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Comment by dws | Hacker News Reader

Many years back (so details are fuzzy), a friend who worked at Atari in the early 80's told that the programmer who did the game part of the work had the basic chess algorithm working in a few months, spent the next year getting it to run in less than 128 bytes of RAM, and was then burnt out and left tech.

IIRC, the game devs used a PDP-11 for much of their work, so that had a bit more RAM to work with to get started.

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I'd love to see a dev setup for using the PDP-11 and the Atari 2600 for doing gamedev. I did a quick search on youtube and the search engines and couldn't find anything.

I'd love to see a dev setup for using the PDP-11 and the Atari 2600 for doing gamedev. I did a quick search on youtube and the search engines and couldn't find anything.

The photographs I've seen aren't all that interesting.

A VT-52 terminal and a hand-built cart wired into an RS-232 port, all on a long desk.

Hopefully there are more exciting photographs out there that I haven't seen.

Have a look at the PDF document here: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/259003-intellivision-devel...

Also check out the links provided at the end of the document.

Besides the PDP-11, I'm glad to see the beloved PDP-10 was also used by game developers back in the days.

Be see, I mean a demo of what it is like to dev Atari 2600 games using a PDP-11. I mean there are PDP-11 emulators, we could setup a pure virtual Atari dev system.

We had a PDP 11/70 for undergraduate work when I started studying for my BSCS in 1984. Nothing pretty, just glass vt52 and vt100 type terminals. Oh, and a 110 baud line printer that could also be used as a terminal. That line printer was not fun, but I had to use it on occasion when all the good terminals were taken.

IIRC, ours had 64KB of RAM in two banks.

The 128 bytes of RAM seems quite easy (game state is 32 bytes for chessboard + 1 byte for side-to-move+castling+en-passant plus 2/3 bytes per move in the search stack + 1 byte to record the depth at which castling was disrupted = 54/64 bytes with depth 10, leaving a luxurious 64/74 bytes for call stack and local variables).

The problem seems to be more the 4KB of ROM, but only if one is trying to make it actually somewhat good, and also perhaps using 1979 tech for programming.

But the computer also needs to keep a scratch space to consider potential moves it could make, which if done in a straightforward manner would exhaust the other 64 bytes of memory.

It could just mark branches at the cost of recomputing moves repeatedly to evaluate scores.

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