kenjennings

That's different. All the microSD to SD card adapters I have look like SD cards. the MicroSD card slides into the top of the SD-like card, and then it goes into any SD card slot.

Does every $0d have to be assigned in the source at compile time? (either explicit array element assignment or array declaration) Couldn't it work with a loop assigning array elements at run time? (less typing). How does pascal keep the array space from crossing over the 1K display list boundary limit? Or have the working examples just been lucky up to this point ?

Awesome. in 1987 one of the computer classes in the Air Force's computer programming tech school used punched cards. The computer was some kind of Honeywell mainframe, or something. Mostly I remember the six bit "bytes". And the fact my assembly language deck ended up with exactly 256 cards. I heard a card punch system was still being used for Basic Trainee payroll when I left the Air Force.

What I find interesting is that even though almost nobody had one at the end of 1979, the Atari 800 was on the cover of Compute issue 1 (late 1979) along with systems that had been on the market for years; Pet, Apple, and other 6502 single board computers. The first "Atari Gazette" column is basically a thick sales brochure for the system. The lead time on magazine publishing probably meant the editors put it together well before anyone could even buy one. The Atari 8-bit capabilities were so paradigm shifting the editors just couldn't help themselves.

EVERYTHING happens during the first scan line of a display list instruction. ( In this case this is the instruction that belongs to the first scan line after the display list instruction with the DLI) The stuff that happens includes the DMA for the Display list instruction, the DMA for the screen memory, and (if applicable) the DMA for the character set. Less happens on other lines of the display list instruction. I did a demo program that banged on COLBAK continuously on a screen of blank line instructions. Every 8 lines the colors were offfset a bit and then I realized what I was looking at.

And it was actually used in arcades. The motherboard in Exidy's Max-A-Flex systems was an Atari 8-bit. Not really sure why anyone would play Astro Chase, Flip and Flop, Bristles or Boulder dash for a roll of quarters when one could play it on an Atari at home. And the Amiga was also used in about a half-dozen arcade systems. Couldn't find anything definitive about the ST being used in an arcade system. Atari Arcade post-tramiel purchase was a separate company from Tramiel's Atari and their 68000-based arcade systems were in-house developments, not STs.

I bought it on a previous sale on Steam. Its a space shoot-em-up, but that's about as similar as it gets to the original Star Raiders.

Yup. I work for transaction processing at a bank. The credit systems run on mainframes and they hire people and teach them COBOL. Banks are the cheapest sons-of-guns on the planet and won't replace anything until it rusts away to nothing.

Hmmm. Have not ever encountered Fortran on the Atari 8-bits. From what I read of the syntax it appears Fortran does not require any characters that the Atari lacks. (Like the way C needs danged, curly braces.) https://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Fortran_77_Tutorial&stable=1 Not necessarily very complicated. Should be doable for someone inclined to port compilers..

The places with a long run of values in sequential memory don't look a lot like missing code. The long sequences of zeros that don't match the original suggests there's a lookup table declared without data... just guessing. Doesn't Mac/65 make a lot of segments in large object files? Or am I thinking of another assembler?

Yes!. That semi-modal pop-out of the picture is the most annoying thing about the AtariAge site. Please, if it could just open to a new tab and let the browser deal with the picture then picture handling would be more convenient.

Awesome! Someone else who watches THE GREATEST COMEDY SHOW on cable TV today!!!!! I rarely stop laughing during the shows.

Great Scott! This is a paradox that could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!... Granted, that's the worst-case scenario. The destruction might be limited to our own galaxy. So, NOBODY go see the movie. :-)

I have these books too. Microsoft BASIC on the Atari is likely closest to the BASIC in these books. However, most of the programs are not that complex and porting them to Atari BASIC (or my preference, BASIC XL) is not unreasonably difficult, especially since almost none of those programs actually do "graphics", because most originate on computers that used teletypes. The first book has a big section discussing porting programs to many flavors of BASIC. Atari BASIC is left out, because the computer didn't even exist when the first book was published. Back in the 80s I had a fantasy of redoing all those games in the book for the Atari with graphics and sound. And then when I looked at them closely I found that many of the programs (most notably the "sports" programs) were just exercises in random number generation. User input was sometimes superfluous. I definitely recall doing Awari and Acey Ducey. It is possible I did more. Been looking for those floppies in my mountain of old disks for a while. They're around here somewhere.

The 2600 game is the only one I can think of. What do you mean by NTSC friendly? Is there something floating around that's PAL only?

Maybe a poll? Is it possible to do a poll with one choice?

FYI: Everywhere I see the subject of republican senators demanding to approve the royal baby name it is presented as political satire/fiction.

Which Atari? On the 2600? Like: Space Invaders Superman Adventure Haunted house Super Breakout Indy 500 Most stuff from Activision and Imagic Hated: Defender PacMan (No, I won't put ET here, it's not so bad) Atari 8-bit computer: Like: Shamus Mountain King Defender PacMan Dig Dug Donkey Kong Star Raiders Star Trek Strategic Simulation Rescue On Fractalus Archon

I didn't have money for a disk drive back in the 80s. I only had the 410 cassette and had to envy others with floppy drives. The only thing I hated more than working with cassettes was.. well, nothing, really. The most value I've seen for a cassette device is The Atari Educational System. The only other reason I can think a person might want tape is that a direct-to-run game loads directly from tape without DOS, though this is easily done from disk with a small bootloader. I'd rather see something else clever built into the OS than the C: device.

Absolutely hilarious. I almost snorted my Dr Pepper soda.

I'd like to see that check. Who sent it?

Wow. Wikipedia is wonderful. From 1979 through 1985 not one western-themed game for Atari 8-bits? It doesn't even list the classic Outlaw for the 2600. I gotta fix that.

Curly braces are not valid Atari characters only in the visual sense. The ROM character set doesn't have any corresponding shape for those two. But, in text files those characters are just plain old bytes. The Atari can read any byte value. It is just that these bytes won't mean "open brace" and "close brace" in the ATASCII character set. Open brace is ASCII value 123. The ATASCII character 123 is the spade graphic character, Ctrl-semicolon. Close brace is ASCII value 125. The ATASCII character 125 is the clear screen character.

The problem we have here is that all the undocumented instructions are now documented, so by definition there are no undocumented instructions. So, we must escalate to something even more cleverer, just because there cannot be enough clever(er)ness. What to use then? . . . . High energy cosmic rays? . . . . Hair dryers? . . . I got it -- using a bug in any of the custom chips cause the OS to crash in a way that increments Y and then of course, safely recover from the crash as if nothing happened..... Yeah, that's the ticket. Any good programmer could do that. So, make it challenging.... Do it in BASIC. And you're only allowed to assign even numbers to variables.

What?