Time sure flies - heading into the past

Wow! March already. I guess I should make a post of what I have been up to.

Since the New Year, I have been kind of bummed out with my main projects. I felt it was time for a break, a metaphorical change of scenery. So, I have gone back to my computing roots and begun on a retro project.

I am attempting to recreate one of the Spectrum's classic games, Hungry Horace, on the Atari 8-bit computer. Originally, I was going to do this with a language known as Quick and program directly onto my Atari 800XL. I had not programmed in it before, and I had heard some really good things about it and I could see how much easier it would make things.

I began the coding, and all was going well, but then I got side-tracked (don't I always?).

On the AtariAge forums, I saw a thread where people were talking about their development environments. someone there mentioned a plug-in for Eclipse, known as WUDSN, that was created for writing in assembly to cross compile to the Atari.

I thought I would give it a look, and I liked what I saw.

To that end, I have decided to restart Hungry Horace, but this time, using the MADS assembler. I have never coded in 6502 assembly before, although I knew the basics, so it would be a good learning exercise.

Upshot is, in two days of part-time programming, I am about a quarter of the way through the project coding. I am very happy coding in assembly, it seems to make a lot more sense than higher languages. I have total control of what I am doing. I still come across a few things that I stumble across (such as only being able to use indirect-indexed addressing with zero-page addresses), but I am getting there. And using Eclipse, the WUDSN plug-in and MADS makes it a dream to code. I can honestly say, I haven't enjoyed coding like this for a long time.

If things go according to plan, and I get a successful game at the end of this project, I will almost definitely create some more Atari games (possibly the two official sequels to Hungry Horace to start with). As one of my other computers back in the 80's was also 6502 based (the Oric Atmos), I may look at writing some games for that too.

So have I given up with RealStudio and BlitzMax? Absolutely not. I will get back to some modern programming again soon, but for now, I am enjoying my time in the past.