Mad-Pascal — writing Atari 8-bit games from a modern PC

By Wojciech "Bocianu" Bociański

A course that runs across issues of Atari Legacy. Every chapter is a working program: you get the article in print, and the source, the compiled binary and a bootable disk image here. Start at Chapter 1 even if a later one caught your eye — each part builds directly on the code of the one before it.

Every part, in order

Chapter 1 · Issue 01

Chapter 1: Setting up and Hello World

Setting up a cross-development workbench on a PC: the Mad-Pascal compiler, the MADS cross-assembler behind it, the Altirra emulator to run the result, and VS Code wired up so that Shift+Ctrl+B takes you from Pascal source to a running Atari program in one keystroke. Ends with hello world on a blue Atari screen.

atarilegacy.com/r/mad-pascal/1

Chapter 2 · Issue 02

Chapter 2: Bomber

A complete one-button game in a few dozen lines of Pascal: a saucer crosses the screen one character at a time, drops bombs on a randomly generated city, and dies if it hits a tower. Poke and Peek straight into screen memory, ATASCII to internal screen codes, and a frame-counter trick that makes the bomb fall twice as fast as the ship moves without a single extra variable.

atarilegacy.com/r/mad-pascal/2