
Atari 7800 Source Code - elwell
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/7800/games/
======
khazhou
Ha! In DIGDUG/DIGDUG.S:

    
    
        1950-          LDA     ROCKSY,X
        1951-*         SEC               ; CARRY IS CLEAR HERE
        1952:          SBC     #$06-1    ;MIGHT NEED TO TWEAK THIS
    

I'm guessing it never got tweaked.

I wonder what the world's oldest TODO comment is...

~~~
TremendousJudge
I don't think it's the oldest by a longshot, but check this one out, from the
Apollo 11 software:
[https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminary099/LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.agc#L179)

------
mrspeaker
Wow, they all seem to be fully commented too! I remember when I first found
out about the Atari homebrew scene for the 2600... I was so excited by the
idea you could make your own game the first console I ever experienced as a
kid. It made me learn 6502 assembler and discover the insane world of Atari
development. "Racing the beam" still blows my mind.

I did kind of follow through and made "sort of a game" for it:
[https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops](https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops)
Though it lacks polish, it does have a theme tune!

~~~
kabdib
Comments in games varied a lot. The coin-op folks did pretty well, and most of
the systems code for the computers was well commented.

Lots of game cartridges had very few comments. While this _was_ in an era
where comments would slow down your turnaround time, I think much of it was
the fast development pace and the fact that once a game had shipped, it was
_done_. It was in ROM, real mask ROMs that were not patchable, and no one
would ever be going back to that code again.

------
ac4tw
After reading through the src for Dig Dug, I have to confess that I'm jealous
of the awesome variable names in gaming.

Didn't see a lot of things like 'DETHWISH', 'FLEE', 'ROCKDETH', or 'VICTIMX'
writing FPGA SW.

~~~
Someone
Variable names likely had to be uppercase, and there likely was a limit on
variable name length (either hard or of the “you can use lowercase/more than
eight, but we will ignore case/all but the first eight” variety).

~~~
kabdib
Depended on the assembler. Some let you have 8 characters, internally
uppercased and silently truncated. Others let you have 16 chars, others were
effectively unlimited.

I wrote a bunch of assemblers, each one better than the last, ending in the
one that Atari used for Atari ST, 7800 and Jaguar development. It's the
assembler included in the 7800 tools archive. Someone cleaned it up a bunch
and put it on github a few years ago.

~~~
ac4tw
Folks like yourself are one of the big draws of HN for me. It's awesome to
hear the perspective of people who created aspects of the things I was in awe
at growing up (in this case I'm thinking of the Jaguar).

------
hotwire
It kind of sickens me that we only have this because some smart person
dumpster dived behind the building of a bankrupt game company...

Who threw this stuff out?!

How much other irreplaceable source code has been lost because some janitor
threw out some boxes of "old floppy disks" or whatever when everything was
getting cleaned out...

