SmileyDude

ADTPro uses the serial ports on the IIc instead of the cassette ports for this reason. I've yet to try to bootstrap a IIc (mine is not working, sadly), but I might get around to fixing it someday. Regarding the original question, was there any solution for file sharing over AppleTalk on the IIc? I remember my high school lab having a mixed IIe/IIgs/Mac environment setup where all of the Apple IIs could boot up over the network (served from a single SE/30 in the back of the lab) without needing a floppy disk. Is this just not possible on the IIc or IIc+? If it's just the lack of support in the ROM, it seems like it would be possible to make a custom ROM that would have the necessary support in it.

Your backstory sounds a lot like mine. We had an Atari 2600, but never actually got the BASIC Programming cart for it. But as a kid, that seemed so cool. Especially with that picture on the box. Way cooler than the picture on the Atari 8-bit BASIC box and manual. When I got older and learned more about the actual hardware of the 2600, it was clear that it was way more limited than I had hoped for as a kid. But I still can't help get a little bit of nostalgia seeing that box art even to this day. Nice work!

@JimmyIpock do you have that kit available somewhere? Or at least the files needed to go off and make one myself?

I just found a PAL version of Bowling (labeled as "Bowling (32 in 1) (PAL)" when running in Stella, MD5 sum is f69bb58b815a6bdca548fa4d5e0d5a75) while looking through my collection of ROMs. Was this an official port by Atari? I'm not sure where the 32 in 1 comes from, because it looks like it has the exact same 6 variations as the NTSC version has. The only difference appears to be 2 bytes, which I assume are just changes to get the game to run on a PAL display. Does anyone have any information on this version? Was this just a cheap way for Atari Corp to make a few more bucks at the end of the 2600's run?

I'm trying to figure out how to get DASM to align some data within a block while keeping the entire block of data together. Here's an example of what I mean: .byte %00001010 ; | X X | .byte %00000100 ; | X | .byte %00001010 ; | X X | .byte %00000000 ; | | <--- this byte needs to be aligned to 4, but also have the three bytes before it stay with it If I was to stick an align 4 in there, it would potentially insert padding between the other three bytes. Is there any way I can enforce that a group of bytes has a particular offset that is aligned with DASM?

Hi everyone -- I'm looking into doing the cart mod on a Flashback 2 that I picked up from a yard sale a few years back for a couple of bucks. I would hate to sacrifice another 2600 to get it's cartridge slot, so I'm asking if anyone knows of a modern replacement that I can use instead? Alternatively are there any sources for original parts that were pulled from already non-working machines? Thanks!

That actually was an interesting suggestion. I think I had heard of that years ago and then forgot about it. I just spent a little time re-working my print method to do this and it works perfectly. Thanks! That said, it would still be interesting to hear if there is a way to use segments that way in dasm. I’m sure I’ll wind up wishing for it again one day.

Hello - Does anyone know if it’s possible in dasm to have a macro reserve space for a string in another segment than the segment the code is being assembled in? For example, I want to have a macro like this: MACRO PRINT lda #<.string ldx #>.string jsr printString jmp .skip .string: .byte {1},$00 .skip: ENDM but without needing to do that jump at the end to skip over the string. Instead, I want to put all the strings together in a single place and let the macro handle the details so I can just say: PRINT "Hello World!" and it works correctly. The above macro does work, but it ends up wasting 3 bytes for that jump. Which is why I want to just push all the strings into a separate segment after my code. Thanks!

Interesting responses. I’ll probably just stick with dasm for now, since it works. But I’ve been dabbling with the NES and Apple II a bit and there just isn’t much support at all for either of those two platforms in dasm. I’ve managed to make things work, but I had to do a lot of defining of registers myself that I didn’t need to do with the 2600.

The last time I looked into 2600 homebrew, dasm seemed to be the assembler of choice. But on other 6502 platforms, it seems cc65 is more popular these days. What are people here using? I’ve used dasm quite a bit, but support for other platforms seems limited (the NES, for example).

I’ve typicslly handled things like this by declaring one array and then multiplying by a fixed offset to get to image I want: const unsigned char Images[] = { // Timmy 0b00111100, 0b01011010, 0b00100100, 0b00011000, 0b01111110, 0b10111101, 0b10111101, 0b00111100, 0b00100100, 0b00100100, // RedBox 0b11111111, 0b10000011, 0b10111101, 0b10111101, 0b10000011, 0b10110111, 0b10111011, 0b10111101, 0b11111111, // more images here }; You could also declare it as a two dimensional array if you wanted to hide the multiply.

I had setup a GitHub repo years ago for dasm. I think it was just a fork of whatever the latest version I could find at the time along with some fixes I needed on the Mac. https://github.com/munsie/dasm I don't know if it's helpful or not, but it is the version of dasm that I use for my own 6502 development. So at least I know it works

If you do this, it would be cool to include the 2600 version as well, via emulation. As long as you don't include the ability to load other 2600 carts, emulators are allowed on the App Store.

To add a little to Nathan's response, it's also fairly sophisticated inside compared to those $20 styli you can get everywhere. It has an 32-bit ARM SoC, Bluetooth and battery inside. Presumably they are doing some additional tracking of position in the pencil (it knows the angle you are holding it at, for example) and that's part of the reason they are getting the performance so high compared to the cheaper variety. Does that make it worth $100? For some people, definitely -- it's been a while since I priced out a Cintiq, but the iPad Pro + Pencil is very competitive in that space. And it doesn't need to be tethered to a PC/Mac to use it (again, haven't looked in a while -- there might be something all in one in the Cintiq line these days, I just haven't been shopping for one). I knew a few artists that might've actually killed for something like this.

As far as apps go, I'm pretty sure both Acorn and Pixelmator were updated with deep color support recently. Not sure if they posted any example images, but you should be able to see it if you create a gradient in either of those apps. The deep color version will be noticeably smoother on your display.