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bfollett

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About bfollett

  • Birthday 02/27/1963

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  1. This discussion has wakened an old childhood memory. There was a tv episode of Popeye where, if I recall correctly, Popeye was trying to get his nephews to eat spinach and he tells them a tale of a Greek ancestor who derived his strength from sniffing garlic before eventually discovering spinach. Well, what do you know, before submitting this reply I did a quick search on youtube and found the cartoon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi6vj9glgIM
  2. Maybe the "how to do it" is well known now, but back in the day, I stumbled across a bad line of code I accidently wrote in an extended basic program that would crash and drop you out of the Extended Basic environment into the standard TI Basic environment with the program intact. You could list the program and you would see gibberish characters for any TI extended basic commands in the code and would error out when you tried to run it, but if the code only contained standard TI basic code it would run fine. Sadly, I don't remember what the line of code was. It was nothing special something like a divide by zero being passed to a standard ti basic command. Does anyone today know of a way to do this.
  3. There's always VBXE which can be added to an existing Atari computer or emulated in Altirra. 640x480i (640x240p) in 64 colors, 320x240p in 1024 colors
  4. It's been a long time, but I used machine language routine that hooked into the DOS file input/output routines and loaded or saved from disk to/from computer memory at full disk access speed. The routine was only 39 bytes long and I stored it in a string variable called IO$. I used it in my program "Space Station Multiplication" featured in Antic magazine. It loaded an 8kb picture and some animation frames into memory. I had a second routine that moved the animation frames from high memory into the visible screen area. Those routines sound like they might be just what you're looking for. As to Fast Basic only supporting integers with values between -32768 to 32767, you do have a full 64k of values, just half of them are negative, internally one bit of the number is just used to interpret the number as positive or negative, so you should be able to just use negative numbers to represent the high values above 32k through 64k, they would have the same binary value internally. Linked below you can find my original program if you wanted to take a look at it. I'd have no problem if you wanted to use the routines, but I don't have the docs on them anymore so it might take a little work to figure out the parameters used, it's been a long time but I might be able to help a little. http://www.atarimagazines.com/v9n2/spacestation.html
  5. Just a minor observation. After the dino lays an egg and it starts rolling, it goes a fair distance behind the left most leg before popping out in front of it. The animation just looks a bit odd, any way of fixing that?
  6. I don't remember the source I got it from, but back in the day, I had a string variable containing a file I/O routine you could call with the USR function. Here's a screenshot of it from a program I wrote back then. If your interested in it I can point you to a source.
  7. The message that 48k was required probably means you needed to hold down the Option key while booting to disable the built in basic.
  8. Just saw a news article over at TomHardware. Here's a quote from the article: Full article here: Atari VCS in Jeopardy After Atari Pull Manufacturing Contracts | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
  9. Here's a quick edit to the original crown station with the image mirrored except for the crown station sign. There are other letters/numbers that are wrongly mirrored but judging from your original conversion, there's not enough resolution on the Atari to resolve those anyway.
  10. I Saw the following being discussed in the Ti forum. Looks interesting if you have multiple retro systems. https://store.backbit.io/product/backbit-pro/
  11. I got to a screen where some sort of circular objects moved vertically or horizontally to hit you. When I tried to jump over one of them. I landed on top of it and my character stayed in the middle of the screen for the rest of the game. I'm not jumping in the screen shot below. That's where my character is standing.
  12. The ribbon cable is 50 pins, but from what little I can find on the subject, only 45 pins are used. Below is what I found posted on the internet. I read somewhere it conforms to the ATA 7 specifications (for what thats worth) 1 Ground Ground 2 DD11 Data bus bit 11 3 DD10 Data bus bit 10 4 DD8 Data bus bit 8 5 RESET- Reset 6 DD14 Data bus bit 7 DD15 Data bus bit 8 IORDY- I/O ReadyDMA ready during Ultra DMA data-in burstsData strobe during Ultra DMA data-out bursts 9 INTRQ Interrupt request 10 DA1 Device address bit 1 11 GROUND Ground 12 DA2 Device address bit 2 13 DA0 Device address bit 0 14 DIOW- I/O WriteStop during Ultra DMA data bursts 15 GROUND Ground 16 DIOR- I/O ReadDMA ready during Ultra DMA data-in burstsData strobe during Ultra DMA data-out bursts 17 GROUND Ground 18 PDIAG- Passed diagnostics 19 GROUND Ground 20 DASP- Device active or slave present 21 GROUND Ground 22 CS1- Chip select 0 23 GROUND Ground 24 DD9 Data bus bit 9 25 GROUND Ground 26 DD13 Data bus bit 13 27 CSEL Cable select 28 DD12 Data bus bit 12 29 DD7 Data bus bit 7 30 DD6 Data bus bit 6 31 DD5 Data bus bit 5 32 DD4 Data bus bit 4 33 DD3 Data bus bit 3 34 DD2 Data bus bit 2 35 GROUND Ground 36 DD1 Data bus bit 1 37 DD0 Data bus bit 0 38 DMARQ DMA request 39 DMACK- DMA Acknowledge 40 IOCS16- Data transfer size is one word per transfer cycle 41 CS0 Chip select 0 42 Reserved 1 Reserved for device use only 43 Reserved 2 Reserved for device use only 44 VCC +3.3V 3.3V Voltage supply to device 45 VCC +3.3V 3.3V Voltage supply to device <br>That's the pinout of the FlexIDE Cable on a Seagate, which I'm rather certain is standard pinout on all such drives.
  13. I know it's probably not practical with today's flash storage options, but I'd be interested to know in what ways the following could be to attached to an atari 8 bit computer. It's a Seagate 6GB micro hard drive. As pictured the drive has what Seagate calls a 50 pin flex ATA connector(ribbon cable) which attached to a USB converter board. Beside options to connect to the Atari via the USB connector, is that 50 pin ATA ribbon cable something standard enough to be hooked up to an Atari in another more "Hard Drive like" fashion? I just think a compact flash card sized real hard drive would be a cool (however impractical) add on. I think the largest Micro HD produced was 8Gb before the lowering cost of flash memory made the product line obsolete in the mid 2000s
  14. I know nothing about programming the VBXE but I did find a post on this forum where it appears you can have independent foreground and background colors with text: Full Color ANSI VBXE terminal in the works - Atari 8-Bit Computers - AtariAge Forums There's a video demo in post #12. Bob
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