I had the same computer! Always felt a little cheated because my friends all had Commodore 64s but I guess the Atari was on sale at Sears that Christmas. Is that a tape cassette drive with it? I remember my grandfather got me a French language course that would play from the tapes and then load a program to administer an exam. I think I was 8 years old.
Posted using Partiko Android
What you see on the photos is the floppy disk drive, however, I started with a tape recorder and it was a pain! I was also about to get the C64 first but the Atari could display up to 256 colors, the C64 had only 16.
I didn't know that about the colours! Of course I wasn't doing 'digital art' back then, just programming for fun. I think my first game on it was Jupiter Landing.
I was doing digital art / animation and programming machine code (not assembly) on the C64. I spent so many weekends and nights on that thing... when I should have been doing school studies. I guess it worked out, because even when I finished school, none of the educational institutions had started teaching what I had already learnt.
I was so nerdy with programming, that my sisters could whip me at most games we had.
Here is my game PhotonTrace (inspirad by the Tron movie) - I tested it today with my daughter on the 8-bit Atari emulator!
A-ha! I thought there was something Tron inspired with this. Did you ever release it?
Assembler is machine code, only you use short mnemonics (symbolic machine code) for the processor commands instead of hex numbers.
Here is part of one of my Assembler codes for a game. I didn't have a printer so I had to write it down all by hand. On the screen I only got 40 x 30 characters which was too little to see the big picture for debugging. I actually started to write the code on paper before I typed it in.
Zoom in
This is amazing!