Code Faster With The Atari Dev Studio | 8Blit

give a man an atari game and  he'll turn into a little boy   but don't worry he'll be  grown up enough to share it This video is Copyright (c) Kyle Reiach https:\\www.8blit.com welcome to eight blit in this episode  we'll explore a little bit about how   the atari vcs games are made in the past and  how we can upgrade our current process using   a free integrated development environment  along with a really great extension i hope   you'll stick around as we're introduced to  visual studio code and the atari dev studio   when the atari vcs first hit store shelves in  september of 1977 it sold over half a million   units in the first year with only nine games  available in its library at launch however by the   end of 1979 the vcs had a customer base of over 2  million units with an extended library of 36 games   over the next decade or so this expanded to  over 30 million units and literally hundreds   of available games since the atari vcs was  discontinued in 1992 the homebrew scene took   over the development of new games for the system  with over a couple hundred releases over the years   many of which are available to purchase  on cartridges from the atari age website   i'll include a link in the description some  developers create for the vcs out of nostalgia   creating games for the first game console  they had growing up spending countless   hours playing with family and friends others do it  for the challenge working with extremely limited   resources on hardware meant only for simple games  pushing the limits of a system over 40 years old   whatever your reason programming  for the vcs can be baffling   even frustrating at times but in the end it  can be very worthwhile and rewarding endeavor   when you finally create a stable screen draw  your first graphic start creating a new game you   become part of the history a part of the future  and a steward of the legacy of the atari vcs   if you google the language originally  used to program games for the vcs   you get some confusing results some people say  the c language was used another person insists   that they were programmed in atari basic but  the majority consensus is on assembly language   while c is an extremely flexible language and is  certainly used to program for the 6502 and 6507   processors the output of a purely c implementation  would not be precise enough for most vcs games   the vcs requires precision timing due to the  hardware limitations so in order to do this   the c implementation would most likely be an  outer wrapper for embedded assembly instructions   and therefore more assembly language than c  language atari basic however was not feasible   as it used an interpreter to run basic code rather  than compiling the code into machine language   that the 6502 processor executes atari basic  was available in 1979 but it was first used   with the atari 8-bit line of computers and  required its own cartridge to run the programs   assembly language however gives you the ability  to control exactly what the processor is doing   which is essential to minimize the number of  machine cycles your code uses to perform each task   such as drawing your player graphics and other  game operations in order to not only fit as   much into the limited time you have but also  squeeze the game into a small cartridge size   which was only two kilobytes when the vcs was  first released what do you think am i way off   what are your thoughts let me know in the comments  originally vcs games would have been programmed   on one machine sent to another machine with a  cross compiler and the binary sent somewhere else   to burn a test rom to insert into a cartridge  and then insert it into vcs hardware if there   was a bug then you'd review the code make your  corrections then start the whole process again   these days we're privileged enough to have  access to several free tools for the vcs   that enable us to build  test in a matter of seconds   we already have experience writing our code in  a text editor compiling it from the command line   with the d8 asm assembler and testing our creation  within the stella emulator this is a great process   and certainly more streamlined than the original  vcs developers had at their disposal however there   are some tools out there that make it even  easier one such tool is the atari dev studio   released in 2019 atari dev studio was described  as a one-stop shop for any programmer that is   programmers wanting to develop for the atari 2600  or 7800 which if you're here i imagine that's you   atari dev studio is an extension for  microsoft's cross-platform visual   studio code and comes packaged with the  batari basic and 7800 basic compilers   and the dasm assemblers as well as the  stella and a7800 emulators all of these   are automatically installed for you and set up  when you add the extension it features syntax   highlighting a very handy reference tool a  sprite editor and other bells and whistles   but enough talking about it let's have a look at  how to set it up compile and execute a program   the first thing you'll need is visual studio code  which is available to download free for windows   linux and mac os i'll include a link  to the website in the video description   after you've downloaded and installed visual  studio code open up the application let's start by   downloading all the eight lit examples from github  we'll do this by cloning the 8-bit repository   just click on clone git repository and then  in the location box above we're going to   paste the 8-blit repository url which will  also be included in the video description   a window will pop up where we can select in  which folder we want to clone the repository   i'm going to use my current working folder but  you can select any other folder on your machine   once you have your folder selected  click select repository location   visual studio code will start pulling all the  files from the repository since the examples   are all small text files this should be completed  quickly when it's done you can click on the open   button to have visual studio code open the clone  repository in the explorer bar we can see a folder   for each of the previous episodes let's open  up one of the examples from the last episode in the code tab we can see the assembler source  code and we can scroll through it using the scroll   bar on the right at this point visual studio  code doesn't know what to do with our code   which we can see when we try to run it currently it thinks we've opened up a plain text  file we can see this down at the bottom left   of the screen but here we can select what our  file is but if we look at the available types   none of them are for the dasm assembler up at  the top of the list we can search the visual   studio code marketplace for extensions that can  handle files with the asm extension as you can   see there are lots of available extensions for  assembly language but the one we're looking for   today is the atari dev studio clicking on  the extension will bring up an information   page and from there you can click on the install  button when it's done installing we can go back   to our example code and see that it now features  syntax highlighting making it much easier to read   and the file type is now set to dasm plus if  we hover over an instruction a handy pop-up   window shows us additional information about  each of the 6502 instructions such as the name   the direction the data flows what processor  status flags it affects along with the different   addressing options the number of bytes that  instruction uses and the number of machine   cycles it takes to execute for each addressing  mode we can try compiling the example using the   little play button on the bottom bar this will  pass the code to the dasm assembler and show   the results of the build in the output window the  atari dev studio also includes the stella emulator   which we can automatically launch after building  our code by clicking on the little rocket icon when it comes time to draw your graphics  you can use the built-in sprite editor   create a new project to define what console  you're using the dimensions of the graphic   the region palette you want and how many colors  to use for the atari 2600 one is the only option   you can set the background color for the editor  to make sure your background and sprite graphics   will look good together for this sprite i'm  going to choose a foreground color of blue   select the draw tool and then  start drawing a character   that might look familiar to you if you make a  mistake you can use the erase tool to clean up that we have our first sprite  i'm going to duplicate it   and then modify the new copy to create  two frames for an animated character we can save our project to work  on later as well as our palette most importantly we can export our sprite into  several different formats depending on the   technology you're using to build your game opening  up our saved file we can see there's a data table   for two sprites in bottom to top orientation if we  copy the first one paste it into our example file add a zeroed byte at the top and then click on the  little rocket icon to assemble and launch stella   we have ourselves our very own ghost from this  pac-man overall the atari dev studio is a solid   extension for visual studio code it's easy to use  not overly bloated with features you never ask for   and it's well supported i recommend you give it a  try and please let me know what you think in the   comments i want to thank every one of you for your  continued support if i piqued your interest in   developing for the atari vcs or if you found this  video interesting please let me know with a like   share a comment or all of the above if you  haven't already done so please consider   subscribing to the channel to keep updated when  new videos come out the example code for this   episode and all previous episodes are available  on our github which is linked in the description   as always thanks for watching  and i'll catch you next time man look at those legs and get a load of  that veneer she could turn up my volume

Channel: 8Blit

Views: 476

Keywords: Atari, Atari VCS, Atari 2600, atari dev studio, 8blit

Id: fZu8dxS1ARw

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021