From: Clay Halliwell <clay.h@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> BTW... "BAStella"? Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic tella? Hrmm.
Beginner Accessible Stella?
> As far as the syntax, I've been doing a lot of Javscript lately, so the
> VB-style syntax looks horribly clunky to me. I'd be thrilled with stuff
> like:
>
> new bitmap tankMaze = {yadda yadda yadda};
> screen.create(NTSC, lineheight, style);
> screen.foreground = 126;
> screen.bitmap = tankMaze;
> sprite.p0.setXY(10, 100);
> sprite.p1.setXY(100, 100);
>
> Maybe call it StellaScript. :-)
ACK! It's the PERIOD, man! How many languages looked like
that in 1982??? Even QuickBASIC (whence Visual Basic gets
its look) is stretching the versimilitude a bit. And I'll be annihilating
the versimilitude with RAM usage, but what the hey.
Tell you what, it will be open source so once I get it working you
can rearrange the syntax however you like ;-)
> Anyway, here's a practical suggestion-- add some predefined color
constants.
> RED, BLUE, YELLOW, WHITE... that sort of thing. Also, a Color(chr, lum)
> command would be handy.
Yeah, a lot of I/O could be smoothed, but my idea was not to
_entirely_ insulate the 7337 H4XOR2 L00Z3R from the realities
of the Stella environment. Thus, all the VCS.H registers that
aren't virtualized look the same to BAStella that they do to us.
I mean, the idea of a tool like BAStella is to attract people to
Stella and interest them in learning the *real* techniques without
making them count cycles yadda yadda yadda before they can
make it bounce a ball around the screen. If they already know
how to make the sounds and colors go, they can concentrate
on learning kernal construction.
And I *did* fix the Playfield, OK?
--Roger Williams
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