Some of my programs from the late 80s and 90s

[machf]

Well, back then in  the late 90s, I was transfering files from my Atari 8-bit diskettes to the PC (using a combination of DiskCommunicator on the 8-bit, and MyUtil, DCMtoATR, and PKARC on the PC) and uploading them to the UMich Archives. Unfortunately, although things like the SISTAP disk images and the Informática Creativa Disk #1 images made it, other stuff I uploaded stayed on the "New" directory on the FTP server an was never properly classified and moved to a different place, and then vanished during some server upgrade (this was around 1999, judging by the dates on my files). I still have those files on backup CDs I burned at the time, so I'm attaching them here. I'll keep uploading more of my old stuff here on this topic too.

 

TV_CALIB.ARC - my attempts at making a program which would allow me to properly calibrate the image on my TV set when connecting my Atari 800XL. Unfortunately, if I judge by the results provided by Altirra (taking a screen cap and then loading it into VirtualDub and applying the ColorTools filter), the colors generated by the 8-bit are slightly off... 3 versions of the program included, with "MITV" being the latest one.

 

UUENCDEC.ARC - Two programs written in TurboBASIC XL 1.5 to perform UUencoding and UUdecoding of files. (People who weren't around in those days probably won't know what they were useful for).

  

BATTLSHP.ARC - Two different versions of the Battleship game (the one played with pen and paper), in Spanish, converted from ones published in the Spanish magazine "ZX" for Sinclair computers, one originally for the ZX81 and the other for the ZX Spectrum. I gave them names in German (SEEKRIEG.TRB and SCHLACHT.TRB) since I was using TurboBASIC XL 1.5...

 

TREKGAME.ARC - the old Star Trek-inspired game, written in TurboBASIC XL 1.5, for two players, with messages in German since I followed the instructions from AK. Dewdney's column in the German edition of Scientific American (Spektrum der Wissenschaft) which was available at my school's library.

 

CALCULUS.ARC - a couple programs I wrote while at the university, one for calculating the Eigenvalues of a matrix and the other one to find roots from polynomials applying Bairstow's method (based on code for the Apple II from the Spanish edition of the book "Science and Engineering Programs, Apple II Edition"  by John Heilborn).

 

CIRC_DIG.ARC - 3 programs I wrote while at the university, one for applying the Quine-McCluskey method for minimization of Boolean functions, and the other two just some simple programs to detect hazards in multi-stage logical circuits (just assuming the delay in every gate was the same).

 

DSP.ARC - several programs to calculate the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) , Fast Fourier Transform (FFT or SFT with "S" for "schnelle" to avoid duplicate filenames), Discrete Hartley Transform (DHT), and Fast Hartley Transform (FHT or SHT with "S" for "schnelle" to avoid duplicate filenames), both using Decimation in Time (DIT) and Decimation in Frequency (DIF) algorithms, for my Digital Signal Processing lasses at the university.

 

INV_OP.ARC - 2 programs to perform Critical Path Management and Linear Programming calculations, for my OR (Operations Research, or "Investigación de Operaciones" in Spanish) classes at the university.

 

MyProgs.zip - contains an .ATR image file with all the contents of the previous .ARC files together on a 130KB disk, to save you the trouble.

 

 

Tv_calib.arc UUENCDEC.ARC BATTLSHP.ARC TREKGAME.ARC CALCULUS.ARC CIRC_DIG.ARC DSP.ARC INV_OP.ARC MyProgs.zip

[machf]

Here are a few more...

 

CardPack.zip - the contents of my old CARDPAK1, CARDPAK2 and CARDPAK3 files which can still be found at the UMich Archives, placed all together in a single 130KB .ATR image file.

 

CardList.zip - Another 130KB .ATR image file, containing LISTed versions of the programs in the previous one, plus a listing for a program that can read the data from a .mid MIDI file (I wanted to eventually be able to play them on the 8-bit, but later didn't have the time anymore to further advance on that project), a text describing the Percom block I found online, and transcripts from "Star Trek Voyager auditions" sketch done for Star Trek's 30th Anniversary celebration in 1996.

 

 

CardPack.zip CardList.zip

[machf]

And the last ones for now...

 

Fractals.zip - contains yet another 130KB .ATR image with several programs to generate fractals which I wrote based on articles on Scientific American, Spektrum der Wissenschaft, COMPUTE! and other magazines... there may be a program I typed from ANTIC mixed in there, too I'm not quite sure.

 

FracPics.zip - and another 130KB .ATR image containing some fractal images generated on my 800XL by those programs on the previous one.

 

 

Fractals.zip FracPics.zip

[Mrshoujo]

48 minutes ago, machf said:

And the last ones for now...

 

Fractals.zip - contains yet another 130KB .ATR image with several programs to generate fractals which I wrote based on articles on Scientific American...

Would this be the triangle wedge shaped fractal landscape from September 1984 issue of Scientific American? A room mate in college had that listing and I too converted it to run on Atari BASIC years ago and when I got a 1020 plotter, adapted it to output on that. The program came to mind again a few weeks ago and Scientific American has a pay wall up preventing a free peruse of that issue as some research nailed down that to be the source of the program.

A program which I had adapted it to run in compiled QuickBASIC for DOS and ran super fast on an AT&T Linux box during a brief employment gig at a local USDA Soil Conservation Service office.

 

At one point I found an article in some magazine I can't remember which plotted fractal clouds and got that to work rather nicely...

Edited June 6, 2022 by Mrshoujo
Forgot a salient thought.

[machf]

5 minutes ago, Mrshoujo said:

Would this be the triangle wedge shaped fractal landscape from September 1984 issue of Scientific American? A room mate in college had that listing and I too converted it to run on Atari BASIC years ago and when I got a 1020 plotter, adapted it to output on that. The program came to mind again a few weeks ago and Scientific American has a pay wall up preventing a free peruse of that issue as some research nailed down that to be the source of the program.

A program which I had adapted it to run in compiled QuickBASIC for DOS and ran super fast on an AT&T Linux box during a brief employment gig at a local USDA Soil Conservation Service office.

 

At one point I found an article in some magazine I can't remember which plotted fractal clouds and got that to work rather nicely...

Yes, I think that's the one, also mentioned on this blog:

http://manillismo.blogspot.com/2011/07/fractal-mountain_30.html

 

I actually used the German version as the source, so the date is some time later...

 

The ones that correspond to that algorithm are MOUNT.TRB, MOUNTAIN.TRB, MOUNTAI2.TRB and HIGHMONT.TRB, IIRC. And possibly FRAKBERG, too. FASTFRAC.TRB, FRACLAND.TRB, FASTLAND.TRB, FASTLND2.TRB, HIGHLAND.TRB and HIGHLND2.TRB, OTOH, are based on the algorithm described in an anrticle published in COMPUTE! sometime in 1987, IIRC, titled "Fast Fractal Landscapes", which uses quads instead of triangles... I also ported those to the PC using QuickBASIC and increasing the resolution, still have them on my HDD.

 

Oh, and there's one titled "SWASTIKA.TRB" - don't worry, I only titled it like that because the shape of the fractal curve it generates reminded me of that symbol, without any other connotations...

 

And "JULIE" and "MANDY" are NOT files for Strip Poker or anything like that... they generate views of Julia sets and the Mandelbrot set, respectively, in case you're wondering.

 

(Speaking of Strip Poker, back then I slso made a custom version using DOS XE, I think, and a 360KB disk which added all the opponents from the additional disks and allowed you to select from all 8, but that's a matter for a different post altogether...)

 

 

[tuf]

How cool!

[machf]

1 hour ago, machf said:

I also ported those to the PC using QuickBASIC and increasing the resolution, still have them on my HDD.

Since I couldn't edit my previous post anymore, I'm attaching this .RAR file to this new one instead... it contains the QuickBASIC versions of those programs in listed form, you can view how close they are to the original TurboBASIC XL ones. Some of them have names a bit different from ther 8-bit counteparts (for example, HAKENKRZ.BAS should be the port of SWASTIKA.TRB, and POLYNOME.BAS of BAIRSTOW.TRB)

Included inside are also a few which, although I DID program them on the 800XL, I didn't find yet on my backup CDs, but I hope to do that at a later time: CAUER.BAS (electrical networks using Cauer's 1st and 2nd forms), FILTROS.BAS (design of Butterworth and Chebyshev filters - I also made a later program derived from that one, for designing digital filters), ABACO.BAS (to calculate impedance of transmission lines), and HANGMAN.BAS (a Hangman game where one player would first type the word to be guessed and the other player would have to guess it). All of those are lying somewhere, since I had previously written them on my 800XL before porting them to the PC (sometimes that would involve LISTing them to a text file on an Atari floppy, placing that disk on a PC's 5.25" floppy drive, reading that file with MyUTIL, opening it with an editor on the PC, and making any necessary changes). As soon as I find them, I'll upload them here too. At first I thought LISSAJOU.BAS was the program for Lissajous filters, but is eems it's just one which plots Lossajous curves instead...

QBASIC.rar

[Mclaneinc]

Thanks Marco, always nice to see stuff from back in the day and nice to see self made programs, some of the stuff people made is amazingly good..

[machf]

I still have to find my program to graph (and print) Bode diagrams, among others... maybe I never got to transfer it and it's still on an Atari diskette. I'll need to clean mys disk drives, and check if the old PCs are still in full working condition...

[Mrshoujo]

Regarding the UUE encoder and decoder...

I had a similar set of programs to create or decode lots of binaries posted but I forget where they came from. Then the echos all went to some messed up Yenc encoding and it went to crap.

 

Though I would see all that Base64 stuff as I seem to recall it and after working it out, wrote an Atari BASIC program to figure out the bits and decode them by using Graphics 8 and drawing them pixel by pixel and then saving those bytes in that line of screen memory out as the binary output. Slow, sure, but I had nothing better to do and I was patient.

 

I spent a lot of time in the Anime Fido echo. Nice to know a couple of posted Gameboy ROM binaries actually worked years later in an emulator! Most of time the binaries posted were images. I did this all on my Atari 8-bit with DeTerm and my 4800 Baud modem and 850 interface which got its protective case from an evicted 835 modem. And via a local multi line subscriber BBS. The guy shut it down at the end of 1999.

Edited June 9, 2022 by Mrshoujo
Correcting and incorrect autocorrect.

[machf]

On 6/6/2022 at 3:48 PM, machf said:

TV_CALIB.ARC - my attempts at making a program which would allow me to properly calibrate the image on my TV set when connecting my Atari 800XL. Unfortunately, if I judge by the results provided by Altirra (taking a screen cap and then loading it into VirtualDub and applying the ColorTools filter), the colors generated by the 8-bit are slightly off... 3 versions of the program included, with "MITV" being the latest one.

I kept trying to remember why I had 3 versions of that program... (TV, TV2 and MITV) First I thought I was trying with different color setups for the color bars, but the filesizes should have been similar for all three if those were the only changes between versions.

 

Then I looked at the code and remembered... and also remembered why I never released that program.

 

Here is the main menu when you run it:

 

 

The 4 "cursors" on the 4 corners of the screen are meant to help you calibrate the height and width of the TV, they should all be visible, at least in part.

 

Option 1 generates this dot pattern:

 

 

 

Option 2 generates this grid pattern:

 

 

 

Option 3 allows you to see the different colors in full screen, changing hue with the up/down keys (actually, "-" and "=") and luminance with he left/right keys (really "+" and "*"), and toggling between color and B&W (which means you go to hue value 0) with the ESC key:

 

 

 

 

Option 4 generates a 16-level greyscale stair:

 

 

 

Option 5 generates the standard color bar chart:

 

 

 

Option 6 is an attempt to generate the SMPTE chart (Still need to work on that one, too):

 

 

 

Option 7 generates a display of the Atari 8-bit's 256 colors:

 

 

 

Option 0 exits the program.

 

 

Aaand... the unfinished and unlisted option (which currently can be accessed by issuing a "GOTO 900" command) is meant to generate a sort of digital TV test pattern:

 

 

 

 

 

In the middle I meant to add a color (RGB) shape using P/M graphics, and there would also be a 1kHz tone playing during the display...

 

I should really start working on this again...

 

Edited June 17, 2022 by machf

[invisible kid]

Good stuff! I especially like the color bar chart and the test pattern.