For full retro effect, use a 386 or better (and it must have a math coprocessor either added or built in!)

I don't think the requirements are very high, just as long as you have some ram, something to store stuff on, a compatible soundcard and a way to move files around you should be good. The PC I used is:

AMD 386SX/33MHZ

CYRIX 387 FASTMATH-20

6MB 30-PIN SIMM RAM

110MB CONNER HARD DRIVE

Standard FDD/HDD Controller card (Not built in)

Paradise VGA graphics (or clone)

Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 CT1740

MS-DOS V 6.22 w/ Supplemental Utilities installed.

1.44MB 3 1/2" Floppy Drive

1.2MB 5 1/4" Floppy Drive

USB 1.44MB Floppy Drive (To attach to newer computers and move files around!)

Find yourself a dev cartridge (or make your own somehow) that you will use

Find a way of transferring your files over to the computer, one way or another. If you want another text editor, any of them that can write plaintext will do.

The Atari has no VRAM and is a pain in the butt to program for! With limitations creativity must take place! Learn from others in the documentation how to proceed and hack together something that works! Don't be afraid of getting out of your comfort zone, at these levels you will not break anything by trying and getting it wrong.

Use other people's known good code to make sure you have a good understanding of how it should work! If you run into problems with known working code, chances are you'll end up chasing your tail needlessly.

To use our system at Heatsync Labs, or if you replicate this yourself, once everything is going, you'll want to:

1. Write your assembly code using your favorite text editor first. We'll be saving them as .ASM files to avoid confusion once multiple files of the same game exist.

2. Make sure that it and vcf.h is inside a scratch directory and that you have made a PATH variable over to wherever you installed the DASM executable.

C:\ATARI>_ 

3. A Full example of the command you should then run to compile your code:

DASM GAME.ASM -f3 -oGAME.BIN

4. Once you have made the binary and the compiler throws no errors, make your binary file into a PCM WAV file:

MWDOS -ts GAME.BIN GAME.WAV

5. Make sure the Supercharger is inserted into the ATARI, and the Audio cable is attached to the Speaker Out of the Soundcard. Have the TV on (Ours is set to analog Channel 2), then use the XTX-PLAY program to play your WAV file to the cartridge.

XTC-PLAY GAME.WAV

6. Your code should then load into the Supercharger, and you will get audio and visual feedback of it loading, and then it should run. If the "Rewind Tape" message comes back up, then there was an error.