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It is not a typo. The book is called "Asembler 6502" because it is a Polish book. It is a complete remake of the same book from 1987, with two additional chapters about WUDSN IDE and illegal opcodes. Marcin Sochacki wrote an extra chapter about WUDSN IDE from the ABBUC. Thanks, Marcin; this is awesome for me. Mainly because in the 90ies, being a "Poland Game" was a true sign of quality - and now the Polish coders use my IDE. What more can you achieve in life?
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In December 2015, the ABBUC celebrated its 30th anniversary. A small team of club members invested countless hours into making all content, disks image, magazine issues, and special edition magazines of these 30 years available in a convenient and easy-to-consume form on DVD. It was released one year ago, in June 2016, and given as an annual special to all 450 club members.
I spent weeks debugging other people's code from 198x to make it work on modern configurations. You wouldn't believe that many programs only work because of pure luck. Well, people were new to the platform, and documentation was unavailable. So you POKEd around until you found a way that worked and released the program to the public. At one point, after months of work, the content management system of the main editor broke and took all the work to hell. After going through the valley of despair, we rebuilt it all from scratch so I could automatically generate an HTML menu that works on all host platforms. Ultimately the work resulted in improvements to Altirra's OS emulation and a German Quick Start Guide for Altirra.
You should change that if you are interested in the Atari 8-bit computer and the DVD and are not yet an ABBUC member. The annual membership fee is still 50 Deutsche Marks, as in 1985 when it all began. That's 36 EUR in today's currency. You get a double-sided 5¼-inch floppy disk with news and programs plus a full-color printed paper mag quarterly. In addition, there are special mags and annual specials and events. The disk and the paper mag are in German because that is the native language of most members (apart from ATARI BASIC, of course). Yet the ABBUC forums are open for English threads and posts, too.
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Almost four years have passed since my last VCS release, but finally, it is done. And today, my Silly Venture 2017 Invitro was released with the new Silly Venture website.
Both effects in this demo are four years old and were initially planned for Sillyventure 2k14. But back then, I didn't have any music, which ultimately kept me from coding for the VCS. Back then, no usable tracker existed, so getting a piece of music is not feasible in the foreseeable future. The sine scroller used almost the complete RAM, so it was clear it would be tough. In addition, kk and Kylearan created new stuff using k65, which is unbeatable in coding for bank switching modules. The latter is a nightmare; why must you do it manually?
During that period, Kylearan created TIA Tracker and changed the VCS world. Finally, musicians didn't have to be coders anymore. At Revision 2017, Flush released .bin with three outstanding tunes that Glafouk created using TIA Tracker. That was very motivating, esp. with Nick Montfort, Flush, and Kyleraran at the party place. Therefore, when Grey announced that there would be a Sillyventure in 2017, I decided to take the effects with my favorite tune, create this invitation, and finally release the stuff.
Read the full story and technical details here.
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This year's Revision Party was the event of the year for the meeting of VCS coders. Roughly 80% of the active VCS coders in the world were present. To give the proper context: In absolute numbers, we're talking about five people :-). And I had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet Nick Montfort, professor of digital media at MIT and one of the authors of Racing the Beam. That book triggered my interest in coding on the VCS by making it seem easy, which it is not. We gathered all the Atari VCS guys and were photobombed by the usual Atari ST fanboys. Here's the result.
So now I have my copy of the book signed by Nick. It's been great talking to you, Nick, and the other crazy people there. I hope to see some of you again at Sillyventure. Keep on racing!
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To my surprise, D-Fox approached me at Revision 2017 and had an Atari Mega ST for free from the former facility manager. As you can guess, I didn't say no, even though I am an 8-bit Atarian. I've spent quite some time taking it apart and properly cleaning it. Here's how it looked in my bathtub.
And this is the final result. I gave it to Biobern, and he's trying to make the Mega File RLL hard disk work. And we plan to release something small and Atari ST related at Revision 2018 to thank you, guys!