The!Cart Studio preview released

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Published: Thursday, 27 June 2013 00:00

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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

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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.