Game development tools

[gtkakega]

Greetings all, surfing the net and seeing the Atari 8-bit community still thriving has rekindled my interest in my trusty Atari 800XL. My goal is to get back into Atari 8-bit game development. I haven’t coded in assembly language using MAC/65 for over 10 years, but it should all come back to me. I noticed some nifty hardware upgrades and cross-platform development tools are now available. I already purchased an SIO2PC interface and MyIDE cartridge to make things easier. No more relying on floppies. ATASM and XASM seem to be the choice for assemblers. I used Envision extensively on my Atari so it’s great to have EnvisionPC for building game fonts and tile maps. Graph2Fnt seems to be an excellent graphics tool also. And Atari800Win Plus is such an awesome emulator. Right now I’m looking for documentation and source code for a game sprite engine w/ scrolling. The game title Cavernia is an excellent example of the use of Antic mode 4 sprites and scrolling. I’m a fan of scrolling adventure type platform games. Any programming info would be appreciated. BTW, I’ve read the SMB thread and seen the demo. I agree it takes a lot of work to develop these type of games. Ghostly Goblins was my first and only attempt at it over 10 years ago – it was a playable demo using p/m graphics. This time around, I would rather have a core graphics engine in place w/ supporting tools than start from scratch.

[Heaven/TQA]

everybody new on board is welcome... my choice of setup:

 

- crimson text editor with XASM config file

- XASM 3.0 but Mad Assembler is quite powerful as well (MADS)

- XBOOT for turning .EXE files to .ATR for quick debugging

- Atari800win 4.0 inkl. debugger

- Charpad 1.0 (C64) for map + font editor, but envision could be the new choice

- RMT / TMC / MPT for music

- G2F for native gfx

- Photoshop-like programs on PC for converting gfx

- Turbo Basic XL for doing my own quick tools