Shawn Jefferson

I'm looking for one with a faulty screen, but otherwise working to do the modern LCD replacement on. It doesnt feel right to pull a perfectly working screen out of my Lynx II. I could have sworn I had another one, but I guess not.

What makes bataribasic or 7800basic better than the options we have for the 8-bit already? We have tons of languages, basic, C, Pascal, assembly. It seems like what we really need are prepackaged engines and maybe some editors... and tutorials. The Lynx is a machine that could use a port of 7800basic! Maybe I'm way off base, and I admit I know almost nothing about bataribasic an 7800basic.

I guess the reason we don't have something like batari basic, is that we already have tons of BASIC languages already, with varying degrees of graphically capability. The Game Designer concept is interesting, but usually limited..hard for them not to be.

PS. In the last decade I did find a copy.

Me too! This was one of the first games I bought for my new Atari 800XL.

One thing that confused me, reading this and your other thread: you end your program by jumping to DOSVEC, instead of just exiting normally? Doesn't that leave some addresses on the stack? (taking up a few bytes) Just wondering, I have no experience with Action, and haven't written much for SpartaDOS, but I assumed most programs were just exiting via RTS at the end (I believe cc65 does this and I haven't seen any issues running programs in Sparta.) PS. I've had thoughts of writing a SpartaDOS library like this for cc65... if I ever get around to it, this will help a lot!

I'd be interested to hear more about his reasons for selling Atari (were they purely monetary?), did he regret selling the company when he saw what Warner was doing with it? What were his interactions like with the Warner folks? What did he feel they were doing wrong, and what were they doing right? Did they orchestrate the collapse of Atari themselves, or was that something that was inevitable due in part to the way he built and ran the company, or decisions that were made early on?

This probably isn't what you meant, but APE has some extended SIO commands that can retrieve the LFN from the currently mounted ATR. There may be others implemented that work with LFN on PC-Mirror drives too... I've never seen an exhaustive list of the extended SIO commands.

You can get more colors in a couple of different ways, the same as other platforms: - Use an interrupt timed to the scanline to change the palette, giving you more than 16 colors on the screen, but only 16 unique colors per scanline - flip between two palettes every "screen", creating the appearance of more colors (and also some flickering.) Alpine Games, I believe, uses the second technique on some screens.

It would probably be best to turn it into, or build a command-line compiler version, and then you can use any editor you like with whatever features you like.

You could copy the PRO image to an ATR, if you can skip bad sectors, but you can't convert them directly.

That file has a header on it for the emulator. If you strip off the first 16 bytes you can flash it to a real cart.

Looks like a rip-off of Ballblazer, and not a great one.

EotB was actually a prototype game created back when the Lynx was still supported, but never saw release. There were some (not sure how many) original prototypes (this isn't one as far as I know) that were being traded around, and then cloned in small runs and sold. EricDeeLee made a larger, cheaper run a couple of years ago and quite a few people got that version. I believe the original prototype had a battery backed RAM for game save! PS. Anyone feel free to correct me where I'm wrong about any of this.

It's TV, and most people watching probably didn't pick up on any of that. Generally it was better than a lot of what passes for "computer stuff" in movies and TV. Yes, he is an asshole, but I actually sort of like him. The show wouldn't be nearly as good without him... the insanely driven individual with a vision and no scruples about who he has to (quite literally) f*ck on the way to seeing that vision become reality. Partially that was what that scene you didn't like was about. Also, I don't know why you think it was not appropriate... I guess the writers thought it was. I guess what you really meant is that it made you feel uncomfortable. You never know... they might bring these things back in at some point. I'm not sure how they are going to do that, and whether anyone will care or not, all the other characters know that Joe is an asshole and probably wish they didn't need him.

This has been answered many times. It IS possible to create a multi-cart without dip switches. Your idea of skipping the first 512KB will not work, and also, there is no need. All you have to do, as explained else where is boot to your game selection menu, then JUMP via software to the OS ROM in the lynx with essentially does a warm boot. There's no magic required (just the hardware and someone programming the boot menu), and no hacking of games.

I don't think the VAPI tools support writing to real floppies. I think you'd need the Kryoflux or SuperCard and the images that are being created here for that (?)

Most of my ingots I have cut the connector that goes to the computer side, so I can use it with more modern supplies if I ever need.

It looks like the limit for ld65 is 256 files. https://github.com/cc65/cc65/blob/master/src/ld65/main.c Check MAX_INPUT_FILES.

Can you flash/write from the Atari side as with the Atarimax carts? (I think the answer is no...)

It's much cheaper if you are buying more than one cartridge, which quite a few people do/have done. It's definitely a security thing... and I guess Microsoft (rightly so I feel), decided that helping protect millions of users was worth pissing off a few garage programmers.

Hook up a VBXE, then you can map memory from $4000-BFFF.

One reason is memory. I'm using the VBXE memory itself from $4000-9FFF to bank in the various structures. It would be much more complicated to do it only in the 16k extended memory bank, and add on top of that the memory it takes to do 80 columns in software. I don't think you could port the code and get the entire thing to fit, or at least it would be much more work. I do plan on trying to get it working with 40 columns, extended memory and the flashcart only... but I will need to make changes to the game, eliminate some items for instance, and maybe re-arrange the screen layout slightly. Well as I said above, the game makes use of the PRNG to generate levels, unique towns, etc... I was worried that the game would either not be as true to the original code, or the ability to restore a seed and get the same random numbers wouldn't work.

I think the problem with ATX files is their use is limited. Are you also preserving the raw dump from Kryoflux (or whatever it is you are using?) If so, it wouldn't matter I don't think as no one is going to care about the sector ordering when using non-protected disks, IMO.

You aren't interested in perserving the software? That's more what I meant. ATX seems to be the format to do that with copy-protected software.