Rico, speaking of retro gaming, check out the video on the home page of The Retro Gaming Expo.

This is text that has been entered and formatted via the rivetingly
spiffy and hi-tech word processor called "Text Pro." I'm using version
5.0. This is running on the
Atari800MacX.

Throwback? You betcha. This reminds me of the time I used a word
processor on an old Sanyo (I think it was) computer. You had to
remember all the escape and control commands. No GUI to speak of, just
like Text Pro five-point-oh. (That sort of rhymes.) Flying without any
kind of spellcheck, it goes almost without saying.

I'm able to easily extra the above text (which is saved on an Atari disk image via the emulation program). The print commands basically vomits the text to TextEdit.

This is going in the retro section because I'm not doing it on the MeanerStreet. But I probably could if I found a good Atari 800 emulator. I know there's MESS, but it has to be one that works good with drives.

So the latest project is even screwier than usual. It involved using the Atari800MacX emulator for OS X. As emulators go, it's buggy. But it does run my current retro effort very well. And that program is Kyan Pascal. It's fairly easy to find info on Pascal on the web, but damned near impossible to find any info on this program. And no documentation is included on the disk. But eventually, after much searching, I found some manuals here. They're for the Apple II, but the gist of the program is virtually identical to the one for the Atari 800. But even with these manuals, it was pure HELL trying to figure this out. I have another version of Pascal for the Atari 800 called Draper Pascal. That programmed helped me learn some of the basics, but it's a pretty rough program. And it added to further confusion since it won't compile programs saved in the ".P" extension as (I painfully learned after much struggle) Kyan Pascal needed. Draper requires ".PAS" for the extension. And if you change the extension and load a file written in the text editor of Kyan (which is a much much better editor,) it loses whole lines. But I couldn't get the damn files to run on Kyan. Eventually I found out that you had to have the Pascal library files in the same director as wherever you saved your program. AND you had to have the default directory or path set ("CD," same as Unix, I think).

After pulling much hair out and swearing at the screen, I'm thinking "And you're doing this for fun?" Well, yeah. But eventually through persistence I triumphed. I'm not at all familiar with the conventions of this stuff. I can do BASIC and some of the higher languages like HyperTalk and Supercard's scripting language (they both are very similar). But this is greek to me. But the good news is that Pascal is supposedly one of the better languages as far as readability, structure, and simplicity.

I also downloaded the free FPC 2.2.2 version of Pascal for OS X. You use it with X-code. But I read that it was a hell of a lot easier to use the PascalGladiator program to use it. But even that is biting off a whole lot more than I can chew. I'm sure it's powerful, and probably lets you making GUI's but I haven't a clue even how to start. So that's when I got the idea to do a true cross-platform Frankenstein and used a text editor called "Smultron" which I found worked quite spiffy and then compiled and run in the Kyan Pascal in the Atari Emulator.. I played with another text editor called "TextWrangler." And it looks like a great program, but I really dislike OS X's Drawers. Smultron just look and works better.

Basically all my efforts for far have been of the "Hello World" type. But it's interesting to play with this stuff. I've found a slew of good tutorial on the web and I'll work through them a bit. The nice thing about using the Kyan Pascal is that it's simple. And, well, because I can.

BN, your screwy efforts make me really smile and happy.
On OS9 i was using "Rainbow", I remember it was a pretty decent and fast Atari-Emulator. It's still available here.
Here are some of its features:

• Emulates 400/800, 800XL, 130XE and 5200 machines
• Has 48K RAM for 400/800 machines; full 64K RAM for 800XL; full 128K for 130XE
• Fast full and medium screen displays
• Accepts 8K and 16K cartridge images; 16K and 32K cartridges for 5200
• Also runs Super Cartridges
• True 256 Atari colours
• Full ANTIC/GTIA graphics, namely all ANTIC modes, Player/Missile
Graphics, fine scrolling and Display List Interrupts
• Two virtual disk drives capable of reading single and enhanced
density images
• Transfer files between disk images and your Mac hard disk
• Superb 4 channel sound using POKEY samples
• Four joysticks (via keypad) and four paddles (using mouse)
• Plays many games such as PacMan, Defender, Joust, Qix, Eastern Front,
Zaxxon, M.U.L.E., Montezuma's Revenge, Donkey Kong, Miner 2049er,
Necromancer, Karateka, Drol, Kaboom, Pole Position II and, of course,
Star Raiders.
• Includes TINYTERM and other software to allow you to transfer files
and whole disk images to your Mac.

Thanks for the suggestion, Herr Smithz. I downloaded Rainbow and it ran on the MeanerStreet quite well. I don't know if I had every tried that one before. I probably have but perhaps never stuck with it because I couldn't find the ROMS or couldn't make them work. Anyway, no problem renaming the ROM files I had to make it work. The two disk drives it enables work well, although it's incredibly useful to have the feature of using a folder on the hard drive as the "H1:" drive that the OS X emulator has and Rainbow doesn't. Via that "H1:" drive you can very easily access individual files that way, and not just from the program running in the emulator. You can then easily use an external editor and save the files back into that drive (which is basically just a designated folder on your Mac hard drive).

I was surprised by the speed of Rainbow. It's significantly faster than the OS X emulator. Either emulator can be throttled back to just 100% speed, but even when throttled back to 100% speed,. Kyan Pascal seems to run faster. And un-throttled I can get about 600% speed. With the OS X Atari 800 emulator I can get about 230% at most.

The text editor that is part of the Atari 800 Kyan Pascal isn't very good or easy to use. But mainly that's because you have to do everything via the keyboard. No mouse. So it makes sense to use an external text editor and then just read the file in (after putting it on the 'H1:' drive) via the emulated Kyan Pascal. But so far I can't find any program that produces the kind of line endings that doesn't confound the Kyan compiler. Atari must use some kind of really non-standard ASCII value for return. I've tried several programs using all kinds of different options for line endings with absolutely no success. I'm still looking.

A good free program for windows is Turbo Pascal 5.5 which is available for free. You can't use a mouse with it, but it does seem to work well. Rainbow has a couple of nice features. For what features it has, it has them laid out well, although I've never seen a program put some of its menus under the Apple menus, such as "Quit" and "Preferences." Don't know if that's a conflict with something else I'm running, but the menus all work just fine. It does have a way to take individual files from the Mac's hard drive and instantly copy them into Atari Drive A. This is good but because the program disks are usually in Drive A, this feature really should have defaulted to Drive B, and I don't think there's anyway to copy external files to Drive B. This is a workaround for not having an "H1:" drive that makes basically a folder on your hard drive act as an Atari drive.

I had to plug one of my USB keyboards into the MeanerStreet because the external ADB one I was using had no Escape key. You gotta have one of those. I used an old USB keyboard from an old graphite 350 MHz iMac. Rainbow is fine for running language programs such as Pascal. But Rainbow apparently doesn't work with joysticks. It just emulates them from the keyboard. That makes playing games difficult. I'm sure some games become quite impractical without a joystick. But I'll have to try it on a few and see how it works.

For those interested, here are a couple good primers on Pascal:

Tutorial 1

Learn Pascal. This has info about downloading Free Pascal or GNU Pascal and the Lazarus IDE to run it. I'm downloading that now and will give it a try.

Pascal Programming

Pascal Tutorial 2

Interesting minutia: Jef Raskin's Pascal Syntax Poster. He really gives a summing up of what it is like to work with Jobs.

Yes the Lazarus IDE (don't know what "IDE" stands for) for Free Pascal seems to be just the ticket. You can do really simple "Hello World" stuff or, as the documentation says, create "programs as complicated as any that you have on your computer right now." You just need to download Lazarus. It has Free Pascal included with it. (I think. I may have already installed Free Pascal so I'm not sure if you need both or if Lazarus includes both. But because they are both about exactly the same size download of 34 megabytes, I think you need just Lazarus.) Download Lazarus here. It's available for OS X, both PowerPC and Intel. I had tried earlier to download just Free Pascal for OS X (which runs through Xcode) and it is a nightmare trying to figure out what to do next. I downloaded (as I mentioned before) PascalGladiator which is a different GUI (IDE?) front end for Free Pascal, but couldn't get that to work, or just didn't take time to figure out how to point it to the Free Pascal I had already installed. Hopefully Lazarus works as well in OS X as it appears to in Windows XP. I'll give it a try later.

Okay, after playing with Lazarus a little bit, there seems little doubt all you have to do is download it and not also the Free Pascal program. Also, this high-end stuff deals in "projects" so it's still pretty tricky to just hack out a little program. In fact, it's proving to be a nightmare. However, Lightweight Pascal IDE looks to be just what I'm looking for…on OS X, at least. I don't see a Windows version. I'm going to try DevPascal and see how that goes. Funny to read that Lightweight Pascal guy's criticisms of Xcode. Sounds typical of OS X.

---

Oh, yes. DevPascal works beautifully. It's just what I was looking for for an IUD. (That's IDE.) I realize that the Lazarus one is surely great for doing big projects, especially ones that include interfaces. But for learning the language, such program just bog you down. and the Xcode environemnt is almost impenetrable for learning. Geez, even professional programmers are programming stuff just to escape its nonsense. But so far DevPascal looks like the way to go if you're in the process of learning.

Yes, the Dev-Pacal IUD is working great with Free Pascal. Once I get more familiar with it, I'll try to use the Lazarus IUD to do something with a graphical interface. It's easy enough to do something like the coding to convert kilometers to miles. But I'm not at all sure yet how to put a GUI on top of it. But that looks like something Lazarus might make somewhat easy. I'm hoping the Lightweight Pascal IUD for OS X will make it even easier still. I don't know. It could turn out to be easier to do on Windows.

Here's a tutorial for Lazarus. With it (and with some mindless cutting and pasting of pre-made code) I made an app. But it shows how to do something very basic. It also includes instructions here for how to use Lazarus for console or text-based programming. I'll give that a try.

Well, it works, but it's still a gigantic pain in the ass the way it does it. Gigantic. But if you can steer clear of the booby traps and the sheer illogic of it, you can make it work.

TeraDepot is completely worthless for uploading files. So I'm going to try this other free service: MediaFire.com. Okay, seemed to work the second time I tried. Well, for free what can you expect. Anyway, here is hopefully a small executable for Windows that I promise will not erase your hard drive or anything like that. It's a simply conversion utility. Just a "Hello World" type of thing. No interface to it other than the one window that pops up. I'll do something more ambitious later. Maybe an OS X Bobblator or something.

Okay, you're just going to have to forgive me for what I'm about to say...to reveal, really. I know this may come as a shock to some of you but I....I....I....

I have been using the command line in OS X.

There. It's out now. I feel better already. I thought that was going to be a lot tougher to say than it was. But suffice it to say that the IUD's (IDE's) and Free Pascal in Windows (wait for it)...just works.. You install Free Pascal. You install the integrated uterine environment in which to type the program (plain text, basically) to be compiled and debugged by Free Pascal (and any debuggers it installs along with it.) And this all (wait for it again).....just works.

But in OS X, on the other hand, it didn't "just work" and still mostly doesn't work. Oh, Free Pascal is loaded but none of the IUD's "just work." I got the OS X version of Lazarus to finally compile but the debugger is fucked up. It doesn't "just work." And every time I open the damn program it warns me that I have it pointing to the wrong directories for the "fpc" compiler and other components. But the choices IT uses automatically are all wrong. But screw that. It doesn't "just work" like a normal human being would expect it to.

Well, I finally (that's an understatement) ran across these instructions for using the Terminal to compile and run Pascal code. And I hate to use the words it just works in connection with the Terminal but it...errr....just works. It's easy enough to compile the program in the Terminal and then run it in a Terminal window. No, this won't work for any Pascal programs that you program with a gui, but it will work fine with so-called "console programs." Those are basically programs that just involve text and user input via the keyboard. And, hell, you can put a rocket ship on the moon doing that -- or (because of a lack of gui and a dependence on obscure text commands) make simple tasks so god damn difficult you might as well be trying to read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Anyway, one thing that pretty much does just work is the program for editing and formatting Pascal text called "Smultron." And by finding that one article I also found out how to make Smultron's command line mode at least compile (not that I need that now). And you can run the programs too but you can't enter anything from the keyboard in any Pascal program that requires it. I don't know why that's how they made it. It will show any text you've programmed to be written to the screen but you can't respond to any prompts for keyboard entry. But I don't need that since the terminal works perfectly for that.

But what a nightmare this has been figuring this out all by myself. I have a feeling that programming on the Mac is probably pretty difficult. But this is a very interesting short interview of Ron Drake of Apple. It's an old one, but it's still an interesting insight into some of this stuff. Will Pascal make a comeback?

I've been playing around a bit (not much...just sort of getting an overview) with Chipmunk Basic. That page links to all kinds of other stuff having to do with basic including the now freeware FutureBASIC. The download page also has a file that has 22 MB of sample. I couldn't get any of them (yet) to work with FutureBasic 5 but they worked with FutureBasic 4. One of the sample files is called "Simple Calendar" and, indeed, it is rather simple. It reminded me of my (well, our...thalo and Yabor were instrumental in its development) Calendar 2.2. I can be generous because there isn't millions of dollars flowing in. If there were it would be "thalo who?" But I was able to peek inside the code of the simple calendar and take a look at someone else's Al-Gore-rhythm for creating a calendar of any month or near, past or future. It's a LOT more elegant than mine. But it's also trying to do less, of course. But the whole project I was flying by the seat of my pants, barely staying above kludge level. But at least it does work. There are always better ways to write the code.

Still, if I were to recommend a simple programming language for hacking a few things on the Mac, it would be SuperCard. Despite the word "Basic" in "FutureBasic," it looks like a very complicated dialect. No doubt it's powerful. But you might as well learn C++. Still, FutureBasic looks like a quite amazing program given the examples of what you can do with it.

As I told a friend yesterday, retro gaming is a hobby that is a heck of a lot cheaper than trying to keep up with and own the latest technology. Yes, flat panel 54" 1080p LCD displays are extremely cool, and I hope to get one someday. But when in you're in retro mode, you can have the "best" for relative pennies.

Yesterday at a second-had store I picked up a like-new Sony 19" (17"?...I forgot to measure it) Trinitron TV with a built-in 8-track player. No, it's a little more modern than that. It has a built-in video cassette player. I've been picking up a few VHS titles here and there as well lately. You can get them for a song, about a buck these days. I picked up "Last Action Hero" and "Predator" the other day. Arnold may not be much of a governor but he's a heck of a movie star. There are just scads of VHS tapes in these second-hand stores. It's funny how the same titles are on just about every shelf. One of these common titles is "Independence Day." Brothel figures it's a movie that everyone upgraded to DVD because it was a favorite. That sounds like as good of a theory as any.

Anyway, the TV replaces a tiny POS 10" or 11" color TV that I was using at the office to hook up to my Atari 800 and the Atari 2600. This larger one is a pretty good improvement. It didn't come with a remote but fortunately the remote I already had for another Sony VHS-playing TV worked fine which allowed me to adjust the picture, which it badly needed. (There are no buttons on the actual TV for doing so.) I'm one of those people who, if you're not watching, will adjust your TV for you when I come over to your house. So many people just don't seem to bother or don't have the eye to do it.

Both of these Sonys are great for when the rug rats come by and spend the day. They love watching movies or playing video games. Along with the Ataris, we've got a Super Nintendo system and the original X-Box system. We also have a DVD player hooked up to one of the TVs. I hooked it up to the new Sony and Star Wars Episode VI looked really good. No, it's not Blu-ray but it is pretty good.

I acquired in a different second-hand store recently what basically looked like to be a mint condition Atari joystick and a mint condition set of paddles. We didn't have a working set of paddles, so for $6.00 this was a nice find. Those paddles seem to wear out fast. We've got two sets of broken one sitting around and I'm not sure if they can be repaired. I'll have to open one up and see if it's just a matter of cleaning the innards. But with these new ones, you can tell that it looks like they've rarely been used. Same with the joystick. The holes where they plug into the computer look completely unstretched and virgin. I wasn't entirely out of Atari joysticks, but it's good to have a spare or two.

What about SEGA? You have to get a SEGA too.

I did a quick measurement of the new retro Sony TV and it's about a 19 incher. I took a photo of the corner of the office (the press room) that has the retro setup. I posted it via a file hosting service so that you could grab it at full resolution and see all the nooks and crannies. Let me know if you have any problem retrieving the jpg. This Retro Corner a little messy but it is well-used, and it is a work-in-progress. One of these days when I can get brothel to clean things up a bit (the laws of propriety and of Good Housekeeping forbid me from taking photos of other parts of the room) then I can neaten this corner up further. But to have one section of his room that is not a complete unorganized explosion of junk is a major accomplishment. Brothel's got many neat marquees like that Joust one that we can eventually hang up on the wall. But his office is such a disaster area, there's no way to do that at this moment.

Yeah, Rico, a Sega system would be grand. My next immediate goal, at least hardware-wise, is to get a Windows PC with a real flat screen LCD monitor hooked up so that I can run MAME and an Atari 800 emulator. (I've got a great Commodore 64 emulator as well.) I've got tons of files on my PC and Mac hard drive (Roms, exe's, bin's, atr's) which are basically the electronic equivalent of the various cartridges, floppy disks, and even cassettes that many games originally came on. You can download these freely but they are otherwise hard to find in the flesh. And even if you do find them, you still need to have a working floppy drive in order to use them. (I've got one, but it's gotta be on its last leg.) I used to have an Atari cassette player/recorder, but that was long ago and those things were extremely problematic. And you can't find much of that stuff on eBay anymore. Heck, you can barely find any of the Atari computers themselves. I think most are simply finding it all runs better and is much more convenient via an emulator. I'm guessing there is just no demand for them even though there still must be tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of working units out there.

But I did purchase a few actual 2600 cartridges lately. There's a second-hand store nearby that has a few. We have probably 35 or so as it is. I recently added "Phoenix" and "Demon Attack." And I have coming for the Atari 800 "Pac Man Jr." It's supposedly a working unreleased version. You'll note that the 2600 unit is the second revision of the original one. The changes between the first and second revision were somewhat slight, and I don't remember what they were offhand. The Atari 8-bit computer to the left of the 2600 unit is the 800 XL which is one of the greatest computers of all time pound-for-pound. The first generation X-Box sits on the shelf below. The Super Nintendo is up and to the right on the metal shelf. That Sony 19" has worked out well. The picture quality is better than I had a right to expect. And the little Sony is of outstanding quality. The X-Box looks great on it. It helps, of course, that the pixels are even smaller and thus the resolution appears to be higher. But it really does look good. The box lid next to the X-Box is full of Atari controllers, many which don't work. These controllers work for both the 2600 VCS and the Atari 800 XL.

The X-Box and Super Nintendo share the smaller Sony. I'm not even sure how to switch between them, but the kids have no problem making all that work. The Ataris are hooked up to the larger Sony. There's no magic switch box. I have to reach behind and plug them in one at a time as necessary. The Atari 800 XL video circuitry is superior to that of the 2600 and puts out a very clean picture. The 2600, on the other hand, is notably inferior with more ghosting and noise. That was just the nature of the beast. I've read articles though about people who have gone inside the 2600 with a soldering iron and have fixed that. But there are some great emulators of the 2600 for the PC, notably the "Stella" one. You get GREAT quality if you use that and use it on your hi-res LCD computer monitor. But it still is fun to play these games on the original hardware, especially since I've never found a replacement for those originally Atari joysticks. PC game pads just don't do it as well, although there might be some hi-end joysticks that can do the job.

The DVD player is on the third shelf down on the wood shelf to the far left. It's sitting on top of the Indus GT Atari-compatible floppy disk drive. I used to also have an Atari enhanced-density 1050 disk drive, but it when T.U. a long time ago as well.

Like the masochist that I am, I was playing around a bit in assembling language on my Atari 800 emulator. I was playing around with the MAC/65 assembler that apparently was the best one ever developed. I followed an online tutorial and it was a nightmare. I've found several versions of the Mac/65 assembler but none of them have the debugger that this tutorial talks about. So I got frustrated trying to even get the tutorial to work (which had instructions for both the Atari Assembler Editor cartridge and Mac/65) and looked around for an image of the Atari Assembler Editor cartridge which, a long time ago, I actually had bought. I found one this morning and was able to get the tutorial to work running a simple "Hello World" program that I found here.. The source could is what is displayed in that Wiki link. After assembling, the object code looks like this:

quote:

0000 05 .OPT OBJ
10 ; HELLO.ASM
20 ;
30 ; THIS SIMPLE MAC/65 DEMO WILL
40 ; PRINT THE "HELLO WORLD"
50 ; MESSAGE TO THE SCREEN
60 ;
0100 ; === CIO EQUATES ===
0000 0110 *= $0340 ;START OF IOCB
0120 IOCB
0130 ;
0340 0140 ICHID *= *+1 ;DEVICE HANDLER
0341 0150 ICDNO *= *+1 ;DEVICE NUMBER
0342 0160 ICCOM *= *+1 ;I/O COMMAND
0343 0170 ICSTA *= *+1 ;I/O STATUS
0344 0180 ICBAL *= *+1 ;LSB BUFFER ADDR
0345 0190 ICBAH *= *+1 ;MSB BUFFER ADDR
0346 0200 ICPTL *= *+1 ;LSB PUT ROUTINE
0347 0210 ICPTH *= *+1 ;MSB PUT ROUTINE
0348 0220 ICBLL *= *+1 ;LSB BUFFER LEN
0349 0230 ICBLH *= *+1 ;MSB BUFFER LEN
034A 0240 ICAX1 *= *+1 ;AUX BYTE 1
034B 0250 ICAX2 *= *+1 ;AUX BYTE 1
0260 ;
0005 0270 GETREC = 5
0009 0280 PUTREC = 9
0290 ;
E456 0300 CIOV = $E456
0310 ;
02E0 0320 RUNAD = $02E0 ;RUN ADDRESS
0330 ;
0340 ; === SETUP FOR CIO ===
0350 ;
034C 0360 *= $0600
0600 A200 0370 START LDX #0 ;IOCB 0
0602 A909 0380 LDA #PUTREC ;WANT OUTPUT
0604 9D4203 0390 STA ICCOM,X ;ISSUE CMD
0607 A91F 0400 LDA #MSG&255 ;LOW BYTE OF MSG
0609 9D4403 0410 STA ICBAL,X ; INTO ICBAL
060C A906 0420 LDA #MSG/256 ;HIGH BYTE
060E 9D4503 0430 STA ICBAH,X ; INTO ICBAH
0611 A900 0440 LDA #0 ;LENGTH OF MSG
0613 9D4903 0450 STA ICBLH,X ; HIGH BYTE
0616 A9FF 0460 LDA #$FF ;255 CHAR LENGTH
0618 9D4803 0470 STA ICBLL,X ; LOW BYTE
0480 ;
0490 ; === CALL CIO TO PRINT ===
0500 ;
061B 2056E4 0510 JSR CIOV ;CALL CIO
061E 60 0520 RTS ;EXIT
0530 ;






0540 ; === OUR MESSAGE ===
0550 ;
061F 48 0560 MSG .BYTE "HELLO BRAD!",$9B
0620 45
0621 4C
0622 4C
0623 4F
0624 20
0625 42
0626 52
0627 41
0628 44
0629 21
062A 9B
0570 ;
0580 ; === INIT RUN ADDRESS ===
062B 0590 *= RUNAD
02E0 0006 0600 .WORD START

The actually binary code would be something different still. I think that code is basically stripped down to numbers. This is all, of course, an exercise in spinning-gear futility. I have no plans to write a game for the Atari computer. But using the low-level language of assembly language is what you would have to do in order to create a feature-packed arcade game with a lot of complicate movement and graphics. These people who can actually do this are either geniuses or not fully human. But it's quite amazing that people can do this. The above code is a lot of code just to write "Hello World." It gives you an appreciation for programmers as well as for what it takes to make computers easier to understand and access. High-level programming may be slower, but its much easier to do. Compare writing a few lines in AppleScript as opposed to manipulating individual processor registers and individual memory locations using the assembly language code for whatever particular processor your machine uses. Boggles the mind.

BN, now you're doing assembler, wow big respect! Could you please rewrite OS X in pure assembly, i would pay a few bucks for that. ;-)

Regarding Retro-Gaming (well more the opposite): Some bastard friends of mine gave me "Burnout Paradise" for PS3 as a birthday gift. I had no PS3 at that time not long ago (October). Because i wanted to play that game very much (I also played all previous versions of Burnout) i finally invested in a PS3, the newer slim model. Burnout is great, IMHO the best arcade racer out there. Runs at a constant 60fps which is killer.

Real Retro-Gaming: I played Robotron2084 at a friends place (on his old dreamcast) and got a blister on my thumb next day. It's not that i played so long, but the digital pad of the dreamcast-controller is sticking out too much for hardcore playing. :-)

quote:

BN, now you're doing assembler, wow big respect! Could you please rewrite OS X in pure assembly, i would pay a few bucks for that. ;-)

I've found a couple tutorials on assembly language for the 6502. Here's one that assumes a lot more knowledge than a beginner like me has. But it's somewhat useful. A much better one -- in fact, I would call this one "excellent" -- is a tutorial by Mark Chasin. Basically this is his book "Assembly Language Programming for Atari Computers" online. I'm up to Chapter 7 and it's making me realize how un-assembly-like my brain thinks. I love puzzling out this stuff, but this is really difficult. But for many people this must come a lot easier. With a high-level scripting language (or just with BASIC), I find it a lot easier to put together a program that does something. But manipulating individual registers on a processor is a different mode of thinking. Yes, time-critical device drivers are probably still coded in assembly language in modern operating systems. But the processors (and graphics cards) are powerful enough that you can program in a relatively high-level language, although if you've ever looked at C, it hardly seems "high level" at all. But compared to Assembly Language, it's like "Dick and Jane."

But assembling language programming for the 6502 processor is doable, if only because there aren't that many instructions, and probably (I'm guessing) it's only a dozen or so of those instructions that you use 90% of the time. But still, I find just reading the logic of an assembly program listing to be extremely difficult. It's by no means easy in just a BASIC listing. But in assembly language it's downright opaque. But a good tutorial can walk you through it as the book by Chasin does (at least so far). Oh, another good book-online guide is Mark Andrews' A Guide to Atari Assembly Language

But you make a great point, Smithz. Can you imagine how fast OS X would be if written completely in assembly? They would have to (stop laughing, thalo, this would most likely be true) worry about adding a lot of code just to slow things down. For instance, a scrolling window is totally unusable if everything scrolls by too fast. And that can happen in some old Classic Mac programs run on a much speedier machine. But it's a nice problem to have and one that's easy to solve. It's obviously much much harder to add speed.

Congrats on the PlayStation 3. I like the look of Robotron but it plays much better in the arcade where you have two joysticks (I think). I found it doesn't play well on a home game system. But it sounds like you're doing okay. I ran across "Robotron 2024" (or whatever the year was) in the bargain bin at a second-hand store and almost bought it. It was for the PC.

quote:

and it's making me realize how un-assembly-like my brain thinks.

I think i know that feeling. It hit me when i tried a few steps of 68000 assembler coding on my C= Amiga. I managed to move some sprites around with the joystick and play some sampled sound, but as you pointed out it was a strange thing compared to Basic. So i don't have a coders brain, but i would like to have one. But this would propably kill my artistic brainparts. Hehehe...

quote:

I like the look of Robotron but it plays much better in the arcade where you have two joysticks

Well, that's right. But the dreamcast-version also offers dual control via moving with the dpad and shooting with the four fire-buttons. Anyway, i'm sure the arcade version is better to handle, but sadly i never played the original Cabinet. If i would have a bigger home i would love to have a Robotron Original Cabinet in there. These are collectors items nowadays.

I'll make you a deal, Smithz. If I ever hit the lottery, I'll find a working Robotron game on eBay and buy it for you. I'd like to get my hands on a few of those old machines, particularly the Tron machine.

Deal!