Atari VCS and Apple II developer environment? What did they do?

[DanOliver]

It would be awesome to write a game with a retro setup like that Agree Apples were comfortable to type on.

I did like typing on them. Wonder if that would still be true today? I liked that they were pretty darn portable, really thick case compared to the sheet metal cases but still light.

 

I guess you coded each bank as a seperate assembly file?

I don't think I ever did a bank switched game. I think only 4K games. Could the frob handle bank switched carts? I'd be surprised if it did.

 

Awesome that you wrote your own Assembler at AdventureVision; you used this instant Assembler afterwards at Atari in lieu of theirs or did you use both sets of tools?

VentureVision.

At Atari I was writing Final Legacy for the Atari 800 and 5200. I can't remember exactly, pretty sure on a VAX and downloaded I don't remember how. That was all Atari's stuff.

 

The 2600 work on Telepathy was kind of out of the blue. Our group wasn't tasked to write for the 2600 so we didn't have any equipment for that. I never even saw any Atari 2600 manuals. I'm sure my boss Chris Horseman could have made an Atari development system appear in short order but I would have had to come up to speed on that and there wasn't a lot of time. It was just pure luck that I'd finished Final Legacy and had about a month to mess around and one thing I had done was bring in my Apple system and I was getting it to target a 800/5200. I'd gotten a 512K RAM to make that work. So when asked if I could do a demo for the MindLink I just happen to be all set up and ready to write code.

 

It was cool because of an instant turn around so fast it was like having a graphic editing system. Instead of drawing sprites on graph paper I could code it, see it, change, view almost like drawing. I could tweak pixels and colors way, way more than I'd ever consider burning EPROMs. So not only could I write code faster I could try way more stuff and make a better game. Telepathy only took a week or two but it was like 2 months worth of development the old way. A real bummer that was the last project I got to use that system. Finally a perfect development system and then have to move on. If I could have done one or two more 2600 games with that system and a reasonable deadline...who knows.

 

Later I did (I think) an instant assembler for the 65816 while at Apple working on the IIGS. Another guy in our group, Rob Turner, wrote one too. I think his was better, further along. I think we were comparing our build speeds. But once again we never got to use it for very long as new Macs were out, IIGS was spinning down, time to move on.

 

It amazes me we don't have instant C++ compilers today. Certainly we've had more than enough horse power for a long time. With the number of programmers in the world, the amount of time they spend waiting around and the money that costs companies, they could afford to pay $30K for an instant compiler and still come out a head. And get better products too. In almost ever other industry they've modernized. Not programming. More stuff, more features, more complexity, able to write fatter and fatter apps, sure. But productivity...I don't see any great leap. Builds get slower and slower. Seems like basically the same deal it's always been. But I think programmers are OK with it, more time to mess around. So little chance of an instant compiler catching on.

 

No question though that I consider writing Telepathy on that system the absolute apex of app writing for me. Never thought of this before but that development system was like a Mind Controller. As fast as you could think of an idea it appeared on screen.

[DanOliver]

I use and iPad with DOSBOX for some developing. I wonder if most of your setup could be duplicated with an emulatior. Not entirely sure what a frob card is.

Wickeycolumbus's post #9 has a great link to a frob thread.

 

I know emulators can be amazing but I've always stayed away from them for development. I don't even like web development that much because I have so little control over what this or that browser will display. It's just too limiting. Too much time making code work with the emulator rather than pushing the platform. Rob Fulop might not had found his star field trick used in Cosmic Ark if had been using an emulator (not that they existed at the time).

 

But I think it depends on what a person is writing. I generally do end user apps so I try to stay as close to them as I can. If I could I'd like to be writing the app in their house on their machine while wearing their clothes.