Blank files issue

[+therealbountybob]

Sorry for starting another topic; someone recently discussed various .BAS files that were blank when you loaded them, I had the same problem. Strangely they were able to be viewed perfectly with Joyful Coder's excellent Memopad utility (the lines seem to be terminated correcly)...

 

I'm having the same problem with the assembler files (.SRC) from atariarchives. I've been working though the excellent Atari Graphics and Arcade Game Design book, files here: http://www.atariarchives.org/agagd/software.php

 

Here is an ATR (BASIC DOS2.5) with several .BAS files (from various sites) that have the problem:

basic04.atr

the files seem ok in the directory - they have size.

 

Any help appreciated - and if anyone's got a copy of the files from the book above if they could post an ATR as I'm itching to get started with my new MAC/65 Cart

[NuY]

If the BAS files open okay in Memopad, you can use Memopad to resave them. Open up in Memopad as usual as a tokenised file, then go File > Save as, and resave it out as whatever filename you like - Memopad will save the raw ASCII which you can then bung back into the ATR and load into the Atari with ENTER (rather than LOAD).

[+bob1200xl]

The files will LOAD but not RUN or LIST. There are ways to make a file unlistable, but it should RUN... Any reason to believe that the files themselves aren't just corrupt?

 

Which .SRC files are you having trouble with? MAC/65? You would have to ENTER a LISTED .ASM file to use it in MAC/65.

 

Bob

[atari8warez]

The files will LOAD but not RUN or LIST. There are ways to make a file unlistable, but it should RUN... Any reason to believe that the files themselves aren't just corrupt?

 

Which .SRC files are you having trouble with? MAC/65? You would have to ENTER a LISTED .ASM file to use it in MAC/65.

 

Bob

 

Bob i tried them too and none but the MENU.BAS runs and MENU.BAS is listable the others aren't. From way back I remember an article about making .BAS files unlistable and that was my initial thought but seeing none of them runs I think there is something else screwed with those files. Looking at some of the files with the hex editor reveals that the files are not blank but trying to run them simply fails usually with an error like "Error at line xxxxxx".

Edited October 3, 2012 by atari8warez

[phaeron]

Did you just make that ATR out of the BAS files you found, or did someone actually upload the whole ATR that way? If it's the latter, I'd have to think alcohol was involved, because it would mean that someone imported broken .BAS files through a CR/LF conversion and posted them in a disk image without even checking it. The BASIC files have the same corruption that we saw last time with all CR ($0D) bytes deleted. It couldn't have been an upload/download problem with the ATR itself because the DOS sector tags are all in the right offsets.

[phaeron]

atariarchives.org is sending .bas files as text/plain:

 

Fetching header for /agagd/software/chapter1/PAINTPOT.BAS from site www.atariarchives.org:80 [74.52.5.67].

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2012 03:38:37 GMT

Server: Apache

Last-Modified: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 05:01:04 GMT

ETag: "6a583b7-a65-3690b45a30400"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 2661

X-Powered-By: PleskLin

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/plain

 

Retrieved 266 bytes

Success! Retrieved 266 bytes.

 

The text/plain MIME type specifies CR-LF line breaks. I'm on Windows, so I didn't spot this at first because Firefox is likely following the OS convention and thus doesn't need to modify the file. I'll bet people on Linux or Mac OS X are the ones seeing this problem.

[+therealbountybob]

Probably I'm confusing the two problems.

 

seems the .bas files don't look ok on Memopad.xex

 

atarionline.pl Stapler.bas (on the ATR I put together and posted) I think most of these were from this site. (The other thread was about the atlantis game from another site)

 

The Assembler book files (particularly chapter 9 ) I did try 'entering' them into MAC/65 . Are they in MAC/65 format, If someone would take a look? (I have assembler editor cart too).

 

I'm using 130XE with APE/USB (Windows XP PC) to create real disks on my 1050.

Thanks

[NuY]

atariarchives.org is sending .bas files as text/plain:

 

 

 

The text/plain MIME type specifies CR-LF line breaks. I'm on Windows, so I didn't spot this at first because Firefox is likely following the OS convention and thus doesn't need to modify the file. I'll bet people on Linux or Mac OS X are the ones seeing this problem.

Not tried fetching the header under Windows, but the delivered file is byte for byte the same one I extracted from the ATR, and hence still won't open in Memopad or Altirra.

[NuY]

Probably I'm confusing the two problems.

 

seems the .bas files don't look ok on Memopad.xex

 

atarionline.pl Stapler.bas (on the ATR I put together and posted) I think most of these were from this site. (The other thread was about the atlantis game from another site)

 

The Assembler book files (particularly chapter 9 ) I did try 'entering' them into MAC/65 . Are they in MAC/65 format, If someone would take a look? (I have assembler editor cart too).

 

I'm using 130XE with APE/USB (Windows XP PC) to create real disks on my 1050.

Thanks

The LST files for that book are in neither M65 or Atari Assembler format. Looking at the equate lines:

 

...
5 SHPL	EQU	$F0
6 SHPH	EQU	$F1
7 SHPML	EQU	$F2
8 SHPMH	EQU	$F3
...

...they appear to be in another assembler format... SynAssembler maybe? Fairly easy to convert, but it will be a manual process. EQU is easy, that just gets replaced with an equals symbol (=). For DB you would use the .BYTE directive, and where comments use an asterisk, you would need to use a semicolon. From memory, I think there's a short guide in the M65 manual about converting from other assembler packages.

--

Edit: Indeed it does, but only for the Atari Assembler Editor cartridge:

 

MAC65 manual

 

Page 67.

--

Edit 2: Indeed it is SynAssembler - the authors of that book say in chapter 4 it is the one they chose for the book:

 

Readers who already own assemblers may use the one they have. We have provided a translation table in the Appendix in the back of this book to aid you in converting our SYNASSEMBLER source code to that used in your assembler. We chose SYNASSEMBLER when we began this book in the Spring of 1983 because it was co-resident (screen editor, assembler, and debugger are in memory simultaneously) and was available in cartridge form.

 

http://www.atariarchives.org/agagd/chapter4.php

 

You need to read the book as well as using the code TRBB

Edited October 3, 2012 by NuY

[+therealbountybob]

Thanks Nuy. I've read the book, every page (though did have about 12 months off in-between the final few chapters)

OK I'll take a bash at a few things over the next week and see if I can work out how to do get these files to load into MAC/65

[phaeron]

Not tried fetching the header under Windows, but the delivered file is byte for byte the same one I extracted from the ATR, and hence still won't open in Memopad or Altirra.

 

I checked atariarchives.pl, and it looks like their files are corrupted server-side -- not only are they broken in the direct download but the batch archive also has broken files.

 

The files on atariarchives.org are also sent with the wrong MIME type but they come down alright. Thus, as long as you use a download client that doesn't actually try to save the text/plain files as text, you can pull working BASIC files.

[+therealbountybob]

I've mailed someone from atarionline.pl to see if they are aware of this. I think I used to dowload BAS files ok so wonder if it's related to a recentish change with their setup (and perhaps some other sites)

 

Now back to the assembler files issue - It's not that I couldn't change the syntax re different assemblers, the problem is that I cannot get the source files into MAC/65 - I assumed that as I could load AS/Ed files into MAC/65 that I could load (enter) these (from Synassember) also - but they don't appear though it does go through the motions?

• Should I be able to load them?
  
• If not is there a way of taking the source code text from the web and getting this across somehow?
  

[i looked through my disks and had a copy of Synassember (using translator) but this didn't read the DOS2.5 disks which I had put the files onto... I still want to use MAC/65 though!]

[russg]

Sorry for starting another topic; someone recently discussed various .BAS files that were blank when you loaded them, I had the same problem. Strangely they were able to be viewed perfectly with Joyful Coder's excellent Memopad utility (the lines seem to be terminated correcly)...

 

I'm having the same problem with the assembler files (.SRC) from atariarchives. I've been working though the excellent Atari Graphics and Arcade Game Design book, files here: http://www.atariarch...gd/software.php

 

Here is an ATR (BASIC DOS2.5) with several .BAS files (from various sites) that have the problem:

basic04.atr

the files seem ok in the directory - they have size.

 

Any help appreciated - and if anyone's got a copy of the files from the book above if they could post an ATR as I'm itching to get started with my new MAC/65 Cart

I tried to salvage STAPLER.BAS. It wouldn't salvage with Jindroush Kubec's chkbas.exe nor

my SALVAGE.BAS. It is 'FORKLIFT' by Stan Ockers. If you actually want the program, you

can find that. It seems to have some German in it. FORKLIFT.BAS is from 10/84 ACE

Newsletter, Eugene Oregon. I'd say it is badly corrupted, or I don't understand what it is.

It clearly has a BASIC LOAD file header, but the rest of it is corrupted. It has a valid ending also.

Edited October 5, 2012 by russg

[thorfdbg]

I tried to salvage STAPLER.BAS. It wouldn't salvage with Jindroush Kubec's chkbas.exe nor

my SALVAGE.BAS. It is 'FORKLIFT' by Stan Ockers. If you actually want the program, you

can find that. It seems to have some German in it. FORKLIFT.BAS is from 10/84 ACE

Newsletter, Eugene Oregon. I'd say it is badly corrupted, or I don't understand what it is.

It clearly has a BASIC LOAD file header, but the rest of it is corrupted. It has a valid ending also.

 

My UNTOK.UTL can partially salvage it - if there is any interest on the results, please let me know. However, there are some lines in which are still corrupted and that do not follow basic tokenization rules, so the file is definitely bad.

[NuY]

I've mailed someone from atarionline.pl to see if they are aware of this. I think I used to dowload BAS files ok so wonder if it's related to a recentish change with their setup (and perhaps some other sites)

 

Now back to the assembler files issue - It's not that I couldn't change the syntax re different assemblers, the problem is that I cannot get the source files into MAC/65 - I assumed that as I could load AS/Ed files into MAC/65 that I could load (enter) these (from Synassember) also - but they don't appear though it does go through the motions?

• Should I be able to load them?
  

 

No. M65 works in a similar way to BASIC with regard to ENTERing files. Although the file is still in plain ASCII, it still needs to make sense to the interpreter when the line is read from disk. As with BASIC, a line is read from disk which has to start with a line number, and it will read all the way until it reads an EOL char, at which point it will try and make sense of the line. Although ASM is fairly loose syntax wise compared to BASIC, M65 will still check as far as possible to make sure it is in a format it understands. Again, as with BASIC, any line it doesn't understand will be committed to memory, but will be prefixed with "ERROR - " before it. However...

 

• If not is there a way of taking the source code text from the web and getting this across somehow?Yes. There are two ways you can get these files into M65 for correcting to the right syntax.
  

 

1. Assuming you have the SRC files on an ATR as usual, boot up M65 and in direct mode, enter the command TEXT. This will turn off syntax checking. Now you can ENTER the file using the command ENTER #D:FILENAME.EXT. When it's loaded, type the command EDIT, again in direct mode. This will turn syntax checking back on. Once in M65, you can then LIST and correct the individual lines to your heart's content.

 

2. Similar method to above, but using Altirra's copy and paste awesomeness. On the pages where you're downloading the SRC files, there is a link to the right of that saying "View". Click that to display the source in your browser. Select all the text of the source and copy it to the clipboard. Flip back to Altirra with your booted up M65, and as above, type TEXT in direct mode, then right click and paste in the Altirra window. Sit back and wait while Altirra shoves all the text in, and when done, type EDIT in direct mode again.

 

[i looked through my disks and had a copy of Synassember (using translator) but this didn't read the DOS2.5 disks which I had put the files onto... I still want to use MAC/65 though!]

 

Yeah, I don't like Synassemblers code syntax. A lot of it seems non-obvious.

Edited October 5, 2012 by NuY

[NuY]

Actually scratch that. The methods I described will work with a plain ASM file, but the ones on the website have the hex for each line before the line numbers, so even in text mode, M65 will still choke on it. You will need to edit them down and strip the hex out before being able to get them in M65. I suspect even Synassembler won't read them in that format either - the whole file is a dump of the compile process, when you actually issue the ASM command in M65.