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gozar

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Posts posted by gozar

  1. On 11/1/2023 at 8:58 AM, reifsnyderb said:

    My thought is to imagine it's the 1980's.  You already have an Atari 800 or 800XL.  Maybe you have a 600XL that was upgraded to 64k.  Why do you need to buy an Atari 130XE?  Is the extra memory more important than the tradeoff of the bad keyboard and ridiculous location for the cartridge port?  Most likely, the answer is no.  Most Atari software, in the 1980's, would run on a 48k machine anyhow.

     

    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.

    • Like 3
  2. 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.

     

     

    • Like 4
    • Thanks 1
  3. 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.

     

    • Like 1
  4. 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!

     

    1759366405_2022-10-20GozSnake.thumb.png.2d21a42b4018261c1c5d287155ec24fe.png

     

    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.

    • Like 8
  5. On 10/3/2022 at 10:57 AM, Keatah said:

    Not at all. //c was the first of the II series to get it.

     

    The III isn’t part of the II series.

     

    The IIgs would also have it, September 1986. Though myself and others don’t recognize the GS as being part of the II series.

     

    And Platinum wouldn’t come out till Jan 1987. This model came with 80-columns as a standard feature.

    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. 😉

    • Like 1
  6. On 10/3/2022 at 12:24 AM, Lynxpro said:

     

    That would've been very ambitious to have done that with the 1200XL. I mean, when did Apple get 80-columns standard in their Apple II computers? Apple definitely had official 80-column expansion cards that had extensive support both from Apple and from their vast number of 3rd Party developers.

     

    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.

    • Like 2
  7. On 9/28/2022 at 1:05 PM, ivop said:

    They could have added an 80 columns mode with an integrated XEP-80 (well, the chip, not connected to PIA obviously :)) in the 130XE, with added 80 column E: driver in the OS. That would have been great. IIRC the C128 has an 80 columns mode, too. Reusing XEP-80 tech would have dramatically reduced cost compared to creating a new chipset.

    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).

     

    • Like 5
  8. 21 hours ago, Jetboot Jack said:

    The thing I like about the Harmony is that the games work on a standard 2600, you buy the cart and you play it on stock hardware - to the user there is no hardware upgrade, just a cart like any other. Sure it's not pure 2600, but does anyone say Starfox or Stunt Race FX or Yoshi's island are not SNES games, no they don't, but w/o the FX chip they could not be done...

     

    Something like this for the A8 would be fantastic, an opportunity to have some additional computational power that works on stock hardware and is utterly invisible to the user. It's just a cart game...

     

     

    ...

     

     

    If games like Draconian or Galagon can be achieved on the 2600, what could the A8 deliver with a Harmony style cart?

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

    • Like 2
  9. 6 hours ago, Stephen said:

     

    Better shoot for the lowest common denominator machine and still target 16kB while the cheaper competitors had 64kB.  This is why we didn't get proper ports BITD.  It's why we didn't see support for the 64kB machines when the C64 was out swinging for the fences.  It's why we didn't see support for the 130XE.  Times change, machines evolve.  I've never owned a computer (or car) in my entire life that I didn't upgrade or modify in some way.  We all wanted an upgraded 8-bit (not the 100% unrelated in every way ST) back around 1985.

    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).
     

  10. On 9/14/2022 at 12:53 PM, Hawkeye68 said:

    In May of 1987, I ordered a mono-520ST and a box of diskettes for $536 shipped.  I bought a color monitor later.  It's easy to forget now, but that kind of pricing made it possible for me (and thousands of others) to get a 16-bit machine.  After all, if you couldn't afford one all arguments about which machine was better would be purely academic.  :)

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

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1
  11. On 9/14/2022 at 1:51 AM, Muzz73 said:

    Something I think that we can all agree on, though; Jack Tramiel saved Atari as Irving Gould saved Commodore. You have to take the good with the bad. After all, without Jack there would have been no ST. 🤔

    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.

    • Like 2
  12. 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.

    • Like 1
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