Atari's development tools

"I would be very surprised if Rotberg wrote the Atari game in Fortran,
considering the development tools they used (they wouldn't have had
a 6502 FORTRAN compiler)
"

I guess I should elaborate on that.. Atari game development in the late 70's
was done on a PDP11 (later a VAX) using the PDP-11 MACRO-11 macro assembler
with a very fancy set of macros to assemble block-structured 6502 assembly
language. I'm sure Jess could go into much more detail on Major Havoc, but
I had a long talk with Owen Rubin about this two years ago. The animations
for the ship in Major Havoc were created with some PDP-11 code to do the
rotations and scaling of the objects, then saved as vector generator move-
draw lists. One of the interesting side effects of this is that all of the
numbers in the source is either decimal or octal (MACRO-11 doesn't support
hexidecimal numbers).
Received on Wed Jan 20 23:19:32 1999