Slashdot Mirror
Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released
jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced. "Remember Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron? They used to be favorites when Atari's 7800 series was still around. Since the era of those consoles is over, and a different world of interactive reality gaming has taken over, Atari has unofficially released source code of over 15 games for the coders and enthusiasts to admire the state-of-the-art (because this is what it was back then). During those times, nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams the games that Atari's developers floated into the gaming thirsty market and instantly swept across continental boundaries. But things changed soon after that and a company once regarded as one of the most successful gaming console manufacturers and developers faded away in the pages of our technology's hall-of-fame."
Un-redacted phone numbers for the programmers in readme.doc files? They probably don't want to be getting calls about these games 21 years later from the internet at large.
-Lee
... we see our first CERT advisory for a buffer overflow exploit in Dig Dug, leading to a remote execution vulnerability in your 'net-enabled MAME console.
This unofficial open source release signals that this will finally be the year of the cutting edge linux gaming platform.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Shaking head in disbelief... Still trying to get someone to pay for Dig Dug after all these years....
Seeing how it was done old-school is always refreshing. No C++, Java, C#, just hardcore assembly.
As an anecdote, I have a friend who used to work at MECC and worked on games for the Apple II like Oregon Trail and Odell Lake (find yourself a Way-Back Machine if you aren't familiar with those games). If memory serves me right, before leaving MECC, he wrote something akin to the following in one of those two programs:
[code]
; Important. Do NOT remove this. -- username
nop
nop
nop
; Proceed
[/code]
Years later it was apparently still in the code and he'd met up with an old colleague who asked, "What was up with the three nops? We didn't remove them because we didn't know what would happen". The response being, "Nothing, I just thought it would be funny to have this conversation a few years later".
Well, if my knowledge of history by way of Hollywood is any help, that's the portion of the game that if accidentally accessed by a kid renders him in control of our nuclear arsenal.
Looks like 6502.
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...
I like compilers.
Spoiling slashdot with Pacman porn again, are we?
MOV HEALTH, AX
I don't think the Atari 7800 used a x86 processor...