Video Chess
Video Chess is Atari's chess cartridge for the 2600, released in November 1979. It was programmed by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead, with help from chess expert Julio Kaplan. You play against the computer on a full board,…
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Larry Wagner was one of Atari’s early VCS programmers. He polished the tank games in Combat, the 1977 launch title that came with most consoles, and added its biplane and jet modes. He is best known for his work on chess. With Bob Whitehead he built a chess program for the 2600: Wagner wrote the chess logic with only 64 bytes of memory, and Whitehead solved the problem of showing eight pieces in a row.
The site has both stages of that project:
Computer Chess, the unreleased 1978 prototype
Video Chess, the finished cartridge released in November 1979
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Combat – Tank Plus
Combat is one of the nine cartridges that launched the Atari Video Computer System (later the Atari 2600) in 1977. It came in the box with most Atari consoles until 1982, and Sears sold it under the name…
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Computer Chess
Computer Chess is an unreleased 1978 Atari prototype by Bob Whitehead and Larry Wagner. It is the early version of the program that Atari later shrank and sold as Video Chess. It never reached the shops, but it…
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