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Native development tools


Alfred

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So we have the sticky post about Windows tools for developing software for the ATARI, mostly graphics editing stuff. What is available for doing the same sorts of things on the Atari ?

 

To my knowledge all we have is Envision for character sets, a few paint programs like Illustrator and that’s about it. 
 

Is that really it, or are there other tools that I’ve just never heard of, like something to build maps from chests like Tiled ? Like a native P/M editor, or any other of the tools you’d need to develop a game on an Atari.

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I used to use Magic Window for character sets but I doubt it's any better, or even as good as, Envision.

 

If you go to atarimania and do do an advanced search on the utilities you can select genre (eg. animation, font editing etc) and you might find something new there.

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Game map/level editors tend to be specific to just a single game and in many cases are part of the game itself.

 

There's a fair few bitmap editors around.

But in the modern day with the likes of RastaConverter and G2F that take care of picture conversions with dozens of colour automatically, it doesn't make much sense trying to do the same on real hardware.

 

There's at least one music editor that's in common use (CMC, CMT, something like that?) but RMT is probably the most commonly used.

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When I started developing games I and my colleagues wrote our own tools on the A8 system - so for Contagion, Beast etc we made custom editors - but rapidly transitioned to cross development with all tools being developed on the ST when it appeared in '84/'85...

 

Running tools on the target machine was painful, and whilst we did use multiple A8 machines they were not "connected" - so we were saving out files onto disc to then pull into a compilation on another machine was the norm, even when we got access to Atari's in house tools. Doing anything that required rapid iteration on the target device was too slow.

 

sTeVE

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Some things that pop up in my mind are:

 

Image converter Bugbiter 240i: http://gury.atari8.info/software/1865.php

 

Music: Find Benjysofts Soundmonitor there: http://www.homecomputerworld.com/programmexl.html

 

Also look for Pegasus Soundmonitor 2.04. This is the tool, with which R.I.K. of Kaisersoft wrote the title tune of the ABBUC Magazine Disk 138.

 

There are many, many more tools. I am quite sure, that Charlie Chaplin will show up soon and point you to more tools. ;)

Edited by skr
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1 hour ago, Jetboot Jack said:

When I started developing games I and my colleagues wrote our own tools on the A8 system - so for Contagion, Beast etc we made custom editors - but rapidly transitioned to cross development with all tools being developed on the ST when it appeared in '84/'85...

 

Running tools on the target machine was painful, and whilst we did use multiple A8 machines they were not "connected" - so we were saving out files onto disc to then pull into a compilation on another machine was the norm, even when we got access to Atari's in house tools. Doing anything that required rapid iteration on the target device was too slow.

 

sTeVE

 

Same for me ... I don't remember anything available when I started programming on the A8. My graphics editor for Jet-Boot Jack was graph paper and an assortment of coloured pencils ?.  When I moved on to some C64 programming I kept my trusty 800 to do the coding and sent the assembled data to the Commodore via the joystick ports. That evolved into writing some editors that ran on the C64 but transferred the data back to the 800 for inclusion in the assembly (this also worked for editing Atari data too). That certainly sped up development.

 

When I returned to the A8 I was amazed by the quality of development tools available. Having said that .... I've just been colouring in some squares on graph paper - old habits die hard!

 

 

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Well,

 

there are hundreds of tools available on the A8 regarding:

 

- painting/drawing (in various A8 Gr. modes, no tool does them all)

- PM animation and/or PM creation+editing

- screen and map creators (limited to certain games)

- sound monitors and sound editors

- game development tools (most of them for text adventures, a few ones for other tasks)

- hundreds of gfx, snd, txt, ... conversion tools

- hundreds of programming languages (e.g. more than a dozen for Basic, several dozen Assemblers, etc.)

 

Yes, I collected many of these tools and could create a list and post links where to find them (or upload them from my collection) - problem is, 99% of users do not use such tools on native A8, they simply use available PC tools (much more RAM available, much faster, much more comfort, etc.) or in case they need something specific on the A8, they simply code it for themselves. So for me, it does not make much sense to waste my time looking (or uploading) these tools that only a few Atarians may use... 

 

Simply take a look what you can find there:

pigwa/Holmes: http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/index.html

(there are dozens of other A8 collections at pigwa with hundreds or thousands of A8 tools available)

atarionline.pl: a) gfx: http://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?ct=utils&sub=2. Grafika

b) msx: http://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?ct=utils&sub=3. Muzyka

c) programming: http://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?ct=utils&sub=4. Programowanie

 

 

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12 hours ago, skr said:

There are many, many more tools. I am quite sure, that Charlie Chaplin will show up soon and point you to more tools. ;)

 

I guess I'm too old, why is Charlie Chaplin the expert here ? Ex-commercial game developer or something ? I don't know who he is, hence my curiosity.

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Nope, absolutely no expert. Not even a programmer...

Just an Atarian with far too many ATR images (over 15,000) in his own collection and many tens of thousands of ATR's in many many other collections (copied unsorted from various CDs, DVDs, SD-cards, USB-sticks, etc. onto a 256GB USB-stick, with a backup on another 256GB USB-stick)...  ;-)

 

Normally I tend to remember the name of a program that someone is searching and either give a link where to find it or upload it from my collection. But this time I am simply too lazy to look up (and write down) all the developer and game creation tools that are available for the A8... 

 

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I rarely used the commercially available tools on the A8 in my A8 projects - either the data they created needed to be munged in some way to make to useful, or the specific project needs (like the map editor for Beast) just did not fit with a generic approach, or were so slow and had such painful file handling that it was just not practical to use.

 

Once I started using cross development then I did use more off the shelf tools like OCP Advanced Art Studio for all tiles, fonts and sprites - as it had great export facilities...

 

In my experience the majority of useful Dev Tools are not things like image editors to be honest, but the tools for specific project needs that do not exist - for instance to convert data into more compressed and differently organised structure for a project.

 

I never found sprite editor of any worth for my games in the A8 - so had my own ? 

 

But I remember using GAD (Databyte) to create Antic E images by editing two different images (top and bottom) that I would combine into one single higher resolution image, because it had the best drawing widgets...

 

sTeVE

Edited by Jetboot Jack
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