File:Stella Programmers Guide.pdf

Stella Programmer's Guide — the programmer's manual for the Atari 2600 hardware, written by Steve Wright at Atari, Inc. on 3 December 1979 and circulated in transcribed form from 1988.

The definitive description of the 2600's programming model: the TIA's 228 colour clocks per scan line and 262 lines per frame, the 76 machine cycles per line available to the 6507, the player/missile/ball/playfield objects and their registers, collision detection, the sound generator, and the 6532 PIA/RIOT with its 128 bytes of RAM at $80–$FF, its timer registers at $294–$297 and the console-switch port SWCHB at $282.

It is cited on the RetroTechCollection 2600 pages for the memory map and video timing figures.

Scanned copy from the Internet Archive item StellaProgrammersGuide.

Copyright © 1979 Atari, Inc. All rights reserved. The document has circulated in the Atari development community for four decades and is hosted here for the preservation and repair of obsolete hardware. If you hold the rights to this document and want it removed, please contact the wiki operator.