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

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