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Lost knowledge?


laoo

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Hi,

I'm mainly from Atari 8-bit neighbourhood, but tempted by recent Atari Lynx 30th Birthday Programming Competition I've decided to give it a try and started to gather enough knowledge to craft some Lynx assembly "hello world" on my own. I've read cursorily posts from this sub-forum and found that there is a substantial amount of interesting findings, but sadly some seems to be lost.

Especially there are discoveries by Wookie about boot process and encryption that I'm very interested, but all links are dead now. E.g. none of these work: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/183090-booting-from-rom-lnx/?p=2305616

Are there any mirrors, copies... whatever?

Maybe it's a lesson, that more information should be kept internally, rather in uncertain outside world.

 

 

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Thank you Nop90 for pointing to that thread, I've initially skipped it and indeed I've found there what I was missing and I presume, that I can reconstruct now the information which is inaccessible due to Wookie's page being down.

Nevertheless I'm a professional programmer and as a Lynx newbie I've had a lot of trouble to build a consistent view on the Lynx boot process and overall "how to make a game in assembly from scratch" workflow, as the information is scattered around in many, many threads and currently starting a journey with Lynx programming has rather high entry threshold.

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It was the same for me. Started interesting in lynx coding last November and I'm still learning.

 

And I'm coding in c using the cc65 framework that helps a lot.

 

I'm slowly making some experiments with Asm because I have a very ambitious project ongoing.

 

I hope you will share some of the experience you will gain, so to help the other newly lynx coders.

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Great to see you're interested in the competition! You don't have to code in assembly, in fact I would encourage to code in C so you can focus more on art/sounds/music. The programming resources section has a good amount of material to get you started - https://atarigamer.com/pages/atari-lynx-programming-resources

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If my experience will prove successful, I will surly post here a "how to make a game in assembly from scratch" guide :)

 

Using assembly is the only way to get to write really small games. The smallest one I have done fits into 1k.

 

It is an Othello game.

 

Without music at https://bitbucket.org/atarilynx/lynxSee in lynx/contrib/ottelo/ottelo.asm

 

There is also a slightly larger build ottelo2.asm that has sound effects and music.

post-2099-0-35344200-1557821694.jpg

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It's really not a mystery that 6502 wasn't designed with high level language compilation in mind and currently there is no way to write a good compiler for it - it would be too freaking complicated to even start thinking about it in non-corporate environments. It's exactly opposite to modern CPUs where you virtually can't write code as good as compiler can generate in a blink of a second.

Hence I'm just not satisfied with quality of code generated by cc65. Besides... assembly is pure fun. Tons of C/C++ I have at work :)

Edited by laoo
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