Dog Daze Deluxe Programming Notes

I wrote my games Dog Daze, Claim Jumper, Dog Daze Deluxe, and Bumpomov's Dogs in 6502 assembly language. The 6502 was the microprocessor used in the Atari 800 computer. (Back in those days, the chips had numbers like "6502" instead of names like "Pentium.")

The 6502 programming language has a small set of instructions for reading, writing, and manipulating 8-bit values. I used the Synapse Synassember, which was about 100 times faster at assembly than the Atari Assembler Editor cartridge. ("Assembly" means the automatic conversion instructions from human-readable "source code" into the number-sequence "object code" understood by the microprocessor.)

The architecture of the Atari computer provided extensive support for graphics and sound. I only had to store a sequence of values into memory, and the graphics chips would put a complex display on the screen, or the sound chip would generate a complex sound such as a honk, crunch, or dog-step sound.

A wealth of information on the Atari computers is available at the Atari Archives web site, including old books, reference manuals, and articles about the Atari 8-bit computers. If you are interested in seeing some of my 1983 programming notes for Dog Daze Deluxe, go to my Programming Notebook page.


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Dog Daze Deluxe ©1981,1983 Gray Chang
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