Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

"Racing the Beam", on the early Atari; notable for nailing both the techological and sociological sides of the games it studies.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System Is a good read about the Atari 2600 and how the devs were able to fight within the limitations of 1970s and 1980s hardware to develop a gaming platform. https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies... (https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X)

Racing the Beam: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam Its about how hard it was to program the Atari 2600 and the clever tricks required to get the most out of the machine. One of my favorite anecdotes was that in I believe Yars revenge, one of the sound effects was produce by reusing a section of code as sound data because it sounded good enough.