LoTonah

You made out like a bandit. I'm not sure--do I hate you now, or is it just envy?

Personally, I have about four games in the pipeline for the //e... but they aren't really games that people would go "wow" over. The one that is likely to be done first is "Learning Math with Lexi", a Grade 5 and under math quiz game. It does feature double lo-res graphics and sound, but so far it's all been in Applesoft so it is slooow. Looking at ways of speeding it up. I'm also working on "Touch Me", the Atari Simon clone (again in double lo-res), and Defend, a conversion of the TRS-80 MC-10 game, plus another I don't have a name for yet. I'm right at the edge of what BASIC can do for me, so I'm dabbling more and more into Assembler. I'm a bit thick in the head and short on time, so I doubt I'll ever get really good at it. Doesn't stop me from trying, though! My current workflow (for BASIC): Write it in TextWrangler (I'm on a Mac), and copy/paste it into Virtual ][. That doesn't work for Merlin though, so for that I have to do it solely in Virtual ][. I have real Apples just twenty or so feet away, but they're on shelves, not desks, so doing any real work on them is uncomfortable.

I'm glad you're back, Thumpnugget. You're doing some first-class work here!

Yeah. I was hoping that new issues would be appearing "any day now", but it's been weeks.

seeding again... Thank you so much! Some of these issues really bring back memories. After school I would check the mailbox for the latest issue. I grew up on a farm in rural Iowa and this was the only magazine I subscribed to. When a new one would arrive I would read it cover-to-cover and carry it with me nearly everywhere. Typing in all the TRS-80 programs helped me learn to program better and I even sent a couple of my own programs in hoping to be published. Does anyone remember a segment called one-liners? It was a challenge to write an entire program in one line of "code", usually 255 bytes or less. I think that was in Softside but maybe it was Creative Computing?? Dave in Des Moines Nibble magazine for the Apple computers were pretty famous for their one-liners section. They even released a three compilation books (One Minute Apple Programs, Two Minute Apple Programs, Three Minute Apple Programs).

Never laid hands on one in real life, but I was playing around with it using the MESS emulator. It has a great BASIC, lots of neat things you can do with it. The game Traffic Jam is a blast, too. I've thought about trying to port it to either the Atari or the C64. Just found this website (while trying to recall the name of "Traffic Jam"). There are a LOT of sweet looking games for the TT. http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/carts.html

I actually *like* the original 7800 sticks. Sure beat the 2600 sticks, I can play a lot longer with them. Of course, I seem a little different than a lot of people. For example, I HATE big sticks like the stuff Wico used to make, but others love 'em. Hmm. Oh, and I have the European 7800 pad. It sucks, everything is too stiff and the buttons are not in a nice, ergonomic places. Too boxy, too--the NES controller got it right, Atari got it wrong. I recently ordered some parts from Sparkfun, if I get some free time I'm making my own controller, my way.

I bought a Plus/4 from eBay (Works, but sold as-is). Guess what didn't work? A few years later, I bought another one. Worked for 5 days, and died. A quick search on Google let me know that both computers had crappy TED chips. So I guess it was never meant to be, for me?

Cool. One of my favorite emulators... Atari800MacX, Virtual ][, and SDLTRS Keep up the great work!

Well, I can't help you with "6502 Games", but the other book can be found here: http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/books-generic.htm I own 6502 Games, too--but my scanner sucks! Sorry.

Snow Leopard's QuickTime Player has screencasting built in: http://www.maciverse.com/how-to-create-a-screencast.html I had no idea! If I do any more (or redo this one), I'll definitely give this a try. Thanks for the tip.

Yes, that would be great, especially with a good hi-res recording, like you could get, in that scenario. I would say that directory listboxes, and anything with a scrollbar would be a good start. Thanks! Hi, sorry about the delay. My six-week old baby girl wasn't feeling good last night so I didn't get far with this. But today, I did. Unfortunately, I don't own a good screen capture utility... it did a great job, but it has a huge watermark on it. Hopefully you can look past that and glean what you need out of it. I tried to show scrollbars, and the control panel. Let me know if there is anything else you need! -Don Youtube Video:

I know I can't really contribute much to the development of this project, but if you ever need to see a particular tool or feature of NextStep, I'm running it on VMWare and I can make videos for you. Just let me know.

Okay, it's been two weeks, are you back yet?

I'm in Penticton, B.C., but I can't say that I know much more than moving a player around using Batari. Why do you ask?

I've been reading all of the Compute! PDFs, in chronological order. Although it was known as "The Journal For Progressive Computing", until the IBM came out in 1981 it really was just a 6502-based magazine. You'd read a little about the TS-1000, but the only non-6502 based computer that they covered for the first few years was the Radio Shack Color Computer. There were a lot of books written for the Z80, just none by Compute!, and no books written in their "style", either.

Maybe after you're done this project you can run a web series on how to program assembler??? That's the most readable assembly code I think I've ever seen!

Oh, and Pixen comes close, but the "pixels" are always square. I'm looking for something that gives me a 4:3 aspect ratio for my palette and pixels.

Hi everyone, I do a fair bit of programming for the old 8-bit machines (Apple, Atari, Commodore), mostly in BASIC but dabbling in assembler. What I'm looking for is a paint program that you can set the resolution that you want to work at (say, 40x40 or 560x192), and it would create a canvas to work in that is roughly the size of a normal NTSC screen (in that aspect ratio). So the horizontal and vertical pixels would be stretched out like on the 8bitters. It would also be cool to have the ability to create and save a palette that matches whatever mode/computer that I wanted to emulate. I would prefer something OSX compatible, but I can also use Windows XP if that's all that is available. Any ideas?

That's awesome that you were able to get those back, memories like that are the best. I did the same thing earlier this year. Most of the stuff that I wrote in '87 and '88 (end of High School) worked, but anything before that wouldn't. Luckily, even as a little kid I was good about printing out my program listings and keeping them, so I have listings dating back to '79 (when I was nine, the first year I started programming). I've been typing a few of the better ones in again, just to have a few giggles

I really enjoyed HiSoft BASIC, but by the time I actually started getting comfortable with programming GEM, it was time to move on to the Windows world. You should check it out, though. Extremely powerful, not many bugs either.

Awesome, two in two days! Did I mention before that I really appreciate this???

Good to hear that you're doing well... and a Daddy, too! They can be a lot of fun, eh? It may seem mean-spirited of me though to wish that this winter is a long, nasty one that results in you doing a lot of work, especially on the Mac version. But that's just the kind of guy I am!

Everything okay, Thumpnugget? I sincerely hope so... you're doing a great job with this!

Back in the day, I drooled over the idea of owning one of these. Sadly, I don't think I could justify what one would cost now, because it'd be just a curiosity. Back then, I'd have used it for real work.