Gunstar Posted January 29, 2020 Share Posted January 29, 2020 (edited) Is this thread still about getting Galaga on the 8-bits? Because wasn't there a thread about Playsoft's work on Atari Age this past year or so? There is this anyway... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=102&v=RbSPYUPlEtw&feature=emb_logo test5200.bin Edit: yeah, here is the thread: Edited January 29, 2020 by Gunstar 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DearHorse Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 22 hours ago, MrFish said: Man, that's a bummer. Hi MrFish, Yes, really I lost a big big amount of intricated work best Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 (edited) 34 minutes ago, DearHorse said: Yes, really I lost a big big amount of intricated work I can sympathize: I lost all my original Atari collection (hardware, software, books, etc.) and programs I'd written in the 80's. Edited January 30, 2020 by MrFish 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 2 hours ago, MrFish said: I can sympathize: I lost all my original Atari collection (hardware, software, books, etc.) and programs I'd written in the 80's. I can too, lost all my books and software when I moved in the 90's. luckily I didn't lose the hardware, but I have completely different hardware now, than I had then, except for one 1050 drive and my dot-matrix printer. For me it was all replaceable though, except for my Atari computer art, which was bad enough, but losing your own code is even worse! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toddtmw Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 On 12/17/2019 at 7:39 PM, Awch said: Galactic Chase was the first game I bought for myself back in the day. It came on cassette in a thick ziplock bag with folded instructions. We were shocked by what a good Galaxian clone it was. Played the heck out of it on our 400! Me TOO! Weird. Mine was on an 800, but still cassette and everything. (I bought the 800, couldn't also afford a drive!) I played the heck out of that game. Of course, once you waited all that time to load it, you HAD to play a good long time! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 4 hours ago, Gunstar said: I can too, lost all my books and software when I moved in the 90's. luckily I didn't lose the hardware, but I have completely different hardware now, than I had then, except for one 1050 drive and my dot-matrix printer. For me it was all replaceable though, except for my Atari computer art, which was bad enough, but losing your own code is even worse! On a whim, I started a thread once about my lost items. I didn't really expect a reply about it, but I was able to let it go, for the most part, after that. I've had many times that amount in hardware, and software since then; and I've written and started writing a lot more software, and created many more graphics that what I had done in the past. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AW127 Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 On 12/18/2019 at 1:39 AM, Awch said: Galactic Chase was the first game I bought for myself back in the day. It came on cassette in a thick ziplock bag with folded instructions. We were shocked by what a good Galaxian clone it was. Played the heck out of it on our 400! Yes, "Galactic Chase" is a great game and very good Galaxian version. The only thing which disturbs me a little bit, is that permanent loud noise, which the player hears constantly in the background. Seems like there is no possibility, to turn this tone off on the real machine. But in the rom of the game maybe? On the internet, i found some rom-versions without that background-noise, like for example the [a2].xex rom of the game, but sadly then not only this constant loud background-tone is gone, but also parts of the other sound-fx, like for example the sound, when the player is shooting. Is there not a rom of this game available, which had only the background-noise turned off, but still all other sfx? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DearHorse Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 (edited) 14 hours ago, MrFish said: I can sympathize: I lost all my original Atari collection (hardware, software, books, etc.) and programs I'd written in the 80's. I was very hungry & discouraged because lots of friends were waiting for phoenix (lots of messages "I can't wait") and except for graphics and intro pokey music, all was lost (HDD & USB keys crashed more or less at the same time. adaptations for ST crunched too. phoenix was huge (37k in MAC65) but near finished (score management and some sounds left) and ST galaga/phoenix far from the end, but all the same, it was hard to swallow. Edited January 31, 2020 by DearHorse 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StickJock Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 I think a lot of us have there. I've lost code from time to time (like accidentally kicking the power switch on the outlet strip), but I think the most discouraging was back in high school in the early 80s. I had written a bunch of games for the Wang 2200T computer, including Space Invaders, Robotron, Tron, Moon Patrol, Breakout & more. The computer ran a version of Basic, and did not have a lot of memory (maybe 8K?). I used lots of tricks to save RAM, like no space between the line number & the commands, and all variables names were single characters. The keyboard had a toggle switch to change between lowercase/uppercase and uppercase/keyword. If you typed "PRINT" then it took 5 bytes, but if you used the PRINT keyword on the keyboard, it only took 1 byte. Cramming as many commands on one line as possible since the ":" tool less RAM than a new line number. It was like a 10-liner contest before there was such a thing! My version of Robotron, for example, used a loader program, the main game program, data files for the rooms, a separate high score program (you could pass variables between programs), and a high score data file. Since there was no POS command, I used string commands to locate X&Y on the screen, where the Y string had a "screen home" character, followed by line feed characters, and the X string had "move cursor one space to the right" characters. The screens were green phosphorous 64 x 16, btw, with tall character cells with underlines & lowercase decenders, too. Anyway, I figured out lots of tricks to get the most out of these old machines. I had just finished my "masterpiece". A two-player tank game that used two separate computers. The two computers would pass their moves to each other by writing to the shared 8" floppy drive (trivia: the 8" floppies had a write protect notch instead of a write enable notch. To double-side the disks, we had to punch the index hole openings in the disk envelope, which required carefully spreading the disk envelope open at the center hole and punch both sides of the envelope, but not the disk material itself). Each system showed two screens, which were windows into a large scrolling map. One window was centered on your tank, and the other on your base. You would move around the world, which was using characters as graphics, and could shoot your cannon and lay mines. You could see your mines on the map, but not your opponent's mines. You could not cross rivers, and you could not see through mountains on the map. You returned to your base to repair damage to your tank and to reload on ammo & mines, and won by destroying your opponent's tank. Anyway, it was a pretty cool game. It was the early 80s so we pretty much thought that all computer games were cool. Anyway, the point of this story is that all of my stuff was on an 8" floppy disk, which was kept in my Trapper Keeper 3-ring binder with all of my school notes. One day, I misplaced it at school. I found it a couple of days later, and someone had intentionally damaged the floppy. It looked like they had spit on the oval disk opening and scratched it with something. I think I may have had a backup 8" floppy, but I had not backed stuff up for weeks, so I lost a significant amount of my work, including my just finished tank game. The next semester, the school got Atari 800s, and I never looked back! BTW: I rewrote the tank game for the Atari in the late 80s, but never finished it. It was meant to be played over a modem, but I never got a chance to test it out since by that time most of my 8-bit friends had moved on to the ST. Man, I haven't thought about that for years. Thanks? for the memories. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 (edited) 5 hours ago, StickJock said: I used lots of tricks to save RAM, like no space between the line number & the commands, and all variables names were single characters. The keyboard had a toggle switch to change between lowercase/uppercase and uppercase/keyword. If you typed "PRINT" then it took 5 bytes, but if you used the PRINT keyword on the keyboard, it only took 1 byte. Cramming as many commands on one line as possible since the ":" tool less RAM than a new line number. It was like a 10-liner contest before there was such a thing! That sounds just like my days before I got an Atari, programming in Sinclair BASIC on my Timex/Sinclair 1000 (ZX81). Though I had the 16K ram pack from the start, so maybe twice the memory of your Wang 2200T. But even though I have over a megabyte of memory to use with my Atari these days, I'll still use all the short-cuts I can, like '?' instead of "print" just because I'm lazy and to save time. I use all the abbreviations I can in SpartaDOS too, if I don't already have a batch file set up for certain things. I really don't see why anyone would use long commands where and if you don't have too. Edited February 1, 2020 by Gunstar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StickJock Posted February 1, 2020 Share Posted February 1, 2020 Yeah, I had a ZX81 as well. It was actually the first computer that I owned. I eventually got the 16K RAM pack for it, but that really slowed things down since, as I understood it, the RAM refresh was done by software by reading the RAM in the OS. That meant that the more RAM you had, the slower the computer ran! The Wang was the first computer that I ever used, learning BASIC on it in 1978, IIRC. My older brother worked in the computer lab at the high school, so he brought me in and taught me how to use them. By the time I got to high school, the 2200T systems were outdated so hardly anyone used the three of them that they had left, so they were pretty much always available, unlike the newer machines that had a signup sheet. Three 2200T computers, all sharing a 2 slot 8" floppy drive. The first one of the three was also connected to a 132 column daisy wheel printer. The "new" computers were a Wang 2200VS system, with about a dozen terminals and a very loud band printer. The terminals were connected to a chest freezer sized CPU and a similar sized hard drive with removable disk packs. The CPU & drive were located in a small, windowed room with two window air conditioners to keep the room cold. Fun fact: The Wang 2200T computer did not have a microprocessor. It had boards full of discrete components, and booted to BASIC in ROM. Programming these old systems, where every byte mattered, prepared me for my career as a firmware engineer, where every bit and every cycle mattered! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted February 1, 2020 Share Posted February 1, 2020 52 minutes ago, StickJock said: Yeah, I had a ZX81 as well. It was actually the first computer that I owned. I eventually got the 16K RAM pack for it, but that really slowed things down since, as I understood it, the RAM refresh was done by software by reading the RAM in the OS. That meant that the more RAM you had, the slower the computer ran! Hahaha... Unbelievable! I wonder how that marketing campaign went down... 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted February 1, 2020 Share Posted February 1, 2020 That being said it still had a great great deal more computing power than those computers that got us to the moon (or the hoax as some believe) thanfully they didn't need the ram pack This thread has made me quite sad for all the people who lost so much, I was in that list too, really hard to know that all your machine probably ended up in the back of a rubbish lorry and crunched up or on a land fill. its not just the machines but the software and even little bits of code that me and a friend had done, a multiboot style menu. It still needed work but we were very pleased with it but gone to a dump with the rest of my stuff. Its a tough thing when it all goes, more so for the coders who have lost hours and hours of hard game or util coding, proper games etc, not some silly menu like ours but proper stuff. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tezz Posted February 1, 2020 Share Posted February 1, 2020 (edited) We can't forget that the Zeddie made computing affordable here at the time, £49.95 as a kit or £69.95 assembled vs several hundred. I was a young kid when it was released and although I wasn't afforded a Sinclair machine until a couple of years later the buzz around the talk of the ZX81 at school and reading about it kick-started my interest in computing. I own a bunch of them now including one in an aftermarket Fuller case. Edited February 1, 2020 by Tezz 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StickJock Posted February 1, 2020 Share Posted February 1, 2020 Yeah, I got my US version ZX81 in the kit form for $99.95. The assembled one was $149.95. Man, I would stay up so late every night programming on that thing! My neighbor across the street had one also. He shaved the "ZX81" off of the case to flatten it and placed a large aluminum block on the case to act as an auxiliary heat sink. Good times! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mytek Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 I also picked up the US version on an impulse buy BITD because of the cheap price, as well as the ram expansion, and I believe a printer. First thing I did was modify it to have a monochrome monitor output jack. Played around with it for a few days, and then set it aside never to use it again. Because I already had 8-bit Atari computers and disk drives, this was a giant step backwards for me. Also I really didn't like the keyboard. I guess if this had been my first computer things would have been different. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 I also had a ZX81 but never did much of anything with it. Most of my programming and experimentation was 80% Apple II and 20% Atari 800. Knowing 2 versions of BASIC and DOS was enough for me, simply didn't have the time to learn a third or fourth. But late-nite programming was fun on just about any micro of the day. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 (edited) Even though I was familiar with 3 micros back in the 80's, first Apple IIe's at school, then the ZX81 at home and later the Atari 8-bit, I also only new two versions of BASIC and DOS, because I didn't use Atari Basic back then, except to type in magazine programs, I used Microsoft BASIC II on both the Apple and Atari for my own original experimentation and programming. I got my first Atari, the 130XE, because it was 6502 based, with 128K and had Microsoft BASIC available for it; just like the Apple IIe's I first learned programming on in school, but I could afford it and not an Apple. My two BASIC's were Sinclair's and Microsoft's, and of course there was no DOS for the ZX81 since there was no disk drive. Though I never used Atari DOS back then much either, I got SpartaDOS soon after I got my first Atari disk drive. But my knowledge of BASIC from back then was lost from dis-use for the last 30 years, as I lost interest in programming and just wanted to play games, so I'm learning BASIC XE again now on the Atari, as I have regained interest in programming it in recent years (but I only have interest in programming languages on the Atari and programming the Atari). Edited February 2, 2020 by Gunstar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 Always wanted an Apple II, they looked so cool and as I'd seen them on Wargames and it was hacking (soo naughty) I wanted one more but never ever got one. The ZX80 and 81 I had, tried to learn basic, hated it then and never ever grew to love it on any machine, I did write some stuff like a mortgage program etc but they were simple as hell and just stupid. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 1 hour ago, Mclaneinc said: Always wanted an Apple II, they looked so cool and as I'd seen them on Wargames and it was hacking (soo naughty) I wanted one more but never ever got one. Pretty much doubt you saw one as it was an IMSAI... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 Yes. I don't recall Apple II in WarGames. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+skr Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 Quote As a sidebar, off wopr topic, we used an atari 800 in preproduction. It had four oscillators and we actually could create the DTMF tones required to dial every number in an area code/prefix and attempt to communicate with a modem. Found this quote at https://www.imsai.net/movies/wargames.htm No II, but obviously an Atari 800 was used during the production of the movie. A movie, that I want to watch again right now. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 1 hour ago, www.atarimania.com said: Pretty much doubt you saw one as it was an IMSAI... Rose tinted memories...What was the computer in The Thing, the one they played chess on and blew it up..Still wanted an Apple tho, they looked so computery Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mytek Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 You know, it wouldn't take much of a leap in imagination to envision something like the 1200XL with internal slots and a lift off lid like the Apple II. Could have built-in something like the 1090 expansion box, and then had the beige section on the top as a separate piece that would have snapped in place for easy access. Then just provide an opening in the rear for cables and such to snake through. Now that would have been an upgrade worthy of the 1200XL's introduction pricing. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SenorRossie Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 With regards to the 1200XL upgrade, or downgrade if Apple is not your thing, we came across an apple IIc clone in a casing that looks quite similar to that of the 1200XL: More info https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1161 7 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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