calamari

Was there such a game? If so, where can it be found? Thanks, calamari

So pull out your dusty old 5200 and play a game or two on the real thing! With that I'll go back to figuring out what I did to break my Solitaire game. There is a trail under the mouse pointer and the keypad isn't responding half the time calamari

Limiting votes to board members seems reasonable to me, of course this isn't any of my business. calamari

Albert, Actually, don't change a thing! Tt looks good now. I can see the new votes I didn't want to know who was ahead BEFORE I voted.. just after, and that seems to have been fixed Thanks, calamari

Confirmed.. you can't type anything with debounce set. I thought the 5200 was freezing up.. but I guess not calamari

As far as new features, I'm still hoping for that second keypad option calamari

Here is a quote from my "Atari 5200 keypad repeat fix... SUCCESS !!!" thread in this forum, when the whole situation was fresh in my mind: "On the real 5200, SKSTAT doesn't act like it does on the emulator (take a look at DEBUG52, and view address $E80F.. see how it is $FF then stays $FB while a key is pressed? Not so on the 5200, it is mostly $FF with an occasional $FB). So, we can't use SKSTAT to tell us when the key is no longer held." calamari [ 04-02-2002: Message edited by: calamari ]

Cafeman, I've developed a 5200 keypad debounce routine. Check the archives in this programming section. No need to reinvent the wheel.. errr keypad calamari

Hi Just a few minor things I've noticed.. The emulators seem to handle held keystrokes incorrectly. The problem is that contrary to documentation, SKSTAT doesn't work as expected. If you want to check it out, use my 5200 DEBUG52 program (burn & run on the real thing). Something is weird with the music. Jum's emu music is similar.. so maybe its the music library being used, I dunno. Atari800 seems to play most everything correctly tho. calamari [ 04-02-2002: Message edited by: calamari ]

Hi, I voted.. but is there a way to go back and see the results again? I don't want to revote just for the results again. calamari

Unfortunately progress has stalled for the moment as I'm in the middle of a move. Once I am moved then I'll put the computer back together and get back to work. Hopefully in a few days I'll have some progress to report Here are some items that I'm working on... I need to fix the $ scoring, and add 3 card mode, but I'm thinking these changes will be trvial to implement. The major change I'd like to make is an attempt at a full color card move, rather than the old black and blue card sprite & pointer seen on atarihq.com. I believe I can pull it off by making an extra wide white background for the card using the combined missles, then using the 4 remaining sprites for left & right black and red. I am concerned about speed & flicker though.. I guess we'll see what happens. I'm also considering putting in a Poker Solitaire game that I came up with back in '95 or '96, it shouldn't be difficult to add as I have my full basic source for that one and the cards don't need to be moved around. If anyone is interested in actively testing the game for bugs, please let me know. calamari

You can find pictures of almost anything on ebay. calamari

Speaking of ports, someone needs to port SpinDizzy to the 5200. Have fun with the bank switching tho calamari

Well, if you want a small language there's always BrainF*** It's small (8 instructions), Turing complete, so it's flexible enough to figure out any computable task, and it definitely exploits any programmers who use it. calamari [ 03-20-2002: Message edited by: calamari ]

Well, I still have the bad habit of writing my code all in uppercase But at least I write comments in lowercase now, so maybe there is hope for me. calamari [ 03-18-2002: Message edited by: calamari ]

I have to disagree. I believe that structured programming is something naturally learned, not something that should be forced. When I first started programming (in GW-BASIC), I had no style. My code was a mess, with GOTOs and GOSUBs everywhere. And, I didn't know any different than have line numbers. I got Microsoft QuickBasic 7.0 for my birthday (back in '89). At first, I wrote all my programs with line numbers. There was no indenting, and I still abused GOTO and GOSUB all over. Eventually I found that line labels were preferrable to line numbers.. they were sure a lot easier to remember! I also came to realize that I could read the code better if I indented inside loops, and IF/END IF (which became easier to read than the all on one line IF statements.) At this point I was still pretty unstructured, I was learning this new environment too. Then, I discovered DO...LOOP (I never got into WHILE/WEND before), this was great because I could exit at the top or bottom of a loop and choose whether I wanted UNTIL or WHILE. This meant that I used a lot less GOTO's. Then there was SELECT CASE. Now this command was really cool. I didn't have to put in huge IF/ELSE/ELSEIF statements. Also around this time I discovered EXIT FOR and EXIT DO... No one had told me that GOTO was evil. No one said that DO..LOOP was better than a GOTO and an IF statement. It just worked out that way. It's easier to code and understand code when it is written properly. Eventually I also gave up GOSUB for procedures and functions, when my programs got larger. So again, there is nothing inherently unstructured about Basic. If someone writes unstructured code it just means they haven't yet learned to do things the easy way calamari

The ORG instruction is for the assembler only, not for the 6502. It deals with how the assembly language instructions are generated when labels are encountered. Take the following code: MYGAME: JMP MYGAME Lets say we wanted to convert those two labels to ASM manually. How would we know where MYGAME: was in the ROM? It could be $0000, $3456, $F000, etc. The ORG tells it specifically that it is $F000, so that makes the code: $F000 JMP $F000 Hope that helps, calamari

Maybe it was a bad assumption, but I am guessing they wanted to write a game for a classic system. If the destination is C++, then yeah I'd agree that Pascal might be a better choice. But, if the destination is assembly language for eventually writing a 2600 era game, it's good to be comfortable using GOTO (after all there are no "while" or "for" loops with the 6502, it's just JMP or branches Also you have stuff like GOSUB (6502=JSR), Atari Basic, and 5200BAS calamari

Atari Master, If you are new to programming, let me suggest that you get started in the Basic language instead of C or C++. It is easier to learn Basic, and with it you can learn concepts that are important when programming in other languages as well. Game programming is not easy, especially for older systems. Most (if not all) of the classic games for the 2600 and 5200 were programmed in straight assembly language (this is a language, when assembled, that the CPU in the game machine directly understands.) I can't speak for the other programmers in this forum, but after I began studying Basic around my 6th grade it wasn't until my 10th grade in high school that I was ready to start looking at assembly language. It wasn't until recently that I began studying C, although with a better book I probably could have picked it up earlier (The book Learn Visual C++ in 21 days leaves MUCH to be desired). Anyhow, I'd suggest writing some programs in QBASIC (it comes free with Windows 95 and 98, look for it on the CD-ROM). This will give you a feel for programming. Also, there is some excellent documentation for QBASIC and you can find numerous examples on the Internet. These can help you get started! Have fun, calamari

To convert, use the BIN2INC program. Thanks, calamari

Hi, Here are the music utilities I have been promising! Included in the zip are MIDI2POK 1.01 (the MIDI->POK convertor), POKEDIT 1.00 (a GUI music editor), and BIN2INC 1.01 (for converting binaries to assembler-friendly include files). http://www.azstarnet.com/~jeffryj/5200bas.html Constructive feedback is always welcome. calamari

Okay! It took a few days longer than I expected, but PokEdit 1.00 is done. All I need to do now is write up the documentation and make a few minor modifications to the 5200BAS player program. One positive side effect of making this editor is that I discovered a bug in my Midi2Pok convertor.. it wasn't continuing long notes like I had thought it was. Now it is, and so I've decided to include that in the archive. That makes the example sound better, and my Solitaire title screen is a little better too The archive will contain PokEdit 1.00, Midi2Pok 1.01, and Bin2Inc 1.01 (useful for converting binaries to .BYTE includes), as well as a full working example with 5200BAS and ASM source. I am hopeful that these music tools will be useful, and I'd appreciate any constructive feedback. I'll post here again when the file is ready for download. calamari

Okay I got the PokEdit UI done for now.. All I need to do on it tomorrow are the Open and Save routines, then modify the player a bit for the distortion/volume routines. After that I think I'll work on Solitaire for a while calamari

"...I don't know and I don't want to ... learn" What is the point of being alive if we don't gain knowledge, have new experiences, and learn new things? calamari

Cafeman, Thought I'd get it done tonight but the UI is being more of a challenge than I expected. I'll keep at it calamari