ATRACT Español

ATRACT, location 77

ATRACT

LOCATION 77 ($4D)

PUBLISH. RUN. REVIEW. FORK.
STUFF YOU MAKE FOR THE 8-BIT ATARI,
WITH OPEN TOOLS.

OPENING SOON AT ATRACT.ORG

READY

Why location 77

On an 8-bit Atari, memory location 77 is called ATRACT. The operating system adds one to it every four seconds or so, and any key press puts it back to 0. When it passes 127, nobody has touched the machine for about nine minutes, so the OS starts shifting the screen's colours to save the TV from burn-in. That is attract mode, and this site is named after the byte that starts it.

It also spells what you do here: Assemble, Trace, Reverse, Annotate, Comment, Tinker.

The counter above is the same rule, run by this page. Or press POKE 77,128 to see it now. Turn it on starts a real Atari in your browser, with a free operating system and BASIC, and the counter then reads the machine's own memory.

What is coming

Publish
Programs, packs, articles and art you made, with their source and a licence that lets others learn from them.
Run
Anything published runs in the browser, on a free OS and BASIC. No ROM to look for.
Review
Comments that point at a line of source, a label or a memory address.
Fork
Make it yours. Changes are readable diffs, and can go back to the author as a suggestion.

Three ideas

Build log

Follow it with the Atom feed.

  1. A new face for this page: a computer magazine from the eighties, with a program you can type in, or let the page type it for you.
  2. The site can look like the real machines: the Atari's own screen and letters, the 65XE computer, or the 1050 disk drive, where each program is a floppy you slide in.
  3. Comment on any program, make your own copy of it, and offer your changes back to its author.
  4. Two names: atract.org in English and atract.cl in Spanish.
  5. Anyone can publish what they make, and a person looks at every upload before it appears.
  6. Programs run right in your browser, on a free stand-in for the Atari's own system. Nothing to install.