Allan11 Jun 2021
Hey Mark,
I number of 'back-in-the-day' Atari programmers have gone back, decades later, and updated their programs and in some cases written new ones. You can see some of their stuff over at Atariage.com in the Atari 8-bit computer forums.
Mark K. Akita10 Jun 2021
Andreas!
I wrote Tactwar entirely in Atari BASIC on a 48K Atari 800 with an Atari 410 cassette tape drive. It is actually a programmable wargame system but time and hardware limitations had me release it as a standalone game. There are no 6502 machine language routines but it uses Player/Missile graphics, a redefined character set and color scrolling. The map and unit info are loaded into a BASIC string from DATA statements. Tactwar utilizes modular programming so additional templates are possible. I've been busy the last 40 years with other projects but I would love to make a manual for playing/programming Tactwar.
Andreas Koch18 Oct 2020
I really like this game! Would be great to get an update with different scenarios or maps. (And maybe the computer acting differently, with different AI.) The menu controls could / should be better however and speed should be improved somewhat (simply use a faster language than Atari Basic, e.g. Fast Basic, C, Action!, Mad Pascal or Assembler)...
Mark K. Akita13 Oct 2020
Hi Atarimaniacs,
Tactwar was written for a 48k Atari 800 with a cassette drive. The floppy drive was available but out of my budget as a college student. If I had a disk drive available Tactwar would've been an extensible DYO strategy game. All the map and unit information is in DATA statements.
I have recently downloaded an Atari 8-bit emulator for Windows and intend to revisit Tactwar.
More on this as it develops.
Thanks!
Mark K. Akita22 Mar 2005
Hi Atarimanics,
I wrote TACTWAR for the Atari 8-bit way back in the early 80's. A few of the cool features unique to the old Atari systems were used, including player-missile graphics and a redefinded character set. TACTWAR started life as a clone of the then-popular board game OGRE, but gradually evolved into it's current form. It was something of a rarity, since most games of the time stressed arcade reflexes over stategy. My more recent games projects include a number of simple games written in the Euphoria programming language, using the SDL multimedia/graphics library. It's good to see a part of the past surviving here...
