Adventure games have been a popular source of amusement for years. This type of game puts you into a created fantasy world where you make the decisions. For example, you could be a knight in shining armour attempting to rescue a princess from a tall tower guarded by a fire-breathing dragon. In adventure games, the […]

What has always been a pain for ST users is the ST’s sixteen-pixel boundary problem. This means that any graphic has to be copied in multiples of sixteen pixels. For example, if you used the command screen copy to put a piece of the picture on screen then it will round its x coordinates to […]

As the name suggests – the Extra extension provides something a little extra. Improved commands and a few you may find useful. Without further ado let’s get started. EXTRA Typing this command displays a list of commands the extra extension provides. Useful if you want a quick way of checking how a certain command works. […]

Well, you’ve opened the STOS manual. You’ve read it and seen all the clever commands and accessories you can use. You’ve read and heard that all this can enable you to write your very own masterpiece. But how do you start, what do you do, how do you tell STOS to do this? These are […]

Protecting a disk from being copied probably involves altering the way the ST reads a disk. A protection is a piece of machine code which is stored in the boot sector of a disk and if it’s read by something other than a ST it can cause all things to happen like damaging the copy […]

Ever found that you are doing some routine that requires the user to enter some kind of string of characters and the input command doesn’t seem to fulfil your requirements. Then why not program your own input routine. This is one of mine I have used in various routines such as my own STOS Adventure […]

When I write a program, I sometimes find it easier to store variables on disk rather than inside the program. Using a few variables, it’s okay to store them in a program but what about storing lots of information in variables. This makes your program a lot longer. Let’s say, for example, I was writing […]

The missing link doc file talks about different kinds of banks for things such as bobs, joeys, blocks, etc. But how do we make those banks in the first place? The answer is simple. On the missing link disk is a file called MAKE.BAS which allows you to convert sprites to other formats. The missing […]

The Missing Link Map Editor (EDDY) is used to set up the scrolling maps that the commands “world” and “landscape” uses. It works similar to the MAP accessory that comes with STOS only we have a larger area. So, what does this map look like then? Well load one of the example files on the […]

The Missing Link is, in my opinion, the best extension to be written for STOS. It covers a lot of areas of STOS programming including a set of extra commands plus better faster versions of old ones. In this tutorial, I shall take you step by step through the commands explaining in detail how to […]

The STOS file selector looks nice but wouldn’t it be nicer to code your own file selector. 2240 rem FILE SELECTOR 2250 wipe S5 : unpack S2+33020,S5 : get palette (5) : wait vbl : A=0 : PRE_Y=0 : PR$=”” 2260 fastcopy S5,back : fastcopy S5,logic : K=1 2270 if LO=1 then T$=”LOAD A PICTURE” […]

A team of programmers (myself included) got together to create what is known as the STOSSER Demo. In this article I will show you how you can write a demo without the complicated stuff the big boys can do. All you need is to produce something that looks nice. The examples below are my contributions […]

Ever fancied writing your own art package? Well in this tutorial I am going to show you how to program a few options that you would normally find in an art package. I have written a full art package called Grafix Art and the routines printed here are taken straight from it. First of all, […]

In some Atari demos they have a main menu where you can select a sub menu to load. We can do the same thing in STOS. This routine below allows you to move a character up and down a scrolling platform which is a kind of hallway with doors. You move your character to the […]

STOS sprites can certainly be a pain sometimes. This article aims to make using them a little easier to understand. The default sprites in STOS are software sprites, meaning that STOS has to do a lot of work with them which makes them slow and flicker a lot. It spends a fair bit of processor […]

As you know, there are only fifteen memory banks that you can use in STOS. Yet some games have more than fifteen pictures or music files overcoming the fifteen-bank limit. This is done by simply sticking all the files into one bank on top of each other. This is called Stacking a Bank. Let’s say […]

Welcome to this tutorial on writing a database program in STOS. A simple database that will store information in the way of names, addresses, and other details. I will call this program “STOS Address Book”. Note there are no prizes for guessing a better name. First, what is a database? Well, it’s a program that […]

A collection of STOS Basic routines I programmed. Taken from Stosser, Power and ST+ diskzines HIGH SCORE TABLE: 10 key off : cls 20 dim NAME$(10) : dim SC(10) 30 for X=1 to 10 : read NAME$(X) : next X 40 for X=1 to 10 : read SC(X) : next X 50 for X=1 to […]

As STOS and Amos are similar languages it was easier to port the STOS code of some of my games to Amos rather than rewrite it. In this article, I will show you how to port your code over to Amos. Converting STOS source code to Amos is easy. Simply save it as an ASCII […]

The STOS compiler is a very useful program to have because it does the following things. It speeds STOS programs up to three times their normal speed. It saves the program as a single PRG file so there’s no need to copy the STOS folder onto the copy disk. Compiled STOS programs are smaller than […]

In this article, I hope to shed some light on what a few people seem to be having problems with…. STOS extensions. Various questions are raised on the subject, what is an extension, what does it do, how do I install it, and how is one written. I shall attempt to answer these questions. 1> […]

Sprites are the little graphical images that move about on-screen such as ships, aliens, bullets, little men, etc. Let’s look at how we can do this. THE SPRITE COMMAND Before you can use the sprite command you will need some sprites in memory. For example, try loading the animals1.mbk sprite bank from the STOS disk. […]

Variables and Dimensions are a way of storing information in STOS to use in your program. The two main pieces of information are words and numbers. Your program would decide if one of these equalled something and act upon it. Here’s a simple example of a variable being used. VARIABLES 10 print “Please type in […]

For you to use this tutorial you will need a copy of the STOS adventure Creator (SAC) which you can download on my Atari ST Page. You can also download the STOS Code to the game. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to write a full adventure game called Witches Castle […]