Hello from Canberra

[Smonson]

Hello, I should have done one of these earlier, I've already been posting quite a bit.

I'm a 39-year-old web developer in Canberra, Australia (...another aussie). When I was a kid, my dad got us an STFM - it was my first experience of a 16-bit era computer. I think that was in 1989. At age 12 I ended up in hospital in traction for several weeks unable to move. My parents were kind enough to buy an STE and placed that in my hospital room for me to play games, which I did for about 17 hours a day.

A long time ago (~2002) I was a firmware developer for a company that made passport scanners. After that, back-end applications programming in C. And now I'm a web developer. A couple of years ago I bought a broken STFM on ebay and got it in the mail from Bulgaria, and fixed it. I still own one original game: The Secret of Monkey Island.

I have been working on writing GEM programs in C++ using stock GCC (I have a moral objection to using the patched compiler that everyone else uses); and also HDMI video output for STFM.

[exxos]

:welcomewave:

Same age as me ;)
What gem programs are those then ? I don't use c, but what's the issue with the patched compiler ?

[Atarian Computing]

Another 39-year-old chiming in.

[exxos]

Another 39-year-old chiming in.

We should start a new club, "the 39'ers" :lol:

[Smonson]

What gem programs are those then ? I don't use c, but what's the issue with the patched compiler ?

Nothing worth mentioning, just a bunch of tests. It was mostly interesting because of having to write libc, libg++, tos lib, etc. I like to work on stuff at a low level.

The patched GCC by Vincent Rivière is used by everyone to enable an older assembler syntax that doesn't use a percent sign on register names. It's a bad idea to me because the source code becomes ambiguous. I consider it to not be of practical use except in compiling existing source code that already uses it. One good thing: his GCC contains a linker, which stock GCC doesn't. But ordinary GCC is perfectly capable of generating code for 68K machines.

We should start a new club, "the 39'ers" :lol:

That sounds a lot better than "the almost 40s" :D

[mikro]

Oh wow, that sounds pretty interesting. So how do you compile and link your programs then? Did you cook some home made elf2tos converter? Maybe would be worth sharing along with your other projects you have mentioned -- libc, libg++ and the other libs, there never to late to invent a new approach! :)

[Smonson]

Oh wow, that sounds pretty interesting. So how do you compile and link your programs then? Did you cook some home made elf2tos converter? Maybe would be worth sharing along with your other projects you have mentioned -- libc, libg++ and the other libs, there never to late to invent a new approach! :)

There's an opensource linker called vlink that can link ELF format into a TOS executable. It's pretty basic, but it does the job. But really I would prefer to just take the linker from Vincent's patched GCC and use that without the compiler patches - I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

My c/g++ libs are terrible, because I've only implemented what I've needed to use so far, which isn't much. My TOS API doesn't match the tos.h everyone else uses - I'm pretty sure it would annoy people. If you want to get angry, check it out here: https://github.com/smonson78/ataricc

[Steve]

Hey Smonson,

As a software coder, do you know if it would be possible to program a simple e-mail app for the Atari that runs on Mint? There aren't any e-mail apps that work with modern e-mail standards as far as I know, apparently SSL is a big issue for Atari. I just find it surprising we don't have a good mail client, even with everyone having these upgraded 060 Ataris... I'd love to have a modern e-mail client for my fast Ataris! I would pay for it!

Thx

Steve

[Smonson]

Hey Smonson,

As a software coder, do you know if it would be possible to program a simple e-mail app for the Atari that runs on Mint? There aren't any e-mail apps that work with modern e-mail standards as far as I know, apparently SSL is a big issue for Atari. I just find it surprising we don't have a good mail client, even with everyone having these upgraded 060 Ataris... I'd love to have a modern e-mail client for my fast Ataris! I would pay for it!

Hi Steve,

If someone has time to write it, it's perfectly possible. SSL might be slow - I don't whether it's so slow that it would make it impossible to use, though. I wouldn't expect it to be THAT bad.

Kind regards, Smonson