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Looking for all 15 tricky tutorials


videofx

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Only some of them. And some of the programs but not the manuals. These were released by two different companies which were really the same company, Educational Software and Santa Cruz Educational Software.

 

I actually just scanned the manual and package cover for Page Flipping #3 yesterday.

 

https://archive.org/details/trickytutorial3pageflippingeducationalsoftware

 

A few of us are still working on getting the rest of them archived. It's hard because eBay sellers tend to sell this at a high price and there is a lot of competition from collectors who do not like to archive their stuff. We will eventually get them all archived.

 

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  • 1 year later...
On 1/24/2020 at 11:29 PM, erichenneke said:

Thanks for putting this up! I'm always looking for more of the Tricky Tutorials since I basically grew up on them but my collection is incomplete, so I went over these disk images, comparing them to what I already have. To my astonishment I found that two of them in particular contain not only the Tutorials themselves but also a few other unrelated files - with my name on them - dated 1991-1992.

 

What had apparently happened was that in the early 90's I was writing various hobby projects, and since Atari compatible floppies were scarce (the high density ones you could buy for the PC didn't work) I used any free space that I could find. The Tricky Tutorials 3 and 14 didn't fill up an entire disk, so I happily used the empty space for my own projects.

Several years later I got an SIO2PC cable, which meant I longer needed floppies (everything was backed up to the PC) and Nir Dary (@ndary) was happy to take them off my hands. At some later point he backed up all those disks himself - including some that apparently I had missed when performing my own backups - and put them somewhere online. From there they spread forth, and these two Tricky Tutorial disks ended up in this collection.

 

Since these files are floating around anyway, let me explain what they are:

 

in disk image Tricky Tutorial 3a -basic.atr:

  • sir1.asy, sir1.obj: this is part of an Assembly language paint program I was working on with my brother Nitzan. There are additional source files that are absent, so this is not very useful as is. Note that the Tutorial files in this image are corrupted beyond repair so this image is basically useless. Use TT3_Page_Flipping1.atr instead.

 

in disk image Tricky Tutorial 14 -basic.atr (which is also the image presently downloadable from Atarimania):

  • desktop.bas - a prototype file manager program with joystick controlled GUI. It displays the disk directory, you can click on the File menu and that's pretty much it. Anything else will either do nothing or crash the program.
  • vbi.* - some VBI source and object code, plus the binary converted to a form includable in a Basic program. I'm not sure what it was used for (it's not the same as the code used within desktop.bas).
  • readme.bas - doesn't do much, loads an 80-column font and switches to it. Screen remains at 40 columns.
  • col80.fnt - an 80 column font.
  • col80mak.bas - converts col80.fnt to col80.lst, for merging the binary font data into a Basic program.
  • col80.bas - a TurboBasic program that displays a text file in 80 columns. No Assembly used so it's extremely slow. However scrolling is achieved by display list manipulation so that part is actually very fast. Crashes at end of the file. This was basically an early proof of concept for what eventually grew to become the Ice-T terminal emulator.

@videofx - if you're still looking for these disks, may I suggest looking at https://atariage.com/forums/topic/22905-tricky-tutorials/ - all 15 tutorials are up there. Also I've just finished a major collection and cleanup operation on these, I will post my results in that thread shortly.

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Just out of interest, the page flipping tutorial, example 4 seems to fail every time here, tried swapping Basics and OS's around but only briefly..Is there a correct comination?

 

When I say fail, I mean its still running but its black screen with no options to proceed like the other examples. (tried start and option etc)

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1 hour ago, Mclaneinc said:

Just out of interest, the page flipping tutorial, example 4 seems to fail every time here

Altirra configured as a standard NTSC XL/XE computer with built-in Atari Basic works for me. Make sure you're not running the file I mentioned in my previous post, that's the corrupted one. The other one (TT3_Page_Flipping1.atr) works fine. Or perhaps you meant tutorial #1? In that one you do need to manually load the next example after ex. 4, see the docs.

 

Note that I've uploaded a cleaned up set of all 15 tutorials with nearly complete documentation at this link.

Edited by itaych
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