What hardware should I look out for?

[Tezz]

Sometimes it sucks being self employed when there's no work around.

Yea, geesh. Tell me about it I doubt my business will see the end of the year.

[Heaven/TQA]

Pete... I have some non used 800xl around here... and as I am on sio2usb now... I have even have one sio2pc available... but you need oldschool printer port...

 

so to see new work... I can borrow you these 2 devices? 1050 is not necessary as we do not use fastloader stuff...

 

think about...

[carmel_andrews]

Sometimes it sucks being self employed when there's no work around.

Yea, geesh. Tell me about it I doubt my business will see the end of the year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

well I've just found myself the first sniff of a sales (non retail) project i have had in 2 months and potentially the first earnings since the start of the year, thing is though it's ad/media sales not the sort of thing that can be doing in this particular econ./business climate (esp. as it's pitching UK)...anyway i've been given a month (trial) to see if i can make something of it...I was rather hoping to find something that i hadn't done selling for or on before (but i suppose in these times you can't pick and choose)

 

Getting back on topic though....what programming environment you looking at,...Mac 65 or atari assembler editor

[PeteD]

@Heaven

 

Thanks man. Let me see how far I get with just the emulators (like I say, I'm not doing anything special yet). Saves everyone any trouble then sending hardware around if it isn't needed. And of course I'm sure a few of you won't mind testing stuff for me

 

@Carmel

 

atm I'm using Eclipse on windows with WUDSN plugin. I think it's using atasm to assemble, I set up the 3 assemblers it supports and just wrote some code in the format I used to use (Turbo assembler on c64) and it understood all the stuff like LDA #<address and #>address etc so I'm quite happy

 

 

 

 

At the moment I've got Eclipse up and working, some basic (as in simple, not the language) code to init the system, set up DLISTs, interrupt vectors etc. Some drawing stuff, scrolling, char movement sprites and I'm just writing the first of my softsprite routines.

 

PC side I've found my old source code (but not what was the latest version) which is done in GTK as I used to run Linux exclusively. I've managed to set all the dev stuff for that up on windows and it compiles and runs (so my tools are now cross platform). I'm just designing the apps I need for A8 stuff. Sprite grabber is already done but I'm going to do a bitmap to 4 colour 2bpp converter (just shows you colours that are used on screen and lets you assign a bit pattern to them, needed for converting C64 stuff because you never really know what bitpatterns you'll get from that, one 8x8 01 could be green and the next 8x8 10 could be lol) and then the G2F style editor (yeah I know I could just use G2F but I want my stuff to work how I'm comfortable working).

 

Couple of weeks (in amongst other stuff) and I hope to have some game demo stuff to show

 

 

Pete

[carmel_andrews]

Oops, i thought you were looking for pucka A8 hardware to actually program on (hence my suggestion of mac65 or ASEMD)

 

Or are you just looking for hardware to test the end (executable/bootable) program on (i.e not source code)

[PeteD]

Just to test on really. Sounds like the emulators are up to the task until I start getting into some of the more complex pokey stuff.

 

 

Pete

[Heaven/TQA]

emulators are preety up on the antic/gtia stuff... only the pokey seems a bitch...

[carmel_andrews]

If you are using atari800win+...avoid version 4.1...there seems to be a sound issue as it sounds like sound sort of interference or white noise (esp. with xp or newer), only going from what i recall, haven't played any emulators for a while

[emkay]

If you are using atari800win+...avoid version 4.1...there seems to be a sound issue as it sounds like sound sort of interference or white noise (esp. with xp or newer), only going from what i recall, haven't played any emulators for a while

 

Just switch to Direct Sound.

[Tezz]

To me original hardware is still essential to ensure everything is tested 100% and to work on the stuff that's not accurate in the emulation yet, it's not just the real bleeding edge stuff, there's still a good few inacuracies with the Antic and GTIA timing with Atari800Win+ & Atari++ producing different inaccurate results. The Pokey side of emulation goes without saying. With that said however, emulation is pretty good on the whole but we've still got some way to go before we have reasonable accuracy.

[atariksi]

If you are using atari800win+...avoid version 4.1...there seems to be a sound issue as it sounds like sound sort of interference or white noise (esp. with xp or newer), only going from what i recall, haven't played any emulators for a while

 

Just switch to Direct Sound.

 

Prolonged use of direct sound can be bad for your ears. Always keep your distance from direct sound.

[atariksi]

emulators are preety up on the antic/gtia stuff... only the pokey seems a bitch...

 

Key word would be "catching up". That's the point-- they are experimentally trying to catch up to real Atari but not there neither in ANTIC/GTIA nor POKEY.

Of course PIA is undoable since even with parallel port you get only one 8-bit port and each individual pin cannot be separately programmed for input/output.

 

You can grant them 6502 chip although not 100% in the timing. Very good disassembler/monitor from what I have seen.

[atariksi]

I would seriously consider some extended ram, because these days alot of the better games & demos need it. It's true that if you are trying to hit the absolute largest common denominator for compatability, a 64k XL/XE makes sense, but noone is buying BRAND NEW ataris anymore.. 90% of your enthusiasts who own ataris have at least one machine with extended ram. It's not hard to do a "Bucholz/Rambo" 256k upgrade to an 800XL, and its really easy to do a 320k upgrade to a 130xe.

...

What's the biggest RAM drive available?

 

>As far as drives, flash-carts, hard-disks, etc. go.... I wouldnt bother... 90% of the most excellent development tools for the 8-bit atari run on a PC nowadayze.. get (or build) a simple SIO2PC interface, and youve got the ability to quickly excahnge data of all types between your PC and ATARI.

 

Perhaps, a Happy Drive is good for testing on real drive or for copying from real disks.

[NRV]

Advanced sound stuff no so great.

...

Graphics... interlace implemented and fairly accurate on a recent Atari++ release. Mid-line switching among GTIA modes, AFAIK, isn't 100% accurate on any emulator.

 

Horizontal scrolling - emulators can sometimes have seemingly fine scrolling in cases that cause corruption on real hardware.

 

Some IRQ modes are not implemented?

Some POT scan modes?

 

also I think I have crashed Atari800Win using some "invalid" Display Lists, like using infinite loops with the jump instruction or something like that..

 

Regards

[Rybags]

Interesting on the DList thing... dunno. Really, any DList should be fine because the real machine stops reading it after 240 scanlines.

 

IRQs - well, I'd say that Interrupt and Proceed aren't there because they're externally triggered over the SIO bus.

Pokey Timers aren't cycle-exact, which was picked up some time ago.

Fast Pot scan doesn't see the POT registers count upwards per cycle as happens on a real machine.

[Tezz]

Mid-line switching among GTIA modes, AFAIK, isn't 100% accurate on any emulator.

I missed that part of your post. This is one of the inaccuracies in the emulation I was refering to earlier. I've also come across issues with dlists crashing in Atari800Win+ 4.0 which was acceptable on the real hardware. Edited August 2, 2009 by Tezz

[Rybags]

Depends how you define "crashing".

 

Pointing a DList to random data causes what looks like screen corruption, but really, just about any data is valid for a Display List... it just doesn't necessarily look like it is valid.

 

Crashes can occur though if that random data happens to have lots of DLI bits set, especially if the DLI routine you have is something that's long running.

[Heaven/TQA]

I crashed 4.0, too... but to be honest... sure the emulation brakes when you do weird things just to screw the emulation... sure it should not but...

[atariksi]

I crashed 4.0, too... but to be honest... sure the emulation brakes when you do weird things just to screw the emulation... sure it should not but...

 

Too many ....

 

One major thing about targetting emulators, you limit your discoveries of what 8-bit can do. Would your HIP be discovered if people were targetting emulators and then running on real machines? Never, because emulators are built on what's known about the real machine so they are always in some sort of catch-up mode.

 

Of course, some known things can't be done due to hardware differences between PCs and Ataris; and other things are just bugs in the code.

[carmel_andrews]

Direct sound option screws up on xp x64

[+bf2k+]

What's the biggest RAM drive available?

 

I used to run a 512k ram disk on an 800XL before I accidentally destroyed my 512k upgrade. IIRC I was using the ramdisk driver from BeWe DOS under SpartaDOS 3.2g.

[MEtalGuy66]

We have an MIO capable of a 16meg Ramdisk. The firmware thatr supports it isnt done, but someone could easily do a DOS handler for it..

[atariksi]

We have an MIO capable of a 16meg Ramdisk. The firmware thatr supports it isnt done, but someone could easily do a DOS handler for it..

 

Is it direct-plug in into 800XL or does it require soldering?

[MEtalGuy66]

Yeah its direct plug in.. no it doesn't require soldering.. Its an MIO... as in the ICD Multi I/O PBI device.. The ram is kept alive by a separate power supply, so you can even boot from it..

[PeteD]

Back to my question of hardware. Is a 65xe suitable for my needs? pretty much 100% compatible with 800xl?

 

 

Pete