WUDSN IDE update 1.6.4 released

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Published: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 00:00

Hits: 1867

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

Details

Published: Friday, 05 July 2013 00:00

Hits: 1512

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: 1404

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!

Easy math for bulb@

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Published: Monday, 18 March 2013 00:00

Hits: 1396

Since bulb@ had some trouble understanding my comments on Ye Olde Plasma and seems to be new to the Atari scene (and actually also to the rest of the scene if not even the whole world) I decided to follow his suggestion and add a little guide here. The Atari Composite file format is a segments file format originating from Atari DOS 2.5. Each segment consists of the start address and the (inclusive end address). The first segment requires $ffff as additional prefix, adding a total of 6 bytes to the file length a minimum file. Though this header is larger than the 2 byte C64 header it is still much smaller than the header of for example Atari ST executable format. Therefore compo rules of Atari related parties like Forever take the header into account and refer to the file size, like this is done on most other platforms. This means that this actually quite nice intro does not fit in to the 256 bytes category on Atari 8-bit. So bulb@ selected the wrong category, but hey that happens. And instead of starting to bash him, I contacted the coder Dimitry instead, sent some respect for cross platform coding and gave some tips on how to even make this better and smaller. I like the scene, competition and exchanging ideas with cool people. I actually don't like trolls, though.