In many ways, it is more of a writing platform than an editor. It comes fully equipped with an interconnected system of amazing features including a fully integrated dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus, among other tools needed to come up with the best wording for your music, story, or thought. That's OK, we can abbreviate these without changing the functionality of the program.Masterwriter is a software designed to provide songwriters, authors, and screenwriters with the necessary tools for writing. ![]() "Goto" is one symbol but four characters. The only tricky part is that many of the Atari 2600 BASIC symbols are comprised of multiple characters, i.e. Since Atari 2600 BASIC programs are limited to 64 symbols they will almost always fit into a tweet. The challenge is increased further by preserving space to support # and tags. In any programming language it's an interesting challenge to fit an entire functional program into under 140 characters. However, this experiment has led me to an almost worthwhile application - sharing Atari 2600 BASIC programs. It's the modern equivalent of covering your car with bumper stickers. If my previous comment about Twitter and burritos wasn't transparent enough I'll cut directly to the chase - I have a very difficult time imagining a practical use for Twitter.Īs far as I can tell the main purpose is to feed people's sense of self-importance. Let's start with something simple, moving one of the dots around with the keypad:Īlthough that only uses five lines it exhausts nearly all available symbols which obviously limits the gaming possibilities. I'm not going to include a tutorial or the sample programs from the manual, those are perfectly findable on the Google. It's just text and dots anyway, you're not missing much. So you're not going to get a lot of pictures. See how they compare to taking a snapshot in Stella: The downside to doing this on the DS is that the screenshots look terrible. If you ever feel insane enough to try Atari 2600 BASIC Programming this is definitely the way to go. It had to be a lot of work to accomplish this and it's sad to think that I'm probably the only person on earth who used it for more than 30 seconds. Some madman actually took the time to emulate the dual keypads on the DS touchscreen: What works amazingly well though is the version that was included on Atari's Greatest Hits Volume 2 for the Nintendo DS. If that description sounds confusing it's because, well, it's really confusing.Įven using an emulator like Stella is painful, arguably more painful than the old-school approach. The 24 keys you get on the two keypads aren't enough so there's a toggle system to shuffle between key sets. ![]() Setting all this up and using the original controllers is an exercise in frustration. I own all the pieces required to run this on the original hardware - Atari 2600, BASIC Programming cartridge, and keypad controllers. Now take away 76 characters and try writing a functional program instead of a description of the burrito you just ate.īefore I get to that though, here's a little more back-story which you're free to skip. Think of all those times you tried to cram your thoughts into a 140 character tweet. Not quite as challenging is writing a useful program in just 64 symbols but that's exactly what I'm going to attempt. You should now be in awe of this program. ![]() The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM and half of that was used for the 64 symbol program you entered so the IDE and interpreter had to be extremely lean. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not even kilobytes - 64 bytes. Well, unless you are him in which case "Hi! Adventure is the greatest Atari 2600 game ever made!".Īnyway, since you're probably not him it'll hurt your brain to think about how difficult it was to write a BASIC interpreter for the Atari 2600 that consumed just 64 bytes of memory. If this sounds horribly limited and lame it's because you haven't yet thought about the hardware it's running on.Ītari 2600 BASIC was programmed by Warren Robinett who is 100x smarter than me and anyone reading this. Instead of a keyboard you have two 12 button pads to work with You can play a range of beeps but I'm not musically inclined so I can't map them to notes In terms of graphics, you have two dots you can move by setting their coordinates Only five math functions are available (+,-,*,÷,mod) There's a maximum of 9 lines, not really an issue considering the first item Your entire program can not exceed 64 symbols - a symbol being a number, variable, or reserved word (i.e. Like most people he wasn't intimately familiar with Atari 2600 BASIC so this response followed my explanation of the limitations: This was a friend's reaction when I told him about this article idea. "You need a more mentally challenging job"
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