Most people’s memories of programming in the 8-bit era revolve around BASIC, and not without reason. Most of the time, it was all we had. On the other hand, there were other options if you sought them out, and [Paul Lefebvre] makes the case that Goto10Retro that Action! was the best of them.
The limits of BASIC as an interpreted language are well-enough known that we needn’t go over them here. C and Pascal were available for some home computers in the 1980s, and programs written in those languages ran well, but compiling them? That was by no means guaranteed.
For those who lived on the Atari side of the fence, the Action! language provided a powerful alternative. Released by Optimized Systems Software in 1983, Action! was heavily optimized for the 6502, to the point that compiling and running simple programs with “C” and “R” felt “hardly slower” than typing RUN in BASIC. That’s what [Paul] writes, anyway, but it’s a claim that almost has to be seen to be believed.
You didn’t just get a compiler for your money when you bought Action!, though. The cartridge came with a capable text editor, simple shell, and even a primitive debugger. (Plus, of course, a hefty manual.) It’s the closest thing you’d find to an IDE on a computer of that class in that era, and it all fit on a 16 kB cartridge. There was apparently also a disk release, since the disk image is available online.
Unfortunately for those of us in Camp Commodore, the planned C-64 port never materialized, so we missed out on this language. Luckily our 64-bit supercomputers can easily emulate Atari 8-bit hardware and we can see what all the fuss was about. Heck, even our microcontrollers can do it.
I fondly remember that orange Action! cartridge. I used it more than any game that I had. It even supported in-line assembly language and allowed you to create interrupt service routines. I wrote a printer spooler in Action!, which I had hoped to sell to the Antic! software library. Unfortunately, my submission was rejected because they wanted all submissions to be in Atari Basic. Oh well…
It nearly broke my heart when my wife sold all of my Atari gear in a garage sale. I had a PC-XT clone by that time and had pretty much moved on from the Atari. Still brings back memories!
Come on back! E-bay is your friend. Get a FujiNet as well!
I like what Brad has to say. The 8-bit World of Atari and even Commodore is experiencing an awakening. A rebirth. Maybe because we’re all getting older and thinking about retiring, but something is happening. I think about the good ol’ days when I was a kid and the media didn’t do what they are doing. I need to simplify my life. Go all 8-bit again.
I’m so happy to hear that people, anyone remember the “Action!” cartridge for the Atari 8-bit line. I usually used BASIC to program games and then I learned some sort of bare metal programming and then stumbled upon that cartridge later. It would’ve solved me so much time and effort and sped up my games.