Atari XL - Manual (Page 73)

The Last Word 3.0 Reference Manual
12-73
as critical a factor as it has always been with LW. After many years trying to get the
Atari Macro Assembler to co-operate with SpartaDOS X, I finally wrote my own Macro
Assembler. The result - MA65
– was used in emulation until quite recently to compile
LW. It was only when the superb WUDSN IDE cross-development platform for Eclipse
was published that I finally ported LW
’s 20,000 lines of source code to the PC, where I
continued to develop the software using the superb WUDSN plug-in for the Eclipse
platform, along with the ATASM cross-assembler. It now only takes a second to
compile the whole program. Nevertheless, MA65 remains my disk-to-disk assembler
of choice on the Atari platform.
12.4 DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING
After nine years of thinking about writing a word processor, I finally began LW at the
start of 1999. It took only 3 months to get a fully working version, and a further 2
months to produce one which was reliable. It was this test period, during which I used
LW to write utility macros and the bulk of this documentation, that highlighted bugs and
design faults for later correction. During this time probably hundreds of complete re-
compilations were done. The program culminated in version 2.1 in 2000.
After version 2.1 was published (to an audience of none!) in 2000, there was a hiatus
of eight years while my Atari lay in a storage box on top of a wardrobe. Then, in
November 2008, a nostalgic conversation with a friend who was also interested in
programming led me to retrieve the Atari. Amazed to find it still worked, I soon set
about porting my files over to the PC using the fantastic new gadgets that had become
available in the intervening time, and by the turn of the year LW 2.1 finally found
publication. It drew such interest among Atarians that it became obvious the program
would have to be updated to take advantage of all the new hardware that had been
developed. 320K was now virtually the minimum amount of memory fitted to an Atari
XE, while 1MB was common. Disk storage was almost unlimited thanks to SIO2IDE,
SIO2SD and SIO2PC, and emulation meant the program development time could be
dramatically lessened. The number one feature people wanted to see in a new word
processor for the Atari8 was a fast
80 column display which didn’t use any hardware
add-ons. The 80 column display only took a few weeks to write. Then I began to see
other things I could improve...
12.5 WHY LW CAME INTO BEING
As well as being popular gaming machines, the Atari 8-bit line of computers have a
huge catalogue of “serious” application titles, including many word processors. The
most popular commercial offerings back in the Eighties included AtariWriter (and later,
AtariWriter Plus), Paperclip, The First XLEnt Word Processor, and Superscript,
although there were also dozens of other, less “heavyweight” word processors. Many
public domain and open source text editors and word processors were also written for
the Atari 8, including Speedscript and TextPro, the latter going through many
incarnations and being one of the few word processors to offer tight integration with
SpartaDOS, the advanced disk operating system by ICD. AtariWriter 80 and
TurboWord used 80 column displays (most Atari 8 word processors were limited to the
Atari’s 40 column screen), although these programs required special hardware in the
form of the XEP-80 device.
I got my first Atari 8
– a 65XE – in the late Eighties while still at school and as soon as
I got a disk drive I began using TextPro for word processing. At the same time, I
started to learn to program: first using Atari BASIC, then Turbo BASIC XL, then C and
finally Assembly Language. Having written a database, a drawing program, various