Basic vs. Assembly

[Danest]

Was every atari game cartridge done in assembly? As far as I know, there's no way to turn an assembly language rom into basic (which is something I'd love to do to just look at these classic programs in readable basic... and I really can't get much personally from looking at assembly.) But maybe if some were in basic, it would be a good place to go if I wanted to take a peek at how they did things? But I wouldn't know where to look if these basic language classic games existed.

[+Gemintronic]

Every "era" commercial 2600 game was assembly (I think). You can make your own BASIC games in batari BASIC. That wont help you understand the disassemblies for Adventure and the like.

[Danest]

Maybe I missed the more advanced tutorials, but the colorful demon attack, and the scale of adventure and indiana jones seem a lot more than what I'm seeing on batari basic, which was one reason why I was so curious about what those programs would really look like in something more readable (to me.)

[+Gemintronic]

Maybe I missed the more advanced tutorials, but the colorful demon attack, and the scale of adventure and indiana jones seem a lot more than what I'm seeing on batari basic, which was one reason why I was so curious about what those programs would really look like in something more readable (to me.)

 

You can do all that and more with batari BASIC. If you're trying to learn how traditional games are made then you might not get as much out of batari BASIC games.

[Cybearg]

You can do all that and more with batari BASIC.

That depends. Technically, you can do more with Assembly, but batariBasic makes things easy enough that clever programmers can figure out ways to make it seem like more is being done. Some things simply can't be done with batariBasic alone, while those who program in Assembly can make some amazing magic happen.

 

Anyway, even if the games were programmed in BASIC and then converted to Assembly, converting it back to BASIC would be extremely difficult because there's no direct 1-to-1 correlation BASIC to Assembly. There are often many ways to achieve the same result in both BASIC and Assembly, so it would be a cryptographer's nightmare to figure out exactly what equivalent BASIC code was being demonstrated in Assembly without going through piece by piece, documenting every line of code, then laboriously breaking it up and interpreting it by hand.

[+Gemintronic]

I'd say start with the commented Adventure assembly.

http://www.romhacking.net/documents/496/

[yllawwally]

There are several big reasons they used asm. The basic language would have needed to be coded on a computer, which is a large task. The programmers at the time would have been more familiar with assembly. Assembly allows the programmer to know exactly what each step is doing in his program. With the extremely limited resources of the 2600, it was important to use every byte of RAM efficiently. The timing is also very critical, so that it is easier to get more technically impressive results by asm, instead of through any other language. Even other later machines used assembly as well. The NES was primarily programmed in ASM, as well. Most arcade machines of the 80's would have been in assembly as well.

[johnnystarr]

Not to mention the fact that BASIC would take up much of the 4K of ROM that was actually available. Leaving very little space for the actual game. Also, its very important for the author / programmer to have access to bitwise operations. Most 6502 implementations of BASIC shielded the programmer from this ability, causing bloat and overhead that you just can't afford when 'racing the beam'. If you take the time to learn 6502 assembly, it will open up a world of platforms. You could go straight into NES or SNES dev. After learning one assembly language, learning another is trivial. For instance, if you wanted to write a gameboy game, you would need to learn assembly for the z80 / intel 8080.