pirx

@Jiří Bernášek hello! So glad to see you!!!!! I am also so happy that your exquisite work has been finally re-discovered @Pecus and me also worked on MicroSpartaDos: https://github.com/pkali/micro-sparta-dos We even made a utility to modify the config to easily add titles and different color schemes It must be somewhere.... swi

wow, this is something! I have this idea to modify the interpreter so it runs from SpartaDOSX from a command line (with ch8 file and config as parameters). With a command-line driven assembler it could make a compelling dev setup

Oh boy, how many trials and errors when we were young and no phaeron to help. I never got the real understanding before, just moving bits and pieces until it somewhat worked 😮

i'll repeat here @newTIboyRob - you'll be much better off by treating atari basic as THE spreadsheet. just declare a 2D variable with `DIM A(10,10)`. populate it and perform calculations. entering formulas as atari basic commands will be similarly laborious as if in a real spreadsheet. The only real (mental) difference is that you do not have the WYSIWYG editor, it will be more like writing in LaTeX than in Word.

drop the link and I am game

for sfx i'd add Nadral

There is a way. Not super easy, but working - you can emulate bitmap mode with char mode. This is generally done for fast scrolling, but adding the 5th color is a worthy goal. how to do it the easy way: - say you have 40x24 characters screen (160x192 pixels). - reserve 8 KiB for 8 separate character sets - do a regular char mode screen with 24 lines. - switch to a new character set every 3 char lines (in a DLI that you already have) in regular video memory put something like .dta 0,1,2,3,..., 39 .dta 40,41,42,...,79 .dta 80,81,82,..., 119 (120 characters in 3 lines). Repeat it 8 times. Now all you need to do is to modify the routines pushing data to the screen to push the data to appropriate places in the character sets. You are losing 8*8 bytes per 3 lines, but it is generally a small price to pay. The next level is to rearrange the video memory bytes to better suit your needs and speed up soft-sprite routines. You also have these additional 8 chars that could be used for some purpose (normally these are scroll buffers and such). And now you can sprinkle the video ram with high bits set for the 5th color.

BCalc looks absolutely fantastic. OCR errors are visible in the mac/65 listing. If I am stuck in this situation, i'd go for the sio2pc solution, you can get the price down to a few dollars if you can solder a little bit. But if it is not an option at all, the next best option would be keeping the spreadsheet data as BASIC program. So Basic has got 2 dimensional tables `10 DIM A(10,10)` Please note this takes a lot of memory - 10*10*6 bytes + some additional cruft for a small, 10x10 table. you can then assign values to cells: `20 A(1,1)=10:A(2,1)=20:A(3,1)=30` then you can do the calculations you wish `30 A(10,1) = 0: FOR I=1 to 9: A(10,1) = A(10,1) + A(I, 1): NEXT I` Now you have in the cell A(10,1) sum of cells A(1,1) ... A(9,1) `40 PRINT "SUM: ";A(10,1)` You can save the whole program on tape, load it, and modify it to your heart's content.

Altirra rulez big time, I use it every day on my Linux machine (with wine). It is more faithful to the real hardware (especially controls) and tries to detect cart type, which worked for me every time. atari800 is also very good, native, and thus many times faster if you crave for 100x speedups.

same, it took like a week to ship to Miami 😮

what you described is normal. this is 30y+ low-cost, toy-quality machine, it can fail because you looked at it wrong. buy a new mylar and rock on.

Thank you @cas!!! I will definitely dig the project up to facilitate the renewed interest :))))

ordered. it is unreal. maybe i'll be able to play my game

too bad, no SV for me Moving to Miami has its downsides... I do hope to be in a better financial position to get to SV next year...

@cas I've heard there is a nice article about chip-8 in the latest ABBUC magazine - could you share the highlights or a scan with me - I'll have an excuse to use a bit of my long-neglected Deutsch!

Hi @Beeblebrox, believe me, we were pondering this question, but it is hard because there are so many available options: players, cash, gravity, wind, rounds, mountains, walls, and 7+ levels of robotanks. practically you can not compare two results if any of these parameters differ. so either we'd need to make 5^7 * 7 ~= 1/2 mil separate high-score tables. Alternatively, we could lump some settings together, but then there would be some clearly easier settings to get more points (like fighting against 5 Morons versus 1 Cyborg). So, no soup for you :]

werks with 576 KB

As a distraction my 4x4 font from Scorch. Not totally readable, but what you can do in 16 pixels... font4x4s.bmp

and that's the catch - i was in Poland then (our 5oft was the name of the band)

Hoi SOD! We were snail-mailing each other BITD Nice to hear from you again!!!!!

we need Super Maria Sisters then

https://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=54

indeed

i use it quite often to write simple data transformation subroutines in python. some of them landed in a production code. the gain is i do not have to think about trivial things. it is a tool. you can hurt yourself with a hammer that is normally quite useful for hanging pictures.

so far bought another contro for less than the mylar, it if works, wow. if it doesn't, ill have a reason to buy 2 mylars from the best