Subject: [stella] on Batari BASIC From: Kirk Israel <kirkjerk@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 11:22:32 -0400 |
So the other day in about a night I used Batari BASIC to code up a simple idea I had for a "drumpad" program: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=72428&view=findpost&p=894817 Unfortunately, the sound lag in most emulators means it's not very fun when not on the real 2600 hardware. But the ease of doing that floored me; it would have taken me at least a week to get my 6502 chops back and code this, maybe longer, and maybe I never would have gotten the energy for it. (I know some people here eat drink and breath in assembly, but I've never gotten quite fluent.) Theoretically, it should just be the "generic kernal" that's making life so much easier, but in practice, the BASIC-like syntax is much easier for the non-native-6502 speaker. Writing JoustPong I was always having to carefully reformulate every math comparison and what not. (Actually, if I wanted to code just in 6502, writing it in BASIC and examing the generated .asm file would be a big hand, everything still maps pretty closely between BASIC statement and generated 6502.) It's interesting playing "what if" -- if this had been out in 2002 or so. Porting JoustPong using it would be a no brainer. And I would probably still think of myself as a "2600 coder", even though I would have worked so much less hard to get there. The previous barrier to learning how to code an Atari game really made it kind of elite thing, (even though I tried to lower it a bit with my 2600 101 tutorial) and that's shifted somewhat. It seems to be splitting hairs to say "I programmed a game for the 2600 in Assembly Language" vs "I programmed a game for the 2600" even though the former is a big achievement in a way the latter isn't. You used to have to gain this expertise in archaic things to make a game that could run on the real hardware...now the particulars of that pursuit seem a bit quaint and oddball, since there's a much better effort/reward ratio to just doing it in "BASIC". So right now the single kernal is pretty limiting, though Quimby's idea of making a 32*12 playfield mapped to memory opens up some gaming ideas. As the language matures, and more kernals are made for it...games probably won't be at the top tier, but still. Heh, one downside is learning how to do simple game logic in ASM was probably a useful ramp up to actually writing kernals...the learning curve between BASIC and kernals is a quantum leap, relative to game logic and kernals. Anyway, I wonder what you all think of this. An upcoming flood of small, simple homebrews makes me feel different about what I've achieved I think. -Kirk Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://stella.biglist.com
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