Making Games for the Atari 2600

by Steven Hugg

The Atari 2600 was released in 1977, and now there's finally a book about how to write games for it! You'll learn about the 6502 CPU, NTSC frames, scanlines, cycle counting, players, missiles, collisions, procedural generation, pseudo-3D, and more. While using the manual, take advantage of our Web-based IDE to write 6502 assembly code, and see your code run instantly in the browser. We'll cover the same programming tricks that master programmers used to make classic games. Create your own graphics and sound, and share your games with friends!

Genres: Programming

263 pages, Hardcover

First published December 13, 2016

Reviews

[Diogo Muller · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the name says, this book is about Making Games for the Atari 2600. The VCS is an old console, full of little details, and programming for it isn't easy, but I felt this was a great entry point for it. It gives the reader great details about the VCS and the unique way it works, at times detailing code line by line and explaining what exactly each part of the code does.

Is it perfect? No, there are some problems. At certain parts of the book, it's not clear if the code given is something the reader has to follow and do, or some kind of example - I wasn't certain how to proceed the first time I saw that, but you kinda get the gist of it after some time. Some parts of the book are not up to date with their online environment, which can cause a bit of confusion - some examples in the website use things that are explained chapters ahead.

Anyway, still a great way to learn a bit about the VCS. While it's not a knowledge that can be easily used today, it helps you think about programming in different ways, and it's always great to expand your horizons.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic

A fantastic guide to the basics and many advanced VCS programming techniques. Everything is clearly laid out and well explained for even beginning 6502 assembly programmers. If you have never coded assembly then you may struggle or require some additional study here and there but patience and persistence should get you through. I was very pleased to see VCS techniques like fine moves, ransoms, multisprite kernels, and bank switching well covered. This book is a great expansion of the Stella Programming Guide and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a great roadmap into programming this very challenging machine. This book almost makes it too easy...

[Carlos Duarte do Nascimento · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book for anyone that wants to write Atari 2600 games. Beginners will have a step-by-step guide (strongly tied to a web IDE, so they can experiment as they read), while veterans will have a great review of things they know (and hopefully catch some they don't). As someone who has already written a game and an Atari emulator, I learned a couple new things!

[Stephen Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest console ever!!!!!!!!!!!! It lasted from 1977 to 1992!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Lorraine Figueroa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book to read if you want to learn how to write a game for the Atari 2600. Why would anyone want to do this - 46 years after the release of the first popular game console? Because it is a challenge. I am a senior programmer and found the constraints programming to a machine with only 128 bytes quite a challenge. The author makes learning quite easy with the 8bitworkshop website to test out the books programs.

I wish it spent more time on 6502 machine language - but there is quite a bit out there to supplement the book.

This book should be in all atari 2600 programmers bookshelf!