32 replies to this topic

[Andrew Davie]

Here's a screen grab of the development environment I used for Boulder Dash. Thought I'd share, as I'd love to see what others are using.
I'm using Eclipse as the IDE. I have WUDSN installed for the nice syntax colour highlighting it offers. Stella is my emulator, and of course DASM is the assembler.
I have single keypress building setup, which is nice. I think the weak link in this chain is DASM, which really needs a total ground-up rewrite.
The machine is newish; a DELL XPS 15 laptop, which I rather like. The OS is Ubuntu 11.10. Unity is completely fucked, but I rather like Gnome 3 which you see me using here.
Screen resolution is a lovely 1920 x 1080.
So, can I see what the rest of you are using?
Cheers
A

Edit: Oh, and Thomas and I shared the source via SVN on www.assembla.com

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[stephena]

Andrew Davie, on Fri Nov 25, 2011 5:35 AM, said:

Here's a screen grab of the development environment I used for Boulder Dash. Thought I'd share, as I'd love to see what others are using.
I'm using Eclipse as the IDE. I have WUDSN installed for the nice syntax colour highlighting it offers. Stella is my emulator, and of course DASM is the assembler.

I've been meaning to fix that ugly, large icon for Stella in Ubuntu. It only happens in Gnome/Unity, not in KDE.

Quote

The OS is Ubuntu 11.10. Unity is completely fucked

Understatement of the century

[RevEng]

I'm using bash, vim, and a makefile, so no fancy screenshots here...

"make" to build the project
"make run" to run the bin in stella
"make debug" to run the bin in stella, in debug mode
"make backup" to tar the working directory up and send it to my gmail

I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 on a Thinkpad W510. I held off when Unity was first pushed out to see what the community reaction was, and I'm still holding off now.

I hear good things about Mint, which is based on Ubuntu but is Unity-free. If I have to do a fresh install at some point, I'll probably try that out.

[GroovyBee]

My 7800 development is pretty much command line driven. I use a DOS shell, the CC65 compiler and link system and NMAKE (free version) along with an assortment of custom tools.

[CannibalCat]

Same as Andrew here, just setup the Eclipse IDE with the WUDSN plugin, Stella for emulation/debugging, ATASM as the assembler. Also have a 7800 running DevOS 0.2 hooked up via parallel port with a RAM cart (still working through some issues with the cart). All running on an old IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop (docked).

[Tjoppen]

Laptop, Makefile (make, make run, make dist), DASM, gcc (for generators), kdevelop, git (both for version control and offsite backup via push), Stella, Harmony.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Still on TextPad, on PC or Netbook, DASM and mainly Stella (sometimes z26 for the trace file).

[Joe Musashi]

Let's see, I'm using the following stuff:

• Editor: Aquamacs Emacs on Mac OSX. The nice thing is that it understands classic Emacs key commands (like control-s for progressive search, which I absolutely love), but also modern key commands (like command-s to save).
  
• Version control: Mercurial. hg on the command line and MacHg on the desktop. Backup is done with a backup repository in a Dropbox folder.
  
• Emulator: Stella of course. I'm using a patched version though, that I compiled myself. It includes a couple of printf's to display the content of some RAM variables. This allows for monitoring their content while the game is running without having to go to the debugger.
  
• Building: Just a makefile plus make. I also have a small script just named "t", which calls make and then runs Stella. So I can do a test run by just typing "t+return" on the console.

[cruzer]

Editor: Gedit on Ubuntu
Asm: KickAssembler, since I'm used to it from C64
Emulator: Stella
Building: A small shell script that tells KickAss to start up Stella if compilation was succesful, called from command-line
Graphics: All done in the source code so far

[Mr SQL]

I edit in one shell and in another I toggle between running the makefile and launching the game under Stella.

I don't see much advantage using an IDE for coding in Assembly or Batari Basic; graphics and sound designers that create blocks of usable code are great tools but they don't have to be part of the IDE; my favourite sound utility for the TIA (conceptwise at least) sports just such a design for grabbing two voices from any SID file and generating the code blocks for a TIA rendition. The playfield and sprite editors are cool but I'd prefer stand alone utilities rather than having them bundled into an IDE.

IMO many parts of the IDE we consider standard today weren't always so; back when autoformat wasn't a defacto component of an IDE other programmers would sometimes get sore at my left aligned code so I wrote a stand alone reformatting utility that would strip the indentation from any selected block of code and reapply it; eventually the next generation of the IDE they were using had this feature built in while paradoxically crippling the debugger which is pretty much the only performance advantage I expect to be able to rely on from an IDE because you can keep track of everything else in your head to save time

[Mr SQL]

Agree the monitor is important; my setup has a 21 inch LCD set to 800x600. It's native resolution is 1600x1200 which makes 800x600 possible with real pixels.

[Primordial Ooze]

• Editor: ConText Editor Portable 0.98.6.
  
• Version control: None, backup is done via manually copy and pasting the project folder to a usb flash drive.
  
• Emulator: Stella 3.41 of course.
  
• Building: built in command shortcuts in ConText Editor. F9 runs a batch file which builds the source code. F10 runs the rom in stella.
  
• Hardware: Atari 7800 with Harmony Cartridge and Custom Atari XE Lightgun. Controller in left port for rummaging around Harmony.
  
• System: Windows XP Pro SP 2 on a IBM T22 Laptop. Screen resolution is 1024*768.
  
• Network: Library Wireless Connection
  
• Current Project: Quacker Blaster

[Ben_Larson]

OS: Windows 7
Editor: gedit
Emulator: z26
Assember: DASM
Building: Batch file
Version Control: e-mailing stuff to myself

I was actually using Ubuntu for a long while till I tried upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and it bricked my install. After that I just went back to Windows...

[trent]

I'm new to this, caught the Stella dev bug while I was working on droid2600.

OS: Ubuntu 10.04
Editor: Gedit, VIM
Assembler: DASM
Source control: Local CVS repository (yes, I'm a dinosaur...)
Build: bash shell
Test: Stella, Harmony cart

[stephena]

Although I don't develop games, I do develop Stella, so here goes:

• OS: Heavily modified Kubuntu 11.04 (KDE 4.6.5), OSX 10.6, Windows XP/7
  
• Editor: Nedit & vim for Linux
  
• Version control: subversion on Sourceforge
  
• Build: makefiles in bash for Linux, Xcode 3.2 for OSX, Visual Studio 2005/2010 for Windows
  
• Hardware: Intel 2600K (!) CPU, 16GB RAM, 160GB SSD
  
• Network: 70/30 Mbit fibre connection!
  
• Emulator: Stella, obviously, but also MESS/z26/EMU7800 to see how other emulators work
  
• Testing: all emulators above, HarmonyCart, sometimes KrokodileCart and Supercharger

Various versions of Windows and Ubuntu are installed in VirtualBox VM's, and I use my Mac laptop for the OSX builds.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, a 2560x1440 27" display. It's an absolute dream when doing development

[Sdw]

I use UltraEdit for editing.
Kick Assembler for assembling (btw. cruzer, maybe we could convince Slammer to add some tweaks to better support writing code that's supposed to go in different banks!)
Command-line window and bat file for compiling
Stella for testing

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

Unfortunately, I don't have a development environment with my current schedule When I get back to it though it would be the same as before...
Textpad
DASM
Distella (when reverse-engineering)
Z26Win
Stella (I use Stella more when I reverse-engineer and Z26Win when I develop)

[disjaukifa]

OS: Mac OS X 10.7/ VM: Win XP
XP VM Editor: Visual bB
OSX Editor: Vim, Text Wrangler
Main Compiler: batari Basic for both Mac OS X and Win XP

Trying to learn 6502 assembly but its really slow going.

[trent]

A fun spin on this question: What did your development environment look like in 2000, 1990, .. 1977!! I only go back a year so I can't participate :-)

[cruzer]

Sdw, on Wed Nov 30, 2011 11:07 AM, said:

btw. cruzer, maybe we could convince Slammer to add some tweaks to better support writing code that's supposed to go in different banks!

Hi Shadow, haven't gotten to bank switching yet, but it can't be long I hope. So if I encounter anything that could be improved, I'll definitely start punking him. Otherwise you can mail him or post on the CSDB-thread. He's usually open for reasonable changes.

[Zach]

My setup was pretty simple. Windows XP, Wordpad, Dasm, Stella, and sometimes z26 for the tracelogs. Used .bat files to compile and play with a double click. Also did a lot of testing on a Krokodile Cart.

[Rybags]

EditPlus 3 with AtAsm called via hotkey.

I've downloaded the WUDSN stuff and should really update to using Eclipse IDE and MADs Assembler but just keep starting new stuff in the old environment.

Manually loading stuff in the emulator doesn't bother me much, but having to save before assembling and the less flexible approach to where everything goes isn't real convenient.

[Ed Fries]

Notepad, SVN, make, dasm, Stella.

[SpiceWare]

I'm using a 15" MacBookPro. Have it hooked up to a 24" 1920x1080 monitor and also use the MBP's screen as a secondary display.

My editor is jEdit, for which I've done up a couple MODE files for syntax highlighting.

I use a terminal session to compile with DASM, test using Stella and a Harmony Cartridge (also have a Krok Cart, but don't use it as much anymore).


I'm also using Xcode to edit the C code for Frantic and Stay Frosty 2's ARM routines. The C code is compiled in a Linux VM.

[Emehr]

I haven't dabbled in 2600 programming in a while but when I did...

Hardware: Macintosh Performa 6116
OS: Mac OS 8.6
Text Editor: BBEdit Lite
Compiler: dasm for Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW)
Testing: a very old version of Stella. And for good measure, try it on a newer version on a newer computer.

I also wrote a Mac program for painting playfield pixels. I was experimenting with Andrew's Chronocolour techniques and needed a quick way to generate playfield data files. Just copy and paste into a Chronocolour display kernel and voila!

I never finished any games but I did create a heavily-commented demo of how to create and move an animated sprite around the screen. Kirk Isreal included it in part of his PlayerPal v2.1 sprite editor (click generate code->generate sample code to view). It had lots of customizable options like how many faces of animation, duration for each face, sprite height, etc.