Name: Making Games for the Atari 2600
ISBN: 9781541021303

Making Games for the Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 was released in 1977, and now there's finally a book about how to write games for it! You'll learn about the 6502 CPU, NTSC frames, scanlines, cycle counting, players, missiles, collisions, procedural generation, pseudo-3D, and more. While using the manual, take advantage of our Web-based IDE to write 6502 assembly code, and see your code run instantly in the browser. We'll cover the same programming tricks that master programmers used to make classic games. Create your own graphics and sound, and share your games with friends!

What Hacker News says

myth_drannonNov 2022

Steve Hugg has a few nice books on the topic https://8bitworkshop.com/ Like "Making 8-Bit Arcade Games in C" and "Making Games For The Atari 2600"

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levicoleJan 2019

I own "Making Games for the Atari 2600" which is listed on this site. It's definitely worth picking up.

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kgwxdJan 2019

I've been into the 2600 homebrew scene since "Making Games for the Atari 2600" came out a few years ago. I haven't made anything useful yet, but the community is great and very active. There's an awesome twitch channel[1] dedicated to 2600 homebrew, ZeroPageHomebrew. They do 2 shows a week, ~2 hours each. The developers and various AtariAge people are usually active in the chat. They're doing an awards show in February for homebrews made last year.

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew

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hugjaMar 2018

Retro Game Dev: C64 Edition[1] build two games (shooter/platformer) in 6502 Assembly Language for a Commodore 64 emulator. Some other similar books are Making 8-bit Arcade Games in C[2] and Making Games for the Atari 2600[3].

- [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692980652/

- [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1545484759/

- [3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541021304/

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ucsApr 2017

As luck would have it, the very same site under discussion also happens to host a neat online "IDE" for learning all about the 6502-based Atari 2600¹.

It is a companion to the book, "Making Games for the Atari 2600". A wonderfully clear and concise primer that I thoroughly enjoyed, even though I had no interest in the Atari 2600 per se. The NES was my first console -- and naturally the one I'd always wanted to program. Since it shares the same 6502 processor, I used this book as an introductory text before diving into the murkier waters of NES development wikis and forums.

¹ http://8bitworkshop.com

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2_ghostsJun 2021

Thanks! 8bitworkshop is a great resource.

I am currently working through this online course by Gustavo Pezzi called "6502 Assembly Language for the Atari 2600". https://courses.pikuma.com/courses/atari2600 It has been excellent. Just the pace and level of detail that I need. I am lucky to have stumbled upon it.

I am also reading "Making Games for the Atari 2600" by Steven Hugg. Previously I was simply exploring what is available on http://www.6502.org/, working through the Easy 6502 tutorial https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/, and checking out YouTube tutorials.

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