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by BooneJS 751 days ago
Would this have been written in C, asm, or something else? I suppose with Atari & Mac II both being Motorola processors the assembly would have been a direct lift except for any Apple-specific UI.

My favorite part of the story was the latent assertions looking for the bug. Any new code I write is peppered with these, though only active in debug builds. I've never learned to enjoy stepping through a debugger.
1 comments
joezydeco 751 days ago
Most of the classic games from this era were written in 6502 assembly language. There were a number of popular macro assemblers available, C compilers were a bit more exotic. Given that the entire executable fit in 48K, there was no runtime library here.

There's an urban legend that Nasir Gebelli wrote his most popular games with the tiny mini-assembler in the Apple ][ ROM, opcode by opcode.

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ndiddy 751 days ago
Not an urban legend, he confirmed it in an interview with John Romero (great interview BTW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3EmtTpoEa8 )
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js2 751 days ago
Some notable exceptions I'm aware of...

Ultima I was written in Applesoft BASIC with portions in assembly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_I:_The_First_Age_of_Dar...

Wizardry was written in Apple Pascal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry#Development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal

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