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[HELP] An old 400/800 6502 programer wishes to start over after 25 yrs.


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Hi.

Nice to ear you're interested but sorry that I don't know you're game(s) on the past but thanks to share and I'm going right now to see where I can download.

There have been so many and great games over the last years, including new, remakes and lots of those that sadly the Atari's 8bits didn't had available back them. Someone in some place even said that never our Atari had so much and better as we have constantly coming as today :).

There are many websites to see people's work, today and old games (and also where you can confirm if your game(s) are there or not), with screens, files and information. Here's some of them:

http://a8.fandal.cz

http://gury.atari8.info

http://atarionline.pl

http://www.atarimania.com/atari-400-800-xl-xe.html

and many many others with lots of all kind of stuff...

Regarding programming, wich computer(s) and programs you've come to the right place, not me because I'm not a coder, but you have here the best and friendly guys of the today's A8 development.

:thumbsup:

Edited by José Pereira
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There are 3games from you are on AtariMania and more from InHome Software:

http://www.atarimania.com/list_games_atari-400-800-xl-xe-dorey-daniel-j_team_339_8_G.html

It's maybe the best place to find your and other old games, demos,... because it has many ways of finding on the [Advanced Search].

Maybe you have some things from the past that aren't available anywhere and want to share with us.

:-)

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I'd recommend some or all of the following-

XL/XE series (get a memory expansion if you can)

Altirra (but don't know if that runs on a Mac)

CC65 suite - C cross compiler and assembler

MAD Pascal

MADS assembler

Action! cart or the disk version

WUDSN IDE

SIO2PC of some sort (er I guess SIO2MAC lol )

 

There's never been a better time to be an Atari developer, unless you want to make money. The tools and the community are just incredible.

Edited by danwinslow
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Ah yes, ATASCII of course. I forgot all about that.

Well I guess it seems a good idea at the time.

is there a nifty conversion program somewhere that you would recommend?

 

You can try these:

Of potential interest to you also is the fact that the native Atari8 one I made was written in Action. And, as always, I included my source code. There are also:

  • A Windows program called "Memopad" which actually allows you to edit ATASCII on a Windows platform.
  • Some emulators, like Altirra for example, have some provisions for conversion built in.
Edited by fujidude
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I am doing my game on a Mac. It's about 80% done, I'm doing it for the ABBUC software contest. It is about 90% assembler, however it also has some C code.

 

I mostly do it on a Macbook pro retina, but I also have a power mac. For me, I downloaded Eclipse as the code editor - get the generic version with no add-ons at all.

 

I also use Atari800MacX for my emulator most days, and occasionally I boot it up in Altirra. Atari800MacX works fine for me, when launching from Eclipse. However, if I were to use it from the desktop, I have to constantly switch the screen mode, because of some bug where it doesn't upgrade the screen until you do. Luckily, again, that isn't an issue for me day-to-day, as it works fine for my coding/testing. I have Altirra running in WINE, but, I haven't played with it enough to know if I could pass it arguments with WINE in the middle of it.

 

For me, the key to productivity is having a 1-click compile and run - that makes everything so easy.

 

My make.sh is very simple, it just runs cl65 -O -C init.cfg -t atari snake.c atari.asm score.asm vbi.asm etc.

Then the second line is:

open -a /Applications/Atari800MacX/Atari800MacX.app snake.xex

 

So Eclipse for editing, and single click compile and run = very fast programming cycle.
you can do the same with WUDSN.

 

I stuck with CC65 to have some C in the mix, which I only use for program flow.

 

The final thing for me, is for transfer to a real atari, I use a SIO2SD, because my macbook pro has a built in SD card slot, I just throw snake.xex on that, and then bring it over to a real atari.

 

In theory - except my real Atari has been at the shop for months.

I'm starting to suspect I'm in for a savage burn when I find out all my code doesn't work on the real thing, but what can you do...

 

My real Atari is an Atari 800XL with VBXE. It will eventually have a Rapidus and some kind of memory expansion.

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Cross compile via Linux, here is one setup: https://github.com/jhallen/atari-demo

(edit your source files, then just type "make").

Atari++ is the currently best Linux Atari simulator, but command line usage is a little weird. For example, you have to give "-holdoption false" to get it to run BASIC... this is fine, but no way that I found to do it in the GUI and you won't find this if you search its documentation for BASIC. The simulator is nice in that you can use its built-in monitor for 6502 breakpoints and for an instruction trace (it shows nn previous instructions up to the breakpoint- I remember in circuit emulators could do this).

 

sio2pc-usb works nicely in Linux (no drivers needed) and is the most convenient way to connect your development laptop to a real Atari.

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Ah yes, ATASCII of course. I forgot all about that.

Well I guess it seems a good idea at the time.

is there a nifty conversion program somewhere that you would recommend?

I don't use a Mac but the various other flavors of the Atari800 emulator have a virtual drive H:. 'H:' without a number is like 'D:' in DOS. H1: through H4: are virtual drives without translation. H5: and H6: through H9: are mirrors of H: and H1: through H4: but these mirrors will perform ASCII/ATASCII translation and vise versa.

 

So, if you set up H1: to point to a folder with a program that's in ASCII you can load that program with "ENTER H6:<program name>" and it will be translated back to ATASCII. If the program is already ATASCII you use "ENTER H1:<program name>". If the program is tokenized then just like in the old days you still use the familiar LOAD command, e.g. "LOAD H1:PROGRAM.BAS"

 

-Steve Sheppard

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