Site Relaunch

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Published: Thursday, 17 April 2014 00:00

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After 4 weeks of hard work, the complete site is now up an running on Joomla. With a new and better content structure, faster loading, mobile compatible UI and built-in search I hope you will finally find your way to retro-coding in a visually appealing and understandble way. Thanks to Sven from the ABBUC for convincing me that a CMS is the best way to got and to Steffen for helping me in getting this up and running technically. All previous content including all news from the vers beginning have been transferred. So if you find anything that's missing or broken links, please contact me.

SillyPack 2k13 released

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Published: Sunday, 16 March 2014 00:00

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This pack contains a disk image in MyDos format with all Atari 8-bit releases of SillyVenture 2k13. 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.

Programming the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (Live)

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Published: Tuesday, 11 February 2014 00:00

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At the end of January I delivered a 35 minutes presentation about the Atari Video Computer System (VCS, Stella, 2600), its history and architecture and how to code for it using WUDSN IDE. Especially the live coding part was very appreciated by the audience. Changing a single line of code and seeing immediately what happens brings you as close a possible to the machine. The recording of the presentation is now available on my youtube channel. The slides (PDF) and the sources can be downloaded from here. I recommend you open the slides in parallel, so you can read the content and code correctly. Thanks to Julien for the event and SvOlli for the slide templates.

New zero installation distribution of WUDSN IDE for 32-bit

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Published: Wednesday, 05 February 2014 00:00

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I've received requests to also provide a 32-bit version of the zero installation distribution. And after figuring out how I can do that without doing everything twice, it's ready for download: wudsn-ide-win32.zip. I have no real 32-bit hardware to test it, so please provide feedback. Thanks also to Timothy, Kevin and Fredrick for the feedback and using WUDSN IDE on Mac OS X. I have extended to FAQs accordingly. 

New FAQs:

• Why is the "Assembler" section not visible in the preferences? 
  If the WUDSN IDE specific sections and features are not visible after a successful installation, you are probably using an outdated Java version. This seems to be a common problem on Mac OS X. Make sure you have Java 1.7 installed and that Eclipse is started using that version. Java 1.6 is out of maintenance since 2013/02 .
• Why do I get "Unable to read repository at ... Read timed out" when accessing the update site? 
  This error message indicates the the Eclipse program is somehow blocked from accessing the site. If you are behind a proxy server, check the general proxy server setttings in the Eclipse preferences. If you use a firewall or internet security tool, make sure "Eclipse.exe", "java.exe", "javaw.exe" or the corresponding program on your host platform are allowed to cannot to the internet. Maybe you have to change the settings, so you are prompted to allow access interactively