Dmitry

I will continue to do updates to the end of the thread based on the feedback. This week's update - Covid has impacted development now. I have 3 children. 1 son in college, 1 daughter living on her own, working. and 1 minor child who still lives with me. anyway my son and daughter came over for Christmas, including my daughter's boyfriend, but he wasn't feeling well. He went home, but later got a test - he has Covid! And he was here feeling sick with a fever! Nooooooooo..... So, now we are all quarantined for 14 days. I hope we aren't infected, but it's not hard to imagine that we are. Anyway - on the development of the game, the hand coded assembly is making things plod along a little bit, but the development path now feels very much like the PC version, I would be shocked if there is any show stopper. I reworked the fire graphics, I think they look better now. Fires are placed using tables for each level, in other words the engine is coming together, it should have some playable elements after collision detected is added. Having a blast, other than covid, of course....

Merry Christmas Friends! Well, I opened a present early, it was a new desk! Unfortunately damaged in shipping, so I went to Staples and bought the desk in the pictures. Still very nice to have a new desk! And for the first time in many years, I typed in a program from a magazine. It was an old game called 130XE Extended Bank demonstration. I don't want to brag, but I got the high score pretty quick. Finally, my Atari 1200XL is working. Well, I couldn't remove the U1MB, so I decided to go ahead and remove the Rapidus, and I will have a different machine for that. I'm having a great Christmas with the whole family coming to visit and I hope you are having a very Merry Christmas as well.

@flashjazzcat I love your videos, btw, I probably said that before. Yes, if I were in the UK, I know one guy that would get all my work, lol But anyway, its always like this for something. I am a cyclist, I do all my own cycling repairs, and yet most of my friends take their bikes in once a year for a 'tune-up' --a working bike they go to the shop once a year and pay the shop $120. To me it sounds like my friends once a year spend $120 for absolutely nothing because, what the heck is a tune-up - the guy eyeballed the bike, maybe adjusted the brakes. But they do it, they like doing it. Hmmm, maybe Atari techs need to offer a once year tune up service, for working machines, omg....I'm terrible. OK, well I've got a couple Atari's on order, once they arrive, I'll get this 1200xl fixed. At the moment the 1200xl is the only working machine (such as it is).

In order to stop making this thread longer and longer, I will just update this particular post and not create new ones for status updates. I tend to do a status update every few days, so it would get rather long. I'm writing a game for fun - and finishing the game is a big part of the fun. However, also just talking is part of the fun. /***********************************/ /* The latest status post */ /**********************************/ /* Status posted on 12/21/2020 */ Working on fire animations. Decided to target 130XE as the machine, and a disk (atr) will load it into the machine. Switching to Mac/65 for development of game logic, as mentioned the C environment is so cool! But I'm a noob, I gotta see what's going on man! that means assembler, somehow that unlocks the mysteries slightly faster. all artwork will be done on the Mac, custom mac based tool will create screen data for writing to the atr.

FYI, I think this is an interesting topic too, the cost of being "soldering challenged" in this hobby. My dad had the soldering skills, it skipped a generation unfortunately. To remove a u1mb, but still have traditional memory that the device was installed to supply in the first place: Shipping to technician: $40 Return shipping: $40 Traditional Rambo upgrade, unpopulated: $40 Charge for 256k of ram: $60 Time: 2 x $60/hr. : $120 This leaves out details like replacement roms/mmu $300 This was a generic price, used to represent various quotes, no particular operation. I talked to four different vendors. The details are different, one shop quotes $80/hr. Many will only do part of the work, not all of it. Like one guy would do some of the work, but won't touch rom replacement.

Thank, I'll give it a try. If I mess up flashing this thing, no biggy, it's gonna be removed anyway....but I'd like to try anything to get this thing sorta-workign a bit better...

I can see you point, but as a practical matter that is what it costs. Tech time is about $60 to $80 an hour, depending upon the person. I am having a 1mb upgrade removed, and a traditional upgrade in it's place. So add that traditional rambo xl to the cost. So I need, a traditional ram upgrade, flashed XL OS, MMU some jumpers changed. That plus it will take 3 months and the technicians are free to ask for more. For the most part, I do trust all the Atari folks I've dealt with - but I've also been ripped off big time and cannot forget that experience either. ---p.s. that isn't throwing shade on this most excellent install. I"m talking about a project I invested in years ago. No, this Atari 1200xl was installed to perfection, I love it - it's just that we didn't know about the compatibility problems. Perfectly understandable, and I didn't even notice for four years, but now with daily development, its so not fun to have problems...ugh This fix will be $300 - as a practical matter, I cannot find any less expensive options, I priced it out with four different technicians.

Agreed, I am having it fixed eventually. But, it is also a 3 month calendar delay to having it fixed. So, looking for short term relief.

how much trouble to create an image? Idont have a windows machine or I would try it. I can only use uflash. The uflash utility seems to envision that you only want to replace one basic with another. It has no facility to delete an image. I want them deleted. My original flash had two empty slots. that helped my flKy machine because I could select an empty slot. can anyonr share an image with two empty basic slots? or preferably all four empty? it is going to cost me close to 300 dollars to have my u1mb removed. if I could try it one last time without basic slots that is something I would like to try. thanks

Hey Billy, doing the same here, rebooting my Atari habit from time to time. I think a lot of folks started with the bedroom programming in the 80's and then turned it into a career. After college I didn't own a computer for about 5 years, I thought that was still an option back then! Although I ended up going into IT I spent many years doing database administration. Back when the iPhone was getting big, I heard the siren call to return to programming. Which I still do today, except now in the area of data science/healthcare analytics. Well welcome. I'm only recently starting this latest round of nostalgia myself! Personally I wanted to just be productive on day one, and I spent some time thinking about what would do that for me. I was keenly interested in Action as well. I just don't feel like there are enough Action examples, and I'd worry if I ran into a bug, that I'd run into a road block. But in the end, I chose C/Assembler. It's actually more of a newish choice, I guess, but whenever I run into an issue I can just switch to assembler, which is probably the best supported development option of all on the Atari.

Thanks for the game, I played it for a while, it was quite fun. Excellent work!

I bought the one off e-bay called 'retro-bit' a couple weeks ago, it worked literally for the first 10 minutes, and then I heard a loud snap, and that was it. What junk. I think I'll just pick up a genesis controller.

Speaking on the original topic, of Atari's lost opportunities, from my perspective, nobody made it. I mean Sinclair, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Radio Shack, not to mention Osbourne, Kaypro, etc. I was disappointed in Atari for a while, but nowadays, with the benefit of hindsight, I have to say, they never had a chance. In fact all those early companies are gone, except one, Apple. ...and they nearly went out of business for a few years there. Speaking of Apple, what a turnaround. I'm glad I got on the Mac train after Atari.... For me the Mac market is quite the exciting "little" market. The fact that Apple just released M1 Mac's on their own silicon and on power per watt basis, is stomping the competition, to me this is about as an exciting time to be in computing, as it was in the 80's. That they introduce exciting languages like Swift and get this huge swell of focus on their free development platform, I see parallels to the old days of integrated-basic computing there as well. in terms of buying a computer and writing code for it with a rich community of coders writing for a beloved platform - it's all there. Just missing player missile graphics and a cartridge port.

I notice nobody said pick up a copy of OSS Personal Pascal, that's disappointing! ha....back in the day, when the ST came out, I decided not to continue on with Basic. I bought my machine with OSS Personal Pascal as a day 1 purchase...I came close to buying C instead. I'm sure I picked it based on the advertisement for it had some exciting wording on it. I recall OSS Personal Pascal was decent for writing GEM applications back in the day, at least I found the documentation to take me step by step through implementing menus and such. My magnum opus was a computer aided teaching system on using the dewey decimal system. You didn't mention what you were writing, but if you are looking to do writing computer aided learning tutorials - then you asked the right guy - pick up a copy of OSS Personal Pascal haha....ah...no. OK. I'll go stand in the corner.

This is *not* a major update, I just get some kind of joy out of small things. But the sprite multiplexing is done. Player0 is all the balloons on the screen. The other players are also multiplexed, e.g. Player 2 is the grey bucket on the bottom, but also part of the green building color. And I'm going to show a little discipline and not implement the big bosses until the game is otherwise complete - I think. Also this is some compact code right: while(1) { read_joystick(); handle_balloons(); handle_edge(); delay(); } haha, I'm just being a clown. I like the c environment I hide everything, and that means it's now organized

Back in the day, after suffering with an old color tv to the point I was ready to throw the TV and the Atari directly into the ocean, someone took mercy on me and sold me an Amdek 300A, I think I traded him my 256K Atari 800XL, which probably seemed unusual to him. I wanted a monitor, and had moved on to a 130xe. So I had a composite amber monitor with no sound. I was one of the few people that could've used a XEP80 and would've loved it, but alas, it came out a bit too late for me, I had moved on to an Atari ST by then. I still strongly want to use 80-columns for the reasons Drac030 mentioned - 80 columns LW, 80-column file explorer, 80-column code editor, and sometimes an 80-column terminal, sure. It's a pity Atari never really solved this for us...the Coco users can just get a Coco3, the commodore folks can get a 128. In the Atari community right now, the VBXE is the closest thing to a standard, but it requires soldering and that's prohibitive in some ways. Anyway, I'm keenly interested in any 80-column solution...40 years later, right, lol

@JesperGravgaard, Thanks for your help. AF3 and AF4 were defined with export, to ensure the compiler included them. However, they weren't actually used. Still, this observation may be unimportant since I have made changes since my post, and can no longer test with that exact code again. Later I added AF3 and AF4 to the init, because I was on a task to zero memory that I was to use in my program. I suspect when I made my post I was relying on the observation that other inline ASM tended to be included in the created assembler output with comments included. Maybe...hard to say now. I put the C based code back in place, and I do see it in the assembler output now. The code does glitch big time with it in place, (by this i mean my player flashes) the player flashing is usually an interrupted DLI. I will probably eventually need to figure this out....but for now, I'll have to put it aside. It's too much to ask someone to look into it for me. I guess for me, I'll have to evaluate if C is helping. If I were an expert in atari hardware and asm, and didn't mind going to the asm to examine what the C was creating, this tool is really sweet. But for me, alas, I am learning the atari hardware, and the high level languages tend to hide what I need to be learning. When I put this "if" clause in now, it tends to work, except the man starts flashing. The man flashing, tends to occur when the dli that colors the man is interrupted. I know dli are non maskable interrupts. I mean another dli can interrupt and dli...who knows. There is no obvious relation to writing an if statement and having a dli glitch....I have no doubt there is a relation, but, I just mean, I may just find it more productive to stick to asm as I ponder these things...OK, but it is a great tool, love it...I'm torn. Thanks for the help, I'll try not to drag you into what turns out to be something else.

I decided to move this post here. A person was talking about Fixit Felix Jr, and I just love the look of that game. The super big boss concept. Here is my theory, the Atari can do vertical and horizontal scrolling on only a portion of the screen, by construction a DLI with an LMS on every scan line. In that way you can put in a mega boss, and have it jumping around the screen. Not only that, because of the line by line color swaps, you can even put a gradient on it, imho, that would be hard for many 8-bit machines to match. In this mockup a super big UFO would be trying to throw a beam on our hero (a beam would be a great use of a player since, it can span the height of the screen too). Well this mockup is amateurish, but hopefully anyway demonstrates the idea

deleted - was making comment on super big bosses, but I'll move elsewhere....

oh wow, first I heard of this, I want a PT version, thanks

Funny you should mention that, I just recently came across Fix It Felix jr. I was really getting into youtube videos there for a bit, and came across some retro gaming news site that had it featured. I was quite impressed. And also inspired a bit, about some "big boss" ideas that would really play to the Atari's strength....if I can remember I'll come back to the thread after coming up with a xex mockup.

but p.s. my comment about 65c816 wasn't about the rapidus... a while back I bought an Antonia 4mb, and was recently trying to get that going in an Atari 800XL. The thought occurred to me, that the super fans tend to buy hardware upgrades...if it's just a matter of losing a few cycles to not using sbc , I'd just go ahead and see if my game can go ahead and support Antonia users. I rather hope most Rapidus users can switch into 6502c mode and don't have my problems. But Antonia is a cpu replacement.

Oh man, you don't know how much I want to unbork this machine. Back in 2016, when I had a technician put together this 'ultimate 1200xl' it wasn't known this combination doesn't work (u1mb/rapidus), but it is super frustrating to me now... The price to get it all repaired is high, like well over $300. I have no skill at it, and to remove the u1mb, I'd need to flash 1200xl roms, replace I think the mmu...something like that, plus maybe solder some jumpers... Anyway, yes, even if I gather the consensus is the Rapidus isn't playing well with others, the u1mb is what I want removed, based on the logic that the combination of the two is the issue. I totally agree that the U1MB is not at fault, but unfortunately it'll someday be the victim of this failure to play together. Right now this this machine is random, it tells me what its goign to do, I don't tell it anything.... lol Anyway I have a 130XE with no mods on the way...I'll use that and enjoy the break from the madness.

@xxl Yes, probably - although I didn't realize it at first. My computer is borked. Even if I put it in 6502c mode, it may throw itself into 65c816. So, that's not good. Too many variables and not enough experience with what works and what doesn't....but even still this is good, I would want my program to run with 65c816. But now I get why it wasn't important to default away from using these undoc'd opcodes. The mystery slowly unravels....

I am just copying terms I find on websites, I find that one website says illegal, one says undocumented, I inevitably use the wrong word - but it doesn't represent an opinion, just an attempt to use the word I found somewhere. OK it is slowly dawning on me, this is what xxl tried to communicate as well. Even if I think this Atari has a 6502C as one of its choices, there is no telling what it is using....it's pretty borked, I have another computer on order. Let's say it was thrown into 65c816, using compatibility mode, would that explain a problem with undoc'd opcodes?