Obscure 8 bit programs

[Tonyscouter]

We are all familiar with the wide variety of games, educational software and business software available for the 8-bit, but what about obscure programs that don't fit these more common categories?  I would be interested in what programs you have that you would consider obscure or unusual.  For example I've attached a program here that calculates the projected altitude of a model rocket based on weight, diameter, engine size and a few other parameters.  Thanks in advance for your input.

rocket.atr

[_The Doctor__]

Ballistics, Stellar charting, etc....   Applied sciences or helper apps...

 

[www.atarimania.com]

The .xmo file on the disk is actually a simple BASIC program so I just renamed it with a .bas extender:

Model Rocket Altitude Calculation.bas

 

Would love to know where you got this title.

[_The Doctor__]

This is the kind of stuff that was in the schools, colleges, and universities all over the USA. Many of them were propagated through select users groups who were not all about copy parties and games...

 

Great to see all kinds of 'lost' stuff coming out of folks repositories and revisits of work/days gone by

Edited March 14, 2022 by _The Doctor__

[Kyle22]

Doc, do you think we can improve this to use w/ ICBMs.

:)

 

[Stormtrooper of Death]

In the 80s, i made my own Guitar Effect. (distortion, hall effect and Delay). using an audio sampler (to connect my electrical guitar to), Stereo modded Atari 130XE and my machine language skills. Worked great.

I've never seen many programs specially made to use a guitar with the Atari 8bit.

 

i also made a upgraded second version, that was able to use audio samples that could be played using the guitar. example, play trumpet,piano,etc soundsamplesw using a guitar and my Atari 130Xe + effect program. Worked rather good aswell.

 

The Guitar Effect program seems to be lost in time when i sold my Atari stuff in 1992.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Stormtrooper of Death

[TGB1718]

Maybe you could call this cheating, but a radio station in the early 80's had a competition to see how

many 3 letter or more words could be made from a "larger word".

I wrote a program in BASIC to output all possibilities and save them, I then went through a dictionary 

to check the valid words.

 

 

I didn't win as I sent a valid list of words and the winner had the same idea but sent the whole

list including non-words, they couldn't be bothered to check the list and gave the prize to that person

 

[www.atarimania.com]

You want weird? There was a publisher called Llewellyn Publications specializing in esoterism, gematria, enochian and various occult themes:

http://www.atarimania.com/list_games_atari-400-800-xl-xe-llewellyn-publications_publisher_3441_8_G.html

 

Did anybody ever see these programs?

[TGB1718]

22 minutes ago, www.atarimania.com said:

Did anybody ever see these programs?

Never heard of them, however the name suggests it's a Welsh Company or has Welsh connections

[www.atarimania.com]

45 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:

Never heard of them, however the name suggests it's a Welsh Company or has Welsh connections

 

Very close, the company is based in Minnesota:

http://www.llewellyn.com

[TGB1718]

13 minutes ago, www.atarimania.com said:

Very close, the company is based in Minnesota:

http://www.llewellyn.com

Knew I was close ?

[Gunstar]

Guitar Wizard is an interesting one I never tried, though I did learn a bit of guitar from some friends who had a band in the mid-late 90's, then I lost my guitar somewhere while moving across the country one of the few times I did. I think I may take up guitar again one day soon and see about learning it with this program on my Atari. Though Atarimania doesn't have the disk image. Do any other Atari software archives have it?

 

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-guitar-wizard_6478.html

 

I don't know if this is what you meant @Stormtrooper of Death when you said programs you use a guitar with or not...

Edited March 15, 2022 by Gunstar

[Stormtrooper of Death]

7 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

Guitar Wizard is an interesting one I never tried, though I did learn a bit of guitar from some friends who had a band in the mid-late 90's, then I lost my guitar somewhere while moving across the country one of the few times I did. I think I may take up guitar again one day soon and see about learning it with this program on my Atari. Though Atarimania doesn't have the disk image. Do any other Atari software archives have it?

 

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-guitar-wizard_6478.html

 

I don't know if this is what you meant @Stormtrooper of Death when you said programs you use a guitar with or not...

No, my program was not about learning to play the guitaar. It was a real sound effect / emulating the Boss DS-1 guitar distortion pedal.

[Gunstar]

3 minutes ago, Stormtrooper of Death said:

No, my program was not about learning to play the guitaar. It was a real sound effect / emulating the Boss DS-1 guitar distortion pedal.

I wasn't suggesting it was your program, just a program that you use a guitar with as I quote you: "I've never seen many programs specially made to use a guitar with the Atari 8bit."

 

Though your program sounds like something I would love to use once I used Guitar Wizard to re-learn.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Gunstar

[Stormtrooper of Death]

Oh, okay. Then I misunderstood.

[Tonyscouter]

23 hours ago, www.atarimania.com said:

The .xmo file on the disk is actually a simple BASIC program so I just renamed it with a .bas extender:

Model Rocket Altitude Calculation.bas 8.93 kB · 14 downloads

 

Would love to know where you got this title.

I'm relatively sure I got it off a bulletin board back in the mid 80's.  The program states it was written by Richard Q. Fox in 1985.

[Gunstar]

11 hours ago, Stormtrooper of Death said:

 

The Guitar Effect program seems to be lost in time when i sold my Atari stuff in 1992.

I feel your loss and hope that it turns up someday through someone in the Atari community, Besides my guitar (though not in the same move) I lost all my disk, cassette and cartridge software in 1996 when the box was left behind in an apartment I had after college, and then I move to California for a job. But as too understanding, I also lost all my Atari graphic art I did back then, many disks worth.

 

I had sent some of it in to my user group Alamo Area Atari User's Group to go with articles I had written in the group's newsletter, as well as more to add to their PD library. I've been hoping those showed up amongst the community one day too. But I have no idea if any of it actually made into their collection. I never got word. Just my articles referring to them in the old newsletters I got by mail. I was only a subscribing member on my way to college in Wisconsin at the time and that was the last I had any correspondence rom the user group. My memory is a bit foggy about it though, I may have already been in my first semester of college when I actually wrote and submitted the articles...the news letter dates will remind me once I dig them out.

 

I suppose I should scan the newsletters I have. I was only a subscribing member for a year and I may have missed newsletters when I was at college that my family at home must have just thrown away as junk mail. And I never inquired about them as I was too busy with new friends and the college social life by then. I only used my Atari for word processing throughout those years too. No time to play games or do art on it with a social life and art I had to work on for my art degree.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Gunstar

[rdefabri]

On 3/15/2022 at 10:17 AM, Stormtrooper of Death said:

No, my program was not about learning to play the guitaar. It was a real sound effect / emulating the Boss DS-1 guitar distortion pedal.

That sounds awesome - I don't imagine you have it somewhere still?

[gilsaluki]

On 3/15/2022 at 12:58 PM, Gunstar said:

I feel your loss and hope that it turns up someday through someone in the Atari community, Besides my guitar (though not in the same move) I lost all my disk, cassette and cartridge software in 1996 when the box was left behind in an apartment I had after college, and then I move to California for a job. But as too understanding, I also lost all my Atari graphic art I did back then, many disks worth.

 

I had sent some of it in to my user group Alamo Area Atari User's Group to go with articles I had written in the group's newsletter, as well as more to add to their PD library. I've been hoping those showed up amongst the community one day too. But I have no idea if any of it actually made into their collection. I never got word. Just my articles referring to them in the old newsletters I got by mail. I was only a subscribing member on my way to college in Wisconsin at the time and that was the last I had any correspondence rom the user group. My memory is a bit foggy about it though, I may have already been in my first semester of college when I actually wrote and submitted the articles...the news letter dates will remind me once I dig them out.

 

I suppose I should scan the newsletters I have. I was only a subscribing member for a year and I may have missed newsletters when I was at college that my family at home must have just thrown away as junk mail. And I never inquired about them as I was too busy with new friends and the college social life by then. I only used my Atari for word processing throughout those years too. No time to play games or do art on it with a social life and art I had to work on for my art degree.

I thought you were a member of AAAUA longer than a year.  You submitted a lot of interesting articles.  I was not into Atari Art programs at the time.  Am now.  I have those (FR)Antic newsletters to about 1998 or so.  They eventually only consisted of about 2 pgs of info.  There are some newsletters where you and I are both in them.  Funny.  Here we are today, Oklahoma.  I wish someone out there would step up and let us know where the AAAUA's expansive disk library went off to.  Former librarians?

[Gunstar]

9 hours ago, gilsaluki said:

I thought you were a member of AAAUA longer than a year.

I only remember paying for a subscribing membership once, so that's pretty much what I go by. I did contribute a number of articles (actually at the time I also got published in Atari Interface Magazine covering 8/16 bits). I was completely gung-ho about writing and art at the time, as they were my planned major and minor (just before and while at college) thinking of a bright future as a journalist (magazine), and sci-fi/fantasy writer/Novelist who would to his own illustrating as a career. It all turned out to be just a hobby in the end.

 

I also subscribed to that magazine for about a year and my article was in the first issue that went to newspaper quality cover and pages from the nice glossy ones with quality paging before (The entire magazine was done on ST and TT computers with their desktop publishing solutions I remember, they even had a big article spread about it in one issue. I found out recently that they only lasted a few more months, maybe to the end of that year, and went from bi-monthly to quarterly I believe. I have all the AAAUA newsletters and AIM magazines still. I'll go ahead a post a couple pictures below...

 

...well, shoot, I can't seem to find my (FR)Antic newsletter binder atm, but here is a picture of the front cover of the AIM magazine I was published in, and it was the fall '92 edition so I must have written and submitted that article right after starting my freshman year of college. I was 24 at the time, not a traditional student, having hit the road for a while and returning just the year before when I subscribed to AAAUA and AIM. And so AIM only had one or two more issues after this one, IIRC, which I never received either because my membership had run out or because my mail was going to my parents and I moved onto college social life by then and forgot all about my Atari computer hobby for about 4 years, except to use it for word processing, for school.

 

If anyone decides to zoom in or download the picture of my article, please excuse my ignorance and some layman's terms of the abilities of the Atari 8-bit, this was at a time before I really got into and learned electronics and really started to understand micro-processors. I had installed a few upgrades by this point, following instructions and that's it.

 

P.S.-While looking for my article, I also stumbled across this news editorial or whatever from the AAAUA president.

P.P.S-Sorry to hijack the thread guys, I just realized...though maybe not so much; my article does mention some quite obscure late-life software of the A8.

 

 

Edited March 25, 2022 by Gunstar

[gilsaluki]

So funny.  Last night, and this is no bull, I just read that issue and your article.  That issue was the first that went to newsprint paper. I think they folded shortly after that issue.  Read an issue of Atari Classics last night as well.  It had an article (fake interview type) about GenLok or GenLock written about our own MyTEK here on this site.  Michael St.....  I still don't know really what that device he developed was used for graphics generation for video or some such application.  Way too over my head, even today.  

[gilsaluki]

Hey, I am mentioned in those Presidential Pondering (AAAUA) notes.  5th paragraph down. Mentions my Pac-Man article.  I wrote a few shorts back in the day.  

Edited March 25, 2022 by gilsaluki
correction

[rdefabri]

I wrote what would likely have been the first "fart" soundboard, called "Fart Chart" (I was in grade school at the time, and yes - I was an idiot).  I still have it somewhere on disk, but I haven't been able to get my A8 to output to my TV (not right connection).

 

That's my goal - to convert it to ATR, and immortalize it forever.

[+davidcalgary29]

Someone bought (and was sold) a complete boxed A8 version of Relax at PRGE a couple of years ago. That's still the most unusual commercial program that I've seen sold for the A8.

[www.atarimania.com]

On 10/23/2023 at 2:13 AM, rdefabri said:

I wrote what would likely have been the first "fart" soundboard, called "Fart Chart" (I was in grade school at the time, and yes - I was an idiot).  I still have it somewhere on disk, but I haven't been able to get my A8 to output to my TV (not right connection).

 

That's my goal - to convert it to ATR, and immortalize it forever.

I scent-se you're going to find it.