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1. Conclusion Should be made Public Domain The next game is Bubbie zone In this game you have to save the Earth by shooting as many bubbles as possible in the playfield with your MK42 tank Sometimes you find Warp tokens and when you have collected enough of these you can go to the next level Some bubbles change into various bonusses When you get a bonus you receive for example extra energy extra shield etc ete The graphics of the game look reasonable The characters are big and clear The animation however is not very Smooth The bubbles are changing their size very jerkily and it s the same uith the movement especially the contro of the tank it is very bad The control is always too late and when you change direction you always drive forward Just like Arena there s almost no sound Just like the other games 1 am not very impressed about this one This is not a game which can be sold commercially As Arena Bubble zone js a compiled turbo basic game Summary Bubble Zone Publisher Richard Core Sold at DOS amp KE Soft Price 5 or OM 19 80 Graphics 4 Sound 2 Playability 2 Value for money 3 Over all sq Conclusion Should be made Public Domain And now the last game You probably think not another bad 29 game Sadiy 1 have to disappoint you The last game Alien Blast is not a bad game no when you see this game you will want to cry The story Basic version of Space Invaders Yo
2. and in this case I must agree with them Although I am a big fan of Sega s 5tar Trek arcade game th s home version does not live up to the promise of its big brother Game play fs gratifyingly fast as you blast Klingons and dock with starbase avoid asteroids and engage in a stellar dogfight with the killer space probe Nomad Trek Fans will recall that Nomad originally menaced the Empire in The Changeling episode But the home simulator is much too easy to master I was able to rack up well over 200 006 points the second Once a puzzle file is selected the game begins you ll be told Uho is first up The screen then changes to shou the blank letters and their headings which must be guessed like the Television program the files consist of Title Person Thing etc You start off with the choice of Spinning the wheel pausing the game or solving the puzzle though you can only pause the game at the beginning of a neu game All actions are carried out via the joystick and commands are very easy to follow The spinning of the wheel is very well done as different values as well as Lose and Bankrupt scroll along the screen It s very much a game of chance as there are five speeds at which the uheel turns depending how long you hold the fire button down so a bankcrupt can fly straight by or creep up or you could just miss that 11000 Once you ve safely landed some Cash however much it may be it s time to take a guess at a letter The J
3. 18 Disolay list data 1348 PRADDR LDA ANUMBERASFF Cony acdress of number 1988 DLIST BYTE 38 88 28 5 7 1358 ST PIERO 918 MORD ILE Title string address MT LDA ANUMBER 254 1028 SYTE H 1770 STA PIERD 1 S 9D JATA je LINES EL lag n ay prograa 1 80 DY 19 jlero index or aign dyte 988 3YTE 34 138942 1398 LOA DATA 2 Set mgn byte i958 MORD FOOTER Footer string address 1408 JSR PRHEY O Print t 268 ITE Nu 1418 LDY 42 inser to low jair ar 1978 AORO DUST 1420 LDA JATA 1 Get low byte 1988 TITLE BYTE LOCATION 3020 1438 JSR PRHEY Print t 1998 NUMBER TITLE 11 sAddress of first 9 in title 448 RTS Return 2008 FOOTER BYTE Use joystick to move vertically 1458 Print a byte in hex foraat Listing i 1450 PRHEI PHA Save 1478 LSR Set 1gn nibble 1480 LER A 1498 LSR A 1580 LSR 4 Si JSR PRDIBIT Print it ise PLA Restore 38 AND D I Mask or iow bie 25 07 HY V AA i6 KT LW LY IN VD YS R XQ VH JT lY WF Yt 2D OAI MEWSLETTER CRACKING THE CODE continued 18 DIM HEX 161 28 LINEcIBQBB TRAP 190 J 91START 24574 38 READ HE1 CHKSUMILSUM B 4g FOR Isi TO 15 STEP 2 SB DisASC HEX 1 1 48102zASCCHETS 4 AC MA NG UE 1 1 1 48 Un AQ NUMx D1 79 D1215 164 02 74 02015 LU 1 YL 7B SUM SUM NUM POKE START J NIR lui BB NEXT I KS EB IF SUMSCHKSUM THEN LINESLINE
4. Notes Wc TU Mie at MALE ere receiving me i i x looking forward to it please pa in issue 67 of New e softibare PM PHOENIX is oniy available from E Owners Through k the S Monthid we or you can eB CH baso 89 page s full of computer T news and very z good articles that covers the Gtari G bit and ST pts comes in full size a n Europe subse 2 ianc E a ster Card accep ied PHORM meo neu disk based neus letter from Ireland Produced SE Robert uem PHOENIX a double sided disk side vt Auill be pocked full of text Ces containing Articles reviews s And much much more Side B will contain a good E selection of P Robert Paden hims self
5. mazes or unusual objects to pick up just cute little creatures peeking sut from behind trees and a couple of dead ends The handsomely printed owner s quide tells you most of What you need to Know about your mission very little is left to the imagination Dark Crystal seems to be more concerned with recreating the events and scenery of the movie than providing a fun game Despite the fine packaging and professional engineering still prefer On Line s previous Hi Res adventures for the Atari STAR TREK It is the 23rd century You are at the helm of the United Federation Planets cruiser Enterprise travelling through space You have just received orders to dock with one of the Federation s starbases to be briefed on an upcoming mission AS you approach the station it becomes obvious that something is very wrong A score of Klingon Katinga class heavy cruisers has descended from warp space the starbase is under heavy bombardment You must make a decision that could spell intergalactic war on one hand or the death of hundreds of innocent persons aboard the station on the other its own Hi Res colour illustration which must be pulled off the disk You tan flip away the picture temporarily to view a listing of your last several commands 30 Grimly you prepare yourself and your ship to do battle with the Klingon invaders If this situation Sounds like an outline for the next Star Trek film you may be half right
6. or Alternating Current has a high and a low potential just like data pulses That js the reason you have to upgrade your power supply to eliminate the A C ripple current on top of the D C voltage The solid state I C s and other solid state devices will stay virtually like new if they receive the proper D C voltage and are protected from excessive heal While your disk drive is disassembled you should also clean all contacts read urite head belts Pulleys and moving components etc At the end of this article J will give you a list of tools needed supplies required and replacement components needed and also where to get them FILTER CAPACITORS GET OLD fis they age the filter capacitors in the power supply dry Out and develop a high power factor This results in letting A C pass through on top of the D C voltage This voltage is usually called the ripple voltage Since this is a major overhaul of your 1858 disk drive we are going to replace them uith premium filter capacitors which are larger than the original high efficient high temperature long life types We are also going to replace the 1N4091 1 Amp Charge Pump Diodes with 3 Amp heavy duty 1N5490 Silicon Rectifier Diodes This will beef up the power supply so it that it is a new heavy duty long lasting supply THE JOB STEP BY STEP I DISASSEMBLY la Turn your drive on its back and with a Phillips screw driver remove the 2 screus in the black front bezel The
7. 18 60T NB D 38 EU 98 Dhecksua error on this lines 95 LIST LINEs END 108 PRINT Data n aesory 19998 DATA 5859868D2FB28089 AA 19819 DATA DAAgORATACBSCBA 1282 18828 DATA 5185CC288A51A92E 7B8 18838 DATA 8D3882A9618D3182 549 18948 DATA A2BGEACDOERSDAEL 994 18850 DATA CBBACCA9529D3 51 1115 LARSA DATA ASCBUDSOA1ASCCOD 1282 18878 DATA 3761A5CB1B592885 814 KR BBG DATA Co9882EACUEBEBES 1479 10899 DATA EB2DDBDFA9429D35 1145 18189 DATA 5185CB9D3561A5CC 1142 18118 DATA 9D3761A9218D2F 82 781 18120 DATA AQ5A8250A985205C 823 18138 DATA E448AD78022981FB 901 18148 DATA BAAD7BB822982F02D 433 18159 DATA ACCESBCACDIBIEA 996 18158 DATA 8785D8288BD3651 847 18170 DATA 38 928903461 8803 888 18188 DATA DEJ76IEBEBEBEB28 1342 YG 8199 DATA DREBZ28DIGRASCDED 1291 18288 DATA BSDS4CCESBESCDAS 1195 MO 18218 DATA COC9RBDRICAZBHOS 946 NC 18220 DATA CDBu35511859289D 853 GH 18238 DATA 355199 RSFES7b1EB 926 IF 10248 DATA EBEBGEBDSEDBEP28DI 1428 AR 18239 DATA GBASCOODUSDAACSF 995 YT YX P XS 18258 DATA E4A97795CB496183 1231 18274 DATA CCASBOADT74129EA 955 18288 DATA 5859825D355128EA 848 18298 DATA 5850484545444528 292 DY HP TL BR AJ 1 Qc C2 RI NS AL MP AT RL TU TL KB UN JQ Y YD TR 18389 DATA FASQAB298FC928FA 988 10318 DATA 5058C98A98851859 582 8328 DATA 174075118591891 493 10338 DATA CBG BBEICBAA297F 1153 18348 DATA C9689804844C2741 795 18359 DATA C92898B7BA3BE928 843 18
8. 218 00 00 03 60 Note BASM results were produced with listing 5 program 2 Computer Alliance s BASM 18 GEIER 17 LISTING 5 BASM Benchmark program 2 for Computer Alliance s 9199 REM x PROGRAM EQUATES 8118 SCREEN 88 8120TIMER 28 13 TIMER256 19 3140 REM x POKE 19 8 POKE 20 8 8158 LET TIMER256 LET TIMER 8 0168 GRAPHICS 24 8178 SETCOLOR 5 8 14 SETCOLOR 6 8 8 0180 FOR 1 8 TO 191 FOR J 8 TO 39 8198 REM x POKE SCREEN4J 255 0280 LDA 255 LDY J STA SCREEN Y NEXT J 8218 REM x SCREEN SCREEN 40 8220 REM x THIS IS A 16 BIT BINARY ADDITION 8238 CLCADA SCREEN ADC 48 STA SCREEN 8248 LOA SCREEN 1 RDC 0 STA SCREEN 1 8258 NEXT I 0388 REM x GRAPHICS 8 8318 FILE 8 8328 BPRINT TIMER PRIMT Jiffies 8338 BPRINT TIMER256 PRINT Jiffies x 256 8340 RETURN REM x BACK BASM 0358 REM x Line 368 initializes the variable I J 8358 DIM I J LISTING 6 Computer Altiance s BASM keywords e BINPUT BPRINT CLOSE COLOR DATA DEF DIM DRAWTO ENDOEF FILE FILL FOR GET GOSUB GOTO GRAPHICS IF INPUT LET LOCATE NEXT OPEN PLOT POSITION PRINT PUT REM RETURN SETCOLOR SOUND STOP TR TRAP WHILE Supplied typed in tidied up and edited by Mr Andrew MCINTOSH 21 ROMAN ROAD BONNYBRIDGE STRIRLINGSHIRE FK4 2DE SCOTLAND Level Codes for Ke Soft s LASERMAZE 1 LASER 2 HYPER 3 SPACE 4 DIGIT 3 TUNED 6 ATARI 7 MARIO 8 TECNO 9 SOGON 18 BASIC 11 LEVEL 12 HDDUL 13 HOOCH 14 HONEY 15 ELEGY 16 DEATH 1
9. Allan Hitchen Andrew C Thompson Brad Rogers Dennis Foggerty Mark Raphael J Espino Richard Gale Robert Mcgrath Peter Panayiotepoulos and John Picken for info that they have sent either to TWAUG NAU or myself direct In the Mailbag issue 11 Allan Hitchen referred to the RF modulator being faulty if the machine was made in Hong Kong actually my machine is made in Taiuan but there s no way of knowing if the modulator was made in Taiuan too Mark Watson urote suggesting that the grainy effect could be a fault in either PIA or GTIA IC s or in both chips Actually a friends I3 XE also suffers from this vertical grainy effect Around 6 years ago he also has a scart lead going to a CAM 18845 monitor and as far as I can remember the grainy effect was still present After bypassing the RF modulator altogether which would appear that the RF modulator was not at fault after all But since it uas a long time ago I cannot be sure for certain and since F have not seen any other 3 XE or other upgraded XL s I have been wondering if this grainy effect is a side effect of the extended memory Below is an example of what the grainy effect my 256K XL is producing My key coding is as follows a light colour and a dark colour in the width of one 8x8 bit character Each vertical grain can be split into a width of 2 bits and in the space of one 8x8 bits of character there is jIj or a light dark light dark vertical bands
10. Data line addressing is one of the most powerful features of Atari Basic since I had used it extensively in the adventure program because it made object handling so much easier Re uritting the adventure was completely out of the question so I compiled the program one last time and ordered the assembler to ignore the unresolved line numbers the remainder of the compilation proceeded without any more errors The final program size uas 214 sectors or about 28 9k more than twice the size of the original Atari Basic program Due to the presence of known errors I did not even try to run the compiled version Other bugs in the Datasoft Basic compiler have been discovered by users of the first release have personally verified difficulties the TRAP statement and the VAL function along with some other confusing problems with strings and numeric arrays Datasoft are aware of these bugs and will hopefully offer updated disks to the original purchasers of the first release THE ENVELOPE PLEASE The choice between Monarch s ABC and Datasoft s Basic Compiler is not an easy one each product has an unique personality that make it suitable for specific applications and programming styles d DATASOFI S COMPILER On the plus side if ultra high speed is very important to you then the machine code produced by the Datasoft s integer compiler is very tough to beat Datasoft s is also the better choice if you want to plau around with the compiled
11. IC is a phase locked loop device whose output goes lou whenever a signal of the correct frequency is received t serves three purposes first as an audio to digital converter second as a current amplifier and third as a filter which rejects any spurious jncoming frequencies Construction of both boards is easy especially if you use the ready made PCBs available from RH Design Alternatively you may prefer to etch your oun from the patterns at Figs 3a and 3b lhe transmitter board layout is given in Fig 4 t s designed to fit into small case supplied by Maplin Electronics but could easily be adapted to suit other boxes if necessary The suitch is a high quality push button tgpe uhich is sturdy enough io hold the entire board firmly in place but ue ve included four mounting holes in case you want to use a different switch or different box Make Sure that ICI is inserted with pin J in the correct position but all the other transmitter components can go e trar way round vada WawsLerrar TD is the ultrasonic transmitter and is marked with a T You can attach it directly to a 2 way PCB terminal biock as shown in fig 4 by bending its leads slightly Alternatively solder on longer leads as Shoun in the photograph this will allou for adjustment of its position in the hand held box The battery leads must be soldered to veropins or directly to their pads The receiver board layout is shown in Flg 5 The only polarised compo
12. NE 20th Street Suite 302 Bellevue WA 98807 U S A Or fax to 286 885 5893 NOTE Jf you are interested in obtaining PC Xformer 2 8 you can purchase it from the TURUG PD library The TWAUG package contains three disks one 5 25 in Atari DOS format and tuo 3 5 PC format disks The Atari disk contains full documentation for building your oun IO PC interface also on the disk are all the utilities you will need The first 3 5 disk contains all the PC utilities and documentation for running the 102PC interface The second 3 5 disk contains the PC Xfarmer with full documentation The PC Xformer package is available for only 4 which includes postage and packing Buy this PD version and if you like it you can place your order for the upgraded version from Branch Always Software at the above address ATARI 8 BIT THE INTERNET AND YOU With ail the media hype about the Super hiqhuag and the Internet it may interest you to learn that the humble 8 bit wil give you access to most cf it s many goodies THINGS YOU MUST HAVE LAn 8 bit with a diskdrive 2 4 modem 3 4 comms programme I use the excellent BOBTERM 4 A phone connection for the modem 5 An Internet provider Compuserve Demon Cix 6 A Credit card you gotta pay mate XXXUDRNINGXx xx The provider charges you to join and for the time you use They offer different things I use CIX Pronounced KICKS its simple very friendly costs more than Demon less th
13. Rambit turbo tape please state which when ordering YORKY 256K plug in memory upgrade with manual and Support disk Very few units left Hurry this could be your last chance Price 50 90 p amp p UK 2 EC 3 50 world 5 OTHER COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE I also have limited stocks of older commercial software on a periodic basis All titles are new and still shrink wrapped with original English documentations At the moment I have the following titles available Disks at 4 75 10 each SILENT SERVICE HALLEY PATROL 2 TAXICAB HILL GORF WINTER CHALLENGE amp SUMMER GAMES ROMS at 6 95 14 each GATO ee m M E en a EE r ama gn All software prices include p amp p to UK overseas please add 2 per order unless otherwise quoted Payment by cash cheque payable to Richard Gore or IMO Prices in doliars are for USA customers and include shipping but payment must be made in US dollars cash preferably using registered post Contact address RICHARD GORE 79 SPROTBROUGH ROAD SPROTBROUGH DONCASTER DNS 8BUJ ENGLAND l Telephone 0302 784642 Plus coming soon new software from Germany GTRACKER a new sample sequencer Golf Tour 94 fa new golf game Super Print LAB XE and possibly Gn the UK the ICD OSS product line such as SpartaDOS Xx R Time 8 Action MAC 65 etc NB i will be at AMS 8 helping out on the DGS stand watch out for some
14. Sega s new Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator takes many familier elements from the Trek films and TV series and combines them into an arcade Style action game The Operations Simulator puts you in the shoes of cadet trainee at the Federation Academy s training school You are in command of the Enterprise and all of its defensive weaponary Using either the joystick or the keyboard you must lead the Enterprise into the thick of battle using photon torpedoes and phasers to combat the Klingons and save your beleaguered starbase You also have the ability to use warp speed a feature that allows you to outdistance your Klingon adverseries or to speed to the defence of an overwhelmed starbase The display Screen is devided in to three parts The lower third represents the Enterprise s bridge viewer YAGO LS eaS 11 ran The upper right third is a bird s eye scanner that shows your relationship with the Klingons starbase and other nearby objects The remaining third is a bar graph display that indicates your remaining photon torpedoes warp energy and the power remaining in your deflector screens This particular gauge is one to watch because if your shields become depleted a disrupter torpedo from a Klingon cruiser uil mash you and your ship to jelly To be a seasoned Atari space gamer Star Trek may sound a lot like Star Raiders a classic worth aspiring to Purists will shake their heads and say The first is always the best
15. TWAUE Wess S Since the rom routines that perform these functions are the same ones used by Atari Basic it would be nice to see a super compiler complete with it s own set of speedy graphics routines similar to those offered by the Val Forth system MEMORY REQUIREMENTS The amount of memory required by a compiled Atari Basic program depends on three things The size and type of program being compiled the efficiency of the compilation and the type and size of the Run time package required to support the code ABC s Run time package takes up 36 sectors or about 4 9k in ram the floating point version of the Datasoft compiler requires 32 sectors or 4k in ram but Datasoft s integer version just requires only 29 sectors or about 3 6k These figures represent the minimum ram overhead required by any compiled program regardless of it s size or function We looked far and wide for a large Diari Basic program that could be used as the basis for a size comparison between the Datasoft s compiler and Monarch s ABC Most of the trouble was caused by the Datasoft compiler which would not accept embedded DATA statements found in virtually every off the shelf Atari Basic program we tried In desperation I re wrote this issue s feature game Adventure in the Sth dimension without using variable GOTO s or GOSUB s misplaced DATA lines or anything else that would violate the restrictions documented by either compiler After completely de buggin
16. a long overdue alternative to Basic that the Radio Shack Tandy TRS 88 and Apple II users have been enjoying for years WHAT IS A COMPILER A compiler is a utility program that reads a program written in Basic and translates it into a lower level code that executes faster than the original A compiled Basic program is completely self contained It is treated exactiy like a binary DOS object file and does mot need the Basic rom or any other special software to run Monarch Data Systems ABC A Basic Compiler Datasoft s Basic compiler and Computer Alliance s BASM are significantly different in terms of features performance and cost Since ABC was on the market ahead of the others we ll examine it first MONARCH DATA SYSTEMS ABC COMPILER ABC is a single pass integer compiler single pass means that your Basic program is only scanned once as it is being compiled Integer means that numbers are stored in straight 3 byte binary instead of the usual 6 byte floating point format used by Atari Basic The elimination of the floating point maths is one of the main reason for the speed of ABC The best way to understand ABC is to review what happens when you compose a Basic program Each time you press the RETURN Key over a line of Basic code the instructions are 13 tokenized into a special internal code that can be understood by fitari Basic ABC takes this process a step further It reads the tokenized file produced by At
17. and a version of our SUPER ARCHIVER to allow copying of protected disks for 3 5 inch format Included with the FLOPPY BOARD is our program to read and write to IBM or ST formatted disks This makes the FLOPPY BOARD the best way to transfer files to and from your 8 bit The FLOPPY DORRO is only 149 95 plus m E handling This device brings the power and fle bility of larger d systems to your 8 bit The Multiplexer is a collection of cartridge interface boards that allow up to 8 Ataris to read and write Ao the same drives itypically a hard disk access the same printeris and talk te each other 11 is the first practical THE MULTIPLEXER Tenue system for the Atari bit computer TA master computer any jt is equipped with the master HulMiplexer interface Then up to 8 slave computers hook up to this master interface es SUPER ARCHIVER fi handling YOu He shipping handling itle only IAE S E fe Operating system that Our latest and greatest product The FLOPPY zum is ru add on expansion board for the BLACK BOX Interface Tt allous the use of the same Five gt mechanisms used in 18M computers The FLOPPY BORRD CONTACT each having their own slave Cope common are things that are to be shared are connected to the master Un each slave all disk and printer 1 0 is routed through the master so no extra disk drives are heeded cartridge ports o
18. by Page 6 as a bonus on one of their issue disks What is rena all about You have to lead a number of power pods to the exit of the screen You do this by changing the playfield so that the pods can op to the exit by themselves When a pod touches a moving part it wi die This is in short the aim of the game In my opinion the game does not look very good Only simple and undetailed signs have been used and can not see what these are supposed to be There is almost no sound just some rare sound effects did take a look at the directory Mmm Runtime Ob j TAUG Wawebiarriak GAMES REVIEW continued Aha so this game is a compiled Turbo Basic game It is a normal basic game that has been compiled into machine language so that it runs someuhat faster This does not have to mean that Turbo Basic games are bad because Turbo Basic has some extra capabilities above Atari Basic Take a look at Whoops 1 where you cannot see that it has been programmed jn Turbo Basic However the extra capabilities of Turbo Basic have not been used in Arena Probably this is the result of lack of knowledge of the programmer The original version published by Page 6 runs in norma Atari Basic So this game is probably compiled for speed and protection of the listing Summary Arena Publisher Richard Gore Sold at DGS amp KE Soft Price 5 or DH 19 88 Graphics 2 Sound 33 Playability 5 Value for money 4 Overall 4
19. d C LH Aa GA KA e cn lf a racing car is travelling with the speed variable on maximum 8 then the scrolling or pixel increment uould be 2 If you push left on the joystick then you decrease SV and thus need to read a different pixel increment This of course is just one metnod for one purpose it s all to do with experimentaioh Q Hou did I achieve the Graphics text sine wave in my demo on TWAUG s Ist issue disk f Very quickly hold vertical positions for the characters and POKE them in rou by rou character for character Nou my technique was to give each character a direction I doun 6 up With a smail routine check the direction flags for each character and adjust their vertical positions as such if any vertical positions exceed maximum or minimum allouances then change direction flag then just re loop which re POKEs them and starts all over There were other small routines to control the timing of luminance changes and text address changes whilst the lines between the text are just Blank scan lines in the display memory Ofcourse don t forget that the vertical positions have to be multiplied by 48 to maintain the correct roue O Why can t someone detail Dis in a somewhat simple manor A Yeah I agree the person who posed this question to Dave apparently already has the Complete and Essential MAP and in it is a full tutorial on DLI s which I consider very direct Anyone looking to utilize the power of DLI s sh
20. for TWAUG We are sorry to say that Mark Fenwick will no longer be doing game reviews for us Mark is not giving up his 8 bit entirely he is just storing it away as he feels that at some time in the future he will be coming back to it but at the moment he is moving on to another machine We would like to give our thanks to Mark for all the time and support he has givet us over the last two years and we wish him all the best for the future This means that we are now looking fot someone who would lite to do a regular games review column for us You will have a free hand as to what games you would like to review but as we receive new software we would like to have it reviewed we will pass it on to whoever has taken on the job If anyone is interested then please get in touch with Dave Ewens either by writing to the TWAUG address or by telephoning Dave on 191 2710086 anytime except Friday evening as that is computer club night 1 look forward to hearing from you 33 FMR CONTENT Side A of this issue 13 disk has another good selection of programmes for you to enjoy The first program is a space invaders type game I found as I started Shooting at the space craft that it was very difficult to hit the target the space craft sensed that it was being shot at and moved either backwards or forwards out of the way After a while I found a way to hit the target regularly Number two on the menu is a program that appeals I am s
21. great offers I hope to see you there 34 ech eL 0213535730 LTIGILORJ I FAX 021 352 1669 c A MR Me x 28 pe KN E 2 f x b Ka oy d F a Se E En M WM We A I ah x Ka d W 7 ma Y z k OR oJ T d oc d om AN gt F H i age TE K mg h E oH ri LENS S T C E A 9i J s b 4 is 3 b b A N d d m e E E NOE 4 1 q CG Y Ss ja E 3 CN y 0 v E Sek W N e E S lt 2 VR KK SS d x M GER e S L AA A L SUN y E Ky Ki Y Va KI n 1 E A b A d KA 3 T m ces A Uy l E k E ea 12 e T ife Qus Coupons E e office KE T TT A receipe rum To ovs ALA E Ka Ge 6 ee 112 0 f New version includes avaltable Seon a v ae a sme 9 P ij pemi Print t under development end currentiy undergoing its THIRD rewrite We apologise for the delay M but aS xp oe pradremmung to l anglesewu DIE a a Sulynedea AL E 4 R e Wales 7 n life UN dur acs ith acces Es toc K War S services Co elpline newsletter vou i 43 E d exe d e January end A gus 0 MR 3 ub Tee b anar EEN wt jane newsletter con AZ months s5uoscription basis onn e rre ership cost Am AER LAT e og ce ATL qup E SUBSCRIPTIONS Sp Bankers drafts made Current Notes mu CN Subscript tions i ad Call cea aso 4761 e E ditor s
22. library files again I was greeted with an error loz disk full 15 Not to be deterred I ropied the ASM OBJ file onto the same disk as the adventure and tried one more time at last success The compiler barely found enough room to write the assembler files and finally made it through the first pass My disk space difficulty uas caused by the fact that the Datasoft compiler always writes assembler files to drive The reference manual estimates that these files require at least about five time the size of your Atari Basic program That places the maximum possible Atari Basic program at 141 sectors or about 17 6k in ram regardless of how many drives you have or can borrow based upon a single density 98k drive such as the Atari 010 Nou the compiler started on passes 2 and 3 but the compiler stopped again to tell me that 1 had some unresolved line numbers but it did not specify which lines were causing the problems So I checked carefully through the Atari Basic program for GOSUB s or GOTO s that used a variable instead of a line number but I did find nothing urong with them The RESTORE statements in lines 73 and 79 do use variable references but the Datasoft s documentation does not says anything about RESTORE s So I wrote a little test program to see if the compiler would accept RESTORE s with variables and sure enough the test failed 1 consider this undocumented restriction to be a very serious read BUG
23. the capacitor to the extension of TPI3 and the other end of the capacitor to your positive probe Set your meter to its lowest A C range The capacitor uil block the D C and will let only the amp C voltage pass You should get a reading of OGiv A C or less That is what I got Do the same thing with TP14 That is t millivolt of A C RMS ripple which is excellent I think it is even less than uhat I measured because my probe leads are not shielded This voltage may be partly stray A C being picked up by the probe leads If you use an analog meter you do the same thing On the A C ripple measurement the needle should not move or barely move at all The A C ripple is the quality measurement of your power supply It should NOT have more than 0Q2 v A C RMS ripple riding on top of your D C voltage The command signal to STOP READ on the Floppy Disk Controller Chip WD2793 on pin 27 is only 38 millivolts If your power supply had an A C ripple voltage of only 1 millivolts RMS which translates into 38 millivolts Peak to Peak ripple A C it would be the same amplitude as the command signal and could easily confuse the chip There are even smaller voltages in your disk drive You can see why the power supply has to deliver clean D C voltages to your IC s 1X LUBRICATING THE MECHANISM ga Use LUBE GEL see supplies and with a swab stick see supplies that is broken in the middle Apply a small amount on the rails of the read
24. the word POWER Take some White Out and put a little on a piece of plastic and with a smooth sponge pick up the wet White Out Gently suipe it across the lettering If you mess up you can remove it uith alcohol You now have the raised lettering in white on the front of your disk drive Your disk drive is nou in tip top shape It is probably better than when it was neu It will work quietly and reliably for you for a very long time In addition gou have improved its appearance TOOLS REQUIRED x A 30 40 watt pencil type soldering iron with a chisel tip x A desoldering tool like SOLDAPULT from Radio Shack H64 2120 5 95 Use Lube Gel to re lubricate it and establish vacuum x A long nose plier and a wire stripper and cutter x A phillips screw driver x A Static Drain Wrist Strap Radio Shack 4216 2397 3 79 SUPPLIES NEEDED x LUBE GEL from Radio Shack 364 2326 2 79 Do not use oill i PWAUVG NEWSLETTER IMPROVING 1050 sent X 91 Isopropyl Alcohol from your drug store 1 00 x Heat Sink Grease from Radio Shack 8276 1372 1 49 X Long stem cotton swabs from Radio Shack Do not use Q Tips X Thin hook up wire REPLACEMENT PARTS x For each disk drive you need 3 filter capacitors They are not available from Radio Shack Order them from DIGI KEY CORP 701 Brooks Avenue South Thief River Falls MN 56701 0677 Tel 1 800 34 4 4539 Fax 218 68 3380 They are 550 uf 35 volt capacitors Digi key tP6465ND each co
25. the last one on side A is an adventure game the instructions are displayed when you start up this game On side B is a demo program of PRINTLAB which is available from Micro Discount for 6 95 it is in ARCed form There is a printer driver for the Canon B J 288 Bubble Jet to use with Atariwriter Plus by Ralph Bradley with Doc files You must use MACROI M65 with MAC 65 editor read the doc file first This is also by Ralph Bradley SCROLLI BAS is a demo program mentioned in the Basic Tutorial article on page 4 SONGS ARC is the song program of Andrew C Thompson s Coding Caper article PWAUG NEUSS ER ATARI SUPPORT from RICHARD GORE ARENA The full 50 level version of the excellent puzzle game that was a demo bonus on Page Dis issue disk Price 5 10 XL XE Disk only BUBBLE ZONE A fast blast em set on a grid being invaded by ever expanding bubbles Collect the tokens and see how far you can advance Price 5 10 XL XE Disk only JAWBREAKER Classic maze game based on Pac Man munch the sweets but don t forget that dental hygene Tuo different mazes supplied which were originally separate games Price 4 5 10 MOUSEKATTACK Another classic maze game but this one involves you Plumbing all the levels of Rat Alley Addictive arcade action with a Simultaneous two player mode dias 4 50 10 Jawbreaker and Mousekattack are available as a double pack for only 6 50 12 They are available on disk tape and
26. their names The computer wili decide at random who will go first You re asked to insert a puzzle file disk into the drive don t look around for another disk as there are plenty of puzzle files on the program disk When you choose a puzzle file the catagories on it wii be Jocked when played so the next time you come to boct up the game and select the same puzzle file you won t get any questions you ve had before This process continues unti ail the files in a puzzle file are locked and 3i You keep going unti you guess a letter wrong then the following player takes a turn Al letters used by players will be indicated on the A Z grid so hopefully you shouldn t pick a letter twice a screen prompt will tell you if you do but you ll lose your go This process is identical to the game show so if you ve watched the show you ll pick it up in no time at all At the start of each turn you can opt to spin the wheel solve the puzzle or when you ve some cash buy 4 vouel The game consists of four rounds after which the one with the most cash can go for the car sorry play the bonus round five letters and a vowel Keep the keyboard handy as you ll need it to enter the puzzle when you come to solve it or get all the consenants on all of the rounds every other command is done via the jogstick Each time you start round one over again you start with no cash but a running total of your total winnings is displayed after the final round this give
27. us the same support for a long time to come Recently we were able to obtain a very good supply of good quality blank disks From time to time I have received letters from some of our subscribers saying that they were finding it hard to buy blank disks at a reasonable price We are now able to supply disks at the following prices 18 disks 1 58 or 25 disks for 3 58 Prices include postage and packing All disks will be formatted before posting to make sure that they are all good As we are now able to get disks cheaper we have decided that we can now reduce the price of our PD library disks From the release of this issue PD disks will be priced as follows Double sided disks f1 58 each any five for 6 any ten for fig Single sided disks f1 each or have two single sided titles put on to one double sided disk for 1 5 This will mean that you can buy any ten single sided disks for 6 or better still any 20 single sided titles for I8 Or you can pick and mix for example 18 singles and 5 doubles for the price of 18 doubles fis you will see in our latest PD library update we now have over 428 titles in our library and we are always on the lookout for new titles to add to it Many of you have given us a lot of support over the last two years by buying from the library and we hope that many more of you wil now be able to give us even more support by buying disks over the next gear Would you like to be a reviewer
28. usually purple that is glued with apoxy to the heat sink The easiest way to remove it is to cut it and later on to solder it again when you assemble the drive 1e You nou can lift the motor assembly and remove it Put it aside for nou You nou have only the PCB and the bottom cover 1I PCB REMOVAL You should wear a wrist grounding strap see Tools or have a grounded surface that you work on for the next steps PYAVO REWRLATTER IMPROVING 1050 DRIVES oz 2a If you remove the 4 rubber cushions on the motor pins it uil be easier to remove the PCB On Tandon drives about 2 inches from the front on either side of the PCB there are plastic snap holders that you must push back to remove the PCR On Werid Storage drives you also have an additional two snaps in the back of the PCB You also have 2 hold doun screws on the PCB in the back and on on the left front of the PCB in some drives You must remove them The PCB will now Come out quite easily Put the bottom aside you wil work only with the PCB 111 UPGRADINS OF THE POWER SUPPLY 3a Ge you look at the PCB in the back on the left side of the meta beat shield are two IC s mounted with screws and one on the right hand side The rear left and right 1C s are the voltage regulators The left is a 7812 for 2 volts D C 08 The right is a 7805 for 5 volts O C Q7 Both of these regulators should have a white paste or heat sink Compound see supplies on their backs If they seem t
29. versions of your software and if you have to use transcendental maths The Datasoft s floatina point package offers a clou TWAUG MawSbaerran BASIC COMPILER certinues On the minus side Datasoft s product is very greedy uith disk space and ram you need at least two drives to compile anything except smal programs You will also have tq put up with the alarming range of Basic programming restrictions Before you go and buy the Datasoft s compiler may I suggest that you check to make sure that youre getting a bug free version MONARCH S ABC COMPILER Monarch s ABC is not as picky about your source code as the Datasoft compiler It will compile just about anything that does not use fractions and it s wide usable number range gives it a decided advantage when it comes to simulating the floating point operations at high speed The P code produced offers a degree of software protection you cannot get with straight 6582 assembiy language last but not least in 1983 Monarch s ABC costs 30 less than the Datasoft product DND THEN THERE S BASM You may be wondering why I have not mentioned BASM the third Basic compiler listed at the beginning of this article The reason is very simple BASM is not really a Basic Compiler at all it s a Basic assembler an entirely new programming concept for the Atari computer lt looks like Basic but acts like assembly language x Take a look at listing S this is the BASM equivalent of the speed ben
30. while adding up a tripple letter tripple word scores D press of a button is all it takes Scrabble is written in basic so boot up doesn t require the Old option key Make sure you don t write protect the disk as the program includes a high score save feature Once the game begins to load a title screen will appear followed by a chance to see instructions 1f desired Shouid you opt for instructions you ll be given a quick run down on the basics of the game plus the controls needed The option for instructions is given as a question yes or no so you need not have to read them every time Once the game has joaded you re asked how many players are going to play up to eight players can play where you all Share the player one joystick Decide who will go first then proceed to enter the names of all the players the first name entered goes first Once you ve entered all the players names an option for Panic game is given This is a real tester to those members of the family who feel they should be members of Mensa as with this option chosen players must think of a word and place it on the grid within one minute It s a good idea to go for panic game as games are quicker and less time is spent listening to that immortal phrase hmmmm for 15 minutes at a time The Scrabble board grid takes up the majority of the screen all the coloured squares double word etc are coloured as of the board game A small border surrounds the grid to give va
31. 1 TO 15 STEP 2 LG 58 2174SC LHEX T 12 48 D2 O8C HES 1 1 1 48 KT 58 MUMS C DI 7HCDL DIG Erbe D2 7HIDZD 1 in iW 5B SUM SUM NUM POKE STARTAJ NUN 1 2451 NEXT 8 LY 28 iF SUM CHKSUM THEN NE L NE 18 607 J 38 iN 58 7 Checksum error on this i ner YO 25 LIST LINE END YS 188 PRINT Dita n pemory RA 9980 DATA 5EA988ED2F229DB9 sea iX 30123 DATA 24401 369 E 5EFC2AS 715 21 WL 9822 JATA Ligen ODEM TWAUG NBYSLETTER CRACKING THE CODE zem FA 8833 JATA A9CABSCAASOSOSCC 1289 j4 3048 DATA 208150A02PB9 CA50 47 C 18858 DATA 2922518818F75945 1817 F B858 SATA 8030824900D3182 O48 j 18878 DATA ASBRESCEBSCIEDMA 921 3J 8888 JATA D449228D2F22A850 345 dr 10898 DATA A2084985205CE 158 281 3i 8188 JATA C4CE 825498385CE 348 SL 0118 SATA EBCDASCDCSSSDOI 1219 tQ 18128 DATA A CABDADAGAS68BD 1187 16 18132 JATA AESBAQB SSCDACT 974 iX 18140 DATA SOEEADSUDORTEEAE 1226 71 10158 DATA 5QASCESDOADAACEF 995 JL 19168 JATA E4BBBICBAAZS7FCS 1283 NE 18170 DATA 5098BABAICOEAQCO 917 Y 9158 JATA 2098B78438E22040 7 8 3 2190 JATA ES8841869482102 227 F 10288 IATA CO89D80058787878 052 20 18218 JATA 1785502352044038 225 8E 18228 DATA 47B568414550242A 759 VQ 18230 DATA 2A2A2A2A2A2A2A2A 216 S 8248 DATA 2AZAZA2AZAZAZA2A 336 i 18258 DATA 2A2A282020205448 480 AF 10260 DATA 5972286971285120 522 7i 18278 DATA 54556D5F 2BAF 5628 598 YC 18288 DATA 736D6FOF74582868 382 AL 18290 DATA 5F72697A6
32. 33 LDA 8 3648 STA 05 EMT JMP NE Ubdate fine scroll 3668 NEXT INC JATA 60 to next character 3678 3NE FINE HIT INC DATA 3898 FINE LDA COUNT Uboate fine scroll 1990 STA HSEROL 2918 VBEXIT MP VBI2 Bacx to 0 5 STASCIT string to display cnaracters Y olds susoer Ze Pa RC BPS PIERD 7 Get charactor 2950 TAY Save tt 3958 AND WF Turn afe hign ait iinversel 1979 CAP 4559 3989 3CC CHI l 3998 TXA Aboye 42 no aojustaent 1009 JMP CHOK 1818 CHI CMP 1578 1028 BCC CH2 1838 TIA Between 28 ano ISE 048 SEC Suptract 28 1858 SBC 1179 1858 JAP CHOK pP CH2 TIA Between 388 ano fif 1088 CLC Sod 48 1898 ADC 1549 1188 CHOK STA PZERO Y save character back 1118 CPY 1508 Last lt naracter 1128 BNE CHCONV 1138 RTS Return 1148 Display ist data 1158 DLIST BYTE 38 36 38 2547 i148 MORD STARS Top string 1178 BYTE BA LIS HS 7 1189 DATA WORD MESSAGE Scrolling aessage 1198 BYTE BAL LAS 7 1280 MORD STARS Bottom string 1218 BYTE UMP 4WVB 1228 NORD LIST 124 8 STARS 3Y E Hapotie ees pe 5 1248 MESSAGE 3YTE TALS is a Jeso of saoctn 1258 BYTE horizontal scrolling This aessage 1248 BYTE goes on and on ano oh 1278 SESSLEN t AESSAGE Nuaoer of bytes in string 1288 COPY 44 Space for coay ai stringe Listing 3 il 19 DIM HEXSI16 HI 28 LINEZIB8BB TRAP 188 0 27587224776 VA 28 READ 4EIS CHKSUM SUN sd AR 18 SOR
33. 348 DATA 4C27518418594891 668 18378 DATA CBCQBRDBDDS87078 1144 18388 DATA 70475C613880BBBO 436 19398 DATA 9899088895088 19488 DATA 1099195999999090 19418 RITTER 19428 DATA 1909508990191801 10438 DATA 1151595185898 9 B440 DATA 88080B85808939427C 238 18458 DATA 51412E612MCAF43 559 18468 DATA 41S4494F4E3AZ830 3 7 18478 DATA 382838285572552B 589 19488 DATA 5A5F79737459 5368 BER 19499 DATA 20746F2D6D6F7565 738 19508 DATA 2075637274696361 782 18518 DATA 6C6C792E 383 Listing 2 1 eT o AR 3ounaanes d i t 1 IMAGE DATA NS Screen wewing area Figure 3 E Dee es d 1 Display screen Ouolicated E Li Unused memory 8188 denso of smooth horizontal scroiling 0118 Hardware registers 128 DMACIL 30488 DMA control W138 HSCROL 30484 jHorizontal scroll B148 Operating systea shadows 8150 SDMCTL 4022F DMA control 8158 SDLSTL 8238 Display list pointer low 0178 SDLSTH 8231 Display list pointer high 8188 Operating systes vectors 8198 SETVBY EASC Set VBI vector 8208 VBI2 EASF jVBI stage two vector 8218 Display list equates 8228 JMP 2 01 dung 2238 WVB z 119 Wait for vertical blank flag 9249 LAS a 348 Load resory scan flag 8258 HS z 318 Horizontal scroll flag B258 B4 s 30 Blank 4 lines 9278 B8 z 78 Blank B lines 0288 Page zero variables 8298 t CB 8388 PIERO e H2 P
34. 7 CACAO 18 CABAL 19 BIGOT 28 AGAIN 21 HAITI 22 INDIA 23 JESUS 24 KOREA 25 CHINA 26 WUSHU 27 MONTY 28 NANCY 29 CAMEL 38 SARAH 31 WALES 32 TIMES 33 WHIZZ 34 TITAN 35 SYNTH 36 STORM 37 SHAVE 38 SHARX 39 ROUTE 48 PIECE 41 PINCH 42 OSCAR 43 OTTER 44 MAJOR 45 LOWER 46 LUCID 47 KNAVE 48 LABEL 49 INPUT 58 SUPER TAUG PEWYSLETTER SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER Qn Annotated List of Available Programs By Bill Hall Canada Computer Chess The earliest of all chess programs for the B bit Atari this 1979 cartridge based game from Atari Corp sports bilious colours abysmal graphics and almost no features Joystick operated Chess 7 0 By Larry Atkin Qdesta 1987 The best of the early games with many features and serviceable graphics Cursor movement is rather awkward accomplished by paddles or cursor keys Translator required Micro Chess D simple version with odd graphics and few features Movement by algebraic notation Translator required specifically the Atari Of translator by Jonathan Sanders e mer Written by Dan and Kathe Spracklin this program is one of the oldest has gone through several incarnations and was available on mang different computers The original Sargon was writter in Z 88 code and analyzed in the book Sargon A Computer Chess Program The publisher Hayden also released the subsequent software versions Sargon 2 11982 employs algebraic notation though coordinates are not displayed and remar
35. F5 7461 986 d 10399 DATA 6C207343724F ACSC 79S 06 18318 DATA 596E572 29545859 589 JE 10328 DATA 7320605573736157 787 P 18338 DATA 6528576F6573206F 795 97 18348 DATA EZB616E64208F3E 732 16 0352 DATA 206165 MIKE 3P 13350 JATA EE 22 _isting 4 GAMES REVIEW by Fred Meijer Mega review Richard Gore mm e Pen m a E E W M a M M PI E me Time for something neu in the Twaug Newsletter the Mega review In these types of reviews 1 will review a number of programmes that are somehow related to each other Instead of the normal reviews I won t discuss all the details This mega revieu is about the new programs of a neu publisher namely Richard Gore from the U K I have especially not used the word company because his software is sold exclusively by OGS in England and by KE Soft in Germany The first package published by Richard Gore is a package consisting of two games namely Jawbreaker and Nousekattack Maybe you think mmm I know these titles 28 G MES REVIEW cont Yes you are right Because these are two very very old games could not find a release date of Mousekattack but found the release date of Jawbreaker as I have the original package myself on my shelves Jawbreaker is a game from 19981 So it is almost fifteen years old But o k our Atari is also very very old and it is stili a nice computer What are Jawbreaker and Mouseka
36. INE 2 SET MB LINE 3 lines E e NO SCOLL e VERTICAL SCROLL ENABLED Fiqure 1 Demo of saooth vertical scrolling 8540 Hardware registers 0558 DMACTL 0408 DMA control 8350 YSCROL D485 Vertical scrol 8578 Doerating syste shadows 8588 SDMCTL 822F DMA control 593 SDLSTL 8238 Display ist pointer low 8680 SDLSTH 8231 Disolay list ointer high 8618 STICKB 8278 Joystick 8529 Operating System vectors 2630 SETVBV SE45C Bet VBI vector 8648 RIZ SEASF jVBI stage two vector HI Display list aquates AAR LINES 48 Nuaver or display lines 3 0678 JMP z 01 dung A wg 540 Hart tor vertical blank flag 4698 LMS 48 Lodo serory scan flag 9700 YB 28 Vertical scroli flag 3719 T e 38 Blank 4 lines 8728 38 78 Blank 3 lines BN Page zero variables a 1748 He CB 8750 PIERO 2 42 gt iPointer UE SOUNT s Scroll counter dp 54000 1799 PLA 379 LOA 4 88 Turn zt JMA 998 STA SDNCTL 3818 STA DMACTL 1920 LDY 348 Correct 48 bytes of text 8858 LDA ITITLELSFF 8948 STA PZERO 8950 LDA ATITLE 256 3960 STA PIERO L 2878 ZER CHCONV DEER LDA ADLISTASFF New dispiay list 9898 STA SDLSTL 3708 LDA ADLIST 256 8218 STA SDLSTH 3720 BL T erg scroll counter 9950 STX COUNT 8740 STX VSCROL di STX PIERO And LMS pointer Ap STX P1ERD 1 24 LOOP SKIP Vertical b
37. SAVCHR 1878 BNE UPLODP 1638 DIGIT CLC Digit Adjust it 1888 JSR PRADDR Print new LMS address 1640 ADC 3510 1098 UFIME LDA COUNT Update fine scroll value 1658 SAVCHR STA PIERD Y Save character code 1190 STA VSCRDL 1568 RTS Return 1118 MP VBEXIT Exito 1878 Convert an ATASCII string to display characters 1128 DOWN INC COUNT Damn Increment fine count AB CHCONV DEY Y hoids nuaber of characters 113 LDA COUNT i898 EDA PIERD Y Set character 1148 CAP 48 98 TA Seve it 1158 BNE DFINE 314 not un then fine scroll 1710 AND MF Tumor hign ait inverse 1188 LDX 48 Reset fine stroll count 172 CAP 4563 1178 STX COUNT 738 ace SA 1188 DNLODP LDA DATA 1 X jAdjust all LMS bytes 1700 TTA Above 568 no adjustaent i 1198 CLC IS JMP CHOK l 1200 ADC 192 i 788 CH CNP 1578 1218 STA DATA L X 1779 3c Op 1220 BCC DSKIP AB TIA Between 28 ano SSF 1238 INC Wi 179 SEC Subtract 528 1248 DSKIP INL 1888 sac 528 1250 INX aan 1818 JAP CHOK 1268 INL E i 1820 CH2 TJA Between 208 ano StF 4270 CPX ALIMES l 998 Sie Add 49 1288 BNE DNLOOP 1848 ADC 4540 1298 JSR PRADDR Print new LMS address BS8 CHOK ST PIERD Y Save character back 1388 DFIME LDA COUNT Update fine scroll 1850 CY 88 Last character 1318 STA VSCROL e 1879 BNE CHCONV 1328 VBEIIT JMP VBI2 jBack to D S 1880 RTS Return 1330 Print out address of first LMS
38. age of this method is that only one LMS instruction is needed but approximately one screen s image data has to be duplicated for each neu block The second method requires LMS instructions on every line but each picks up data spaced at say 64 bytes apart so that any boundary will always coincide with the start of a line Figure 3 illustrates hou the display image comes from the first part of each line with some unused memory at the end of each line Unlike the previous method the data has to be noncontiguous because of the unused memory on each line HORIZONTAL SCROLLING fis with vertical scrolling having the horizontal flag bit set for a line causes it to be moved to the right by the number of color clocks specified by the contents of the HSCROL register Note that as scrolling is done by color clocks the HSCROL register only extends from to 3 for a standard character cell such as mode 2 not Dnce a line has been shifted by its maximum amount then HSCROL should be reset to zero and one added to the address of the LMS instruction for that line Reversing this process produces scrolling to the left instead of the right To scroll region of lines horizontally requires each to have its horizontal scroll flags set and each to have its own LMS instruction Figure 3 which shows the set up for a vertically scrolling screen also serves as an illustration of horizontal scrolling over several lines the line length might be anyth
39. alue and subtracting from the LMS address The LMS instruction in the display list will usually be placed on the first scrolling line of a region determining where the display data will come from Listing gives an example of a vertically scrolling region in a display Listing 2 is the BASIC program to read in the code after running it the code can be executed by typing The display will show the contents of memory from location By using a joystick the display can be moved up cr down over memory while the top line of the display will 22 indicate the address of the first memory location being viewed The display list is defined on lines 1988 to 1970 of Listing 1 1t consists of a line at the top which displays the text Location 8800 and ends with a line which displays the text Use joystick to move vertically The scrolling lines in the middie of the display list have not been defined but space has been reserved for them 1o be filled in by the program when it is executed After turning off the screen DMA the program calls on the routine CHCONV to perform the conversion between the ATASCI codes generated by the assembler to display the codes of the character set as explained last time The new display list is then installed and some variables are initalised The missing part of the display list is now built uith an LMS and address for each line The addresses are initialised so that each points 32 bytes further on from it
40. always with the disk drive front facing you The Printed Circuit Board will be referred to in this article as the PCB DEVICES NEEDED There are a few devices that you have to make yourself You need TIE POINT EXTENDERS to read the voltages You cannot reach the tie points otherwise easily Take a 5 in black piece of thin solid hook up wire Remove ia insulation from one end and 1 4 in insulation from the other end Take the end with the longer exposed wire and wrap it about 5 or 6 limes around a Seuing needle so it forms a little spring You will nou be able to slip this over the tie points on the PCB and be able to measure the voltages easily Make tuo more exactly the same way with different color vire You will also need 4 SPLICERS Take a very thin Copper wire and wrap it about 10 times around a darning needle so it forms a spring about 1 4 long Cut off the ends that are Sticking out Splicers are used to connect together wire components for soldering They are also commercially available as COLMAN SPLICERS 1345 H DISK DRIVE AGEING What deteriorates in your disk drive is the internal power Supply The power supply is like the heart of a human being that pumps blood to the organs The power supply pumps D C Voltages to all the 1 C s and chips This voltage has to be almost pure D C If there is a Substantial A C component riding on top of the D C then your 1 C s get confused and think they are receiving information pulses A C
41. an Compuserve If uou want to try out CIX use your modem to dial up 881 398 1244 and follow the prompts they offer a free tour You also pay the Connection to the UK end THE NET IS ADDICTIVE WATCH THE PHONE BILL Cix offers E MAIL conferencing Even an Atari 8bit one Chat and Internet TELNET JARGON TELNET A means of getting directly into a distant computer or board EXRMPLE I telnet to The Well a board in Sanfrancisco I instruct CIX ie go internet and at the ip prompt type TELNET WELL COM Once felnei connects me I use their board The connection Uk Sanfrancisco is at Uk local rates There are lots of sites tak ing TELNET 10 INTERNET zo FIP File Transfer Protocol allows entry to a distant computer and the download of text files from that end I emphasize TEXT as the 8 bit s memory limits frustrate Graphical or Zip files There is a convention of courtesy in FTP The host is altowing you the courtesy of using it often this very very expensive facilities GOPHER D super quick means of locating specific files for FTP ing ARCHIE Basically a similar thing doing the job differently WWW The latest toy The BBC board is a Web one You recognise www sites by the prefix HTIP I haven t yet tried it but BOBTERM set to VTI08 emulation should allow Tex access If you re into Esoteric things H M Treasury has just gone on WWW Gee Wow IRC International Relay Chat talk to other users on a dir
42. ari Basic and translates it into a even more compact form called Psuedo code or P code This P code is then linked to a small machine language program called a Run time interpreter which reads and executes each P coded instruction The big difference between tokenized Atari Basic and ABC s P code is it s conciseness by using only whole number integer arithmetic and a more efficent memory management scheme ABC simplifies the execution of each command in Atari Basic repertoire the result is a significant increase in the speed of the compiled program According to Monarch the speed mprovement factor can range between four and twelve times seven times being a reasonable average lt should be noted that the P code is not directly straight 6502 assembly language It is essentially a series of pointers into the Run time interpreter much like a Forth program You cannot LIST Dis assemble or make any significant sense out of the P code without a detailed understanding of the ABC s Run time interpreter This is an important feature if you are planning distributing your compiled software because the code will be protected against all but the most determined pirates EASY TO USE Experienced Atari Basic programmers should have no trouble using ABC First you Save your completed Atari Basic program to disk then you remove all cartridges from your Atari and boot the ABC disk Once ABC is loaded it asks for the name of your Atari Basic sourc
43. asoft s Programming Restrictions Unsupported functions integer mode only ATN CLOG COS EXP LOG SIN SQR Unsupported Arithmetic operators none Unsupported statements BYE CLOAD CONT CSAVE DOS ENTER LIST LOAD NEW RUN dev FILENAME EXT SAVE Other restrictions Integer mode values limited to either plus or minus of 32767 except address constants DATA statements must be at the end of the program and cannot be executed see text DIM statements cannot use variables for size allocation such as DIM X IA GOTO s and GOSUB s cannot use variables for line references such as GOSUB FILE GOTO MENU LISTING 3 for ftari Basic and Compilers 18 REM 3339000000090000000000 0OOOO0t 15 REM x BENCHMARK TEST FOR BASIC x 20 REM x COMPILERS x 25 REM J30O00900000900000000000000000 38 POKE 19 0 POKE 29 9 35 GRAPHICS 24 48 SETCOLOR 1 8 14 SE TCOLOR 2 8 8 45 SCREEN PEEK 88 2S6xPEEK 89 58 FOR I 8 TO 191 FOR J 8 TO 39 55 POKE SCREEN J 255 6 NEXT J SCREEN SCREEN 48 NEXT I 65 GRAPHICS 78 PRINT PEEK 20 Ji ffies 75 PRINT PEEK 19 Jiffies x 255 Benchmark Program 1 LISTING 4 Speed Test Resuits from Program 1 Run time m Jiffies Hours Minutes Seconds 100 s Atari Basic rev A rom 4160 00 01 09 30 Atari Microsoft Basic vl8 3348 00 00 55 80 OSS Basic A v3 85 2717 29 99 45 38 Monarch s ABC compiler 565 00 00 09 40 Datasoft s FP compiler 2435 00 00 40 60 Datasoft s integer compiler
44. ation for faster PCs The speed of Atari 8 emulation is proportional to the speed of your PC with a 33 Mhz 386 approximately giving the normal speed of an Atari 8 Twice the speed of an Atari 880 when running on a 486 33 and faster yet on faster PCs 486 and Pentium users can use the slou fast option to slou doun the emulator to normal speed to make games plagable or speed it up to allow graphics and mathematical programs to run as fast as possible XFORMER 3 8 PC Xformer 3 0 is a 32 bit implementation of an Atari 800XL 130XE emulator It does not run on the 286 processor and thus requires a 386 or faster By using 32 bit features of the 386 chip the same reason why Windows NT and 05 2 v2 1 also do not run on a 286 PC Xformer 3 8 adds these additional features which truly make it a complete 130XE replacement x 800XL I30XE memory bank switching x Player missile graphics collision detection X Sound card joystick port modem port and printer port support PC Xformer 3 8 runs on any 386 486 Pentium based PC with at least 640K of RAM and a VGA compatible display 50 only a small number of PC users will be unable to run PC Xformer 3 8 A sound blaster card and game card are optional Users of PC Xformer 2 8 can upgrade to version 3 8 for only 29 95 You can order directly from Branch Always Software PAVO WESS XFORMER 2 0 zer For additional information or to place an order write to Branch Always Software 14150
45. bit set to i has a further 32 color clocks giving it a total of 192 This information is useful in the context of horizontal scrolling because ANTIC actually fetches different amounts of data for a line when its horizontal scroll flag bit is set For a narrow screen the amount of data fetched for a scrolling line is the same as that for a standard screen A standard screen uses the same amount as a uide screen A wide screen however does not cause any extra data to be fetched for a scrolling line For the narrow and standard screen widths scrolling lines take their data from 16 color clocks further in than usual Thus you must arrange your data accordingly As HSCROL is increased in value then this hidden data at the left edge of the screen starts to become visible In wide screen mode the situation s much simpler There are no offsets for data to be accounted for as data is displayed as normal As HSCROL is increased in value then background color is scrolled in to fill up the gap at the left edge This is really of little consequence though a amp the extremes of the picture to the left and right are usually well out of visibility on most monitors and televisions WHAT NEXT Having seen how horizontal and vertical scrolling can be used all that remains is for you to make use of these techniques in your programming It should be obvious that horizontal and vertical scrolling can be mixed at will and it is very easy to produc
46. chmark used to test other Basics and compilers Notice that some of the program lines look like Atari Basic and others look like assembly language the REM statements are included in those places where BASM differs significantly form Atari Basic BASM programs are composed with a text editor supplied with the package The source file is then saved to disk and assembled into machine language A very small runtime package is then linked to the code and your application is ready to run The BASM system understands a very usable subset of Atari Basic along with a number of statements and conditions not found in Atari Basic See listing 6 Primitive commands like PEEK and FOKE must be replaced with their assembly language equivalent LDA LoaD Accumulator and STA STore Accumulator READ DATA structures are implemented by using the 6582 s X and Y registers as indexes BASM allows you to mix both Atari Basic and assembly freely where possible even on the same logical line This arrangement combines the simplicity of Atari Basic with the Power of straight 6582 assembly language in an ingenious manner Because BASM programs have an assembly like syntax the efficiency of compilation is Buch greater than that of either ABC or version of the Datasoft compiler Only the pure basic statements are compiled and the assembly language sections of code are incorporated into the program as in machine language This means that the speed of a BASM compi
47. d LIST are not Supported by either Systeri 14 This makes sense because of the self standing nature of a compiled program also note that the floating point maths functions such as CGS SIN etc cannot be used in either ABC or the integer version of the Datasoft compiler The documentation provided with ABC suggests a number of sneaky ways to get around it s lack of floating point arithmetic It gives examples of how to simulate fractions trigonometry and the RND B function without producing a compilation error ABC s 24 bit integer maths package allows a usable variable range of either plus or minus of B million so it s possible to scale almost any value to a convenient whole number Both integer and floating point versions of the Datasoft compiler offer a nice implementation of the RNDIB unction jt also allows you to utilize the RUN command as long As you don t include a filespec such as RUN DI PROGRAM2 EX Datasoft s compiler wont lei you use variable as line references such as IB X 30 Y 1 20 0SUH X GOTO YXx3 etc Neither can you embed DATA statements in your Atari Basic code you have to place them alj at the very end of your program preceded by either an END STOP GOTO statement personally like to keep DATA statemenis close to the corresponding READ statements because jt makes the programs more easier to de bug 1 also like to use variables as line references because it makes my c
48. des exactly into 4096 so any boundary will always occur at the Start of a line Rs every line reloads the LMS with the address of the next line the boundary has effectively been lost lf a standard width screen was used then at 48 bytes per line boundaries would rarely occur at the start of a line and so we wish to display memory contiguousl y from line to line there is no way of avoiding boundary problems Similary a uide screen at 46 bytes per line would also cause problems with boundaries Does this mean that to scroll correctly over a At byte boundary that a narrou screen must be used The ansuer is no the reason Why the wider screens could not be used in our example iS that contiguous memory is being displayed TWAVG NEWSLETTER CRACKING THE CODE continues from line to line however if we use noncontiguous memory for the display then ths problem is easily overcome There are two basic approaches which can be used to display a continuous image whilst crossing boundaries The most obvious method is illustrated in Figure 2 this has continuous image data starting at the first boundary and extending to just before the next boundary Once the screen has been scrolled into the last part of this image then the displag is suitched to the start of the next boundary By having a copy of the previous screen s image at the start of the next block means that the display will appear continuous as the next block is brought into view The advant
49. e a screen which scrolls in all directions over a background or landscape uhich is used as the basis to many games Of multicolour character sets make a world of difference over boring old mode 2 The use of DLI s to produce areas scrolling at different speeds or directions is also quite effective Just add some players and missiles and you will have exploited much of the power of these fine machines Above all experiment it is the only real way to learn NEXT TIME Yes this series will undoubtedly be back next time Over thirteen parts we have covered just about everything from binary arithmetic to a detailed look at the hardware features for multicolour graphics In the future we uil still hava some more mundane aspects of the hardware to cover as well as the use of the sound channels However the main area of discussion is going to be the operating system Editors note In part 12 of this series the word Luminescence was inadvertently substituted for luminance a small but significant error sorry for any misunderstanding it may have caused 8188 OM 9128 130 3140 3158 2168 3178 8188 319 9200 3210 0228 22 8 0248 0728 3260 3278 3298 3298 3308 8318 2328 3270 MI 3536 3358 2378 3380 3399 8420 8419 8420 3430 3448 345 8458 8478 3489 9499 0580 051g 8528 8538 TWAUG NEWSLETTER CRACKING THE CODE continued Text V SC HOL NO SCROLL 40 scan LINE 2 scan tines L
50. e has decided to icav it out iet me see nou the pieces are CODING CAPER zeen SPRING SYZZLE ROARX YABUTE BEATZ FRIZ SYZZLE2 CRYSVAR LIQDEM and the last is named TING SPRING is a Simple song using simple chords written of course by a Simple person Chords I hear you say but what are they Well Chords are a group of notes banged on the piano or plucked on the guitar simultaneously 1 a piano demonstration Rightyho Elgar lift right hand spread selected fingers and hold tips of fingers at same height quickly thrust down and baang Yes A CHORD was played It might be out of tune as far as we know but at least that s how a chord is played Later in this song there comes some so called Arpeggios someone told me how to spell this word this is where each note of a chord is played in quick succession So this example on the guitar would probably sound like frankly Hank Ding Ding Ding The rest of these short tunes have their own little peculiarities such like the SYZZLE ones these sound very strange like a few pieces of bacon in the frying pan being fried at different speeds Nou there s a high tech tip to achieving different frequencies in the volume only bit mode for all you intermediate programmers ROARX is also A distant runoff of an arpeggio style movement but each group of notes are from 3 octaves this way a strange bassline of whitenoise has introduced itself Whitenoise being something like the n
51. e file and the name of your target file the target file will become the compiled version of your program ABC next writes a copy of the run time interpreter out to the target file 1t then scans your Atari Basic program and translates it into P code one line at a time Finally the P code is appended to the Run time interpreter and you are left with a binary format disk file This file can be loaded and executed though Atari DOS using option L the original Atari Basic source program file is completely unaffected A couple of different Run time libraries are included on the ABC disk These provide a choice of loading addresses to match different memory configurations and DOS requirements There is also a clever little program called MKRELO that makes your compiled program re locatable a handy feature for commercial development lt assures that your software will run on virtually any Atari computer with enough memory THE DATASOFT COMPILER Datasoft s Basic compiler is a four pass utility that converts Atari Basic programs directly into 5502 machine language Because machine language does not need to be interpreted the execution speed of the compiled program can be very impressive PYAUG BEVELETTER D A SIC CON APII ER continued Datasofi claims a speed improvement of 5 to 28 times over an origina Atari Basic program Like Monarch s ABC a Run time support package must be linked to the Code in order for if to run Datasoft g
52. e program on a separate disk GOOD DIAGNOSTICS Dn interesting feature of the Datasoft compiler is the Line Reference Map this function displays each line number of your original Atari Basic program along with the exact address where it s machine language counterpart can be found The map can be sent ejther to the screen immediately a printer or a disk file for later reference Line references are very useful if you wish to de bug or and modify the compiled version of your Atari Basic program The error handling of the Datasoft system is also helpful problems that bccur during the execution of a compiled program produce a standard Atari error number along with the address of the instruction that caused the fou up 1f you prepared a line reference map of the program you tan determine which line in your Atari Basic program produced the error the Datasoft system also allows you to restari a crashed program at any point by specifying a new run address THE CATCH t would be wonderful if you could take any old Atari Basic program send it through one of these compilers and get a nice speedy output file Unfortunately things are not that simple both Monarch and Datasoft s products impose restrictions on the type of Basic code that cai be successfully compiled Listings and 2 show the documented programming restrictions of ABC and Datasoft Basic compiler respectively Notice that the program access commands Such as LOMD SAVE ENTER an
53. ect on screen mode Similar to a phone but your conversation s on one half the guy or gal you talk to is on the other half of the screen I found the guys on CIX very helpful to a novice NET SURFER NO I don t have shares in CIX I used COMPUSERVE at the beginning it s good has lots of goodies to download once you fathom where they are but it s VXEXRxY American and costly if you only have 389 1288 baud on your Modem Whatever service you choose you ll get E Mail For those who haven t ever used E mail the speed would be surprise Your mail goes as soon as you ve sent it the reply sits in your in basket for the next time you look for it SNAIL MAIL is the one you pay 9p or 25p for a quicker snail If there s anybody who needs more info drop a line to TWAUG my limited lvery experiences are at your disposal Jim Cutler E mail jcutlerfcix compulink co uk gt amarofwell com sf ca us Bear in mind that should you wish to connect to a Bulletin board say in Holland or Germany you pay the international phone charges If it has a TELNET or FTP facility you re paying at UK charges USE Cheap weekend phone costs PYAVO NEWSLETTER Mr Andrew MCINTOSH 21 ROMAN RORD BONNYBRIDGE STIRLINGSHIRE FK4 2DE SCOTLAND Dear TWAUG For Mailbag please include my full international contact address with this letter as it allows persons from outside the UK to write direct to me I would like to thank the foliowing
54. entioned The other programs he mentions can he tell me what disks they are on or better still can he send me a copy of them The self test vector at E471 is the only way that produces a clean re boot with no garbage data flashing upon the screen 11 check through the normal way the rom and all 4 k and 48k were found to be ok Can anyone explain why this happened and what does this poke do Does anyone know how to access the 192k extended ram in basic for 4 Mark G Rice 256k XL J can access the first 4 16k banks as in the 138XE but I have no data whatsoever on how to access any memory above the standard 138XE I think that the 3 XE memory is the highest available memory and the other 128k is somewhat below the standard 193 value used in the 130XE but I am unable to map this out properly I wonder if anyone can tell me if there is a version of Turbo Basic that is compatible with the old 400 800 machines and also compatible with SpartaDos v2 34 Does anyone know where I may be able to purchase a 6532 PIA chip Atari Part no COI 75 and also can I use a industry standard 6532 PIA chip instead of the Atari specific chip Does anyone know of any documented assembly language source code for 055 Atari Basic revision C Does anyone know of any documented assembly language source code for OSS Atari DOS 2 5 in the files DOS SYS DUP SYS and RAMDISK COM Does anyone have the documented assembly language source listing for A
55. f the 130XE Connectors for both types oi computers are built into the BLOCK BOX so no adapter boards are necessary A cartridge put 15 available on E board The Multiplexer selis for 199 95 for a master and two bue l units With cable Additional slave units are 89 95 each plus shipping handling THE SUPER ARCHIVER II E The SUPER ARCHIVER I edits and copies all enhanced P programs plus retains all the features of E ARCHIVER the SUPER is mg 99 95 plus RU NOTICE if T already have THE SUPER ARCHIVER upgrade 5 5 11 for only aoe ER Bag mag S pK jy ES used with the SUPER ARCHIVER the p writer is ny 19 25 pius draoa THE ULTRA SPEED PLUS OS should be in every XL XE ij computer The Ultra Speed Pius puts unbelievable speed as convenience at your T e a E A o use 3 any Dos to place Ultra Speed formats on your disks with KFSSE or modified 1050 drives reading and writing at this speed with most programs This high speed mode can be turned off for maximum ee Four simple solder connections are required for installation Af your machine has a socketed OS ROM The Ultra EE o5 is ba only 69 95 plus Rain l For more information on these and other 8 bit products COMPUTER SOF TIJRRE SERDICES PO BOR 17660 ROCHESTER NEW YORK 14617 USA EE ORDERING LINE 716 429 5639 S FAH 716 247 7158 BBS 716 247 7157 p co
56. g the adventure I saved it to disk and checked it s file size the neu version uas just uithin the bounds of the maximum file size for a single drive on the Datasoft compiler with only 99 sectors I then proceeded to compile the adventure with ABC with my single drive and 48k system I experienced no problems until the very end of the compilation it reported an error 156 point data length This really puzzled me so 1 called up Monarch and spoke to the author of the compiler he tracked doun the problem and found too many COSUB s on line 66 He also suggested an easy fix and promised to eliminate the limitation in all future releases My second compilation uas flauless the P code produced by ABC was only 129 sectors in length about 30 larger that the original Atari Basic program and the compiled adventure runs perfectly but of course a lot faster Next 1 tried compiling the adventure with the Datasoft compiler again using the same setup as ABC 1 followed the instructions in the user s manual and copied the system equates file to the same disk as my Atari Basic program then 1 ran the compiler Before the end of the first pass the compiler reported an error 162 disk full 1 looked at the disk from DOS and found that the assembler files had completely filled the disk leaving no room for the assembly itself 0 I borroued another drive and recompiled using a second disk containing copies of the assembler equates file and Run time
57. gh written in basic it is well coloured and the main grid is very clear as are the large character sei used DI the things from the board game are here plus more and yes you get a 50 point bonus for a seven letter word Being a PD title Friday Fun Scrabhle offers good value for money and is bound to appeal to most if not everyone THANK YOU MARK FOR ALL THE HELP QND SUPPORT YOU HOME GIVEN US OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS ALL THE BEST TO YOU AND YOUR WIFE FOR 1995 THE OL HACKERS ATARI USER GROUP INC O H A U G is an all 8 bit user group in the State of New York they are producing a bi monthly first class informative newsletter on disk The disk is double sided full of news Views articles and bonus games and or utilities The disk has its own printing utility which you can use to read the content of the disk on screen or make hard copies also A large PD available Library is TWAUG is contributing to the OHAUG newsletter and vice versa For more information on how to join why not contact the President of this first cless club by writing to A Pignato O H A U G 3376 Ocean Harbor Drive Oceanside N Y 11572 U S A JATWRUG Jn 8 BIT T W A U G P O BOX No 8 WALLSEND TYNE amp WEAR NE28 6DQ TWAUE NEWSLETTER ANNOUNCEMENT First of all we would like to wish everyone a belated happy neu year and thank you all for your continued support over the last two years We hope you will continue to give
58. grammer has not even taken the time to compile it This also became clear uhen I pressed Control during play everything stood still After a simple press on the reset button we could examine the listing According to John who programs games under the name TML the listing was a complete mess It was not structured and the extra capabilities and commands of Turbo Basic has completely been missed out For example you can load a binary file in turbo basic with the command BOET The programmer of Alien blast probably does not know that because he used a seperate machine language routine to do exactly the same effect Maybe it would be a good idea to send the programmer a manual of Turbo Basic think Alien blast is terrible Richard Gore should be ashamed to sell such a game commercially Combining a Basic listing which has probably been published by a magazine with a Basic type in listing of some music this is not a way to earn some money A terrible game like Drag from KE Soft is still much better than Alien Blast What a garbage Summary lien Blast Publisher Richard Gore Sold at DGS amp KE Soft Price 4 95 or DM 19 82 EDS ZANU C UST SUPE Te GAMES REVIEW continues Graphics s1 Sound 2 Playability Value for money Y verall DW Consiusion Should be thrown into the garbage can Overa conclusion am not impressed about these games and their supposed commercia qualities I know that
59. h unfortunately could be implemented only in machine language Because it has to be done in vertical blank interrupt in order to prevent jumping Don t worry all the routines could be incorporated in a Basic program but it is a littie tricky Remember character sets Just imagine a colourful redefined character Set that scrolls on the whole screen as a background for other moving objects Lets get to work In order to perform any kind of scrolling we need to play with the display list remember article 17 If you remember the fifth and sixth bytes of the display list hold the address of the begining of screen memory Nou if we change these values we change where the screen memory begins If we were to increment the numbers in a loop and have a line written on the screen we will see it scroll right to left and to the previous line and so on 8ut as I said before this is coarse scroll its not very nice The Atari computer has two Scrolling registers These scrolling registers cause a character on the screen to move pixel by pixel either up down or left to right Now if we where to change these registers to almost scroll one character and then increment the fifth and sixth bytes in the display list we will get a nice smooth scroll The problem is if the scroll is smooth and the scroll register is being changed in Basic the scroll will still Occasionally jump and the result isn t nice This is uhy we have to change the registe
60. have it use 91 alcohol see supplies VI RERSSEMBLY 6a Put the PCB in the bottom cover and snap in the plastic retainers on the side of the PCB 14 on World Storage drives If you kad hold down screws for the PCB reattach them Gb Put the rubber cushion back on the 4 motor resting pins with the flat side up before putting the motor assembly back look at the belt on the bottom Clean it with soap and water if it seems greasy Clean the motor pulley and the flywheel with alcohol and reattach the belt 6c Take the motor assembly and put it on the 4 pins so they match the holes in the housing 6d Twist the wires around a few times and attach jack J15 on the right rear side Twisting prevents RF 6e ttach jack J6 on the front right side 6f Attach jacks J11 J12 Jf JIB and Ji4 to their pins on the left hand side Twist Ji a feu times around This prevents RFI Ji is the motor jack It is sticking out a bit on Tandon drives 69 If you had cut the purple ground wire re selder it and put insulation tape over it You are now finished with the major part of the reassembly of your drive Plug the power transformer in to the drive tura it on and see if everything is O X and the read write head goes into the park position VII SPEED ADJUSTMENT Use DOS 2 6f black DOS or any other disk drive speed checking program to see if the speed is correct The 1858 is very stable in this regard and usually does not need to be adj
61. he charge pump diodes CRIS CRI6 They are in the middle between capacitor C7 and C68 They are clearly marked on the FCB Ue are NOT going to desolder them instead ue are going to clip them near the body of the diode so we have two leads sticking up for each diode The new diodes wil get attached to these leads The 3 Amp diodes have thicker leads and uould not fit into the holes on the PCB Beside this is the easier way cf doing it WW INSTA QN OF NEW PARTS 4a The first thing we are going to do is install the neu 3 Amp charge pump diede NS40 in place of the CRIS CRI6 I Amp diodes Cut the lead of each neu diode about 1 2 in from its body and bend it 98 degrees Take a solder splicer and fit it over each leg of the diode Slip the other end of the solder splicer over the old leads of the diode sticking out of the PCB The band of the diodes faces right solder the connections Do this for both diodes They both face to the right with the band 4b Next take your neu filter capacitors which are not wire lead types but have snap legs and see if you have tc adjust the legs They will not fit flush on the PCB but are about 1 8 in above it Adjust the legs so they fit into the holes of C67 C68 and C71 and solder them The negative band faces to the right on all 3 filter capacitors V CLEANING To clean the jacks contacts and 1 0 contacts use CREMOLIN RI and Diop See CN Oct 98 page 24 THE MAGIC JUICE or if you do not
62. him that my 8 bit with printer costs only 39 pounds Keep up the good work On request the name of this letter writer has been withheld REPLY am very pleased to hear that you can see an improvement in my spelling am doing my very best Bu it really isn t my spelling that needs improving I am fairly good at spelling and if I am in doubt about a word I consult the dictionary which is always by my side I also use a very good spell checker but the checker doesn t tell me when a word is missing in a sentence or when placed wrongly nor does it tell me uhen there s no capital Jetters after a full stop You cannot beat your eyes for proof reading but it doesn t help when your eyes are getting old and tired I do overlook some spelling and typing mistakes But what s wrong with one or tuo misspelled words among friends even the professionals make mistakes occasionally Max Hello David John amp Max Minor additional info to that nice book you published C 8 E M by A T In part 2 of the book on page 298 regarding free bytes location 653 26D is fixed to 252 tdec and is unalterable My 8 bit would suck if it s the only one that has this A feu other locations free for use not mentioned are as follows 651 28B vacant 693 2B5 vacant screen line idefault 255 read book for explanation on location 1817 3F9 vacant Additional info for free bytes as follows 47 2F used in Basic for PUT operation read boo
63. ill Hall ULTRASONIC SWITCH by Len Golding CRACKING THE CODE by Keith Mayhew GAMES REVIEW by Fred Meijer GAMES REVIEW by Mark Stinson GAMES REVIEW by Mark Fenuick ANNOUNCEMENT by TWAUG DISK CONTENT ADVERTS FOR R GORE MICRO DISCOUNT ACPC CURRENT NOTES amp PHOENIX 10 11 13 17 18 22 28 30 31 33 34 35 36 TM AHG WEMSILSTIes BASIC TUTORIAL ANIMATION 3 This is the third article on animation In this article I am going to discuss scrolling Since animation could be considered any type of movement scrolling could definitely be considered as animation Since we already knou about character sets we will see how to combine scroiling with Character sets to achieve animation What is scrolling Well scrolling is a technique that moves the contents of a screen up down left or right When the screen moves up or down this is vertical scroll and when the screen moves left or right this is horizontal scroll Either the entire screen or selected lines can move Space games often use both horizontal and vertical srolling The entire galaxy moves in the desired direction depending on the joystick This enables us to have a larger piagfield than the screen thus adding more realism to the game There are two methods of scrolling There is the course scroll which moves one byte at a time and appears jumpy this is only useful for fast scrolling The other method is smooth scrolling uhic
64. ing up to 4K bytes As with vertical scrolling it is necessary to arrange data so that boundaries occur at the start of a line Listing 3 is amp program uhich sets up a display list to scroll a single Jine of mode 2 characters in a continuous loop like a message board After adjusting the text string for display the first 44 characters are copied to just after the end of the message string this corresponds to the data duplication for vertical scrolling as in Figure 2 Once the VBI has been installed the message is fine scrolled to the left The coarse scrolls are counted by the variable POS When POS reaches its maximum value it means that the whole message has been displayed and the copy of the start of the message is now in view The LMS address is reset at this stage to point back to the start of the string which is identical to the image already being displayed so the loop can continue making the message look infinitely long Listing 4 is the BASIC program to read in the code for this program it is executed by typing X USR 24576 Course SCREEN WIDTHS The bottom two bits of DMACTL determine the width of the screen i e how many bytes will be fetched for a line of data The narrow screen bit 1 set to A amp bit set to I has a total of 128 color clocks in width The standard screen bit set to 1 amp bit 0 set to nas 32 more color clocks giving it a total of 160 Lastly the wide screen bit 1 set to 1 amp
65. ives you choice of two different Run time packages a high speed integer version and a Slower version tha supporis the ful floating point functions The compilation procedure for the Datasoft compiler is fairly involved after specifying the source and target filenames lhe program asks the user to select the type of run time package of either the high speed integer or the slower floating point version The appropriate Run time package is then linked to your code the compiler then studies your Atari Basic program and converts il into one or more Assembly language compatible files which are written to disk Next the Datasoft system loads a three pass assembler which reads the intermediate files created by the compiler and produces an assembly language binary object file which is the final executable version of your Dia Basic program Ali assembly source files remain intact on disk and may be accessed by Datasofi s DATASM Editor Assembler sold Separately for later tweaking by hard core hackers Datasoft s product is iricky to utilize if you only have access to jusi one disk drive because the assembler and output files must be written onto the same disk as your Atari Basic source program You have to be sure to leave enough space for them according to Datasoft this limits the maximum size of your Disch Basic program to about W sectors or La Users with more than one disk drive can lessen the limitation by putting the Atari Basic sourc
66. k for explanation on location and similar locations 1621 1023 3FD 3FF not used read book for explanation on locations during initial cassette disk loading operation see CASBUF Just a few brief notes I hope they make sense to all interested Thank You Amish Aziz SAU REVSLETTER BASIC COMPILERS FOR THE ATARI A COMPARATIVE VIEW Reprinted from Analog compuling issue 1H Apr May 83 ABC 48k disk by Monarch Data Systems lhe Basic Compiler 48k disk by Datasoft BASM 32k disk by Computer Alliance Originally written by Brian Moriarty The world is full of Atari Basic programmers listing for speed They squirm with envy as the desciples of C Forth expound the virtues of those fast and exotic languages They gaze with wonder upon Assembly language programmers who wield their mysterious powers at 1 79 mhz Why this insatiable craving for faster programs The answer is Simple Games Every serious Atari user has the secret desire to create the ultimate computer game A dazzling tour de force that would make Tempest look like Pong Unfortunately many would be Chris Crawfords don t have the lime to master more than one programming language and there s no need to quess which excruciatingly slow lanquage that one usually is If you ve ever been frustrated by the speed of Atari Basic then a Basic compiler may just be what you need The recent releases of three new compilers for the Atari offers Atari programmers
67. kably ugly graphics Sargon 3 1985 is a much improved version and for a time was considered the front runner in the chess wars The Atari version was done by Lynn and Alex Ford Decent graphics and movement is accomplished by joystick or algebraic notation This cartridge based game from Parker Brothers offers bright pleasant graphics and just enough features to satisfy those players without a deep interest in chess It is often found in PD libraries and though it lacks any distinguishing text it can be identified by its length 66 sectors An interesting aside this is the only Atari B bit game which shows pieces actually moving from one position to another In all other games a piece is moved by disappearing from its old position and reappearing at its neu position Joystick only Rather surprisingly this program by John Krause is the only BASIC chess program for Atari 8 bit 13 ULTRASONIC SWITCH By Len Golding Ever since man first poked his enemy with a stick the subject of remote control has fascinated the human mind You can switch on your TV or VCR open your garage doors lock your car drive model aircraft and a host of other clever things without Stirring from the spot But this armchair revolution seems o have by passed the computer world certainly the Atari B bit machines have a lot of catching up to do 50 here s a gadget to start us on the right road it s a simple remote control device which jets you se
68. lank vB UP Displav image m n M LOA STA LDA STA LDA STA LDA LLC ADC STA BCC INC INI TWX INX CPI BNE LDA STA LDA STA LDA STA H STA S 2 NO SCROLL NO SCROLL NO SCROLL NO SCROLL NO SCROLL NO SCROLL UY LOX LDA JSR RTS LDA AND 3E3 LDA AND BEG MP DEC BPL LDA 318 dt 8978 UPLDOP LDA j 1 f i ILNS YS 2 Save an instruction i DATA X PIERO DATA 1 X P1ERD 1 DATA 2 1 i PIERO Nove pointer to next line And its address 932 PZERO SKIP PIERO 1 Next LAS instruction LINES 3 i LP 4LNS 2 Last one has no scroll flag DATA X PIERO DATAS 1 1 PIERD41 DATA 2 x M21 DMA on with arrow screen SOMCTL IVBIASFF Install VBL 1VB1 256 l SETVBV interrupt STICK Test tor uo ar down aoveaent Hu d STICXA 12 DOWN YBEXIT COUNT Up decresent scroll aunt UFINE 1f positive then ing scroli y Reset count COUNT 39 Adjust all 38 zwa JATA 1 4 Ri E en ANJA EISES PTER CRACKING THE CODE Ganesa 3788 SEC 1548 NY Next character ingex 3998 SBC 132 1559 JSR ORDIGIT Print it i 1889 STA Ifa 1560 RTS eu 1818 acs USKIP 1278 Print single hex digit 1828 DEC DATA 2 1 OB PRDIEIT Cap 3504 1838 USKIP INX 599 JE MEIT Belem 3 5 ginu 1048 INX 1600 CLE Else add to yet cnar code 1858 INX 618 DC 4417 1858 CPX LINES 1b28 MP
69. led program can approach the limits of the hardware 16 I compiled the program in listing 5 and obtained an execution time of just 8 jiffies That s just less than a third of a second this is 231 times faster than Atari Basic equivalent Computer Alliance claims a more conservative speed improvement of up to 138 times that of Atari Basic NOT FOR BEGINNERS BASM is not as straightforward to use as both ABC and the Datasoft compilers You will have a hard time foliowing the 72 page reference manual unless you already know something about the 6502 architecture and assembly language programming It took me a while to grasp the syntax required for certain types of Basic variables and addressing modes More complete documentation is definitely called for even if it means raising the price a bit l also ran across a bug in the disk interface my review copy of BASM bombed out whenever I tried to execute a compiled program more than once this made it impossible to repeat mu benchmark test without completely re booting the system When Computer Alliance fixes this problem they will have a very impressive and very powerful Basic compiler IMPLICATIONS A stigma against Basic programming has arisen in the software market over the last few years The prejudice is based on the absurd idea that the quality of a program has something to do with the language it was created on The compilers reviewed in this article will help Basic programmi
70. n remove the 4 screws in the corners Slide the top forward ana out Place it aside Ib Next we must disconnect all the jacks from the PCB so we can remove the mechanical motor assembly The motor assembly rests on 4 pins with rubber cushions Lift the front to see it In the front on the right side of the PCB is a jack Mark it and the PCB with White Out so that you know hou to insert it again Remove the jack Do NOT pull on the wires but use the body of the jack to pull up on ic In the back where the power supply is there is a large jack on the left and a smaller one on the right They have to be removed The left hand jack is really 5 jacks next to each other and they will come out individually If you look next to the jacks on the PCH you will see the jack markings On Tandon drives the body of the jack is also marked On World Storage drives the jacks are corrugated and they are not marked The easiest way to mark uhere the jack belongs is to take a piece of masking tape urite the jack number on it and glue it around the appropriate wires Here are the left handed jacks front to back and the number of yires they have JM has 4 wires Ji has 2 wires J has 4 wires motor control J1 has 4 wires J14 has 3 wires Dn the right hand side there is a single jack JI5 Mark it and the PCH with White Out so you know how to insert in later on Remove it also 1d On World Storage drives there is one more wire a ground wire
71. nd messages to your computer from a distance of up to six metres If can add an extra dimension to audio visual displays n schools or staff training centres allowing you to step through a pre set sequence of tills or computer animated drawings at the touch of a brtton without any trailing wires lt can also be used to trigger any of the power control gadgets described in previous issues so you could switch mains or battery powered appliances on or off without going near them It can even be made to operate as a stand alone unit to switch appliances on or off without the help of your computer We ve chosen an ultrasonic system for various reasons H s cheaper and simpler than radio control and beats infra red on range cost of operation and susceptibility to extraneous factors in the outside world There s also no risk that it will accidentally change channels on your IR controlled TV or activate your VCR It uses a single on off channel but this is adequate for many purposes as we ll explain later Fig shows the transmitter It s a simple oscillator which can be adjusted by VRI to generate any frequency from around 35Khz to 45KHz so it can be tuned precisely to the ultrasonic emitter s optimum frequency Fig 2 shows the receiver which is a little more complex TRI and TR2 form a simple but powerful amplifier which converts the tiny output from the ultrasonic transducer into a respectable voltage swing at the input of IC2 This
72. nents are TRI TR2 1C2 and C2 The transistors will fit only one way round 1C2 has a small notch in one end as Shoun in Fig 5 and C2 has black chevrons to mark the Qv side All other components can go either way round As with the transmitter board the ultrasonic transducer 102 can be wired to a two way terminal block or directly to the PCB pads via extension leads When evergthing has been correctly soldered the tuo units must be tuned to work together This can be a bit fiddly Sf you don t possess an oscilloscope but it s worth the effort to achieve maximum reliability and range Start by plugging the receiver into port 1 and run Program 1 You should see the number i at centre screen If you get adjust VR2 until the number changes and holds there reliably If you can t get a to appear there s a mistake in assembly somewhere Attach a 9v battery to the transmitter board and adjust VRI to somewhere near its centre point Hold it pointing at the receiver about half a metre away press the button and adjust VR2 on the receiver board until the number on screen changes from to and the text window disappears This adjustment is fairly critical Now stand about two metres away and press the transmit button again If the number on screen does not change adjust VR on the transmitter until it does Repeat this dual adjustment procedure at about six meires distance to get the best possible response Programming c
73. ng become more respectable again For this reason alone I think that they are the most important pieces of Atari software to come down the pipe since Val Forth They may actually be more significant because they offer much of the performance of Forth without the need to learn a new programming language That means Atari Basic programmers can spend less time puzzling over stacks disk screens and all other unfamiliat concepts and more time improving the performance and the quality of their Atari Basic software I m quite happy to report that zero of these compilers mentioned in this article requires a licensing fee You can sell your compiled software royalty free as long as you include a credit in your documentation or program to say it was compiled on such a compiler and the contact address Atari basic compilers are about to open up the world of professional software developments to a whole new range of talented authors Let s hope the code they produce 15 as valuable as these three products LISTING 1 ABC s Programming Restrictions Unsupported functions ATN CLOG COS EXP LOG RND SIN SQR TAUG MawWeLervriann BASIC COMPILER continues Unsupported Arithmetic operators exponentiation Unsupported statements BYE CLOAD CONT CSAVE DEG DOS LPRINT NEW RAD RUN SAVE ENTER LIST LOAD Other restrictions Cannot use fractional non integer values Cannot use constants greater than 65535 LISTING 2 Dat
74. ntact T W A U G we Mhi do our best to heip TWAUG MIB SS SUAE DTE EDITORIAL Who to blame John Matthewson David Ewens Max Gerum The Editorial staff of TWAUG would like to wish a very happy and prosperous 1995 to all subscribers Good News for our readers For the last few months when I had a bit of time on my hands I experimented with new fonts to find the best one for the newsletter I Know some of our readers had difficulties reading the reduced fonts in the issues Starting with the next issue the print should be muoh larger and you will of course have more pages to read It will not affect the quality or the price of the newsletter The contribution fees for home and abroad HOME 1 COPY 2 00 DO COPIES 11 00 EUROPE 1 COPY 2 20 DO COPIES 12 50 ELSEWHERE 1 COPY 2 50 DO COPIES 14 00 REMINDER The book The Complete and Essential Map anyone unable to pay the ful amount of the cash price can pay in instalments whenever and whatever you can afford at no extra charge The next issue will be ready by mid March CONTENTS EDITORIAL BASIC TUTORIAL by Ofer Saferman end IMPROVING YOUR 1050 by Ron Fetzer CODING CAPERS by Andrew C Thompson PCXFORMER 2 0 and 3 0 8 bit emulator for ST amp PC INTERNET and YOU by Jim Cutler LETTER SECTION BASIC COMPILER by Andrew Mcintosh CODES FOR LASERMAZE SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER by B
75. o have very little compound on them remove the nut bend the IC a little forwzrd Clean both surfaces with 91 Isopropyl alcohol Put neu heat sink paste on them and reapply the nut This helps dissipate the heat from the IC The front left IC usually has some kind of insulating material square clamped to its back This is the TIPIIQ 06 Leave it ALONE 3b Next you are going to ground the metal case that covers mast of the IC s Cut a 5 in piece of hook up wire Strip the insulation from both sides Find another nut that fits over the right side of the screw that sticks out from 07 on the metal shield Put the wire around the screw and put the second nut on top of it Solder the other end of the wire to the side of the metal SEH This prevents RF from your drive 3c Next ue desolder the 7 big black filter capacitors C67 C68 and C71 On Tandon drives they have only 2 leads and n World Storage drives they have 3 leads 4 and a dummy lead You must desoider all of the leads to remove the capacitors I used the SOLDAPULT desoldering tool from Radio Shack see tools and found it quite effective After the capacitors are removed clean out the holes To clean the holes put a little solder over it and suck it out again with thc SOLDAPULT tool The old capacitors were 4700 uf at 35 volts or Jess The new ones we will install are going to be jarger 6888 uf 35 volt 185 degree C temperature long life high efficiency types 3d Remove t
76. ode self documenting statements like GOSUB NEWLINE more meaningful than GOSUA 2911 Hopefully a later version of the Datasoft compiler will deal with this common stylistic approach more realistically WHICH ONE 15 FASTER Speed is one of the main reasons for using an fitari Basic compiler To compare the speed performance of the Monarch and Datasoft products 1 wrote a short benchmark program that uses nested FOR NEXT loops to fill a graphics 24 screen with direct POkE s see listing 3 The hardware timers at locations 19 and 20 keep track of the execution speeds in 60th s of a second or what is known as jiffies The benchmark program was compiled and executed on a standard 48k system using Atari Basic Atari Microsoft Basic v1 8 disk OSS Basic A v3 85 and of course ABC and both version of the Datasofts compiler The benchmark program was run three times on each system and the results were average to produce the results in listing 4 The 5 280 times speed improvement claimed by Datasoft s integer compiler uas clearly justified Similarly ABC speed increase is about 7 4 times faster also right in line with Monarch s advertising The floating point version of Datasoft s compiler is not very impressive in this example it was not much faster than OSS s Basic Ou Prospective users should knou that graphics statements such as PLOT DRAWTO end FILL 1x101 will net be significantly speeded up by using one of these compilers
77. ointer 4318 POS nl Position in string 8328 COUNT trL Scroll counter 8238 iz 15809 l 0348 PLA os MI LA HB fon off DMA 2350 STA SDMCTL 0370 STA DMACTL 0388 AY 129 Correct strings 0398 LOA ISTARSUSFF 26 8928 Convert in 1919 ZACONV JEY 1943 JA PWAUG NEWSLETTER CRACKING THE CODE Centinuea OT STA PIERO 0418 LDA STARS 254 3420 STA P2ERO 8430 JSR CHCONV 3440 LDY IMESSLEN 8450 LDA OMESSAGELSFF 1450 STA PIERO B479 LDA IMESSAGE 256 0488 STA P1ERD 1 8499 JSR CHCONV HI LDY 43 Copy start cf aessage to end 8518 CPYMESS LDA MESSAGE Y 1520 STA CopY Y 0538 DEY 1549 BPL CPYMESS 1550 LDA SDLISTASFF Nom display list 0540 STA SDLSTL 9578 LDA 2L157 236 9588 STA SDLSTH 0578 LIA 0588 STA COUNT lero fine scroll counter 8619 STA POS lero position in string 628 STA HSCROL Reset hardware scroll 1530 LDA 3622 sy DNA on with standard screen 8549 STA SDMCTL l 9458 LDY QVBISSFF install VBL 0658 LDX VB1 256 4570 LDA d 8468 JSR SETVBV 8 98 RTS 3788 Vertical blank interrupt 4718 VBI DEL COUNT Decrenent scroll count 0728 BPL FINE 4 positive just fine scrolt 1738 LDA A Else reset to aaa value 271g STA COUNT 475 NC POS Increaent 20s1t on 3768 LDA POS 077 CAP INESSLEN At end 3788 3NE NEXT No go to next character 1799 LDA HMESSAGELSFE Yes 20 to start EH STA DATA 8818 LDA MESSAGE 254 2828 STA DATA 38
78. oise a pressure cooker makes uhen the spuds are just about done FRIZ is something completely different originally designed at a slower speed but played fast introduces violin and vocal sound affects listen to it and see uhat I mean Mou TINO and CRYSVAR are both short variations of the original tune CRYSTAL which came out with the Soundmonitor package Anyhow YABUTE is here for you to laugh your cotton socks off since it s my strange attempt to medievalism The last tune LIGDEM or LIQUID DEMISE appeared on my EGO demo not so long back aha you can see how it s made and then sling it where it belongs Anyhow leaving the subject of earache let s move into some headaches and give some quick answers to some questions that have come my Way Q How does one achieve moveable shapes greater than 8 bits in width A There are several ways the Ist is to use more than 1 PMG for the same shape a 2nd way is through software sprites self created and controlled uhilst a 3rd way would be to put your image in screen memory and scroll the memory There are always limitations but depending on the application use the most suitable method Q How would I give weight to an object meaning to slow something down to a halt and not to just stop it like as though it has crashed A One way would be to keep a speed variable SV and table ie TAUG REWSLETTER CODING CAPER TABLE 0 8 25 9 5 8 75 l 1 25 1 5 1 75 2 ka CO
79. order code DBPl2a and DBP12b Price 2 38 per pair Joystick extension lead order code AT111 Price 2 99 Available from R H Design 137 Stonefall fivenue Harrogate North Yorkshire HG2 7NS Tel 0423 506359 TWAUG US SS B Figure I Circuit for transmitter 038 OJ6 OJ9 Figure Ila The PCB transnvtter pattern 20 YAGO STET continued Pin Ping Ping Figure V Component layout for receiver Figure IV Component layout for transmitter 21 TAUG WEWSLSY Vi CRACKING THE CODE by Keith Mayhew Re printed by M Gerum This article first appeared in The UK ATARI Computer Owners Club later renamed MONITOR Part 13 The principles of smooth scrolling both vertically and horizontally were described last time The most important faci is that scroHing can be achieved without the need to move any dispiay data thus making it fast We continue uith some example programs that demonstrate hou display lists can be built for scrolling characters such methods form the basis of mang games but are also of use in other applications such as Word processors VERTICAL SCROLLING Any display list instruction which has its vertical Scroll flag bit set will cause its associated line on the display to be shifted upwards by the number of scan lines specified by the contents of the VSCROL register When a group of consecutive lines have their vertical scroll flag bits set then the whole region will mo
80. ould hardly be simpler Your computer thinks the switch is a joystick trigger button so the number in address 644 changes from 1 to Q uhenever the unit is activated You can use this to initiate a single action or build a step counter into your program which selects options in sequence when the button is pressed In this case it s a good idea to build in some kind of delay as well to avoid triggering unwanted options on the way through the sequence Program 2 shows a suitable system Hold down the Transmit button to step through the various options without triggering any of them and release it when you get to the one you want As it stands it simply notifies you that a particular Option has been triggered but you can insert extra code at line 118 to make it do something useful For example it could trigger one of the power contro devices we ve described in earlier issues to control models or mains appliances The power controller could plug into port 1 leaving port 2 for the ultrasonic switch In this case the address controlled by the switch will be 645 Software to drive the power controllers themselves is described in the constructional articles for each device 19 If you would prefer to use the remote switch as a stand alone module independent of your computer attach a 6v or Sv battery in place of joystick leads 7 and 8 ive to the pin 7 point and replace R9 with a 1N4148 signal diode wired with its cathode coloured band t
81. ould read this appendix and if you don t have the book then so be it on your head Well then folks that about concludes another different but partially helping and partially hindering Coding Capers Column PC XFORMER 2 0 First published in Current Notes Aug Sep 1994 issue reprinted by TWAUG with permission Six years after releasing the Atari ST version of the 8 bit emulator to Compuserye and GEnie we released PC Xformer 2 8 the same way free of charge and available on Compuserve GEnie the Internet and most Atari BBSs as well as in the CN library PC 1 PC Xformer 2 0 is a 16 bit implementation of an Atari 400 800 emulator XFORMN AER 2 0 cont That means that it can run on any 16 bit Intel compatible PC include those using the 286 386 486 and Pentium chips as well as PCs that can emulate the 286 PC Xformer 2 8 is the first and only Atari 8 bit emulator for either the ST or PC that support all these features x 48k RAM with built in Atari 400 800 operating system and Atari BASIC x Display all ANTIC text and graphics modes including GTIA modes x Display player missile graphics no collision detection X Handles display list interrupts IRQ and NMI interrupts x 256 colour GTIA palette x Reads and writes to ST Xformer and SIO2PC generated disk images x Reads MS DOS files directly x Switches Atari BASIC on off with one keystroke x Joystick emulation using the keyboard X Slow and fast modes of emul
82. owards IC2 Choose a 6v relay whose coil is 80 ohms or more such as Maplin types FX88U FM91Y FM89W or FX23A and connect it between the pin 7 and pin 6 terminals The relay contacts will close when the transmit button is pressed and open again when it is released PARTS REQUIRED FOR ULTRASONIC SWITCH TRANSMITTER Maplin Order Codes RI IK brown blak redi Mik R2 12k brewn red orange Mi2K VRI 4K Horizontal preset UH 2C C1 601 mfd Mylar marked 182K WWISR Sf Push to make switch R6 7X 1C1 TLC555C RA76H 101 Ultrasonic transmitter x PP3 battery lead HF28F PP35 battery FK625 8 pin DIL socket BL17T Small narrow box optionall FT31J RECEIVER R3 R6 1M broun biack green 81M R4 47K yellow violet orange M47K RS IK ibroun black red MIK R 18K tbroun black orange MIOK R8 18K brown grey orange MIEL R9 4 yellow violet red M4K VR2 18X horizontal preset UHA3D C2 100mfd 10v single ende FF18L C3 3n3 ceramic WX74R C4 22n ceramic WX78K c5 jn8 ceramic WX68Y C6 0 imfd disc ceramic YR755 C 22mfd Mylar marked 224K WW83E C8 Q Q1mfd Mylar marked 183K WWI8U JRLJR2 BCIBC QB33L 102 NES67 tone decoder QH69A 102 Ultrasonic receiver x 3 way PCB terminal RK72P 2 way PCB terminal toptional FT38R X Note the ultrasonic transducers are sold as a pair order code HYI2N Al components are available from Maplin Electronic Supplies P O Box 3 Rayleigh Essex 556 8LR Tel 0702 552911 Printed circuit boards
83. ower portion of the screen changes to show the whole alphabet underneath which is a line of consenants and vowels Move left or right then fire to select a letter your score will accumulate depending how many of your chosen letters are in the puzzle time I picked up my joystick There is no multiplayer mode and only one skill level This incarnation of Star Trek probably won t impress a hard core of an fitari computer gamer Its lack of challenge would soon relegate It to the I m very bored pile of games As for myself it will certainly be a long time before my next voyage on Sega s Starship Enterprise GAMES REVIEW by Mark Fenwick WHEEL OF FORTUNE You ve seen the show played the show dreamt of the wonderful prizes nou play the game of Wheel of Fortune on your Atari You won t win a car or f10 000 jn cash but you will enjoy it anyway Wheel of Fortune written by Chet Walters is another quality PD title from the TWAUG collection for 2 4 players Wheel of Fortune must be loaded with basic and the disk must be left without write protect otherwise it will not load On loading the game you are asked if you require instructions these instructions are very much in depth and include how to create your own puzzle files It s a good idea to check out the instructions first time around or print out a hard copy for later use should you decide to make up your own puzzle files Once loaded you re asked how many players and
84. q P ply kv AU iem a te LU a jum amm rid eena ones re K pa 4 Xo Newsletter of TWAUG luo pis tes der cn T T n a natae tr eg eg a he HN w v E Sof tware B Reviews mmm E Editorial k Bu y amp Sell ATARI Section USER TROUP E e Hardware mE Repair Info Public Domain Library ISSUE 13 JANUARY FEBRUARY 1995 rem ni L k eum BBYSLETTER BRING YOUR EIGHT UP TO DATE with power products from COMPUTER LER SERVICES The BLACK BOX is an add on board for the Atari 6QQXLSOGXL and 13 XE 8 bit computers It is a T shaped board that plugs info the PB port of the XL computer or the EC and itserf fer 130XE users The 8L ack BOX FS many unique and useful Functions he four primary functions are e jS T s X R 232 serial modem port E E s THE FLOPPY BOARD L M Seem enhancements 3 x Parallel printer port X SRSI SCS har disk port E with an 1 onboard te printer ON Spin and een extra Ma funetingsseand bale fj pres available fin fe tur 1 Sector editor 00 VM Miss c es PIX Ais ten of th BLACK om EXIPNCER revires oe sinple A Geck solder connectian Dag 49 25 plus shippi g handling gs sns inexpensive flopi first fl ppy drive interface to support high gt E drive mechanisms im either 5 25 inch or 3 5 inch Built into the FLOPPY BOARD are our BLACK BOX ENHANCER
85. rious information such as letters left shuffle option plagers letters and current high score Play is simple you must guide a black cursor via the joystick picking up and dropping letters as well as executing other commands are carried out by pressing fire So there s no cheating once a word is placed on the grid the following player must decide if the word is ok or not so watch your spelling If the word is ok then the score vil be calculated and displayed a the bottom of the screen and the next player takes a turn When playing the panic game you might find that there s not enough time to place your word in the given time as the timer is about to run out a sound wil indicate a few seconds to go A part word on the screen will not count obviously if it doesn t make sense so the following player must click on to No for word ok this will clear it from the grid and the player gets his letters back There s also a shuffle feature which counts as a turn where all or some of your letters can be changed by pressing the cursor on the shuffle square however you will not know your new letter until you next take a turn As with the board game play continues until all the letters have been used ihe winner uil then have his her name and score saved to disk for next time you can then opt to play again with more or less players 32 All in all Friday Fun Scrabble is a great conversion to computer format and plays exceptionally well Althou
86. rs in machine language during the vertical blank Vertical blank is the time the electron beam has finished drawing the screen and gets back up and starts re drawing it again Changing the registers in this period avoids the ugly jumpiness Don t worry if you have no idea what I am talking about I will supply the needed machine language routines that can be used in your program We still have to let the computer Know which line we want to scroll so we have to add to the mode instruction of that h line in the display list the value 16 for horizontal scroll or 32 for vertical scroll For example if you are in graphics zero then this is Antic mode 2 So just pick a line on the screen and check the display list instruction for that line you will see that it is 2 So just add to the 2 either 16 or 32 or both and poke it back to the display list The computer will then know that you want to scroll that line If you want to scroll at a higher speed it can be done but it requires some machine language knowledge to change the routine The principle is very simple instead of incrementing the scroll register by one you would increment it by 2 or 3 but not too much because you Could loose smoothness This is very dry and technical stuff so check out the programs which I included and you will understand the basics better E Don t miss the concluding part of this series because in my opinion it s the most interesting and important pa
87. rt Player Missile Graphics For any questions remarks criticism problems etc just write to me OFER SAFERMAN 21 BRANDE ST PETAH TIQUA 49600 ISRAEL IMPROVING YOUR 19050 DISK DRIVE by Ron Fetzer member of OL HACKERS AUG The inspiration and ideas for this article came from Ben Poehland recently retired A C Managing Editor and a member of OL HACKERS AGEING Most 1850 disk drives by now are getting older and showing their age Performance signs of age are occasional failure to format a disk failue to read a good file noise and sometimes inserting strange symbols into your text Before you make the upgrade you might want to check the Condition of your power supply Read the section DEVICES NEEDED and section VIII VOLTAGE MEASUREMENT This will give you a good idea of the condition of your power supply and if the upgrade is needed nce you have made the upgrade the 1858 wili be just like new again very reliable quiet and will last you a very long time There are two types of 1858 disk drives One is the TANDON and the other is the WORLD STORAGE They are identical in most respects and are upgraded the same way quJAUG NEWSLETTER IMPROVING THE 1050 DRIVE c t LABOUR OF LOVE You must have skills in soldering and unsoldering Budget about 4 hours for each drive upgrade This is a labour of love and 1 would hesitate to impose on a friend with this project The description of the parts position is
88. s another goal to aim for even if you don t always get to ihe bonus round l Overall Wheel of Fortune is the closest you ll get to meeting Nicky Campbell it s addictive as well as very entertaining With the added option of making up your oun puzzle files provided you have Atariwriter then there s little chance of boredom uhen you exhaust the puzzle files on the game disk and there s plenty to go at too The other thing 1 like is that when you come to load up again you re never confronted by the same puzzles with the clever way they re locked in Dos For the price of a PD disk it offers E entertainment for the whole family SCRABBLE Trying to get the family involved playing games on the Atari is no easy task some opt for shoot em ups whije others find strategy and puzzle games their pleasure So wouldn t it be nice to play a game that s both challenging and entertaining which involves the whole family What s the game I hear you ask Scrabble of course Friday Fun Scrabble by Les Howarth available from the TWAUG qWANS NEWSLETTER GAMES REVIEW enre PD library has all the attributes of it s original board game version but has those little extra s only found with your Atari Most board games when converted to computer format seem to fail in certain areas making you wonder why convert it at all With Scrabble however this isn t the case for a start you don t have to sit scratching your head or other parts of your anatomy
89. s predecessor The DMA is turned back on with the screen set to the narrow size which gives 32 bytes per mode 2 line the VBI routine is enabled and control is returned back to the caller During each VBI the joystick is tested to see if it has been moved up or doun 1f movement has occurred then the scrolling technique described above is used Note that a copy or shadow of the VSCROL register is kept in COUNT this is because the scroll registers are urite only When a coarse scroll js to be performed then all of the LMS addresses are updated by either adding or subtracting 32 After a coarse scroll the routine PRRDDR is called to print the new address of the first LMS at the top of the scren as a four digit hex string PRADDR uses PRHEX to print each of the tuo bytes which then calls on PRDIGIT to print each hexadecimal digit to the screen DISPLAY BOUNDARIES Just one LMS instruction could have been used for the scrolling region but this would clearly have caused a problem as the display can cross over a 4 K boundary If the display was to be limited to only one 4K block at a time then this approach would be suitable However because we want a continuous display regardless of boundaries it is necessary to use an LMS instruction on every line Choosing the narrou width screen DMA in this example means that each mode 2 line requires 32 bytes The consequence of this is that multiples of 32 give multiples of 4896 i e 32 divi
90. school Or some spell checker which one 1 am not that good at spelling either but when you re Jearning you notice all other poor spellers use an old daisy wheel printer with my 8 bit You would think that I could easily up grade to a fancy dot matrix but then old printers like mine can be picked up very cheaply They don t draw fancy pictures but work very well with word processors There s another advantage The print never fades I ve noticed that the work I produced only Jast year on dot matrix has shown to be yellowing I ll guess others will chant on over the disadvantages of the daisy wheel but the cost of its purchase 2nd hand outweighs ALL arguments My goung children have now taken priority over the 8 bit I get a look h when they climb into bed There s a vast number of games on the machine either cartridge tape or disk They seem to like the speed of loading with the Roms though don t complain when I help loading via the disk I guess that s something to do with my eldest who once posted a piece of paper into the drive It took months to figure out the problem and it still fails on the odd occassion I must learn noi to blame him as 5 years have gone by since l overheard a student beast that he managed to obtain a werd processar for ninety pounds J interrupted to inquire about the printer to gicat He told me there was NO printer with 117 12 I ETTER SECTION continued didn t dare tell
91. sts 4 04 Qc EL xYou will also need two 3 Amp diodes for each drive They are JN5460 Silicon Rectifier Diodes Digi key i1N54 8G The diodes are also available from Radio Shack 4276 1141 They are tuo for 99 If you have done the upgrade you can now pat yourself on the back for a job well done Your disk drive is now as gond as you can make it It will last a long time and you will nou have the peace of mind knowing that you have done all that is possible to do l This article first appeared in The DU HACKERS ATARI USER GROUP INC Newsletter November December 1994 issue Reprinted by TWAUG with permission CODING CAPERS by Andrew C Thompson And we return for another part of the programming column this issue being something completely different I m going to take you on a voyage of complete and utter insanity and a small break from too much programming Yes you quessed it I m going to play the piano totally out of tune until your brain for those who still have one melts out from your ear lugs There s a slight snag however we are not going to program musix instead have treated you to some completely origina works that have been lying dorment in my cupboards for about a year nou These pieces if you like 18 in all all have the filename extension 5NG and you ll need to load them into the Torsten Karwoth SoundMonitor Prefessiona to listen to them You should find that musix package on this issues disk unless Dav
92. t on its value as a souvenir The program occupies both sides of three disks Disk 1 side fi is the main interpreter the other sides contain picture data for the dozens of colour illustrations On Line thoughtfully provides a back up utility that lets you copy the picture disks which are subject 10 lots of wear and tear The interpreter is copy protected however Game play is similar to On Line s popular Wizard and the Princess and Mission fisteroid adventures The parser js of the simple two word verb noun variety multiple commands or complex sentenses are not allowed Each game location has Provisions are made for the saving and loading of up to 15 different game positions The program also lets you format an extra game save disk during the course of play a lifesaver if you are in a tough spot with no formatted disk handy The illustrations for Dark Crystal are supposed to have been digitized from actual movie stills Details and colouration are still rather crude certainly not photographic but the selection includes a number of dramatic perspective and Shading effects you don t often see in games of this type I spent the best part of an evening mapping out Dark Crystal I wandered through almost fourty different locations and exhausted three of the five picture disk sides Aside from a few unavoidable encounters with characters telling you what to look for nothing happened There were no threatening situations po puzzles
93. tari DOS 2 s lt DUP Utilities for the file DUP SYS Does anyone know of any documented assembly language source code for Turbo Basic I require verification regarding TW 4 243 CC 65 confirming it s full title and version number because I have been wondering if this version is the same as DGS s PD 125 CC 65 package that s on 5 double sided disks PWAUG NEWSLETTER Finally can anyone tell me if Optimized Systems Software Incorporated stil exists and can they supply the contact address I would like to get in touch with Mr Bill Wilkinson the Copyright holder of Atari Basic UOS 2 5 Assembler Editor and very much more besides or does anyone know Mr Bil Wilkinson s contact address Yours faithfully Andrew MCINTOSH IASI Industries PS ASI Industries is my computer hack name not company my Hello again Please find enclosed my subscription renewal Y enjoy using the Atari B bit used to Compose this very letter ve been meaning to put something down on paper for a while noy but a thousand other things always appear before my eyes The decorating the leaking plumbing you name it I also subscribe to other 8 bit info gatherers and am pleased to note that uou don t nag over lack of support but the opposite Think positive I remember it has frequently been drummed into my ears as a student I am also pleased to add that the spelling has vastig improved is it thanks to the local night
94. there is almost no new commercial software published nowadays but I think this junk only gives a bad name to the Atari XL XE I hope that KE Soft and DGS will stop selling these games as soon as possible About KE Soft For over two years now Kemal has becn writing n his German magazine Zong that KE Soft stands for quality He must be convinced that new programmes must differ from the software which already exists for the 8 bit before he wants to sell it He calls this the famous KE Filter Often enough other companies are blamed that they are selling so much Polish software and old Atari cartridges But now I am asking myself how large is the hole of his filter when such junk is coming through it He has made probably a very profitable arrangement with the publisher because I see no other reason why he should sell these programmes So here js a question for Kamal fin German Kemal warum verkaufen Sie doch solche slechte Spiele als Arena Bubble zone und speziell Alien Blast Fred Meijer GAMES REVIEW by Mark Stinson THE DARK CRYSTAL Dark Crystal is an illustrated adventure based on the Jim Henson movie of the Same name The object is to locate and restore the missing shard of a magic crystal before the Great Conjunction of three sons I haven t seen the film so I had no prior knowledge of the story s plot or characters My comments here are based solely on the inherent qualities of the game and no
95. throughout the entire screen regardiess SE graphics mode is on screen NEE EE HUE 1111580 640 141 19160 11 PESE HN DO ABE B un um LETTER SECTION Watson Whereas the cold start vector at E477 does produce this unclean garbage flashing upon the screen that makes me feel as if the system has not cleared any memory at all but just invoked the cold start start up sequence again While playing around with the bank select switch on my 256k XL at location D30ih 54817d I have found something quite strange regarding the self test for memory 1 typed POKE 34017 7 and the system jumped right into the self test mode for testing the memory The rom appears to be bad being a red color and it tested all 64k rather than the normal 4 k Since I was using basic at the time and Sk of the BO tested uas bad too When I pressed RESET the system just jumped back to basic without re booting the entire system as it normally does also the sound t st screen had the PMG crash effect Though upon returning back to basic the system had crashed or locked up This poke does not always work as it sometimes just locks up the system Upon retrying the self test memory um the type of dis assemblers I am interested in are uhat I call the Reverse Engineering Class programs Those that have a disk file output such as my oun Assembly Source Interface rather than just screen or printer such as the Diskmaster program John Picken m
96. ttack all about Both games are variations of the famous game Pacman think that everybody knows Pacman so 1 won t explain the game In Jaubreaker the pacman has been replaced by little teeth which have to eat all the candy in the playfield The four ghosts have been replaced by smileys In every corner you can find four powerpills When you eat one of those pills you can eat tha ghosts So as I said above it is an exact copy of Pacman In Mousekattack you don t have to eat the dots but you have to place tubes in the labyrinth When the uhole labyrinth is filled with tubes you go on to the next level The ghosts of Pacman have been replaced by rats when they touch you you Jose a life You can keep the rats at a save distance when ycu eat the cat symbols However sometimes you find that there are super rats that can eat the cat symbols The games are quite nice The large disadvantage is that they are old Games from 1989 were not made to the same quality as nowadays also believe that aimost everyone has an illegai copy of these games in their collection Summary Jaubreaker Mousekattack Publisher Richard Gore Sold at DGS amp KE Soft Price 6 95 or DM 24 80 Graphics 5 Sound 4 Playability 5 Value for money 2 Overall 74 Conclusion Should be made Public Domain Then the next game Arena The name will probably sound familiar too because the first levels of this game had been published
97. u have to shoot all the aliens before they reach the bottom of the screen There is only one thing different with the original version you have to shoot the aliens with your lightgun 1t sounds like a nice idea After some loading you hear tonly on a J3BXE a digitized voice saying Alien Blast The music sounds very familiar This ls not so strange as the music is known as Tico Tico it is a PD listing which had been published in various magazines At the bottom of the screen is a scroller but not a smooth one You see some text going from right to left in a vary jerky way The game itself is obvious a type in listing from some magazine Even the aircraft which has to shoot the aliens and would normally be controlled with the joystick is still on the screen In the first jevel you get 18 bullets to shoot 8 aliens This is far to few because you always wil miss the target a feu times Most of the famous Jightgun games Jike Operation Blood offer a moving cursor on the screen so you can see where you are aiming st Sadly Alien blast does not have this capability In other Jightgun games with no cursor you still see the bullet and where ii hit Alien Blast does not offer this capability You can hardly see where your shot hit Together with John Maris I have taken a look at the directory Mmm no Runtime Dbj but a very big Rulorun Sys and Autorun Bas Like the previous games this is another Turbo Basic game but the pro
98. ure to the younger chilren The program asks some personal questions first for instance your name the person s sex Male or Female the age of the person and finally it asks if you want a recorded message played That recorded message is of course Happy Birthdag a picture of a birthday cake with candles and a figure of a person is draun on the screen The third program is a drawing program You are prompted to enter some variation factors the rotational angle and colour Type in a number and it draws a graph which you can print out to keep D The fourth program lets you personalise your disks with a message up to 36 characters long and this message is displayed on the screen while the DOS SYS is loading Just follow the prompts and have a formatted disk at the ready The next program on the menu is a two player game which is controlled with the numeric keys You remove some matches from a pyramid gou must put your thinking cap on to beat your opponent The computer tells you at the beginning of the game who the winner will be sometimes it is the last one Uho draus a match and sometimes that person is the loser The next programe is some sort of one armed bandit kind of game The control of the ball is via the joystick plugged into port one The aim is to drop the ball into the correct section that is worth the amount you collected the ball from it can be a nicle or a dime If you drop it into the wrong section you lose a o And
99. usted The correct speed is 288 RPM for an unmodified drive The range can be from 288 to 296 without an adjustment TAUG UEWYSLAT VB IMPROVING 1050 DRIVE cert If you have to adjust the speed look for the potentiometer VR2 lt is just to the right of jack J1 It is a small rectangular block with a tiny screw on top Use a jewelers type of screw driver to adjust the speed to the right RPM VIII VOLTAGE MEASUREMENTS Take the black TIE POINT EXTENDER LEAD that you made previously and slip it over TP15 TPIS is the ground It is located in front of C68 and slightly to the left of it It is clearly marked on the PCB To the right of TPIS is TPI3 Take the other extension and slip it over TP13 To the left of TPIS is TPi4 Slip another extension over this tie point also You nou have 3 wires sticking out of your disk drive 1 black ang 2 others Take your Digital Volt Meter DVM or VOM and attach the ground probe to the black extension and attach the positive probe to the extension of TPI3 Set the range switch to 18 volts D C Turn on the drive It should read 4 9 5 1 v D C Nou attach the positive probe to the extension of TPI4 It should read 12 01 12 03 v D C These are not the most important voltages that you wil measure The most important voltage is the A C ripple voltage that is riding on top of the D C voltage gt To measure the A C ripple voltage get about a 1 uf 180v or higher mylar capacitor and with clip leads attach
100. ve together as VSCROL is altered Such a region is terminated by the first line which does not have its vertical scroll flag bit set The last line actually forms part of the scrolling region So the smallest possible region must consist of two lines one vith its vertical scroll flag bit set and the next which does not have it set The fast line in any region is displayed es only one scan line in height When VSCROL has the value zero then a region is displayed in its normal position with only the top scan line of the last line visible As VSCROL is increased in value the region is moved up losing scan lines from the top of the first line while bringing in data from the last line Note that no matter what value VSCROL contains the region remains exactly the same number of scan lines in height Figure illustrates a scrolling region of text and the corresponding display image produced for different values of VSCROL assuming that each line is normally eight scan lines in height Once a region has been scrolled upward by its maximum amount using VSCROL ie it is one Scan line away from the next line s normal position then VSCROL should be set back to zero whilst a coarse scroll is performed by adjusting the LMS addresses by addinq the number of bytes for one line of data eg 49 bytes for BRSIC S GRAPHICS mode Scroiling the image in the opposite direction is simply a case of decrementing VSCROL and then resetting VSCROL to its maximum v
101. write head Smooth it out with the cotton swab DO NOT use Q Tips or oil in your drive Q Tips are glued to the stick and when dunked into alcohol the glue then will spread over every surface you touch 9b Put Lube Gel on all the moving surfaces that eject the disk and are rubbing such as the tang that louers the spindle lo the disk etc 9c Take the cotton swab and with 91 Isopropyl Alcohol clean the read write head Sd Rotate the pressure pad about 30 degrees with a screw driver to expose a new felt surface The pressure pad is right over the read urite head and holds the disk to the head 1 16 in of felt shouid be showing below the plastic If it is uorn doun to the plastic replace it You can get a neu one from BEST amp CO 9e Clean the two 1 0 connectors in the back and the power supply jack with Cremolin or alcohol Qf To install the cover move it from the front to the back and install the 6 phillips head screus and tighten them Your disk drive is how reassembled Try it out and see if it works DE i y X COSMETICS On the back of your disk drive on top of the 1 0 connectors there is raised lettering Mask the top and bottom with Scotch Tape and take a permanent type black felt tip marker and gently swipe over the lettering Remove the Sotch Tape and the lettering will now stand out in black Mask the lettering on the front black bezel with 5cotch Tape OFF POWER ON Also put tape in front and the back of

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