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."

Great guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've conversed with Landon online a couple of times over the years. He seems to be a super nice guy, and his blog is at times hilarious. My favorite two stories are the guy with no degree (who purports to have one) and repeatedly applies for a job, and another entry with an intimidating inscrutable bulging forehead genius who interviewed Landon for a job.

Other Media of Related Interest

[Ieshan]

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.

FWIW

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:And your point is?

[jo42]

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 in the early '80s. Now get off my lawn!

Re:And your point is?

[Provocateur]

That's impressive. Am curious though, you know how some people put their very first paycheck into a frame to hang on the wall? Have you ever saved your work or preserve it in some way that you can show to peers? This is after all, back then, when "bloat" was not used to refer to software yet =)

Re:And your point is?

[ushering05401]

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?

[kabdib]

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:Other Media of Related Interest

[BeeBeard]

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:And your point is?

[DingerX]

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.

Re:Open Development

[Vellmont]

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

Actually, he was talking about assembly on the 8 bit machines. Along with Basic, that was about your only option to program in.

The 16 bit machines had C compilers available for them, so programming was quite a bit easier.

That may explain the "easier to get into" comment.

Best...computer..ever...

[obstalesgone]

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:Nep0

[iamhassi]

" 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.

Re:Open Development

[Doc Ruby]

The Atari computers weren't targeting mostly games. Atari released all kinds of general purpose SW. VisiCalc ran on Atari. It had serial ports, modems and printers.

The problem was that the Atari corp was mostly not targeting. RTFA to see what a circus it was. In the early 1990s I knew the guy who wrote the Atari computer game version of "Millipede" (funny how the creeper programmers like to talk). He told me stories of how the halls of Atari were filled with people wired on coke so much, there literally was a team whose job was to collect people freaking out, usually locked inside their offices.

If Atari hadn't been first absorbed by the Warner giant conglomerate that failed to gain "computer" insights just by buying Atari and letting go its visionary founders, it might have had a great chance. Everything Amiga should have been Atari's. Atari even had a Mac-type desktop (GEM, on its 16bit 68000 versions) much truer to the Xerox PARC model, before the Mac did. That desktop was a better publishing platform than the Mac, too.

With its games attracting programmers and users, it should have had it all. But it didn't have the spirit. And mainly, it didn't have the marketing that either IBM's momentum or Steve Jobs' genius brought. It lacked either the industrial muscle or the visionary spirit to match its HW brains.

Re:FORTH

[tompaulco]

My first job out of college was programming in Fortran-66 (1966 standard), which had no IF blocks and WHILE loops, only GOTO's. The company didn't want to pay for a newer compiler.
Don't hold back, tell us what year that was.
My first programming job was while I was still IN college, in 1989, converting Fortran 66 code into the state of the art Fortran 77, if you can consider 11 years old to be state of the art. It was kind of comparable to running Windows 95 today.

Re:Nep0

[jlarocco]

Weird coincidence. I wrote a Tic Tac Toe program in assembly the other day with the goal of making it fit in the 512 bytes of a floppy disk bootsector.

Right now two players take turns placing either 'X' or 'O', but I have about 40 bytes left to make the computer play.

Fun stuff.

Re:And now that office mate is . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill [G.] looked down on Steve [J.] because he couldn't actually program. [folklore.org]

Re:Open Development

[schon]

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:Nep0

[lena_10326]

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.

You know. Except for the gaming part, exactly that happened with general application programming and the VB/JS/PHP programmers of the 90's and 00's and a lot of people complained that untrained, know nothing dolts were diluting the talent base and bringing down the perceived value of classically educated computer science graduates. For some reason if on the job training occurs with ASM it's romanticized, but if it's high level scripting, it's denigrated.

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.

ASM is rather fun if the project is small. It's just about the closest you can get to pure, refined coding.

Been there, done that....

[Joce640k]

I've done most of the stuff mentioned in that article so it was fun to read, but a bit light on horrific details.

I remember well the hundreds of pages of assembly language with no comments, the overloaded "server" machines which would grind for an hour if everybody hit "assemble" at the same time, RS232 downloads to the target machine, etc.

Crappy license deals, the "need something, anything, by next week" deadlines which meant that most games were much worse than they could have been, all standard fare in those days.

Oh, the shame

[Atari400]

My first computer was an Atari 400 (hence the moniker), and I had a lot of fun with it, first learning Atari Basic, then moving on to 6502 Assembler (Assembler/Editor cartridge, then the bliss of Mac65). I upgraded the RAM from 16K to a massive 48K, then got an Atari 1050 disc drive, then a Happy/US-doubler chip for the drive so I could make "backups" of my legitimately purchased software.

The only code I wrote that got in to the wild was some disk based copy protection. I wrote the loader using an interpreted C compiler (Deep Blue C), and some 6502 code - stored in duplicate sectors on a certain track. For example, track 5 would contain two sectors 7s, one sector 7 with valid 6502 code, the other with bogus code. The only way to read in the correct sector 7 was by reading the track sectors in reverse sequence, something no disk copy program would do, but the Deep Blue C code did (the code took advantage of the order in which sectors on a track were placed so as to optimize read times). The 6502 code was the loader (and de-mangler) for the rest of the program.

Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I'd have written Tetris and retired...