Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

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6.1 The box art for Atari’s VCS launch title Indy 500, shown on the top left, features an intricate, realistic painting of the game’s subject. The game itself is much more abstract, as an image of the screen on the bottom left shows. The box art for David Crane’s early Activision title Grand Prix, top right, more closely matches the level of abstraction and even the aesthetic used in the game itself, as seen on the screen on the bottom right. From an economic standpoint, Atari took a tremendous hit by losing its lock on profi t-making cartridges. But it’s not clear that Activision was entirely bad news for Atari. As both Activision and Atari programmers have recently suggested, the new source of competition may have ended up goading Atari programmers to develop better games. 3 Development Practices Today, video games are usually created by large teams working for many years on a single project. The largest games require teams of several 6 Pitfall! [101]
hundred people. These teams are divided into strict roles: programmer, artist, voice actor, designer, producer. In the heyday of the Atari VCS, a single programmer would create an entire game. Until Imagic broke the mold by having artist Michael Becker create the in-game graphics for its 1982 Demon Attack, an “artist” working in game development was the person who illustrated the box art or designed the game’s printed manual. 4 One might imagine that VCS games were created by one individual just because they were simple. But as the previous chapters suggest, the machine was anything but simple to program. In the early days of the Atari VCS, though, software engineering for microcomputers and videogame consoles was not nearly as industrialized a practice as it is now. Commercial software was usually developed by individuals or small groups. For example, in 1981, Microsoft bought exclusive rights to its fi rst Disk Operating System (DOS) from an individual coder and then licensed it to IBM. 5 Although it is possible for VCS programmers to share code, cartridge development for the system is not amenable to the engineering of individual titles by large teams. Even though programmers learned each other’s techniques (both by directly talking to one another and by reverseengineering what others had done), their work did not divide into neatly reusable subroutines. This does not mean that VCS programs were underengineered or poorly written—the precise timing required just to get the screen to draw wouldn’t allow for much sloppiness in coding. But the constraints of ROM and RAM usage, cycle timing, and logic timing often demanded unusual and unintuitive shortcuts. For example, in the early days of Activision, programmers would push up against various boundaries. They would often run out of ROM space. Most 6502 assembly instructions are two bytes: one for the opcode and one for the operand. Saving space on ROM requires consolidating code—usually removing one line for every two bytes of space reclaimed. Assembler programs are composed of elementary instructions, not of higher-order functions. For example, the following assembly language instructions load a value from the top of RAM, add the value 8 to it, and store the result in the TIA register that sets the background color: [102] LDA $80 ADC #$08 STA COLUBK
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Racing the Beam
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Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost The MI
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Contents Series Foreword vii Acknow
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• an awareness of and discussion
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A shout-out goes to the bloggers an
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1982 Atari 5200 introduced; Atari V
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eception and operation of computer
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specifi c machines can reveal the r
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important contributions as well. Ce
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game encourages continued play and
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1.1 To play Atari’s Home Pong, th
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Design of the Atari VCS The enginee
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RAM, the memory programs use to sto
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of the basic hardware capabilities
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Combat 2 The Atari VCS console was
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ROM technologies that are not truly
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and the available VCS controllers.
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allows for bits 4 (left player, up)
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Where VCS Meets TV The processor is
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2.3 The smallest vertical unit in t
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For Two Players Combat imitated the
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VCS programs. Even when the machine
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Game Variations The game’s variat
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.BYTE $24 ;Game 1: 0010 0100 TANK .
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Storing a large set of instructions
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two human players, as it had no AI.
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Adventure 3 What video game could b
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computer platforms of the early 198
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PF0 PF1 PF2 bits: bits: bits: 4 5 6
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merely press the joystick in a comp
Page 64 and 65: of Tank had been developed jointly
Page 66 and 67: Turning a missile on for the entire
Page 68 and 69: 3.2 If Adventure had used bounding
Page 70 and 71: 3.3 This map of the world in Advent
Page 72 and 73: why the cursor matches the walls an
Page 74 and 75: Today, there are perhaps a handful
Page 76: different perspective to let the pl
Page 79 and 80: Pac-Man did fairly well in Japan, b
Page 81 and 82: More important than the sheer amoun
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Page 85 and 86: 4K ROM provides greater fl exibilit
Page 87 and 88: Pac-Man would have been unrecogniza
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Page 91 and 92: 4.3 The VCS Ms. Pac-Man has bonus f
Page 94 and 95: Yars’ Revenge 5 In 1981 Yars’ R
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Page 98 and 99: Asteroids, on the other hand, makes
Page 100 and 101: some cases, as important as the ses
Page 102 and 103: up and down are both laid out in RO
Page 104 and 105: There are reasons for these intrica
Page 106 and 107: The Code Zone Yars’ Revenge featu
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Page 110: mechanic), and up from the bottom (
Page 113: [100] our contribution to the compa
Page 117 and 118: Design Center. The company later ad
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Page 121 and 122: comprises Combat’s planes, Slot R
Page 123 and 124: that this idea would make an intere
Page 125 and 126: As stated here, the high bit of the
Page 127 and 128: contemplated all at once. It offers
Page 129 and 130: Another graphical detail can be see
Page 132 and 133: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Page 134 and 135: tribution through Sears, the compan
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Page 148: Things could have come about very d
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Page 153 and 154: enjoyed so little success in the ma
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Page 158 and 159: Afterword on Platform Studies As cr
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Notes We discuss the technologies u
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25. The discussion that followed th
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9. Alexander, “Video Games Go Cru
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21. Activision’s method is clearl
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Bibliography Texts Aarseth, Espen.
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Herman, Leonard, Jer Horwitz, Steve
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Williams, Geoff. “10 Businesses F
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Higinbotham, William. Tennis for Tw
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Coppola, Francis Ford. The Godfathe
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Alcorn, Al, 7 Amidar (VCS game), 12
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Combat (cont.) handicapping adjustm
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Journey Escape, 124 Joysticks, 22-2
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Pixels, 28, 29 Platforms, 16, 23, 4
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Sports-themed games, 65 Sprite grap
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Yars’ Revenge (VCS game), 81-97 a
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