Donkey Kong and Me

MBCook sends us to the blog of one Landon Dyer, who posted an entry the other day entitled Donkey Kong and Me. It describes how he was offered at job at Atari after writing a Centipede clone and ended up programming Donkey Kong for the Atari 800. It's full of detail that will be fascinating to anyone who ever programmed assembly language that had to fit into 16K, as well as portents of what was to come at Atari. "My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad."

Nep0

My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly

Without RTFA, I bet its a relative of an Atari bigwig.
       

Re:Nep0

" My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly "

Makes me miss the good ol' days when you didn't need a staff of hundreds and a multi-million dollar budget to make a good game. Back then one guy who didn't know anything could sit down and within a few months crank out a fun game for a popular console. I took a semester of assembly for CS and it's not that bad, wrote a tic-tac-toe game as a final project where the computer randomly placed it's pieces (could have had it scan the board but that'd be too hard for players, as-is the PC wins most the time) so I know a tiny fraction of what the author's talking about.

Other Media of Related Interest

Not that it has direct relevance here, but if you haven't seen it, "The King of Kong" is a fantastic documentary about "Competitive Donkey Kong". It's the tale of a guy who has the gall to challenge the world record holder in Donkey Kong and the corruption in the competitive gaming industry. It's also fantastically funny and a great time to watch.

Highly recommend it if you're at all into gaming, but it's also a great social commentary to watch even with your non-gamer girlfriend/boyfriend.

Re:

Search for "King of Kong" on YouTube. Clips are posted by PicturehouseDF. The second clip is simply named "King Kong", but it's really "King of Kong". Fun documentary.

Re:Other Media of Related Interest

I saw "King of Kong" and rank it among my most favorite films.

However, I would object to the notion that competitive arcade gaming is an "industry" at all. Some of the movie's best moments were when it laid bare what competitive gaming really is--a self-regulated collection of sycophants, plagued by the childishness of its most famous poster boy.

Your assessment of the film's accessibility to nerds and non-nerds alike is completely accurate. If any Slashdot readers have a friend or girlfriend (although that might be stretching things in the latter case ;) who may not share your interest in gaming, this is the perfect film reaching across the non-nerd isle. I cannot recommend it enough.

Re:Other Media of Related Interest

We just played it. A *lot*. And read the cheat guides in books and magazines. (For some titles we got "expert hands" and took video tape).

But you don't need to beat a game to get a good feel for it.

Re:Other Media of Related Interest

Donkey Kong consists of 4 boards that repeat in a sequence, with increasing difficulty. And then there's a wraparound bug [jeffsromhack.com] on the timer that makes a level unplayable.

Anyone with a decent amount of reflexes can make it through several cycles of the boards, enough to document the way things work and change well enough to clone it. If they never make it as far as the timer-glitched level, it won't matter; what they create will still be quite recognizable as "Donkey Kong".

FWIW

After RTFA, you can watch some video [youtube.com] of the game (here's the Atari 2600 version [youtube.com]).

Open Development

How I wish Atari had got that guy to teach everyone how to program the Atari 800 and 400. I had to teach myself from the most cryptic, sparse and often contadictory documentation. There was an "Internet" in the early 1980s, but practically no one had access (I did), so we depended on the few published books, occasional insights in magazines like COMPUTE!, Creative Computing and Byte.

It wasn't enough. Programming wasn't just hard because it required assembly code skills (or forth, hah!), but because it was completely hidden territory. There was no real way to get source code from the programs that some people managed to write and distribute, and certainly no obligtion for anyone to release it (except the occasional superficial magazine article).

The competing Apple ][+, IBM-PC and TRS-80, all had BBSes full of downloadable code (often including source). Their corporate vendors each published detailed programming guides. The TRS-80 was doomed because of the direction of its corporate parent (which should have stayed in the PC business, porting its OS on Intel HW when they all upgraded from 8 to 16 bits). But IBM and Apple survived, even thrived (as we all know), because it was easy to get in the programming game.

By the time Atari finally published its "De Re Atari", which was a good start (the source code to the OS), the small developer "community" had already chosen either Apple or PC. If Atari had taught us all how to program from the beginning, its superior hardware and attractive game platform would probably have left it a strong competitor to the PC, much as the Mac has. But we were all on our own, and our platformed disappeared.

The same dynamic is still true on new platforms. Make it easy to develop for it, and it will survive, even thrive.

Re:Open Development

Agreed. I had been doing assembly on the IIe for a couple years before(enough to start hacking the kernel and working on my own DOS) I got my hands on an Atari 800 and then I discovered that all of the info on writing anything for the 800 was basically useless and, as you stated, contradictory. I had at least 2 books on assembly for the Atari and neither of them got me to first base. Eventually I just dropped it and bought an Amiga which was a lot easier to get into.

Re:Open Development

I had been doing assembly on the IIe for a couple years before(enough to start hacking the kernel and working on my own DOS) I got my hands on an Atari 800 and then I discovered that all of the info on writing anything for the 800 was basically useless and, as you stated, contradictory. I had at least 2 books on assembly for the Atari and neither of them got me to first base. Eventually I just dropped it and bought an Amiga which was a lot easier to get into.

WTF? The Amiga didn't come out until 1985, by which time the Atari 8-bit line had been around for years and was reasonably well-documented. (*1) Sure, in its early days, Atari (intentionally IIRC) did not release information about the 400/800 line, and caused problems for developers. However, AFAIK people mostly had them figured out by the mid-80s.

And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it.

The Amiga was neither the contemporary of, nor (at the time of its release) comparable in price with the Atari 800/XL/XE. Even if you did get your Atari then (and you meant "Amiga" rather than getting it confused with another machine), it wasn't the same mystery as it had been in earlier times.

(*1) The same year that the Amiga came out (1985), the third iteration of the same basic Atari 8-bit hardware (now sold as the XE line) hit the streets. The 400/800 had come out in 1979, the XL line in 1983... that was *years* earlier.

Re:

"And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it."

Wtf?

You never noticed the full hardware specs for the Amiga, that wer

Re:Open Development

The Amiga may have been well-documented, but it was a far more complex machine and being fairly new would have meant that people were still finding their way around it.

I started with a vic-20, the to the C64, then to the Amiga. The Amiga had more complex hardware, but the archetecture was *much* easier to code for - and the documentation made it a breeze to move from one to the other.

Having a dictionary doesn't make you an expert in the English language.

This is completely irrelevant. You don't need to be an expert in the English language to be able write a story.

the specs etc for the various API's?

The guy was talking about assembly programming, so that wouldn't be applicable here.

If you believe this, then you have absolutely *NO* idea what the Amiga documentation consisted of. I programmed the Amiga in assembly (right off the bat), and the "Includes and Autodocs" were indispensible. To say that they "wouldn't be applicable" just shows that not only are have you never read them, but that you don't really know what you're spouting on about.

Re:Open Development

I had at least 2 books on assembly for the Atari and neither of them got me to first base.

You have much to learn about women, grasshopper. Much to learn.

Maybe they wrote their server in 16K!!

Just to think I started programming that was a lot of memory, today code seems so bloated....

Re:Maybe they wrote their server in 16K!!

Take off the rosy glasses and you'll remember all the bad things as well. I had a Commodore 64, and there were so many things that you couldn't possibly fit into that amount of space. For example, I doubt you can fit a simple truetype font rendering library with hinting in 16K. I'm glad I'm past that point where I need to think about the 200 byte structure I'm working on is passed by copy or reference, or whether this is a short or a long. I'm glad I can pass around a larger structure and not try to chase byte-size improvemets by calling everything on a need-to-have basis. I'm glad I can use standard library functions, even when they're ovrekill to invoke.

My primary metric is clear, do as much as possible with as little code as possible. By that I don't mean extreme LOC-compression or extreme cross-referencing, I'm talking about writing using standard functions to minimize maintenance, complexity and sources of bugs. Bloated? Well, you can say that I don't care how much memory the libraries eat, but I certainly don't want the *code* to be bloated.

And now that office mate is . . .

My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad.

So, what was it like to work with Bill Gates?

[rim shot]

Text in case the blog goes down again

Donkey Kong and Me

In the fall of 1981 I was going to college and became addicted to the Atari arcade games Centipede and Tempest. I knew a little bit about the hardware of the Atari 400/800 home computer systems, and decided to make a scary purchase on my student budget and buy an Atari 400 and a black and white TV (which was all I could afford). I messed around in Basic for a while, then bought an Assembler/Editor cartridge and started hacking away on a Centipede clone. I didnt have much to go on in terms of seeing prior designs for games and had to figure everything out myself. Like most of the school problems, you really just have to work things out with a few hints from the textbooks and lectures.

Anyone whos worked with that Asm/Editor cartridge probably bears the same deep emotional scars that I do. It was unbelievably slow, the debugger barely worked, and I had to remove comments and write in overlays of a couple K in order to squeeze in enough code. My game, which I called Myriapede, took about three months to write. I still have the original artwork and designs in my files; graph paper marked up with multi-colored pens, with the hexadecimal for the color assignments painstakingly translated on the side.

[I had to guess at colors. All I had was that cheap black and white TV, and I had visit a friends and his color TV for a couple hours in order to fine tune things].

The Atari Program Exchange (a captive publishing house) was holding a contest. The grand prize for the winning game was $25,000. Id spent a semester of college blowing off most of my courses and doing almost nothing except work on Myriapede. I finished it with a week or two to spare and submitted to the contest.

A few weeks after I mailed Myriapede off to the contest, I got a letter from Atari that said (1) they were very impressed with the work, but (2) it looked to them like a substantial copy of Centipede (well, it was) and that theyd rejected it for that reason. The subtext was they would probably sue me if I tried to sell it anywhere else, too. I was crushed. I wound up going to a local user group and giving a couple copies of it away; I assume that it spread from there. I hear that people liked it (best download of 1982 or something like that).

A few weeks later I got a call from Atari; they wanted to know if I was interested in interviewing for a job. I was practically vibrating with excitement. I flew out and did a loop, and made sure to show Myriapede to each interviewer; it was a conversation stopper every time. Until they saw it they kind of humored me (yeah, okay, you wrote a game), then when the game started up they started playing it, got distracted and (ahem!) had to be reminded that they were doing an interview! One of the guys I talked to was the author of Ataris official Centipede cartridge. He said on the spot that my version was better than his.

A couple weeks later they gave me an offer. Atari moved my single roomful of stuff out to California. I flew out and spent two weeks in a hotel waiting for my things to arrive; Atari wanted me out there real bad.

Now, there were two popular arcade games that I simply could not stand; the first was Zaxxon, a stupid and repetitive scrolling shooter. The second was Donkey Kong it was loud, pointless and annoying. Of course, the reason they wanted me in California was so I could work on a Donkey Kong cartridge. After a few moments of dispair (and faking enthusiasm in front of my bosses) I gritted my teeth, got a roll of quarters and spent a lot of time in the little arcade that my hotel had, playing the DK machine there and getting to know it really, really well.

I should explain how Ataris Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Ataris marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorps Foobar Blaster on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

And he's now hosting his blog on that very same Atari he used oh-so-many years ago.

Best...computer..ever...

the best computer ever in the whole universe, except for virtually every other computer that has been produced since, was my Atari 600XL. Simple enough for a 5 year old to program in machine code, by copying long lists of poke statements out of the blue pages of antic magazine, this computer changed the way I saw the world. In fact, after only a few short years of sitting in front of a 27" inch TV typing in listings, the way I saw the world had become rather myopic.

Until I got my first Amiga of course. 68000 assembly language reads like a great literary work. Yes, the Amiga 500 with it's unix-like (but not *too* unix like) operating system and it's non-surface mounted giant chips named after *hot chicks*, and later, pregnant chicks, brought a 12 year old and his potentially permanently scarring soldering iron closer together than they had ever been before. Yes.. I got my first virus on an Amiga. It was so cool.. and so scary. Never before had I seen a virus! Don't share floppies kids!

Back then, there were also machines called "macs" which were identifiable by the fact that they used completely different hardware than a PC (stuff made by Motorola.. pfft.. a cellphone manufacturer. leave it up to them and we'll soon be computing on our cellphones!!) and completely different input devices. People said we would never learn to like mice... and they were right.

Well.. it's all gone kids. The mac doesn't exist anymore. Just PC's with unix-like operating systems, and PC's with Microsoft operating systems... and we still rate them on the same system... we fire up mame, and see how well they can duplicate the Donkey Kong experience.

I nearly beat level 2 today.

Re:

You missed the best part of TFA. A new word has entered the lexicon by accident of hyphen: "cow-orker".

Some of us wrote video games in 6502 assembly language back then. I made enough in the first year off of royalties to buy a brand new car for cash back i

Re:And your point is?

A new word has entered the lexicon by accident of hyphen: "cow-orker".

You kids today, no sense of history. "Cow-orker" is at least 15 years old, it was common on alt.folklore.urban when I was a USENET junkie. (USENET. You know, USENET? Newsgroups? The original peer-to-peer system? Ah, forget it. I gotta go yell at some kids to get off my lawn.)

Re:And your point is?

TFA is not supposed to be relevant to most people.

TFA is an act of geek nostalgia. A good number of us like to remember for the sake of remembering. While I couldn't care less about Atari pre-Tramiel (the DOG!), stories about Amiga still interest me.

Check the comments section at the end of TFA, the messages are from people who still revere Atari and people with personal connections.

Re:And your point is?

That is exactly right; this is pure geek nostalgia. Nobody really cares about the details of a failed company 25 years ago, or about some guy who wrote an arcade game clone on an obsolete computer. The world has moved on.

But . . . some of the lessons are timeless: Failing companies go south in common ways (poor hiring practices, success concealing bad mistakes, miserable engineering practices, etc.). This was my first job out of college, I had no idea what the real world was like, and it was a real eye-opener. (And from a geek perspective: You can do amazing stuff in 16K. Still can. Firmware engineers do this kind of thing every day).

(It kind of sucks to be slashdotted. I never expected that).

Re:And your point is?

dude, as a professional historian, I find it pretty cool. In a period where we tend to sentimentalize the early years of videogames, it also highlights a key part of the game industry: many, many games were written by people who had no particular interest in video games. It was a coding job. It's hard to imagine now, when there's enough demand that writing videogames involves taking a pay cut, but people were involved in it with no inspiration whatsoever, producing shovelware. In my short period in the industry as a (paid) tester, years after this incident, I remember explaining just what constituted traveling and offsides to a lead programmer whose basketball game was already in final testing. We remember the smart folks, and the good games, but there was a lot of junk out there. We all played the games of the believers, but most of the games were made by hacks, and only a small number played them.

So, yeah, thanks for sharing.