Asteroids Deluxe?

[prog99]

59 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

Speaking of Doug Little's gaming tools, and how amazing it is, this

is what it can do (I'm sure many of you have already seen this):

 

 

 

Yes we’ve all probably seen it and it’s very impressive.

30+ years too late though and ideally needs tech not readily available in the STs heyday.

[zzip]

On 8/8/2022 at 11:26 AM, DarkLord said:

Speaking of Doug Little's gaming tools, and how amazing it is, this

is what it can do (I'm sure many of you have already seen this):

 

 

 

Great stuff!   I wish the ST homebrew scene was more active.   Seems like the 2600/7800/8-bit have new games announced every week.   Even Jaguar seems more active.    I would think the ST(e) should be the easiest to develop for out of all those systems with all the tools at its disposal.

[+DarkLord]

On 8/8/2022 at 12:28 PM, prog99 said:

Yes we’ve all probably seen it and it’s very impressive.

30+ years too late though and ideally needs tech not readily available in the STs heyday.

 

Well, I guess that's the thing for me - I'm not overly concerned about "what if" scenario's.

 

I'm excited that this is here now, today, and people are using it to create wonderful pieces

of software for the ST/STe line.

 

Like all the new hardware stuff that's come along in the last few years. Good times, and

the promise of even better to come. 

 

 

[MrMaddog]

On 8/8/2022 at 12:28 PM, prog99 said:

Yes we’ve all probably seen it and it’s very impressive.

30+ years too late though and ideally needs tech not readily available in the STs heyday.

I'm sure Douglas Little would have love to make STe games back then, but the publishers wouldn't let him use any enhancements for the ST version cause they only cared about making money off Amiga players.

 

Besides, who the hell said you can only use commercial software on STs instead of homebrew stuff?

 

[ParanoidLittleMan]

There were already 'homebrew' games for Atari ST family in 80-es. Some as freeware, some as shareware and like. And they did not need special 'tools' for it in most cases. What was most popular is STOS - even some commercial games were programmed in it.

But, as is known STOS has it's limitations, and diverse fixes appeared for it, mostly to make input work in later TOS versions. And some extensions too.

 

I would say that even with diverse tools, ST(E) is harder for programming than some 8-bitter. CPU is way more complex. Surely, can use STOS, C ... but that will make it slower and using more RAM. Then learning TOS, specific HW usage. If not using TOS calls need to know programming of floppy access, for instance - that was not present on consoles, 8-bit machines. Actually I'm not sure that there is some homebrew done lately what doesn't using TOS calls. Or at all.  Doing something really good needs like 1 year of intensive work.

And yes, some nice games were made in last 2 decades, and big part of it was commercial. And that's perfectly normal.

[zzip]

6 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

I would say that even with diverse tools, ST(E) is harder for programming than some 8-bitter. CPU is way more complex. Surely, can use STOS, C ... but that will make it slower and using more RAM. Then learning TOS, specific HW usage. If not using TOS calls need to know programming of floppy access, for instance - that was not present on consoles, 8-bit machines. Actually I'm not sure that there is some homebrew done lately what doesn't using TOS calls. Or at all.  Doing something really good needs like 1 year of intensive work.

And yes, some nice games were made in last 2 decades, and big part of it was commercial. And that's perfectly normal.

I coded on both Atari 8-bit and ST, and I think ST is much easier with some exceptions.  On the 8-bit, if you wanted to write a game with any kind of performance, you needed to learn Assembly Language.   Maybe you could get away with a low-level language like Action!, but BASIC was too slow for good results.   And you needed to interact with the hardware directly for many things, so you needed to learn the ins and outs of that   APIs weren't a thing yet,  and limited memory really limited the scope of what you could accomplish.

 

On the ST, you could get pretty far with something like GFA Basic,  you could put together a game with sprites and sound with acceptable performance, especially if used the compiler.  As I recall, the hardest area in GFA was reading the standard joystick which I think required going direct to the OS and doing some trickery.   I've never used STOS, but that seemed to make game programming even easier.     If you wanted high performance, then yeah you would need C or Assembly or something.   Maybe learn to make your own blitter calls.  

 

However, if you want to do advanced work,  It did seem like the documentation was better for the 8-bit

 

 

[prog99]

16 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

I'm sure Douglas Little would have love to make STe games back then, but the publishers wouldn't let him use any enhancements for the ST version cause they only cared about making money off Amiga players.

 

Besides, who the hell said you can only use commercial software on STs instead of homebrew stuff?

 

I don't recall anyone saying that. The home-brew/shareware scene was huge in its day and I made my own contributions to the cause.

 

 

[MrMaddog]

4 hours ago, prog99 said:

I don't recall anyone saying that. The home-brew/shareware scene was huge in its day and I made my own contributions to the cause.

 

 

Of course it was, I had plenty of it from PD libraries back in the day.  The point was most of the best ST software were from homebrewers.

 

But there are some retrogamers who insist on only considering commercial stuff for silly forum arguements...

[ParanoidLittleMan]

16 hours ago, zzip said:

I coded on both Atari 8-bit and ST, and I think ST is much easier with some exceptions.  On the 8-bit, if you wanted to write a game with any kind of performance, you needed to learn Assembly Language.   Maybe you could get away with a low-level language like Action!, but BASIC was too slow for good results.   And you needed to interact with the hardware directly for many things, so you needed to learn the ins and outs of that   APIs weren't a thing yet,  and limited memory really limited the scope of what you could accomplish.

 

On the ST, you could get pretty far with something like GFA Basic,  you could put together a game with sprites and sound with acceptable performance, especially if used the compiler.  As I recall, the hardest area in GFA was reading the standard joystick which I think required going direct to the OS and doing some trickery.   I've never used STOS, but that seemed to make game programming even easier.     If you wanted high performance, then yeah you would need C or Assembly or something.   Maybe learn to make your own blitter calls.  

 

However, if you want to do advanced work,  It did seem like the documentation was better for the 8-bit

 

 

I would say again: learning efficient programming/coding with MC68000 needs much more time than with 6502, Z80 (later is more complex than 6502) .  I saw lot of not efficient ASM code in games, with 'footprints' of 8-bit programming style, habits.

 

It stays for ST too that may need to programm direct HW access instead using TOS functions/calls. Actually in 1985 it was practically only way for games, since TOS was not in ROM, but loaded from floppy.  For instance Brataccas - boots from floppy. I don't know were some games published which needed first to boot TOS from floppy, then change disk ...

 

Joystick read via TOS is good example about poor TOS DOCs - it was not described enough detailed. Not even in Atari ProfiBuch. Only much later some people experimented and found that TOS supports well ST joystick (both) read. This is btw. reason why STOS do not read joysticks when runs on later TOS versions - compiled games need so called STOS patch. Earlier patches just expanded address list for later TOS versions. My patch changed whole way how STOS reads joysticks to one what was already in TOS, only that because lack of proper DOCs it was barely used.  I even wrote details about it in this forum .

[zzip]

7 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

I would say again: learning efficient programming/coding with MC68000 needs much more time than with 6502, Z80 (later is more complex than 6502) .  I saw lot of not efficient ASM code in games, with 'footprints' of 8-bit programming style, habits.

No doubt lots of us learned ASM on the 6502 and that forced us into certain coding habits.   Although I did find  68000 ASM easier to code for and more pleasant to use.   It had a lot more registers for a start.

 

7 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

It stays for ST too that may need to programm direct HW access instead using TOS functions/calls. Actually in 1985 it was practically only way for games, since TOS was not in ROM, but loaded from floppy.  For instance Brataccas - boots from floppy. I don't know were some games published which needed first to boot TOS from floppy, then change disk ...

 

Joystick read via TOS is good example about poor TOS DOCs - it was not described enough detailed. Not even in Atari ProfiBuch. Only much later some people experimented and found that TOS supports well ST joystick (both) read. This is btw. reason why STOS do not read joysticks when runs on later TOS versions - compiled games need so called STOS patch. Earlier patches just expanded address list for later TOS versions. My patch changed whole way how STOS reads joysticks to one what was already in TOS, only that because lack of proper DOCs it was barely used.  I even wrote details about it in this forum .

I'm sure it was rough in the beginning, but by the time I was writing ST programs in 87, you could do a lot without direct hardware access.   If you wrote a mouse/keyboard driven program it was no problem.  It was just the joysticks that were ridiculous.   Well It was simple to poll the Jaguar-style joysticks on STe and above,  but the classic 9-pin ones not so much.

 

Still though..  we have all that information now, so my original question is why the ST homebrew scene is tiny today compared to the other Atari platforms?   BITD the ST homebrew/shareware scene was pretty robust with lots of high-quality software.   Some of my favorite games were shareware ones.   Now we have the knowledge and better tools.