awsm

Thanks TracMan, quite a fascinating read for an Atari Newbie like me. I need to learn more about charset graphics, color and resolutions of the 8 bit Ataris (I upgraded from a C128 to an Atari 1040 STE back in the 90s). I'm surprised that the colors turn out to be a challenge here, might not be worth the effort maybe.

Hey TracMan, colors are no special trick, really. Both C16 and C64 use multicolor charsets with an individual foreground color per char. I've released an updated version for the C16 with uses an identical charset and looks similar. Border colors can be set completely individual from the rest of the charset colors on the C16 and C64. The different player colors (green face, pink face) are because the green face is the original whereas the pink face is my correction. Technically it was simply a matter of assigning different colors within the charset. Funny as the updated C16 version does use grey as border color.

Yeah, the game is quite unforgiving, but that's more or less the point of the game. I still remember my sweaty hands moving the joystick around when I was a kid. I must admit I know too little about the specifics of the Atari platforms. The character limit would defenitely be a challenge. Since you did some conversions already: what else would be typical challenges when converting a game from Plus/4?

Hi! I recently ported the game Ghost Town from the Commodore 16 to the Commodore 64 and made the source code available on Github: https://github.com/Esshahn/Ghost-Town I was wondering if anybody here would be interested in porting the game over to Atari's 8bit computers? Being a Commodore 16 game initially, hardware requirements are very low, e.g. no hardware sprites, no scrolling. It's mostly character based. If you are interested, feel free to get in touch with me ( also on twitter: @awsm9000 ), I'd be happy to get you started. You can download the game here (even play it in the browser): http://www.kingsoft.de/ And I've written a blog post about the conversion process here: http://hinterding.com/ghost-town-64/ Cheers! Ingo

Can somebody help me out a bit getting my Gotek to work in my STE? This is how far I've come: - I got the Gotek drive - I soldered the pins to the board - I've ordered a USB2TTL writer The best setup guide I have found so far is this video: Questions: - The guy in the video does use a different firmware than the one from the hxc website (which costs 10€). Is that recommended? - I do not own a windows machine but a Mac, has anybody successfully completed the process using a Mac? Thank you all in advance, cheers!

Thank you Jeff for taking the time and giving me really good advice on how to progress from here. I'm now at step 3 (the score and timers) and it really takes me a long time to understand most of it. Probably, because the code - at least for me - is so cleverly written. It feels like unzipping the code in my brain.

Thank you SpiceWare, I've started the tutorial. Excellent work, well written and full of valuable information.

Snap! Didn't catch that one, thanks for letting me know. I need to learn more about that then. Thanks! Really? Hm. Can't spot my error there... Wow. Okay. Guess I have to respect that then. Thank you for the heads up Understood! I will make sure to take more time getting familiar with the details and the tutorial provided. Thank you for pointing me to it.

Hello everybody, I'm new here so first of all thanks for accepting me to AtariAge. I hope that over time I can give back more than I initially might take. I'm also new to VCS development, while having some experience doing 6502 assembly on the Commodore C64 ( http://www.awsm.de). I followed the excellent tutorial from Kirk Israel ( http://alienbill.com/2600/101/index.html) and now I'm looking forward to the next steps. I must admit that it was an off and on again job, so I clearly don't remember every single information given, but will give it a second read again. Anyway, I took the code and tried to make it my own by converting it to my coding habits (mostly syntax). I came across some issues I'd like to get your advice on. 1. Is there an easy way to show changes visually? With the luxury of memory mapped IO on the Commodore 64, if I want to track e.g. if a specific section of my code got executed, I could simply to either INC $0400 (increment the first char on the top left of the screen) or INC $d020 (increment the border color) but I can't seem to do that with a simple INC COLUBK, right? 2. Is there something like a best practice template for the code? On the 64, live was easy. Whenever you want to change something of the screen, just update the screen memory. No beam racing. Now with my first changes to Kirk's tutorial script, I seem to be running into timing issues already, having "just" added a few lines of code. I know I need to understand and learn better how to manage cycles and when I got enough time to do some calculations. I'm just wondering if there's something like a template that some people find helpful to get started with a good code structure. 3. Are JSR and JMP bad coding practice on the VCS? This might sound silly, but better ask before falling into a pit I can't climb out of. Kirk's tutorial avoids subroutines and code jumps, it's basically one big chunk of code with some conditional branching. On the 64, I'm used to setting up my code in different files, build small libs even, so there's some JSR and RTS to keep the main asm file structured. Since memory is so limited I guess every byte counts twice, so what's your take on this? 4. Which resources (links, tutorial, books) would you consider "must read"? Surprisingly, I seem to find far less on the topic of VCS development than I anticipated, and quite a bit of what I find is quite old (which is fine since it's safe to assume VCS hardware didn't change too much since 1977...). Any advice will be helpful here. Finally, I would be thankful of anybody more experienced than me (that would be all of you probably ) to check out my code and comment on it. ANY advice is appreciated really, there's no pride to hurt if you're starting at square one... Specifically, you'll see that after adding a second player (the rectangle), a big portion of the left screen seems to be unaccessible to the sprites. My idea is that I simply lack the time to draw everything, but then again it could be something really different. In the end, that listing is just a quick copy and paste version of the tutorial. The source and bin are included in the attached ZIP. Thank you for reading through this on hopefully not rolling your eyes already Enjoy the day, awsm mini-game.zip