De Re Atari
| Author | Chris Crawford, Lane Winner, Jim Cox, Amy Chen, Jim Dunion, Kathleen Pitta, Bob Fraser |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Atari 8-bit family |
| Publisher | Atari Program Exchange |
|
Publication date
|
1982 |
| Pages | 250 pp |
De Re Atari ("All About Atari") is a book written by Atari, Inc. employees in 1981 and published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1982 as an unbound, shrink-wrapped set of three-hold 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. 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!. By 1985 De Re Atari was out of print.
An article on Player/Missile Graphics by De Re Atari coauthor Chris Crawford appeared in Compute! in 1981:
Another article by Crawford and Lane Winner appeared in the same month in BYTE:
De Re Atari was serialized in BYTE in 1981 and 1982 in ten articles:
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 by Atari Program Exchange (APX) in its 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 and assembly language".
The magazine series and De Re Atari were the first public, official publication of Atari 8-bit technical information. The series was based on Atari's confidential, 8-bit development documentation written in 1979-1980 for third-party developers under non-disclosure agreements. Individual chapters are devoted to making use of the features of the platform, which included ANTIC and the display list, "graphics indirection" in the form of color support in the GTIA and customized character sets, player/missile graphics, using the VBI and display list interrupts (aka HBI/Raster interrupt), smooth scrolling and sound, including a discussion of "volume only sound" which offered higher-resolution volume control for digitized sample playback. Additional chapters covered utilities in the operating system, Atari DOS and Atari BASIC, and design of intuitive human interfaces.
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