STREET RACER — Terminal Port

A terminal port of Street Racer (Atari 2600, 1977) — original by Larry Kaplan. Runs entirely in your Linux terminal. No GUI. No dependencies beyond a C compiler and aplay.

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What it is

Street Racer was one of the Atari 2600 launch titles. You drive a car up a single lane, dodging oncoming traffic. Hold fire to accelerate. Don't crash.

This port runs in a standard Linux terminal using ANSI true-colour escape codes and raw terminal input. The sprite data, crash sprite, and speed accumulator algorithm were all reverse-engineered directly from the original 2600 ROM — the same bytes that ran on the hardware in 1977 are rendering your car today.

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Requirements

• Linux
• Terminal with true-colour support (most modern terminal emulators: Alacritty, Kitty, GNOME Terminal, iTerm2 etc.)
• Terminal window of at least 160 × 48 characters
• aplay for sound — part of alsa-utils, usually already installed:

  sudo apt install alsa-utils      # Debian/Ubuntu
  sudo pacman -S alsa-utils        # Arch
  

  Sound is optional — the game runs silently if aplay is absent.

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Build & run

gcc -O2 -o strtrcr strtrcr.c
./strtrcr

No Makefile, no CMake, no dependencies. One file, one command.

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Controls

Key	Action
← →	Steer
f or Space	Accelerate
q	Quit

Hold accelerate to build speed. Release to decelerate. The speed curve is taken directly from the original 6502 assembly — same accumulator, same right-shift formula, just scaled for a modern frame rate.

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How it works

The port started with a full disassembly of the 2600 ROM (Street_Racer_NA.a26, 2048 bytes). Key findings:

• Sprites — the car graphics live in a table at ROM address $F79A. Eight variants, one per game mode. The player car, crash car, and enemy car are all drawn directly from that table.
• Crash sprite — sprite variant 6 from the table: rear wheels intact ($C3), front destroyed asymmetrically. Physically accurate — the front takes the hit.
• Speed algorithm — zero-page variable $9E,X accumulates ±1 per frame (±SPEED_STEP scaled for 15fps). Per-frame movement delta = max(1, speed >> 4), giving 1–7 rows per frame. Same formula as the original 6502 code at $FC7B (four LSR instructions).
• Rendering — ANSI true-colour background blocks (\033[48;2;R;G;Bm), one terminal cell = one sprite pixel × 2 character widths.
• Sound — raw 8-bit PCM piped to aplay. Engine: 25%-duty square wave, pitch 40–280 Hz proportional to speed_acc. Crash: white noise burst. Score: 880 Hz chirp.

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Differences from the original a.k.a. To-do List for v1.1

• Single-player only (original supports up to 4 via driving controllers)
• Keyboard input instead of driving controllers
• One enemy car on screen
• No game variation selection (difficulty, game modes)
• Approximate sound (TIA chip emulation would require far more)

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Credits

Port: hyprc0w (2026) Original game: Larry Kaplan, Atari, 1977

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Support

If you enjoyed this, you can buy me a coffee.