Atari Game Development and Assembly – Day 1

Well, here goes nothing. Or, in fact, something!

With the right tutorials I’ve got my head around some Assembly, after a while of research and learning how to structure loops and the equivalent of while loops I feel like I’m getting somewhere!

I’m limited to a paltry 4k of ROM space and everything is being drawn on a line-by-line basis, I doubt I’ll need all 128 bytes of RAM to be honest as there’s not much room to play around!

Still, so far I have a background and moving missile sprite, which moves based on Player Input. There’s even some tones being generated on movement which is kinda cool.

Coloured Bg and Yellow Missile, Yay!
Coloured Bg and Yellow Missile, Yay!

Plus there’s a register dedicated to handling collision detection, how cool is that? I mean, you just check the set bits and you know what has collided with what!

Right, I’m going to see how I can get a sprite or two on there, seeing that it can only handle 2 sprites, 2 missiles and a “ball” on the hardware I’ll be hard pressed to make something playable!

Really Useful Links for anyone interested:

6502 OpCodes – http://www.6502.org/tutorials/6502opcodes.html

AtariAge Tutorials – https://atariage.com/2600/programming/2600_101/06happy.html