Wrathchild

Did you have to obtain a Vendor ID for the USB cart, or does in not require to provide its own Vendor/Product ids?

Thanks for the details Tempest. I have played Blue Print and Gremlins before on the A8 though. Were those official A8 releases or prototypes? Regards, Mark

Are there many 5200 games without an A8 version? I've noticed the Beef Drop thread and other titles such as Haunted Hourse II and Combat II. Would there be much work in porting these to the A8? Regards, Mark

I'm going for the inside mounted approach, with the HD sitting above the RAM. However, currently when the HD is plugged in, the machine just hangs upon powerup... this maybe my board of course! However, what I wanted to know was, I have an 800XL and with the larger power supply, Mr-Atari said the newer XE supplies weren't up to powering the HD as well as the Atari. The HD is rated at 5V & 0.7A and I'm connected to the motherboard as follows. +ve is on the capacitor to the top right of the RAM (the mains smoother I guess) and the -ve goes at an earth point somewhere between bottom left two large black chips. Is there a recommended place to put these or would I need a separate power supply? Thanks, Mark (I'll try and get a photo of the board to makes things clearer if necessary)

After having had to work through this weekend, I thought I'd relax a little... grabbed a scene from a cartoon and G2F'd it. I'm not very happy with the outlines, plus the colours look very different when I load it into A800WinPlus4, adie from that its OK(ish). Therefore the original bitmap is supplied too if someone better at art than me (not too hard) can finish it off. Regards, Mark krtek.zip

Was the 6809's OS9 portable to the 6502?

Maybethe UDS-10 be interfaced simply to the SIO bus via something like a PIC micro? Using the uIP library on the A8 (or even in the PIC) to handle things?

Ah, one of the pages I often visited, I liked the IPµ8930 but a bit beyond the hobyist's budget! How much is the W3100A or IIM7010?

Here you go... The 'characters.c' file was used to generate the A8 data statements for inclusion within an assembler file. You could rewrite it to output the bytes directly to another file if you like and use 'incbin', or some equivalent command, in your project to include the data. Note that I included the raw data within the original C file, I think this was because the hex editor I was using let me copy to the clipboard as data statements. This could be better achieved by opening a file, moving to a specific offset and then reading a given length of data (plus closing the file). These details could be passed as arguments on the command line. The 'chars.s' assembler file gives an example of this kind of output being used. In this case, letting the user see the graphics by selecting one of 4 screens using the joystick. Note: this was built using the CC65 tools (CA65 to assemble and LD65 to link) and the linker was passed the 'generic.cfg' file to override the default Atari memory map. If anyone fancies animating these little guys it shouldn't be too tricky. The images in the original ROM provided 4 states per character. These are: down (1), up (1), left (1) and left(2). As the animation of walking in a direction only has two states, the missing images achieved in the NES via hardware flipping. So: down (2) = down (1) flipped horizontally, up (2) = up (1) flipped horizontally and right (1) and right (2) are flips of left (1&2). To perform the flipping on the A8, use the 256 byte lookup table provided in 'flip_table.s'. Enjoy, Mark nes2a8.zip

Also, http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=32830 Perhaps the FAQ should quote these too?

I wrote a small conversion routine to extract NES graphics in an A8 usable format (see my avatar for an example). I'll dig it out tonight and upload it. That may make it slightly easier getting graphics from NES roms. However, as pointed out before, the 8*8 tiles used on the Nintendo require 2 (4* characters on the Atari.

Is a problem here that you effectively have to write you're own FAT handler in order to manage the filesystem? Or do these devices sometimes contain their own micros that do that work for you? Similarly, some of the networking devices such as http://www.zonetusa.com/DispProduct.asp?ProductID=130 could be used, but again, how much work is the device going to do for you? Studying linux device driver code could help in some instances, as trying to get help from the manufacturers isn't always fruitful. Regards, Mark

I was doing something like this with Combat, however I would say that a direct port of say a games kernel (primarily the screen drawing part) is not always feasible and you better off mapping the ideas of a game to the A8 specific ways of doing something. Examples of problems are: 2600 supports playfield reflection, this can be done in the vertical though custom Dlists, but in the horizontal this means you need to write this in software to compensate. Not always used though in 2600 games. 2600 sprites can be flipped and also 'cloned' (e.g. the planes in combat) by hardware. Although the expansion of a sprite is similar, this means you need to use some of the other A8 players and missiles to provide this... more overhead. Therefore you end up doing the sprite graphic prepartion work when screen drawing is outside of the display areas (e.g. VBI) rather than on-the-fly as a 2600 game typically does. 2600 sound - slightly different random generators used for the noise, but doesn't look too tricky to translate this.

Just looking on the MicroUSB site http://www.strotmann.de/twiki/bin/view/Mic.../ProjUSBAtariST When you follow the link to http://www.janthomas.f2s.com/index.html this only states that its for the Falcon? Is the project ST compatible?

I'll try harder to get my ports done next time around, unfortunately paid work keeps getting in the way

Certainly does Dave Murray is one of the main reasons why I still strive to play the guitar (after about 20 years now)! As for tutorials, not really, but I help out where I can From what I can remember of my early experiences of learning 6502, the main thing was to keep experimenting and work through the crashes! Set yourself small targets and then build from there. Later I found that disassembling or working out how a game does something that you like helped see how other programmers did things diferently, i.e. their 'style'. An example of that was 'Elite', which showed me for the first time the use of the 'BIT' command to effectively ignore a the next two bytes of code, here's an example: loc_0_9019: CMP #$3B BEQ loc_0_902B CMP #$3A BEQ loc_0_9028 CMP #$3D BNE loc_0_9030 LDX #3 .BYTE $2C loc_0_9028: LDX #2 .BYTE $2C loc_0_902B: LDX #1 JMP ChangeView Good luck in your projects!

Software sprite routines that I'd like to understand one day would be the Zeppelin Games' Draconus, and also the games 'Basil - Mouse Detective' and 'Black Lamp' appear to have good routines too.

could you clarify for a NOOB? No problem, "effectively an AND of the lower half of the address" should have read: "effectively an AND to make the lower half of the address" Say I want to set the Display List to point to (hex) address $7F20 The AND makes the lower half of the address by masking only the lower 8 bits of this address, i.e. $20 as 256 is 2^8, dividing this address by 256 gives us the value $7F So we can poke address $230 with the (lo) value $20 and address $231 with the (hi) value $7F, e.g. SDLSTL=$230 SDLSTH=$231 my_dlist = $7F20 LDA #my_dlist*255 LDX #my_dlist/256 STA SDLSTL STX SDLSTH Alternatively many assemblers let you use '<' for lo and '>' for hi: LDA # LDX #>my_dlist STA SDLSTL STX SDLSTH Hope that helps :wink:

For 'of' read 'to make'

255 should follow the & symbol, effectively an AND of the lower half of the address.

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If you're using Windows then having Cygwin installed is a good idea, though you can get away with just using a win32 version of 'gnumake'.

I did disassembly the whole game for them using IDAPro and offered to help but not much came from that From my experiences (Elite/Bard's Tale/World Class Leaderboard and others) there are some games that lend themselves nicely to porting and others that don't. The A8 can manage a similar bitmapped type screen layout (i.e. Antic 4) but at a slightly higher mem usage and with not such a great control over the colour palette. A game with heavy sprite usage typically needs that portion completely rewritten and again you often lose out due to colour (having to use software rather than hardware sprites) or resolution (e.g. Mission Impossible bloke) If you want a recommendation from me... go for Rock'n'Bolt. Simple graphics and nice gameplay, topped with a basic tune. Regards, Mark

I've recalled that the game may have been called 'Swag' but I'm not 100% certain... it didn't show up on XL-Search. Does it ring any bells with somebody? Thanks, Mark

typically, programmers get sidetracked all to easily