Mr SQL

Now you can create your own standalone retro forum server for fun and games, or Gangsta business! I found the BBS Setup disc and shared it on the TRs-80 forums - @MrMaddog if you need help setting it up you can send me a PM with your questions, if you don't want to post them here Best paractice then and now: change default sysadmin passwords...

Ryushi I found the setup disc that will enable transparent bi-directional communication for BASIC through the bit-banger port: BBSMLNG1.DSK Create a real disc image or drop it on your SD drive, anyone who wants to explore it can also use the online CoCo emu Mocha: https://www.haplessgenius.com/mocha/ The instructions are timed at 300 baud which is pretty cool to watch: RUN "USER" The instructions tell you how to run SETUP, I was amazed how similar it is to the way we configure server software today... nothing really changes There's also this CoCo Demo on the disc but you'lll need a CoCo3 or the CoCo3 emulator to run it: RUN "BBS AD" BBS Server images from the 80's and 90's The BBS image discs of live installs from the 80's and 90's and even current installs Today are disconnected forum servers with their information frozen in time, waiting to be discovered one day by digital archeologists. This thread shows an example logging in to read user messages from 1994 using the default SYSOP password. Sysadmins never change their passwords simply because they cannot forget them.

Davis has a lot of interesting observations, the distinction that the games have to be fast twitch action games that require rapid decision making to train our minds sounds similar to physical exercise. Games with cut scenes and dialogs are less effective, like going to Planet Fitness on Pizza night.

Very cool, you are a very advanced Chess player likely a chessmaster or close! The Chessmaster engine is quite powerful - Chessmaster 2000 on home computers and on the 4 Mhz PC in the 80's play pretty close to 2000 on the advanced levels. Peter jennings Micro Chess is faily weak for a strong player, I would give it an 1100 rating max. Battle Chess is also fairly weak which is surprising in light of the advanced gameplay animation. Video Chess is more impressive and somewhat between these, plays similar to the 1977 Fidelity Chess Challenger, around 1400 at the higher levels - most Chess players will not beat Video Chess. This is interesting, you could set up a Modern "Turk" with this design like IBM did with DeepBlue; fake Chess computer can be inside the machine or networked, doesn't matter - The Design allows the current Chess champ to engage in unfair network play against an entire [hidden] team of former Chess masters all equipped with the latest Chess computers. "If cheating" - IBM dismantled the system immediately afterwards once the stock soared so that no one could examine exactly how the DeepBlue SuperComputer had passed the turing test; the latest advances in computer Chess mechanics have been lost, or they cheated.

Yes, you might like the ASDK - an abstract Assembly development kit designed to make programming the Atari 2600 much like programing the C64 - You can click the Play button in the IDE and it compiles an executable on the fly and runs it in an emulator: C64 style Assembly programming: Friendly C64 style sprite objects and a scrolling playfield are available so you don't have to race the beam directly and can write C64 style Assembly for game development. The example above shows horizontal assembly which is also supported - you can use the concatenator operator like in BASIC and it transposes as shown on the left when building the ROM. WYSIWYG virtualworld playfield and sprite support: Just like C64 Assembly programming you can store your virtualworld bitmap and sprite bitmaps rightside up as normal images without flipping sections of them upside down and backwards. The ASDK is the runtime for SuperCharger BASIC, so BASIC can be mixed with your Assembly or either can be used exclusively. There's an old thread here that shows how to call ASDK functions in Assembly (before the IDE integration): You can download the ASDK as part of SuperCharger BASIC The IDE in the image is already present on Windows, instructions for setting it up to use Z26 or Stella to launch the ROM's in the emu are here.

I don't usually write PAL versions of games so I'm giving this PAL version it's own thread - SillyVenture 2019 contest version: ROM Binary BREAKOUT2002_LASERBEAMS_PAL_R3.bin SuperCharger audio image BREAKOUT2002_LASERBEAMS_PAL_R3.wav BREAKOUT2002 LASERBEAMS R3 is a PAL game for zero or more players and the CPU can take over for both players! SillyVenture had some difficulty categorizing this PAL entry from the USA as a PAL game or a PAL demo, but ultimately put it in the PAL demo category - As a demo, BREAKOUT2002 is a light and sound show with a familiar breakout theme people can watch or interactively play at parties - friends can join in anytime. Goal: Make it to the level 10 treasure room without being caught by the Logo! there's a thread somewhere on the Atari 2600 forum with the instruction manual, but I'm not sure where it is. Prior PAL version R2 lost the lower intensity color rows on PAL, possibly only via PAL composite mods; I punched up the PAL intensity a bit above, both PAL builds will work fine in the emu but... there are other cool things to explore in R3. Have fun! BREAKOUT2002_LASERBEAMS_PAL_R2.bin Thoughts on PAL PAL has some interesting challenges over NTSC, the top and bottom of the palette are basically cutoff - Where the NTSC version eschews the first grayscale row of the palette, the PAL edition must kick out the top two rows and the bottom two rows to keep the game fully in color. I think the PAL greens look nicer than NTSC.

Progressive Gangsta's and Extremist groups have beneffited from advanced Forum technology like AtariAge since the 80's! As John Wick teaches us through powerful images this technology is still in use by clandistine groups today. Secure communications technology also has application for less nefarious purposes - many businesses, people and organizations value private communications software that can connect via legacy modems, null cable networking or operate as stand alone secure communications consoles. All these modes of operation were and are still popular with my 80's BBS software from Saint John Gallery and RelationalFramework still offers analysis and data recovery support on existing installations of legacy communications servers Today! Here is an analysis demo of a standalone install from 1994 where I backdoor in and step back in time to recover the last users email by loading the image disc into an emulator: JOHNWICK_VINTAGE_BBS_SOFTWARE.mp4 Secure systems cannot be hosted in an emu (defeats the concept) but they are excellent tools for analysis and data recovery from John Wick Technology systems The BBS forum software is for the TRS-80 Color Computer and runs at 300 baud with BASIC I/O enabled through the bit-banger port. Discussion on the featureset shown in the movie - email, instant messaging, forum boards and sub boards is encouraged! @Keatah will really like this stuff and @Albert has my permission to use this software for the next forum upgrade

The VIC-20 and the CoCo are awesome machines, why not get them both? Tons of great VIC-20 games, my favorites are the ones that fit in 5K and the Scott Adams adventures! The VIC achieves particular retro awesomeness by having really big letters with a screen 22 characters wide, the CoCo comes close with it's 32 character display. Both have an excellent full featured Microsoft BASIC; the lack of graphics commands on the VIC is made up for by the accellerator hardware whose registers you can POKE. Both are true color computers - the VIC is very colorful mixing multiple colors and shades on screen to great effect. The CoCo has 9 color semigraphics, but less control over text colors. And the original CoCo does have some tricks if you don't like the default green text screen - you can get an Orange screen or a Black screen as shown in these two Text Adventures, Temple of the Lost Ark from Saint John Gallery and The Parlog Building from the Rainbow 4th book of Adventures: Here's a preservation site for the CoCo with many interesting games to enjoy: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Disks/Games/

Very cool! I like the data compression technniques using values beyond 15 to change how your sound engine processes the sound, and how much data is required. This kind of controlled sound processing offers a big edge over the simpler uniform sound engine in bB that processes every line the same way, because the engine becomes programmable via the musical score - thanks for providing an excellent example of this The experimental sound engine in BREAKOUT2002 achieves data compression by utilizing a shared duration for the waveform and frequency in the musical score. It also uses data compression to shape the envelope differently for the channels by flaring one and fading the other by using the shared duration to seed the algorithm such that these identical waveforms and frequencies produce distinctly different sounds: chiptunes 6,18,6,18,15 This engine has a tiny footprint to run in a small space like the SuperCharger where 6K is the limit for everything, but the details on the design ideas may be interesting - It supports patterns via an index on the musical score: chiptunes 4,19,4,19,8 4,17,4,17,8 4,15,4,15,8 4,14,4,14,15 4,19,4,19,8 0,0,0,0,0 4,14,4,9,32 6,30,6,30,8 0,0,0,0,0 The sound engine repeats the first tune when it encounters a line of zeros, and the index can also be set to point to any line to play back one or all of the measures in any pattern below the main chiptune. whenever it encounters a line of zeros, it returns to repeating the first chiptune. Interrupts and overrides for Fx on one or both channels are handled in BREAKOUT2002 by hooking the sound engines shadow registers in conjunction with the TIA registers to change either the shared duration or to override one or both channels from an algorithm or Fx data tables, and to change the pattern index.

If visuals are not important there are no negative impacts, the digitized audio in Quadrun and in MemberAtarian's sound digitizer require updating the TIA registers so frequently there is no time for the display. Video Chess uses all the cycles thinking and only changes the background color but doesn't render the board. I wonder if a pulsed sound digitizer could be written that uses all the cycles but runs every alternate frame to allow a 30 Hz display and digitized sound.

I think you are on the right track! To get your sample programs to work try avoiding calling drawscreen multiple times because you need to update the TIA registers regularly, experiment with updating them every frame or every 2nd or 3rd frame from your data table and you will hear different shaping effect. What happens when drawscreen gets called is that the next frame occurs and with a variable number of these calls (depending upon the program path) there is no way to evenly disperse the register updates to shape the sound envelope. A music engine that is called from the other vertical blank every frame could handle it transparently, I checked out SpryBug's music engine RT linked which is very cool and has flare and fade features which may allow shaping the envelope when drawscreen calls can be avoided in the game programs. Ideas to avoid calls to drawscreen - one way to do this is with a framecounter variable where different frames handle different loads instead of load balancing via drawscreen calls; then the main loop is always able to update the TIA sound registers every 1st, 2nd or 3rd frame. Wow awesome soundtrack and really cool game RT! I was playing that for a few minutes battling the AI - I like the Smiley face character and the game is challenging What really made me keep playing was the immersive soundtrack I wanted to keep listening to with more ear candy whenever I hit the enemy - very well done! Smiley face Chase (what I named it on my Haromony) is an excellent game and a fantastic example of the concept of a balanced melodious soundtrack complementing the gameplay and interactive Fx with the use of both channels. And I really like what Sprybug is doing with his engine and the idea for patterns! We have limited space and being able to sequence a block of musical measures or a single measure is key to making longer musical compositions. The patterns concept better explains what I was trying to convey to @MemberAtarian regarding his sound digitizer - building extended musical compositions via the use of patterns has tremendous potential for digital sound samples by breaking them up into smaller segments we can sequence. I used a similar concept on my demo at the 80's Expo to sequence the Max Headroom effect, patterns work with vocals too.

Very cool you are experimenting with expressive sound and an Atari drum/rythm machine - I am looking forward to seeing your project! I think data tables are fantastic, there are so many purposes for them. We can have data tables for the musical score, but then may also have more data tables to change the sound or use an engine for that (more algorithms), and maybe mix other algorithms into the sound too. Here's an inspiring pure algorithmic TIA tune written with the BASIC programming cart; a lot can be added with algorithms from shaping effects to entire chiptunes:

Yes I understand you can't have a display with this player with the VCS due to the timing constraints. My idea is to put an index on the sample to allow the player to be called to play just 1/2 second segments of the digital sample instead of playing the whole sample - Couple this with a tracker sequencer player like TIATracker or the simple one built into bB and you would have a combination player that plays TIA tunes interspersed with digitized sound sequences.

Awesome audio player! Sound quality is excellent - I like both the 8000 Hz samples and the 4000 Hz samples iesposta used to digitize Popcorn with TJoppen's sound engine. The 8000 Hz sample is very clear and 4000 Hz allows a 32k ROM to fit over a minute of digitized sound. Here's an idea that can be implemented for both players that may lend itself better to higher quality sampling since it requires shorter duration: Break the digital sample up into 1/2 second segments that can be marshalled and reused or mixed in with tracker sequencer like we saw with the C64 scene and the SID chip to create mixed music compositions on the VCS. Play the video on this thread for an example of what I'm talking about with the segments - it breaks the sample (in this case 5 seconds) up into 1/2 second segments and repeats one of the segments to create the effect; segments can also be resequenced:

This programmers bug for the SuperCharger routines in the emulator is interesting, games with the bug will only run in the emulator: @John Saeger may be able to fix this one, the bug originated in Z26.

New edition released, BREAKOUT2002 LASERBEAMS NTSC R2! Read about the concept design on the programming forum.

Color Fx techniques and Ideas The sphere version (ROM here) adds color cycling to the ball player sprite for lazy sideways rotation to complement the forward rotation: BREAKOUT2002_LASERBEAMS_NTSC_R2.txt Loading Sprites upside down for the forward roll animation The forward roll rotation animation is comprised of 4 frames, like Assembly and batari BASIC we can flip the sprite sideways, but SuperCharger BASIC has an additional keyword (defined in the manual) for loading sprites upside down! This allows a single sprite image to turn into four frames which is what is happening with the Ball's forward roll which seems smooth because it is at a fast 30 FPS despite the large increments: Normal sprite Normal reversed sprite upside down reversed sprite unside down sprite Cycling the ball player sprite colors for sidways rotation animation Cycling the sprites colors at a slower rate adds sideways rotation creating the illusion of a sphere with both forward and sidways animation at different rates. Program architecture - Runing SuperCharger BASIC in both vertical blanks: New concept - two game loops: Note there are two gameloops which run in the top and bottom vertical blanks - batari BASIC only has one of these, but the extra vertical blank can run additional code instead of having to call draw screen - this is important because you can get up to twice as much time to do stuff. New concept - kitchen sink loop: What is this? Well SuperCharger BASIC also allows you to use an entire frame to run code which is a lot of time, this be done intermittently like with SuperCharger Space Invaders, or constantly like with this game, resulting in a 30 Hz display. New concept - 30 Hz displays and motion blur reduction: A 30 Hz display can be used to optimize motion blur reduction from panning the camera object and requires careful selection of the palette to minimize flicker. this game features smoothed jaggies; pulsed movement that is visibly smoothed. The forward roll on the ball is a pure 30 fps and smooth, the sideways color cycling animation is at 7.5 fps, but the transitions are at 30 Hz pulses. The PAL palette does not play nice algorithmically and needs a lookup table for flicker optimization if someone wants to create a PAL version!

If you launch The Best BBS and then hit break you will return to BASIC at 300 baud with IO mixed in through the bit-banger.

LOL you did that on purpose! I was about to say Escape from the Mind Master but realized I mixed it up with Tunnel Runner from reading the thread; very easy to do, both are first person perspective pacman ports.

Yes it generally only affects homebrews and hacks since the commercial releases usually filled the banks, interesting detection method. Chapter 17 has the details on how to add padding to get partially used banks to be recognized, Assembly or batari BASIC programs that are similarly affected can be fixed the same way: http://relationalframework.com/Atari_Flashback_BASIC_Manual.txt

If your 8K hack isn't using enough of the second bank it won't run, if this is the case you could fill some of the extra space with data so the Portable will recognize the bank.

Blueberries are blue berries, but there are blue berries that are not blueberries. Frye is indeed interlacing and racing the beam, but not the interlacing that offsets scanlines for doubled resolution.

I see tremendous potential with your browser based VM - I would have used it in Atari's iPhone Pong Challenge in 2012 if it was ready instead of the app VM apple was busy locking down because there's nothing to install and the emulation is excellent! Your VM is so transparent with the ability to link ROM's in the URL that it essentially turns all Atari games into phone games you can click to play - that's how I use it on my website. It's a very similar idea to my SQL VM that turns the iPhone into a development platform for SQL Server where the user just clicks a link and the phone transforms. http://RelationalFramework.com What I can't figure out is what's the App store for? Apple put a real browser on the phone and we can do anything with that

Great thread topic! I competed in Atari's 2012 Pong Challenge under Nolan Bushnell with just such a theme and was the only competitor to use an Atari as the virtual machine but they were all "Atari games" designed to capture the graphical/audio style while bending the rules a bit. It was a lot of fun!

Some more thoughts on the best BASIC's for education - I think Atari 2600 BASIC Programming is an excellent BASIC for learning to program (if you have the keyboard controller overlays) because it allows single statement programs and very small programs which have great utilty making it easy to learn: http://www2.gvsu.edu/brittedg/BasicProgramming.txt BASIC 10 liner contests back in the day and now are tremendous fun and fantastic for learning to program with any of the classic BASIC's. Modern BASIC's including bB have a steeper learning curve with GUI designers and include options compared to the single-statement-is-a-program model of classic BASIC. I gave this topic a lot of thought designing SuperCharger BASIC and it has a similar complex GUI designer mode like bB that I've written about recently in this article for advanced BASIC programmers who are interested here: But I also included an old-school mode specifically for education that allows single statement programs like: 10 vwpixel(5,5,on) Classic BASIC dialects allow the student to start right away, and to build on what they learn. Here's a 9 line Atari game for inspiration in classic BASIC - 0 data city 1,4,2,5,3,2,3,1,4,1,1,1,5,2,2,3,1,4,1,4,3,1,4,4,1,1,2,2,3,1,3,4,5,4,4,3,4,5,1,2,4,1,5,2,2,3,1,3,1,1,4,1 1 if g=0 then for j=0 to 7:player1(j)=189:player0(j)=pl(j):next j:BYTErowoffset=120:COLUPF=$42:COLUP0=$b4 else goto 3 2 for j=20 to 71:k=j-20:k=city(k)+14:for i=k to 19:vwpixel(j,i,on):next i,j:player0y=88:player0x=94:COLUP1=$74:y=20:g=1 3 COLUBK=0:AUDV0=0:scrollvirtualworldtoggle=1:BITIndex=BITIndex+1:missile0x=missile0x+2:data pl 0,224,127,231,252,192 4 if joy0fire=1 and y>=20 then AUDF0=6:AUDC0=8:AUDV0=15:x=BITIndex+11:y=11:i=88-player0y:i=i/10:y=y+i:data P 128,0 5 if y<21 then vwpixel(x,y,bindplayer1):j=y-10:y=y+1:COLUP1=M(j):data M $64,$54,$b4,$a4,$32,$44,$c4,$94,$f4,$54,$24,$42 6 if y<=19 and vwpixel(x,y,poll)>0 then vwpixel(x,y,flip):player1x=0:player1y=0:AUDC0=y:y=20:AUDF0=4:AUDV0=15 7 if BITIndex>71 then BITIndex=0:player0y=player0y-2 else missile1x=missile1x+1:missile1y=missile1y+3 8 if CXP0FB>126 then CXCLR=0:g=0:for i=0 to 255:AUDF0=i:AUDV0=i:COLUBK=$34:next i else missile0y=missile0y+2