Recently, in podcast episode #149, the Video Game History Foundation interviewed game developer John Van Ryzin about his development of the Atari 2600 game H.E.R.O.
The conversation also covers Van Ryzin’s pre-Atari career, including the development of Apple II games Bellhop, Kamikaze, and Shuttle Intercept.
In the interview, Van Ryzin details some unique interactions between the Apple II and Atari 2600 platforms, both of which used the 6502 microprocessor:
… Garry [Kitchen] had … a circuit board that he designed that went into a slot in his Apple II computer that emulated a ROM. So he had an Atari 2600 sitting there with a ribbon cable that went into the cartridge, where he pulled the actual ROM of a production cartridge out and put this other ribbon cable in there. And so he would code it and assemble it and then send it over there. So there was no debugging or anything like that. It was like, write the code and run it and see if it works. And the rest of us were working on Apple II computers because we were writing Apple II games.
… the funny part was, the Apple II, we could compile the programs faster on our Apple II’s than all of us sharing a PDP-11 [Activision’s development kit for the Atari 2600]. So that part really stunk. Like, you’d go to assemble your program, and you’d be sitting there forever competing with all these other people trying to use the same machine.
Van Ryzin has since developed Alien Abduction, a new Atari 2600 game that he considers a spiritual successor to H.E.R.O.