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

9. Alexander, “Video Games Go Crunch.”
10. Warshaw, Once Upon Atari, episode 2.
11. Control over memory banks is memory-mapped, meaning that a VCS program
writes to a specifi c location in memory to switch from one bank to another. This
can be very helpful, but is not as useful as being able to address a large memory
space directly. Often, some of the contents of one bank will have to be duplicated
in another because it is impractical to switch back and forth at every point where
it would be necessary.
12. Available to members of the AtariAge forums at http://www.atariage.com/
forums/index.php?showtopic=54937.
13. Kohler, Power-Up, 24.
5 Yars’ Revenge
1. Stilphen, interview with Howard Scott Warshaw.
2. Weesner, interview with Howard Scott Warshaw.
3. Email to Montfort, 28 October 2007.
4. Larry Rosenthal was the developer of Space Wars. After he left Cinematronics,
Tim Skelly needed to reverse-engineer the company’s own product (which was
not clearly documented) to determine how to create other XY graphics games of
this sort. After succeeding at this, Skelly developed Star Castle. Skelly, “Tim
Skelly’s History of Cinematronics.”
5. Novak, Game Development Essentials, 9.
6. Turkle, The Second Self, 84–85.
7. Poole, Trigger Happy, 23.
8. GameSpy, “Asteroids Gives Birth to Smack Talk.”
9. That is, assuming that the color/BW console switch is set to color and a color TV
is used.
10. Many emulators do now offer a mode in which pixels are blurred so that the
game appears more like a CRT image, although the scan lines of the television
are still not visible as they would be on original equipment. Zach Whalen has
investigated the difference between the “blocky” and “fuzzy” representations of
pixels in popular culture and has looked at how different display modes infl uence
the appearance of digital images, particularly typography. Whalen, “Lost in
Emulation.”
11. Email to Montfort, 28 October 2007.
12. This assembly code was developed from the binary stored in ROM; Debro,
“Yars_Revenge.asm.”
13. Stilphen.
14. Email to Montfort, 28 October 2007.
6 Pitfall!
1. Fleming, “The History of Activision.”
2. Fleming.
3. During a Classic Gaming Expo 2007 panel.
4. Rob Fulop, quoted in Hahn, “Favorite Atari 2600 Games.” Fulop explained
further in a forum posting on http://www.AtariAge.com (16 October 2007):
Notes to Pages 76–102 [155]