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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."
I haven't seen it yet, but it looks interesting. Trailer is here
Agreed. I had been doing assembly on the IIe for a couple years before(enough to start hacking the kernel and working on my own DOS) I got my hands on an Atari 800 and then I discovered that all of the info on writing anything for the 800 was basically useless and, as you stated, contradictory. I had at least 2 books on assembly for the Atari and neither of them got me to first base. Eventually I just dropped it and bought an Amiga which was a lot easier to get into.
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Search for "King of Kong" on YouTube. Clips are posted by PicturehouseDF. The second clip is simply named "King Kong", but it's really "King of Kong". Fun documentary.
Donkey Kong and Me
In the fall of 1981 I was going to college and became addicted to the Atari arcade games Centipede and Tempest. I knew a little bit about the hardware of the Atari 400/800 home computer systems, and decided to make a scary purchase on my student budget and buy an Atari 400 and a black and white TV (which was all I could afford). I messed around in Basic for a while, then bought an Assembler/Editor cartridge and started hacking away on a Centipede clone. I didnt have much to go on in terms of seeing prior designs for games and had to figure everything out myself. Like most of the school problems, you really just have to work things out with a few hints from the textbooks and lectures.
Anyone whos worked with that Asm/Editor cartridge probably bears the same deep emotional scars that I do. It was unbelievably slow, the debugger barely worked, and I had to remove comments and write in overlays of a couple K in order to squeeze in enough code. My game, which I called Myriapede, took about three months to write. I still have the original artwork and designs in my files; graph paper marked up with multi-colored pens, with the hexadecimal for the color assignments painstakingly translated on the side.
[I had to guess at colors. All I had was that cheap black and white TV, and I had visit a friends and his color TV for a couple hours in order to fine tune things].
The Atari Program Exchange (a captive publishing house) was holding a contest. The grand prize for the winning game was $25,000. Id spent a semester of college blowing off most of my courses and doing almost nothing except work on Myriapede. I finished it with a week or two to spare and submitted to the contest.
A few weeks after I mailed Myriapede off to the contest, I got a letter from Atari that said (1) they were very impressed with the work, but (2) it looked to them like a substantial copy of Centipede (well, it was) and that theyd rejected it for that reason. The subtext was they would probably sue me if I tried to sell it anywhere else, too. I was crushed. I wound up going to a local user group and giving a couple copies of it away; I assume that it spread from there. I hear that people liked it (best download of 1982 or something like that).
A few weeks later I got a call from Atari; they wanted to know if I was interested in interviewing for a job. I was practically vibrating with excitement. I flew out and did a loop, and made sure to show Myriapede to each interviewer; it was a conversation stopper every time. Until they saw it they kind of humored me (yeah, okay, you wrote a game), then when the game started up they started playing it, got distracted and (ahem!) had to be reminded that they were doing an interview! One of the guys I talked to was the author of Ataris official Centipede cartridge. He said on the spot that my version was better than his.
A couple weeks later they gave me an offer. Atari moved my single roomful of stuff out to California. I flew out and spent two weeks in a hotel waiting for my things to arrive; Atari wanted me out there real bad.
Now, there were two popular arcade games that I simply could not stand; the first was Zaxxon, a stupid and repetitive scrolling shooter. The second was Donkey Kong it was loud, pointless and annoying. Of course, the reason they wanted me in California was so I could work on a Donkey Kong cartridge. After a few moments of dispair (and faking enthusiasm in front of my bosses) I gritted my teeth, got a roll of quarters and spent a lot of time in the little arcade that my hotel had, playing the DK machine there and getting to know it really, really well.
I should explain how Ataris Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Ataris marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorps Foobar Blaster on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents
The ______ Agenda
And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it.
The Amiga was neither the contemporary of, nor (at the time of its release) comparable in price with the Atari 800/XL/XE. Even if you did get your Atari then (and you meant "Amiga" rather than getting it confused with another machine), it wasn't the same mystery as it had been in earlier times.
(*1) The same year that the Amiga came out (1985), the third iteration of the same basic Atari 8-bit hardware (now sold as the XE line) hit the streets. The 400/800 had come out in 1979, the XL line in 1983... that was *years* earlier.
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"And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it."
Wtf?
You never noticed the full hardware specs for the Amiga, that were available from the start, as well as the specs etc for the various API's?
If those aren't obvious, you must be fucking blind.
He doesn't say. But he does say that his coworker was fairly typical for new hires.
We just played it. A *lot*. And read the cheat guides in books and magazines. (For some titles we got "expert hands" and took video tape).
But you don't need to beat a game to get a good feel for it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
"And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it." The complexity has little to do with the number of bits, and the Motorola 68xxx with its flat memory model and universal registers was really easy to get into. Switching from that to 8086 with its segments and offsets made me want to slit my wrists.
Funny this article should come up, since I just watch "The King of Kong" today. Very good documentary, but wikipedia has more info (or at least another perspective) that wasn't covered in the movie.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Donkey Kong consists of 4 boards that repeat in a sequence, with increasing difficulty. And then there's a wraparound bug on the timer that makes a level unplayable.
Anyone with a decent amount of reflexes can make it through several cycles of the boards, enough to document the way things work and change well enough to clone it. If they never make it as far as the timer-glitched level, it won't matter; what they create will still be quite recognizable as "Donkey Kong".
egypt urnash minimal art.
I, too, found it fascinating. However, despite how well and convincingly the movie presents everything, I would encourage people to take the factuality of the events portrayed with gracious helpings of salt, as a number of the events in King of Kong have been disputed by Twin Galaxies itself. Personally, I believe that it's safest to view King of Kong as a piece of fiction based on actual people and events rather than a truly factual documentary.
You DO know that Bill was a programmer, wrote for the Altair, and had a reputation for writing tight code, right?
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