knnngt@ukma.UUCP (Alan Kennington) (01/07/86)
Now that I've got my developer's kit (after less than 4 weeks over the Christmas break!) my mind is starting to turn to all that public domain C software out there. Only trouble is, I don't know where it is. Do I have to subscribe to Compuserve (and pay money!) to obtain such software? It's seems odd to me that net.micro.amiga has so many C programs on it, while there is very little on net.micro.atari. Is this because of qualms of conscience on the part of ST programmers (<-- this is a term formerly used to describe "developers"), while Amiga programmers let their passions overtake them? Why is it that net.micro.atari consists almost entirely of hardware discussions and anti-Amiga rhetoric, while "they" spend most of their time talking about software? Does this indicate that ST discussion is going on elsewhere? If so, does anyone have a comprehensive list of the forums for ST software discussion and communication of public domain stuff? If so, I think this information should be posted for the benefit of those who would like to escape the soul searching of this newsgroup and get stuck into the programming side of things. Thanks in advance, ............ak.
dan@BBN-PROPHET.ARPA (Dan Franklin) (01/08/86)
One good source of public-domain programs is Antic magazine. They have some public-domain and low-cost programs that I'm certain to get (sorry, it's at home so I can't give examples). Anyone who wants to do serious things with an ST should subscribe to Antic and probably Analog as well. It was from one of these magazines (Antic, I think) that I learned that the 520 ST has the ability to interrupt at the start of the horizontal and vertical retrace intervals. In those intervals you can change things like the color registers (which is what the example program did) and also, I hope, the starting address for the bitmap. If you can change the bitmap's address on every vertical retrace you can do really nice smooth scrolling. If you can change it on every horizontal retrace as well you could provide (full-width only) windows very efficiently. Unfortunately, if the ST documentation tells you how to do this kind of thing I haven't found it yet. I was rather annoyed that the hardware descriptions that came with the developer's kit told me about the keyboard, the sound chip, the DMA chip, and the diskette driver chip, but not a word about the display chip. Have later developer's kits remedied this problem? Or is the information buried somewhere I haven't found yet? Dan Franklin dan@bbn-prophet.arpa ima!bbncca!dan