Woz Talks About His Gaming Past

Gamasutra has up a rare article with founding Apple visionary Steve Wozniak about his love of games, and his history with the medium. The article discusses Woz's prototype for the title Breakout prior to his involvement with Apple, the gaming habits of Steve Jobs, and the influence that videogames have had on the personal computing industry. " The reason Atari wanted me to design [Breakout] is they were tired of their games taking 150, 200 chips, and they knew I designed things with very few chips, so we had incentives for getting it under 50 or under 40 chips. That was my forte. Now I designed it, but it was... To save parts, I'll make no part go to waste and have tricky little designs that are hard for just a simple engineer to follow. Once you understand it, it's very easy because there's so few parts, it's easier to understand. But they had trouble understanding it."

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[keenada]

To summarize the interviewer: "That was cool, back in the day, and stuff like that..."

Re:For someone with such a reputation...

[hansamurai]

Read this article then...

http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html [woz.org]

Is the interviewer 12 years old?

[dannycim]

That's cool.

That's cool. [...] like conferences and stuff like that?

Did they have like a sketch of the way it would look on the screen or did you just interpret it yourself?

That's where I stopped reading.

Re:Tradeoffs

[greg1104]

Simplifying the hardware saves you real dollars per device. But tricky, touchy drivers and firmware costs you in support, debugging and developer training.

It's really not fair to evaluate the design using modern standards like that. Back in the era where individual chips cost real money, being able to pull down the hardware costs by cutting them made the difference between a computer that people could afford and fit in their home and one that was priced or sized out of reach.

As far as the complexity introduced, there was a point in my life where I had a good working knowledge of the entire ROM of the Apple II at the source code level. When it's possible to fit the whole software design of the machine in your head, whether the approach used makes for tricky drivers isn't so relevant.

By the way: if you think needing to page align data such that there's no byte rollover makes for difficult to write code, you should take a look at Atari 2600 programming. What you have to do in software to work around the hardware constraints of that clever-so-it-can-be-cheap 6502 design make Woz's Apple design look downright elegant and user-friendly.

Re:Woz should design a new computer

[Man On Pink Corner]

And I don't mean a PC inside an updated Apple II enclosure. I think he would be the perfect person to design and sell a new computer targeting the home electronics hobbyist. Something very slow, like ~25Mhz, that could allow one to wire-wrap a daughterboard and just plug it in. Like people used to do in the '70s.

These pretty much already exist. Google "Chumby" (designed by Bunnie Huang of Xbox 1-hacking fame).

Also, the amount of fun you can have with a $20 ATmega128 board and a free copy of AVR-GCC is pretty impressive.