Easy math for bulb@

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Published: Monday, 18 March 2013 00:00

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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.

Site Update

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Published: Friday, 22 February 2013 00:00

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This week I attended a course about "Sematic web technologies" at the Open HPI university where I learned new things about RDFa and Microdata . So I tried enriching my site and ended up with one of the "One day I will..." improvement which have been planned for too long. The list of productions on the Atari 8-bit tab is now generated in PHP based on a simple CSV file. The resulting HTML contains all semantic information about the productions, so search engines can use it. See what the Google Webmaster Tools can get out of this now.

SillyPack 2k12 released

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Published: Thursday, 17 January 2013 00:00

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This pack contains a disk image in MyDos format with all Atari 8-bit releases of SillyVenture 2k12. The disk was originally compiled by PIN/TRISTESSE. I felt this is a good idea and SillyVenture deserves a good presentation, esp. the graphics and music releases for which no art pack/music disk exists. This is an updated version with a proper results viewer which also acts as a menu from where you can directly start all releases and read the readmes. The menu remains memory resident, so you don't have to load it again every time. This makes watching the graphics entries and listening to the music entries much more fun, esp. on the real machine. These are the controls for the menu:

• Pressing any key during loading the menu takes you to the DOS shell.
• Pressing RESET in the menu performs a cold start.
• Pressing RESET in while a release is running returns to menu, if possible.
• Further controls are displayed in the menu itself.

RGBA - 1st place and final version released

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Published: Monday, 24 December 2012 00:00

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RGBA yielded the 1st place in the Atari Intro Competition at SillyVenture. Though the party version was way tooooo long, the youtube video of RGBA got 1000 views in only one week! And in two late-night coding sessions I have now re-synced the whole thing. The result is the final version which has 4 times faster transitions, less text and much a better pace. The new version including the sources are available on the Atari 8-bit tab. And the best thing for me after all was finding this one. A true Atari guy stunned by the unexpected demo ending. It really made my day :-)