PaultheRoman

What exactly is missing from our knowledge of the Atari VCS/2600's hardware that prevents us from making a perfect hardware clone of it? I've looked around, and apparently there's already a lot of information, and even hand-drawn schematics, on the TIA custom chip. What else is there missing?

Hey, guys. I'm a beginner Atari programmer and I'm trying to go through Andrew Davie's book 2600 Programming for Newbies. I downloaded the dasm assembler from https://sourceforge.net/projects/dasm-dillon/, and i put the vcs.h and the macro.h file within the directory that the dasm.exe file is located. However, when I drag a file named testing1.asm to the dasm.exe file to compile it, i get a file called a.out that has nothing inside of it instead of a .bin file. What am I doing wrong? Below is what is written in the testing1.asm file. processor 6502 include "vcs.h" include "macro.h" SEG ORG $F000 Reset StartOfFrame ; Start of vertical blank processing lda #0 sta VBLANK lda #2 sta VSYNC ; 3 scanlines of VSYNCH signal... sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC lda #0 sta VSYNC ; 37 scanlines of vertical blank... sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC ; 192 scanlines of picture... ldx #0 REPEAT 192 ; scanlines inx stx COLUBK sta WSYNC REPEND lda #%01000010 sta VBLANK ; end of screen - enter blanking ; 30 scanlines of overscan... sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC jmp StartOfFrame ORG $FFFA .word Reset ; NMI .word Reset ; RESET .word Reset ; IRQ END

I was able to find it. Thanks, Karl!

Since Andrew Davie isn't hosting his website anymore for the DASM assembler, I don't know where I can get the vcs.h and macro.h files. It's not in the sourceforge distribution https://sourceforge.net/projects/dasm-dillon/. Does anyone know where it's distributes?

Will the rom for this ever be released? I use Stella to play VCS games.

Oooo, I can't wait for this. I'm new to the AtariAge community and this sounds awesome. As a new Atari 2600 user though, I will be using Stella. I hope that's alright.

Where can I find the BIOS roms for the atari 8bit computers? I can't seem to find them at all :L .

Thanks, guys, for all your responses. I appreciate them greatly, especially this one: I didn't know about that all. Thank you Spacecadet

Question, are the ROM's here legal? I would like to get into Atari gaming (I love retro 8-bit games) and into the culture as a whole, but I'm wondering where can I get free and legal roms for the Atari 8-bit computer. I'm trying to do things as legal as possible. I know, if I'm not mistaken, that there are a bunch of roms here for various Atari systems, but is legal to download them?