Having some insider knowledge of how Williams wrote their videogames, Steve's disassembly is the best presentation of how the Robotron architecture worked. This setup was used in almost all of the games that DeMar and Jarvis did for a decade or two to come, including the pinball operating system (which was pretty much this exact same process/task system). These guys always wrote in assembly. I don't think C came along at Williams/Bally/Midway until they switched to an X86/PC-based architecture sometime around 1998-1999.
Earlier on HN someone posted an article about a Tron-like light cycle game where the cycles would break out of the framebuffer and start to mess with program memory. What's cool about Robotron is that you are actually killing processes when you wipe out the robots. A true superuser!
Earlier on HN someone posted an article about a Tron-like light cycle game where the cycles would break out of the framebuffer and start to mess with program memory. What's cool about Robotron is that you are actually killing processes when you wipe out the robots. A true superuser!