Pokeypy

You may want to take a look at the good old AIAB ("Amiga in a Box"), which has glow icons and many other features. Seems, in the meantime someone has also done a "Remake" version of it.

Does the narrator in the video ever take breath?

Hi, thinking of the Spectrum Next and the Mega65, today I thought, would it maybe be possible to recreate the Amiga custom chips in a FPGA chip and connect them to a modern processor (like let's say one of the recent Raspberry Pies or maybe an ARM processor of a recent smartphone)? So creating an "Amiga" with lots of Speed and RAM (1 GB for example) that way? I wouldn't want the Amiga Workbench, more a combination of a programming language and a DOS at bootup. Kind of BASIC and Atari DOS (or Amiga DOS) (similar to modern "Colour Maximite 2 Deluxe" approach). And no mouse, just joysticks like on the A8 / C64. And I wouldn't want BASIC as a programming language, but Python. It should come with modules for directly accessing the hardware of the machine (blitter, copper and these). So it would be possible to write Amiga style 2D games in Python on that machine. A new processor should be fast enough to cope with the reduced speed of the interpreted language compared to original Amiga Assembler (it is in Pygame actually). Maybe also add in the sound chips of certain Arcade machines, such as "Outrun". Besides Paula's four channel PCM sound (or maybe better, 16bit sound and a few more channels, 64 or so). Wouldn't that be cool?

Having had a ZX Spectrum back then, I have to admit that the TI was a very good home computer, with its full typewriter keyboard, sound chip and even 16 bit processor in 1981. Its problems were not of technical, but of business/marketing nature. When Jack Tramiel released the C64 in 1982, he saw the TI as its main competitor and started a price war against the TI. A big argument against the TI was, that Texas Instruments licensed only certain developers to program their proprietary processor and the cartridges (which the developers even had to buy). While the C64 was open to everybody who wanted to program it, so that a large software library was built up over time. Texas Instruments made a big mistake there. In the end that ruined the TI (that was, as mentioned, in itself pretty good), and it was given away cheap. So that customers even wondered, why it was so cheap - was there something wrong with it, maybe? So there you have it: A technically good machine, that nevertheless couldn't compete on the market for other reasons. While the Sinclair machines, although technically maybe not quite as good, were a commercial success, especially the Spectrum. Its system (even with the rubber keyboard, the beeper and the cassette tape as storage device) did make sense and I had a lot of fun with it. The ZX81, well, in my opinion it was too reduced, too limited to be really useful. Similar to the VIC-20 with just 3,5K RAM. But some people even liked these. Well, it were just the predecessors to the machines to come, the Spectrum and the C64.

The Linux way (or one of them) (without Altirra): 1. Convert the text file to ATASCII using aac.py (Python script). 2. Download and compile a tool called "franny". Compilation should be easy. 3. Create a new ".atr"-file: franny -C myatr.atr 4. Write the ATASCII-file to the ".atr"-file: franny -A myatr.atr -i myprog.bas -o MYPROG.BAS Done.

Computer christmas demos are pretty nice, be they 8-bit or the Sierra ones, for example. Today's computer have Youtube though, so these two the clips appeared to be the best "demos" I found yet. Can watch them every year ? :

True 1983 problem. ?

A logarithm would be pretty difficult to calculate without a LOG function. So that one's definitely useful. "tan(a)" seems to be "sin(a) / cos(a)", so that could be replaced. But it sure is convenient. And if you had the bytes in the interpreter for it (having these bytes was a miracle in a way, because these interpreters did so much in so few KB), why not put it in?

So that's for NEC's TurboGrafx-16-thing also called "PC Engine"?

Like for example "Divorce Barbie": Included in the set is Ken's car, Ken's house and Ken's boat.

Seems, there were different approaches to 3D. Most impressed I was with: Vector Graphics: Elite (ZX Spectrum), "Mercenary I (Escape from Targ)" (A8) Filled Vector Graphics: Starglider II, F/A 18-Interceptor, Virus, Falcon (all Amiga) Raycasting: Wayout (A8), Alien Breed 3D (Amiga 1200) Don't have a clue, how "Rescue on Fractalus" (A8) does it. "Alien Breed 3D" was like "The 486 of that guy down the street can run Doom alright. Oh look, the A1200 can run something, that's not totally different, too. And it even has an 'Aliens' theme". When you take the flight simulations and something like "Carrier Command" or even "Test Drive" into account or you add even isometric games, actually quite a lot of games used 3D. Psion Flight Simulation on the ZX Spectrum was probably the first thing I saw: Mercenary I and Starglider II were probably the ones, that were most impressive to me. And, yeah, alright, Doom and what came after it, too. On the other hand, "Frontier - Elite II" wasn't.

Just like in the old days: The Spectrum being a more affordable alternative.

Back then (in the 1980s), C support on 8bit wasn't that great. But today, there's a cross-compiler called "CC65" for the PC, with which you can write Atari 8bit programs in C on the PC alright. Problem is, 1,79MHz on a 6502 is so slow, there's still a significant difference in speed between C and Assembly programs. So if you want the speed of the games back then on such a machine today, you still have to go for Assembly. And as the others already said: There'd be still a lot to learn, about how the machine itself works, the ANTIC, the CTIA/GTIA chips for graphics, and the POKEY chip for sound. That's still not easier today as it has been back then. To get more speed in C, you'd have to write C-programs in a more Assembly-like way. That is, you'd have to check the Assembly code, the compiler produces from your C code, and optimize your C-program in a way, that the resulting Assembly code will run faster. That's also not easy to do without advanced knowledge of the subject. I guess, there's a reason, why they put BASIC interpreters into these machines to enable ordinary users to take the first steps into programming. And, actually, with all these complicated custom chips, graphics modes, player/missile graphics and sound filters, I'm not even sure, the Atari was intended to be programmed by the user at all. Just press "Option", and be happy with your games and applications, that were created and sold to you by professional companies. I think, that's more, what the designers thought about the user.

From 1984, I remember a program called "Disk Sherlock" we used. Was pretty good. Was the first time, I came in contact with Hex. Anybody else remembering that program?

Looks interesting. So that's an approach similar to "Scratch", I guess. I'm not really a fan of it, but it seems, people around the world use it. I had to smile, as the guy, who wrote the main website, says on the "Under Construction" card, he's called "Adam".