You should be reading Atari Projects
Jason H. Moore has been quietly publishing bite-sized Atari programming tutorials for years, and it is exactly the kind of passion project the internet needs.
I interviewed Jason H. Moore on the Retro Game Club podcast back in 2020, and I have been a massive fan of his website ever since. Atari Projects has been quietly publishing bite-sized (or maybe byte-sized) technical tutorials for years now. It is exactly the kind of hyper-focused documentation that keeps old hardware alive.
A very qualified hobbyist
Moore brings a serious academic background to his hobby. He is Jason H. Moore, Ph.D., the Chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. By day, he works on artificial intelligence, health informatics, and automated machine learning. By night, he writes assembly code for a console released during the Carter administration.
He even combined these interests to create Gene Medic, an Atari 2600 edutainment game about editing a patient's DNA. He programmed the entire thing in assembly language.
Fifteen minutes or less
The best part of Atari Projects is the format. Moore breaks down complex programming concepts into tutorials, many of which take 15 minutes or less. If you want to learn how to compile assembly code using the DASM cross-compiler, he has a guide for that. If you need to generate a random number in Atari BASIC using the POKEY chip's linear feedback shift register, he shows you how to do it in five minutes.
He also covers lighter topics. One of my favorite posts walks through the process of triggering hidden Easter eggs in Atari home computer games. He details the exact steps needed to find the programmer initials in the Atari 800 port of Donkey Kong, a secret that went undiscovered until 2009.
Building your own corner
People should know that their little corner of a niche interest brings joy to others. We spend so much time arguing about the broader gaming industry that it is easy to forget why we actually like this stuff. Sites like Atari Projects remind me that the internet can still be a place where people just share things they think are neat.
Moore's stated goal is simply to share the fun he is having and make it easy for others to try these projects on their old systems. I hope his work inspires more people to create highly specific, deeply nerdy sites like this. If you have a weird technical hobby, document it. Someone out there will be thrilled to read it.
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