Atari Program Development Books

[Martin72]

I have a question about a learning path: I have read the book "The Atari Assembler" together with the Atari Assembler Editor cartridge and try all exercises and programs. This book gaves me a good basic knowledge about machine language, the instruction set and to program and debug small programs with the Assembler Editor. After this, the same for "Atari Roots" but also with the MAC/65 cartridge and I am at the point I will finish this book. This book learned me a lot about the Atari such as allocate memory, IOCB, Graphics etc. What will be the following step I can take to get more advanced with the Atari 8 bit?

 

[chevymad]

I am trying to type in the Alpa program from the Atari 130xe beginners book. I get to line 1060 and there's a bunch of dark triangles that I have no idea how to make...  I've also tried Geisters d/l, and while I can get a directory showing the files with dos 2.5, I can't seem to load either of them. I get error 164. I'd rather type the program myself anyway, if anyone can help with the triangle character. 

[chevymad]

On 5/11/2019 at 6:10 PM, Geister said:

OK, as promised, these are the companion programs for the book "Atari 130xe Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner". The one program called ALPA stands for Assembly Language Programming Assistant, and the other called Hexpert is a sort of dis-assembler.

ALPA_Hexpert.ATR 90 kB · 57 downloads

Can anyone get this file to work? I've tried on my xld and altirra. I can see the 2 files but can't load either. I can view each file, but they appear to be mostly gibberish. Have they corrupted?

[Geister]

It's likely the upload wasInsert existing attachment corrupted or Altirra created an ATR that isn't readable.  I can load the programs from the ATR on my PC, I'll try to create a fresh ATR and upload it when I get a chance.

 

OK, I tried again with someone else's attempt at creating an ATR.  The disk is a DOS 2.5 version with the files saved directly from memory in Altirra.

DOS TEST DISK.atr

Edited July 3, 2020 by Geister
Upload another version of Alpa/Hexpert disk.

[chevymad]

Thanks, Geister. The files on the new ATR work fine!

[zbyti]

I found this books great, really 8-bit fundamentals.

Machine_Language_Programming_Cookbook_I.pdf Machine_Language_Programming_Cookbook_II.pdf Usborne Guide to Computer Jargon (1983)(Usborne Publishing).pdf

[atarialoha]

https://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com

 

Tons of stuff there. Good curated collection specific to programming for Atari.

[Max_Chatsworth]

On 5/12/2021 at 6:47 PM, atarialoha said:

https://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com

 

Tons of stuff there. Good curated collection specific to programming for Atari.

Hawaii 8 bit connection

[atarialoha]

5 hours ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

Hawaii 8 bit connection

LOL

[rdefabri]

Are there any programming guides for FastBasic outside of the documentation on the github?  I'm a person that needs hand holding, and looking at the manual, it's not enough for me to grasp the key elements (unless I missed something or skimmed it too fast).

 

Seems like a ton of potential for that language to be used.  Heck, I'd write the book if I knew it better!

[scottinNH]

Wow. I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned 

Dr. C. Wacko's miracle guide to designing and programming your own Atari computer arcade games [PDF]

 

This book gets technically advanced but it starts out assuming you are a beginner and brings you along. There are projects that, once completed, are revisited again to be improved.

The author is a professional tech writer (and obviously, programmer) and the book reads well for any age or experience level.

 

Lastly, the book uses humor, cartoons and mnemonics to help you learn (and remember!) boring topics. 

At the time, a lot of computer books used these techniques to appeal to children (which does not happen as much anymore), but there's tons of research showing these techniques improve memory as mneumonics engage more of the brain.

----

See also: "Head First C" [PDF] with very similar humor, style and mnemonics. It's helping me learn C on CC65 from scratch, since I don't have time for completely dead languages (sorry)

Edited September 24, 2022 by scottinNH

[Ray Gillman]

My favorite Atari assembler book - the one that took me from scratching my head to using ML code in my BASIC programs regularly.  Must have for me anyway 

 

https://archive.org/details/atari_The_Atari_Assembler

 

The nutshell two tables which helped it click here

Edited December 21, 2022 by Ray Gillman

[glurk]

On 12/21/2022 at 4:29 PM, Ray Gillman said:

My favorite Atari assembler book - the one that took me from scratching my head to using ML code in my BASIC programs regularly.  Must have for me anyway 

 

https://archive.org/details/atari_The_Atari_Assembler

 

I have a (rough condition) physical copy of this, if you (or someone) want(s) to pay shipping for it.  Just PM me.

[Ray Gillman]

1 minute ago, glurk said:

I have a (rough condition) physical copy of this, if you (or someone) want(s) to pay shipping for it.  Just PM me.

Through a few moves over 40 years I first lost most Atari hardware, later most disks then the last of my books and the last of the hardware.  The ST and Amiga took front center for a bit which made it easier to transition away.  Made sense to pare it down in the steps I took and I decided everything I do would be emulators running on Windows or Linux and pdf e-books and electronic copies of like ATR's.  So while I love the feel of having paper books I have maybe two bookshelves of books today and most are medical or field study science books or maybe a few dozen sci-fi fantasy.  We called it minimalizing along the way - I figured I could always play a proper game of MULE on an emulator but turns out we kind of can't.  Hah!   

[XL Freak]

my fav programming book is The Atari Basic Source Book. it has the source code for basic as well as explaining how it works in plain English with plenty of illustrations. it's a great read for anyone interested in higher level languages

[+David_P]

One of the most useful single page references for the Atari I ever found - Dec, Hex, Char and OpCode for all official 6502 op-codes, from Antic 3/9.

 

https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/OP_CODE_FINDER.html

 

[Hrivis]

On 5/3/2019 at 3:44 AM, tane said:

Old Programming Books Collection:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:c5addbccd709208d82b658e68f7b81089854c998&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3a6969

 

Books.xls 36 kB · 169 downloads

Do you have that book colection somewhere? Magnet link is not working for me.

[+MrFish]

On 1/1/2023 at 5:53 PM, David_P said:

One of the most useful single page references for the Atari I ever found - Dec, Hex, Char and OpCode for all official 6502 op-codes, from Antic 3/9.

 

https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/OP_CODE_FINDER.html

 

Pretty nice reference, but it's not the greatest scan.

 

I took the page from the PDF of the magazine. I'm posting the original page and one I turned grayscale and boosted the contrast on.

 

    

 

 

[ClausB]

Thanks to my friendly salesman at New Dimensions In Computing, I got photocopies of the pre-release Atari Hardware Manual and OS Manual, a wealth of detail, in 1981. Also, Lance Leventhal's 6502 Assembly Language Programming. But what really put it all together for me was Chris Crawford's series of BYTE articles in 81/82, later to become the book De Re Atati.

 

https://archive.org/details/Atari400800HardwareManualNovember1980

 

https://archive.org/details/AtariOperatingSystemUsersManualNovember1980

 

https://archive.org/details/6502-assembly-language-programming

 

https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-de-re-atari

 

 

Edited September 4 by ClausB