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.

Use 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!

To see the programming IDE in action, click here.

Chapters: Introduction to 6502 - The 8bitworkshop IDE - VCS Memory Map - Writing Your First Assembly Code - Painting on the CRT - Playfield Graphics - Players and Sprites - Color Sprites - Sprite Fine Positioning - Player/Missile Graphics - The SetHorizPos Subroutine - Joysticks and Switches - Indirect Addressing - A Complex Scene - NUSIZ and Other Delights - Scoreboard - Collisions - Asynchronous Playfields - A Big (48 pixel) Sprite - Tiny Text - Six-Digit Scoreboard - A Big Moveable Sprite - Sprite Formations - Advanced Timer Tricks - Multisprites - Random Number Generation - Procedural Generation - Drawing Lines - The Sound and Music - Pseudo-3D: Sunsets and Starry Nights, Driving Down the Road - Bank Switching - Wavetable Audio -  Paddles - Illegal Opcodes - Timing Analysis - And More...