DanBoris
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Posts posted by DanBoris
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With the current interest in the Action! I thought I would take a look at PL65. I had never heard of this language before, and after reading the manual I was quite interested in it. Similar to Action!, but some notable differences, particularly being able to use assembler mnemonics directly in your code.
I've spent some hours disassembling the PL65 compiler, and looking at the code it generates in a couple of programs. Sad to say, my initial excitement has waned as it has become apparent that PL65 just doesn't generate very good code at all. I suppose it's faster than Basic, but I expect Action! would beat it handily.
The main problem is that virtually everything is done via subroutine. While this is understandable for complex routines like 16 bit multiply or divide, it's rather wasteful when it's employed for simple calculations.
Main()
PChar(0,"Hello, World")
End
generates
Main()
PushByte(0) ; PChar(0,"Hello, World")
PushWord($2cF3)
PushByte(12)
Jsr Pchar
End;
which doesn't seem so bad. However for something a little more involved:
Func Str$(Int num)
String Sbuff[16]
Byte a,b
;Begin
jsr PopWord
sta num
sty um+1
;Sbuff[15]="0"
lda #15
jsr PushByte
lda #<addr("0")
ldy #>addr("0")
jsrPushWord
lda #1
jsr PushByte
lda #<sbuff+15
ldy #>sbuff+15
jsr PushWord
jsr Move ; Block copy routine used to move one character
; a= 16
lda #16
sta a
;Repeat
; Dec a
dec a ; handy to use asm code here
; B=num mod 10 + 48
lda num
ldy num+1
jsr Pushword
lda b
jsr PushByte
jsr Mod
lda #48
ldy #0
jsr Add2Stack
etc.
It's too bad. PL65 has some nice features, but all this stack juggling is wasted effort. It's hard to say, but with all the stack juggling and zero page use in the compiler, I could almost believe that PL65 was itself written in PL65.
Maybe if someone gets bored, they can upgrade the compiler.
I remember looking at the code PL65 generated back when that "PL65 Cracked" thread first popped up. The took an approach that made code generation fairly easy, but the tradeoff is very inefficient code. Action jumps through a lot of hoops get the code as tight as it does. 6502 is a challenging processor to write a compile for.
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It is very cool to see this source code! Thanks to Alfred and JAC for you work on this. I had an Action! cartridge back in the day and really liked the language. I even did some blog posts here that took a look at the 6502 code that the compiler generated.
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Hello, all.
Pulled my system out of the basement some time ago, which was working when put away. Upon powering up, it seems to be stuck in a loop at the title screen of each cartridge inserted. I'm thinking capacitors, as all the switches have been replaced to cure a power issue. The schematic shows a bunch of caps listed as ".1"... Are these tiny electrolytics, or are they more of a ceramic style? Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Did you try cleaning the cartridges and cartridge slot? What you describe is what happens when the system can't validate the cartridges signature.
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TLDR: now available: source code for Claim Jumper, Dog Daze, Dog Daze Deluxe, and Bumpomov's Dogs, plus Gray Chang's design documents, fan mail, and users' review forms.
Earlier this month, Gray Chang sent me a box of ephemera from his days programming Atari computer games. Gray is author of Dog Daze, Dog Daze Deluxe, Bumpomov's Dogs, and Claim Jumper.I scanned all the paper matter in the box, which you can download from https://archive.org/details/GrayChangAtariPapersIt contains:Bumper sticker ideasConcepts for bumper stickers for Bumpomov's Dogs. Unknown if stickers were actually produced.Bumpomov's Dogs - draft descriptionDraft description of Bumpomov's Dogs for the Atari Program Exchange catalog, along with correspondence with APX staff.Bumpomov's Dogs - draft instructionsDraft manual for Bumpomov's Dogs for Atari Program Exchange, along with correspondence with APX staff.Design DocumentsScreen concepts on graph paper (for Dog Daze and Claim Jumper?)Dog Daze - user review formsAtari Program Exchange customers could send in forms to provide feedback on their purchases. This folder includes the 5 forms that Gray had, along with correspondence cover letters from APX.Dog Daze manual - Educational Software versionA version of Dog Daze was released by Educational Software. Here's that manual.Dog Daze manual - variationAnother version of the Dog Daze manual, perhaps for a self-published version of the game?Fan mailThree letters that Gray received from users of his games.He also sent several floppy disks with source code, which I have made available here: https://archive.org/details/GrayChangAtariSourceCodeThere are multiple versions of some things, and it will take someone who is a better programmer than I am to sort it all out. Please share what you learn!Dog Daze - two disks. One includes just a runtime version, the other has source code.Dog Daze Deluxe - four disks of source code, seem to be different variations.Bumpomov's Dogs - the source disks are labeled SLOTS. Gray wrote: "The diskettes labeled "SLOTS" have the source code for Bumpomov's Dogs (patterned after the Slot Racers game). You can see there are several revisions: disk J, disk K, and so on. The time stamps on the files might reveal which is the final version." (Dates are written on some of the diskettes.)Claim Jumper - here's something I bet you didn't know! The working title was "Gold Rush". A working version with that name is on the disk Dogdaze_Goldrush_Speed_10errorsectors.ATR.Useful information about the disks might be gleaned by the pictures of the actual floppies in the "pictures of the disks" folder.The "misc. disks" folder has a "continuous demo disk" advertising Educational Software's Tricky Tutorials. I am not aware of this having been available on the Internet before. (I like how it says 'EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE AND "STORE NAME" PRESENTS THE TRICKY TUTORIAL DEMONSTRATION') Also in that folder is the source code for Eastern Front: 1941 (which is available elsewhere and I include merely for completeness.)My interview with Gray is available in episode 15 of ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast at http://www.ataripodcast.comKevin, thanks for making this material available, I love to see this original source code!
The source files are in Syn Assembler format so I wrote from code to convert the files to plain ASCII. Attached is a file with the ascii versions of the files on disk DiskW_thru16K_081282.atr. The file CLAIMW.SRC appears to be a binary file, not a source file so it is not included.
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I'm not a coder Dan. I'm working on getting info for the IP owner about the reality of the project. How big of a team would be needed, the engineering issues, etc. so we can try to get a funding stream put together. It's a great idea that has appeal to a certain fan base.
A lot of documentation no longer exists, so it is pretty much reverse engineering a huge chunk of it.
You could easily do something like this with a single experienced programmer. One thing you will need to think about is how you would release the emulator software. If you went an open-source route there are plenty of existing open source emulation code that you could leverage to make the process much easier.
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It would be a much smaller project if you focused on making an authentic experience instead of emulating multiple systems. Simulation instead of emulation.
Yeah, since we are talking about a system that runs a very limited set of software, simulation may be far more particle then the emulation route.
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Access to the original hardware is not an issue, as I have the original owner, and current hardware owners on board. Disassembly of roms and source code would be required as well. Any ideas of where to take a project like this?
Disassembly of the roms is not necessary, all you really need is the binary dumps. You say you have access to the hardware, but do you have any technical documentation on it like schematics, memory maps, hardware descriptions, etc? If not you will need to reverse engineer the hardware. At the very least you will need to document the major chips used in the system, you may also need to trace out the key parts of circuit.
Do you have any programming experience or are you looking for a developer who can write the emulator?
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I'm wondering if anyone on AtariAge can get me pointed in the right direction.
Emulation. I'm setup with a group of folks who used to love the old Virtual World Entertainment BattleTech & Red Planet games, and the discussion has turned to emulating those complex (for the time) rigs.
The distributed network was setup like this:
Missions were served off of an Apple System 7 Mac, running an A/Rose card, across an Arcnet network to 8 pods. Each pod has a custom 68000 based CPU and a secondard Amiga 500 Based CPU for graphics. Two more custom cards drove sound and I/O.
Mission events were spooled back to the Mac Console computer which created a log file, and then set over an AppleTalk network to Mission Review software.
It's a big project to emulate, and we have no idea of where to start the discussions at or with whom. I'm working with he current owner of Virtual World to see if we can develop a plan, or a Kickstarter project.
Clues for the clueless?
First thing you are going to need is the technical specs of all the hardware used to run the game. The server sounds straight forward since it's standard apple hardware, but the other hardware sounds custom so you would need detailed specs for it. Next you need the actual software that ran on each component of these system. Once you have these items you can start to develop an emulator. You could write a single emulator that runs all the components of the system, or you could write seperate ones that use TCP/IP to communicate that way you could run from separate machines or run it over the internet if you wanted to.
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I was watching a couple of YouTube videos showing the original arcade Pong in action. In both the ones I watched the game ended when one player got 11.
Does the game always end on 11 or is there some other mechanic at play? And if it does end at 11, does anyone know the reason for this? It just seems to me that 9 would have been the more logical choice considering that only a single digit is initially displayed per player.
According to this site, 11 is the official winning score for Ping-Pong
http://www.killerspin.com/spin-info-table-tennis-rules#11
Technically a player needs to win by 2 points, but that would have been difficult to implement in Pong.
There is also a switch in Pong that can be used to configure it for either a max score of 15 or 11.
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Visit Dan B's home page. Click on Atari 5200. You will find the "Hello World" sample there. Google Dan B's to find it.
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Recently I got about 25 floppy disks from a friend who said he found them in his grandfathers basement, who had recently passed away. My friend asked if I could pull any data from them and save it, which I did. What I ended up finding was really interesting, there was old software, archives of short stories his grandfather had written, a few games, his grandfather even had lots of letters that he had typed up from the handwritten ones he had sent his wife when they were dating almost 60 years ago. Really awesome stuff, and it kind of bit me with a bug to keep finding these floppy disks and save the data from being destroyed. Who knows what some of those old floppies may contain! I'm interested in saving and archiving the interesting data on the disks so it doesn't get lost forever.
Now obviously there are a few challenges for this. Firstly, personal data. Some people may be concerned over what may be on old floppy disks, and to that I can only say that any personal data such as financial information, sensitive data, etc would be destroyed and not saved into the archive.
The second challenge is simply getting the floppy disks. As I would quickly run out of money to pay for the floppies, they would be more on a donation basis, I would pay the shipping to get the floppies here. If the sender was interested in the information from the floppy disks, I would make a download archive available to them, or send them a CD with the data for a very slight fee to cover the CD cost.
The goal of this project would to save data and make it available to everyone in a web-based archive. I'm not interested in stealing anything, making money, etc. As floppy disks physically degrade we're losing our chances to save bits of history from being lots, and that to me is a shame. I don't know if I necessarily am even able to handle a project like this, but I would be very interested in trying.
Which is where I would need help. Primarily it would be needing help simply with acquiring floppy disks. Whether you guys know of people that have old ones, see them at thrift shops or garage sales, or even have them in your own homes, I would need help simply acquiring the actual disks.
That leads me to my ultimate question: do you guys think a project like this would be worth it? Or do the Internet Archives negate this as a foolish idea? Their projects seem focused only on the actual software, as opposed to whatever other files may be stashed on floppy disks (user written programs, art, etc), whereas I'm interested in preserving whatever may be on the floppy disks. To me I think it could be a useful, cool project to save floppies before they vanish forever. Then again, it could be a very dumb idea and I simply am blind.
What do you guys think?
I was at VCF East a couple weeks ago and saw a presentation by Jason Scott about the Internet Archive. He is actively working on the software preservation part of the Archive but also spoke about the project in general. One of the big things he emphasized was not to worry about whether you think something would be useful to the Archive or not, just give it to them and people will can worry about the value of it later. So I think the Internet Archive would be a good place for this sort of data.
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For a while, Trebor and I have been working together on improving the MESS 7800 emulation. We've had a fair bit of success, and our changes have been incorporated into MESS 0.153, which was officially released today.
Here's the highlight of changes:
- DMA cycle stealing has been added.
- support for 256k and 512k ROM formats, with and without RAM, with and without CPUWIZ banked RAM.
- The INTIM timer now matches real hardware.
- Mess now runs with the correct number of scanlines, 263 for NTSC, and 313 for PAL.
- Additional accuracy of the RIOT/6532 2 button register IO control.
- Improved RIOT/6532 timer emulation accuracy.
- Improved INPTCTRL emulation accuracy.
If you're developing games for the 7800, you might want to check it out.
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I released my 7800 testing tool in the 7800 hardware facts thread. If you run it in the new MESS, you'll find it's much closer to real hardware for a number of the tests, but there are still a couple of shortcomings 7800 developers should be aware of.
Firstly, the MESS DMA cycle stealing sometimes falls a bit short of the real world results. In the GCC Spec, some DMA cycle timings are provided as ranges, and we don't emulate the delays that cause the range of timings.
Secondly, MESS doesn't faithfully display register changes that happen mid-line. If you change color registers while a scanline is being drawn, the display will be inaccurate. This is common shorcoming with all existing 7800 emulators, AFAIK.
Still, the changes we made have put MESS into the right "real hardware" ballpark now, where previously we were in the wrong state.
Enjoy!
Great work! It's nice to see this driver getting some attention.
Dan
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Wow, interesting interview- wonder when in his life his mental affliction began (not that a switch flipped it on). Probably not kosher to ask.
I missed out on his 1st few games but loved Rebound. I made some screens & should've entered that contest. I recall it but I guess I didnt think they'd win. I played Rebound last time I dragged out the 800XL from storage.
That was a great interview. I remember typing a couple of his games back in the day, some pretty impressive work especially for games written in Basic.
Hearing about how he has coped with his illness was very interesting. He has a very frank bio on his web site that indicates his illness started in the early 90'. He would have been in his early 20's at the time which is commonly when Schizophrenia onsets.
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I plan to be there Saturday.
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Its an understatement to say that I'm not fond of reading through monospaced text docs. So I went ahead and converted the 7800 Software Guide into a PDF with a navigable index and proportional font for non-diagram text. I also added relevant TIA and 6532 info from the Stella doc, and an extra bit on reading two button joysticks.
I found this version is a lot easier on the eyes and better for quick look-ups, so I figured I'd share. Feel free to report any errors here.
Nice work on cleaning up the guide! Can you add the information about the control register....
http://atariage.com/forums/blog/52/entry-5118-7800-control-register/
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Was done with Adventureland - there's a Z5 version of that written in Inform.
If it could be done with Inform 5, there's a possibility of a Z3 version (the actual back end of Zork).
It has been done for all of them:
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXscott-adamsXgamesXzcode.html
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This wasn't a game that really interested me, but I do have very distinct memories of seeing this game for the first time on the Wildwood boardwalk during one of our summer vacations. I remember virtually every arcade having two or three of these lined up right at the front entrance.
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Of the Scott Adams games I have to say Ghost Town was my favorite.
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I answer to the original question, marketing. I put a section on my 7800 cartridge page about this a while back:
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Has anyone see scans of the Coleco Mini Arcade cabinet art that can be printed out to use as replacements? I have a Donkey Kong that has a couple really messed up labels that I would like to replace.
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Back in the 80's, the Wildwood, NJ boardwalk. There was at least one arcade in every block. Saw a lot of games for the first (and sometimes last) time there.
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Hey guys thanks for the roms. But I think one reason they're hard to find that hasn't been mentioned is the fact that there really isn't a very good O2 emulator, at least as far as I know. I know MESS is starting to support it and there's O2EM but both leave quite a bit to be desired, at least in my opinion. If anyone knows of a really good O2 emulator I'd love to hear about it...
I really need to stop coming to the boards, they just make me feel guilty about not working on certain projects.
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Here is something you don't see everyday, and un-assembled MITS Altair kit...
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[Help!] Atari 810 drive repair.
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted · Edited by DanBoris
There is no sensor in the 810 for track zero, it just moves the head long enough to be sure it has hit the hard stop so it knows where it is at, this is what causes the gridning sound on these drives. Pretty much anything in the read logic could cause a problem like this. If the drive is unable to read the disk properly it will just keep re-homing the head and trying again. Don't know of an way to troubleshoot this without a scope.