What are your proudest programming moments?

[AlmostRice]

My brother used Basic XE to create a tetris game. He released it to the local BBSs in Houston. It might still be floating around. I will have to find it in the 4 cases of disks I have. It may be in a mixture of ATR8000, xf551, or 1050 disks. I have just restarted to use the systems since buying MyIDE and SIO2PC interfaces.

 

Just found it. It runs kinda slow and has to be run with Bxe extensions.

Edited December 2, 2005 by AlmostRice

[Shannon]

Nothing special but here are some.

 

Wrote a hangman program in basic, typed it in on a TI/99 computer at a local k-mart.

 

Electronic Detective. Took me 2 weeks to complete. 1st week to write it out on paper, 2nd week to type it in.

 

Modified a type in program called Goldrush for 2 player action and so it would fit in a 16k machine (or was that 8k??).

 

Yahtzee

 

A database for keeping track of names & addresses

 

A database for keeping track of high scores (which I suspect was stolen/modified and submitted to compute l8r on)

 

A database for keeping track of UNO scores (wrote for a neighbor)

 

A database for keeping track of softball stats (wrote for a diff neighbor). I think I wrote this in microsoft basic.

 

I silly game called "berserk". Inspired by Berserk, had nothing to do with berserk.

 

A game I created based off a picture of an oddysey 2 game (I forget the name).

 

A ml prog to load multi-load binaries off of cassette (written for a friend to cheap to buy a disk drive).

 

A prog for drawing graphics in the GTIA graphics mode (allowed pictures to be saved/loaded). It was nothing fancy.

 

I've done bug fixes/optimizations to BBS software before, but do not remember much.

 

That's all off the top of my head.

[576XE]

Hi there Carsten!

 

For a long time I see you near Atari!

 

Now Your resource is one of the BEST INFO resources!!!

 

Recently I can see that you are really interested with LISP.

 

Please Don't kill the pianowist...

 

InterLISP/65 is a project never released!

It's only a scheme to do it.

At first, you know that LISP is a Tree-like structure!

It means Memory and Memory and...

 

At second you know that LISP Must to do it's calculations in RAM, thus RAM and...

 

At third you knows that LISP works with HUMAN WORDS - symbols.

 

There are no in InterLISP/65 symbols, concerning letters of ATASCII-code etc...

 

Thus it's NOT really implemented language!

 

LISP itself is a charm!

 

It's functions and data are saved in memory (EXTENDED) in the same manner.

It can be done but InterLISP/65 is too old.

 

There is no even STANDARD TO ATARI evaluating characters and strings.

 

It's one of annoying problems! I even can't have a way to print directory of disk!

LISP sees spaces as delimiters and how can I treat the abcence of dot and spaces?

 

Only now we really have a PROPER way to lisping, but ...

 

Best wishes and many thanks!

I'm in your site very often...

[Bryan]

Quite a necrobump there.

 

Castle Crisis was the biggest thing I'd attempted when I did it. Especially because I disassembled much of the arcade ROM first. I tried to make the cleanest looking conversion the A8 could do at 50/60 fps and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.

 

I've done some other small experiments that I think might trump it one day, but who knows when I'll have the time to do more with them.

[Synthpopalooza]

My proudest moment:

 

#1: Writing the basic game Sky Scraper ... it's somewhere in the forums here, but basically it's a platform change-the-colors type game, but with 39 unique game levels and music, each one loaded from disk using the basic "ENTER" command as needed.

 

#2: Writing the ICE character editors for those new Super IRG modes in 2011. It got me 4th place at ABBUC and I feel very proud of it ...

[Dmitry]

I suppose a few come to mind. The first is at age 11 writing successfully a breakout clone on the ti-99. Later, and I mean skipping ahead 15 years, automating the detection of store polling issues for a Fortune 500 company. Since I wrote that on my own, I wrote it in Amiga ace basic. Later code for that company was done in tcl and could run on Windows. My first iOS game was a massively ambitious project, that was released on time. And that was my first public release, it was done for a large denomination. Nothing before that did I let other people run including games.... It was all for my private enjoyment or for me to run personally as per of my job. Oddly that was a very big mental hurdle for me, so it is remembered as an achievement. Then there is this upcoming ABBUC contest, writing a game in assembler after all these years. I've written games, unreleased of course, for other classic systems but only in c, in the past.

[+slx]

For me it was completing a ca. 7K machine language monitor and mini-assembler which I think I submitted to a magazine but which was not accepted. It was more of a cheap ML learning tool as I couldn't figure how to include a debugger but I made it both modular and relocatable so it would be possible to add more functions and with a little fixed address loader it could be loaded almost anywhere on an Atari.

 

I also wrote a planet generation utility for SPIs RPG "Universe" but did not complete the other utilities required to play the game.

 

I hope to able to top these one day as I have some ideas but too little time to follow up. Reading retro forums seems to consume too much of my time

[ACML]

I wrote many programs. An Atari 1020 program that printed graphics 8 photos that were digitized using Computereyes, a viewer that displayed your Micropainter masterpieces, a game cataloger and bunch of other utilities. My proudest achievement was one of my first:

The game is called Mission Moscow. I wrote it in 1982 when I was new to computing and 18 years old. It's not a masterpiece, or even good , but boy did I learn a lot about BASIC and had an absolute blast coding it. It uses an artifacted character set using alternate pixel stripes to achieve red or green color in Graphics 8 mode (text). On a chroma/luma monitor, it won't show color. If you set artifacting on in Altirra, you can see how it would have looked like on an NTSC RF television.

Please keep in mind the period I wrote this. 1982 was the height of the Cold War. It runs entirely in Text mode. You are basically an USAF F-15 pilot that has to fight your way through Soviet air defenses and deliver a nuclear cruise missile.

You must:

Shoot down helicopters

Shoot down MiG-25s. Be careful, if you allow one to pass, he'll be on your six.

Bomb ground targets, If you let the SA-6 truck mounted SAM system by you, they will launch.

Survive ground Surface to Air missile batteries. If you fly too low, you are temping an easy hit.

When prompted, release your nuclear cruise missile and RTB!

Simple controls: Joystick, UP=Climb, DOWN=Dive, LEFT=Drop Bomb, RIGHT= Speed (Afterburner)

Hint: you can use the "speed" (right stick) to guide your bombs on target.

Again, a lot of joy to a new computer geek some 34 years ago!

Mission Moscow 2014 (BASIC).ATR

[ilaskey]

On the 8bit side, Back when Computer & Video Games in the UK still published listings, I decided to do the ultimate Hammurabi/Kingdom type game. For a simple game, which was usually implemented by others as GR.0 text only, I went to town. Nice colour scheme, custom display list, scrolling regions, DLIs etc. Finally finished it and was very pleased. I went out to buy the latest issue of C&VG to get the address to send it to only to find out they'd stopped doing listings...

 

Another was a version of Star Chess (The UK games console, not the Star Trek thing). Imagine chess but you can shoot pieces rather than take them (shields protected more powerful pieces needing repeated shots), warp off the board to safety and other features. There was something in Analog or Antic that allowed you to create a custom character set but blit it directly onto a gr.7 screen. I used that with PMs for borders and the cursors, more DLIs for cool effects etc. It turned out pretty good, even though I say so myself.

 

On the ST side, by then I was a commercial developer working on DEC Unix etc. I had a Mega STe by then running Lattice C 5. I had some minimal dummy libraries I put together so I could write the Unix code on the MSTe, compile it, even though the output would have been useless at that point, and then bring the disks to work (1.44 floppy on the MSTe was very handy) and have the code compile up clean on the Unix box. very handy for early working from home.

 

Happy days.