Assembly Language Programming for the Atari Computers

[+MrFish]

In keeping with the retro theme of Atariage, I still have 3-4 old laptops mostly running Win 98SE. I have one system on a plate where I have my PB10 and a couple of floppies I used for recent ATR8000 CP/M jerking around.

 

I still play Rogue, been doing a fair amount of Diablo I this year.

 

I agree with most of the lamentations about the direction of OS. W98 was really a sweet spot: Better then the previous versions of Windows, still had option to boot in DOS mode, included good'nuff USB support and networking. The system on a plate has both PCI and ISA slots which means I can use most cards from the inception of the PC to PCI. I gave one of the old systems to my grand kids so they could play Doom!

 

The thing that upsets me most about the new OS is more general direction of what they are allowing. I read an article on ARS where the author found something like 120 tracking cookies/sites being reported to on his computer. Someone with a differing opinion then myself on a topic cited a web site. When I went to the web site, it turned out 85% of the page was advertising and they didn't divulge one of their advertisers would directly benefit from their advocacy/position. I make that at 100% BS.

 

Recently my cousin had her parents<my aunt and uncle> scammed. Bozo posing as my cousin's son phoned them asking for bail money. He had details obviously gleaned from FB.

 

Just too much pimping going on with your personal information and the default is people can crawl up your butt with a microscope. The new OS/browsers are all made to make it possible. I downloaded an apk to my cellphone that asked for access to my contact list. Next day, everyone on my contact list gets spammed with email that spoofs my email address and even signs it with my name! I got an email to myself signed myself. Letting someone have access to your contact list does not give them licence to impersonate you. This is a freaking nightmare. Remember when spam and advertising was illegal on the net? What difference is their from someone spamming your mailbox and a web page that dumps hundreds of megs of advertising on you? All the BS about how 'we have to track you to better serve you' is just that. Things are bad and getting worse. Anything to make a buck.

 

I think the web should just be text, images, and hyper-links. That's it. No java, no scripting, no streaming, no cookies. Browsers should only read simple html and render the page. No extensions or other garbage. All the problems come from these additions. If you want special functions that work over the internet outside of that, then they should be part of specialized applications.

 

I just recently installed several extensions in my browser to prevent/control scripting, cookies, flash, and advertisements. The whole thing's a joke...

Edited October 13, 2014 by MrFish

[kogden]

Yeah but looking back, the IE4 and IE5 days in the Win98 and NT4 era were MUCH worse than they are now. The problem now is that there is demonstrable profit in preying on people's ignorance about their system and the average computer user is less experienced than most who used computers in the 80's through the mid-90's.

 

I remember our Win2K terminal server getting hit with pop-up malware and throwing pop-up ads for porn over RDP to all the Windows Based Terminals. Was classic. Even customer facing point of sale screens. And this was with solid AV software running. Don't make the mistake of trying to look at 2000 and XP with rose colored glasses. They sucked when they were new over a decade ago, and they still suck today.

[Kyle22]

I use Firefox with Ad Block Plus, M$ Security Essentials, and Spybot S&D, and never have popups or virus problems. Use a little common sense and don't click on FREE FREE FREE things, or software from un-trusted sources.

 

I have installed many Server 2003 systems in pizza shops using XP for clients that RDP into the server. It's on the Net with only port 3389 forwarded in the router to the server, and have never had problems. I am able to RDP into the system to fix any issues with the POS software.

 

As for the rosy glasses, I don't need them because the operating system is already rosy. It does all I need, and doesn't come with all the bloat of 7 or 8.

 

I have wiped the HD in several new i5 and i7 machines that came with Win8 and installed XP, and have had many positive comments about it.

 

I guess everyone has a right to their opinion, but I tend to go with what works for me, and the results of speed comparisons between different OS's.

 

I thought this thread was supposed to be about Assembly programming... How did we get into this?

[flashjazzcat]

I thought the thread was about a a PDF.

[ricortes]

I'm trying to remember the name of the ST development package for mixing text and graphics on a BBS, coming up blank. At any rate I was fairly friendly with the sysops of Compucat BBS at the time and they implemented an adventure game using it. I wrote an 8 bit terminal program that had the same features. Pretty simple, just something like #G was the escape character/sequence and the following commands were executed i.e. #GGRAPHICS( would put your Atari in bit mapped graphics mode.

 

I can't remember all the commands I had in there. Some were pretty obvious like a binary load and USR() function. I figured it would be good to have them for things like a redesigned character set and P/M graphics.

 

First thing my son said when I finished it was "Hey! This is neat! You could format someone's hard drive with it!" Ah, teenage angst. I decided to not release it. Seemed like a terrible idea at the time. Considering current developments, the concept of giving control of your computer on any level is even worse then I thought.

 

hehe, .PDF.

[_The Doctor__]

Back in the late 80's my friend made a simple ansi joke, unfortunatley it then spread like wild fire on accident from his bbs.....he re-assigned y for n and n for y........well when the prompt said format c:\ Y/N?

well you get what ended up happening....

Not one bit funny after that...

Edited October 16, 2014 by _The Doctor__

[_The Doctor__]

@ ricortes... I have two such grahic bbs programs on a disk burried somewhere in the garage.....

 

back too assembly language programming......

 

how about everything gets converted to straight machine language.... wouldn't the world be a faster more efficient place?

[kogden]

back too assembly language programming......

 

how about everything gets converted to straight machine language.... wouldn't the world be a faster more efficient place?

 

Well, on the Atari doing everything in 6502 Assembler is feasible, the 6502 was designed for it. I'm actually starting to really admire the 6502's simplicity in this regard. Lack of a hardware divide or multiply instruction can be painful. I'm no mathematician to begin with.

 

In the modern world, it would be asking for trouble. Security holes could get introduced easily and tackling bugs in a 60MB chunk of 64-bit assembler for larger, serious apps would be a straight-up nightmare. Even managing RAM would be a PITA. But, if you really want to see what a 64-bit OS written in assembly would look like, check this out.

 

http://www.menuetos.net/

Edited October 17, 2014 by kogden

[_The Doctor__]

Now that is cool... and not as insecure as it first looked....thank you for finding and posting this!