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Adventures in Atari Programming

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Chaotic Grill - Rough analysis notes for Sprite Flicker Management timing

Recently, I was looking into improving the sprite flicker management of Chaotic Grill.  I took the following notes to give myself a general idea of the timing of this routine/process (6507 code).  This is just a list of timestamps and some basic notes / calculations for handling 5 sprites.  Overall, this is probably not that useful without the code or more context, but it might be interesting to some people.   ---------   Start on cycle 768 (scanline 10, cycle 29) 768 -

2600 Display Kernels

Welcome to the wonderful world of 2600 display kernel writing.   Here's a quick overview of some of the display kernels I've written:   ----- Chaotic Grill Chaotic Grill uses a 5-line display kernel... similar to the M-Network version.  It uses DPC+ to gain access to RAM and Data Fetchers with Fast Fetch capability.  It uses half of the 4kb DPC+ display RAM as a graphics buffer for the displaying the burger pieces.   The main 5-line kernel is

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The Bike Shed is now Blue

Sometimes when I'm working on a project, I have the need to attempt to improve tools I'm using.   I had an idea of adding a "variable watch list" feature to Stella, but somehow I ended up painting the bike-shed blue... and doing some layout changes.     At least I took the time to make a bigger output view (I combine the previous two views into one, minus the snapshot feature).   And yes, I have been working on ChaoticGrill recently and I have made some p

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Neolithic v0.3 alpha release

It's been too long... so I figured I'd take the time to release another version of the compiler.  I spent a lot of effort doing cleanup in the code base (paying dev taxes).  There are a few good features that have been added, but mostly bug fixes and compiler code cleanup.   Here's the compiler (with some test code) for Win/Mac:   Neolithic-v3_alpha_with_tests.zip   AND the latest Congo Bongo source with Windows Batch file to build the different TV format versions (

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Neolithic v0.2 alpha release

Here's another alpha release of Neolithic for those of you ambitious enough to grind thru figuring out how to use the compiler and what it can and cannot do.  This should be more usable than the last version, as I've recently added direct binary generation.  And I remembered to turn off the "debug" code that botched up the first (subtle) alpha release.   Included below is a zip file containing both a Windows and a MacOS executable.  It's a command line program, so you need to use eithe

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A picture that's worth more than a 1000 words.

But can be summed up in less than 100: Using Stella to debug a rudimentary sprite sorting algorithm (in C compiled to assembly then run thru DASM to run in Stella) WHICH is being used to help with developing a better multi-sprite engine for ChaoticGrill WITH the added layer of complexity being it is using a C compiler which is still in-development (Neolithic C) AND debugging issues with that (the C compiler) at the same time.   Oh, the joys of debugging.  

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Congo Bongo demo coded in Neolithic

Welp, I've made quite a bit of progress on the compiler/language I've been working on, but it's still a major work in progress.   I consider this an unofficial preview alpha version.  After development had stalled out sometime around July 2020, my focus shifted towards game projects... first Chaotic Grill, then Paint The City, with a some proof of concept work on a port of Congo Bongo, both for the 2600 and the 7800.  My focus has been jumping between all of those projects until about

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Yet Another C Compiler - The Long Slow Process of Progress

I've been working on and off for the past several weeks and I've made some progress; which can, at times, seem like a lot.  Other times, this all still seems to very much be a daunting task.   When I started writing this entry, I realized I should probably give a general overview/background of how this compiler works under the covers.  Here is a basic outline of the process that the compiler follows:     (1)  Input files are run thru a handwritten Recursive Descent parser to

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Maybe yet another C Compiler for 6502 programming...

Mocha/BCA Announcement   Usually, the biggest hassle with getting things done for me has always been a lack of enough big chunks of free time to do stuff.  Due to the current pandemic, that is no longer the case.  Since I'm pretty much home-bound waiting for the weather get warmer, I have a lot more free time to work on personal projects. I've been wanting to announce and talk about my current projects for a while.   I'm in the process of developing a C-like compiler foc

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BurgerTime Remake: And then there were more enemies!

I'm long overdue for an update... so here it is: There are now 4 enemies (including a Mr.Egg, and Mr. Pickle) running around on the screen utilizing a 20/30 Hz Flicker routine. I'm planning on improving it by attempting to fit in some mid-screen sprite changes into the display kernel. For the most part, the enemies run around the level properly. But every once in a while it seems one or more of them get lost following their own path. Code has been moved around and spread out across a c

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BurgerTime Remake: The Road to DPC+

After recovering from the holidays, I finally got a chance to sit down and work some more on this. What's new in this update: The display kernel has been updated to take advantage of the DPC+ capabilities. Mainly this affects the burger pieces on the level which now actually look like the finished burgers... both in shape and color. This is done by utilizing DPC+'s fast fetch and the ability to write to Display Data to create a frame buffer for storing the burgers. Also using Fast Fetch

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BurgerTime Remake: Opening up the project to the Community

Sorry about the lack of updates; I got distracted by a trail of other things: acquiring an Atari 5200 and games, working on the house, dealing with fleas in the basement, etc. Basically real life really snuck up on me and turned my attention towards other things. So I've decided to open up the project to the community for those who wish to collaborate and hopefully help drive this project to be completed sooner. So how can you help? I could really use help on the game logic... I know th

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BurgerTime Remake: The Start

M Network's BurgerTime for the Atari 2600 is a decent game. It was one of the first games I played on an Atari 2600 emulator back in the late 1990's. But it is not without it's issues. The chef moves quite sluggishly, the graphics are bit on the bland side, and the controls could do with some improving. The graphics were a compromise made when the game was developed to avoid as much flicker as possible. The only time the game flickered was during the use of pepper (which wasn't too bad) and

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