I found this gem from one of my readers over at brainwagon.org He figured out how to program the Atari 2600, which is not an easy task. He made a game that emulates the WWII German encrypter machine called the Enigma. For a little bit of history, an Enigma was a device that the Germans used to encrypt messages. It was electric, and had 3 rollers on it. Depending on how the rollers were turned determined how the encryption was typed. It literally looked like a typewriter. It was an electrical mechanical device. When being used, the electricity would flow through the rotors, and that would set up the encryption. The German’s plan failed when an Enigma machine was found by someone in Poland, which was then forwarded to the British. A British mathmetician figured out how the machine worked, and was able to break the code. This allowed the British to stop the German advance.
As far as the Atari game goes, Mark gives a good podcast that goes into great detail about how to program the Atari 2600, and what he did to learn how to do it. He used the Stella Atari 2600 emulator to test his creation. After he got his creation to work on Stella, he decided to get an EEPROM burner from Mcumall, as well as an Atari PC board that accepts an EEPROM. He did his assembly in p65, which is a 6502 assembler written in perl
I am sure there are some other cool uses for the Atari PC boards. I think you could burn a rom onto them, and play it on your old atari. If anyone has any experience in that, then let me know. Anyway, check out brainwagon.org, and you can see his finished article here Note, he did this over several posts, so if you search for his projects, you can find and read all about it.
4 Responses to “Programming for Atari 2600”
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Thanks man. I really liked your site as well. I would love to write an Atari 2600 game. It was around during my younger times. So my question is, if I had that pc board and an EEPROM, could you program a ROM on the chip and play it on your Atari?
I would be doing more cool how-to projects if I wasn’t hammered this year. Sadly, I can’t even play with my PIC chip programmer
Thanks David, I will check it out.
I’ll second the recommendation for AtariAge. The documentation placed there was highly instrumental in getting to understand how the Atari VCS worked and getting my first programs to run. I also give kudos to p65 and to the guys behind Stella (particularly the new version which has very nice debugging capabilities, it’s really nice to single step through things and see what the machine is drawing with each instruction).
In case it wasn’t clear, the picture of my Enigma Machine that you have is actually running on a VCS. I scavenged an old SuperBreakout cartridge, disassembled it, pulled out the old PC board, plugged in the new one with my freshly programmed AT28C64 EEPROM, and that’s what you get! So yeah, with the stuff you listed, you can actually make real hardware. I even made a label ( http://brainwagon.org/images/atari.png is an early version, I’ll have to find the final version on my laptop sometime) and reassenbled it into a nice cartridge which sits alongside Pitfall II.
Good stuff.
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