Kay’s Atari 8-bit programming projects. https://www.savetz.com
At the end of each year, I write a letter surveying the computer history work that I did in the past year. I’ve been doing this annual ritual since 2016, making this my tenth letter. It’s true that I write these for my Patreon backers, but mostly I write them for myself: to take in the view of the grand forest of a year’s work — rather than my day-to-day view, myopic close-ups of the trees. I…
It’s time for my annual letter summarizing my computer history work in the past year. It’s an opportunity to take stock, reflect on accomplishments, and make a plan for the new year. My headline for 2024 was discovering and digitizing 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe , a radio program that aired from 1983 through early 1986. It included computer news, product reviews, and interviews. Except…
Well, that about wraps it up for 2023, which means it’s time for my letter summarizing the computer history work that I did in the past year. I’ve been writing these letters since 2016 , making this my eighth annual letter. I wish I had started this tradition in 1996, the year that my computer history efforts began when I launched the Digital Antic Project, which grew into Classic Computer…
Greetings from the tail end of 2022. This is my annual letter summarizing the computer history work that I did this year. When I wrote last year’s letter , I was in a bit of a funk. I wrote: I doubt I will be as productive in 2022 as I was in 2021 … I can’t predict how much energy I will have to devote to these projects in 2022. I need a break from so many interviews (each is more time-consuming…
It’s the waning days of 2021, which means it’s time for my annual summary of the computer history efforts I’ve made in the past year. I published interviews with 29 people across 28 episodes of ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast . Many of those interviews can be grouped into specific subjects that I gave extended attention to. Those subjects were: The Capital Children’s Museum and Interactive Picture…
It’s 2021. Thank goodness. I don’t need to tell you that 2020 was a horrendous year. I’m just glad that it’s over. Of course, the flipping of the calendar doesn’t change a thing, but the new year brings hope that the days to come will be better than the days behind us. The flipping of the calendar won’t bring back the 1,800,000+ people worldwide who have died of…
Hot on the heels of the poker game, I wrote a blackjack game for the 10-line BASIC contest. It is also in TurboBASIC XL on the Atari 8-bit, and also in ten 120-character lines. I borrowed the card shuffling code from the poker game, but otherwise it’s all new code. As always with these short programs, there were some space tradeoffs. In exchange for a wallet/calculating money, I found room to show…
My first entry for the 2020 10-line BASIC contest is a poker machine simulator written in TurboBASIC XL for the Atari 8-bit computer. At ten 120-character lines, it qualifies for the PUR-120 category. It is based on the common “Jacks Or Better” poker machine, although I changed the payouts to make it more fun and to conserve space. The game deals a hand of five playing cards. You can choose to…
Hello, it’s 2020, and time for my annual look back at the computer history work that I did in the past year. I find it helpful to make a periodic checkpoint, and the start of the new year is a good time to do it. The bulk of the year’s work happened at the scanner. I scanned a massive amount of computer history documents and uploaded them to Internet Archive . This material included source code:…
A quickie, final entry for the 2019 10-liner BASIC contest: GARDEN. Inspired by arjanvandermeij ’s #plottertwitter art “ 8 bits binary flowers ,” I wanted to create something similar on the Atari 8-bit. I recently learned how to draw ellipses in my work on Renderiffic , my SVG renderer for Atari 8-bit computers, and learned how to rotate shapes from Bruce Artwick’s book…
Use the joystick controller to land your LEM (lunar excursion module) on a moon. Land on one of the green landing pads. The trigger fires the main thrusters, pushing the ship upward against the moon’s gravity. Left/right stick movement fires the side thrusters for horizontal movement. A control panel shows your vertical speed (indicated by ↓), horizontal speed (→), strength of gravity on the moon…
My sixth entry in the 10-line BASIC contest is Bomber, a Kaboom! clone. It’s written in Turbo BASIC XL and fits in the PUR-120 category. You need a paddle controller and quick reflexes to catch the mad bomber’s falling bombs. The game ends when you miss five bombs. You earn one point for catching a bomb, and lose an increasing number of points for missing them. Here’s the code:…
My fifth 10-line BASIC contest entry is Bouncy, a throw-the-ball-into-the-goal game loosely based on “Cup” by Jonathan Freidin from the 1979 book “More BASIC Computer Games.” I have never actually played Cup, but read the sample game and code in the classic red book many times over as a kid. The goal of Bouncy is to throw your ball into the target (not a cup, but a line in…
One of the great features of the Atari computers was the ability to redefine the character set. Normally, the character set — the collection of letters, numbers, punctuation, and special symbols that the computer can display — is pulled from ROM, where it can’t be changed. But the Atari had the ability to look elsewhere in memory for the character set. Using that feature, you could create…
Back to my personal theme for 10-liner entries — classic BASIC algorithms. It’s hard to get more classic than Conway’s Game of Life. This simple game/simulation was covered so times from many perspectives in Byte Magazine, Creative Computing, and so on. I used the algorithm as described by Mark D. Niemiec in the January 1979 issue of Byte for my 10-liner. My program lets you edit the starting…
My third grade teacher hated me and told my mom that I would grow up to be a serial killer. (This turned out to be inaccurate.) She also taught me the dice game “Pig.” In our class, the teacher would roll two dice again and again. Students would add each dice roll to their score, and could quit at any time. But if the teacher rolled snake eyes, the game was over, and any students still playing…
I love the BASIC 10-Liner contest! I didn’t find the time/energy/whatever to enter in 2018, so am excited to write some short BASIC programs for this year’s contest. First out of the gate is Floody Bot. This will be an entry for the EXTREME-256 category. My soft overarching theme for entries this year is classic BASIC algorithms. Floody Bot started with the kernel of Maze Generator by Charles Bond…
Hello, it’s 2019, which means it’s time to look back on the computer history efforts that I made last year. In 2018 I finished managing the Ted Nelson’s Junk Mail scan project. Recap: from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, computing pioneer Ted Nelson collected catalogs, flyers, brochures, spec sheets, and sales slicks for products and services in a wide variety of industries. They…
My goal for 2017 was to interview 50 people for ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast . (That goal was a significant reduction from 2016, where I interviewed 146 people. I don’t know what sort of caffeine-fueled, adderall-enhanced cocaine I was on that year, but that was a crazy number of interviews to research, do, and publish, and I don’t intend to try that again.) For 2017, 50 interviews seemed a…
After I submitted the DESCEND game for the 2017 10-line BASIC programming contest, AtariAge forum user vitoco took it upon himself to improve the game . He made it significantly smaller and used a single MOVE to scroll the screen rather than my many MOVES in a FOR-NEXT loop. That change is so, so obvious — now. Having first programmed this game in assembly language, I was thinking like an assembly…