Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I spent a little time this evening making some fireworks for tomorrow night!
Download, unzip, launch in your favorite Atari 800 emulator, like Atari800MacX
Pick Y from the menu, ESC to end, reboot to get back to the menu. See you in a year!
(I didn't get around to putting an emulator page on my site; I will before my next actual game)
OK, thinking about projects time, what I've done with my 3-year summer vacation (extended, 2022 edition).
Schemers in general are annoying but less annoying than LISPers, so if the LISP community pissed you off, Scheme's might be 50% less toxic. I still have to block some people in IRC because they won't STFU or tolerate anyone Doing Things in Unapproved Manner. You know what would be amazing? A language as technically awesome as Scheme, with Python's friendly community. Python the language is trash, tho.
Haunted Dungeon, Scheme roguelike. Needs at most weeks of work, and then I can take a day and grind out binaries for various platforms (UUUUuuuugh Windows & Linux suck so much to interact with; Mac does for different reasons), ship it. It ballooned past my original tiny roguelike design long ago, but it's still not that big.
Multiple small Scheme programs & games, once I do that ship day I may just make a bunch of binaries. None of these are amazing but some are nice. Don't ask a developer to praise their own software, you know?
New Perilar CRPG, also Scheme. I have this at like 60% functionality, map generation's beautiful, and fuck-all for story, it's fine, same shipping problems, so much I need to think about if I get it to a playable state. Or it may be a learning experience.
Little Atari 8-bit game. Dungeon crawler with no purpose but it's cute, was meant to be a ZX SpecNext game but that's still not shipped after 2 years so… It's now at like 30% done, but I have some vision for it.
Open world action-adventure game I've got a bit of design for (in my paper sketchpad! Not even on the computer!), it could either be Scheme or Atari 8-bit or whatever. I don't actually know of anything like this design, tho original Zelda & Metroid are the parents (I clearly don't understand genetics) of all such games. Needs so much mapping & writing before I even start, but all the technical side is easy for me.
Currently Atari stuff's in TurboBASIC-XL which is less bad than you'd think, but still really sucks compared to having a modern language; both Pascals and C's I have access to are less useful. I've been borderline to making a new language that compiles to 6502 ASM, but I know I'm lazy at tools-to-make-tools support.
One nice part with Atari 8-bits is, shipping is easy. Put it in an ATR file, with an Atari emulator as seen on archive.org. One click, any browser shows it. Down side is, can't really charge money for this. Beg for patreon support; which I need to be better about giving you goodies in return for your cash, my fine patrons. Shall I write thee a sonnet?
Update & reupload my iPhone stuff. Should I even bother with Castles? I liked the underlying game but the UI is unbelievably shit, I had no idea what I was doing and limited by iPhone 1 screen/UI constraints. But Perilar, and some utility stuff, and maybe patch Brigand to be paid-up-front instead of IAP and say "this is what you could've had!". And I have my 3D game which never got shipped, just shown as demos. Worth spending some time on this and then never looking at it again.
Tabletop RPGs. Fuck this third goddamned plague year, which has made playing & playtesting RPGs just a nightmare. Every online group I try flakes out so fast they may be composed entirely of microscopic black holes. So I have my "original dungeon game" retroclone, and my much nicer sword & planet game, and a couple tiny gamelets. And with Hasbro's sabre-rattling at the OGL and "One D&D", I'm inclined to just ship only the sword & planet game, and turn the rest into world books for it. But I'd like to test it more than once with other Humans and also not get infected with plague. So. State of that world is uncertain.
I haven't seen the new movie yet, but I was in a mood to do something this primitive.
It'll go into attract mode eventually, which I think is cool, add 11 POKE 77,0 to disable it. Or any key that doesn't exit will clear it.
Not any really interesting coding tricks, except I replaced POSITION:? with POKE for speed. I use PEEK(764)=255 and then re-POKE it to test if there's a waiting key, but then use GET to read it in ATASCII instead of scan code.
(updated almost immediately: I realized on XL machines I can turn on accented characters instead of graphics blocks. Take out the POKE 756,204 line if you don't like that.)
(updated 2021-12-24: I made it pour in from random starts, rather than top of screen, looks somewhat more like the old intro.)
I've completed my BASIC 10-Liner contest entry, download on itch.io or find the latest version here:
Just shove the disk (.atr) in Atari800MacX or any other compatible Atari 800XL emulator, disable BASIC and hit reset, it should boot up into the launcher:
Where you can read docs or source:
And play the game!
So, the source for my first pass was manually-packed down, and I couldn't really fit everything I wanted in there, or switch to text-graphics mode. With some rethinking, and a better source editing tool, I could… So I wrote a filter program "Basic2List.py" that removes comments & blank lines, joins up everything after a numbered line with colons, lets me insert binary codes with \xFF escapes. It still looks a little dense, because I have to manually use abbreviated statement names or remove spaces, I'd like to make it smart enough about BASIC source to do that itself.
But it lets me turn source like:
5 POKE731,1 // noclick
GR.1 // 20x20 wide chars, 40x4 regular
SE.1,13,15 // palette 1 to gold
W=20 // world size
DIME$(27),M(W,W) // E$() encounter table, M() map
//RRRZZZD$$..........#######>
E$="\xF2\xF2\xF2\xFA\xFA\xFA\xE4\x04\x04\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE#######\x3E"
H=10 // Hit Points
L=1 // Level
// G=0 // Gold, default value
?"NANOROGUE BY MDHUGHES"
into:
5 POKE731,1:GR.1:SE.1,13,15:W=20:DIME$(27),M(W,W):E$="RRRZZZD$$..........#######>":H=10:L=1:?"NANOROGUE BY MDHUGHES"
(except the RRR... are inverse & graphics chars)
See the Atari BASIC Quick Reference Guide to learn the abbreviations and some of Atari's peculiarities. And it's running in Turbo Basic XL which really helped the program size, so I was able to squeeze in stairs!
Last time I was using the compiler, and that worked but it distorted my sounds, and I couldn't make LAUNCHER.CTB run NANOROG2.CTB! So if I just left them all uncompiled (but tokenized) .BAS files it works fine.
The only down side is it's stuck in easy mode. I'd love to have a difficulty which increases the GP to Level Up, and makes monsters hit harder (but not reward more), but that didn't quite make the cut.
Generally I'm pretty pleased by this!
The ZX Spectrum (non-Next) port is turning out to be hard, it lacks a few things and doesn't have ELSE, either, so I don't know if it can be done.
Let's go back to the 1980s!
So I knocked down a tiny subset of my already tiny BASIC demo program, NANOROGUE, and plan to make 10-line versions for Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum. Getting it running on desktop in Chipmunk BASIC was trivial. Just a little ANSI for screen positioning.
Initially I just used standard Atari BASIC, and that worked fine, if very very tightly packed, and not fast… but the lack of an ELSE statement left me with an 11-line program, I wanted to end with 50 ... :GOTO 20:ELSE:GOTO 20:ENDIF but had to move it to a new line. Very frustrating. So I'm using an enhanced BASIC, which is allowed for the PUR-120 tier, for one command.
Being "compiled" (to bytecode, don't expect miracles) and making AUTORUN.SYS easier than my own utility is nice. TBXL is at least a 1985 tool; though at the time I was using the "official" BASIC XE cartridge instead, which had similar features, and mainly moving over to Action!, 6502 ASM, and C. But for retrocomputing it's fair game.
Making a TBXL executable & bootable disk is a little fussy.
H to write DOS files). This is your program disk. Like TRON, everything you do will be encoded on it, and losing it will subject you to immediate deresolution.READY. Check you're in TBXL by typing DIR.ENTER "D2:FOO.LST". RUN to test it. But if you like living the '80s lifestyle all the way (or using non-ASCII chars, which are annoying to work with), you can work entirely in TBXL.SAVE "D2:FOO.BAS"FOO.BAS, save as AUTORUN.CTB. Swap disks back (you want your program disk in D2!).COPY D1:RUNTIME.COM D2:AUTORUN.SYS
So resuming work on NANOROG, I get:
The only down side is this tiny version has a very slow redraw, it renders the entire screen each move, instead of just fixing last/new positions. I'm pondering changing it to graphics 1 (wide text, 4 colors) and poking screen memory which is probably faster than printing. I made some acceptable bleeps and buzzes with SOUND commands; I'm a poor sound designer, but I get there with some trial and error.
Anyway, next week's task is the ZX Spectrum version. Speccy BASIC is pretty good, so I expect I can knock that out quick and without all these shenanigans.
Modern videogames suck. Let's go back to the '70s & '80s forever!
Ordered this for my birthday last month, I got screwed (but not charged) by a phony 'zon seller, then reordered. When it got here I discovered it doesn't have an HDMI cable in the box(!!! Some choice language was used that day, I assure you), and I only have micro-HDMI spares, so I had to order one (didn't feel like disassembling my existing systems). So weeks later, I can now set it up!
The "console" is hand-sized (joysticks on the box cover are to scale!), but looks just like the classic VCS, classic fake woodgrain on black plastic, very nice chunky silver switches that feel great when you flick them to set difficulty or choose game mode, smooth plastic where the cartridge slot would be; I think they missed an opportunity to put an SD card slot there. The previous Atari Flashbacks had a less authentic looking case, and goofy yellow plastic buttons.
There's two Atari-style joysticks with it, they have the usual one trigger button, and Home, Start, Select, Rewind buttons on the front base. I'm not in love with the joystick feel, it's much looser than a new Atari joystick which was a real struggle to move more than a few millimeters, these are closer in feel to 3rd party sticks, not as mushy and unresistant as Apple or CoCo joysticks. The device uses a standard Atari 9-pin joystick port, so I'm thinking about either getting old Atari sticks, or if I can find one in good condition the Spectravideo QuickShot which was my weapon of choice in the Atari 8-bit days.
The main screen has menus Favorites, Recently Played, Alphabetical, Atari, Paddle, Settings, About; everything's in Alphabetical, the Atari one is just 1st-party so you miss all the best games. Paddle games are extremely hard to control. Settings are limited to setting a "bezel" design, or wiping your saves. I do wish you could un-favorite games so they don't appear in a normal list, because I have no use for Atari's awful sports games.
So I hit up Yar's Revenge, obviously, and play that first. The first screen has an ugly and inadequate text summary of the manual, it doesn't have scans of the manuals or the comics, so you're going to need to find those; the game variations are not explained beyond 1 or 2 player versions. So on difficulty B (easy in this case; some games used A for easy), game 0 which the actual manual says "the simplest version, a good choice for young children to play. It features a slow Destroyer Missile", I got destroyed the first time, even shot myself with the Zorlon Cannon once, which is maybe the dumbest death I've ever had in a videogame. Second run I killed the first Qotile but got demolished fighting the scrolling shield; in theory it's easier because you can nibble the top or bottom and flee across the top/bottom border to avoid the missile, but timing the gap with the cannon is too much for my distracted old brain. I think some practice will get me back up to speed where I can actually get a decent score.
The Code Mystics iPhone ports of these games do include the manuals, but not all the peripheral material either, and playing on the phone is difficult; I have an "8-bitty" bluetooth joystick that talks to the phone, but BT has perceptible lag, and it's not a big chunky joystick, and then how do you prop up a teeny little phone so you can play a game? No, it's impossible except for the simplest games.
Of course the Swordquest games are unusable without the manuals and comics. I desperately need to find an archive with, say, PDFs of all 2600 game manuals, comics, Atari Force comics, etc. Some of that is in gamesdatabase.org, but not organized for one-click download.
Went thru a bunch more games, and generally they look and play great; as fast as the originals without noticeable lag, tho I haven't done high-speed video recording to verify it's not dropping frames…
Most games have an inset screen with the above-mentioned bezel around it, tho some of Taito's and Activision's games are full-screen. There's no setting for this, and I'm displeased but it's on a 46" or something screen, as opposed to the 17" or smaller CRT of my yout'. There is a fake-scanline setting, which I don't understand the point of. CRTs looked fuzzy so you couldn't really see the scanline, and the pixels were soft and curved into each other, and had color artifacting. On a big LCD, a fake scanline isn't going to make the pixels look softer or change their harsh colors. It's just a completely different appearance. I do have a CRT TV, but only a DVI-to-RGB adapter, I'd have to find an HDMI-to-RGB to drive this.
The paddle games are unplayable with the joysticks; they work, but you can't move fast enough. I killed a bunch of clowns trying to do Circus Atari, and scored no points. I need to order some classic paddles.
Many of my favorite games are in this, but there are some obvious missing ones: Battlezone, Berzerk, Casino, Defender, The Empire Strikes Back, Pac-Man, Pitfall II, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The licensed ones are probably hard to get back; nobody misses E.T.
Several keypad-based games are missing; I'd happily pay for an optional keypad that enabled these: Basic Programming, Brain Games, Star Raiders.
But it does have the Sears Stellar Track which is BASIC Super Star Trek that runs on a dinky little 2600! I have no idea how that was technically possible in 128 bytes of RAM.
Deluxe bonus games:
Takeaway is that the new VCS box is delayed until Spring 2020, maybe later, with a number of excuses, and some more case photos but no working demos anywhere. The cases do have connectors inside now, which is very exciting if you're completely gullible, but there's zero evidence from Infogrames that anything can be powered on and do something.
There's a bunch more lies, such as that most Unity games will work on it; while it's true you can recompile many Unity games for Linux, it often requires specific hardware and software configs, like the SteamOS, and the odds that Infogrames' contractors who are building this have matched those configs is vanishingly small.
The "original software" they tout is a $100/year subscription to play classic Atari games, which you can get a bundle of for far less, existing consoles for $20-40, or "free" (pirated, but it's been 40 years; meh) with MAME.
The actual reason they used IndieGogo is that IndieGogo doesn't require shipping a product, you're throwing money into someone's pockets with no guarantees. I've been waiting since 2013-10-17 for the LotFP Hardcover Referee Book, Raggi says (posting a weekly update a month ago…) he's still working on it, and I believe him because he's an honest 6-years-late fuckup. I wouldn't believe the Infogrames people if they said "le ciel est bleu".
My programming started in 1979 with the TRS-80 Model I, but in late 1981? early 1982?, I got my Atari 800, and later a 1200XL, then Atari ST. Those are what I consider "my computers".
Last few weeks for hobby time, I've taken up playing with an Atari 8-bit emulator, and may soon buy an old machine (130XE? I guess?) and a modern SD-card reader, and HDMI adapter unless I want to set up my old CRT… Yes, this is "pointless", but it's the most emotionally rewarding programming I've done in some time.
Had to do a lot of setup to get to this point, though. Follows are my excessive notes, which will hopefully be useful to others.
The keyboard mapping in AtariMacX is weird, I finally figured out:
| Mac Key | Atari Key |
|---|---|
| ` | Break |
| F2 | Option |
| F3 | Select |
| F4 | Start |
| F5 | Reset |
| Sh-F5 | Cold Boot |
| Opt-F5 | Insert Char (be REAL DAMN CAREFUL not to miss the Opt key!) |
| Sh-Opt-F5 | Insert Line (same, DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER) |
| Home / Opt-F7 | Clear |
| End | Atari/Inverse |
| PgDn / Opt-F10 | Help (XL/XE) |
| Opt-F1 | F1 (1200XL) |
| Opt-F2 | F2 (1200XL) |
| Opt-F3 | F3 (1200XL) |
| Opt-F4 | F4 (1200XL) |
| Capslock | Cycle caps, may take several tries of caps A backspace repeat until you get lowercase, not graphics or uppercase. |
| Sh-Capslock | Uppercase, almost always works |
Typing on a real Atari keyboard is probably the #1 reason to get real hardware instead of emulation.
Immediately it comes rushing back, how much I didn't like the default environment of blue screen, clicky keyboard, inset margins. Easy to fix with a few pokes, but I don't want to do that every time I reboot, so I need a startup program.
DOS25.XFD image in OSRoms, and call that boot.atr, store it in Disks, Load it in D1 Cmd-1 and pick boot.atr.disk2.atr or whatever.
I <return> D2: <return> Y <return>AUTO.LST, convert Unix newlines (char 10) to the ATASCII newline (char 155 õ), and drop it in the HardDrive1 folder.% LANG=C tr '\233' '\n' <AUTO.LST.TXT >AUTO.LSTE."H1:AUTO.LST" <return> RUN <return>, pick Y. (Script AUTORUN.SYS), and enter:
boot.atr.LIST "H1:AUTO.LST". I use LIST/ENTER (text LST format) instead of SAVE/LOAD (tokenized BAS format) so I can read it from the Mac; BAS is slightly smaller and much faster to load/save, but it doesn't matter with emulation or an SD-card.
BASIC set up and tested, and it's a convenient place for little utilities, but now for real programming.
Atari Macro Assembler and Program Text Editor
Atari Macro Assembler and Program Text Editor.atx (ATX is write-protected or encrypted or something; you can't use them directly, and have to disable the SIO speedup hack in emulator) disk in drive 2 of your Atari (Cmd-2), Control -> Disable BASIC (which will reboot to DOS). So you want the program files off that:
C <return> D2:MEDIT,D1:MEDIT <return>C <return> D2:MEDITCM.BAS,D1:MEDITCM.BAS <return>C <return> D2:AMAC,D1:AMAC <return> (skip if you'll never write ASM)C <return> D2:SYSTEXT,D1:SYSTEXT <return> (I think only needed for AMAC?)disk2.atr.LOAD "D1:MEDITCM.BAS" <return> RUN <return> and configure MEDIT however you like.
C <return> D1:*.ECF,D2: <return>L <return> MEDIT <return>, filename D2:HELLO.PAS, and enter:
program hello;
var c: char;
begin
writeln('Hello, Atari!');
read(c);
end.
<option> exit <start> to save & exit. Note return doesn't execute commands in MEDIT, start does. Kids Today™ have some meme about how hard it is to exit vi? Ha ha, they have no idea. RTFM.
Finally ready to program in Action! or Pascal, which is what I mainly did back in the day.
UNSUPPORTED FEATURES
Features in C not supported in DEEP BLUE C are:
1) structures, unions
2) multidimension arrays
3) Floating point numbers
4) Functions returning anything but int
5) Unary operators: sizeof
6) Binary operators: typecasting
DIFFERENCES FROM STANDARD C
THE DEEP BLUE C language has the following nonstandard features:
1. The last clause of a "switch" statement, either "case" or "default", must
be terminated with a "break", a "continue" or a "return" statement.
2. The ancient =<op> construct has been removed. Use <op>= instead.
3. Characters are unsigned. Chars range in value from 0 to 255.
4. Strings can not be continued on the next logical line.
5. C source code lines can be a maximum of 79 characters long.
6. Functions can have a maximum of 126 arguments.
SPECIAL SYNTAX
C uses several ASCII characters not available on the ATARI computer's
keyboard. In particular the braces have been replaced by to two-letter
combinations $( and $), and the tilde has been replaced by $-. The $ character
is not used in C, so your editor's find and replace command can be used to
convert standard c programs into a format acceptable to DEEP BLUE C.
.PCD), so has to start from bootdisk or run Draper's menu then your program, ick. But this was no trouble to get running, so it wins.
drpascal.atr in drive 1, reboot, boots into a menu.\o/ Hit any key to exit the program.boot.atr, Drive 2, drpascal.atr, rebootC <return> D2:AUTORUN.SYS,D1:PASCAL.COM <return>C <return> D2:INIT.PCD,D1:INIT.PCD <return>disk2.atrL <return> PASCAL.COM <return>INIT.PAS source is included. If I ask it to compile, it prompts to insert drpascal.atr, and then I can switch back, which is reasonable.disk2.atr contents to H1, so they can be managed & edited on the Mac, but I just wanted to get things running first.This took quite a lot of my hobby time doing something harder than actual work, to be honest. But I'm in a good place with it now.
"Atari SA", formerly Infogrames who bought the name, are still not shipping their fantasy "modern VCS", to everyone's total lack of surprise.
This is just about physically painful as these useless parasites take peoples' money (not mine) for a grift, based on love of what a different company named Atari was like 30-50 years ago.
Now they're so shitty, their con so obvious, they've been removed from moderation of the subreddit about them.
Code Mystics' Atari Greatest Hits collection is unrelated, and a fantastic emulation on iOS and DS.