Mark's 1986 Science Fair Project

[Knutsen]

@Savetz recently interviewed me about how I programmed a star cluster simulation in valFORTH on my Atari for a science fair project in 1986.

 

The interview is forthcoming. In anticipation of that, I have attached the software for you to play with. You do not need to know Forth to enjoy this, but you do need to be patient. It's slow.

 

a) For the demo I do in the interview: mount "ClusterDemoTypeDOIT.atr" on your real or emulated Atari 800. Boot, and type "DOIT".

 

What you are seeing is two views of 3-D space. On the left, the Z axis is pointing straight at you. On the right, the X axis is pointing straight at you. For more details, watch or listen to the interview ?

 

b) To explore further, mount "Cluster4thFiles.atr" as drive 2 and reboot. Type the following (ignoring my parenthesized comments):

 

MTB       ( empty buffers; seems to be important for the following to work )

0 82 C!   ( narrow the left margin for readability )

ON ECHO

DIR 2     ( show DOS-format D2: disk contents )

FLOAD D2:TWOSTARS.4TH

INITIALIZE

CLUSTER   ( hold START - or click it rapidly in emulation - to exit )

0 GR.

PRINT D2:CLUSTER2.4TH/N   ( to see the actual source of the simulation, already loaded )

ClusterDemoTypeDOIT.atr Cluster4THFiles.atr

[TGB1718]

Interesting, doesn't seem to work on 130XE, not the program, the FORTH language just freezes when

trying to type the commands, had to change to 800.

 

Use Warp Speed in Altirra, makes this run quite quickly

 

Edit: This might be of interest to people in the Programming section of this forum

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by TGB1718
Update

[Knutsen]

11 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Interesting, doesn't seem to work on 130XE, not the program, the FORTH language just freezes when

trying to type the commands, had to change to 800.

valFORTH predates the XE line - and XL, although it does work with my 800XL - and with AltirraOS on Atari800MacX. Can you try an OS translator?

11 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Use Warp Speed in Altirra, makes this run quite quickly

My modern machines are all Apple hardware. I would rather not run my emulator in an emulator ?

 

However, Atari800MacX will run at 5x normal speed, which helps.

[Savetz]

My interview with Mark is here: https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-424-atari-at-the-science-fair-mark-knutsen-star-cluster

 

-Kay

[Ricky Spanish]

Bump for a fascinating program !