Gray Chang - Revision history

Computingpioneers at 23:07, 3 November 2023

2023-11-03T23:07:36Z

Computingpioneers: SynAsembler

2016-04-06T04:02:14Z

SynAsembler

Computingpioneers at 21:27, 14 May 2015

2015-05-14T21:27:09Z

Computingpioneers: new

2015-05-14T21:26:08Z

new

Show changes

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 Gray: I don't remember. They probably did. This was already getting late in the game, as they say. I think the collapse was about to come. I wrote Bumpomov's Dogs. I showed it to Broderbund. They liked it but said it wasn't original enough and they encouraged me to keep writing games and to submit any new ideas to them. I went to sell it to through APX, they were happy to take it. In fact, they were spending a lot of money on promotion at a trade show in San Francisco for Bumpomov's Dogs. They set up a booth with Bumpomov's Dogs running, they got helium balloons with Bumpomov's Dogs logo on it. They were set to sell a lot of Bumpomov's Dogs, so, when I went to the trade show, I got there and the APX guy, they're saying, there have been some changes at APX since we last saw you, which was like a week earlier. They laid off a whole bunch of people. This was the collapse. They'd laid off bunch of people and most of the people I knew at APX had lost their jobs but they'd already paid for this trade show, so they still went through with it. But it was kind of disappointing that this is happening. So, I never earned any royalties at all from Bumpomov's Dogs, even though I saw people purchase Bumpomov's Dogs at the trade show, but they collapsed and then never came through with any royalties.
-Kevin: So, that was it. That was your whole [inaudible 00:19:14] right there, those four games, right?
+Kevin: So, that was it. That was your whole oeuvre right there, those four games, right?
 Gray: Yes, that was it.

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 Kevin: I'm sorry.
-Gray: Yeah, and I got the basic cartridge, so of course the first thing I did was start kind of reading the basic manual. So, I was just playing around and making colored dots appear on the screen and then I made us a crude draw program with the joysticks. I would make dots appear, different color dots appear randomly and I'd draw rectangles randomly, sort of a light show kind of thing. One of the one things I did was I wrote a simple, basic program that made a draw program and also, at the same time, randomly made dots appear on screen and had two joysticks. Two people drawing and then, when a dot would appear on the screen, the two people drawing would naturally try and draw their line towards the dots. "Hey, that's the game," I thought. Something appears on the screen and people race for it.
+Gray: Yeah, and I got the basic cartridge, so of course the first thing I did was start kind of reading the basic manual. So, I was just playing around and making colored dots appear on the screen and then I made up a crude draw program with the joysticks. I would make dots appear, different color dots appear randomly and I'd draw rectangles randomly, sort of a light show kind of thing. One of the one things I did was I wrote a simple, basic program that made a draw program and also, at the same time, randomly made dots appear on screen and had two joysticks. Two people drawing and then, when a dot would appear on the screen, the two people drawing would naturally try and draw their line towards the dots. "Hey, that's the game," I thought. Something appears on the screen and people race for it.
 I looked up player missile graphics and I started programming. I tried to animate some kind of moving spaceship or something using player missile graphics and basic and I quickly found that basic was too slow. The animation was slow and jerky and I said, "This is not gonna work, I'm going to have to do assembly language." So, I bought an Atari Assembler Editor cartridge and started learning 6502 assembly language. And I bought the Atari technical manual which is, basically, a bunch of specifications thrown together into a book and it wasn't easy to read. I had to figure out stuff. But once I figured it out, I was able to animate a dog. It was pretty exciting, just to get the dog to move across the screen left and right or up and down and to have some very simple animation like the legs moving back and forth, and tail flipping up and down. And so, I started getting the game start together. You know, it was pretty fun. It didn't take that long. I don't know, a couple of months maybe. So, that's the story of Dog Daze, how I got started with it.
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 Kevin: Do you have enough assembly language in your head that you can do it?
-Gray: Oh yeah, I'm sure. I used a send assembler, by the way. Anybody out there, if you want to program assembly language, forget the Atari Assembler editor cartridge, use [inaudible 00:40:21]. That's a Synapse assembler. It runs about a 100 times faster. When I would compile an assemble game like Dog Daze, it might take five minutes to assemble it with the Atari Assembler Editor but with the [inaudible 00:40:39], it would take like five seconds. It was just that big a difference.
+Gray: Oh yeah, I'm sure. I used SynAsembler, by the way. Anybody out there, if you want to program assembly language, forget the Atari Assembler editor cartridge, use SynAsembler. That's a Synapse assembler. It runs about a 100 times faster. When I would compile an assemble game like Dog Daze, it might take five minutes to assemble it with the Atari Assembler Editor but with the SynAsembler, it would take like five seconds. It was just that big a difference.
 Kevin: It's a whole other world, now.
-Gray: There's a slight difference in syntax between the Atari assembler editor and the Synapse [inaudible 00:40:55]. So, if you're going to learn one, learn the [inaudible 00:41:00]. I think you can download it for free nowadays. I don't know. Are there people still programming games for the Atari?
+Gray: There's a slight difference in syntax between the Atari assembler editor and SynAsembler. So, if you're going to learn one, learn the SynAsembler. I think you can download it for free nowadays. I don't know. Are there people still programming games for the Atari?
 Kevin: Yeah, there are. There certainly are. New games come out semi-frequently. There's a user group in Germany that has programming contests, game programming contests and, every year, there's 20 entries of really high quality games. So, absolutely.

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 Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast
-Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-15-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-gray-chang-jonathan-halliday
+Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-15-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-gray-chang-jonathan-halliday and https://archive.org/details/Atari_Gray_Chang_Interview
 Interviewer: Kevin Savetz