Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

About three years back, the source code for many Atari arcade games was made public on github.com/historicalsource. I believe these were rescued off the material atariscott donated to ICHEG/Museum of Play, but I'm not certain of the provenance. There's some really interesting stuff in there (like this signature analysis test ROM for Space Duel, and this very complete document which explains Centipede's self-test), just a ton of material, covering the mid-70s (Fire Truck, Super Bug, Subs, Orbit) up to around 1982 (Black Widow, Fast Freddy, Crystal Castles). There's also a lot of non-Atari stuff in there, mostly home computer games, but some 7800 game source as well.

The Atari arcade games are kind of a mixed bag. In particular, some of the Space Duel stuff seems to be corrupt — the project documentation and commandlists to build the ROM images contain fragments of source code, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the game code was horked as well. Asteroids Deluxe seems to be missing the rev 2 source, which sucks! I always wanted to see exactly what they changed about the difficulty level. But still: interesting stuff, especially if you're a boring old dweeb like me. None of this was terribly useful, because Atari wrote their own macro assembler, linker, and image splitter (MAC65, LINKM, and IMGFIL), which all this stuff uses. No other assembler can handle these files, and everything makes extensive use of the macro facilities — especially the vector games. So it seemed this was all little more than historical curiosity.

Until... around a month ago, copies of the tools used in Atari coin-op also surfaced; I'm not sure where from. IMGFIL is still missing, but is the simplest of the tools, and can be replaced with some trivial Unix dd commands. And the person who released those was able to use those tools in a PDP-11 emulator to assemble a bit-exact copy of the Centipede v4 ROM images, for the first time in 40+ years.

For the less programming-oriented dorks around here, what this means is that anyone can now have, more or less, the same ability Atari did to revise these games, and make more like them, if they want. This has always been possible, but now it's significantly easier. I'm excited to see what comes of this!
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