It's odd how something like a simple book from your past can spark up memories. When I was about 14, my best friend and I used to rent Apple II software from a local shop near the airport. They had about 2 shelves worth of Apple II games and probably VHS cassettes in the rest of the place. One day, a very fine book magically appeared on the shelf of this rental store: Apple Graphics & Arcade Game Design by Jeffrey Stanton. In his book he demonstrates via real 6502 assembly language by creating a defender-clone! I can't remember much else but in those days it was a real gem and we were thankful. Amongst all the 6502-reference books out there this one really stood out. This book was our most beloved possession and we actually kept it in a zip-lock bag when it was not in use!
So I managed to track down the author's biography and here is what I came up with. The thing I find the most interesting is that the Apple // book was merely a side project in his life. I somehow expected him to be this established game programmer. Just goes to show ya!
The best part is that I managed to score a copy of this book on Ebay and I eagerly await its arrival. I will be sure to bust out my copy of BigMac Assembler so I can test out the sample code! Perhaps I'll post some of the code in another post.
Did this gem of a book ever come?
ReplyDeleteYes - got it and have enjoyed reading it. I have been typing in 6502 assembly language into the Merlin assembler. Lots of good concepts in there for old retro arcade games. I plan to port the defender game to XNA (xbox360) as a learning exercise.
ReplyDeleteXNA is interesting! So you'll be coding in C#, yes?
ReplyDeleteHi! I just across your post looking for more info about this book. I posted a short blog entry about those days here, if interested. I still have my original copy of AG&AGD. It's very beat-up but still holding together.
ReplyDeleteThose who use the Open Library may be interested to know that you can check out copies of Stanton's book here. (I recommend avoding the epub on this one -- epub works fine on novels, but the OCR causes havoc with code - stick to the scanned pdf)
ReplyDeleteThe open library also has other interesting 6502 books from the era, including Roger Wagner's "Assembly Lines: The Book".
(yes, I just came across your posting by google now)
I bought this book in 1984 and it was like a bible. It allowed me to go from slow Apple BASIC to assembler. I let someone borrow it in 1986 and they never returned it... been looking for it ever since as it helped my programming skills tenfold. Assembler/machine code etc... until I got the book was like a myth and something only certain people even knew existed or could use. Eventually got into C/C++ and x86 assembler because of this book
ReplyDelete