Best homebrews to learn from?

[Nostalgic]

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the grass was green, I learned a lot about programming by typing in, reviewing, and tweaking program listings from Antic, A.N.A.L.O.G., and Compute! magazines.

 

I see a lot of fun and interesting games being developed for the Atari 7800 - and it looks like 7800basic is a powerful tool for making development accessible.

 

There are quite a few games with 7800basic source code posted here, so there's definitely an opportunity to analyze and learn from that code. It's almost an embarrassment of riches!  So where to start?

 

Which games out there now would be best for somebody to learn 7800basic from?  (I know there are some samples that come with 7800basic.)  I don't have a particular genre in mind and I'm a professional programmer, so this is about learning 7800 game programming in particular rather than Basic in general (though my Basic is definitely very rusty!).

 

Or put more simply, when you started programming in 7800basic, which other games did you study to learn from?

[BydoEmpire]

The samples that come w/ 7800basic are definitely worth checking out, they're a great starting point.

 

When I was working on Wizard's Dungeon I definitely took a look at code from a few other games (Dungeon Stalker, etc) but more to find specific things "how did they do XYZ."

[+Muddyfunster]

Another good set of tutorials is here by Atari Maximus.

 

I'd also recommend Atari Dev Studio as your IDE 

 

 

 

[Nostalgic]

On 2/12/2022 at 12:43 PM, Muddyfunster said:

Another good set of tutorials is here by Atari Maximus.

 

I'd also recommend Atari Dev Studio as your IDE 

 

 

 

Thank you! I pulled down and set up Dev Studio. It looks like it will indeed come in handy. From what I saw of the headaches regarding image color indexes with most editors I'm hoping Dev Studio will make dealing with that easier. (A small part of me wishes I could hand-draw images directly in the source code!)

 

I also came across the third part of those tutorials and a full PDF version, which I now have in hard copy so I can scribble down notes and read it offline. ?

[+Muddyfunster]

Colour indexes require a little bit of work to get right, you will soon build that into your workflow. I struggled a bit with them at first but once you get your head around them, they are very easy to work with.

 

If you have questions, just yell, plenty of folks who will happily lend a hand.