Hmmm...
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.
Re:Ms. PacMan (Score:4, Funny)
Spoiling slashdot with Pacman porn again, are we?
Parent
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.
Just source code for proprietary software. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but whomever wrote that headline is making a common mistake. The use of the term "open source" tells us that "open source" is apparently no more clear to people than what that movement tried to supplant—free software. While "free software" has an ambiguity problem, that problem is easily resolved by saying the "free" refers to freedoms to run, share, and modify the software, not a reference to price. "Open source" is also widely misunderstood [gnu.org]:
but not easily cleared up. As that essay points out, "the explanation for "free software" is simple--a person who has grasped the idea of "free speech, not free beer" will not get it wrong again. There is no such succinct way to explain the official meaning of "open source" and show clearly why the natural definition is the wrong one.".
From what I can tell, there's no permission given to share any of these programs, no permission to modify any of these programs, and no permission to distribute these programs commercially.
The blog poster claims "In an official release, Atari has quoted that the purpose of the release is to give potential developers insight into the Atari's gaming platform so they may possibly build upon the 7800 series." but there is no link to the official release from the copyright holder. Therefore the provenance of this source code is unclear. I would consider these programs to be neither open source nor free software. This looks like an offer to download source code for proprietary software then make the mistake of distributing unauthorized derivative works based on these programs. It might be fun to program new Atari 7800 games, but copyright lasts a very long time and there's too little information to verify what the blogger claims.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Looks like 6502.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like 6502.
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...
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Okay, curse my failing memory, I believe I just "misremembered" that factoid. On the 6502, you couldn't push or pull X or Y from the stack, necessitating the cumbersome txa, push or pull, tax instead of simply pullings into the desired register. I don't recall now if loading immediate into X or Y worked on the 6502.
The scary thing is that I remember ANY of this shit over 25 years later...
Re:Is there a cross assembler? (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like 6502.
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...
I like compilers.
Parent
Re:Is there a cross assembler? (Score:5, Informative)
6502c, actually. It's a custom version of the 6502 that was integrated with various other system hardware and could dynamically adjust its clock depending on which memory address was being accessed. (That was how Atari gained 2600 compatibility, which was a custom 6507 chip.)
It sounded all well and good on paper, but the actual implementation of the processor was a serious PITA. If you weren't careful, you'd accidentally drop the speed to 1.19MHz and throw all your timings off. Even more annoying was that many functions required you to access hardware that dropped the clock speed. The worst offender was the TIA sound hardware because Atari was too cheap to install a POKEY chip.
Worse yet, the normal 1.79MHz was underpowered for the complex sprite hardware they'd paired it with. The sprite hardware basically processed lists of lists of sprites, requiring sophisiticated data structures to get good performance out of complex, fast moving scenes. And if that wasn't painful enough, you were wise to find a way to keep as much of the structure in ROM as possible so that you wouldn't blow through the mere 4K of RAM.
The 7800 was an interesting and potentially even useful design, but it simply wasn't practical for most developers. (Many of whom were not computer scientists.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No kidding. That would make them like 50 or 60! Quit being so ridiculous...
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"The 80s called. They want their non-parallel sprite sub-processors back."
"The 80s called. They want their battery-backed high score storage back."
"The 80's called. They want their idiotic misused apostrophe back."
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