SPACE Newsletter

NEWSLETTER for February, 2004 President’s Corner

Treasurer's Report

by Michael Current February, 2004

by Greg Leitner For January, 2004

Well, it seems to be a real winter this year, doesn't it? As I write, we haven't seen 5 degrees above zero for a couple days, and there's plenty of snow. Another thing I've learned this winter, heat is expensive! My energy bills have been stratospheric, as are everyone's I'm sure. I'm doing everything I can think of to keep it down as much as possible. I have another new Atari purchase to mention! I purchased a copy of the new game cartridge "Castle Crisis" by Bryan Edewaard. It's a perfect reproduction of the original Atari game, Warlords. It's a fantastic programming success, and it's FUN! 1-4 players are supported, using paddle controllers. More information at: http://members.core.com/1F/A1/bryede/cc/. He takes PayPal, so purchasing couldn't be easier. What do you say, next time I make it to a SPACE meeting I bring this cartridge along with two sets of well-lubed paddles for some 4-player Castle Crisis? Something to look forward to!

I was really hoping to see a good turnout to start the new year, but that didn't happen. Only six members showed up for the January SPACE meeting. Thanks to those who attended we still had a lively meeting taking on a new dimension in our BBS board. Nolan is working on a backup BBS, and he is going to monitor it closely as it opens up a possible liability for SPACE. If all goes well, the new BBS backup will be a great addition. Let's just hope a few doesn't ruin it for the rest. The first edition of the Atari super newsletter by David Sherwin was a big hit. I still have a few copies left, but remember you have to attend a meeting to get one. I hope David can continue to produce this newsletter in the future. He has the endorsement from SPACE. Now for the treasury report for the month ended Jan 31, 2004: Beginning balance for January 1, 2004:

978.10

I've been working on the 8-bit Atari vendors/developers list lately. I decided to finally make a push to eradicate all email addresses from the list, in order to reduce everyone's spam load. For entries with no web or post mail addresses, I tried emailing them for updated info. Most emails were old and invalid anyway. But there were a couple surprises. Did you know there's still an active Atari dealer in Fairbanks Alaska? Far North Atari Computers. Next project, a second round of sending paper letters to all contacts with no online presence. As with the last time I did that, I expect most letters will be returned undeliverable, at which point I'll delete the entries. But there may be a surprise or two again as well.

Receipts for the January meeting: Membership Dom's Total receipts for January

15.00 6.00 21.00

Expenses for the January meeting: Newsletter-8 months Room Rental-3rd & 4th qtr."03 BBS for January 2004 Total expenses for January

69.18 150.00 10.00 229.18

Ending balance for January 31, 2004

769.92

SPACE home page counter update: as of 1/30/04, 10:00pm: 1,238 hits since June 7, 2003.

We spent a lot of money the last two months but we are now caught up with our expenses. The most alarming and disappointing thing I see is the lack of interest in our Dom. Glen spends a lot of time every month producing the dom and if he only sells a couple each month how does that justify his time? You all know how difficult it is trying to find new material for the dom and I am sure Glen pulls his hair out some months working to get the dom ready for the next meeting. So please!, I beg you; support your Club and let Glen know you care by buying a dom each and every month. If you miss a month it doesn't matter because Glen always brings past months with him to the meetings.

Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday February 13, 2004.

Keep your memberships up to date. We are still holding at around fifteen paid up members. I hope we could get a few

more of you to show up next month and get this new year off to a good start. We only need one membership renewal and sell eight doms to pay for the room rental, BBS and newsletter each month. That seems very easy to accomplish. So what do you say? Let's support SPACE, and I hope you can start in February! See you then.

Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For January, 2003

The meeting started at 7:34 PM. Greg welcomed everyone to the meeting and then I read the minutes from last month's meeting. We had very good food from Applebee's for our Christmas party. The food cost $148. We took in $24 - $15 from a membership and another $9 from DOMs. We paid out 8 months of newsletter expenses to Michael Schmidt, our newsletter editor, in the amount of $69. We also paid out $10 for the BBS. Greg will be calling about the room rental fee of $150 for the second half of 2003. Even after the room rental is taken out we should still be at around $800. Our bank balance as of the last meeting stands at $987.10. Yet again, we had another great DOM. There are two or three graphical adventures and also some text adventure games. At the start of this meeting there were 15 paid up members. There will be another renewal after the meeting.

membership expire. For example, say a member had not renewed in 8 months. Should their renewal date stay the way it is so if they do renew they in effect have only 4 months left on their membership? Or since it's been quite a while, should they just start over as a new member? After much discussion it was agreed that members who are more than 6 months overdue in their memberships and that wish to renew, should be treated as a new member, with their renewal date being that particular month in which they renewed. The renewal dates of members who are less than 6 months overdue will stay the same. In both cases, members who are more than 6 months overdue stop getting the newsletter. ---------------------------------------------The Atari CD-ROM that SPACE just bought is only 1/4 full. Almost all the content are videos, which appear to have been taken with a camcorder. The rest of the stuff we have seen before. ---------------------------------------------I brought up the idea of possibly combining both the SPACE BBS and backup BBS into one. The backup BBS would provide such things as access to some of the major Atari newsgroups, a news server, a mail server, networked discussion areas, and other things. However, with this additional access a good point was mentioned - Do we want to provide this access with the possibility of someone on the BBS posting something they shouldn't? After discussing this issue, it was voted on to have a split logon so that when you connect to the BBS there should be a menu asking which BBS you want to be connected to - Either the main SPACE BBS or the backup BBS.

The BBS is going great. The Telnet BBS listing counter is now up to 967 and the Dialup BBS listing counter is at 406. There have been a total of 573 hits to the SPACE BBS website as of the start of the meeting. There is more BBS news covered in the New Business section. Continue reading for the details.

---------------------------------------------Brian Little mentioned that Retro Gaming Radio is having the first 4 years of its broadcasts on DVD.

Old Business: ============= The food for the Christmas party was great, but we probably won't be able to do that again for a while. Greg told us that when he picked up the food at Applebee's he got into a discussion with someone there about Atari.

**************************************************

Greg made sure everyone received the super-newsletter that David Sherwin put together. It was emphasized that it was only to be distributed to those members that were actually present at the meeting.

The best place I can think to start off would be by telling everyone how to properly connect to the BBS.

The idea was brought up to contact other Atari clubs that were listed in the super-newsletter.

New Business: ============= A discussion arose regarding members who had let their

---------------------------------------------The meeting adjourned at 8:25 PM. Welcome to the BBS Corner! Welcome to a new column in the SPACE newsletter! I hope to fill this space every month with news on the BBS, the BBS website, how-to's, and other tidbits of information.

****************************** * Connecting to the BBS * ****************************** To properly connect to the BBS you can use any type of telnet program. The standard telnet program that comes with Windows will work as will HyperTerminal. You can also connect to the BBS by telnetting into it from another system As would probably be the case if you would be using a real

Atari with a shell account. No special configuration is really necessary, other than making sure you have the "local echo" option off in whatever telnet program you're using so that everything you type isn't shown twice.

web site. Just before the last meeting the total number of hits to the BBS web site was 442; three weeks later, it stood at 544. Now the count stands at 668; a much higher jump in that time frame than ever before.

One quick way of loading up your telnet program and connecting to the BBS in one easy step is to put in the complete address that's listed on the back page of this newsletter into a web browser, which is telnet://spacebbs.noip.com/. This should make your browser load the default telnet program and connect to the specified address. Alternatively, you can just put in the address of spacebbs.no-ip.com into your telnet program once you have it up and running.

Other counters on the SPACE BBS web site are on the Dialup and Telnet Atari BBS Listings. Just before the last SPACE meeting the Dialup counter was at 343; three weeks later at 397; and now it's at 436. The Telnet counter was at 840; three weeks later at 937; and now it's up to 1057.

After a few seconds you should be connected. If you find that you're connected but not getting any response, just hit your ENTER or RETURN key three or fours times. That should get the BBS to respond. ****************************** * SPACE BBS News * ****************************** I have installed a backup BBS program on the computer that gives the SPACE BBS its Internet connection. This has been done so that there is something available for those who call in when the main SPACE BBS is down for maintenance or if it is down for another reason. Right now, it isn't readily apparent that the backup BBS has anything to do with the SPACE BBS so I'll implement those changes first thing, such as setting up a few messages bases and modifying the welcome screens just to get things going. *UPDATE* It was discussed at the last meeting that we would more or less combine both the SPACE BBS and backup BBS into one. The SPACE BBS is run on a real Atari 8-Bit computer. The backup BBS will provide such things as access to some of the major Atari newsgroups, a news server, a mail server, networked discussion areas, and other things. However... It was voted on that we separate the login for each. There will be a main menu when logging on to the BBS asking whether or not you'd like to be connected to the SPACE BBS or the backup BBS. The name of the backup BBS has yet to be determined - Something to discuss at the next meeting. Over the years, I have collected a large amount of BBS Express! Professional files. All sorts of things like games, utilities, documentation, etc. I plan on making everything available to everyone as soon as I can find a place to put them. After all, there are way over 800 files - Just over 16 MB. Stay tuned for details :) ****************************** * SPACE BBS Web Site News * ****************************** I have started to do more work on the SPACE BBS Web Site in the last few weeks and plan to update it often. Feel free to check back often – The address is http://spacebbs.atari.org/. One thing I'd like to report is the number of hits to the BBS

****************************** * Next Month * ****************************** Stay tuned for next month's column as we go more in depth on how the SPACE BBS (running on a REAL Atari 8-Bit computer) is actually connected to the Internet, as well as more news on the SPACE BBS and its website. Who knows... There might even be something new and totally unexpected :) -------------------------------------------------------------------If anyone has any comments, suggestions, ideas, or submissions for this BBS Corner column or the SPACE BBS web site, you may email them to me, Nolan Friedland, at the address shown on the back of this newsletter under the "CLUB OFFICIALS" section. ************************************************** A-T-A-R-I Answers-Tips-and-Relevant Information by Paul Alhart paulalhart@hotmail.com 1988.2 I am proud (relieved) that after a year since I released SEARCH SYSTEM II, no one has ever mentioned having any problems with it. For those that don't know, SEARCH SYSTEM II is an all-purpose, industrial strength database that can be found in our clubs 8-bit library. I have found two minor "bugs" in the program though. Neither will cause a crash or change your data in any way, so don't be alarmed. To fix these bugs yourself, first Unlock SEARCH.SYS from DOS, Go to BASIC, LOAD SEARCH.SYS, make the changes and save SEARCH.SYS back to disk. I will make sure the library copy is fixed too. LINE 110: This line should be: GOSUB 14. The other statements on that line cause the program to blow it error horn if "A" is pressed while at the main menu. I know, "A" isn't even a choice. I told you these bugs have gone undetected for over a year. LINE 204: In this line change X=1 to X=0. This causes the Directory to be printed in four columns for all your data files and not for just the first 7 files. LINE 328: This is not a FIX but a MOD. If you want the Cursor to default to ON when the program first loads, change C$="OFF" to C$="ON" Now ReSave the program and your done. Have an Atari Christmas and a Federation New Year!

March, respectively, leading to the launch of the game itself. ********************************************** --From: Steven J Tucker --Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 15:15:53 -0500 I'm happy to announce the availability of a new all-in-one SIO2PC interface that combines SIO2PC and ProSystem cables into one low cost, jumperless and auto-switching interface. Interfaces are available with real Atari SIO jacks, or with terminals. The SIO jack model will probably be a limited production, I doubt I will be able to get many more of the SIO jacks. Prices for the first 100 standard interfaces sold are only $19.99. Complete documentation for the interface along with photos and PayPal order form can be found at http://www.atarimax.com/sio2pc/ Steve ********************************************** LOS ANGELES, CA, January 2, 2004 – Further extending its already deep ties within the entertainment community, Atari, Inc. today unveiled another “convergence first” between Hollywood and the interactive entertainment company. Atari announced that it has retained Ridley Scott Associates (RSA) – the commercial production company owned and run by legendary filmmakers Ridley and Tony Scott – to produce an original three-minute live-action film inspired by Atari’s highly anticipated upcoming game, DRIV3R. The film short, which is the first of its kind in the video game industry, is titled “Run The Gauntlet” and will be the core component of both the DRIV3R web site, www.DRIV3R.com, and an extensive marketing and advertising campaign for DRIV3R being launched globally by Atari, beginning in late January. RSA, the producers of several of the original series of short films on BMWFilms.com, is currently in post-production on “Run The Gauntlet,” which was written and directed by RSA’s Sean Mullens, and inspired by the characters, plot and action of DRIV3R. The third installment in the DRIVER franchise, DRIV3R casts players once again as the original Wheelman -- undercover cop Tanner -- who must infiltrate a global car theft ring in an action-packed adventure that features Hollywood-caliber production values and a gripping, narrative story line. “DRIV3R is a unique property and we wanted a marketing approach that matched the game in innovation. Since Hollywood and interactive entertainment have become more and more intertwined in terms of content, it was a natural progression to expand that relationship to encompass marketing and promotion,” said Wim Stocks, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Atari. “With RSA’s tremendous talent and experience, we knew we would get an explosive film that would enhance the DRIV3R brand the way BMWFilms enhanced the BMW brand. And by bringing this original film to gamers in an interactive environment on the Internet, we will be able to deliver the same kind of immersive, adrenalinefilled experience that they get actually playing games.” While the plotline of “Run The Gauntlet” is being closely guarded, RSA, in collaboration with Atari, is producing a series of :30 second vignettes as preview trailers for each one-minute episode of the film. A rough-cut of “Run The Gauntlet” in its entirety will debut at Atari’s DRIV3R U.S. launch event on Tuesday, January 13 in San Francisco, CA. The two vignettes promoting Episode I will debut on www.DRIV3R.com on January 13 and 19, 2004, respectively, building to the exclusive release of Episode I on the site on January 23, 2004. Episodes II and III, and their corresponding vignettes, will be released exclusively to www.DRIV3R.com during February and

“To be given artistic license to bring the world of DRIV3R to life through our vision, is an incredible creative opportunity,” said Jules Daly, President of Ridley Scott Associates. “DRIV3R plays like an interactive movie, with richly developed characters, expansive environments and non-stop action. There are no boundaries in the world of DRIV3R and Atari put no creative boundaries on RSA for this project.” “Run The Gauntlet” and its supporting vignettes will be at the heart of www.DRIV3R.com, which will contain exclusive content that will only be available at the official site, which launched in late December 2003. In addition to “Run The Gauntlet,” the site will contain detailed character studies and renderings, interactive vehicle showcases and information, video content and more. Developed by Reflections Interactive (an Atari studio), the masterminds behind DRIVER and DRIVER 2 – which have sold more than 12 million copies worldwide – DRIV3R is an actionpacked driving adventure game that stays true to its roots, incorporating the cinematic gameplay and gritty street crime of its predecessors with ground-breaking graphics and three mammoth, wide-open city environments: Miami, Florida; Nice, France; and Istanbul, Turkey. DRIV3R is slated for release in March 2004 for the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system and the Xbox™ video game system from Microsoft. For additional information on DRIV3R visit www.DRIV3R.com. ********************************************** Hello folks, Abbuc has decided to do another software contest 2004. So, here is the chance for every Atari programmer to win some prices (money!). And some good news right at the start: Abbuc does not get the copyright of the contes programs, only the right to release them on the Abbuc magazine - so the authors still keep their rights and may do anything with the program after the contest... Now on with the rules, much more detailed than last year...: Rules for the ABBUC-Software Contest 2004: 1) General Rules: - Deadline: 01.August.2004 ! (=> Unconventional); - Prices: 1. place: 500 Euro + 250 Euro Bonus; 2. place: 250 Euro + 100 Euro Bonus; 3. place: 200 Euro + 75 Euro Bonus; 4. place: 150 Euro + 50 Euro Bonus; 5. place: 100 Euro + 50 Euro Bonus; 6. place: 75 Euro; 7. place: 50 Euro; - Rights: - ABBUC gets the right of a premiererelease on its magazine! - Quality Check: - Sorin Pascu (Contest leader!); - Wolfgang Burger (ABBUC chief!); - ABBUC members (at the Unconventional & ABBUC hp.); - Presentation: - author needn't be there/present at the Contest; - presentation at the Unconventional and ABBUC homepage, decisions and places/prices at ABBUC-JHV 2004; 2) Program Types & Size:

--From: Kevin Savetz - Program Types: a) Games(s), b) Application(s) (also Tools, Utilities, ...) c) Operating-Systems (DOS, Computer-OS); => no Demos !! => no pre-versions, no Alpha/Beta Versions, etc. !! - Compatibility: - must be minimum XL/XE compatible! (800XL, 800XE, 65XE, 130XE); => the support of extra hardware is allowed but this extra hardware mustn't be (!) a requirement to load and/or run the program properly; - RAM Size: - 0 to 128kbytes ! (min. 64k or max. 128k Ataris!); - Ramdisk (if any): - if so, must be 130XE compatible, standard E3,E7,EB,EF banks!; => must not use sep. Antic access ! for all XE and XL upgrades!; - Disk Size: - no minimum or maximum length ! (<=>1 diskside!); 3) Loading & Languages: - Disk Format: a 5,25" Atari disk or an ATR-image that contains: - a) Disk-File(s) or b) Boot-Disk(s) => no PC-Disks, CD's, Tapes or E-Mails with pure Atari files !! - Disk Density: a) Single (90k), b) Enhanced (130k); - Program load: - if Bootdisk: Auto-Boot with/without Basic !; - if Disk-File: a) DOS 2.x Autorun, b) Gamedos boot; - Language: a) inside program: english or german; b) description/doc.: also english or german; - Pgm. Language: - theoretically any programming language you know/have/like ! => but all programs (*) must be compiled or prepared in such a way, that they will run fine without the used programming language !! (* with the exception of Atari Basic & Turbo Basic XL listings); that was it so far. Many rules are self-explanatory, but for some rules you must keep in mind that Abbuc has 400 members and not all of them do have DD drives, harddisks, big ramdisks, etc. greetings from ABBUC - Andreas. Magenheimer. Ooops, I almost forgot - send your programs for the contest to: software<nospam>@abbuc.de or to: sorinp<nospam>@web.de or visit the abbuc homepage for more information (also available in english) and click on the subject "software contest 2004"... greetings, Andreas. P.S.: Remove the <nospam> place-holder when replying... ********************************************** --Date: 12 Jan 2004 00:04:30 -0000 --To: Michael Current

The full text of the classic computer book Assembly Language Programming for the Atari Computers by Mark Chasin is now available at: http://www.atariarchives.org/alp/ Published in 1984, the book is one of the best introductions to Atari assembly language written. Chapters include graphics and sound, input/output, and machine language subroutines for use with Atari BASIC. Several other books about 6502 machine language are also available at AtariArchives.org, including the best-selling Machine Language For Beginners (http://www.atariarchives.org/mlb/), Atari Roots (http://www.atariarchives.org/roots/), De Re Atari (http://www.atariarchives.org/dere/), and others. ********************************************** --Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 14:21:15 -0800 A version of the Atari 8-bit/5200 Rainbow emulator has been released for OS X. The OS X version of Rainbow adds an improved GUI and significantly improved sound over the earlier classic MacOS version. Please visit Richard Bannister's OS X Rainbow page to download the latest version. While there, you may want to browse through many of the other emulators he's ported to OS X. http://www.bannister.org/software/rainbow.htm [This news item courtesy of Atariage.com: http://www.atariage.com] ********************************************** --Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 21:54:32 +0100 I'm proud to announce cc65 version 2.10.0 ("christmas edition"). cc65 is a complete cross development package for 65(C)02 systems, including a powerful macro assembler, a C compiler, linker, librarian and several other tools. cc65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502 machines, including - The Commodore VIC20 (contributed by Steve Schmidtke <steve_schmidtke@hotmail.com>). - The Commodore C64 and C128. - The Commodore C16, C116 and Plus/4. - The CBM 510 (aka P500), a quite rare Commodore machine (programs run in bank 0). - The CBM 600/700 family (programs run in bank 1). - Newer PET machines (not 2001) - The Apple ][ (library support by Kevin Ruland <kevin@rodin.wustl.edu>) - The Atari 8 bit machines (thanks to the Atari team: Christian Groessler <cpg@aladdin.de>, Mark Keates <markk@dendrite.co.uk>, Freddy Offenga <taf_offenga@yahoo.com> and David Lloyd, <dmlloyd@atari-central.com>). - GEOS for the C64 and C128 (by Maciej Witkowiak <ytm@elysium.pl>) - The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) (contributed by Groepaz, <groepaz@gmx.net>. - The Supervision console (contributed by Peter Trauner, <peter.trauner@utanet.at>) (startup code and linker config only). - The Oric Atmos (this one is BETA!). The libraries are fairly portable, so creating a version for other 6502s

shouldn't be too much work. Regards Changes to the last version: This is a major release with many new features and (of course) bug fixes. Lots of things have changed since the last major release. The compiler itself got only a few user visible changes, but there are many visible additions to the libraries. Hardware support has been much improved thanks to the help of many contributors. Serial drivers are now loadable at runtime, which means that applications can support a much broader palette of serial devices (and can even support hardware that wasn't known when the application was built). Serial support is now available for more machines than before, so the Contiki team has something to do over christmas:-) Lots of new extended memory and grahpics drivers are available. To sum it up: Library support for more platforms and better library support for existing platforms. The assembler has gotten some nice enhancements: Better 65816 support, improved scoping, and the addition of structs/unions and other high level constructs. And last but not least: The documentation has been extended, the function reference is much more complete, and there are now docs that outline the special features for each platform. See the (almost) full list of changes below for more information. Available packages: As usual I will provide the complete sources and several binary packages, including RPMs for RedHat Linux. Linux is the primary development platform, so the sources do compile out of the box on Linux machines. Please note that there are separate RPMs for the compiler proper and the target specific libraries. To develop for one of the predefined target systems you need the compiler RPM package *and* one of the target machine packages. Starting with this version, the docs are also in a separate package, so if you want docs (recommended), be sure to download the cc65-doc archive.

Uz -----------------------------------------------------------------------List of changes for 2.10.0: * Assembler: - New .FORCEIMPORT command. - New address size override symbols (z:, ...) - New macro package "cpu". - New assignment operator := - INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE of the .CPU pseudo variable - New pseudo functions .SIZEOF, .HIBYTE, .HIWORD, .LOBYTE, .LOWORD, .BANKBYTE - Structures, unions and enums: .STRUCT, .UNION, .ENUM and .TAG. - New, improved scoping rules. - First support for far and near segments/procedures. * Compiler: - Flexible array struct members. - Provisions for handling arguments to main() - Rewrite of the type conversion. - New keywords (some of them only in non ANSI mode): far, near, __far__, __near__ - Slightly improved code in a few situations. * Linker - New directory search options. - Generation of debug info is now "official" (but the format of the file may still change). NOTE: The VICE label file will go in the next release, so if you are using it for some other purpose than feeding it into VICE, please think about using the debug info file instead. * cl65 utility: - Small additions to track changes in the tools called.

Binaries for DOS and Windows will follow or may already be available at the time you read this. OS/2 packages will again be available, but since there are almost no downloads for OS/2, so the host platform may get dropped in the near future (again). As with the RPM packages, you need the package for the development system (Windows, etc.) *and* one or more of the target machine packages, plus optionally the doc package.

* ca65html - New --linenumbers and --linelabels options - Ability to convert tabs to spaces in the output - Colorization - Can generate links to the C source files (must be generated by c2html)

Download: * Library For more information and a download link, please visit the cc65 web page at: http://www.cc65.org/ Mailing list: There is a mailing list for discussing cc65 related issues (programming, suggestions, bugs, ...). See http://www.cc65.org/#List for information on how to subscribe to this list. ----------Thanks to all who sent feedback and suggestions, and of course to anyone who helped developing cc65. I wish you a merry christmas and lots of fun with this new cc65 release!

- New directory functions for the CBMs contributed by Josef Soucek. - Joystick drivers are now loadable modules. The old statically linked code has been converted to loadable drivers and is no longer available. - Library support for the NES by groepaz <groepaz@gmx.net> - system() function. - isblank() is "official" in C99. - Arguments passed to main for several platforms (includes GEOS!) - The open function for the CBMs will no longer add a file type, so files of any type can be opened without changing _filetype. - Joystick driver for the Apple 2 contributed by Stefan Haubenthal. - Two joystick drivers for the C64 contributed by groepaz, one of them converted to c128 by me. - Minimal Supervision support (linker config and startup file)

contributed by Peter Trauner. - Several graphics drivers for the C128 and GEOS written and contributed by Maciej Witkowiak. - New ramcart extended memory driver for the C128 written by Maciej Witkowiak. - Two new Apple ][ TGI drivers contributed by Stefan Haubenthal. - One new extended memory driver for the Apple ][ contributed by Stefan Haubenthal. - New serial (RS232) driver architecture. RS232 drivers are now loadable. Drivers are available for C64/SwiftLink, C128/SwiftLink and Plus/4 (builtin ACIA). The latter is not tested because of the lack of an RS232 interface on my side, but since it is to more than 90% identical to the (tested) C64 version, there's a good chance it will work. The old static drivers are still available but deprecated. They will get removed in one of the next releases. - INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE for GEOS applications: Exiting main() now ends the program. Before, exit() had to be called explicitly. Please read the docs! - Full file I/O support and other improvements for the Commodore 610. - RAM extended memory driver for the CBM610 does now work. - New loadable serial driver for the builtin ACIA of the Commodore 610. - More small changes/additions.

disk format. Due to this change, Chris has had the opportunity to improve several aspects of the game, including more colors, faster draw routines, larger backgrounds, and more speech samples. Please visit Chris' Space Harrier Conversion Project page for complete details. http://www.sheddyshack.co.uk [This news item courtesy of Atariage.com: http://www.atariage.com] ********************************************** --Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:30:44 -0800 Version 1.3.2 of the Atari 8-bit/5200 emulator Atari800 has been released. Atari800 supports many computing platforms, including DOS, Windows, Windows CE, Amiga, Falcon, and more, as well as forming the basis for several other Atari 8-bit emulators. Improvements since the last release include: R: can now be hooked to a real serial port Various ANTIC and POKEY fixes Disk and cartridge info saved in the state files Cassette handling greatly improved Even more cartridges supported (40 now!) Some rare buffer overflows fix You can download the latest version of Atari800 as well as the source code at the Atari800 Emulation Page.

* Documentation http://atari800.sourceforge.net/ - Platform specific docs for the Atari, C128, C16, C64, Plus/4 and CBM610. - Much extended function reference.

[This news item courtesy of Atariage.com: http://www.atariage.com] **********************************************

- Documentation for ca65html (an assembler source to HTML converter) added. - Lots of other additions. * Other - New co65 utility that allows to convert an o65 file into an assembler module, so it can be linked statically. - Changed object file format. - Disassembler ready, documentation added. ********************************************** --Sun, 11 Jan 2004 14:24:13 -0800 New versions of the Atari 2600 emulator Z26 and the Atari 8-bit emulator AtariXLBox have been released for the Xbox. If you have an Xbox and enjoy playing Atari 2600 and/or Atari 8-bit computer games, then you'll want to check these emulators out. Z26: http://ps2emulation.netfirms.com AtariXLBox: http://ps2emulation.netfirms.com/atarixl.shtml [This news item courtesy of Atariage.com: http://www.atariage.com] ********************************************** --Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:32:11 -0800 Chris Hutt has posted a recent update to his Atari XL/XE Space Harrier Conversion Project page. This ambitious project aims to port the popular Sega arcade game Space Harrier (http://www.klov.com/S/Space_Harrier.html) to the Atari XL/XE computers. Chris' recent work involves moving the game to work in a cartridge, as opposed to the original goal of making it available in