sack-c0s

One of those days waiting for automates processes to run for an absolute age.. got bored. knocked this together. Not the greatest thing in the world but it did stop me being bored for a bit at least this comes under my usual DWTFYLWI licence sack_whereismymind.zip

Interesting, isn't it Imagine... it's 1979, you plug in a Cartridge, plug it to the stereo and you get such music and graphics in a game... I wonder, what could be the best way to get the "Goat Tracker" files converted to the RMT. Some tunes yell for being converted to the A8 Put goattracker at one side of the screen, RMT at the other and port it across pattern-by-pattern, fixing up as you go. Due to the tuning issues with Pokey an automated process doesn't always sound that good so this really does end up being the least painful way of getting a good result.

goatTracker is open source, so maybe fixing that up would work? It would just be minor surgery on a windows editor (mostly just the warning stuff for selecting load addressses and zeropage usage) and the register addresses in the playroutine (and maybe the frequency tables? Not sure about the clocking). That way people could edit their own tunes comfortably, and any existing workfiles could just be saved out for the atari so they can be reused.

Only famous - not rich. You can't sell a conversion. At least not without asking Steve Rowlands permission. They did allow a rerelease of Mayhem in Monsterland, but that was self-published to start with. Seeing as creatures went out through Thalamus it might be a different issue as to whose permission is needed though. I'm trying- I just need a little less work getting in the way

if I'm coding in notepad and writing NEW 10 . 20 REM PROGRAM GOES HERE 30 . 40 . RUN and pasting that whole thing into altirra each iteration will that have the same effect as that trick?

I never understood why to be honest - Uridium looks like it should be an A8 game

IT - I remember that... --Would you like fries with that? ++Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I'm going to give up with the odd string handling of Atari basic and just poke my screen into existence then. Now to find somewhere safe to stash display lists, PMs and stuff like that...

As someone who has tried to live in a second language I think people need to be a lot more forgiving of people who learn english. Having a Spanish girlfriend has taught me that you are bloody lucky if English is your first language because at times it is so nonsensical you wouldn't *ever* want to learn it as a second language.

That's not a cover of 'Don't go' - it's the theme to the original cartoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fiPfIjAnA0 If you want to do a cartoon theme cover then it's pretty much got to be 'the mysterious cities of gold'

so I can just code it BASIC V2 style?

I do like a good Breakout clone; if it was only an hour and 1K of code up to now, that could be a hit We all like a good breakout clone - when I come across one I'll let you know It's mostly the clunky ball movement methinks - time to plumb in some PM graphics to improve things a bit...

This is what just over 1K, about an hour of free time and 15 years without writing any BASIC gets you It's a suprisingly hard language to return to when you've been away for so long and I can't say I miss it much

tempted now... can I even remember how to program in BASIC though? EDIT: Starting to get the hang of this using the 'paste into Altirra' method. Nobody told me about those bloody error messages in Atari BASIC (or rather the lack of...)

Is he going for port 1 or port 2?

I would agree with most NES music. But some tunes weren't "soulless". Particular this Robocop tune, surprised me. Castlevania .... Batman.... Journey to Silius... outstanding stuff. I wasn't too big on NES music either - but Tim Follin changed my mind It's just that amazingly weak sine channel that is a deal breaker for me. the chip I'm interested in playing with at the moment is actually the SNES SPC - that sounds and feels to me like what a successor to the SID would've been

commodore BASIC is from $A000-$BFFF, hence the little 4K hole from C000-CFFF people use for wedges, little blocks of machine code or any other big block of data that needs to be poked in from basic. I never did understand why they didn't just map the bloody thing in at $B000-$CFFF and be done with. That way folks could've had a choice - if they wanted more basic memory they had an extra 4k, if they wanted that 4K for other purposes they could just move the ramtop down.

Sack also thinks he speaks Portuguese just because he thinks it's almost the same as Spanish. The same if C64 Basic has 'POKE' and also the Atari then knowing one and you know the two... I didn't say I *spoke* Portuguese - it's read-only to me (and for the mods - if I reported that post there it's not offensive or anything - I just missed the 'quote' button)

Z80 strikes me as being much better for C. The 16-bit stack helps a lot (and would make multitasking much easier too), the extra registers in place of the zeropage and the IX/IY registers can be used for struct pointers. I think for me C in 6502 would be a case of fleshing out and validating an algorithm, and then reducing it down by hand to what it should be

In my current framework code I'm playing with I'm taking the NMI vector at $FFFA/FFFB after banking the OS out and it works just fine, but that leaves the minor problem of things not working on 48k machines. Thing is what I have in mind would probably fit into an original 800, so I'd like to keep compatibility if at all possible. Is there a another way of retaining 800 compatibility or would I just need to leave the OS intact and go through the OS handler at $E45C?

I've been working on a little A8 stuff and looking at example code I find that BASIC actually obscures things. Yes the code examples I came across would run on any machine for anybody because everyone has access to BASIC and can type them in but ,just as on the c64, it gets distilled down to an unreadable chunk of DATA statements and a POKE loop. I'd rather have a readable (and ideally commented) chunk of 6502 myself. Mind you - on the BBC micro you could do that...

Technically I speak french on account of having a B in GCSE french, in reality I have a rough grasp of Spanish (I've forgotten a lot, but it still lets me brute-force my way through Portuguese much to the amusement of josé). Although I have been turned down for jobs in Spain on the grounds that 'technically you don't speak English'. It seems you need certain certificates to prove it, all of which are 'as a second language' and as such people whose mother tongue is English are barred from sitting the exams. I'm rubbish at maths and can code for the C64 and bespoke microkernel assembly language for GPUs. Not quite sure how that happened - I think it's down to by sheer luck it needs the least worst parts of my maths to do it.

There's an awful lot of pokes in that display list tutorial. isn't there a command for that stuff?

quoted for maturity

Thanks - I'll have a look to see what I can do. I want to do a do! runrun-esque game but I'd like to do it over the c64 and the A8 if I can. Obviously I don't want to completely compromise it and do something half-arsed on both machines if I can do a version that fits the graphical strengths of both well, but I'd like to at least keep logic and level design across the two so I need to do a bit of investigation and figure out where to draw the line. I'll get back to you when the dayjob eases off a bit