laoo Posted May 10, 2019 Share Posted May 10, 2019 Hi, I'm mainly from Atari 8-bit neighbourhood, but tempted by recent Atari Lynx 30th Birthday Programming Competition I've decided to give it a try and started to gather enough knowledge to craft some Lynx assembly "hello world" on my own. I've read cursorily posts from this sub-forum and found that there is a substantial amount of interesting findings, but sadly some seems to be lost. Especially there are discoveries by Wookie about boot process and encryption that I'm very interested, but all links are dead now. E.g. none of these work: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/183090-booting-from-rom-lnx/?p=2305616 Are there any mirrors, copies... whatever? Maybe it's a lesson, that more information should be kept internally, rather in uncertain outside world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nop90 Posted May 10, 2019 Share Posted May 10, 2019 Nothing is lost on AtariAge. I made some experiments with the bootloader last month. You can find some hints I received here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/289657-splitting-out-combo-game-carts/ You can find the code to decrypt the bootloader in the handy sources too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+karri Posted May 10, 2019 Share Posted May 10, 2019 Wookies site was attacked by some php technique and he took it down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laoo Posted May 11, 2019 Author Share Posted May 11, 2019 Thank you Nop90 for pointing to that thread, I've initially skipped it and indeed I've found there what I was missing and I presume, that I can reconstruct now the information which is inaccessible due to Wookie's page being down. Nevertheless I'm a professional programmer and as a Lynx newbie I've had a lot of trouble to build a consistent view on the Lynx boot process and overall "how to make a game in assembly from scratch" workflow, as the information is scattered around in many, many threads and currently starting a journey with Lynx programming has rather high entry threshold. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nop90 Posted May 11, 2019 Share Posted May 11, 2019 It was the same for me. Started interesting in lynx coding last November and I'm still learning. And I'm coding in c using the cc65 framework that helps a lot. I'm slowly making some experiments with Asm because I have a very ambitious project ongoing. I hope you will share some of the experience you will gain, so to help the other newly lynx coders. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laoo Posted May 11, 2019 Author Share Posted May 11, 2019 If my experience will prove successful, I will surly post here a "how to make a game in assembly from scratch" guide Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Great to see you're interested in the competition! You don't have to code in assembly, in fact I would encourage to code in C so you can focus more on art/sounds/music. The programming resources section has a good amount of material to get you started - https://atarigamer.com/pages/atari-lynx-programming-resources Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laoo Posted May 14, 2019 Author Share Posted May 14, 2019 One more question: where can I find files mentioned in Appendix 4 of Lynx documentation: http://www.monlynx.de/lynx/sprite.html ? Namely 6502:macros/sprite.mac, 6502:macros/display.mac, 6502:src/sprite.src and 6502:src/display.src Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+karri Posted May 14, 2019 Share Posted May 14, 2019 If my experience will prove successful, I will surly post here a "how to make a game in assembly from scratch" guide Using assembly is the only way to get to write really small games. The smallest one I have done fits into 1k. It is an Othello game. Without music at https://bitbucket.org/atarilynx/lynxSee in lynx/contrib/ottelo/ottelo.asm There is also a slightly larger build ottelo2.asm that has sound effects and music. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laoo Posted May 14, 2019 Author Share Posted May 14, 2019 (edited) It's really not a mystery that 6502 wasn't designed with high level language compilation in mind and currently there is no way to write a good compiler for it - it would be too freaking complicated to even start thinking about it in non-corporate environments. It's exactly opposite to modern CPUs where you virtually can't write code as good as compiler can generate in a blink of a second. Hence I'm just not satisfied with quality of code generated by cc65. Besides... assembly is pure fun. Tons of C/C++ I have at work Edited May 14, 2019 by laoo 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted May 14, 2019 Share Posted May 14, 2019 Ah fair enough then! I'm not sure where you can find those files unfortunately. Maybe some others who code in assembly on here can help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+karri Posted May 14, 2019 Share Posted May 14, 2019 My guess is that you need to dig for tools used for the original toolkits released by Handy Software for the Howard board. They might be found in the Road Riot sources that were released earlier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laoo Posted May 14, 2019 Author Share Posted May 14, 2019 Couldn't find it there. OK. It's not an issue then, because I thought that they are widely known files and only I can't find them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+karri Posted May 14, 2019 Share Posted May 14, 2019 sprite.mac plus lots of other macros are included in lynx/contrib/redeye but similar macros are in bll also. The oruginal macros are more complex as they allow you to run the code on Howard board. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laoo Posted May 14, 2019 Author Share Posted May 14, 2019 (edited) I haven't checked it precisely but it might be it, as I've found it here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229015-porting-comlynx-epyx-redeye-code-to-cc65/?p=3058741 Thanks for help. Edited May 14, 2019 by laoo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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