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I had a good time at this year's Fujiama Party again and could present WUDSN IDE to many people. All of them are now happy "customers" with an environment where they can easily play around with assemblers. When I installed the previous version of the IDE, I found a bug in recent versions of Eclipse due to an incompatible change in the "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 that 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 to create the file. This simplifies the 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
- Screenshots and descriptions have been updated to reflect the latest version.
FAQ
- The question "How do I compile into ROM images?" was added.
- The question "How do I compile into disk images?" was added.
- The question "How to run a makefile script instead of an emulator?" was updated.
Site
- Section "Further information on assembler programming" was 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.
- The graphics editor now correctly closes the 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, 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 if the segment length exceeds the file length (by one).
- Disk images (for Apple II) are now updated 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>
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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 their project files to improve the quality of the CRC database without sending actual ROM files.
- Visualization of banks now shows banks of the duplicate entries as "continuous" blocks.
- The 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 are now accepted in titles ("[","]",":" etc.).
- Headers of DD & 16 MB ATRs contain the correct size information now.
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In October, a 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 Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It has English and German localization. The first download and documentation of the preview version are available here. The sources are available here. All feedback is welcome!
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Since bulb@ had some trouble understanding my comments on Ye Olde Plasma and seems new to the Atari scene (and 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 segment 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 an additional prefix, adding a total of 6 bytes to the minimum file length. Though this header is larger than the 2-byte C64 header, it is still much smaller than the header of, for example, the Atari ST executable format. Therefore, compo rules of Atari-related parties like Forever consider the title and refer to the file size, as this is done on most other platforms. This means this nice intro does not fit into the 256-byte category on Atari 8-bit. So bulb@ selected the wrong category, but hey, that happens. Instead of starting to bash him, I contacted the coder, Dimitry, who sent some respect for cross-platform coding and gave some tips on how to make this better and smaller. I like the scene, the competition and exchanging ideas with fabulous people. I wouldn't say I like trolls, though.
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This week, I attended a "Sematic web technologies" course 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..." improvements 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.