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Atari used to put things like “No disassembly of the code provided in this cartridge is permitted” in the back of their user manuals. I wonder if they could have made that stick ?

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Sorry Duke, I missed your post about messing with existing examples because it was on the previous page. Credit to you too then ?

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That very much fits in with Ed’s suggested approach of taking a working example of something ( A magazine listing  or a You Tube tutorial) and playing with it to see what happens. I thoroughly recommend it but it helps if you have an idea of what your playing should do before you start ?

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https://www.edx.org/course/css-basics

You may like to have a look at some of the courses on edX like the one above. They are free if you dont want a verified certificate.

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Its been years since I did this but when I first started writing machine code routines I had to compile them by hand as I didn’t have an assembler. I used the tables in the back of the book “Programming The 6502” by Rodney Zacks to look up the opcodes. The biggest pain was the different instruction addressing modes such as Absolute, Relative or indexed as they all had different opcodes. When I finally got hold of an assembler, branching or jumping to a label was sheer luxury !

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Sorry Cambridge Uni point to the chip.

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Well I suppose it could be possible if the BMC firmware was deliberately compromised during manufacture but no one has yet seen that happen. Bloomberg point to an extra serial memory chip found on some Supermicro boards but they dont actually say it had anything nasty on it.

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I would be inclined to ignore Bloomberg on this one as they made little attempt to say what this chip may be or what it may do. Some vague reference to network card firmware was as far as they went.

 

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I found a good use for GOTO to make an ELSE.

10 if A=1 then B=2:goto 30

20 B=1

30 dont do the goto if A isnt 1

 

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Two place’s because it holds the x and y position of the snakes tail ?

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And talking of Atari BASIC strings. I still cant find my snake program but the trick bit is A$=A$(2). It shifts the whole string left 2 places at near machine code speed.

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Oh yes page 6 ! 256 Bytes of memory you could  put your USR code in. Neither BASIC or the OS would touch it. I put my display list interupts there too.

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Well Atari asked Microsoft to wright a version of BASIC for them but they couldn’t make it fit on an 8k cartridge in time for the 1979 launch. So they went to the people who wrote Atari DOS. Open Systems Software i think. Atari were the second largest company in the US at the time so Microsoft didnt give up. You could buy Microsoft BASIC 1 and 2 later.

 

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I think i will post the Atari BASIC code for Snake if I can find it. It has comments so see if you can pick the logic out of it ?

Old style BASIC but I know it like the back of my hand so I still use it to prototype my ideas.

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Yep is more or less the way things work but if you use a goto some perfectionist idealist will tell you off ?

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Nothing I can see to fault it on. Hope Mum enjoys it for years to come ?

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Do you have any programming experience Tippon ? Anything will do but if you don’t you should get to grips with Variables, Loops and conditional branches like the If then do stuff. You can’t write an app without them.

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I was torn between a memory upgrade or a larger SSD about 4 months ago. Glad I went with the memory now ?

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I am still learning how to write my first Windows game in C++. I know enough C for the program logic but I still mess up when it comes to making Windows User and GDI calls to setup and write to a window.

The game is going to be a version of snake. I already wrote the game in Atari BASIC some years ago and it uses a string as a shift register to keep track of the tail so the end of it can be deleted as the snake moves forward. I can use an int array in C to do the same thing.

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I considered that LG TV a few months ago but I ended up buying the Samsung 49MU6400 mostly because my narrow TV table needs the stand to be in the middle. The two TV’s seem much the same apart from that and I am very happy with mine. There have been 3 software feature updates since I got the telly with the last one two weeks ago giving me an improved picture in picture EPG. I have also got used to talking to the smart remote, very startrek ?

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