March 2012
NEWSLETTER for March 2012 President’s Corner by Michael Current March 2012 Last month's SPACE club meeting was reported to be excellent, with a great turnout including a new member. Welcome aboard, Marcus! Over at the AtariAge.com Forums I've been very slightly involved with the discovery and identification of an early software project from Atari for the 400/800. I had recently learned about a software title Atari apparently announced at the January 1980 Consumer Electronics Show, a cartridge to be called Personal Finance. It was to released under the Atari part number CXL4012 by summer of 1980. No such cartridge was actually released, and that part number would be reassigned to Missile Command. I had added this information to my Atari FAQ List, including my speculation that this unreleased title may have been a precursor to the later (though still early!) title released by Atari, Personal Financial Management System. Well, someone recently found a unique 400/800 cartridge by Atari labeled Checkbook, with the very strange part number CXL8001. Inside the cartridge, chips had handwritten labels, "PERS FIN" and dates from February and March 1980. Finally, examination of the software code contained on the chips included the discovery of the title, Personal Finance. There's no mistake, this is a version of the mysterious Personal Finance cartridge once announced by Atari. A long lost Atari software project rediscovered! I don't usually get that excited about prototype software (there's often a good reason it wasn't worth releasing, such as it wasn't finished or working as intended), but it's fun to think that my reference to Personal Finance in the FAQ helped people make the connection.
Who knows what other forgotten, unreleased Atari software remains out there to be discovered? Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday March 9, 2012. **********************************************
Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For February 2012
One of our best meetings in some time took place at the February SPACE meeting as eight members were present. Sorry to have missed the January meeting as I understand that only three members were there. We sure made up for it in February, and we even had a new member join, Marcus, who came as a guest with my son, Tony, and Marcus seemed to be in his glory as he fit right in with the SPACE crowd. I even have to give Marcus credit for figuring out the cube game from the November SPACE dom that had the rest of us scratching our heads. Turns out it really is a great game and had the computer tied up for most of the night. It seems that SPACE members really want to keep things going as the February meeting shows: Starting bank balance as of February 1, 2012:
709.20
Receipts for the February 2012 meeting: Memberships and renewals Doms
75.00 18.00
Total receipts for February
93.00
No expenses to report Ending balance as of February 29, 2012
802.20
I had to pay for the room rental for 2011, but I had to call them to get the bill so I paid it later than usual and it will show up next month. That will reduce our balance by $300.00 to $502.20, but I expected things to be much
worse. Thanks to our never-say-die members we had four membership renewals and one new membership, and the dom sales of $18.00 was really a nice surprise. Way to go!! SPACE members. Let's keep the ball rolling throughout the new year, and we will show the world we ain't done yet. The fat lady may never sing for SPACE.
- the Supervision console. - the Oric Atmos. - the Lynx Console. The libraries are fairly portable, so creating a version for other 6502s shouldn't be too much work.
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Secretary's Report By Brian Little For February 2012
No minutes from the October meeting were submitted in time for this Newsletter.
This version is a bugfix release against 2.13.2. It includes about 40 bug and documentation fixes and some minor improvements: * Fixed some macro issues (cc65). * Static const local data goes into RODATA, not DATA (cc65). * Fix error handling in .LEFT (ca65)
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From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 9:11 PM Subject: Announcement: cc65 version 2.13.3 --From: "U. v. Bassewitz" <uz@spamtrap.musoftware.de> --Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:05:11 -0600 I'm proud to announce version 2.13.3 of cc65. 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
* Fixed problems with 80 column mode (C128 library). * Fix problem when converting function to void pointer (cc65). * Fix register info for several runtime functions. Result was invalid code (cc65). * Fix smbx and rmbx instructions (da65). * Fix problem with .REPEAT (ca65). * Fix an error in the runtime division routine (cc65). * Fix problem with alignments >= 256 bytes (ca65).
- the following Commodore machines: VIC20 C16/C116 and Plus/4 C64 C128 CBM 510 (aka P500) the 600/700 family newer PET machines (not 2001).
* The LINE function mistakenly enabled the BASIC ROM (TGI driver for C64). * Fix internal error caused by error recovery (or lack of) (cc65). * Fix invalid handling of signed int types in some cases (cc65).
- the Apple ][ and successors.
* Fix some issues with conio scrolling (C128 library).
- the Atari 8 bit machines.
* Fix and improve the code for compares (cc65).
- GEOS for the C64 and C128.
* Fix some macro issues (ca65).
- the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
* Fixed/improved several error messages (all tools).
* Disallow __asm__ on global level (cc65). * Remove final jump to RESTOR for all CBM platforms (cc65 libraries). * Add missing export for CBM510 platform (cbm510 library). * Fix problem with access to structs returned by functions (cc65).
ftp://ftp.musoftware.de/pub/uz/cc65/ More information on cc65 can be found on the cc65 web page at http://www.cc65.org/ There is also a mailing list for discussing cc65 related issues (programming, suggestions, bugs, ...). See http://www.cc65.org/#List
* Fix an internal error in the code generator (cc65). for information on how to subscribe to this list. * Merge back POSIX directory routines for the Atari (atari library).
* Several documentation changes.
While I'm the main developer of cc65, it is actually a joint effort. I would like to thank the target library developers, all the people on the cc65 mailing list, all those sending suggestions and feedback, and even those bugging me for a new stable release:-) The CREDITS file is probably incomplete, but you know who you are.
* Several documentation fixes and improvements.
Thank you!
* Merge back Olivers C interrupt handling code (cc65 libraries).
Precompiled binaries are available for the most common platforms. On many other host platforms, the sources compile out of the box, so you'll able to create your own binaries.
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For RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, ready made RPM packages are available. These packages may also work on other rpm-based Linux systems. Please note that there are separate RPMs for the compiler proper, the docs, and the target specific libraries. To develop code for one of the target machines, you need the compiler RPM package *and* one of the target machine packages. Be sure to download the documentation package if you're new to cc65.
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For windows users, there's a user friendly installer package (the one with the .exe extension). All subpackages are selectable from within the installer dialogue. The installer will also setup the necessary environment variables and start menu entries. It is recommended that Windows users choose this package instead of the .ZIP files. Precompiled binaries for DOS, OS/2 and Windows are available in ZIP archives. As with the RPM packages, you need the package for the development host system (Windows or whatever) *and* one or more of the target machine packages, plus optionally the doc package. All packages are available from the MU software FTP server:
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