''De Re Atari'' ("All About Atari"), subtitled "A Guide to Effective Programming," is a book written by

Atari, Inc. Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari was a key player in the formation of the video arcade and video game industry. Based primarily around the Sunny ...

employees in 1981 and published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1982 as an unbound, shrink-wrapped set of three-holed punched pages. Targeted at developers, it documents the advanced features of the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and includes ideas for how to use them in applications. The information in the book was not available in a single, collected source at the time of publication. The information in ''De Re Atari'' was serialized in ''

Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

'' beginning in 1981, prior to the book's publication. The release of Atari 8-bit technical details through the magazine and book quickly resulted in other sources being published, such as ''COMPUTE!'s First Book of Atari Graphics'' (1982). Atari released official documentation for the hardware and a source listing of the operating system the same year, 1982, but they were not as easily obtainable as ''De Re Atari'' and tutorials in magazines such as ''

COMPUTE! ''Compute!'' (), often stylized as ''COMPUTE!'', was an American home computer magazine that was published from 1979 to 1994. Its origins can be traced to 1978 in Len Lindsay's ''PET Gazette'', one of the first magazines for the Commodore PET ...

''. By 1985, ''De Re Atari'' was out of print.

Background

Atari at first did not disclose technical information on its computers, except to software developers who agreed to keep it secret. ''De Re Atari'' ("All About Atari") was sold through the Atari Program Exchange mail-order catalog, which described the book as "everything you want to know about the Atari ... but were afraid to ask" and a resource for "professional programmers" and "advanced hobbyists who understand

Atari BASIC Atari BASIC is an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that shipped with the Atari 8-bit family of 6502-based home computers. Unlike most American BASICs of the home computer era, Atari BASIC is not a derivative of Microsoft BASIC a ...

and assembly language". ''De Re Atari'', and its 1981-82 serialization in ''

BYTE The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

'', were the first public, official publication of Atari 8-bit technical information. It was based on Atari's documentation written in 1979-80 for third-party developers under non-disclosure agreements. Individual chapters are devoted to making use of the features of the platform:

ANTIC Alphanumeric Television Interface Controller (ANTIC) is an LSI ASIC dedicated to generating 2D computer graphics to be shown on a television screen or computer display. Under the direction of Jay Miner, the chip was designed in 1977-1978 by ...

and

display list A display list (or ''display file'') is a series of graphics commands that define an output image. The image is created ( ''rendered'') by executing the commands to combine various primitives. This activity is most often performed by specialized di ...

s, color registers, redefined

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

s, player/missile graphics, the

vertical blank interrupt {{unreferenced, date=February 2008 A vertical blank interrupt (or VBI) is a hardware feature found in some legacy computer systems that generate a video signal. Cathode-ray tube based video display circuits generate vertical blanking and vertical ...

and display list interrupts (a.k.a.

raster interrupt A raster interrupt (also called a horizontal blank interrupt) is an interrupt signal in a legacy computer system which is used for display timing. It is usually, though not always, generated by a system's graphics chip as the scan lines of a fr ...

s), fine scrolling, and sound. Additional chapters cover the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

Atari DOS Atari DOS is the disk operating system used with the Atari 8-bit family of computers. Operating system extensions loaded into memory were required in order for an Atari computer to manage files stored on a disk drive. These extensions to ...

, and designing intuitive human interfaces. Lead author Chris Crawford used many of these features in the seminal

wargame A wargame is a strategy game in which two or more players command opposing armed forces in a realistic simulation of an armed conflict. Wargaming may be played for recreation, to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking, or to s ...

Eastern Front (1941) ''Eastern Front (1941)'' is a computer wargame for the Atari 8-bit family created by Chris Crawford and published through the Atari Program Exchange (APX) in 1981. A scenario editor and assembly language source code for the game were also s ...

'' released in 1981. Another of the book's authors, Jim Dunion, used custom display lists in the DDT

6502 The MOS Technology 6502 (typically pronounced "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two") William Mensch and the moderator both pronounce the 6502 microprocessor as ''"sixty-five-oh-two"''. is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small te ...

debugger A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the programmer to track its executi ...

to produce a partitioned, IDE-like display. DDT was later incorporated into the MAC/65 assembler.

Serialization

An article on Player/Missile Graphics by ''De Re Atari'' coauthor Chris Crawford appeared in ''

Compute! ''Compute!'' (), often stylized as ''COMPUTE!'', was an American home computer magazine that was published from 1979 to 1994. Its origins can be traced to 1978 in Len Lindsay's ''PET Gazette'', one of the first magazines for the Commodore PET ...

'' in 1981: * Another article by Crawford and Lane Winner appeared in the same month in ''

'': * ''De Re Atari'' was serialized in ''BYTE'' in 1981 and 1982 in ten articles: # # # # # # # # # #

Reception

''De Re Atari'' was very successful; the manager of APX later said that it and ''Eastern Front'' "paid the bills, i.e. were our biggest sellers".Kevin Savetz
"Fred Thorlin: The Big Boss at Atari Program Exchange"
April 2000 ''

Mapping the Atari ''Mapping the Atari'', written by Ian Chadwick and published by COMPUTE! Publications in 1983, is a location-by-location explanation of the memory layout of the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. The introduction is by Optimized Systems So ...

'' described ''De Re Atari'' as "an arcane, but indispensable reference to the Atari's operations and some of its most impressive aspects". ''The

Addison-Wesley Addison-Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles throu ...

Book of Atari Software 1984'' stated that the book had "a wealth of information, but tends to be obscure and includes numerous errors".

References

External links

''De Re Atari'' online''Early Atari 8-bit Development Docs'' online
{{Chris Crawford 1982 non-fiction books Computer books Atari 8-bit family