Shamus

I dunno, break it into two lines? Put everything after ON P=32 GOTO 40 into a line 41.

I dunno, for my money I'd look into Action!. It's fast enough to do (somewhat simple) graphics kernels with while still being fairly high level. And of course you can have my Mac/65 cart when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Dunno if there's a Mac version but it works quite nicely under Wine. Seems kinda like killing a flea with a flamethrower, using IDA for 6502 code--a bit of overkill.

Just thought I'd throw this out there: JAC's Silly Things demo doesn't work correctly in v1.58( c ). When the demo starts going, the "SILLY THINGS" line doubles in size, and the colored letters (the "S" and "T") are a solid color instead of being shaded. Also, when the demo gets to the picture section, the screen is filled with garbage characters. This is on Linux, with all the PAL options selected from an otherwise stock run. BTW, Thomas, is there any chance that you could incorporate Blargg's NTSC filter in Atari++ in the future? When I saw it in Atari800 1.2.0 I could've sworn I was looking at my good 'ol 19" color TV... Made me shed a tear, it did.

Cool demo and nice music. Great work JAC! I love how the transitions are smooth and flow very well everywhere--that's something you don't see much in demos these days. Just thought I'd post a little note here on emu compatibility: It works perfectly in Atari800 1.2.0 but for some reason, it doesn't work in Atari++ 1.58©. When it goes into the demo proper ("dots") the "SILLY THINGS" logo doubles in size, and the colored letters are a solid color. Also, the picture section shows garbage characters. Of course you all know how it works on real hardware.

In a word: Action!. It's a great combination of high level and fast. You can even do kernels with it. Back in the day I was able to do nice prototyping with it; before then it was an uneasy alliance of Basic and assembly. I can't say enough good things about it. But, eventually, you will want to learn assembly if you really want to push the hardware.

What's interesting about that and his homepage is the complete lack of any mention of anything he did at Atari. The silence on the matter is deafening--unless I'm mistaken (and I hope I am), I can't seem to find any commentary by him about any of that stuff. Also, any mention of Ballsong 1, 2 and Hollywood Medieval cannot be complete without mentioning Interval! Really great stuff! Well, if you have any interest at all in music it is.

Hm, never thought of using a joystick with Hollywood Medieval--I figured that since the console keys all did the same thing (turn a corner at the next available opportunity), there was no point to a joystick. Does it really do anything other than turn at the next corner (like the console keys)? I remember getting out of the maze exactly once. I can't remember which musical "passages" I took, but it was pretty cool, musically speaking. At least I think I got out--the music came to a "proper" end.

Hey Miker, Yeah, we're still alive and kicking; development is still ongoing but slow (it isn't my day job, what can I say?). I think speedwise we're still not there (not by a longshot) but we're inching the compatibility closer to 100% (ok, 99.9% or so--think bsnes and you get the idea). BTW, those other two projects that you mentioned are dead, dead, dead. Official forums are listed on the VJ homepage; I usually check those on a regular basis more than I do here. Besides, most ppl in the other forum on AA *cough* *cough* aren't interested in it.

Yes, quite good! :thumbsup: Like Metalguy said, it's amazing how people are able to push the limits of a thirty year old technology. The thing that really stood out to me was the fairly realistic SNARE drum. Wow! Quite impressive!

Yes, part 2 of Pitfall II had a proper ending and that was the end of it. No part 3, though that would have been cool. Wayout had the level selection screen at the start, yes. And some of the mazes had some powerful wind coming out of the exits too. It had pretty fast rendering from what I remember. And while you probably could do an RPG with that engine, I doubt you'd get the same speed with nice textures or large open areas.

Did it work for you?

Like I said in an earlier post, my brother and I played the "Hacker Cracker" cracked version of The City (he as an evil char, me as good) and never had any problems with it. So it occurred to me that that version probably didn't get wide distribution, so here's disk 1 for anyone interested in trying it. Couldn't find my copy of disk 2, but any should work with it (I played it last night in Atari800 using a disk 2 downloaded from the internet, and saving and reloading a character worked as I remember it from back in the day ). d0167a - Alternate Reality The City 1A.atr d0167b - Alternate Reality The City 1B.atr

Or heck, just sharing insight with the atari800 guys would be quite welcome. This post brought to you by Atari800--the Other White Meat!

I linked the interview in my first post in this thread, but here's the relevant part (linky): Now to me, it would seem that "after you had owned it for a while" would imply that he was changing the code on disk somehow. Or perhaps writing a counter as someone else mentioned. But I don't know, as I don't have a copy of the original.

Didn't I mention this before? Philip Price said in an interview that the game would change over time and your finding would seem to confirm it. The only way to know for sure would to be to get an original copy that's never been played and see if it changes after playing it for (say) a month. Perhaps that Homesoft version, if it's a full disk image, will start having gravity balls if you play it long enough.

Found it! Seems to work OK in the emulator, either XL or OS B. No greyouts, as far as I can tell. Does seem to have problems every once in while with shot collision detection, but I think all versions have that problem, no? Forgot how much fun this is and how difficult it is to play with a keyboard. Ok, I dug out the reference: It was in a PP interview: http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/PRICE.HTM d0139b - Tail of Beta Lyrae.atr

I have a copy that I got from a friend back in the day... Ahem... Let me see if I can dig it out of my archive. Also, I remember seeing something somewhere (vague, I know) where Philip Price said that the game would patch itself over time, so the game would constantly change itself... I wonder if that was just wishful thinking on his part or if he really implemented that. Now I have to go dig that reference out too.

IIRC RAMBrandt (Antic Software) was written in Forth.

For me there was one very good reason to have an ST: Dungeon Master. Even though it was a "move one square at a time" style RPG it was still quite awesome. OK, that and Time Bandits. And Cubase. And Revenge of the Doh... And Starglider... And.. And... Too bad there weren't any decent development tools for it, tho. I think that was the one thing I really missed about the ST: A quick, easy to use, fast-as-all-get-out language like Action! on the 8-bit...

Be sure to get a bottle of denatured alcohol and a pack of cotton swabs. I found out the hard way that sometimes the binder on those old floppies will have a tendency to let go of the disk when attempting to image them. Depending on how crucial your disks are to you, you might want to clean the heads after each disk.

OK, I see that Action!, Basic XL and Basic XE are *still* not in the database. So to correct this incredible travesty, I offer dumps of my own carts in .a8 format. Enjoy! I'm pretty sure I have the Action! manual kicking around here somewhere, and at least one of the Basic's manuals as well. For the record, the Action! image was from an orange OSS cart; Basic XL/XE carts were the black/yellow variety. If I can find the carts, I'll scan 'em for you. I have an image of the Basic XE extension disk (I think; it may just be the autorun.sys that loads the extensions) and I have either the Action! Runtime and/or Toolkit. If there's any interest in those, I'll dredge 'em up for y'all. OSS Carts.zip

Sorry about that, I wasn't really clear. What I meant was the moderators over there that read this forum. I know you guys can't do anything about them.

I have an idea where the bottlenecks are, and those that I don't I can use gcov & gperf to tell me. We've been purposefully holding off on optimization in order to get the emulation right--speed is easy to do once the pieces of the emulator are correct. ATM one of the major bottlenecks is the new blitter, but that's to be expected as it's a pretty low level approach. And since lots of programs use it, it slows down lots of stuff these days. Again, optimization is a no-brainer for such areas, but we want it to be right first. EDIT: Could a moderator approve my application to FJP? Pretty please?

Oooo! A challenge! @CyranoJ: Good see you around here, and sad to hear about all the BS going on. I wish it weren't true but I have to agree 100% with Curt's assessment. A real shame. (Note to others: That's all I'm going to say about it and I won't reply to anyone who brings it up.) BTW, I can't speak for Niels and the others, but I wouldn't mind it at all if you guys would pick on our emulator and let us know where it's falling down for y'all. We just got hold of some interesting things that aren't working (and now one more, thx ) and have thus fueled our motivation.