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New Atari programmer here! Seeking advice


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Hey everyone, I'm new to Atari programming and I just want to know where to start..I have a hefty pc (rtx3080ti intel i910900k, 64gb DDR4 3200MHz ram), and can run just about anything. I've currently been running Atari800MacX with basic loaded up and have been able to create simple colors, lines, flashing, etc. But I want to dive deeper into this. I want to know why little things as well, like..why do some people jump their lines to say.. "10, 20, 25, 26" why not 30, 40? ...I want to know the depths of plotting lines, and images using drawto, just the whole kit and kaboodle! Is there any really good instructional videos, or books that you guys could recommend? Please let me know! Thanks. 

 

Sincerely, a 27 year old who prefers the classics over the new stuff. ❤️

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10 minutes ago, hatemeplease said:

why do some people jump their lines to say.. "10, 20, 25, 26" why not 30, 40?

Usually a program starts out 10,20,30, etc. then they have to add new line as the program gains complexity, if this

is Atari BASIC there is no line renumber facility, so that's how the program stays, some other later BASIC's have renumber available. 

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6 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:

Usually a program starts out 10,20,30, etc. then they have to add new line as the program gains complexity, if this

is Atari BASIC there is no line renumber facility, so that's how the program stays, some other later BASIC's have renumber available. 

Can you elaborate please on what you mean by "renumber facility"..sorry might be a dumb question but genuinely curious. Are you saying that in BASIC, it will generally be 10,20,30,40, and so on?

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33 minutes ago, hatemeplease said:

Are you saying that in BASIC, it will generally be 10,20,30,40, and so on?

No, it's up to you what you increment line numbers, but in general people use an increment of 10 for the reason I gave above.

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52 minutes ago, hatemeplease said:

Can you elaborate please on what you mean by "renumber facility"..sorry might be a dumb question but genuinely curious. Are you saying that in BASIC, it will generally be 10,20,30,40, and so on?

On some basics you could tell the editor to add X to every line number after Y, so like "add 10 to every line after 50" to free up line 60. You could, if you were really brave, just add 1 to the line number each line, but if you realized twords the end that you needed something between lines 12 and 13, well, your keyboard would be getting a workout.

Edited by LadyErrant
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40 minutes ago, LadyErrant said:

On some basics you could tell the editor to add X to every line number after Y, so like "add 10 to every line after 50" to free up line 60. You could, if you were really brave, just add 1 to the line number each line, but if you realized twords the end that you needed something between lines 12 and 13, well, your keyboard would be getting a workout.

I think I'm catching on. Can you give me an example of this?... so like x=??? and add that to every line? Sorry...this is all so new to me yet so interesting.

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Line numbers should have died with the Teletype, but oh well. Pascal certainly didn't need line numbers even in the 1970s, and even before the Apple ][, "smart" terminals that could support moving a cursor around the screen to edit anything anywhere were starting to become at least semi-affordable even to mere mortals outside of ivory mage towers,

 

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-true-history-of-vi

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3 hours ago, LadyErrant said:

This is absolutely what I do today. I have no nostalgia for the era of manually numbered lines.

I'll drop back to OG Atari BASIC for something quick and dirty or to prove a point, but if you're not partying like it's November 1979, the likes of FastBasic, Action!, PL65, maybe even Meta or Logo is the way to go if you don't absolutely positively need bare metal assembler

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If you're looking into programming sound and graphics there are lots of period books promising to introduce you to just that. Many of them have been scanned and are available for free online. E.g. Atari Sound & Graphics. Compute! Books are generally easy to read as well, they usually consist of a number of articles explaining various programming concepts and I think there are at least two of them. Look here.

 

De Re Atari is one of the classic texts explaining how the Atari works although it has less examples. For hardcore stuff try the Altirra Hardware Manual.

 

Playermissile.com has a lot of tutorials, Atari Wiki a lot of programming related assets.

 

Pinned threads in the 8-bit programming subform list more books and PC tools for programming.

 

Good Luck and have fun!

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I would love a book with the words of current and past bleeding edge DEMOscene, Game, and app coders explaining the methods use to get performance, sound, and graphics on the 8 bit machines. I would want a further section in that book getting information from the tools makers that those coders used to make it happen. This would bring us to the point where everyone could stand on the shoulders of the hard work that made it all happen. If they used this or that book, special tool, revelation, or previous person etc would be bonus.

This would include the whole group, graphist, artist, sound, composer, and programmers. Some of them could probably write books about the making of their series of works. I'd pay good money for those. You never know who will provide the keystone or nugget of information. What system, or code snippet, what compression or algorithms, what subsystems. Sometimes the key comes from an emulation expert too, very interesting.

I want to hear the journey of what was successful in getting them there, what they learned and from what. I think it would be three books at least, perhaps a fourth.

Getting there, Making, The nuts and bolts. Just for fun, a coding explosion!

Edited by _The Doctor__
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On 9/13/2024 at 7:31 AM, _The Doctor__ said:

I would love a book with the words of current and past bleeding edge DEMOscene, Game, and app coders explaining the methods use to get performance, sound, and graphics on the 8 bit machines. I would want a further section in that book getting information from the tools makers that those coders used to make it happen. This would bring us to the point where everyone could stand on the shoulders of the hard work that made it all happen. If they used this or that book, special tool, revelation, or previous person etc would be bonus.

This would include the whole group, graphist, artist, sound, composer, and programmers. Some of them could probably write books about the making of their series of works. I'd pay good money for those. You never know who will provide the keystone or nugget of information. What system, or code snippet, what compression or algorithms, what subsystems. Sometimes the key comes from an emulation expert too, very interesting.

I want to hear the journey of what was successful in getting them there, what they learned and from what. I think it would be three books at least, perhaps a fourth.

Getting there, Making, The nuts and bolts. Just for fun, a coding explosion!

Agreed!  It'd be especially useful to have a repository for code snippets / functions for different tricks of the trade, so it can be integrated into whatever software.

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