potatohead

I have read that one in the past from the university library. Great book. It is out there today for those who go looking.

Awesome! I'll get setup to test it this week. I've a //e with the CFFA and real disk drive. Thank you very much for posting it here. Feel free to expand on it and tell us some of your 6502 adventures. Many would enjoy reading that.

Well, that is because a demo is an environment where the max tricks can be pulled out of the hat without worrying about anything but the effect. Many in the demo scene went on to do games and we see their work today. We've got pages and pages here that describe how and why demo effects can't always be in games. Games have a lot more to do, basically. Enjoy it for what it is. Great tech demo! What they showed here is a love of the old hardware and that's best shown by getting others who appreciate it to say, "wow!" and better, "how?" and best: contribute one of their own. Great demo! I enjoyed it a lot.

With the conversion being done inside the tape drive, it seems to me, modding one to inject the audio where it would come from the tape head, or right after would work just fine. Has anyone ever attempted this? I know it's slow, but just wondering...

Apple logo was color, BTW. It was just your screens. No four turtle setup though.

I've never attempted LISP. Just did FORTH recently. Very intriguing. That makes a person think much differently about this stuff. I'll put LISP on the list. Should be interesting. If I can remember, I'll post back one day. LOGO really did a lot for me personally. Having used BASIC for a while, LOGO was strange at first, but I picked it up like that. Kind of amazing at the time. A few of us used it for all sorts of goofy, "what if?" kinds of programs that would take longer in BASIC. Both languages were responsible for me getting into first machine language, then assembly language. On that note, lots of people probably do not know that difference. Back then, it was significant!

Really, that depends on whether or not the window manager allows focus follows mouse type behavior and allows window input without popping it to the foreground. If those two things are available, then overlapping windows can really shine. That said, I completely agree with you. Being able to select window managers is in and of itself a killer Linux feature.

Yes. I don't know about new and exciting. I have a couple of Ubuntu Live distributions that I've added applications I need. Boot 'em, do the Linux thing, and move on. Nice. I'll probably put a good Linux on my Thinkpad in the near future.

At this point, we just need the code. FPGA the thing and check it out!

Me too.

Yes, and it would come down to whether or not others could and or would have that mod. Say some magic drop in CPU ended up being dead simple, cost $20, and people just started selling Atari systems already modded, similar to video mods and memory mods. If the population got up there, we all might have a fine time jamming on it. Problem is, the stuff just never quite gets ubiquitous. Harmony seems to be making the jump though. Plenty of people have 'em, more are buying 'em, and batari is gonna be around for a while and did a great job engineering it to just work and not cost much. So, I would say this is possible, but hard. Thing is, Harmony games using the extra CPU still feel a lot like 2600 (VCS) games, so it all kind of works. Maybe that's a special case due to how the VCS does it's thing. Personally, I always wanted a 6809 in my Atari back in the day. Once I programmed it on the Color Computer 2 and 3, it was addictive. Fun chip! Now it got done, but the moment has passed for me. Wanted one in the Apple as well, on a card and those got made too. A little different, but still that moment has passed I think.

Seconded. Just about everybody played the crap out of that one. Great launch title.

Oh I think so. Something like that would run and feel like an Atari for sure.

Lots of great responses so far. I tend to base it off of simplicity and whether or not it's a plausible extension. The VBXE is technically awesome, and part of me likes that, but it's not really Atari to me. Seems a bit of a stretch for where the machine might have gone. The tech is cool though. Glad it's out there, and I know the people who built it and use it are having a good time of things. Happy days. Another qualifier might be how many other people end up with whatever it is. External storage is popular. Serving files up from a PC, or fetching them via USB stick or SD card is very cool, and we all can have that with few worries. That's Atari to me. And it's Atari, because I could share experiences. Sharing experiences is kind of important to preserve the overall feel and community around these things. Harmony on VCS is working that way, as an example. Most of the experience is still there, still authentic, but the extra oomph takes the machine a bit farther, and I think that makes it relevant to a few more people, while keeping it fresh for those who have been around for a while. Sort of fails the simple test once advanced code on the board comes out to play. Mixed bag, but most of us can have it, and some people can just enjoy without knowing too much, leaving the feel there, which is a lot of the attraction. On Apple, if it's a card that can go into the slots that most people could end up with, that generally flies. On Atari, hardware expansions get odd. Some need under the machine work, others work on the expansion port, still others are in the cart slot... For the cartridge things, I'm game. Under the hood was being done in the time, with dual POKEY setups and such, so a lot of that works. An ANTIC + GTIA spiffed up a little might still be Atari, for example. Same colors, but maybe just add a mode or two that may well have happened back then. Problem there is starting down that road pretty soon gets to VBXE, because the tech is there. Hard call on these things. I don't know. What I do know is what I like, or that says "Atari" to me, and I sometimes won't know until I see it. A positive example might be an exercise to imagine what ANTIC + GTIA 2 would have been, or maybe just a new ANTIC. Say Atari saw VIC II and did another engineering cycle to compete... Maybe the color resolution gets doubled, and with that the half color clock mode goes to 640, the 160 pixel modes get to 320 pixels, and maybe some 16 color modes get dropped in... The extra DMA sucks up CPU, so they can't be used willy nilly, leaving the challenges and that "Atari feel" in there. That would be Atari to me, probably. Maybe talk to the guy who made POKEY and finish it / remove the bugs or whatever he mentioned was lacking at the time. So, the machines that feature more hardware expansion options tend to have an easier time with this. IMHO, hanging some cool stuff off the SIO might say Atari too. How about an 80 column display with some graphics options? Hook that to a second display, and it's plausible and potentially useful. We all could get one and use it fairly easily too. Really for me, that's important. That might be Atari to me, setup right. I could plug this into my Atari, boot a disk and go! Seems to me, that could have happened back in the day too, like it did for some machines that got spiffy graphics options. S100, CP/M, Apple, others... FPGA projects are intriguing. For a long time, I just didn't think much of those. But, I'm currently running a new chip being developed on an FPGA. We don't have real silicon yet, but the FPGA feels real. So, an FPGA Atari with the most useful and popular add-ons built in might really appeal. Could put that in a case and keep the vintage look, or maybe not and just use vintage controllers and a TV display. VGA looks really nice, but looking really super nice on a VGA is easy. Much harder on a TV, and that says Atari to me. Being on a TV or high bandwidth composite monitor. Amber / green / grey. I ran my Atari on those things back then. No brainer to capture the feel today. So now I have a nice DE2 board, and I'm going to explore that technology when the current project completes. The idea of making real-time circuits seems a little less abstract now and that seems like a great fit for 8 bit fans. Lots can be done on a board, schematics shared, etc... I might really get into this at some point, mostly because building actual hardware leaves one on that "nobody else has it" island, or it's expensive and hard to get something many people can get, etc... I already know I don't like these, "does it all" FPGA things. I have emulation for that. Emulation is a mixed bag for me. I like it for development. There are times when I miss just coding on the machine, but then I do that, and I miss all the tools that get coding done faster today on modern OSes and hardware too. So, emulation is good for doing stuff, but not necessarily experiencing stuff. Disks... I don't miss the Atari disk drive much. Not sure why. I never used an Apple without a disk, but I did use an Atari with carts, cassette and a disk. Maybe that is some of why. Using carts and an SIO device seems just fine. I do miss Apple disks, and I have one, and I have an external storage device too. Still will use a disk from time to time, just because. We all have those quirks. Now I have a SD card cart for the CoCo, and I like that, and I don't miss the disks because I never had one. That machine worked fast enough from cassette that's all I ended up using, because mostly all I did on it was program on the 6809 for fun. Again, quirks we all have based on experiences and things we miss or don't.

LOGO saw a lot of use in education on the Apple ][. By the time I was in a position to try Atari LOGO, I had moved past the language was onto other things. However, I did program on the Apple in LOGO quite a bit for about a year. One of the goals for the class was to develop some materials for subsequent classes. A few of us were taking it as an elective / free period kind of thing. We developed a nice collection of fun drawing programs and a fleshed out Lunar Lander type game. That one was presented a piece at a time with code going up on the overhead projector. Students were to participate in a lecture, Q&A session, then look at and discuss the code, finally typing it in, debugging and getting it to run. Once it did, it got saved off to a disk and over time all the parts to the game got done. On game build day, the main loop called out the various parts and the students all played their games. Extra credit was given for game variations and modifications. Some added wind, and the game ran with the turtle on and used as the ship. Some students hid the turtle and produced their own lander, which slowed their game considerably, but it looked really cool... The rest consisted of some math programs that would plot functions, "drawing the students initials" and some text. Guess my number, a little adventure game kernel with a few rooms, etc... I ended up helping deliver the class the following year. Most students did pretty well, and I personally thought that impressive for the time, given most of them had only school computer experience. A big part of the class was group debugging and learning. After lecture, kids would go type it all in and ended up making a surprisingly large number of bugs in the process. Groups of them would solve programs and the teacher and I would go around and patch things up for those that were not successful. We also kept some "in process" saves so they could just punt and pick up at a known place and continue on. That proved essential. Most students got it done, but there were plenty of, "what did I do, and ????" kinds of events. They could go and get the pieces they needed and just continue on with no worries. The teacher factored that in, and I thought it really smart at the time. Students were required to submit some original programs throughout too. Those were most of the grade, with the idea being learn by doing, then show something was learned. A year later Apple Pascal was introduced with the same formula. I participated in this, but not to the same degree. While Pascal was much faster, the barrier to entry for students was a lot higher and they did not see anywhere near the success they did with LOGO, or BASIC. LOGO was, IMHO, very good for people who had very little exposure to computers. The LOGO students would more frequently make successful additions to the programming projects and would nearly always be exploring the fun geometry drawing possible. IMHO, part of this was how nicely the Apple package was put together. Editing and such was not difficult at all and the whole package just worked on "the disk", so they could stick it in, get used to understanding how things got stored and go. The students learned quite a few core computing concepts in a reasonably fun and interactive environment. Applesoft was about the same, but the Pascal was too much at that time. Advanced students did lots of cool things, but there were only a few of those. Most everybody else went off and did the productivity thing with Apple Works and some drawing program or other, making various things like letters, flyers, etc... All in all, very fun experiences. I really should have given the Atari LOGO a shot, but I had moved into assembly programming, CP/M and some other things by the time I had a shot at it. (didn't have my own machine prior) The thing I remember the most was LOGO was very accessible. Didn't take much to get going. But it was SLOW on the Apple. Bet the Atari would have been better, but even 2X what the Apple would do just wasn't any good for interactive things, beyond fairly simple, small scope tasks. Learning language only, if you ask me. But, I also think they hit the nail on the head for the time period too. In any case, that's probably why there was not more code floating around out there. Most people would very likely have jumped in and moved on. The lander game was one of the larger programs. Met one guy in Denver as a kid who was into the AI bit. I got shipped out there to help an uncle rewire some apartment buildings and the one tenant who stayed had a couple of Apples, RAM card, Zip Chip, and was using LOGO to attempt some natural language parsing. His efforts were large, slow, but sort of worked. I remember thinking the INFOCOM stuff was actually better. (And I didn't know enough to realize the problem sets were that different back then.)

I sold mine having seen at least a couple of those coming. Got out even. I'm sure somebody is happy with that thing.

If you do end up pulling chips, be sure and get a nice chip pulling tool. I like to use one of those and gently unseat the chips with a simple screwdriver, or bent something or other that fits under the chip. Of course, you could try seating them too. Sometimes that can help. When I got my //e, some of the chips were sitting very high in the socket. Does it run and the video is scrambled? Can you take a picture?

Bummer. The //e is my favorite too. My first //e to replace my old + from the 90's ended up having an iffy power supply. After getting that replaced from the seller, the thing runs great. The CFFA makes it a great machine! I would think you can just get another //e and combine for much cheaper than you can ship to repair... Maybe you should post this up on Applefritter. They might help you troubleshoot, if you are inclined to do that. At some point, you need a joystick.

Not sure if I mentioned it or not, but I really enjoyed the shows. Thanks. Great work. Looking forward to them now.

@James #125 I agree. For me personally, I draw the line at 8 Bit machines for retro fun. My path in life took me to the PC when 16 bit computing really started getting fun, and from there I went high end SGI for a long while. Because of that gap, I really don't connect to the GS well, though I consider it part of the apple 2 line. Also personally, I would like to someday get a c+ because that one had the faster CPU, or maybe get a faster CPU for my //e DGHR is a challenge at 1Mhz, though many of the titles mentioned perform way better than one would expect.

It's all artifacting on the ][ through + and //e c machines.

Not without some assembly routines that I know of. Well, let me clarify that. It could be turned on from Applesoft, but Applesoft did not contain double high-res graphics primitives.

They are the same size as Antic E pixels. Double-High Res on the //e. 140x192, but aligned on color clocks like Atari pixels are, just a few less of them per scan line. The //e also did double low res, which is 80x48, same colors.

Apples have 6 color visuals... Well, counting black and white. Apple //e computers have 16 color visuals. Just saying That happened to me. I really explored the Atari computers for a long time, but Apple computers were first. I reached a point where I am into the Apple right now and I'm having a good time. They are great machines like many 8 bitters are. I try not to ditch stuff out of hand. Like my CoCo 3. It was really fun for a bit, but now it's archived. I got a cart that works with SD cards, and it's all setup to do fun things. What comes around, goes around. There will come a day where I'm enjoying that again, and maybe I'll stuff the Apple in storage. The Atari is setup under the bedroom TV for the occasional "Star Raiders" fix at present.

Which is entirely valid! A CPU runs in context, right? So that context matters, which was the point of the sentence.