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Turbo Basic


wmt029

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Hi!

13 hours ago, baktra said:

Since FB cross compiler is a transpiler

to CC65, it benefits from its linker LD65 and only includes used parts of the runtime library.

 

Only a nitpick, FastBasic cross-compiler is not a transpiler in the common sense, as it directly produces assembly files. It does use the CA65 assembler and the LD65 linker to produce the final executable.

 

On 2/23/2021 at 8:59 AM, wmt029 said:

Thanks! I'll need to test it. I think I'd want to be able to compile the game into an executable.

 

Maybe I'll take a look at FastBasic or MadPascal. Does anyone happen to know if those platforms work with the 400/800?

 

FastBasic produces stand-alone Atari DOS executables (.XEX), and works on any Atari 8-bit system. If you program using the Atari IDE, the compiled programs will always include the full run-time, but this is only about 3kb. Using the cross-compiler, as @baktra said above, the resulting program will be smaller. Also, the cross-compiler includes an optimizer, making the code about 10% faster.

 

Have Fun!

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Hi!

On 2/21/2021 at 9:41 PM, wmt029 said:

First stab at emulating the screen layout. No sprites or actual game yet. Text layout needs more polish, just a first swing.

 

Left is the the full Windows version of the game (built in GameMaker Studio 2), right is Turbo Basic version in progress. Basically it draws a random starfield then the lines (it'd be neat if I could somehow imitate the parallax star scrolling effect of my Windows game but I think that's asking a lot of a Basic program). Next up will be figuring out the sprites/player missile graphics.

tunnelvision.png

 

I downloaded your game to see what it is like, I think you could borrow the technique from the WAZERS ten-liner (made by @vitoco in 10 lines of FastBasic) to implement this, see the description at: http://www.vitoco.cl/atari/10liner/WAZERS/

 

Basically:

- Your ship and the shots are players.
- Enemies are implemented in character mode (ANTIC mode 4, using redefined charset), this allows having many enemies in the same line.

- Collisions are detected using hardware collision registers.
- The star-filed could be implemented as two missiles with the horizontal position controlled from a DLI.

 

Have Fun!

 

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12 hours ago, dmsc said:

Hi!

 

I downloaded your game to see what it is like, I think you could borrow the technique from the WAZERS ten-liner (made by @vitoco in 10 lines of FastBasic) to implement this, see the description at: http://www.vitoco.cl/atari/10liner/WAZERS/

 

Basically:

- Your ship and the shots are players.
- Enemies are implemented in character mode (ANTIC mode 4, using redefined charset), this allows having many enemies in the same line.

- Collisions are detected using hardware collision registers.
- The star-filed could be implemented as two missiles with the horizontal position controlled from a DLI.

 

Have Fun!

 

Awesome! Thanks for the advice!

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Speaking of @dmsc’s amazing work, I was notified an hour ago of a new Fast Basic v4.5 release candidate :) Thank you for the awesome work, Daniel!!

 

https://github.com/dmsc/fastbasic/releases/tag/v4.5-rc

 

To the original question, I LOVE Turbo BASIC XL, but if you need to wring more performance out of a BASIC program, Fast Basic will definitely gain you a good deal of performance in most areas. This evening I was playing around with Fast Basic V4.4, TBXL, and Advan BASIC, just testing how many times it would read a joystick and print the STICK(0) results at 0,0 on a GR. 2+16. Nothing else was going on, just reading STICK(0) and printing that value at 0,0 for 15 seconds in a WHILE/WEND loop. Fast Basic does a little over twice the # of iterations (averaged about 3,600). This was directly on real hardware.

 

 

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55 minutes ago, wmt029 said:

I have a very dumb Mad Pascal question...

 

Do you actually write the code on an Atari? I've been hunting around and I found the github page for it but I don't see anything like an .atr, .xex. com file etc.

You write code on a Windows/Linux/macOS machine, and compile for the Atari. Getting the executable over to the Atari is an exercise for the reader. ?

 

 

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