7800 Basic programming tutorials?

[Inky]

Are there any good 7800 Basic programming tutorials? I'm thinking about tackling some programming, but all I find are reference guides.

[RevEng]

Atarius Maximus put out out a couple moderate level tutorials: Creating 7800basic compatible graphics images with Gimp and Creating 7800basic compatible maps with the Tiled app.

 

Unfortunately there's no very beginning tutorial right now. There's the manual and the "samples" directory, and a good place to start is compiling the samples. Then take a look at the simple.bas sample, and play around.

[+Random Terrain]

Atarius Maximus put out out a couple moderate level tutorials: Creating 7800basic compatible graphics images with Gimp and Creating 7800basic compatible maps with the Tiled app.

 

An adapted version of those can be found here:

 

randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories.html#7800basic

[+Atarius Maximus]

I created some simple beginner sample programs and code snippets for bB about 10 years ago or so that (just looked) have all combined have been downloaded over 25,000 times. Yikes. It might be time to work on something similar for 7800basic. No promises on timeframe, but that's something I wouldn't mind doing in the future.

[Mord]

This isn't so much a tutorial as much as a tip. If you want to break apart your *.bas file into separate files to make it easier to manage (in my case, I'm doing this to make it easier to keep straight what code is in what bank. Kinda regret not bankswitching from the beginning right now. ) you can do multiple files then combine them prior to feeding them to 7800basic.

 

The command in dos for Windows users would be:

 

copy /p source1.bas + source2.bas + source3.bas + source4.bas target.bas

 

the /p simply prevents it from asking for manual confirmation of overwriting the file. Leave it out if you want to. The actual filenames can be anything. Just use a + between each of the sources that you want to combine into the final file in the list. After that, run the resulting target.bas through 7800basic as usual. Just remember that the order you add the sources matters. They'll be added to the target one after the other.

 

I use to have a command like that rigged up in a batch file in my 2600 programming days so I'd just have to type "make".

[Mord]

I was tinkering with palettes again and noticed this works for fixing up palettes when your graphics application messes them up (usually when reducing the palette size). In particular this works for paint shop pro 8, but it might work similar in photoshop.

 

1. open your image in the graphics application.

2. attempt to change the palette resolution to the desired level.

3. If the colors get mucked up, use the edit palette function to get the desired colors where you want them in the palette.

4. Save the -palette-. (Not the image.)

5. Undo the changes you made to the palette. if you have to re-open the image and do the initial changes again, do so.

6. load your saved palette into the new image. In paintshop pro it will (should) keep the image the same while swapping the palette references.

 

If anyone using photoshop wants to try and see if this works with that, let us know. I don't have photoshop myself to verify.

[+frankodragon]

Another place you can download 7800basic samples is from Atarius Maximus' page http://www.bjars.com/7800.html