At section 8 for Atari 2600 Programming for Newbies

John Chubb · November 5, 2012

Got to the point where I downloaded 'my first kernel' and I got the pattern to appear on Stella. The page seemed to indicate putting in on your assembler DASM will reveal the lines of code in the kernel.

I tried to bring it up on Crimson Editor but only got the same symbols over and over again. No lines of code. I haven't even tried to put it on Visual Batari Basic yet, and the DASM page does not turn up, so I can't download that.

You can tell how green a rookie I am with this problem. Still I need help to see what next to do.

Omegamatrix · November 5, 2012

So you want to take the code that Andrew posted, and have Dasm compile it into a binary file that Stella can use.

In short:

1) copy the code off of the page, and put it into a .txt file. Then rename the file to .asm (for assembly)

2) get Dasm, vcs.h, and macro.h

3) configure Crimision Editor to compile with Dasm

Steps 1 and 2 I have done for you, and put them in a zip file:

StarterPackage.zip

Setting up Crimson Editor:

1) open Crimson Editor, go tools, configure user preferences, click in one of the slots for a tool and make these configurations:

Command is the path to your Dasm.exe file, and Dasm.exe lives in sub folder in that starter package under Dasm, bin, and then DOS folder

Argument is:

"$(FilePath)" -f3 -o"$(FileTitle).bin"

Initial directory is:

$(FileDir)

After that open the Kernel1.asm file with Crimson editor, and then go tools, 2600 bin. It will now make the binary file for you that you can use with Stella. You can also make other tools in the other slots. One that I use is making a binary and list file at the same time. The tool configurations are the same as the last tool, except that you use this for the arguement:

"$(FilePath)" -f3 -o"$(FileTitle).bin" -l"$(FileTitle).lst"

So take all this info and see if you can get there.