gozar

Altirra runs really well on the Steam Deck: Before that I used the GPD Win (1st version, and I can't find a picture of it) and a PiBoy:

By the time the 130XE came out I was already sporting an 800XL with 256K, so the 130 didn't bring anything extra to the table.

This is how good AtariWriter was at the time. Freshman year at college there were 4 computers in my corridor. A Mac that no one was allowed to touch, an original IBM PC that no one wanted to touch, and Apple ][+ without lowercase characters, and my Atari 800XL. Half the corridor typed up their papers in AtariWriter instead of walking to a computer lab, I still have several disks of other people's work from the time.

Back to the topic, I say you stick with AtariWriter or The Last Word at 40 columns. Back in the day I really wanted 80 colunmns, but nowadays I realize that I don't need 80 columns to write. The print preview in AtariWriter works well at showing where page breaks would be. I wrote A LOT in AtariWriter back in the day. When I write on my A8s today, I use The Last Word in 40 columns and use Markdown for formatting because I'm usually going to bring the text into something else anyway.

The directions are on the second disk of Atari 400 800 XL XE Printer Driver Construction Set Since the FX80 was so popular, Disk A already contains the driver for it. Copy it to your AtariWriter boot disk and name it autorun.sys. Boot up AtariWriter from that disk and you're good to go!

Upgraded my Incognito today! The link to the manual from the Incognito page doesn't work though https://atari8.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Ultimate-1MB-Incognito-1088XEL-1088XLD-SIDE-SIDE2-and-SIDE3-Firmware-Manual.pdf comes up file not found, but the link on the Ultimate page: https://atari8.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Ultimate-1MB-Incognito-and-1088XEL-U1MB-Firmware-Manual.pdf does work. Thanks again!!

Besides the other recommendations, I have Deluxe Invaders in one of the slots.

A couple of months ago I came across this video of programming Snake on the Apple II. After I got over the initial shock of how painful the Basic editor is on the Apple II, I thought that it would be cool to recreate it in AtariBasic. The culmination of which is now in a state that can be shared. Behold GozSnake in all it's glory! Yes, there are tons of improvements that need to happen, but at this stage I think I'll start over. I wrote this over the course of 4 livestreams without really planning anything. It is the epitome of spaghetti code. You can check out a bootable disk image and the code over at the Github repo. What I'm most proud of is the automatic updating of the Github repo as I program on my Atari 1200XL. Using a Fujinet and a local Linux host, I could automatically post the code to Github whenever I changed it on the Atari. Full details at my blog.

Awesome, thanks!!

I want to autoboot an AtariBasic program. Any pointers to an autorun.sys that will let me do that?

I did do some searching into how the Internet Archive does it, and found https://github.com/db48x/emularity so I now have a new project... 🙂

I want to put up some of my scrappy little AtariBasic programs online for others to play around with. Has anyone done this? What are my options?

My only experience with Apples was at school, and every //e we had came with the 80-column/64K card. Maybe home users didn't buy that card with their //e, but schools sure did. This was all in the '83-'87 time frame because I was out of high school by '87. 😉

I don't think I saw any Apple //e in the schools that did not have the 80 column/64K upgrade card in 1983, the same year the 1200XL was released. In fact, for all of the talk about how the Apple II line succeeded because of slots, a majority of them only had the 80 col/64K card, a disk controller, and Super Serial Card and were never upgraded.

It was too late for Atari by the time the XE line was released, 80 columns should have been added to the 1200XL (shameless self promotion).

Check out the Tomek cart to see what would be possible.

I wrote an article on what Atari could have done with the 1200XL to make it a success. Basically, add 80 columns to give it a huge enough advantage over the 400/800 line to make it something Atari users wanted to upgrade to while enticing others that were looking at the Apple ][+ to switch to (and be able to compete against the Apple //e that was being released).

Why, oh why, did the 354 drive exist?!?

He also helped by pushing the 8-bit line in Europe in the late 80s/early 90s, which gave the line a few more years of life.

@pixelmischief Have you looked at SD 3.2 or RealDOS?

I remember distributing this for people, I don't remember the specifics, but I did find this message: http://www.verycomputer.com/10_6b8a79768902a153_1.htm Too bad I don't really have anything from back in those days. :-(

However, there is nothing stopping you from using an 80 column E: compatible editor with your .act files.

Do you mean in the editor? Action! uses a custom screen handler so it can't work with the XEP80-II.

I didn't bother running it in the background. In my home folder I have a batch file: @echo off c:\Users\gozar\tnfsd.exe "m:\My Drive\Applications\Atari8" The tnfsd.exe is in my home folder, and all of my Atari files are in my Google Drive mounted at M:. This is my home network, so I'm not worried about anyone messing around with my stuff, and that I know it's only running when I run it.

Well, I was remembering wrong, it was the Unocart.