Well, the assembly language program can now take an RLE encoded string and draw the whole screen. Which is further than before, when it was basically a proof of concept. This still doesn't yet do the extra thing I want it to do - handle return chars and quotes, by borrowing run lengths of 255 & 254 - to signal that.
Also I thought that I was going to be dealing with the internal representations of a character - but I'm not. Plain ATASCII is all I am dealing with - oh well, that makes
Ha - I wrote an assembly language program. As one might expect for a first program, it's simple. It's the start of what will become an RLE decoder. But for now all it does, as its called from basic, it takes the argument count off the stack, then takes the address of the string off the stack. It set up a space in memory for a running location of where you are in screen memory, a counter, and the address of the string.
It does a loop. It does basic arithmetic, and basically - just puts the
Slogging through some slow going stuff - so my first thought is, I need to invest some time in doing a tool chain, so things aren't quite so slow.
But some issues are solved already.
What has been done so far:
setup real Atari 800XL with 1050 disk drive & sio2pc
PC software being used: Aspeqt, Altirra, Gimp.
Atari software: Assembler Editor Cartridge & Built-in Atari Basic*
Set up a custom display list with 56 lines graphics 15 ("header"), then 17 lines of Graphics 0 ("body")
Well I'm blogging again - in case it's interesting to anyone - we all have our own styles of work.
I've found that with the Atari, there are a literal sea of choices - and some interesting tricks to get the last bit of performance. But that's actually a problem - too much interesting things - not enough coding.
so I've decided to make some quick choices, and re-examine them only after I have a working demo.
A working demo is important - it means people can use it, and see if they
It seems to me from the reading I've done so far, that the effort to keep the atari 'connected' is in part about getting BBS's to work over the internet.
In addition there are some efforts to do an Atari tcp/ip stack with text browsing.
Well I'd like to add to the mix, atari web services.
Basically, the "web server" is going to run REST api's.
The atari will connect - using R: emulation in Altirra, or, your real atari with A.P.E. system, piggy backing your PC's internet connection,
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord