Vitoco: Every new software and hardware motivates me to stay in the Atari scene

April 27, 2019 • Updated: Mar 18, 2025 - 12:23 AM

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Victor Parada is, without a doubt, one of the main representatives of Latin America in the international Atarian scene. His various games have occupied first places in competitions such as BASIC Tenliners; in addition to being responsible for the renowned tape copier SITRE.

In this interview for Atariteca, Chilean “Vitoco” shares little-known details of his role as a programmer for Atari computers, as well as his upcoming plans for software development for our beloved computers.

Atariteca: Tell us a little about yourself and how you got involved in the world of computing: your age, if you are married, have children, where you live, how you make a living.

Víctor Parada: I was born in Valparaíso (Chile), and I lived and studied between that city and its neighbour Viña del Mar, but almost finishing university I moved to Providencia, a commune in Greater Santiago, where I have lived and worked the second half of my life. I managed to graduate as a Civil Engineer in Computer Science and then I got married and started a family. I have two children, aged 13 and 11 respectively. I started working in the IT department of a bank and I still do the same thing today, but in a newspaper company.

What was your first computer and what inspired you to start programming it?

When I was a teenager, for a birthday my grandmother gave me an annual subscription to the magazine “MUY Interesante”, and she renewed it for a couple more years. In that magazine I read about technological advances and I was excited by the articles about microcomputers. During a school visit to a company, a manager in the systems area gave me an old programming book in BASIC language, and that blew my mind. I began to make programs without a computer, I just wrote code in a notebook and imagined how it would work. So you could say that my first computer was “virtual”. Among the first low-cost home computers that arrived in Chile was the Sinclair ZX81, which was the first computer where I put into practice what I had learned, and in a few weeks I had already made three simple games on a friend’s computer.

How did your relationship with Atari computers begin?

When Atari computers arrived in Chile, the father of a classmate became an official representative in my city, so from time to time my friend and I would sneak off to his father's store to play. At the same time, my school set up a computer room with several Atari 600XLs and an 800XL sharing a disk drive and a printer, and I was able to take the elective Computer Science course.

My family knew of my interest in computing and made an effort to buy me one, and fortunately the opportunity arose to bring an 800XL with its 1050 disk drive from the United States. Since I was interested in seeing what other things could be done with it, I took the opportunity to read and photocopy some books from my friend's store, including the original edition of "Mapping the Atari" and, at least a year later, the appendices I needed to complete the XL edition.

This enabled me to develop a system at school that allowed me to quickly check test results for the equivalent of the current University Selection Test, using a device that another student had built and that plugged into one of the Atari's joystick ports. I also developed a registration card system for a school event, taking as an idea another card program I had seen on the ZX81.

Do you still own an Atari 8-bit computer?

Of course I do, although I moved most of my floppy disks to a PC several years ago, so the drives were put away, as was my first 800XL. I usually use the Altirra emulator for experimenting, developing and sometimes playing games, but when I want to try something on the hardware, I use a PAL (European) 800XL which has several modifications: 320 KB RAM, stereo sound, improved video and built-in SIO2BT.

What led you to develop games for Atari?

I have two different answers to that question, corresponding to two distant stages of my life.

Before the computer, my family had a 2600 console with only 5 games, and my favorites were the ones I could play against other people, like Combat, Video Olympics (pong) and Surround. When I got the 800XL, I saved a copy of all the games that were in circulation at school on a diskette, but since there weren't many games for 2 people, I decided to program some. However, later I moved on to programming utilities, since I found it more entertaining and interesting to investigate and hack, in the sense of removing protections, converting the formats of programs and games.

After many years of not doing anything interesting on the Atari other than talking about it on forums, I had a complex family problem, and as a distraction I came up with the idea of programming what eventually became Toy’Swap, which I submitted to the ABBUC competition in Germany in 2015, winning 3rd place. While I was at it, I heard about NOMAM, another event in Germany, and in which that same year Daniel Serpell had won 1st place with a 10-line BASIC game. I found it interesting as a challenge and made some prototypes that quickly became finished games, which I submitted to the competition the following year, winning 2 first places in different categories. Since then I have not stopped, releasing 23 minigames to date.

Vitoco's notes for the MiniBros game

How do you remember the Atari scene in Chile when you were first a computer user?

I have the impression that the scene in Viña del Mar and its surroundings was not like the one in Santiago. There were several small shops where they sold pirated games on cassette, and I was able to make more than one exchange with them, since I never bought one. Sometimes I put my brand on the credits or I removed someone else's brand so I could exchange them again in another store.

I was already finishing high school and entering college, so I disconnected from the scene despite continuing to use the Atari as a word processor for my work. Of course, it was more convenient to work at home with PaperClip for as long as I needed, rather than asking for an hour in the lab to type hastily in Word Perfect 5.1. Dot matrix printing using continuous form was similar in both worlds.

However, during my summer vacations I would visit game stores to see what was new, but I was never blown away by any particular game.

We see that you were already developing programs at that time, such as the SITRE copier. Was it profitable? What projects do you remember from that time?

Sometimes these stores would send me games with protections and they would pass them on to me to see if I could unprotect them. I wrote several utility programs to help me with this task and I was always able to return with the game ready to be copied to tape, or to disk if that was the format used by the store. Obviously I kept a copy of everything that passed through my hands.

I told you that I sometimes modified the credits of games, and I did that with a utility that I developed and used a lot. Its name was Summed Text Searcher and it was a disk sector editor that had the ability to search for “encoded” texts within programs and allowed them to be modified. It was written in Atari BASIC with some assembler routines, but I transformed it into what we now call XEX using the MMG compiler so that it would take less time to search. I never marketed or released that utility, but while I was visiting a meeting, someone copied it when I was not looking, and later released it in Santiago without my knowledge. I discovered that a few years later in one of the local retro forums where someone asked me if I was the same person who appeared in the credits of that program, and that had been incorporated into a disk with utilities and copyers. They sent me a copy and when I checked it I could see who it was, because they had signed the only part that wasn't protected, but my name was still intact on the screen.

In the field of diskette copiers, I made a sector copier based on the Black Rabbit published by ANALOG magazine, but which allowed to generate bad sectors in a modified diskette drive when it detected that the source disk also had them. I had never seen a diskette drive with Happy or similar modifications, so that was my way of copying protected disks. I never used it massively for that purpose, because in the end I always removed the code that verified the protection from the program or game.

The SITRE tape copier and loader was born as an initiative of one of the pirate stores, which sought to bring together in a single copying program the features of other existing tape game copiers, without having to modify or adapt the games. I took it as a personal challenge, and as a reward I kept the XC11 tape deck that they gave me for development and free access to all the games in the store.

As you can see, I never spent money on games, but I never earned any either.

Which of your projects (games in particular) do you like the most? And why?

I think SITRE is the project I put the most effort into, and the one with which I had great satisfaction, both when I developed it in the late 80's and when I documented and modified it a few years ago to take advantage of the extra memory of the modified 800XL and be able to record games of more than 64K on tape.

On the gaming side, Toy’Swap is my favorite, as it allowed me to apply all the theory I had learned about Atari 8-bit computer hardware but had never used it before in a single program.

What inspired you for this project?

On my morning commute to work, I used to play with Pou, the virtual pet that lived on my phone. He had several minigames that were good for entertaining a while, including a simple variant of Candy Crush, and I thought it might be possible to make an Atari version of that. I did some 100% machine-language proof-of-concepts, and Toy’Swap slowly began to take shape, with its own set of rules for leveling, and the ability to use different types of controllers. I also added some music and sound effects using the RMT tracker by the late composer Rader “Raster” Sterba (1973-2011).

There is a chance that you will develop more complex or detailed versions of games like Where's my cheese? and/or Space Ranger?

After I won first place in its category with Invaders, I thought about rewriting it in machine language using the same graphical technique, and thus being able to incorporate those elements that I had to leave out due to the restrictions imposed by the 10-line-of-code mode and transform it into a complete game. However, there were already enough variants of Space Invaders that in practice it would not bring anything new to the community.

With Where’s my Cheese I got rid of a thorn that had been stuck in my side since my first stage as a game programmer. At that time I had designed a 3D perspective maze game that I even thought could be distributed via APX, but I really didn’t achieve anything good at that time and I threw the project away. I realized with NOMAM that the point was to make games that, without having the detail of a commercial game, could attract attention and entertain for a while. That’s where creativity comes in, making the most of the available resources using the least amount of code possible. The visual effect I achieved with the maze was just the result of analyzing what I wanted to do, seeing if I had all the necessary resources to store in memory all the possible combinations of views and superimposed layers that would allow me to animate the game, and I used everything. How could I improve that? The next step would be something like Nelson Ramírez’s Project M, which requires a much greater effort and is far from what I do currently.

However, it is always possible that a good idea, no matter how simple it may seem, can be transformed into something bigger, as is the case with the games Jim Slide and Skyscrapper.

Mini Bros and Pixelated Puzzle are both notable. Are there any plans to release sequels to any of them or any of your other games?

Pixelated Puzzle itself can have all the sequels you want if you use the editor to generate your own images (and share them with the community). I had a lot of fun making each one I included in the ATR. However, this game was the evolution of M*N Puzzle that I participated with previously in the lower category, and I was thinking about evolving to another version with more detailed graphics for the extreme category.

As for Mini Bros, I see it as one of those CASIO games with an LCD screen and a superimposed playing field. Any changes to it would have to be outside the tenliners rules. I have no intention of improving that game, but the complete code is published and anyone can take it and do whatever they want with it.

But I do have in mind to take Bounce & Catch to the next level under the tenliners rules. I designed the game for the smallest category of NOMAM, where you can only use the original Atari BASIC, which is very slow and has many restrictions compared to other versions of the language for the same computer. If this game is run in TurboBasic XL, the bounces are much more realistic, so you could have a better experience taking it to the intermediate or extreme category, incorporating other elements into the game.

What was the most complicated/challenging feature you faced when developing any of your projects?

I assume we're talking about just my current projects, the tenliners. And saying that these programs are only 10 lines of code is a gross oversimplification, because it's actually a lot of instructions packed together in some way and strategically distributed into the small space allotted; and that optimization is the most time-consuming part of development. There are times when you're compacting the code and discover that some things can be simplified even further, freeing up space that can be used to add more elements to the game, but there are also other times when you have to sacrifice some things so that the game doesn't break the rules or become unattractive.

Are there other people who have collaborated with you on your projects?

There are two games in my gallery that were born from the initiative of another great tenliners contestant: Kevin Savetz. He was once programming a mini Centipede and couldn't move forward with development because the code had some issues. He asked me if I could take a look at it to find out where the problem was. I reviewed it and then rewrote it in a simpler way, but keeping his own definitions so he could get back to developing. A few weeks went by and he didn't have time to devote to it even though I had given him a couple of ideas on how to proceed. As the deadline for submitting it was approaching, I decided to take one of my ideas and worked on it until I completed Minipede, which I submitted to the contest on behalf of both of us. But I was left wanting to carry out Kevin's original idea, which was to split the centipedes into two parts if they were hit in the middle. Using the same code base, I made some simplifications to the logic and graphics, giving birth to Decipede. Both games finished on the podium in their respective categories.

On the other hand, there is Daniel Serpell, who, as I mentioned, was the one who inspired me to participate in tenliners. He is currently developing FastBasic, a version of the BASIC language very similar in syntax to TurboBasic XL, but with unique features that make it much faster than other BASICs. He has stated that he started this development precisely with the idea of using it to program tenliners, and he has been very receptive to my suggestions, introducing improvements to the language that allow me to improve my own games in development.

What are your next plans after the games you prepared for BASIC Tenliners 2019?

There are never any plans. Sometimes ideas come up, but I can only materialize them when I have time to do so. I would like to make a platform game, but that would require too much time, so for now I prefer to stick to tenliners, where a lot can be accomplished in a few days. I find these challenges entertaining and that is the only reason I do them. I currently have several ideas in my head, but I don't know if they will ever see the light of day. Some have been discarded at the proof of concept stage, and others that, even after being discarded, I have taken up again because I have visualized some alternative way to make a game attractive to try and, above all, "playable."

How do you rate the participation of members of the AtariAge/Atariware forums or Facebook groups?

I might never have taken the 800XL out of the cellar again if it weren't for these communities. It's always said that you shouldn't live in the past, but it's in them that the future of these machines has been developed. There are very active members, but the support of those who might seem passive is very important. The best ideas can come from them and they also do a good job of testing and commenting on ongoing developments.

This is how Where's my cheese? came about

What do you think about competitions like ABBUC or BASIC Tenliners?

These contests are a way to keep these “old” machines alive and encourage developers to create. They are a showcase to the world of what is happening in the 8-bit scene.

ABBUC is a club that has been operating for many years and in which you have to pay a subscription, which allows a fund to be generated so that there is a prize that encourages participation.

On the other hand, there is BASIC Tenliners, which is open not only to Atari but to any 8-bit platform, but which does not have defined prizes other than donations from the NOMAM and ABBUC community, so whoever participates does so simply for the love of art.

What are your all-time favorite Atari 8-bit games? Why?

I collected games, but I didn't generally play them, or at least not out of personal motivation. I only played when friends came over and we'd spend some time playing the Atari. On those occasions we'd pick any random disc and put on whatever game came up. I do remember spending more time on Karateka, Bruce Lee, and Dimension X than any other, but I don't have any favorites.

Is there any of them that you “admire” for their technical aspects or any other in particular?

Although I never looked into the technical aspects of the games, I have the impression that the vast majority of them only used the resources they had available and, at most, used DLI (display list interrupts) to modify the color palette or another attribute in the middle of the screen.

However, at the time I was drawn to Karateka for the quality of the animations; Jet Boot Jack for the colours; Koronis Rift for the animation of the planet's surface. I could perhaps mention Master of the Lamps as one that brought together many things that, if analysed knowing the hardware restrictions, went beyond the usual. Another game that made good use or abuse of interruptions could be River Raid.

Over the past few years I've had the chance to review a few games and discuss their features on the forums, and one that caught my attention was Bruce Lee, as it made good use of the Player/Missile graphics, both for animations and collision detection for hits and falls. Recently the subject was brought up again in AtariAge, as the community as a whole is building a new version of it based on the one already made on C64 called Return of the Fury.

What do you think of Zybex II, as well as the Draconus II, III and IV versions?

I've never played these games, not even the original versions, but I think it's great that someone dares to modify the mazes or levels to introduce new challenges. Also in this category are Montezuma, Boulder Dash and soon Bruce Lee.

What do you think about "modern classics" or homebrews like His Dark Majesty, Space Harrier...?

I've seen excellent implementations of classics that never made it to Atari in their time. If they had been developed in their respective years, they probably wouldn't have the quality you get these days. Back in the golden age, developers were pressured to meet deadlines; today, however, they are motivated by expectations, and a development could take years to complete.

What are your impressions of the current Atari 8-bit scene?

I really like what is happening 25 years after production stopped. Every new software and hardware development motivates me to stay with it. I have my own projects in progress, but most of them are on hold because I can't continue them. It's just a hobby, and the time I can devote to it is sometimes scarce.

And what do you think about today's new gaming platforms and video games?

I am amazed at the quality of games achieved by these console-like computers. I see my children playing with great ease using controllers full of levers, buttons and triggers. I am only able to use a single red action button, although in the Wii era I managed to use the Wiimote with nunchuck at the same time to share with my children.

Today's video games have added extra features like gaining experience points, which gives you the ability to customize the elements of the base game, either by earning them as you progress or by purchasing them from online stores. Did I mention that I liked games where I could play with or against other people? I wish I could have played online in the 80's. On the other hand, there are smartphones. There I see the possibility of introducing minigames like the ones I make for tenliners, but I haven't taken the time to explore that world or the existing libraries to do so. At least there we have Retrox, which allows us to return to the 8-bit classics whenever we want.

What other hobbies do you have?

I currently dedicate part of my free time to the Chilean and Latin American communities of Waze, where I participate in various roles. Although it is not a hobby, I play volleyball weekly to avoid a sedentary life.

What is the main lesson you have learned during your time programming for the Atari 8-bit?

I can't devote so much time to this hobby. The family also needs attention, especially when you are still the super dad for your children.

Any recommendations for those looking to embark on the task of resurrecting/creating games for the Atari 8-bit computers?

The architecture of the 8-bit Atari is really simple, and therefore, it has its restrictions. Understanding what each thing does or how to control it is not complicated and there is a lot of documentation and tutorials about it. You just have to experiment a bit. You don't need to use a real Atari for this, just an emulator like Altirra and some basic tools on the PC. Help can always be found in the communities, just ask your questions in one of the forums to get a guide.

Thank you for taking the time to give us this interview. Is there anything else you would like to share with Atariteca readers?

First of all, I'm glad that Atariteca exists, because it allows you to keep up to date with the things that are happening in the scene in a simple way. You don't always have enough time to investigate the news in each of the forums around the world, especially when you have to disconnect from the scene for a long period to return to work and family life.

I do want to ask readers to support the scene. A lot of the new stuff comes from people who dedicate their free time and their own resources, and it doesn't hurt to contribute a little money to these projects when it is requested formally and transparently.