Atari Childhood Memories

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Published: Wednesday, 09 October 2013 00:00

Hits: 1374

After a long struggle with hardware, codecs and recording & editing software I finally managed to have a system setup where recording videos is as easy as I always wanted to have it. So I decided to finally start the tutorial series on Programming the Atari XL/XE that I had always planned.

This tutorial series complements the general tutorial series on using WUDSN IDE itself with the knowledge to the Atari XL/XE computer itself. The purpose of the tutorial is to show interested people how easy it is to control text screen, character set, colors graphics screen and sound with just a few lines of code. Starting is very easy.

The tutorial series consists of short (5-10 minutes) videos. In each video I develop and explain the code live to show you the evolution of the source and the immediate result on the Atari. 7 videos of the about 12 planned videos are now available. You can ask questions and post seed feedback via this thread on AtariAge, youtube comments or e-mail. Once I'm though with the basic stuff, I'll create individual videos for the topics you ask for.

The following videos are now available on the youtube playlist:

WUDSN IDE update 1.6.4 released

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Published: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 00:00

Hits: 1996

I've' had a good time at this year's Fujiama Party again and had the possibility to present WUDSN IDE to a lot of people. All of the are now happy "customers" with an environment where they can play around with assembler so easily. When I installed the previous version of the IDE, I found a bug in recent versions of Eclipse which is due to an incompatible change "plugin.xml" file handling. The bug causes the toolbar button to be invisible and locks up the "Customize Perspective" dialog. Therefore I decided to release a new version which contains all the fixes and round offs I have implemented in the past 12 months.

Editor

• Auto completion for ".PROC" now adds "RTS" before ".ENDP" in MADS
• Auto completion for ".LOCAL" now adds ".ENDL" in MADS
• Clicking on the link to a non existent file now asks for creating the file. This simplifies creation of includes during refactoring.
  

Assemblers

• Error message assignment to include files now normalizes the file separator before comparison, making it more robust in case of compiler bugs (e.g. MADS 1.9.4)

Emulators

• Virtual ][ emulator added for Apple ][

Installation

• Screen shots and descriptions updated to reflect the lasted version

FAQ

• How do I compile into ROM images? added
• How do I compile into disk images? added
• How to run a makefile script instead of an emulator? updated

Site

• Section "Further information on assembler programming" added to the installation section of the IDE. The new section contains links to readily formatted source code includes and examples.

Fixes

• The toolbar icons now work correctly with newer Eclipse versions
• Atari 8-bit Graphics 12 Converter works again
• Graphics editor now properly closes input stream for image files
• Empty selection and too large numbers no longer lead to exceptions when opening the context menu for "Convert..."
• Pressing refresh in the graphics converter now always updates the image pane correctly and not only if the size has changed
• Inline repeats like ":64" in MADS are no longer detected as labels
• Hex Editor now correctly detects erroneous COM files in case the segment length exceeds the file length (by one)
• Disk images (for Apple II) are now updated also if only "Compile" instead of "Compile and Run" is used
• Apple Commander integration is now part of the installation, as it should have been with 1.6.3
• The HELLO program generated for the auto-start disk images of Apple II now displays a title and uses "BLOAD/CALL" instead of "BRUN" because of this bug in Apple DOS

  10 PRINT "Loading <title>" : PRINT CHR$(4);"BRUN WORLD" : CALL <address>

The!Cart Studio update released

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Published: Friday, 05 July 2013 00:00

Hits: 1594

Features:

• Automatic detection of 738 titles and 693 content types based on Krotki's list added.
• CRC-32 values are now saved with the project file. This way people can share/post the their project files to improve the quality of the CRC database without sending real ROM files.
• Visualization of banks now shows banks of the same entry as "continuous" blocks.
• Command line interface is now working:
  java -jar TheCartStudio.jar -new -assignNewBanks -addEntries:ROMs\AtariOnline\Airball.car -addEntries:ROMs\AtariOnline-Renamed\*.car -saveAs:example.tcw

Fixes:

• Additional characters accepted in titles ("[","]",":" etc.)
• Headers of DD & 16 MB ATRs contain correct size information now

The!Cart Studio preview released

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Published: Thursday, 27 June 2013 00:00

Hits: 1491

In October a brand new flexible Atari 8-bit cartridge named The!Cart will be released as part of the ABBUC Hardware Contest. I support the project with the software to create cartridge images of up to 128 MB. The software named The!Cart Studio is based on the ideas of the Maxflash Cartridge Studio and adds additional features like support for up to 16384 entries, import of ".CAR" cartridge files, incremental flashing and a menu with a Google like search. It is written in pure Java and runs fine on Window, Linux and Mac OS X. It comes with English and German localization. The first download and documentation of the preview version are available here. The sources are available here here. All feedback is welcome!