Atari World Headquarters, Sunnyvale, CA
April 21, 1979
When Michael Eisner stepped into the room, everyone fell silent. The populace of Atari was still unsure of what to think of their lord and master, who, with the help of outsider Raymond Kassar, had ejected the company's founder and greatest creative mind. But then again, Atari
was now facing the greatest growth in profit it had seen since
Pong, and compared to the stormy seas of Bushnell's last few years, it was nice to have some stability. It certainly helped that, thanks to an aggressive ad campaign over the holiday season, Kassar had saved the 2600 from oblivion.
The big man himself was visiting to check out the progress on some of the games coming out of the pipeline, namely two. He waltzed down the halls like he owned the place (which he technically did) and entered the first door on the left.
Inside, a trio of young men sat crowded around one desk. They were Ed Logg, Lyle Rains, and Dominic Walsh, and the future of Atari dominance in the arcades rested on their shoulders.
"Whatta we got, boys? I don't have all day, just gimme something brief," said Eisner.
Startled, the three programmers scrambled around. "Mister Eisner! We-we thought you weren't coming until tomorrow!"
"I decided to make my visit a little earlier. Now, show me the goods."
The trio hastily prepared something for their boss, displaying the cutting-edge vector graphics being used in their game,
Asteroids. Despite the fact that it was in black-and-white, Eisner seemed impressed.
"Excellent. It'll be a great follow-up to
Space Invaders. Keep up the good work."
Eisner turned on his heel and ventured further into the building, checking in on many projects in varying states of completion, until he found what he was looking for.
Warren Robinett was sat at his desk, balancing a keyboard on his lap and typing frantically away, lines of code appearing on the tiny screen of his HP 1611A microprocessor computer.
"Talk to me, Robinett. How's
Adventure going?"
Of all the other devs Michael Eisner had seen that day, this guy was practically unphased by his presence. A few keyboard clicks later, and he pulled up a (surprisingly) working prototype. "Planned ahead for this," he smirked, plugging a joystick into his monitor.
Eisner smiled and gladly took the stick. For a little while, he fiddled around with the controls, moving his avatar, a little yellow square, around on the screen. "Not really much to it, is there?"
"Why don't you try going to the edge of the screen?"
Eisner obliged, and as soon as the little yellow guy hit the edge, it shifted over, in a choppy, laggy motion. But after just a short while of moving around on the new screen, the game flickered, and shuddered to a stop.
"Dammit... it keeps doing that," muttered Robinett.
"That was amazing!" exclaimed the CEO. "I've only ever seen games play on one screen before."
"Yeah, it's the first of its kind. I had to come up with some clever workarounds to make everything go right. Clearly I haven't done enough, though."
"Well, keep up the good work. But this... this is a Disney-killer for sure. They're all bragging about how big
Black Hole will be, but this... this is the game of the year."
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(Note: A big thanks to reader
@Kalvan! He provided the vast majority of this segment, I just cleaned up and added to the dialogue a bit.)
Walt Disney Studios, Burbank, CA
April 29, 1979
"So," said Walt. "What exactly am I looking at here?"
Rolly Crump shifted his weight from one side to the other. "Well, after playing
Space Invaders long enough to fly from here to China and back again, I realized that the age of discrete logic in arcade video games is over, and if we want to make better games, we need better hardware."
"You mean, all of these wires and motherboards and chips are for..."
"
Black Hole, yes."
The system consisted of three PCBs connected by Centronics ribbon cables. Walt didn't have a clue as to what anything did, but he was always interested in learning more.
"I realize I have the power to override Roy's veto, but you gotta explain to me what's going on here so I know if that's a good idea or not. Maybe then I won't have to override it in the first place. So, why two... what are those, 6502s and then the one 6508?"
"Two words, Walt: money, and power. The MOS Technology 6502 executes one instruction every clock cycle. Compare it to all of its easily available competition, where instructions execute anywhere from every fourth to every twelfth. It's available for $25 for the basic 6502 version, only five bucks more for the 6508, which we're using for the main CPU. Not only that, but we can get both of 'em for half those amounts in surprisingly small bulk purchases, andless shipping and handling, of course. The alternatives, even the Zilog Z80, all ran a lot higher. It's pretty much the best deal we could've gotten."
Walt nodded, arms crossed. "The fact that it's cheap yet powerful should get Roy on board. And I'm already sold. But keep on going."
"The main motherboard features that 6508 which we clocked to 2.38 megahertz, which is about as high as we can get without adding a cooling fan and taking up more space. Sixteen kilobytes of main system RAM keep the program data in place while it's processing, and a 6520 Peripheral Interface Adapter handle player input, four eleven pin controller jacks to connect to the input hardware below the monitor in front of the board, two or four coin sensor jacks mounted in back of the board, and and the two ribbon cable ports to connect to the other boards."
"It seems that book I gave you did a world of good for ya, Rolly," laughed Walt. "I see this weird tape drive... thing. What's that for?"
"That's an Exetron Stringy-Floppy--"
"A
what?" asked the older man, sure he'd heard wrong.
"--an Exetron Stringy-Floppy. It holds the program so that it can be loaded in RAM. We chose it because it's faster than a floppy drive, and much cheaper than it or paying a fab for ROM Masks. We crunched the numbers. Twice. More bang for our buck, really."
Walt gestured widely at anothet circuit board. "What's all this?"
"Well, that's is the Video Board. That 6502 over there controls the game's video output."
"...Why didn't you just go for an off-the-shelf video chip?"
"I tested the Intel 8275 and the Motorola 6845, and neither did too well. So, I got creative, took that 6502 and clocked it at 1.34 megahertz. But since I used Ralph Baer's direct pixel addressing method, Magnavox would come a knockin' for some royalties if we actually did that for a game people are putting quarters into. So, uh, Tony and I grabbed your secretary's Apple II--"
"So that's where it went! She went ballistic, threatened a couple people with a ballpoint pen--"
"Yeah, um, did she hurt anyone or--nevermind. But we took the Apple II apart, reverse-engineered it, and came to a conclusion: Steve Wozniak is a genius."
"I fail to see how that helped."
Rolly grinned. "We took his mathematical formula of scanline shifts on 74 series gate logic and AMD 2900 series bit-slices, and turned it ninety degrees to map vertical rather than horizontal scanlines. This means that, theoretically, so long as video RAM and processor speed is not an issue, it can scale without limits. Because the Woz
probably wouldn't appreciate us borrowing his color generation method, though, we're using a typical color television, minus the tuner hardware. We've managed to get 32 total colors to work with using the NTSC color wheel, and a resolution of 320x208 pixels."
"That... mostly went over my head, but I'll take it that's pretty good. So what this last board?"
"This is the audio board. That last 6502 is connected to a second source 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter which in turn is connected to two General Instruments AY-3-8900 audio chips, with an audio buffer of 16K of Dynamic RAM, since the refresh cycles wouldn't completely overlap between the two chips."
"That means..." Walt counted on his fingers. "Six channels total?"
"Better than that. It means we can get some
digital audio if we play our cards right. The best part is that we've managed this for roughly half the price of an Apple II, or one fourth the price of an Exidy Sorcerer or Trash 80."
"Yeah, I think Roy'll approve, but I'll have to run it by him just in case."
"One last thing, because of the voltage and signal differences, if we want to ship to Europe, Africa, or Australia, we'll need a local partner."
"Good to know."