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Assuming I have the display list safely outside of $4000-7FFF, would it be possible to use a DLI to switch banks, and have ANTIC generate the screen display from different banks?
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What are your top 10 favorite Atari BASIC games from magazine listings? This can include games that use machine language subroutines. If you can include what magazine each game came from, that would be helpful too.
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Any ideas why the memory immediately after PMBASE is not used and the missiles don't start until 384/786 bytes after PMBASE? Does this have anything to do with how ANTIC memory access works? Is it safe to put code or even a display list list between PMBASE and the data used for the first visible player/missile?
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I managed to get the atari 800 I had when I was a kid from my mother's house, after she passed away. It had a bad space bar from way back, and my little brother mangled the little metal fingers under the key trying to fix it. Long story short, I replaced the keyboard with a new one. It worked great for about 10 minutes, then suddenly no keys are working. Putting the old keyboard back in didn't clear up the problem, so I have to assume it's something on the motherboard. After doing a bit of research, it seems like the Antic chip might be the issue, as absolutely none of the keys work, but I don't know how to diagnose it for sure. Further, even if I decided to buy one of those fast disappearing chips to replace it with, what caused it to go out in the first place? It seems rather coincidental that it goes out 10 minutes after replacing the keyboard, after surviving for 30 years with a broken space bar, and a year of use since I got it back, using it with the broken space bar. I'd like some ideas on what to test to maybe figure out why it would have gone out. I appreciate any help someone can give me.
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Does anyone have or know of a complete list of ANTIC/GTIA graphics modes, in one place, to help developers make the right choice for a particular project? One that includes not only the "originals" (as in http://gury.atari8.info/ref/graphics_modes.php for example) but also the special ones discovered over time such as APAC, HIP, RIP, TIP and whatever else. Ideally including which color registers are used, limitations, tips, and any other pros and cons of each mode.
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My name is Robert Anschuetz. Together with my brother Eric Anschuetz and friend John Weisgerber, we wrote 3 Atari BASIC games that were published in 1985 in Antic magazine (Kooky's Quest (Feb. 1985), Overflow (July 1985), and Robot Dungeon (Nov. 1985, Antic Disk Bonus). In addition to these three games, we also submitted and sold two games to Compute! Magazine that were never published (Kooky Klimber and Night Rescue). We also wrote several other games that were never offered for publication. We are now releasing all of these games to the Public Domain with the hope that the Atari 8-Bit community will take a look at them, and perhaps they can be added to the Holmes or TOSEC archives for preservation. Again, these are not new games, but they are new to the Atari 8-Bit community. Many of these games really pushed the envelope at the time for what could be done in Atari BASIC, including bi-directional smooth scrolling, assembly language subroutines, parallax scrolling, cut scenes, attract modes, display-list tricks, interleaved-displays, etc. In conjunction with the release of these games, we have written a short article that describes how we got together as a team to write these programs, along with game instructions, and development notes. This article gives a really good insight into what it was like in the 1980's to discover the hidden programming secrets of the Atari computers during many late-night programming sessions. All of these games were written for an Atari 400/800 with 48K RAM (most run with less) and BASIC. An Atari 800XL configuration should run all of these games with no problem. Each game is saved to an individual ATR file, which also includes an AUTORUN.SYS that automatically runs the game at coldstart bootup. One note, after the games start, almost all of them require a lengthy initialization process. Even after the "Press Start to Begin", some require another minute of initialization before the game actually starts. As part of this release, we updated one of our old games called "Alien Assault" because it only ran with a cassette system. It now works fine with a disk. Included in the zip file are both versions. We are also re-releasing a 2017 version of the game "Robot Dungeon" that was originally published as an Antic Disk Bonus in November 1985. The original game had 3 levels of 400 rooms. This newer update cuts the size of the levels way down and makes the game winnable (the cut scene at the end is worth seeing!). The user can create mazes of any size from 5x5 to 20x20. The ATR comes with three 5x5 levels (25 rooms per level) (use the filename D:DUNJIN.DAT to load the maze). We have also added a cheat so you can walk through interior walls and not be killed by monsters. Attachments include the "Anschuetz/Weisgberber/Anschuetz Atari 8-Bit Programming Saga" as well as a zip file containing all the ATRs that can be run with an emulator. Again, remember to have BASIC turned on and Coldboot to auto-run these games. And be patient during initialization! We hope that you enjoy this release of "new old stock" games! And if anyone can submit these to the Atari repositories, please do so! Sincerely, Robert Anschuetz / Eric Anschuetz / John Weisgerber Atari 8-Bit Game Programs - Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz.pdf AWA ATR Floppy Disk Images.zip
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I recently got my old first computer out of storage. It's a 130xe and it's been dead for 30 years, and I wanted to repair it. It shows a solid black screen when running. I ran a logic analyzer across a variety of pins on the system to see what seemed to be working. The address and data lines across all ram chips, the sally, antic, and gtia all seem to be good. The BASIC chip also has solid connectivity to these lines. The OS Rom chip was socketed by the former owner of the machine (I bought it in 1986 used,) and most of the pins on this socket aren't making contact to the address and data lines. This is likely the cause of the fault in the system. The socket doesn't seem to be gripping the pins very well and the chip comes out a bit too easily. But the other thing I found is that P5 on ANTIC, which goes to P20 on GTIA, and P23 on GTIA are all solid logic low, when the Sam's guide says they should be going back and forth between low and high. Most of the other pin the wave form is provided for seem to have good signals on the analyzer. (I don't have a scope to verify the waveforms though.) Would the OS chip being disconnected cause it to be a solid black screen all on its own, or could there be some other problems with the GTIA and ANTIC? I'm going to be ordering a new socket for that (and maybe a new ROM, just to be safe,) and wanted to order any other chips that could be bad at the same time so I don't need to wait around twice if the first thing doesn't fix it. (I already have sockets for the RAM chips, and new ram chips on the way, since I figured this is a common failure mode with a MT ram based 130xe's.)
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Last week, Eric dug deep in his attic and found boxes of Atari stuff that has been hidden away for 30 years! Included were hundreds of pages of hand-written A/W/A game notes, more correspondence with Atari 8-bit magazines, and some 5 1/4" floppies that were still usable after all these years. One of the disks was really warped and unreadable, but Eric had to perform disk surgery to extract the media from within the protective disk cover and insert it into another disk that wasn't quite so warped. We had to wait for a serial to USB cable to arrive so we could use our old SIO2PC to dump the games. I have updated the document covering the Anschuetz/Weisgerber/Anschuetz 1980's game development. I have added a change history so you can see what new sections have been added. There is quite a bit of new stuff, some related to the newly discovered games we uncovered in the attic boxes. I have also attached a separate game development notes document that has scans of hundreds of pages of game development notes, code, and bit-mapped graphics. These are organized by game so you can compare the development notes to how the games turned out in the other document. I have also attached a zip file with 3 ATR self-booting BASIC disks with 3 games that were found on Side B of some of the 30 year-old-disks. These games are Phoenix, Piracy, and Ramses' Revenge. Ramses' Revenge is really worth taking a look at. It takes a minute to initialize, and is meant for two players, but it can also be played with one player (you'll just always win!). These three games were some of the very first that we wrote within a couple months after getting our Atari 400 and teaching ourselves BASIC in 1982. Phoenix was literally our first game and was written within a couple weeks of getting our computer while trying to learn to program. Hopefully you'll enjoy taking a look at this peek back into the history of Atari BASIC game development from the 1980's! Robert Anschuetz Eric Anschuetz John Weisgerber Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz v3.0 - Atari Age.pdf Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz - Development Notes.pdf AWA Disks.zip
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I don't know how many people are actually interested in Bridge, but I decided to do a little font fix for this game from Antic that was recently uploaded to Atarimania. The font looked pretty sloppy to me. Only the first disk was changed, but I've included the rest to simplify things. Original: Fixed: Blue Team Bridge (Font Fixed).zip
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Hello Atari 8-Bit Community! We were inspired by the many kind responses about our Atari BASIC game development document, our newly posted 1980's Anschuetz/Weisgerber/Anschuetz Atari BASIC games, and our Antic Atari Podcast. For those that missed it, here are the links: Forum post with Atari BASIC game development document and 1980's Atari BASIC games: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/268424-1980s-anschuetzweisgerberanschuetz-basic-games-release/ Antic Atari Podcast: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-297-robert-anschuetz-eric-anschuetz-john-weisgberber-antic-magazine-games In this post, we are uploading version 2.0 of the Atari BASIC game development document. This version enhances the original document in many paragraphs, and also adds some new and very interesting sections to the document. This version includes our original 1980's type-written (we didn't have a printer) instructions and programming notes that were submitted along with our BASIC games to Antic, COMPUTE!, and A.N.A.L.O.G. Perhaps even more interesting, we have also scanned the correspondence letters from these magazines for programs that were accepted and rejected for publication. The table of contents indicates these new sections (Development Notes pages 46-71, and Magazine Correspondence 75-91). These are scans from documents that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1980's! Thanks go out to John Weisgerber for saving all of this information for the past 30 years! We are still trying to dig up the old design notes and the graph paper that we used for character bitmaps! They are probably in the attic, closet, or basement somewhere. We hope you enjoy these new additions. Robert Anschuetz Eric Anschuetz John Weisgerber Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz v2.0.pdf
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I've been spending way too much time just thinking about Atari graphics, as a cool diversion from my full time programming job (C, C++, Java, perl, SQL). I've been reading about ANTIC and GTIA, and all the stuff they can do (or you can do with them). I've read and understood how to do a coarse horizintal scroll (and a fine scroll is just a variation on top of that). But all the examples I found assume that your in RAM screen is large-but-finite, and that your screen is just a window onto the RAM screen. For any given screen row, the offset from the base of your row is the offset from your physical screen to your virtual screen. Simple. But what is your data is really large, larger than your physical memory (or each row is larger than 4K :-) This might be the case in a procedurally generated (or otherwise compressed) horizontal scrolling game, for example. I kept thinking about this, and designed an answer. Clearly, because you can't have all your large screen drawn ready, you have to draw it on an as needed basis. Cue diagram (screen width 10 cells) Memory visible offset abcdefghij...........abcdefghij..0 kbcdefghijk..........bcdefghijk..1 klcdefghijkl.........cdefghijkl..2 klmdefghijklm........defghijklm..3 klmnefghijklmn.......efghijklmn..4 klmnofghijklmno......fghijklmno..5 klmnopghijklmnop.....ghijklmnop..6 klmnopqhijklmnopq....hijklmnopq..7 klmnopqrijklmnopqr...ijklmnopqr..8 klmnopqrsjklmnopqrs..jklmnopqrs..9 klmnopqrst...........klmnopqrst..0 ulmnopqrstu..........lmnopqrstu..1 uvmnopqrstuv.........mnopqrstuv..2 So, when you start, you just have your start row. As you scroll to the right, you only need to add the newly exposed bit of virtual screen ('k') on the right, and offset the memory (LMS) by 1. To keep scrolling, we just keep adding more stuff on the right, and keep incrementing the row base via LMS. But it gets interesting when we've drawn a whole screen of new stuff. We could now like to reuse the whole (now wasted) screen's width of memory to the left, but we'd have to redraw the entire screen ('k' to 't'). However, since we KNOW this is going to happen ahead of time, we can do what the diagram shows. When we draw a new piece of virtual screen, we draw it TWICE (or draw it once and copy), offset by a full screen width. So in the second line of the diagram we not only append a 'k' to the row, we replace the unused 'a' with another 'k'. This 'k' is very much a long term investment; we won't use it until the LMS memory offset is once again set to 0, 10 rows down the diagram. So - is this how everyone does it? I searched this forum (and the net) but could find anything. If this tehcnique has a name, I don't know it (so I couldn't search for it...) BugBear (dipping a toe in the cool Atari waters)
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I am working on a single 16mb SDX ATR with all the Antic magazine disks. I already have the disks in the ATR and I am now trying to incorporate text versions of all the Antic articles into the same ATR. I removed the files that were repeated on every disk, like MENU.BAS, DOS.SYS, DUP.SYS, AUTORUN.SYS, HELP! ETC ETC. I have the articles done for first issue 1982 through June 1983. Getting the software all moved over and sorted into separate directories took about 6-7 hours. The Articles are taking quite a bit more time to copy, paste, convert and import, these will take awhile....... Would anyone else besides myself be interested in something like this? I do plan to tweak the MENU.BAS, adding changing directories and a basic search function. I hope to also do one for ANALOG and others once this one is finished. Best Regards Robert
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I just put a PAL ANTIC (C021698) into my Incognito 800 in hopes of running Numen and Dimo's Quest, and all the other good PAL only stuff. The trouble is that my monitor, a Sharp Aquos LC-13B2UA, shows a monochrome picture. It has many modes available: N358, N443, PAL, PAL-M, PAL-N, SECAM, PAL-60, and Auto. It has no NTSC-50 mode. Yes, I tried them all with no luck. Does anyone know of a good monitor that will work with this?
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Been looking at ANTIC; how flexible is it - can you race the beam and run code in the vertical blanks? looks like with NTSC the entire screen is refreshed 60 times per second like a 240p signal. Looking at how feasible it would be to port the Virtual World BASIC runtime; I could write something specific to the 8-bit (maybe next) but it would be really cool to be able to cross-compile BASIC games for both systems, and cross-assemble assembly games that use the runtime. EDIT: Is it possible to load a 200 WSYNC loop into a single DLI routine and just draw the screen? Been doing some reading ... http://www.atariarchives.org/dere/chapt05.php Where can I get the source to BasketBall for the 400/800? Preferrably if someone has commented it so I can follow it; this program uses a kernel like the VCS, I will use it as a template.
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A magnificent meal made even better when paired with Antic Wine! The vintage is even from the correct era.
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Hi there, I am looking for a replacement ANTIC IC for my Atari 800 I need the PAL version as its for a UK version of the machine Part no on chip is: CO14887-03 Thanks in advance
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I've read that when ANTIC (pretty accurate name now, huh?) is disabled (memory adress 559 dec or $22f hex = 0 ), atari operates about 30% percent faster. But I didn't notice any differences with PLOT operations, i.e. after setting this memory area to 0 and then restoring value after image has been drawn (to remove that nasty "rendering" behavior), time spent plotting was roughly same, the only change was that screen was blank until "rendering" been finished. What I'm doing wrong? More importantly, is there any faster version of PLOT for ACTION! ?
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I have 27 original Antic floppies dated from 1987 through 1990. (There is one copy in there too, as a 28th). Most of them are NOT written on like the example on the left is. The two shown are the only two with Antic sleeves, the rest are blank or other styles. Is there any value in these? If they're literally just worth the cost of shipping, I'll just keep them, but if not, please make an offer of cash or trade. Just putting feelers out there. Thanks!
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Hello,I am looking for a complete or near complete set of Antic magazines. I am not sure of the value so make me an offer and if I can swing it I will buy... THANX, C-Rex
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Hello everyone, I've made a series of 4 YouTube videos describing in detail the conceptual work, and the creation of words to implement an ANTIC disassembler tool in FORTH to compliment the ANTIC assembler that I wrote. This basically demonstrates how FORTH can quickly be used to make useful tools that can be intermingled with the development of programs in FORTH so that you don't have to load entire other programs to get stuff done, but rather just flow from one vocabulary of words to the next. Let me know what you guys, think. -Thom
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Please watch these videos, like them and subscribe to this amazing channel! It contains long videos about A8 programming in BASIC, plus Assembler. The programmer needs some encouragement to continue ASAP, otherwise no more tutorials! :-(( http://www.youtube.com/user/SeetheTruth4Yourself?feature=watch