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The choice of AppleSoft BASIC for a recreation seems to be somewhat odd and deliberate, and doesn't represent the typical limitations of the time (AppleSoft BASIC does floating point math!): in August 1975, the MOS 6502 hadn't even been announced and the Apple ][ wasn't yet a dream. Even Microsoft 4K BASIC for the Altair hadn't been introduced, yet (this was to happen only later in October.) Meaning, none of the basic technology of choice would have been available.

Something along the lines of Intel 8080 assembly may have been more appropriate, given that the target platform would have probably been a coin-op machine. (Given that "Gun Fight", the first arcade video game utilising a microprocessor, wasn't yet released, even this would have been an ambitious choice. Atari doing research for something that required an ALU may be even more interesting than the involvement of the young Steve Jobs.)

PS: This is just to give some truth to "this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad". ;-)

2 comments

Yeah... it's a bit unclear to me what hardware this was even supposed to run on? The home and arcade video games Atari was producing at the time (Pong and later Breakout) were based on discrete logic chips, so weren't "programmable" in any modern sense of the word. As you wrote, the 6502 was only introduced later in 1975, and designs using it came even later.

Yes, someone cramming code into 4K ROMs in 1975 would very likely have been writing in assembly language. With you on that one.

Notably, Dave Nutting Associates (Bushnell's former employer, who also distributed Computer Space) had played around with an Intel 4004 in 1974 and then demonstrated (to Bally) a CPU based system with a frame buffer in September, which evolved into the Intel 8080-based board that ran Midway's Gun Fight. Atari would have probably been aware of this (Nutting Associates had filed a patent.) So, something along the lines of Intel 4004 or 8080 machine code, maybe M6800.

Anyone could in a Apple I from the monitor, even from the Kim-I and a serial adapter.