Dutch800XL

Have you tried Mini Office?

Philsan, thank you so very much for sharing this one. I used to have this book, and typed in all the games. "Blockout" was a big favorite with my family. Only three pages of BASIC code, but the fact that it had a two player mode and great game play, meant that this game was played for hours and hours at our house, even at parties, because it didn't have any distracting/ annoying music. Blockout and Frank Ostrowski's "TwoMaze" where the top two games at these parties, and I'm sure they would still be played here today if the hardware was still around. Thank you for scanning this, even after collecting thousands of magazine scans and dozens of (scanned) books, this will be my favorite, and brings back memories of typing in the code. The quality of the scans is excellent!

I have sent MrFish a nice little package consisting of all my SpeedScript stuff (magazine pdf, source code, assembler, some optimization utilities, commented html source code, SpeedScript html manual, etc). I hope he can share it somewhere, I'm a bit strapped for time atm.

Mr. Fish, thanks for asking. Have you tried compiling the source code mentioned earlier (I haven't). I only remember typing the source code from the Speedscript book (published by Compute!) then compiling it and comparing it with the compiled code from the magazine. This is from the notes I made in the book: p. 78 right column, insert "lda toplin+1" before "sbc texstart+1" p. 84, right column, label "yorn" change "jsr presg" to "jsr prmsg" p. 89, right column, label "redir" change "inc xxtr" to "inc xptr" (there will be two identical lines) p. 90, left column, label "getname" change "dec xxvr" to "dec xptr" (there will be two identical lines) p. 89 right column, label "overstor" change "sva tex" to "sta tex" p. 89 right column label "overmarg" change "lda # < pzbuff" to "lda # < prbuff" Do you have an email address for me to send all my stuff to? It would be nice if this could be useful to others. I made a little "unifier" utility as well, to reduce the number of binary load blocks, so it loads faster and the compiled code is 100% equal to the published code in Compute!

I believe there were some errors in the original source. I have an ATR with fully "working" source code, if you need it. Complete with html manual, magazine pdf, etc. Speedscript was a wonderful package!!!

Amazing stuff... I just downloaded the latest Altirra and tested your new rom. The Atari 600XL was my first computer in January 1985. This is very special to my after (almost exactly) 30 years. Really, really special.

I just listened to the mp3 and must say this is excellent stuff. I'm sitting here with bated breath listening to Bill explaining the semi colon/ minus sign error in Basic. Absolutely amazing!! Then he explains how this was actually the only error in the code, but Atari did no debugging on this (demo) code, and immediately released it. The very first computer magazine I had was Compute! issue 57, February 1985. Bill's "Insight Atari" was about the only info on the Atari I had in those days, but I've always loved his articles, and I will never forget his "B is Bad for Basic" piece (at least not the title). You can imagine how happy I was with your Antic, Analog and Compute! archives, and then later the scanned versions. Listening to the interview with 70-year old Bill now, knowing he's in the hospital at the time, is just so wonderfully strange and special, as you said it's amazing he remembers all those details. Thank you so much for this... There are a lot of special moments in the interview, but the part about losing money, and Atati exaggerating sales of the machines, was actually kind of emotional. Well done letting Bill just talk about that as much as he wanted (but also letting him move on when he didn't want to talk about it anymore). Very speciall stuff, thanks for all your great work Kevin!!

Sorry if this was mentioned somewhere already, but when I close Altirra, my internet connection is reset, in rare cases the connection is lost until I reset my system. Can I do something to prevent this? If not, can we please have a setting to prevent using the network at all? Thanks! (Really love Altirra!!)

I used our 800XL for making invoices for our company from about 1985-1989. In fact, my brother bought the XL because he wanted something a bit easier than a typewriter. To make a long story short: He couldn't really "get into" Basic, so instead I tried it, and after a few months/ years, the program became quite sophisticated. The first versions were run from tape (!), later I used a diskdrive, so datafiles could be stored etc. I used TurboBasic XL for later versions (I remember it well, using giant $strings$ in memory, dumping them to disk with direct SIO, etc). Around 1990 I tried the ST, but with the poor software support, I could never find a decent program language (or other software), After that, I bought my first PC and used Clipper (dBaseIII compiler). Too bad the ST never took off as a business machine, though they came very close around 1990. I believe I was the very first owner of the MegaST1 in The Netherlands. It looked quite professional from a distance (but actually quite cheap from up close). Oh well, I could go on forever...

Thanks CharlieChaplin for your insight. I'm an avid collector of "E-mags" myself. Antic, Analog are on AtariMania (as you will know), Compute! I found on usenet (Tosec archive). Those I have the best memory of, I also downloaded some Page 6 mags, Atari User, etc. (only the ones I used to own, these are the ones I still have a "connection" to, I used to read them over and over, hey, there was no internet yet!). I used to type in most of the (Atari) stuff from Compute!, so I have very lively memories of Speedscript, Speedcalc. Also some of the BBK stuff from Analog, etc. Oh, and of course Turbo Basic from Happy Computer! I've written some semipro accounting stuff in Turbo Basic, my Atari with Epson LC24-10 was 100% productive back then!! So it would be great if in the next couple of months/ years, I could find some old Happy Computer magazines (used to own the Turbo Basic Sonderheft, now *that one* I should've kept!!). For me, it's also a nice way to check what used to be "hot technology" in a particular year. Strangely, magazines from 1984-1996 are actually easier to find than, say, mags from 2001-2005. I'm also a big fan of C't, I have a lot of those as well. Thanks again for your assistance, I will keep the Abbuc archive in the back of my head, I might pursue that one day.

CharlieChaplin, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!!! You made my day!!! This is the right one, very happy that you found it for me. The helpfile is also wonderful, without it I couldn't remember the commands!!! This takes me back about 20 years+ in a flash: First to read the helpfile I kind of "automatically" typed (in DOS 2.5) "C" for copy, then "d:monitor.txt, e:" (very strange, I haven't used Atari DOS in 20 years and I still seem to recall these commands, hehe). After reading the file, I finally remembered!: eg.: DIR D:*.* (to get a dir) L 25000/D2:MONITOR.TXT A 25000 (to get a listing of all bytes from that address) Aahhh, this is so wonderful, once again: THANK YOU, I'm looking forward to checking out more stuff on your website. On the other topic: Any idea on more scanned German magazines? Thanks!

I've been having a lot of fun last week browsing through old Antic and Analog magazines (downloaded from Atarimania). I used to own hundreds of Atari magazines in the 80s/90s, but I threw them all out, kind of hoping I'd miss them one day (rather than tripping over them all the time). Luckily, we have a lot of online repositories these days, best of all Atarimania, from where I downloaded "back" all my classic issues of Compute!, Antic, Analog, Page 6, Atari User, etc. From this place I would like to thank everybody who made that possible!! It would be nice if some German magazines would also show up on site like this. I used to have lots of issues of "HomeComputer" and "Happy Computer!". Also some "Atari Magazin" issues, but these were never particularly interesting (to me at least). As it turns out, "Atari Magazin" is the only one showing up... Now to my question: I recall a (ML) monitor program from "HomeComputer" called "hc6502" or something? Does that ring a bell with any of you guys? I do believe I saw it on an .atr disk some time ago, but I'm afraid I don't remember any of the commands, so a scan of the magazine would be great! Or at least a scan of the page, or some other (text)file? I remember doing some simple "hacking" with this tool, even though I don't remember much about that era. Something like loading large binary files into memory, changing a few bytes, then writing it back, etc. I would really like to try my hand at stuff like that again. Thanks everybody for listening, and thanks for keeping the Atari alive on AtariAge!!!

Thank you Philsan!!!! Just looking at that cover brings back some wonderful memories!! (Not sure if it was really that much fun back in the days of type-in basic listings, with the Basic B lockups, tape errors, etc.). "Blockout" was actually a wonderful and very addictive game! At family parties it was a favorite, the two-player mode was fantastic for championships etc. THANKS!!!!

I would like to mention "Games for your Atari 600XL" (not sure about the author, but I believe there was a "Ryan" in there, it was a small book with some great basic games). I never saw this one in scanned form, I used to own it, but haven't got it anymore. Wait, found a thread about it here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/172855-games-for-your-atari-600xl-by-a-certain-mr-rybags/

1982 copyright on the banner I stand corrected. I got confused by my 1989 Atari umbrella from the German Atari Messe in 1989.