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Batari basic newbie looking for direction


easmith

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I have decided to try to dive into Bb in order to make a game which is beyond my ASM skills.

 

I have a few questions that I hope someone could help me with. I have seen a lot of scattered materials but want to know I have found the best info.

 

1. I want to make sure I download the correct programs from the correct legitimate website.

 

2. I want to know what the best tutorial website and or reference books are

 

3. I want to understand how Visual Batari basic and Batari basic are related, and if an entire game can be done in VBb. If so , what is the best tutorial / reference book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I'm curious what you don't know how to do in ASM that you think you can do in bB?

 

The batari Basic forum is the best place for bB questions.

 

The official release of bB is 10 years old now, and people are using the RevEng builds with improvements and bugfixes these days. Take a look at Take a look at these instructions for installing the latest versions of VbB and bB itself.

 

Visual batari Basic is an IDE for batari Basic, and uses the latter under the hood. You can make the same stuff regardless of whether or not you use the IDE, though many people prefer using it. I'm on a Mac, so I've never used it for development myself. If you are on Windows, you might as well install it and decide for yourself.

 

The batari Basic Commands Reference is your guide to all things bB, and there's a VbB reference linked to from that page, too, I believe.

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[edit - Karl beat me to it. Good on you, Karl. :P]

 

Ideally you should post about bB in the batari Basic subforum. There are also pinned topics in that forum that relate to your questions.

 

1. You should follow Random Terrain's batari Basic commands - Getting Started. RT's guide is also a good answer to your second question.

 

Whatever you do, don't download the batari basic from bataribasic.com. The version there is very old and hasn't been updated in over a decade. Same goes for the "tinkernut tutorial" installer.

 

2. Check out RT's site and those bB subforum stickies. I learned bB just by reading RT's guide - there are lots of code examples.

 

3. Vbb is a GUI add-on for bB, developed by Jeff Wierer. It contains a bunch of resource editors (code, music, sprite, ...) and calls the command-line bB utility to actually compile your basic program, so you need both Vbb and a matching bB. RT covers that under his Getting Started section.

 

(bonus unasked question) It's obviously not required, but bB allows you to code sections of your game in assembly or even replace parts of bB itself with your own assembly code.

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THANKS!

 

 

I'm curious what you don't know how to do in ASM that you think you can do in bB?

 

Really it is just sprite graphics that is holding me back, specifically having multiple colors on the same scan line in a sprite

 

 

(bonus unasked question) It's obviously not required, but bB allows you to code sections of your game in assembly or even replace parts of bB itself with your own assembly code.

This would be ideal , if I could code the sprite graphics with Bb and use assembly for the rest

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bB isn't going to help you with that. You can't have multiple colors on the same scanline for a single sprite in asm or bB. To get more than one color requires overlaying a sprite and a ball, missile, or a flickered sprite.

Ahh! Duh! Seems obvious now , but that might be my solution . Thanks.!

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bB isn't going to help you with that. You can't have multiple colors on the same scanline for a single sprite in asm or bB. To get more than one color requires overlaying a sprite and a ball, missile, or a flickered sprite.

I think I am on the right track now. I am using P1 missile for P0 hand , and P0 missile for P1 hand.

 

I will have to draw P0 and P1 hand/foot , or P1 and P0 hand/foot on alternate frames to ensure collision detection. And depending on the move/ animation graphic, I can move the missile object to act as either the hand or foot , then detect collision with say P1 missile and P1 for a hit against P1.

 

 

My plan is to make a karate game like International Karate ( C64) .

karate.bin

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If you want to get multiple colors on the same scanline there is another BASIC that will allow you to do that using artifacting. Artifacting works by leveraging idiosyncracies in the NTSC video signal.

The BASIC is here along with some examples of writing games in as little as 10 lines of BASIC:

http://relationalframework.com/Atari2600gamesonline.htm

You won't have anything to install, the IDE is already on your computer and only a single configuration command needs to be run to enable it.

Here's an artifact color example from one of my games from the 80's:

post-30777-0-14106600-1547823111.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

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