What are your proudest programming moments?

[Foebane]

I'm talking about those of us who made our own games in the 1980s and later, as well as playing the vast Atari library available.

 

In my youth (I was born in 1972) I started many, many programming projects on the Atari 800XL, but my problem was I hardly ever finished any of them, but a few I did.

 

These projects I completed (but have since failed to keep) were written mainly in vanilla Atari BASIC, with help from various articles from Atari User magazine, and they were, not in order:

 

1. WORMS - Basically, a snake-based eat the pills type game which used a combination of GR.1 and GR.10 for 8-colour graphics (so the resolution was very poor but very colourful) together with some effects from Boulderdash (mainly the flash/crack and the door once you got the max number of diamonds).

 

2. BLOCKMAN - I don't remember too much about this one, but it was a grid-based game where the tiles disappeared under you as you moved. The graphics I think were good enough, but I put a lot of effort into the sound effects (especially of someone falling down stairs).

 

3. PARTY PETER - This wasn't the name of the game, but the name of the character. This particular game used a combination of sprite/playfield collision and animated graphics to represent the various traps in the mazes (once again, think of Boulderdash's animations slowed down and applied as collidable playfield). This was probably the greatest game I made, but I never kept it, which I regret. Besides, I don't see how I could've.

 

4. SPECIAL AGENT FARTSKI - Yes, crude, but a simple game involving running along the top of a parapet and letting rip at anyone climbing up ladders towards you. Er, ahem! I think I was inspired by The Comic Strip's Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door for that one.

 

5. ANIMATED HORSE - I once painstakingly pixellated the images of a running horse which I was going to use for a detailed showjumping program written in Assembler, but it never got further than that - but the animation was full screen (if monochrome) and exquisite.

 

6. ASSEMBLER CLOCK - This was the only program I wrote in Assembler. A simple clock program that used screen character memory to keep track of the time. As you can imagine, it was very simple to implement.

 

And that's all I can think of. There were many more projects I started, but back in my youth I had very little patience and so most of those were never completed before I got interested in something else.

 

But these projects I mentioned were the ones I am most proud of.

 

What about all of you? I'm sure most of you Atari fans have tried to make your own games and programs, so let's hear about them.

[danwinslow]

I wrote a game called HERO III ( what about I and II? Don't ask ) for the ST. I had a 'publisher' but he only put out like 10 copies of it...its avail for download somewhere on line but I forget where.

 

But my proudest moment was watching all 16 lines light up on a multi-user text game I wrote in the late 80's/early 90's. It was in a language called Ada, and ran on a 386 PC with 16MB of RAM. It could handle up to 16 people on at a time...I had 16 local phone lines coming into 16 2400 baud modems...I ran it for around a year, charging 50 cents an hour. It was a lot like Gemstone III if anyone remembers that game.

[Rybags]

I co-authored a book of games (More Games for Your Atari 600XL) in 1983/84.

 

I also wrote a game on the C-64 which appeared in someone elses book, and 3 others which were in their own book "Astounding Arcade Games for the Commodore 64" in 1984.

 

I worked for a software house doing BASIC/ASM educational software for the C-64 in 1986 (the company went under).

 

I made a 1050 emulator + LPT cable adaptor on the ST around 1989, in DBASIC/68K Assembler. Never developed it beyond a home project though.

 

Heaps of industry experience on mainframes, I'm qualified as an IBM OS/390 Systems Programmer.

 

Biggest programming project there were an accounting system for a database, which was around 6,000 lines of code which took about 10 weeks to write.

 

I successfully worked out the technique for "Sprites in the border" on the Commodore 64 on my own after seeing it in a game.

I also devised a method for doing glitch-free split-screen scrolling on that machine (most split screen games have nasty flickering in the transition areas).

[emkay]

Well, I never intended to earn money with programming, but it was a lot fun to me. Heck, in my best times I wrote a full working game in one week.

 

One day, I remember, I was showing the functionality of the XL to a guy that bought it fresh.

He had only a tape and my programs all were placed on disks.

So I wrote a small fun game with joystick support in 15 minutes, right out of the head.

 

I always finished my projects, except the MCS idea.

The most fun was to have the XL and the ST Game "Schiffeversenken (Battleship).

Which was playable on both computers with data exchange by the SIO to ST (PC) cable.

 

"Admirandus" was the first game (and it's still the only one) with three graphicmodes in a scanline and "hires colour fonts".

 

 

There was only one project with a commercial background. It was a protocolling and filing tool on the ST for a Chess-Computer called "Kasparov".

[Plastron]

"Admirandus" was the first game (and it's still the only one)  with three graphicmodes in a scanline and "hires colour fonts".

 

 

956657[/snapback]

 

 

May be you can send a copy to Atarimania they do not have a dump of this game

[Goochman]

I started alot of projects in Basic and most were never finished - However, after finishing an 'Ultima' like game in basic I finally mastered my technique of artifacting and rolling screens in and out from disk. With some ASM help I was able to alternate char sets for some motion.

 

I was working on a ship/island game which couldve had lots and lots of islands - I got the artifacting do well I had the ship with its brownish hue, blue water, greenish trees, yellow lightening bolt from my 'storm cloud' and some purple.

 

I had many of the screens drawn and characters redefined - then my disk went bad.......and my backup..............I couldnt get back to restart it

 

Another great concept I had I started on DOS 3.0 - after realizing it was a mistake using this DOS I had to abandon the project since I couldnt get the source back to a DOS 2.5 disk.

 

So,

I finished a PM racing game in basic and my Ultima like game (12 screens ).

[ZylonBane]

Cliff Diver-- Simple little game... take a running jump off a cliff, and hope you don't smack into one of the rocks in the water below. Had a decent little physics system hampered by blocky character graphics.

[Heaven/TQA]

when i wrote my 1st vic-20 game which was published in a german "type in mag" and i got 240 DM for that!

 

other moments:

 

my firts typed "BYE" on a 600xl... and then switched to the sound-test...

 

then my 1st assembler code written on 800xl around 1986/87... but all demos and one game whirlwind which was written completly in Mac/65... as far as I remember or was it biboassembler?

 

next... my 1st demo "Carpe diem" and my intro "Really Unreal"... when i was at university i had plenty of time... heheheh

 

next big step was the release of "Numen" which I had just some ideas which Fox and Eru made possible... f.e. TIP/HIP effects... (the TQA bump mapper)

[DEBRO]

I guess my proudest moments would be when 2 games I wrote were accepted for publication. Nuclear Reactor made it in ANTIC. I wrote another game I titled Mow Down that was accepted for publication by A.N.A.L.O.G. but it never appeared

 

I was also proud about another game I wrote I titled Bust Out. I was proud of this because...

1) I finished it

2) I took the time to do a high score table

 

The high score table wasn't that big of a deal but I was proud that I did it on my own and that I went the extra mile to save the data to disk if a disk drive was present.

 

All games I did were written in BASIC. I didn't start 6502ASM until I started looking into programming the 2600.

[Wrathchild]

Getting the 'Elite' ship spinning on the A8.

 

The various 'Speedball' bits I did was also rewarding,

most of the artwork being done on graph paper by

staring hard at the ST graphics, then drawn on the A8

using the AtariArtist cart and pad. I can't recall if the

coding itself was initially done with the Atari Assembler

cart or MAC/65 but certainly with a cassette unit. It

wasn't later until I did some other bits using Turbo Basic.

 

Mark

[bosgameboi]

The Atari version of Space Caverns I did for Apollo just before they went on a helicopter ride and crashed. Some will know what I mean. And yes, I have it somewhere.

[Foebane]

In my last year of A8 ownership before I got an ST, I did also dabble a lot with the Mandelbrot Set, and wrote numerous programs to generate it in Turbo Basic. Oh man did I have fun with that!

[Chunder]

I remember being pleased at pulling out some groovy graphics routines from a game listed in Page 6 (called "Dilemma" I think) - basically, words on the intro screens zoomed in letter-by-letter from the edges of the screen, accompanied by sounds.

It was cool, so I pulled it apart and put my own text in, and turned it into a security/log-on program which I installed on a bunch of my disks. This blocked break and reset, prompted for the correct time and date, and required a name and password. Needless to say, I can't remember how to get back into it all anymore!

 

I also managed to play around with one of TurboBASIC's sound commands (dsound) and, by using a set of user-input values for the parameters managed to recreate almost all of the weird bloopy sounds that Zeppelin used in Draconus. Well cool - and it was all on disk with a letter ready to submit to P6/NAU, but for some reason I never did... ah well!

[+CharlieChaplin]

Heya Folks,

what about some downloads of your mentioned A8 games here ?!?

And err, Wrathchild - have you ever continued your work on the A8 version of Elite ?!?

 

Well, I never programmed anything since I cannot program. When my brother and me "bought" an 800XL in 1984 (it was meant to be an XMAS gift, but since it was so expensive we had to pay a little extra money), my brother programmed or re-programmed some games in Atari Basic.

 

Afaik he changed "Magic Fire" in such a way, the player got invisible when walking downwards (which made the game easier to play). He updated an adventure-action game by correcting some print errors and adding two or more screens (in that game one had to move from the begin of the screen to the end; in the screen there were one or more invisible traps, so you got killed when you entered it for the first time; it was some kind of brain-trainer: remember the invisible traps...alas, I do not remember the name of this Basic game anymore...)

 

Last not least he started programming a text adventure. It was based on tales (or ferry tales), like Cinderella, Snowwhite and such. One had to walk through a magic forest and help to correct "bugs" or mistakes of a certain tale. Or one had to help the main (tale-) figure to fullfill his/her task...

 

Alas, all games were saved on tape and got lost due to defective tapes (all tapes were defective after approx. 5 years - even the backup tapes)...

 

-Andreas Magenheimer

[Wrathchild]

And err, Wrathchild - have you ever continued your work on the A8 version of Elite ?!?

Sadly not, pretty well documented why throughout these forums.

Plus I keep getting distracted with the 101 other A8 projects I'll probably also never finished

Regards,

Mark

[Artlover]

Pong - My pong clone for the C-128. 100% basic. Took weeks.

 

Slot Machine - My slot machine type game for the C-128. Also, originaly 100% basic, but later updated to a self modifying basic code with binary attachment because it used to be two files, and everyone had problems downloading both parts, or not knowing they needed it.

 

Go to my website for details on both and downloads.

 

Artwerx Strip Poker Picture Fixer. My first assembly code, designed to take out the interference character they imposed over the pics to try and keep people from viewing them outside of the game.

 

Large rewrite of that one guy's (I can't believe I forgot his name) adc0820 digitizer code to allow specific byte addressing and stereo recording/playback. My most signifigant bit of assembly programming.

 

Nothing Atari related.

Edited November 6, 2005 by Artlover

[cas]

My proudest moment probably was when I was 13 years old, trying to understand how to do graphics on a VIC-20, waking up at 3:00 in the middle of the night when I got the solution to the problem (how to define character graphics on the fly, nothing fancy then and now) in a dream (the human brain is an interesting piece of art), then coding 'till I went to school in the morning finishing my first graphics program.

 

Later I did finish the (german) strategic game "Kaiser II" (--> http://www.strotmann.de/twiki/bin/view/APG/GameKaiserZwo ) together with Björn Israel, which sold quite well (around 150-200 copies) in 1990.

 

My next proud moment will probably be when I get enough knowledge to port Oric-Lisp to the Atari (I'm working on it for 3 years now, still learning Lisp )

 

Carsten

PSC

[Artlover]

(I can't believe I forgot his name)

961203[/snapback]

 

Russell Prater! I remember last night while trying to fall alseep.

[LYNXGUY]

These projects I completed (but have since failed to keep) were written mainly in vanilla Atari BASIC

 

What is vanilla Atari BASIC ???

 

Mu best friend Chris and I took a standup arcade game that no longer worked and took out the insides and hooked up the ATARI 800 to it and we even used the joysticks that came with the game too, we had to figure out which color wire was up, down, left, right on both the stand up and the ATARI 800 joystick,the only problem was in the standup game there was no diagonal movement.

We even improvised and he bought 2 plastic discs that looked like fire buttons and we got them to work also.

 

I can't remember the title of the stand up arcade game but as I remember you climbed up a building going from window to window (2 joysticks and no fire button as I recall)and you had to avoid falling flower pots, people would open up windows and drop them as you climbed up.

[MrFish]

These projects I completed (but have since failed to keep) were written mainly in vanilla Atari BASIC

 

What is vanilla Atari BASIC ???

963005[/snapback]

 

Didn't you know? Atari BASIC comes in seven great flavors: Vanilla, Lemon-Lime, Strawberry, Chocolate, Rasberry, Pineapple, and Neopolitan! Try 'em out...variety is the spice of life!

[LYNXGUY]

Didn't you know? Atari BASIC comes in seven great flavors: Vanilla, Lemon-Lime, Strawberry, Chocolate, Rasberry, Pineapple, and Neopolitan! Try 'em out...variety is the spice of life!

 

HUH What the

[cas]

Didn't you know? Atari BASIC comes in seven great flavors: Vanilla, Lemon-Lime, Strawberry, Chocolate, Rasberry, Pineapple, and Neopolitan! Try 'em out...variety is the spice of life!

 

HUH What the

963209[/snapback]

 

Thesaurus entry for "vanilla"

 

http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=vanilla

 

Main Entry: everyday

Part of Speech: adjective

Definition: common

Synonyms: accustomed, commonplace, conventional, customary, daily, dull, familiar, familiar tune, frequent, garden, garden variety, habitual, informal, lowly, mainstream, mundane, normal, ordinary, per diem, plain, prosaic, quotidian, routine, run-of-the-mill, starch, stock, unexceptional, unimaginative, unremarkable, usual, vanilla, wonted, workaday

Antonyms: different, exceptional, occasional, rare, special, uncommon

Source: Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1)

Copyright © 2005 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

 

 

vanilla Atari Basic = the normal one, the not-changed, not-enhanced one

Edited November 10, 2005 by cas

[andylama]

Around 1979 or 1980, walking into the local Atari dealer shop (HW Computers, Northridge, CA), where they had a bunch of 800s set up for demo/play, and seeing a kid sitting at one of them, playing a BASIC game that I had written. I didn't know the kid before that, but he went to the same junior high school that I did, and had received a copy through a chain of trades.

 

The game was a simple platformer (more complex than Donkey Kong, but less sophisticated than Jumpman). It used a redefined character set in text mode, and was slow, but quite playable. It took up almost all 37,902 bytes of free BASIC memory.

 

I was just floored that someone thought it was good enough to trade and play.

 

Wish I still had a copy. It's long, long gone.

[LYNXGUY]

I didn't know there was an enhanced BASIC

[cas]

I didn't know there was an enhanced BASIC 

964010[/snapback]

 

Turbo-Basic, Basic XL, Basic XE and a lot more enhanced versions of Atari Basic exist.