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I just finished reading the Hints & Tips for Video Game Pioneers book by Andres Hewson and Rob Hewson of the former Hewson Consultants. The book is very well-written and entertaining. It brings back the memories of when it all started on our beloved 8-bit machines. With all the background information and quotes, and interviews of many different people involved, it provides excellent insights. Many of the mentioned games I've not even heard of before. I recommend you buy and read it; it is worth the money.
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The "AtariSIO tools" are a set of command line tools to handle "ATR" and "COM/XEX" files. Mathias Reichel created them, and they are available on his website http://www.horus.com/~hias/atari. Since I am now familiar with Git and Git Hub and own an Intel & Apple Silicon macOS machine and a Linux VM, I've created binary builds and uploaded them to the WUDSN Tools Git Hub repo for your convenience.
Source: https://github.com/HiassofT/AtariSIO
Binaries: https://github.com/wudsn/wudsn-ide-tools/tree/main/ATR/AtariSIO/tools
- adir displays the directory of an ATR disk image.
- ataricom shows the details of an Atari COM/XEX file.
- dir2atr creates an ATR disk image from a folder of files.
The binary versions have been compiled by
- Peter Dell (linux-86-64, macos-aarch64, macos-x86-64, windows-x86-64)
- Sanny from AtariAge (macos-ppc).
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R.I.K. organized another edition of H.A.T.Z., and I had the luck of being there for full three days. On day one, I checked all the Atari computers I had brought. Then Roland Wassenberg and I reconstructed the type-in assembly game "Gunfight". Lots of fun with the assembly source not matching, and the assembly listing is even different from the printed memory dump. I think the author didn't use the assembler described in the book. On day two, I created a new version of "The!Cart Studio" with several fixes since the last stable release in 2020. I also managed to add support for the latest Boot Manager version from 2022, which has been used by all Homesoft disk compilations recently. The rest of the day, I coded in Mad Pascal and Mad Assembler to get the graphics and colors rights in a "soon" to-be-released game by R.A.F. On day three, I made "The!Cart Studio" work again with Java 8 so existing users can use it without problems. Thanks to Tron04 for the quick feedback and testing. Then I created a small tool in HTML and Javascript to convert texts for Mad Assembler. With this, I'll be able to improve the built-in help texts of MADS. Ultimately I spent the rest of the day enjoying the never-ending thrill of using tape drives. It is unbelievable what can go wrong - EVERYTHING!
Nevertheless, it was a great time with lots of fun. On day four, Tigerduck and I played a few rounds of Robix (by Raster) and Scorch (by Pirx and the team). And ultimately, with the support from the guys from Pigwa, my video tutorials are now all also available there for download - just in case youtube goes down one day :-)
Thanks to everybody who participated; this was a lot of fun. See you at Fujiama!
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With almost 40 years of experience in computers and writing software, I believe architecture should follow common sense and reality. This is frequently contrasted by "this is the one-serves-all solution" hypes and buzzwords created by youngsters or marketing people. I recommend reading the following two articles to both groups of people.
- Amazon: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% (PDF) online.
- David Heinemeier Hansso: Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices (PDF) online.
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On March 11, 2023, Andreas Gustafsson, aka. Shadow (Sdw) died unexpectedly in an accident.
I was returning from Midwinter Meeting when the news reached me. Two weeks before, I had sent him my appreciation for the beautiful latest Atari VCS release he had created with Mermaid. Andreas was an outstanding demoscener in many regards. Not only he made over 130 demos - each of them was a gem and some even milestones. He had the unique passion and ability to create demos on everything that consumed electricity and that could be programmed. His skills were not only in the area of coding but also in the area of design. He always impressed me with the color schemes he used and with the brilliant ideas to overcome the limitations of every piece of hardware. His work was a source of inspiration for many of us and me personally. Some of my best demos were humble attempts to adapt his ideas.
He was always kind and helpful to many of us, and I am happy that I could help him a few times when the chips in the Atari didn't want to obey his commands. I owe him many cheerful moments in my life. We've lost one of the best, and I am deeply saddened that I have to write these lines. If you want to express something, you can write in his obituary.
You can find the list of his releases on these websites, and I'm pretty sure none of them covers all of what he did. The screenshot below needs no further explanation.