Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released 153
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."
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?
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Shaking head in disbelief... Still trying to get someone to pay for Dig Dug after all these years....
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That's not the dig dug I remember. Sorry try again...
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Go spew you open source crap on someone else's country for the next 12 hours
hahahaha........... no....
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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.
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i seem to recall something along these lines whereby if the person who was gifted the car by these terms could prove that they had sole possession of the car for a sufficient amount of ti
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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)
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?
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Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow I don't think that theory would hold up in court, well either theory.
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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?
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Hey, I never knew that. Turns out you're right.
http://www.publaw.com/advantage.html [publaw.com]
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And an equally smug 5-digit UID got it somewhat wrong, too. Copyright wasn't automatic in the US until ~1989 - if you hadn't registered, you had no copyright.
I'm smug because I know my shit.
You don't.
You have confused ratification of the Berne Convention with automatic copyright protection. Sure, the Berne convention included automatic copyright starting in 1971 and was only ratified in the US in 1989, but that didn't prevent the lawyers from implementing parts of the convention before it was fully ratified.
Automatic copyright started in the US in 1976 with the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976. Well before the advent of the Atari 7800.
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).
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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.
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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
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SCOTUS ruled that what you throw out is public property...
When and in what context? The betting here is that the property on question was retrieved from a trash can and introduced as evidence of a crime.
The gun you tossed in the dumpster.
Does your GPL'd project become public domain if someone reconstructs the code from the shards of paper that you ran through the shredder?
That I doubt very much.
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Atari, who btw are still in business.
The modern Atari *isn't* the original company by any reasonable measure. The original Atari is effectively dead; it was split in 1984, and both its descendants are now gone. Atari Games (the arcade division) was later purchased by Midway, then renamed, then closed down in the early-2000s. Atari Corp. (the home and computer hardware division) was bought by Jack Tramiel and enjoyed some European success with the ST before going totally downhill in the 1990s and merging with a third-rate hard drive manufacture
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Someone might have dug this code out of the trash, but the RTFA implies there is an official press release from Atari where they allow this code to be distributed. (No link? Unfortuantely Atari's corporate site is only in French.)
BTW, when the original Sunnyvale CA Atari folded, loads of amazing classic gaming crap was dug out of the garbage or found in abandon warehouses and so on.
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Just disassemble the ROMs.
can't do that... violation of the DMCA!
Alas Dig Dug, i knew him well...
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Those are completely without comments and most importantly, variable names.
MOV HEALTH, AX
is more understandable than
MOV BYTE 0xFF43, AX
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MOV HEALTH, AX
I don't think the Atari 7800 used a x86 processor...
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 s
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Looks like 6502.
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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...
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Loading immediate worked, otherwise indirect addressing with the accumulator would have been a giant pain in the ass. (assumption: INY and DEY would not be present if the silicon lacked direct load)
was a fairly common idiom, IIRC. Maybe a CPY #0 before the BEQ, I forget if DEY set the zero flag. I'm about 90% sure it did, though.
I'm certain you're thinking of PLA and PLP.
> The scary thing is that I remember ANY of this shit over 25 years later...
I
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.
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I like compilers.
I like cake.
Mmmm... chocolate compilers...
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.)
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Oh yeah?! Well, my dad can beat up your dad!
P.S. Great comment. And here I was, fancying myself a geeky computer-history and techie buff. I feel so inadequate.
-dZ.
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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.
No, LDX #$FF is a perfectly valid 6502 opcode. 65C02 only added a few minor things like pushing and pulling index registers, and fixed a few minor hardware bugs. It's kind of irrelevant though, since the 7800 has a 6502C, which uses a plain 6502 core.
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Looks like 6502.
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$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...
BZZT! WRONG! Thanks for playing...
I have written hundreds of pages of 6502 code, on systems old enough (Apple 1) to have original MOS Technologies 6502s in them, and the "immediate" addressing mode (denoted by the # symbol in the argument) was DEFINITELY in the original 6502.
Don't believe me? Take a look at this listing [6502.org] of the (nearly completely unused) Floating Point routines that were included in the original Apple II monitor ROM. You will see an immediate load of the X register (LDX #$2) within the f
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Here http://www.6502.org/tutorials/6502opcodes.html [6502.org]
the long hand stuff are just remarks
Crystal Castles (Score:1)
Phone numbers? (Score:1, Funny)
Un-redacted phone numbers for the programmers in readme.doc files? They probably don't want to be getting calls about these games 21 years later from the internet at large.
-Lee
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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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That would be the '80s. Unless you're talking about the actual 80s. Good years, those. Man, was opening night at the Colosseum fun.
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.
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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).
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Looked decently documented to me. Assuming you are familiar with the op codes.
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I bet you that the original Joust from Williams was written in poorly commented M6809 assembly. And so was Defender and Robotron.
Gosh, how I loved Joust. Damn you! Now I have to spend the 4th of July setting up and playing MAME.
-dZ.
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...
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Means somebody found the source code while dumpster diving.
Anyone notice... (Score:1, Interesting)
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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.
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Perhaps in a round about way. I don't see any license or anything else, so the safe way would be to release a free Makefile that helps you download the source and then builds a ROM for you.
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
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Er, hold on there, cowboy!
That's not THE Joust. That's the crappy Atari 7800 port.
Though it was made by Williams, which kept it very faithful to the original.
Ok, then, go on--do some cartwheels and stuff. It's cool!
-dZ.
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Er, hold on there, cowboy!
That's not THE crappy Atari 7800 port. That's the even crappier 2600 port.
The Year of the Linux Gaming Platform? (Score:4, Funny)
The year was actually 2005 (Score:2)
Correct link for Sphinx (Score:5, Informative)
Should end in SPHINX.zip not Sphinx.zip. Beware the 404
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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!
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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.
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It looks like Hattrick is written mostly in Forth btw. I personally didn't know they wrote games in that language!
There aren't many, but the poster children are Starflight and Starflight II [geocities.com] -- great games, btw.
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Let's give credit where credit is due (Score:5, Informative)
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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".
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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.
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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?
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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 $EA triggered the right combination of steps internally to do nothing. In other words,
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(find yourself a Way-Back Machine if you aren't familiar with those games).
You'll find that Oregon Trail remains a steady seller on Amazon.com - and that older versions are easy to find through sites like The Underdogs.
Hmmm... (Score:2)
CMP #$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?
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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.
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Hell, anyone who has played Pac-Man on an Atari 2600 could have told you this much.
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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.
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Same old BSD "freedom" vs. GPL "freedom" war (Score:2)
Yes, we've had God knows how many rehashes of the endless "BSD is free, GPL isn't free because it forces conditions" / "GPL makes sure it remains free, BSD can become proprietary" argument / flamewar around here, so I'm *sure* we need another one.
As per usual, it'll include the exact same detailed and polarised arguments that we've already seen in great detail countless times previously, no
score tables (Score:2)
Robotron is one of my favorite games, so I've been looking at the source to it. One odd thing I've seen is the table of points scored for each enemy. They stored the 150 value for (for example) an Enforcer as:
DB $01, $50
.
For those who aren't aware, the '$' prefix denoted a hex number in Motorola assembly. It's strange that the score values are stored in this weird BCD-ish way. Maybe it was more efficient to do BCD math than to convert the binary to decimal every time the score changed (which meant a screen update)
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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.
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That makes sense. I'm pretty certain the 6505/etc didn't have BCD opcodes, but I do vaguely remember now why BCD was used.
My memories of assembly on 6800 (Score:2)
One of my tasks at work, around 1980 was to redo the source code to a gas chromatograph used in oil refinery control. The original development machine was a Unix that was limited on the number of variables, the size of the names and the size of files. Much of the code was hard coded to start at a location for each subroutine and the program used hard coded address for variables and data. It was so spaghetti, that They could no longer make any changes safely. So I took TWO years to re-do and test to a "moder
This reminds me... (Score:2)
Somewhere in a box under my desk, I have an old book about programming arcade-style games on the C64. It includes all sorts of code examples :D
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> ...could these projects build off the code and use it to design their own games?
Not legally.