toddtmw

Did this ever happen?

Yeah. As much as I loved writing to the hardware, it became very clear that it meant a complete rewrite when you moved to a different platform. Back then, you had to do it because there just wasn't enough power. Today, computers have so much excess capacity that it is more efficient to write to a higher level. But those were fun days. It's like my first car. A 1972 Chevy Monte Carlo. It had a hood you could play tennis on. I rebuilt that engine and stoos INSIDE the engine compartment while doing it. I took the cam out without removing the radiator. Now, you open the hood of a car and cannot even see through to the ground. Replacing something as simple as a belt often involves removing lots of unrelated parts just to get to it. Completely different experience.

What is project M?

I put one of those switches in my 800. It turned off the key beep speaker. It went a long way toward allowing me to keep what was left of my sanity.

I just added Galactic Cresta as a Clone to Moon Cresta.

I updated the spreadsheet with the latest recommendations. Some of the Clones kind of play fast an lose with the definition, but it doesn't hurt to include them. I had forgotten about Galactic Chase. I played the heck out of that off cassette back in the day. (Of course once I got the thing loaded, I didn't want to turn my computer off!

Aren't non-arcade ports I like the double negative. Those are on their own tab.

Okay. This is my favorite basic story. On the Atari, when you would go up to edit a line, I would hit enter to get back down to the bottom to run it or list it or whatever. I never understood why when I went past READY it gave an error 6. I took years for me to realize that Atari Basic didn't need spaces, so it was interpreting that as READ Y and in most cases, there were no unread data statements, to it gave Error 6 (Out of Data Error)! I laughed for a week every time I thought of that after I figured it out. -Todd

Reminds me of my experience. So sad. I don't miss the hardware as much as I miss the suitcase full of disks I had.

Is there anywhere on here where people can share BASIC games or see other games people have shared? Maybe a dedicated subforum under the programming forum just for that? I'd love to see other peoples creations and the code they used to create them. It's how I learned to program in Atari BASIC back in the day. I mean, I learned the basics from reading the reference manuals, but I learned a lot of the cool tricks by typing programs out of magazines and seeing how others did things. Thanks.

It's a crap game, but it's an entertaining thing to create it. I started out of college programming in IBM 370 and Z/OS Assembler for liek 20 years. Seems like 6502 Assembler can't be worse than that, can it? (Anyone who's done both care to comment?) -Todd

This is really cool. I did a little game that I had fun with back in the mid 80's. I never submitted it to be published, and I never managed to transfer it to a "modern" PC format, so a few weeks ago, I started rewriting it from scratch in Altirra running in VMware on my Mac. I've got the game about where it was 30+ years ago and am now looking at options to make it better. I've tried compiling it, with the MMG compiler, which helps performance but opens a whole new set of timing challenges. I'm thinking of rewriting it in Assembler or in Advan BASIC. I'll check this out. Maybe it will give me some ideas. Thanks for sharing.

Where I grew up, there was a store called Electronic Connexion. (I might have the spelling off...) They actually allowed you to try games before buying them. A friend convinced me to go with him to try to copy a game in the store while we were "trying" it. They had the computers in little cubicles and we had an Atari 800 with the cartridge door opened and a pencil (that we borrowed from the sales guy) poked into the slot to allow it to be powered on with the door open, we had the copy software running and had just pushed the cart in to try to dump it when the sales guy came in. He was like, "What are you doing?" My firend looked at him and said, "Copying games." I grabbed my stuff and dragged him out of the store before the salesman could react. That store did a lot of public domain copying, but I was not aware of them doing any commercial copying. Ah. Fun times....

I separate them by system (of course) and then depending on the size of the collection, I break them out into separate directories by the first letter if there are more than 50 or so. I also like the romhunter packs...

I've been playing with emulation since the 90's. I've run stuff on Macintosh, Windows, iPad, Android, Nintendo Advance, Nintendo DS, Original XBox... I think Altirra underl Windows is the best implementation of an emulator I've seen for any platform on any platform. The attention to detail and the options and the attempt to get as close to the bare hardware as possible (to say nothing of the fact that the author wrote his own BIOS and BASIC versions) is just more than I've seen anywhere else. I don't want to diminish the other emulators out there. There are some really good ones, it's just that Altirra stands out to me. -Todd

That's a relief. I know they were asking for legal help on the retropie site. Looks like maybe they managed to get some. I cannot beileve that people try such underhanded stuff. (Okay, I believe it, but I think it sucks!) -Todd

Is there a reason that someone couldn't post the compiled version so we could load it (I know we would have to have a developer account to actually load it, but when you compile it, does it tag it to the developer?)

This is really cool. It would be neat to do this with some of the other classic "best of" games!

So, do we have any feel at all about how much the finished product might cost? Thanks!

So, 2 years in. Is anyone actually working on this? I'd love to see this. I hated it when anything on C64 was better than somehting on A8. Stupid Commode Door computers.

So, what are the minimum specs to run this effectively? Thanks.

Hello all. I really enjoyed this thread. So much so that I took all of the information people shared throughout it and organized it into a spreadsheet. I added a link to the Atarimania page (or pages) for each A8 game and to Wikipedia (if I could find it) for the arcade game. I also listed A8 format (as presented on Atarimania) along with publisher of both the A8 and Arcade versions. There are three tabs. Arcade to A8, A8 to Arcade and Arcade to A8 Clone. This should be editable by anyone who has this link, so feel free to update it to include other information. (Or let me know and I can make the updates.) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_Mbk63SmENqitZ4htutnbD29ZO3W2220YJK0pLAY4Eo/edit?usp=sharing Thank you Todd

Guess it depends on how much bandwidth you have. Web site would be better in most cases. People could choose to only download what they need without pulling a single big file. Plus, it seems that this torrent may not be popular enough to always be seeded well. Again, web site would eliminate that. Finally, there are some places where torrent downloads are not allowed (Companies, possibly universities, etc.) The site is relly nice as a museum right now. Adding links to the files would really take it to the next level of usefulness. Kind of like a more curated, higher quality version of Atari Mania. -Todd

The web site is really amazing. But there do not appear to be any links to download anything. Any idea when that will happen? Thanks!

That's pretty extreme copy protection. "I know the real disk is write-protected, so if the disk is not write-protected, it must be a copy, so format the disk." Wow.