[R-390] Progress?

[blw]

> Barry wrote:
> 
>> The first Atari had 16k of chip memory and used the first VLSI chip made
>> for home computers. It ran at 1.77 mHz.
> 
> Who said Atari?  The first ones came with a Combat cart which is where the
> ROM was and they were 2KB.  Most games had 4KB of ROM but eventually there
> were carts with bankswitching that went up to 16KB and more.  They had 128
> *bytes* of RAM and it's one of the most difficult machines to program for
> ever made.  Kinda like a *real man's* computer from a programmer's point of
> view.  In fact to this day, a certain number of young programmers coming of
> age like to prove their manhood by writing a game for it.  Funny, I got
> interested in the old radios as a way of getting away from the Atari.  But
> *NO*.  *SOMEBODY* had to bring it up.  ;-)
> 
> John


Yes, a Barry wrote the above snippet.

The cartridge is ROM only. Different from the ROM and RAM in the computer. I
think the carts went up to 8k and then bank switched for anything more. That
is why the super cart games flickered. The flicker was the switching of
ROMs. I was never into carts much except to get the data out and make boot
sectors so that I could run the games from floppies.

No, those computers eventually had 128K of RAM, but with the 6502 chip it
could only address 64K at any one time. This is kilobytes, not bytes.The
other 64K was bank switched. This was an 8 bit CPU chip, so the math only
goes to 64 something thousand (64K). You had 4K reserved for BASIC, which
you could kick out if you knew how so that you really had 52K of RAM to use.
I modified one 8 bit computer to have 256K and another to have 576K. You
were pretty much on your own back then when it came to modifying hardware. I
had to patch my DOS for the extra memory banks in 8K boundaries. I had no
idea if my patches would work but they did the first try. I was terrible in
hex math.

Funny, but I found 6502 programming easy. I learned ML. Trying to learn
Motorola 68000 programming proved too tough. I think it had 8 data registers
and 7 address registers. The last one was for the stack...I think. Plus,
breaking data into words and longwords was tough enough, but mixing bytes
and words did me in. You mean to tell me that you didn't like rotating bits
right or left?  My personal favorite was the WD fdc. Head step settle times,
etc.

Learning copy protection schemes pretty easy on the Ataris. The ST was easy
to learn. It's kind of a funny reminescience to see the music CD copy
protection being beaten so easily. It reminds me of the days of fuzzy
sectors, elliptical tracks, data under the index hole sectors, minus tracks,
branch on equals,  etc.  I never thought the copy protection for CDs would
last long. Same old story, different centuries. Folks will never learn.

I bet you are sorry you asked now!!!


one of the Barrys and I ain't saying which one