Donkey Kong and Me

MBCook sends us to the blog of one Landon Dyer, who posted an entry the other day entitled Donkey Kong and Me. It describes how he was offered at job at Atari after writing a Centipede clone and ended up programming Donkey Kong for the Atari 800. It's full of detail that will be fascinating to anyone who ever programmed assembly language that had to fit into 16K, as well as portents of what was to come at Atari. "My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad."

Comments

FORTH

[Tablizer]

The 'cartoon' sequences were given to another engineer, whose code I had to entirely replace (he originally wanted to do the job in FORTH, and didn't understand that the game couldn't afford to devote half the cartridge space to a FORTH interpreter just to make his life easier).

That's what happens when you over-educate people: they learn all these great abstractions and ideas, and then have to do it the primitive way in the field. My first job out of college was programming in Fortran-66 (1966 standard), which had no IF blocks and WHILE loops, only GOTO's. The company didn't want to pay for a newer compiler. It was hard to accept; I was not ready for the real world and can relate to the poor FORTH dude. I hope he's making big bucks in a FORTH shop with plenty of RAM somewhere.