Programming the Atari XL/XE - Part 7 and 8 released

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Published: Tuesday, 08 July 2014 00:00

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The next two parts of the tutorial series on Programming the Atari XL/XE are now available.

WUDSN IDE update 1.6.6 released

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Published: Wednesday, 11 June 2014 00:00

Hits: 3481

A new version of the IDE is available via the update site and as zero installation download. When I started recording the 7th part for the Programming the Atari XL/XE video tutorial I found that the graphics editor and hex editor are not as usable as they should be. So I decided to implement some improvements and fixes first. At the same time quite a number of Mac OS X users reported issues with installing Java 1.7 on their machines, making it difficult for them to use WUDSN IDE. Hence I invested quite some time in reworking the code, so it runs properly also with "good old" Java 1.6. 

General:

• This version can run with Java 1.6 (JRE/JDK), so also a vanilla OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), Lion (10.7), Mountain Lion (10.8) and  Mavericks (10.9) can run it out of the box.
• Improved handling of relative file paths in source and binary includes.
• Zero installation download now uses Eclipse 4.3.2. You can of course keep on using Eclipse 4.3.1 in case you already have it installed.

Graphics Editor:

• All buttons now have icons with tooltips.
• Enabling of input fields and change detection is consistent now.
• Typing into any file path of text field updates the dirty indicator immediately, so you see if there are unsaved changes.
• Toggling the "Shrink" and "Zoom" buttons updates image size correctly now.
• Line numbers have been added in the script editor.
• The line with the cursor is highlighted in the script editor.
• New default converter scripts for converting character sets have been added.
• Error messages in case of script errors have been improved and the cursor is positioned to the error location in the source.

Hex Editor:

• Performance when opening a file with the Hex Editor improved by a factor of 10 to 20. Now a file with 1 MB is opened in far less than 1 second.
• Allowed maximum file size has been increased to 8 MB.
• ATR files with 256 bytes boot sectors are now handled correctly because they are rather common even though they violate the ATR specification
• ATR files created from single Atari COM files, so called "k-files", are now detected automatically. For them not only the sectors of the ATR are displayed, but also the segments of the contained Atari COM file are displayed in the outline and the editor.
• C64-PRG files are now detected automatically.

Site Update

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Published: Wednesday, 14 May 2014 00:00

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• Compilers download archive updated with new versions and more host platforms
  • ATASM 1.07 recompiled  for Linux (32 & 64 bit) and Mac OS X (Intel & PPC)
  • DASM 2.20.11 recompiled for Linux (32 & 64 bit) and Mac OS X (Intel & PPC)
  • MADS 1.9.8 compiled for Windows, Linux (32 & 64 bit) and Mac OS X (Intel & PPC)
  • KickAss 3.34 included
• Zero-distribution installation updated
  • Download for Windows 32-bit now contains Vice for 32-bit and not for 64-bit
  • Source code examples and latested compilers for the Programming the Atari XL/XE video tutorials are now included
• Two new videos have been added to the video tutorials for the Programming the Atari XL/XE 
  • System Characters Sets
  • Modified Character Sets
• New page for my VCS demo ISO added with some information in how the logo was created in "just" 6 weeks
• New page Tutorials added where I decsribe how you can easily create good video tutorials using free software
• Remaining broken links in the articles should now be fixed

New video tutorial series: Programming the Atari XL/XE

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Published: Sunday, 11 May 2014 00:00

Hits: 2108

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: