Home Applications and Games: for the Atari 400/800 Computer

This book boasts 31 easy to use Atari BASIC programs. Simply type them in and use them to manage your checkbook or to keep an inventory of household good. You can even play graphic games, shooting down MIG fighters or battling the monster Grendel, or one of the evil Ghost Town Vampire girls. You can also compose music, encrypt or decrypt private files.

What's special about this book is that its programs take advantage of all the sophistication of Atari BASIC. Its 6502 Motorola main processor talks to a separate graphics chip which offers great graphics for games, a feature that was unavailable on other home computers of the time.

More particularly, in addition to graphics, Atari BASIC supports sound, (SOUND statement), graphics (GRAPHICS, SETCOLOR, COLOR, PLOT and DRAWTO) and peripheral units like joysticks (STICK, STRIG) and paddles (PADDLE, PTRIG). Other home computer users were often left with cryptic PEEKs and POKEs for such programming.

As such, this book's litany of programs provides a self teaching guide to all the nuances of Atari Basic.