TommyB

Thanks for the updates! I will take a look at the Flying Shark changes to see what you did differently than what I tried. I didn't know the _6000 being in the output filenames was important and didn't notice the problem with the wrong start address. I am happy to hear it wasn't me or my new laptop! I pulled down the beta of your fantastic Pinball99 game and was able to build it without issue, so I thought maybe something with bank switching wasn't working right since Pinball99 isn't using banking. I will follow along on the xdt99 thread to see when/how that is resolved.

I must admit, the idea of breaking changes for a 40-year-old computer didn't occur to me when jumping into revisiting the 99/4a. ? I am interested in seeing what changes you have to make for it to build if/when you do that. I may have something else set up incorrectly, as I haven't been able to build Bouncy's Obstacle Course or Knight Lore either. I'm on a new Windows 11 laptop, using the latest Python and JRE as well as xdt99, so it could be any of those things.

Adding one more attempt after my last comment... I read the xdt99 docs a bit more and thought that the order of the directives may be important, so I tried placing the bank directive first, followed by the aorg directive, like so: bank 0 aorg >6000 This thinking was based on the manual's statement that "Within each bank, all *ORG directives may be used, without leaving the current bank". Unfortunately, that produced the same results of getting a blank screen and a non-stop tone that sounds like the beep when you press 2 to select the cart. So, to recap, removing ",x" from the aorg statements allows the code to compile but doesn't produce as many output files. Using "bank x" and "aorg >6000" statements in either order, or "bank x, >6000" without an aorg directive, gets a compiled bin file but nothing but a blank screen when I launch. Maybe I will solve this someday once I have more experience.

Thanks for the replies! @Asmusr, I tried removing the ,x options. The compile errors went away but only one ~8k levelx-rom file was created per asm file, so later parts of the makelevels.bat file failed. @PeteE I changed the aorg >6000,x directives to be separate aorg >6000 and bank x directives as you suggested, which also compiled fine, but I was greeted by a clear screen and random noise when I pressed 2 for Tiger Shark on the TI menu screen. Now that I know about the bank directive, I looked it up in the xdt99 manual at https://github.com/endlos99/xdt99/blob/master/doc/MANUAL.md#banked-output. Based on the documentation, I tried changing "aorg >6000,0" to "bank all, >6000" and the remaining occurrences of aorg to "bank 1", "bank 2" etc. This also compiled okay, but the resulting files were around 15K each instead of 8k, and the same clear screen and random noise was seen when I tried to launch the cart. My last attempt was changing "aorg >6000,x" to "bank x, >6000" and not having a bank all directive. This change got the output files back down to 8K each, but still with the same results. One other difference to note - the output files no longer contain the base address as part of the file name. For example, "level1-rom_6000_b1" is now being named "level1-rom_b1". Any idea if that is expected with the bank directive or if it indicates I've done something incorrectly? I may punt on this for now. Trying to fix this is way above my expertise currently. I only tried building Flying Shark to confirm I had installed everything correctly. I can't even claim to know enough to be dangerous yet! Thanks again for the quick responses!

I'm a few years late to the party, but I wanted to add to the praise of how amazing this and other modern projects are! It's so far beyond what I remember the TI being capable of back in the 80s. The 99/4a was my first computer. It was my 1982 birthday present, and I spent every waking minute of the whole summer that year trying to recreate Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and others on it with Extended Basic. It has always been special to me, but I hadn't kept up with it in the years/decades since. That changed a couple of years ago when I saw some YouTube videos about it. I got the itch to dig my TI out of storage, bought a FinalGROM cart from ArcadeShopper, and relived some awesome childhood memories. I recently placed an order for a TIPI for Father's Day (my wife says she never knows what to get me haha) and I'm looking forward to trying out new things with it. I've read through the "assembly development" and "smooth scrolling" threads here and would like to try my hand at assembly language programming. I installed xdt99 and IntelliJ Idea on a PC to write code, and will use Classic99 to test before transferring over to the TIPI to run on real hardware. I also downloaded the Flying Shark source that Rasmus has kindly shared on Github (thanks for that!). I'm hoping to learn from it and reinforce what I've read in the threads. I tried to compile the code by launching the "makelevels.bat" file but I see a lot of "deprecated use" errors in the output like this: xas99.py -R -b source/level1-rom.a99 -o build/level1-rom > level1-rom.a99 <1> 0002 - aorg >6000,0 ***** Error: Cannot use bank with AORG directive (deprecated use) I guess this is a question for @Asmusr or @ralphb, but I would love to hear suggestions from anyone on how to fix this. I can look for older xdt99 versions that support banks with AORG directives, but I'd like to learn the new way to handle this. Googling didn't turn up much on it unfortunately. I'm also happy to create a PR to submit the changes once I get it working with the latest xdt99 version if that is helpful/wanted. Thanks for reading! I hope to contribute to the fun someday.