The Hitch-Hacker's Guide to the Atari Digital Vector Generator

Back in my student days, I occasionally found myself with just enough time between lectures to get bored, but not enough time to get lunch. So I took a copy of the Asteroids and Lunar Lander schematics and a dump of the Vector Generator State PROM with me, and spent a few days reverse-engineering it.

This document is the fruit of that effort: a description of how the DVG works, and how to program it.

This is the December 4th 2018 revision, which fixes several mistakes in the description of the SVEC opcode.

Download PDF file: vecgen.pdf

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  • Last modified: 2018/12/04 18:27
  • by philpem