For the programmers...

[Max_Chatsworth]

Just now, baktra said:

The explanation is simple, the former COMECON countries including Czechoslovakia were generally late to the home computer party and so was I. Businesses started aggressively adopting PCs since 1990 (before that, they had to rely on mainframes and minis, personal computers were scarce and adoption was slow), while 8-bits and non-PC 16/32-bits honored many households by their continued presence until approximately 1996.

That's awesome. Glad you found a way to make it happen...

[DanBoris]

9 hours ago, DanBoris said:

I wrote a program for my father's job that did a graphical demonstration of a manufacturing process. This was done on an Atari 800 in Basic using the hi-rez graphics mode 8. I used a utility from either Antic or Analog magazine that allowed you to write text onto a graphics 8 screen. I really should dig through my disks and see if I still have a copy. 

I managed to find it in my old disk images. My father worked for the Franklin Mint which at the time was also owned by Warner Communications, the main reason I ended up getting an Atari. The program demonstrates the Damascene process for etching copper patterns, which is often used in electronics manufacturing. This may have been one of the reasons Warner bought the Mint. 

 

The program runs on normal Atari Basic. The first two screens will advance on their, but takes a little bit, especially the first screen. I was using the time to load some things in the background. You can go through the rest of the presentation my pressing a key on the keyboard. 

DAMA.BAS

[Max_Chatsworth]

13 hours ago, DanBoris said:

I managed to find it in my old disk images. My father worked for the Franklin Mint which at the time was also owned by Warner Communications, the main reason I ended up getting an Atari. The program demonstrates the Damascene process for etching copper patterns, which is often used in electronics manufacturing. This may have been one of the reasons Warner bought the Mint. 

 

The program runs on normal Atari Basic. The first two screens will advance on their, but takes a little bit, especially the first screen. I was using the time to load some things in the background. You can go through the rest of the presentation my pressing a key on the keyboard. 

DAMA.BAS 15.4 kB · 6 downloads

Cool....I'll have to fire it up and check it out. I can't believe you still have the source code!

 

[ClausB]

The first computer I programmed was a Honeywell 200, in FORTRAN, on punched cards! It was 1975 in high school. We punched our cards in class and sent them to the computer center every night and got the printouts back the next day. 23 hours waiting to see that you forgot a comma! Aside from simple programming assignments, I remember writing a program to print the calendar for any year, and another to score bowling games.

 

The next year we got 2 Altair 8800a micros with BASIC. We formed a Computer Club and wrote a computer dating program and sold the matchmaking service to students in the cafeteria! In 1976 I bought my first personal computer, a TI SR-56 with 260 bytes RAM. In college I got a TI-59, an Atari 400, and a Sinclair ZX81 kit. Programming became my career, software mostly in C and LabView, and firmware in various assembly languages.

Edited July 22, 2020 by ClausB

[Max_Chatsworth]

On 7/20/2020 at 2:11 PM, littleman jack said:

Yes, my D&D friends were also the Atari programming and gaming friends, which were separate from my sports and BMX friends. And the nuns at our Catholic school somehow found out about our D&D sessions and told us that it would result in eternal damnation if we kept playing. Scary and fun times both.

By the way..what baseball game is that on your icon? I know I saw it back in the day. Was it something like realsports baseball..or strat-o-matic digital or something?

[zzip]

6 minutes ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

By the way..what baseball game is that on your icon? I know I saw it back in the day. Was it something like realsports baseball..or strat-o-matic digital or something?

Star-league Baseball I think, from GameStar

I remember seeing screenshots of that game back when I only had a 2600, thinking how realistic that game looked!   Couldn't wait to get an Atari computer and have graphics like that :) 

[Alfred]

The first computer I used was a Color Computer II in highschool, I was 16. We were doing little physics problems on the machine when someone gave me a 40 page photocopy of I think it was a Compute! article on the Colossal Cave adventure game. The article was the source code to the game in HP 3000 BASIC, and I spent the next couple of months porting it to the Color Computer II.  A couple of years later I was hired to work in a data centre as a protein robot for the tape drives and printers. Lounging around on night shift, I taught myself S/370 assembly language and after that PL/I. One of the other meat puppets there had an Atari 800 that he introduced me to, and I bought an 800XL and a 1050 shortly after that, late '84 maybe. After that, it was more XL's, disk drives modems, etc. Never really used BASIC or any other language on the Atari besides assembly language, although I did try Action! occasionally.

[Max_Chatsworth]

@Alfred

 

Wow..teaching yourself ASM while on night shift..that's hard core!  I still wonder how I ever learned anything before the internet back then!

Thanks for sharing!

 

 

[Max_Chatsworth]

21 minutes ago, zzip said:

Star-league Baseball I think, from GameStar

I remember seeing screenshots of that game back when I only had a 2600, thinking how realistic that game looked!   Couldn't wait to get an Atari computer and have graphics like that

That's it!  And I remember thinking the *exact* same thing about it...."look at that 3d baseball field!" .  If I do recall I think I was underwhelmed a bit when I actually played it but I think that was only because I drooled over the screenshots for so long that ...you know...expectations being too high. I only got to play it because my parent's insurance agent/friend had his whole office on Atari automation and like games and he had it. 

 

Incidentally the WORST baseball game I ever played was Domark's baseball for the ST.....ugh..it was by a British company and I think they just ported a cricket game with a few add ons or something terrible.  

[zzip]

5 minutes ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

That's it!  And I remember thinking the *exact* same thing about it...."look at that 3d baseball field!" .  If I do recall I think I was underwhelmed a bit when I actually played it but I think that was only because I drooled over the screenshots for so long that ...you know...expectations being too high.

I don't think I ever actually played it.  We got Hardball as our 8-bit baseball game, and it was worth it.

 

I remember lots of cases of seeing amazing screenshots in magazine, and the actual game being a letdown.   Namely Graphic adventures!  They always looked so amazing in tiny screenshots, but on a real screen they didn't look so good :)

[Max_Chatsworth]

3 minutes ago, zzip said:

I don't think I ever actually played it.  We got Hardball as our 8-bit baseball game, and it was worth it.

 

I remember lots of cases of seeing amazing screenshots in magazine, and the actual game being a letdown.   Namely Graphic adventures!  They always looked so amazing in tiny screenshots, but on a real screen they didn't look so good

Hell yes!! Accolage's Hardball!  by Bob Whitehead and music by Mimi Dogget...is it sad I knew that info from memory?!  That was the first game that me and my buddy with an 800 teamed up to purchase to double our libraries.  We played that thing into the ground!

[rra]

I have posted previously about my early Atari programming days along with my twin brother and best friend.  See thread linked below:

 

My twin brother and I received our Atari 400 with 48K RAM expansion on Christmas Day 1981 while we were Juniors in High School.  Since we weren’t experienced at typing, that very Christmas Day they had their Dad type in a BASIC program called “Shoot” from the September 1981 issue of COMPUTE! Magazine. “Shoot” was similar to Air-Sea Battle on the Atari 2600 VCS, and was actually a machine-language program that used a BASIC listing to call the machine language routines.  The first game that I wrote in early 1982 was a game called “Phoenix” written in chunky character graphics. Phoenix was semi-playable and was, of course, modeled after the arcade game Phoenix.  My brother, myself, and best friend read Compute!, Antic, ANALOG, Softside, and Creative Computing and got pretty decent at programming.  We submitted several games to Compute! and Antic where they paid us between $150 and $400 per game, and a few of them were published in Antic.  The best game we wrote, Night Rescue, was bought by Compute! but never published.   All of our Anschuetz/Weisgerber/Anschuetz BASIC games that we wrote (except a few that were lost on cassette backup) are now uploaded to Atarimania.com:

http://www.atarimania.com/pgelstsoft.awp?system=8&type=G&team=2501&step=25

 

After High School, all three of us majored in Computer Science.   The first couple of classes were really easy because we already were experienced programmers, but we learned FORTRAN, Pascal, C, LISP, FORTH, and Assembly language in collage.   After college, all three of us went into programming careers.  My brother and I ended up moving to Orlando where the Army and Navy have their centers of excellence for modeling and simulation.  We made careers out of programming video training systems for the military, so our Atari BASIC games programming experience led right into our careers.  My brother and I were also early MAME developers.  I wrote an Arcade Emulator that played Galaxian, Moon Cresta, The End, and other Z80 based games of similar architecture.   My Galaxian emulator was rolled into MAME for version 0.5 along with those 10 or so game drivers way back in 1998!  My brother also became a MAME developer.  I'm still technically a MAME developer but I haven't contributed anything in a very long time!

 

A few years ago, I decided to write a lengthy document covering what it was like to write BASIC games in the 1980's.  The thread below has links to that document.

 

My brother and I also sat down and played and discussed all of our old Atari BASIC games a couple years ago and put it on YouTube.  We were also interviewed for Kevin Savitz' ANTIC podcast where we discussed writing Atari BASIC games in the 1980's.  Those links are also below.

 

 Robert Anschuetz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[littleman jack]

7 hours ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

By the way..what baseball game is that on your icon? I know I saw it back in the day. Was it something like realsports baseball..or strat-o-matic digital or something?

As zzip said, it's Star League Baseball from Game Star. It had some crazy pitches, right fielders that could make plays at first, and silly announcements between innings. Not as professional as Hardball. But more silly and simple to play.

[Gunstar]

On 7/20/2020 at 9:30 AM, Max_Chatsworth said:

I was a bit of a Stranger in a Strange land. I was into computers and played D&D with my brother/friends..but I also was really into sports...so those two worlds did NOT overlap in the early 80's much!  LOL

I was a closet nerd with my computers and a publicly into sports as well. My nerd side didn't see the light of day (except with other nerds) until after college.

[Gunstar]

19 hours ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

Hell yes!! Accolage's Hardball!  by Bob Whitehead and music by Mimi Dogget...is it sad I knew that info from memory?!  That was the first game that me and my buddy with an 800 teamed up to purchase to double our libraries.  We played that thing into the ground!

I had two baseball games for my Atari, Micro-League for the manager-style game play and authentic rosters and Hardball!, the a best 8-bit baseball game ever. I didn't move on to something better until I got Frank Thomas' BIG HURT baseball for the Sega Saturn in the 90's. I still play Hardball! on the A8 and my most modern baseball game I still play is World Series Baseball 2K1 for my Sega Dreamcast.

[+skr]

26 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

[...] Hardball!, the a best 8-bit baseball game ever.[...]

Baseball is not a thing here in Germany, not even a small thing. But for whatever reason I had a copy of Hardball too. There was no manual with it (?) but I liked it so much, that I figured out the rules by just playing it. When I saw my first actual Baseball game in 2011 in Phoenix/Arizona, I knew the rules and and some people wondered, if I´m into baseball. I said "no, just loved playing Hardball on the Atari". I think, they still don´t believe me.

[Max_Chatsworth]

44 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

I was a closet nerd with my computers and a publicly into sports as well. My nerd side didn't see the light of day (except with other nerds) until after college.

I see you *might* be from Oklahoma?  I'm in KS. If interested, join my new club  ?  We aren't doing much yet but trying to figure out what we *should* use it for.

 

 

 

[Max_Chatsworth]

43 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

I had two baseball games for my Atari, Micro-League for the manager-style game play and authentic rosters and Hardball!, the a best 8-bit baseball game ever. I didn't move on to something better until I got Frank Thomas' BIG HURT baseball for the Sega Saturn in the 90's. I still play Hardball! on the A8 and my most modern baseball game I still play is World Series Baseball 2K1 for my Sega Dreamcast.

The only game I loved more than Hardball! was later on the NES Bases Loaded by Jaleco.

[littleman jack]

On 7/23/2020 at 11:21 AM, Max_Chatsworth said:

The only game I loved more than Hardball! was later on the NES Bases Loaded by Jaleco.

My brother and I played the snot out of that one, Bases Loaded. Good times.

I need to go back and check out Hardball. My brother got that one for the Atari 800 after I left for college, so I never played that one. He also got it for the Sega Genesis a bit later.

[Max_Chatsworth]

17 hours ago, littleman jack said:

My brother and I played the snot out of that one, Bases Loaded. Good times.

I need to go back and check out Hardball. My brother got that one for the Atari 800 after I left for college, so I never played that one. He also got it for the Sega Genesis a bit later.

Yeah..I saw that they ported Hardball! to other platforms and I think I even may have played it for my Navy buddy's Genesis in 92 or so.  As the years went by I noticed that there had been Hardball! 2, 3, etc....and I even played 2 or 3 or one of them later for what must have been either the 16 bit Ataris(ST) or 16 bit Commodore(Amiga) series as by the early 90's me and my friends in the navy who were into home pc's had moved on to the 16 bits. It may have even for a 386 or 486 PC clone as my roommate was early to adopt those.  Can recall for sure, but what I do remember is not being impressed. Now I know that those later games were probably dazzlingly better in animation, speed, graphics, sound...you name it. But part of the reason Harball! was so impressive is that it was groundbreaking in my opinion..whereas the other...by the time they came out..there was plenty of dazzling stuff around to play. Just my take on it anyway. 

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

Yeah..I saw that they ported Hardball! to other platforms and I think I even may have played it for my Navy buddy's Genesis in 92 or so.  As the years went by I noticed that there had been Hardball! 2, 3, etc....and I even played 2 or 3 or one of them later for what must have been either the 16 bit Ataris(ST) or 16 bit Commodore(Amiga) series as by the early 90's me and my friends in the navy who were into home pc's had moved on to the 16 bits. It may have even for a 386 or 486 PC clone as my roommate was early to adopt those.  Can recall for sure, but what I do remember is not being impressed. Now I know that those later games were probably dazzlingly better in animation, speed, graphics, sound...you name it. But part of the reason Harball! was so impressive is that it was groundbreaking in my opinion..whereas the other...by the time they came out..there was plenty of dazzling stuff around to play. Just my take on it anyway. 

Sounds about right.  I had Hardball on ST, and it looked better than A8..   but I almost never played it on ST because other titles grabbed my attention.

[Max_Chatsworth]

On 7/22/2020 at 4:12 PM, rra said:

I have posted previously about my early Atari programming days along with my twin brother and best friend.  See thread linked below:

 

My twin brother and I received our Atari 400 with 48K RAM expansion on Christmas Day 1981 while we were Juniors in High School.  Since we weren’t experienced at typing, that very Christmas Day they had their Dad type in a BASIC program called “Shoot” from the September 1981 issue of COMPUTE! Magazine. “Shoot” was similar to Air-Sea Battle on the Atari 2600 VCS, and was actually a machine-language program that used a BASIC listing to call the machine language routines.  The first game that I wrote in early 1982 was a game called “Phoenix” written in chunky character graphics. Phoenix was semi-playable and was, of course, modeled after the arcade game Phoenix.  My brother, myself, and best friend read Compute!, Antic, ANALOG, Softside, and Creative Computing and got pretty decent at programming.  We submitted several games to Compute! and Antic where they paid us between $150 and $400 per game, and a few of them were published in Antic.  The best game we wrote, Night Rescue, was bought by Compute! but never published.   All of our Anschuetz/Weisgerber/Anschuetz BASIC games that we wrote (except a few that were lost on cassette backup) are now uploaded to Atarimania.com:

http://www.atarimania.com/pgelstsoft.awp?system=8&type=G&team=2501&step=25

 

After High School, all three of us majored in Computer Science.   The first couple of classes were really easy because we already were experienced programmers, but we learned FORTRAN, Pascal, C, LISP, FORTH, and Assembly language in collage.   After college, all three of us went into programming careers.  My brother and I ended up moving to Orlando where the Army and Navy have their centers of excellence for modeling and simulation.  We made careers out of programming video training systems for the military, so our Atari BASIC games programming experience led right into our careers.  My brother and I were also early MAME developers.  I wrote an Arcade Emulator that played Galaxian, Moon Cresta, The End, and other Z80 based games of similar architecture.   My Galaxian emulator was rolled into MAME for version 0.5 along with those 10 or so game drivers way back in 1998!  My brother also became a MAME developer.  I'm still technically a MAME developer but I haven't contributed anything in a very long time!

 

A few years ago, I decided to write a lengthy document covering what it was like to write BASIC games in the 1980's.  The thread below has links to that document.

 

My brother and I also sat down and played and discussed all of our old Atari BASIC games a couple years ago and put it on YouTube.  We were also interviewed for Kevin Savitz' ANTIC podcast where we discussed writing Atari BASIC games in the 1980's.  Those links are also below.

 

 Robert Anschuetz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow..thanks for sharing!  Don't know why I didn't see your reply before, but that was great...and impressive!   I was in the Navy in Orlando in 90-91..were you there during that time?