Re: Atari's development tools

Al Kossow wrote:

> "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).

That is ironic, considering the nasty jab at both Digital Equipment
(the manufacturer of the PDP series and the VAX) and VAX in
the scrolling story during attract mode. Something like "the
Vaxian empire from the planet Maynard" (Digital was based in
Maynard, Massachusetts) and how they were trying to force
the galaxy to use mainframe computers. Forgot the actual
wording, but it is very funny if you get the inside joke of it.
Received on Thu Jan 21 03:33:17 1999