Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game

Source: Hacker News

TEMPEST vs TEMPEST

TEMPEST vs TEMPEST is a book‑length attempt to explore and understand the code and craft of Dave Theurer’s Tempest (1981) and Jeff Minter’s Tempest 2000 (1994).

The idea is to explain how many different little things in each of the games actually work, down to the level of how they are implemented in the 6502 (Tempest) and 68K Motorola (Tempest 2000) assembler source code.

I tried to keep it light and digestible, so the book consists of lots of short chapters, each presenting a hopefully‑tasty morsel from one of the games.

• Download and read the book here (9 MB) – a dual‑page view in your PDF reader is recommended to aid viewing code and commentary side‑by‑side.
• If bandwidth is no object, high‑resolution version with better quality pictures (27 MB).

The book is free, but if you like it you can gift what you want.

Source & more

Find out more about the making of this book at its GitHub repository.