February 2009
NEWSLETTER for February 2009 President’s Corner
Treasurer's Report
by Michael Current February 2009
by Greg Leitner For January 2009
Seems to be a quiet time this month. I've been hard at work on my 8-bit Atari FAQ. Primarily thanks to an Atari user from France. He went over the whole FAQ with a very fine-toothed comb and sent me a mountain of changes to make, from numerous typos (to my embarrassment) all the way up to great new information on SECAM versions of Atari XL and XE computers (not at all rare in France), the Arabic verion of the 65XE (not at all rare in that part of the world), and extensive details about the SECAM standard itself. Plus key points in the history of the Atari computer in France for my timeline section. A tremendous amount of work, but so much fantastic information! Plus, just working with the FAQ keeps leading to more new information to add here and there. The power of the web keeps making more information available as people scan and post images of various Atari gear that had never been known in this part of the world. Questions that I always had continue to slowly get answered and clarified as new information appears. Good stuff!
We really dodged the bullet for our SPACE meeting in January. The forecast was for snow all day on Friday and we were expecting 3 to 5 inches of snow on the ground by Friday evening. It didn't happen and we actually only received a dusting of snow so the meeting took place with six members present. Nothing going on in the Atari scene and most of any news these days are gloom and doom. People are losing their jobs left and right and those of us who have jobs are asking to give up some of our benefits so that we can least get a paycheck.
I also recently received my copy of Hobglobin, the new game from GR8 Software of Poland. Yes we had that on a DOM (totally legally) several months ago, but they also sell the game on cartridge, nicely packed with color box, instructions, and souvenirs. I'll bring it in for showand-tell some time. It's a very hard game!
Here is how things are shaping up for this year:
The good news for SPACE is that we made it to $1000 in December 2008 just before the room rent bill came in the mail. Now that the rent is paid for 2008 we probably won't receive another until December 2009. This means we have a lot of time to get our bank balance back up there again. I still have plenty of 8-bit and ST software for future auctions and we should talk about having another one maybe in March when I hope the weather won't be a factor.
Beginning balance as of January 1, 2009:
1,005.43
Receipts for the January SPACE meeting: Doms
+ 9.00
Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday February 13, 2009.
Expenses for the January SPACE meeting: Room rental for all of 2008
- 300.00
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Ending balance as of January 31, 2009:
714.43
So now that we are clear of the room rental for another year we only have the newsletter expense and the monthly Web-site expense for the rest of the year. Since we are ahead of last year's balance at this time I believe it is very possible to pass the $1000 mark sometime during the year. We will have a few more auctions this year and our membership count is holding steady. Just
keep buying a dom every month or whenever you can and the Club will do just fine. Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and let's all hope that 2009 will get things turned around back in the right direction!! See you all next month on February 13th. Oh great! Friday the 13th!!!!
Cooper of Paradize writes: Hi, Puzzledize...erm... Paradize brings you a new little Falcon 030 game called Jewelz. More info are available on the Paradize website.
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» Download Jewelz http://files.dhs.nu/files_game/jewelz.zip » Visit the Pradize site http://paradize.atari.org/
Secretary's Report By Steven Peck For January 2009
Well, six people showed up for the meeting, but it was enough to make it a good meeting. Lance was saying that he is marketing a new game for the Atari 8-bit called "Tempest Xtreem". Just out of curiosity, I went to the Video 61 website to check it out. I could not believe my eyes. The graphics were outstanding. Top-notch for an 8-bit computer. Lance also announced that it will have a killer soundtrack with it.
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 10:59 AM Subject: New C/Assembler kit ported to Atari New C/Assembler kit ported to Atari 2009
January 1st,
MiKRO of Mystic Bytes writes: Hi everybody,
The programmers took two years to produce the game. It was originally going to be released for the Atari 5200 SuperSystem, but couldn't release it due to the troubles at Atari.
I'm more than happy to announce the end of our effort to port vbcc/vasm/vlink tools to the TOS platform. Thanks to dedicated work of Frank Wille we've got:
Other that that, there was nothing too eventful at the January meeting. So, I will sign off. I will see you in February. Thanks.
- modern & superb assembler with nearly all devpac directives, i.e. you can finally use your fave assembler under any modern multitasking OS (i.e. FreeMiNT)
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- linker with many input and output formats - fully compliant ANSI C99 compiler that produces hell of optimized code
BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For January 2009
The whole toolchain was heavily tested on one big project, i.e. we killed quite a many bugs so you should get very well tested product.
If anyone has any comments, suggestions, ideas, or submissions for the 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.
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 11:01 AM Subject: New Falcon game from Paradize New Falcon game from Paradize 2009
January 21st,
As suggested, this toolchain is aimed to be replacement for bloated gcc/gas/ld toolchain which is quite unusable on anything but aranym/ct60. vbcc is lightweight package that runs fine on 4 MB machines, even without FreeMiNT (i.e. under plain TOS!) Primarily, it's focused to run under FreeMiNT, so I post here little tutorial for the first hello world, in case you're interested in making setup for commandline compiler/assebler under single TOS, feel free to contact me. So, the easiest way to compile "Hello World" under FreeMiNT:
1. go to the website (http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc) 2. download vbcc_bin_mint.tar.gz and vbcc_target_m68k-atarimint.zip 3. directories "bin" and "config" from vbcc_bin_mint.tar.gz copy into /usr/local/vbcc 4. create environment variable called "VBCC" with the value of "/usr/local/vbcc" 5. directory "targets" from vbcc_target_m68k-atarimint.zip copy into /usr/local/vbcc 6. tweak access rights for /usr/local/vbcc/targets/m68k-atarimint/include/* and /usr/local/vbcc/targets/m68k-atarimint/lib/* with "chmod +r+w" type "vc -o hello hello.c" and you should get Atari ST compatible binary! Please refer to the manual of vasm/vbcc/vlink for advanced usage. You can contact me (see my website) for Atari specific things or Frank in case you fall into some trouble. What? Did I hear you don't need new C compiler since you're happy with your gcc/g++ but still like the idea of having new assembler? Well, no problem! vasm is able to produce fully compliant a.out mint object files, so you can link vasm output with gcc, yeah! Beat this with devpac! What again? Maybe you would use the vbcc but the gcc offers cross compilation possibility? Well, vbcc as well! You can produce amiga, elf, atari etc binaries on amiga, linux, freemint, windows etc based machines! No complicated configuration, just run "make TARGET=xxx" on any machine you want! Hope you'll enjoy it, I was looking for some decent devpac replacement for years and now I got it! » Download the VBCC toolchain v0.90 http://files.dhs.nu/files_coding/vbcc_bin_mint.tar.gz » Visit the VBCC site http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/ ******************************************** ********************************************
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