John K Harvey's Atari 7800 Projects Page

Last updated February 8, 2003

• Upgraded for 7800 support
• POKEY equates support
• Bugs fixed!
• Regression tested on over 400 games!

This was a painstaking effort to convert distella to support Atari 7800 games.
In its development, I fixed a few bugs (listed in detail in the distela.txt file,
and added POKEY sound support.

Ballblazer and Commando are the only 2 back-in-the-day releases that had POKEY
support.  Since Distella does not support bankswitching, Ballblazer
is the only cart that the POKEY equates will work successfully on.

So, since Ballblazer is an interesting example, here is how to run the program:

  distella -paf7ikscball.cfg ballblaz.bin > distella.asm
  // Assumes no header bin file, so explicitly use -k option

  distella -paf7iscball.cfg ballblaz.a78 > ballblaz.asm
  // With the header, the POKEY support is known, so -k is implicit 

• Distella version 3.0 is available here // NOT YET!
• A partial config file for Ballblazer is available here.
• To recompile with dasm, you'll need a version of Maria.h that supports POKEY equates. This can be obtained here.