Tony is a Geek

Why revival?  Well... apparently I did "some stuff" with my Atari ST back in 2017 and then again in 2021 ... and due to over-working on work/work stuff and not setting aside enough personal-time, the machines kind of moved further and further under piles of "stuff". ( yes, that is an original Sony AIBO ERS-111 on the shelf that I purchased back in 1999/2000 - that little dog is still more advanced than most of the latest "AI" technology in the market-place today ) Well, I decided to take 2 weeks off work. literally. off work.  It took a few days, okay, about 5, to totally disconnect and wind down and stop / not think about work/work related things.  During this time, I decided to "sort out the 16/32 bit room".  This was my old home/office, basically a large double-bedroom that a child of any age would absolutely love to have; however, I had managed to overfill it with "stuff" and it had become a mini-cave with very little or not desk s...

So... I spent some time setting this up on a Windows 10 laptop environment, which involved downloading and installing cc65 and adding the /bin folder to the PATH - I'll get screenshots from that laptop and paste down below - the reason I mention this is because that setup did not have the cl65 executable that allows you to do the compile/link all in one go, you have to do it step by step, which isn't a major problem, but it is interesting to do & understand what is happening behind the scenes. In my UBuntu linux environment, all that I did was: $ sudo apt-get install cc65 Then I used snap to install atari800xl-linux This allowed me to have an emulator for the atari800xl locally. Once the cc65 (cc = cross compiler) is installed you can use it straight away. I used the code from this page as a quick example. As you can see below, the simple C code is located in it's own folder, I then used the cl65 command to make the output file, for the Atari800xl it is best to call th...