An emulator is a program which pretends to be another machine/program. Nowadays, we are able to see changes to code almost immediately because of the availability of good emulators.
This was an inherently slow process (trust me, I did this for NES development!) and it sometimes took 15 minutes just to see a change! and then physically 'burning' the binary onto an EPROM, putting that EPROM onto a cartridge and plugging it into a '2600. But hopefully we'll come out of it with a greater understanding of this little machine, and appreciation for the work of those brilliant programmers who have developed the classics for this system.ĭevelopment of a game in the '80s consisted of creating a binary image Write source code, assemble into binary. And we'll probably divert on tangential issues here and there. We'll walk through binary arithmetic, hexadecimal, machine architecture, assemblers, graphics, and whatever else gets in our way. We're going to assume that you know how to program *something*, but not much more than that. here's your first installment of "2600 101".
But the rewards are great -making this simple hardware do anything at all is quite an achievement -and making it do something new and interesting gives one a warm fuzzy feeling inside. For programming this machine is tricky at best -and not for the feint of heart. It is this online community which makes developing for the machine 'fun' -though I use that in the broadest sense of the word. So don't be scared -with a bit of effort, anyone can do this! We have a helpful online community of dedicated programmers, readily available documentation, tools, and sample code -and online forums where we can pose questions and get almost instant feedback and answers. We'll take this in slow easy stages.ĭeveloping for the Atari 2600 is much simpler today than it was when the machine was a force in the marketplace (back in the 1980s). Really! What I plan to do with this tutorial is introduce you to the arcane world of programming the '2600, and slowly build up your skill base so that you can start to develop your own games. I'm Andrew Davie, and I've been developing games for various computers and consoles since the late 1970s. The string of 0's and 1's is actually a binary representation of "2600 101".
Welcome to the first installment of "000001010 00101000 00000000 1100101" -which at first glance is a rather odd name for a programming tutorial -but on closer examination is appropriate, as it is closely involved with what it's like to program the Atari 2600. So, you want to program the Atari 2600 and don't know where to start?
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