Diamond Craze

Entry posted by arwanderer in Programming November 13

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Tonight, I finished the fifth and final example game from Oscar's book "Programming Games for Atari 2600", called "Diamond Craze". Additions to this last game are difficulty selection, game reset, lives, and multiple enemies chasing your player on screen. Like previous games I coded, I finished earlier, but spent a couple days working out bugs due to my typos. I really can't recommend this book enough. I went from knowing absolutely nothing about assembly language and only minimal experience with messing around with Batari Basic to knowing, well....something! But that's a lot more than I knew before. The book started out with basic demos and led into showing you how to program some fun games representative of some of the main genres on the 2600. After the five games, the final chapter goes over some more advanced techniques and the final pages of this 324-page book are filled with some useful appendices. I've got a couple more Atari 2600 programming books to work through next, but I definitely see myself returning to this one again, if not to work through again, then at least for reference.

My one and ONLY complaint is that the book isn't twice as long. Hopefully, someday Oscar will write a second book on 2600 programming like he did with Intellivision.

If you don't already have this book, get it now - Programming Games for Atari 2600 - Amazon

Due to flicker, my screenshot didn't capture the enemies, but they're really there.

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