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

Re:Open Development

[Dogtanian]

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. WTF? The Amiga didn't come out until 1985, by which time the Atari 8-bit line had been around for years and was reasonably well-documented. (*1) Sure, in its early days, Atari (intentionally IIRC) did not release information about the 400/800 line, and caused problems for developers. However, AFAIK people mostly had them figured out by the mid-80s.

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.

Re:Other Media of Related Interest

[kabdib]

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.