Case study

Donkey Kong: an annotated Atari VCS disassembly that rebuilds the cartridge

Coleco's 1982 Atari VCS cartridge of Donkey Kong is disassembled into labeled and commented 6502 assembly kept byte-identical to the cartridge, down to a filler byte that pushes the audio frequency table to the next page. Comments outline the overscan, vertical blank and kernel main loop and the horizontal positioning routine, and an NTSC switch selects the PAL listing, which retimes vertical blank and overscan for 312 scan lines and changes colours and sound frequencies.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-09

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Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Assembling needs a 6502 assembler and the vcs.h Atari VCS header that the listing includes.
Limits: The author notes that heavy use of overlays and offsets may leave some variable meanings or table positions unidentified.
License: No licence stated on the project page.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{donkey-kong-atari-vcs-disassembly-case,
  title = {{Donkey Kong: an annotated Atari VCS disassembly that rebuilds the cartridge}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.qotile.net/minidig/disassembly/dk.asm}},
  url = {https://www.qotile.net/minidig/disassembly/dk.asm},
  urldate = {2026-11-09},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/donkey-kong-atari-vcs-disassembly-case/}}
}

Plain text

Donkey Kong: an annotated Atari VCS disassembly that rebuilds the cartridge. https://www.qotile.net/minidig/disassembly/dk.asm (accessed 2026-11-09). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/donkey-kong-atari-vcs-disassembly-case/

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About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources.

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Primary sources

https://web.archive.org/web/20260714101337/https://www.qotile.net/minidig/disassembly/dk.asm