So the first task is to find an Atari 2600 emulator to run on my mac and a compiler.

A little bit of googling lead me to Stella this page has a download for Mac. Stella could not be more simple. You run it, locate your .bin files and double click to run. It looks like it has some very sophisticated options behind it.

Initially I started looking at batari Basic http://bataribasic.com/

I followed the instructions on these two links.

http://bataribasic.com/download.html
http://bataribasic.com/install.html

However  when I did my first compile i got this error.

batari Basic v1.01dreveng17 ©2005-2013

2600 Basic compilation complete.

/Users/bc/bB/2600basic.sh: line 15: /Users/bc/bB/dasm: Bad CPU type in executable

Build complete.

A little more googling and I found this thread. This guided me to a more up to date version of DASM specifically dasm.Darwin.x86

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/168765-installing-batari-basic-for-mac-osx/

atari Basic looks excellent, but I would specifically would like to look at 6502 assembler.

DASM options are as follows.

Usage: dasm sourcefile [options]

-f#      output format 1-3 (default 1)
 -oname   output file name (else a.out)
 -lname   list file name (else none generated)
 -Lname   list file, containing all passes
 -sname   symbol dump file name (else none generated)
 -v#      verboseness 0-4 (default 0)
 -d       debug mode (for developers)
 -Dsymbol              define symbol, set to 0
 -Dsymbol=expression   define symbol, set to expression
 -Msymbol=expression   define symbol using EQM (same as -D)
 -Idir    search directory for INCLUDE and INCBIN
 -p#      maximum number of passes
 -P#      maximum number of passes, with fewer checks
 -T#      symbol table sorting (default 0 = alphabetical, 1 = address/value)
 -E#      error format (default 0 = MS, 1 = Dillon, 2 = GNU)

Taking the above I was able to compile a sample asm file using this command.

dasm.Darwin.x86 asmtest.asm -I”$bB/includes” -f3 -lasmtest.list.txt -v5 -sasmtest.symbol.txt -oasmtest.bin

Much of my research to get this up and running as based on these excellent sites.

http://www.atariage.com/2600/programming/

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-tutorial-andrew-davie-01.html

http://aboredprogrammer.com/2017/02/21/develop-atari-2600-game-project-aims/

http://aboredprogrammer.com/2017/02/21/develop-atari-2600-game-part-2-hello-world-of-sorts/