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atari st basic


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today i've got my third atari st with a bunch of disks, and one was labeled with : atari st uk language disk. when i started it, there was atari st basic on it, so i was wondering if anybody programmed something with it. is it possible to do something usefull with it ? unlike basic programming on the 2600

 

TheleN

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If it's the same Atari Basic that came with my ST, forget about it quickly! It is completely useless. Get GFA 2.0, which I believe is freeware and you'll have a very useable programing tool.

 

I still boot up stuff I wrote with GFA years ago and say "wow, did I really do that?".

 

Forget Atari Basic, go GFA!

 

As Always,

Markimus of K.

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Seconded. GFA rocks hard and fast. I programmed in it extensively and managed to get it to do some fairly amazing things. One of the greatest things about it is its ability to adapt to the coder's proficiency. You can program in a high level, or you can used advanced commands and techniques to achieve much lower level code that runs faster and more efficiently. And it's capable of anything you can toss at it, from including assembler subroutines you can access from within your code, to direct access to Line-A and Line-F functions and everything in between. It's also a structured basic, so you can use functions and procedures (which can be folded and unfolded for neatness), pass variables and parameters into and out of them, and all that coding goodness.

 

It was developed by Frank Ostrowski who designed Turbo Basic for the 8-bit Atari way back, which I also loved programming in, and which was similar in a prototypical sort of way.

 

If you wanna program in a really nice language without getting down to the bare bones of assembler, GFA is perfect.

 

When you get fairly good at it, see if you can find a text manual called "GFA Xpert." It's a guide to the more advanced and useful features of GFA, detailing some of the neat tricks you can use to coax better performance and enhanced features and tricks out of GFA.

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you're looking to write games, an honorable mention would be STOS. It's pretty much BASIC with a bunch of cool features, like automatic sprite banks, plug-ins for added functionality, and the like. The only drawback is you're fairly limited to what you can do in it (wouldn't wanna use it for anything other than games), and if you're familiar with many of the old ST games, you'll notice that almost all of the ones programmed in STOS look very, very similar.

 

Still, it's a pretty nifty development tool, and is definitely good as a primer for creating games.

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