batari Basic kickstart - Old Windows Instructions

Running Games in Stella

Unzip a ROM file if neccesary so you are looking at the ".bin". (For better or worse, that is the standard file extension for games ready to run Atari 2600 games.) You could start Stella, navigate to where you saved the .bin, and play it, but I would strongly recommend associating .bin files with Stella so you can double click on them and start playing immediately. To do this, right click on the file, hit "Open With", "Choose Program", hit "Browse" to indicate where you installed Stella (C:\Program Files\Stella ?), double click Stella, make sure "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" is selected, and hit OK. (This was on XP... different versions of Windows may differ slightly.) By default, the arrow keys are mapped to the first player, and ctrl is fire. F1 is "Game Select" and F2 is "Game Reset" -- some games use those physical switches on the console to control the actual starting of a game.

Running batari BASIC

The best place to download batari Basic is bataribasic.com. On the left side should be a link to the download page, and the link is probably the first one listed: "version 1.0 for Windows/DOS" in this case.

This is a zip file you should unzip in a directory. For better or probably worse, things will be much easier if you unzip it to a path that has no spaces in the name. Yes, it's corny, but that's the way it is with some of these tools.

For now I'll unzip it to C:\Atari2600\bB\ (which is the default suggested by the README) but you're free to put it somewhere else ... just make the appropriate changes below (and if you don't think you'll be able to tell what the appropriate changes are, well, keep it in C:\Atari2600\bB\ )

You should get used to using the bad old "DOS command line". To get to it, from the "Run" menu type "cmd". Some people are frightened of this thing, but I swear to you it's pretty simple. (For the people who don't find it comfortable, you can start using the Visual batariBasic IDE, but I'm going to pretend you want to try it using the command line at least once.)

So the "README.txt" in your batari Basic directory lists a few steps to do: