The!RamDisk released

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Published: Saturday, 18 May 2019 00:00

Hits: 1623

Besides its 128 MB of Flash ROM, The!Cart has a built-in 512 KB RAM chip. This chip was required because the physical bank size of the Flash chip is 64 KB, i.e. only full 64 KB blocks can be erased. So without the built-in RAM, a standard Atari 48 KB or 64 KB computer would not have able to update The!Cart. Using the built-in RAM of The!Cart for other purpose has always been somewhere on the very long todo list, but time did not allow me to pursue that aim.

Luckily, in 2019, my fellow Atarian Holger Janz received his The!Cart and found the idea of writing a RAM disk driver for it encouraging. He likes to use the real hardware and real programming cartridges, and we all know that having a RAM disk there is a very useful thing. He first went into the details of DOS 2.5 and existing RAM disk implementation for it and after some weeks he released it to the public. Support for other DOS versions is planned.

The video below shows how The!RamDisk can be used. The detailed documentation of The!RamDisk including ready-to-use disk images, source code, and test programs are available at https://github.com/HolgerJanz. You can follow the development, ask questions and give feedback via the A.B.B.U.C. thread (German) or the AtariAge thread (English).

WUDSN IDE update 1.7.0 released

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Published: Tuesday, 01 January 2019 00:00

Hits: 3563

After 4 years, a new major version of the IDE is available via the update site as a zero installation download. It includes the following improvements:

Daily build

• Besides the last stable version of the IDE, which is always available via the update site "https://www.wudsn.com/update", a beta version of the next version is now always available via the update site "https://www.wudsn.com/update/daily". It includes the current state of development and allows for testing new features and fixes for users who are interested in them while keeping the stable version untouched.
• See section Releases for the complete overview of update sites.

New source code annotations:

• For most use-cases, the defaults provided for the compilers and in the preferences are sufficient. But if you want to develop in parallel in multiple projects, for different platforms (Apple II and Atari 8-bit) or in different output formats (".XEX" and ".BIN") with the same compiler it may become cumbersome to change the preferences every time. Therefore WUDSN IDE offers annotations which you can put into the source code files. These annotations override the defaults and the preferences.
• @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfoldermode
  • Overrides the "Output Folder Mode" from the preferences.
  • Allowed values are "SOURCE_FOLDER", "TEMP_FOLDER", "FIXED_FOLDER".
  • This annotation is only relevant to the main source file.
  • Example: @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfoldermode=SOURCE_FOLDER
• @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfolder
  • Overrides the "Output Folder" from the preferences and the "@com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfoldermode" annotation.
  • Allowed values are file paths relative to the folder of the main source file and absolute file paths.
  • This annotation is only relevant to the main source file.
  • Example: @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfolder=..\out
• @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfileextension
  • Overrides the "Output File Extension" from the preferences.
  • Allowed values have to start with a period.
  • This annotation is only relevant to the main source file.
  • Example: @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfileextension=.bin
• @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfile
  • Overrides the "Output Folder", "Output File Extension" from the preferences and the automatic computation of the out file name based on the main source file name.
  • Allowed values are file paths relative to the folder of the main source file and absolute file paths.
  • This annotation is only relevant to the main source file.
  • Example: @com.wudsn.ide.asm.outputfile=..\out\output.bin

Editor:

• When you press "Compile" or "Compile and Run", the changes of all open editors are saved automatically before the compilation step. This ensures that all your changes are visible to the compiler, especially when working with include files.
• Hyperlink navigation is now available also via the context menu and the standard key binding to the function key "F3". If there are multiple matching targets, the first will be used automatically.
  
  

Breakpoints:

• The "Go to File" context menu entry, toolbar entry and the double click on the "Breakpoints" view now navigates to the corresponding source file location. If required, the file is opened for this.
• By activating the "Breakpoints" command group in the "Customize Perspective" menu, you can make the standard keyboard shortcut "Ctrl-Shift-B" available for toggling line breakpoints plus as the "Skip All Breakpoints" toolbar button.
  
  

DASM:

• The default parameters of DASM have been extended with "-s${outputFilePathWithoutExtension}.sym" to generate a symbols file with a name that is automatically loaded by Stella 4.0 and later. The list file generated with "-l${outputFilePathWithoutExtension}.lst" is also loaded automatically.
• Due to a small bug in Stella, auto-loading the symbols and list file will not work if the ROM image is binary identical to a ROM in the known ROMs database. In this case, you have to load the symbols manually. The bug has been reported to the Stella team.
  

Symbols View:

• New view "Symbols" that displays all symbols and their effective values from the last compile run has been added. The view can be visible via "Window / Show View / Other / Debug / Symbols".
• The result in the view can be filtered. The filter can consist of one or more sub-strings. The filter applies to the name, the hexadecimal value, the decimal value and the text value of the symbol.
• The ".lbl" symbols file which was previously automatically generated by the IDE in "XASM 3.0.1" format is now no longer generated. It's only use-case was using Atari800Win with ATASM/MADS. Maybe the feature will be added again in future in a more general way, so it works specifically for each emulator.
  
  

Preferences

• Performing multiple changes to the syntax highlighting and the compiler settings in the "Assembler" preferences panes now only causes a single redraw of the open editors instead of one redraw per change.
• Changes to the "General / Appearance / Colors and Fonts" settings do now take effect in all open editors immediately.
• The values maintained in the "Assembler" preferences panes can now be exported from a workspace into a file and be re-imported in another workspace.
  
  

Hex-Editor:

• New context menu entry "Copy as Decimal Values in Block Format" added to copy the selection in a way that all digit use 3 characters and commas are aligned vertically. This is useful when structured content is copied and later edited in block mode.
• New context menu entry "Save Selection As..." added to save larger chunks of a file into a new file. This can be used for example to extract one or more segments of an Atari COM-File.
  
  
• New content types "Atari MADS File" and "Atari SpartaDos X File" are now recognized and the hex editor displays the structure and content of these content type specifically.
  
  

Sound Editor

• Atari 8-bit sound files and C64 sound files can now be opened and played directly within WUDSN IDE thanks to the excellent ASAP by Piotr Fusik (fox) and JSIDPLAY2 by Ken Händel (kenchis).
• Supported file extensions and file formats are currently "sap, cmc, cm3, cmr, cms, dmc, dlt, mpt, mpd, rmt, tmc, tm2, tm8" for Atari 8-bit and "sid" for C64.
• The binary song data can be saved together with a replayer into a file for use in your programs.
  
  

Graphics Editor

• New file category "Apple II Graphics" added.
• New converter for monochrome "HGR" images added for both directions.

Online Help:

• New section "Releases" added which contains the overview of all previous releases of WUDSN IDE. It also lists the required minimum Java and Eclipse version plus the link to the release news article and release news video where available.
• Compilers can now have different help files for different languages. MADS, for example, has "mads.html" in Polish and "mads-en.html" in English. The "Compiler Help" menu and the online help automatically determine the best fitting help file for the current locale.
• Error messages related to the online help are now more explicit, for example in case the compiler executable path is not set or the help file is missing.
• New online help section "CPUs" which lists the opcodes on every supported CPU type. For every compiler, the mnemonic and the supported addressing modes are also displayed. This is particularly helpful when converting sources with illegal opcodes or 65816 opcodes between compilers, because their names may differ.
• Better visualization of all tables, especially the border of tables, rows, and cells.
• FAQ extended with "Why do CTRL-SHIFT-0/9 and other key combinations not work?"
• FAQ extended with "Why is editing sometimes slow or even everything is blocked showing the wait cursor?

Fixes:

• For compilers that have case-insensitive identifiers, the hyperlink navigation for symbols now also works if the source and target are different with respect to lower case and upper case.
• Folding in the source code now collapses the sections to a single line instead of two and works correctly also for the last line in the source even if there is no final line break.
• Using file names in source code includes with different upper/lowercase than the actual file system now results in an error message. This ensures that compiler messages can be mapped to the correct include file.
• Using file names with spaces is now supported in the generated Altirra ".atdbg" files. The file path in breakpoints is now quoted as "`Example with Space.asm:123`".
• XASM labels and symbols are now parsed correctly. Also warning messages and return codes of the compiler and converted correctly now.
• Hex-Editor now correctly starts with the first byte of a selection and not with the last byte of the previous section, in case the section is selected completely.
• Opening a file without file extension in the graphics editor now no longer causes an exception.
• ACME and TASS now have "65C02" also listed in the dropdown for the CPU/instruction set.
• ASM6 and ACME download links adapted to new locations
• MADS editor now supports ".ifdef" and ".ifndef"
• Online displays plain text help files for ACME (resolve files in docs folder) and TASS (newlines converted to CR-LF) correctly now. 
• Graphics conversion script for CharSet1x1MultiColorConverter works correctly now. Thanks to General Lee Inept for the fix.

WUDSN IDE now on GitHub

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Published: Sunday, 30 December 2018 22:00

Hits: 2650

WUDSN IDE has always been open source, but the source has only been included in the plugins itself. Keeping backups manually, keeping track of the changes and building releases are cumbersome for me and part of the reason why updates have been rare. Now I have invested a lot of time to provide a daily build to iterate faster. And finally, I have climbed the hills of Git in Eclipse, GitHub and TLS 1.2 to make the source available to the public in a reasonable way. From today on, the source code is available on GitHub via https://github.com/peterdell/wudsn-ide.

Consequently, the source code will be removed from the future feature builds. This will make the plugin installation even smaller.

Silly Venture 2k17 Invitro revisited

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Published: Friday, 14 September 2018 00:00

Hits: 1729

It always very rewarding to see people who like the result of the hard and completely useless demo coding for obsolete machines. So here's nice video from a Polish guy I don't even know.

"In June 2017 this demo appeared. It is an advertisment for the Silly Venture 2017 party. This demo (or call it invitro) was written by JAC!, Glafouk did music for this demo. It's a 16kb production and it's already loaded here on EPROM. I will keep myself silent 'coz I don't want to make noise. The most important thing is what will happen on the screen in a moment. I hope you will enjoy it. ... .. do, what, how did you like the demo? I am thrilled, call it intro, invitro, Whatever, I am just thrilled. Amazing cooperation of coders, those pals are truly amazing.

Thanks man for these encouraging words! I' consider them a kick in my a... to get my Silly Venture 2018 done and check my hotel bookings asap :-)