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Got up late, so didn't coffee, only wrote tiny bit of useful code, then dicked around with Atari ST emulator & mags. Finally updated to Hatari 2.5.0
hatari-emu.org

Which solves some problems, but I still can't run some things. This is mostly an EmuTOS problem, I suspect real TOS would be fine, and then I could have desk accessories again.

But for just loading old games, or playing around with ST BASIC, it's fine.

Couldn't get Laser C to run, CFG file problems?
#atari #retrocomputing

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus

@lambdacalculus I don't think so, but there were a LOT of dev tools:
atarimania.com/list_utilities_…

There was a Scheme, but I used the one in the Unix labs instead; I had MIT Scheme running under MiNT later, IIRC.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

And I just remembered: I don't have *Smalltalk*, per se, but I do have a copy of Little Smalltalk, which is a dialect of Smalltalk, for the Atari ST in a repo I made to gather up Little Smalltalk releases!

github.com/LambdaCalculus37/li…

Look in lst1-atarist/ for a disk image! The book is in the docs/ folder!

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

I never knew they updated ST Basic. I remember the stock version being dismal.

FaST Basic is nice. It's BBC Basic with a GEM UI.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

Also found HiSoft BASIC:
atarimania.com/utility-atari-s…

docs:
archive.org/details/hbasic_v2_…

Which is kinda QuickBasic-like, all the structured stuff you'd want, but still mostly ST BASIC-compatible. Editor's a little better than ST BASIC's, but not much? Uses blocks for moving text. No interactive mode at all, which is bogus. Crashes once in a while but it compiles to binary, and runs fast when it works. This could be a keeper.

#atari #retrocomputing #basic

ClaudioM reshared this.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

Weirdly, HiSoft also made HiSoft C… an interpreter. WTF. WTAF are you doing, you noodle-brained lunatics?
in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

Using ancient dev tools makes me appreciate how much better they were than anything we have today.

I used then, Mark Williams C on the ST, and basically what I use today: Unix-like shell, editor (originally microemacs, but then vi), compile with command line tools.

But these GUI dev tools are nice. HiSoft pops up an editor, hit Alt-X and it builds & runs, shows a message window which has relevant errors.

Doing that in Xcode suuuuucks, and error reporting in it is shit.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

If I want to make a GUI in HiSoft, I can just draw in the standard RCS (Resource Construction Set), generates a .h header, import that and call GEM functions to pop windows up.

No fighting with CSS or shitui (I mean swiftui or did I?) all afternoon to get a box to fucking center. DRAG IT TO THE CENTER. DONE.

Why are we bothering with this modern shit? I've had to build a giant abstraction layer on top of SDL which is a giant abstraction layer over native APIs. GIVE ME A FUCKING FRAMEBUFFER.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

I just laugh and laugh at the lintwits fighting over Wayland or X11 (RIP) or whatever, I'm sure they'll have another incompatible GUI system tomorrow, but it's not like they're uniquely awful. Every desktop environment now is poisoned by this overdesigned shit.

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