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There's an awful lot of pokes in that display list tutorial. isn't there a command for that stuff?

??? Maybe because there was no more room for additional commands in ROM for Atari BASIC?

 

 

sack's comment'll make more sense if you have a read of SIO99's other posts, but to summarise he has an obsession (and a blog) about bashing the C64's BASIC for using POKEs rather than having bespoke commands.

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There's an awful lot of pokes in that display list tutorial. isn't there a command for that stuff?

 

There are only a few POKEs in the display list tutorial. Apart from this, they're being used for something the Commodore 64 can't do AFAIK. Not only that, but users could decide to be happy with a standard display mode instead.

 

BTW, one of my worst subjects at school was maths and my best subject was French. I also studied German by myself while at school and passed an exam. I speak other languages as well. I think the Commodore 64 harks back to a time when only mathematicians could program computers. More about this in my latest blog post "Hires Graphics on the Commodore 64".

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There's an awful lot of pokes in that display list tutorial. isn't there a command for that stuff?

??? Maybe because there was no more room for additional commands in ROM for Atari BASIC?

 

 

sack's comment'll make more sense if you have a read of SIO99's other posts, but to summarise he has an obsession (and a blog) about bashing the C64's BASIC for using POKEs rather than having bespoke commands.

 

Ok, I get it. That is pointless... It would be better to talk about more tricks and possibilities for making better programs and games. For any computer...

 

And hey, I read another day in other post that you had quit drinking coffee :) My problem is I drink coffee everytime I sit down front the PC and doing something retro. Was there any special warning or is it just you who decided and switched to tea?

Edited by Gury
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sack's comment'll make more sense if you have a read of SIO99's other posts, but to summarise he has an obsession (and a blog) about bashing the C64's BASIC for using POKEs rather than having bespoke commands.

 

Ok, I get it. That is pointless... It would be better to talk about more tricks and possibilities for making better programs and games. For any computer...

 

 

Oh, i agree absolutely - that's why i consider a fixation with BASIC a bad thing personally.

 

And hey, I read another day in other post that you had quit drinking coffee :) My problem is I drink coffee everytime I sit down front the PC and doing something retro. Was there any special warning or is it just you who decided and switched to tea?

 

It sort of happened by accident; i was constantly getting tired at the middle of the day to the point where i needed to go to sleep and the only thing i could think of that might be causing it was, because i was getting through a lot, coffee. So i went "cold turkey" and switched to tea (occasionally i forget when making a drink and put coffee in my own cup rather than my other half's so i end up drinking about one every month or two like that). For a while it helped, but the drowsiness turned out to be caused by type 2 diabetes and i've just stuck with tea since because i like it.

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There's an awful lot of pokes in that display list tutorial. isn't there a command for that stuff?

 

There are only a few POKEs in the display list tutorial.

 

And your point has always been that BASIC shouldn't expose people to the machine itself at all and, whilst Atari BASIC is better than the C64's BASIC in many respects, it still has areas that require POKEs to do anything. So by not complaining in the same way about that or the POKEs required to use players and missiles you're being hypocritical.

 

Apart from this, they're being used for something the Commodore 64 can't do AFAIK. Not only that, but users could decide to be happy with a standard display mode instead.

 

 

What, the C64 can't do mode changes? In character-based modes it's possible to change between 320x200 and 160x200 resolution on a character by character basis. And the C64's ability or otherwise to do specifically what's in the video is a moot point, sack was talking about the POKEs required to do it.

 

BTW, one of my worst subjects at school was maths and my best subject was French. I also studied German by myself while at school and passed an exam. I speak other languages as well. I think the Commodore 64 harks back to a time when only mathematicians could program computers.

 

i failed GCSE maths twice (and French once) but i can still program the C64, Atari 8-bit, Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, VIC 20, Atari 2600 and several other 8-bits in BASIC and assembly language to varying degrees; the only difference between us is that i've put the time and effort into learning about these machines rather than insisting that BASIC should be doing all the work for me.

 

More about this in my latest blog post "Hires Graphics on the Commodore 64".

 

What, the post where you got the C64's graphics modes wrong and didn't even count the number of modes correctly?

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I see, that is good habit anyway. But I can't work without coffe :)

 

10 IF PEEK(53770)>100 THEN PRINT "I will drink coffee as usual!": END

20 PRINT "I will drink beer today!"

 

Oh noes, it's a PEEK command!!

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Technically I speak french on account of having a B in GCSE french, in reality I have a rough grasp of Spanish (I've forgotten a lot, but it still lets me brute-force my way through Portuguese much to the amusement of josé).

 

Although I have been turned down for jobs in Spain on the grounds that 'technically you don't speak English'. It seems you need certain certificates to prove it, all of which are 'as a second language' and as such people whose mother tongue is English are barred from sitting the exams.

 

I'm rubbish at maths and can code for the C64 and bespoke microkernel assembly language for GPUs. Not quite sure how that happened - I think it's down to by sheer luck it needs the least worst parts of my maths to do it.

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I've been working on a little A8 stuff and looking at example code I find that BASIC actually obscures things.

 

Yes the code examples I came across would run on any machine for anybody because everyone has access to BASIC and can type them in but ,just as on the c64, it gets distilled down to an unreadable chunk of DATA statements and a POKE loop.

 

I'd rather have a readable (and ideally commented) chunk of 6502 myself. Mind you - on the BBC micro you could do that...

Edited by sack-c0s
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC

 

Damn cool. They got it right. That level of integration is just sweet. Batari Basic for the VCS does a very similar thing, making it effortless to just use the CPU for this and that directly. Why we didn't see this more is beyond me.

 

The Apple had some ASM tools too, though not as good. There was a real machine monitor, mini-assembler, and 16 bit CPU intrepeter to use with BASIC, through the usual CALL function.

 

For a while, no built in assembly language capability was an inhibitor on the Atari. I used to just use the Apple mini-assembler / monitor to build short routines, entering the numbers needed into Atari BASIC... Got MAC/65 and things were much better. Though I still would have used the crap out of BBC Basic. I find it hard to focus on the higher level organization and lower level detail at the same time. Blending BASIC with ASM helps a ton with that.

 

Anyway, did you all see there was a C64 version of BBC Basic ported? Bottom of the Wiki page.

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It sort of happened by accident; i was constantly getting tired at the middle of the day to the point where i needed to go to sleep and the only thing i could think of that might be causing it was, because i was getting through a lot, coffee. So i went "cold turkey" and switched to tea (occasionally i forget when making a drink and put coffee in my own cup rather than my other half's so i end up drinking about one every month or two like that). For a while it helped, but the drowsiness turned out to be caused by type 2 diabetes and i've just stuck with tea since because i like it.

 

This is interesting, I too have started to get very tired around 1pm and I simply HAVE to sleep, my body and head just cease functioning correctly unless I sleep for a bit.

 

I didn't know what to put it down to as the large number of meds I take have been a regular thing now for years with few changes.

 

May have to get myself tested...

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I can't understand anything sack says. Too bad he doesn't speak English.

:twisted:

Sack also thinks he speaks Portuguese just because he thinks it's almost the same as Spanish.

The same if C64 Basic has 'POKE' and also the Atari then knowing one and you know the two...

:-D

Edited by José Pereira
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I can't understand anything sack says. Too bad he doesn't speak English.

:twisted:

Sack also thinks he speaks Portuguese just because he thinks it's almost the same as Spanish.

The same if C64 Basic has 'POKE' and also the Atari then knowing one and you know the two...

:-D

 

I didn't say I *spoke* Portuguese - it's read-only to me :)

 

(and for the mods - if I reported that post there it's not offensive or anything - I just missed the 'quote' button)

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Question is, how big is c64 basic, after all A8 basic was only 8k (since it had to fit into the one of the rom areas of the atari memory map, typically the a000 region, though apparently you could mix both atari basic and assembler cartridges in the atari memory map, does that mean that the run/init car addresses of a8 basic or atari assembler cartridges aren't actually fixed, since if you can mix both the assembler and basic cartridges at the same time logically speaking they must run/init in different areas of memory)

 

Another question is, any reason why atari didn't expand A8 basic when the xl or xe series came along, since i am assuming that rom memory was less expensive by the time the xl/xe systems were introduced

Edited by carmel_andrews
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Atari Basic is effectively 10K because the floating point stuff is normally within the Basic on other machines.

 

There was little point in Atari expanding it, for starters they didn't even write it and expanding it would just mean more incompatability with the 800.

Plus, they had MS Basic anyway, and there were other alternative Basics around.

 

Atari was well served with languages anyway. Probably more available than any other 8-bit system except maybe Apple 2.

 

You can't mix Basic/AsmEd carts, they both live @ $A000. There's no such thing as a relocatable cart.

But on XL you can load an 8K language like AsmEd into the Ram under Basic and switch between the two.

Edited by Rybags
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Question is, how big is c64 basic, after all A8 basic was only 8k

 

It's 8K, mapped into RAM at $a000 to $bfff. If memory serves, Atari had to originally turn down Microsoft BASIC because the more feature-laden version was around 12K so one guess at the reasons for the sparse version being used on the C64 might've been to avoid eating through the RAM available for BASIC programs (note the smaller available RAM Simon's BASICl leaves for example, that's a 16K ROM and has to start mapping in at $8000).

 

Another question is, any reason why atari didn't expand A8 basic when the xl or xe series came along, since i am assuming that rom memory was less expensive by the time the xl/xe systems were introduced

 

A fiver says compatibility. If you start extending an existing BASIC on later models of a machine you're going to break compatibility with older software; the first random example of this that springs to mind is the UDGs in Spectrum BASIC that were available to the programmer on a 48K machine but taken back for the ROM on 128K. And it doesn't stop at BASIC programs either because at least some machine code ones will be calling chunks of the BASIC ROM directly to use things like sine/cosine functions or even borrow the PRINT routine for text output; start adding or moving code to the ROM and these programs JSR into oblivion and fall on their arses.

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<vulgar_rant>

Why the fuck am I EVER reading ANYTHING about the Commodore 64 here? For fuck sake man, GET OVER IT!

</vulgar_rant>

 

Generally or specifically in this thread?

 

If you mean generally then it's always good to discuss how other platforms work in relation to the Atari 8-bit because there's quite a few techniques that can be "borrowed" in both directions - no man is an island (well, except the Isle of Man) and neither are 8-bit computers. It's also good to encourage programmers from other 6502-based platforms to come play in the A8 sandpit because they might make new and interesting castles. Here's one i made earlier:

 

callisto_level_2.png

 

If you mean this thread specifically then it's down to the original poster who insists on bashing the C64 purely based on it's BASIC needing POKEs pretty much every other post here. Yes, it's possibly a little childish to respond in kind but the discussions that build up around these things tend to be interesting to some readers as well. And he started it! [Pokes tongue out at SIO99 and blows a raspberry]

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I can't understand anything sack says. Too bad he doesn't speak English.

:twisted:

Sack also thinks he speaks Portuguese just because he thinks it's almost the same as Spanish.

The same if C64 Basic has 'POKE' and also the Atari then knowing one and you know the two...

:-D

 

I didn't say I *spoke* Portuguese - it's read-only to me :)

 

(and for the mods - if I reported that post there it's not offensive or anything - I just missed the 'quote' button)

We'll see that one of these days...

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