Problem getting Stella to work with running bB Samples/Crimson/2600IDE

[AtariMaster26]

Hello Everyone!

 

I am trying to teach myself how to program Atari 2600 Games and I recently went to Batari Basic's Web Page and followed the download tutorial that they give to create a C:Atari2600 file and download all the recommended programs and emulators...

 

I finished the tutorial for downloading everything and set all the programs up. But when I tried to run the compiled draw.bas or zombie_chase.bas the Stella emulator window comes up but it just makes an annoying "BWAH BWAH BWAH BWAH!" sound and the screen 'caves' in towards the middle, repeatedly. (the screen sorta looks like it's the screen when you're loading a supercharger game)

 

When I try to run other games downloaded from AtariAge.com and run them with Stella, they seem to work perfectly.

 

Can anyone help? What could I do to fix this? - I am running Windows Vista.

 

Also, does anyone know of any books that I could look into to help me learn how to program Atari 2600 Games? Should I first get a BASIC Programming book and learn that before I do anything? Or what other books do you all recommend?

 

Thanks for your time everyone!

[+Random Terrain]

Are you using Visual batari Basic? Also, have you looked at this page yet:

 

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-me...c-commands.html

[+batari]

Hello Everyone!

 

I am trying to teach myself how to program Atari 2600 Games and I recently went to Batari Basic's Web Page and followed the download tutorial that they give to create a C:Atari2600 file and download all the recommended programs and emulators...

 

I finished the tutorial for downloading everything and set all the programs up. But when I tried to run the compiled draw.bas or zombie_chase.bas the Stella emulator window comes up but it just makes an annoying "BWAH BWAH BWAH BWAH!" sound and the screen 'caves' in towards the middle, repeatedly. (the screen sorta looks like it's the screen when you're loading a supercharger game)

 

When I try to run other games downloaded from AtariAge.com and run them with Stella, they seem to work perfectly.

 

Can anyone help? What could I do to fix this? - I am running Windows Vista.

 

Also, does anyone know of any books that I could look into to help me learn how to program Atari 2600 Games? Should I first get a BASIC Programming book and learn that before I do anything? Or what other books do you all recommend?

 

Thanks for your time everyone!

Your problem is not with Stella, as those loading bars are the default for an abnormally-sized binary. Chances are the file size is 0 bytes due to a configuration issue somewhere.

 

Are there any error messages during the compilation process?

 

Regardless, I will second Visual bB, as it seems to work very well and that alone might solve the issue.

[SeaGtGruff]

As Fred (batari) said, the most likely reason you get the "Supercharger loading" screen is because of a bad ROM size. And from what I've seen whenever people run into issues trying to get things to "work as advertised," it's usually due either to a funky directory path-- namely, the inclusion of one or more spaces-- and/or problem(s) with the compile batch file.

 

Spaces may be okay to use in directory paths and file names these days, but they cause problems when the directory path and file name are being used as a parameter in a command line, because they make it look like multiple parameters rather than a single parameter. For example, suppose you have a compile batch file named "compile.bat," and it expects a single parameter telling which source file to compile, such that the command line would look something as follows:

 

compile c:\game.txt

 

(where "game.txt" is the name of the source file that's being compiled, and it's sitting in the root directory of the C drive). If the directory path contains any spaces, and/or if the file name contains any spaces, then to the compile batch it would look like you're sending it multiple parameters, as in the following example:

 

compile c:\my directory\my game.txt

 

In that example, it looks like three parameters instead of one-- "c:\my" being the first parameter, "directory\my" being the second parameter, and "game.txt" being the third parameter. You can get around that by enclosing the directory path and file name in quotation marks, as follows:

 

compile "c:\my directory\my game.txt"

 

If you're using Crimson Editor, you would include the quotation marks in the setup for your user-defined tool-- specifically, in the "Argument:" field, as follows:

 

Argument: "$(FilePath)"

 

The second possible issue is with the "2600bas.bat" comile batch file itself. I've found that the one that's packaged with batari Basic has a number of places where there are missing spaces, as well as forward slashes that should be backward slashes. I think the direction of the slashes is probably a Unix versus Windows issue, because Unix-- and possibly other operating systems-- use forward slashes in their directory paths, whereas MS-DOS and Windows use backward slashes (such as "/mydirectory/myfile.txt" versus "\mydirectory\myfile.txt"). And the missing spaces I referred to are around the various "special" symbols-- namely, pipes and redirectors-- because it seems that Windows may sometimes get confused if you use redirectors without putting spaces around them (for example, typing "compile mygame.txt>mygame.bin" instead of "compile mygame.txt > mygame.bin" or something like that). I'm attaching a zipped copy of the "2600bas.bat" file that I use, in which I've made all the necessary spacing adjustments and slash conversions.

 

I hope this information helps you get things working! Of course, there might be other things causing this, but try these two things first (the quotation marks in the "Argument:" field, plus the slightly modified "2600bas.bat" file) to see if they fix it.

 

Michael

2600bas.zip