Posted in 2022
Atari 800 Winter Solstice Celebration Demo
- 23 December 2022
Every December, I try to make a little wintery demo to exercise one of 8bitworkshop’s platforms. This year, I chose the Atari 800 to test out the new native TypeScript emulator in 8bitworkshop. You can see the demo emulated here.
I revisted my Bally Astrocade “Happy 2020” Demo, which simulates falling snow. It uses pixel-level collision to simulate each falling particle, which creates neat little piles of snow and particles that ripple off the sides of obstacles.
Atari ANTIC Mode $F uses the GTIA chip to add additional modes beyond what the original CTIA chip provides. I used GTIA Mode 10, which is 80 x 192 pixels with nine different colors.
Displaying QR codes on 8-bit hardware
- 01 December 2022
It’s often hard to interface the world of 8-bit computing with modern digital devices. These machines don’t have USB, Wifi, Ethernet, or anything resembling a modern interface.
It’s interesting to think about ways older machines can communicate with modern devices using only hardware of the era – even if it might be kind of convoluted. One of these methods might be via QR code.
A QR code is a two-dimensional pattern that encodes a short string of bytes or text – often a URL. These patterns can be printed on paper, or displayed on a screen. If you scan the pattern with your phone’s camera, it decodes the pattern, and displays the encoded text or URL.
Mastodon and the Vintage BASIC Bot
- 14 November 2022
Mastodon has gained popularity as an alternative to commercial social media, especially within the #retrocomputing community. Even 8bitworkshop is on Mastodon, so feel free to follow!
Just post @8bitworkshop@oldbytes.space into your search bar.
One feature of the “other” social media network (affectionally known as “Birdsite” on Mastodon) is the presence of bots.
8bitworkshop 3.10.0 Release
- 03 October 2022
It’s been awhile since we had a proper IDE release. Here’s what’s new in 3.10.0:
New Atari PCS Emulator – The old Atari 800 emulator relied upon MAME, which was adequate but lacking in performance and debuggability. The new emulator is written in TypeScript, is cycle-accurate 1 and runs most cartridge-based games pretty well. It can even load certain well-behaved XEX files.