David Crane and Garry Kitchen On Atari 2600 Programming

The Atari 2600 cost around US$ 189 when it was released in 1977 and sold around 30 million units. The machine had only 128 Bytes of RAM memory and a 4KB ROM program memory on each cartridge.

You can download a zip file containing a 4096 byte ROM image from https://www.atarimania.com/games/atari-2600-games-pitfall-14162 It runs in JavaScript in a web browser. Try https://javatari.org/?ROM=https://www.atarimania.com/2600/dumps/pitfall_cce.zip It's too difficult for me! There is a user manual:

You can disassemble the .a26 ROM images at https://www.masswerk.at/6502/disassembler.html.

The reset vector for 6502 processor family is a 16-bit address stored at 0xFFFC and 0xFFFD:

The 4KB ROM on the Atari 2600 is mapped at $F000-$FFFF even though the 6507 variant of the 6502 CPU had only a 13 bit address bus, it was internally the same silicon, so the 8KB of accessible memory was effectively mapped eight times through the full 16 bit (65KB) address space:


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Amazing range of behaviour out of that tiny bit of leeway: 


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Retro Game Mechanics Explained:


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Released the same season (1982) as Pitfall! and Donkey Kong, the E. T. game had a special place in Atari 2600 history:


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Howard Scott Warshaw (author of the game E.T. The Extra-terrestrial) was a bored Hewlett Packard engineer when he managed to get a job at Atari:
 

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David Crane mentioned the Sega Channel and digital delivery in 1990s:
 

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