I was able to put together a great collection of consoles and cartridges. When I started collecting Atari hardware and software in 20 was a prime target. I recall standing in line at Sears to purchase Pac-Man when it first came out. I had an Atari 2600 in the late 1970s before we got our first Atari 400 and 800 computers. Needed: DASM cross-compiler, assembly code Just go through the folders on your PC to the executable for the compiler and then for your emulator.Task: Compile Assembly Code for the Atari 2600 It will then ask for the path to the compiler and emulator. To set up Visual bB you just need to start the program. Best of all, Visual bB has integrated sprite and sound editors, further easing the development process. This makes it streamlined for batari Basic. Visual bB looks and works a lot like Microsoft Visual Studio and is focused on use with batari Basic, unlike Crimson Editor. Crimson Editor is linked to on the batari Basic website and instructions for setting that up are included in the 'Tutorial'. If you aren't comfortable compiling on the command line, then you can download a couple of Integrated Development Environments, both of which are Windows only unfortunately. Basically, you need to download and extract the compiler and then set up the command path so you can use the '2600bas' command on the command line to compile your games. If you want to go the command line route, thorough instructions for setting up all of that are included in the 'Installation' and 'Tutorial' sections of the batari Basic website. There is a snag though. The Atari 2600 was made a rather long time ago and people were completely happy to program in assembly language back in those days. Programmers were a lot more patient. Assembly for the Atari 2600 may seem daunting and for a novice programmer it is. Unfortunately, there was never much of another, more high level option for a programmer wanting to get into the VCS home brew scene. Most games on the 2600 revolve around getting a high score doing some arcade style task like shooting enemies or dodging obstacles. Thinking about creative ways to make simple tasks into games can be very fun and since games for the 2600 are generally pretty simple, game design is not all that hard. If you want to see what some people have done in the homebrew scene, here is Elevator Amiss, programmed by Bob Montgomery, and Go Fish, also by Montgomery. Because of the age of the system, the only new content for the 2600 being released today is from homebrewers. Here is a list of some current games being worked on by people for the system. The Atari 2600 has a devoted homebrew base and several homebrew games are released every year.

Atari 2600 homebrew bin files