4 ms·
Atari didn't have source control. AFAIK, it just didn't exist. The VAX or DG mini that most people used for cross-development was probably being backed up at le
by kabdib 11y ago
Atari didn't have source control. AFAIK, it just didn't exist. The VAX or DG mini that most people used for cross-development was probably being backed up at least weekly, but if you accidentally wiped out something important, like all of your source code, you were likely hosed.
On a project like this, adding people to it will make it later. The 2600 is a different beast from something that you can divide-and-conquer using APIs and so forth. A typical commercial 2600 game is a holistic, byte-shaved monster piece of spaghetti code, full of tricky timing and other traps. Hard to imagine that any collaboration would have resulted in a better game.
- abecedarius 11y agoI used a VAX in college, and the DEC operating system had built-in support for file versions. E.g., something like: when you write to a file, that creates FILENAME.EXT.5 where before there were FILENAME.EXT.1 through 4. Compared to Unix it was harder to accidentally wipe your data. (It's been so long, and I didn't use it so much, that I won't opine on how much harder. But the Unix Haters Handbook ragged on Unix quite a bit for this sort of thing.)
- kabdib 11y agoFile versioning was nice, but it cluttered stuff up. People still lost files. I know that I did. Fortunately, since I was an admin, I had arranged for daily incrementals, and didn't lose anything. :-)