Omnivore - the Atari 8-bit binary editor sponsored by the Player/Missile Podcast

While producing the Player/Missile podcast, I have had many ideas about hacking code on the 8-bits like I used to as a kid. One of the tools I had was the Omnimon system monitor board by CDY Consulting, an add-on board for the Atari 800 that provided a ROM-resident monitor similiar to what was available by default on the Apple ][ series. In fact, I originally named this program Omnimon but felt that would be too confusing as there are people in the 8-bit community who still use the original Omnimon hardware. Using the prefix "Omni-" is my tribute to all the fun I had with the Omnimon hardware.

Omnivore is a cross-platform app for modern hardware (running linux, OS X and Windows) to work with executables or disk images of Atari 8-bit machines. (I have long- term goals to support editing MAME ROMS and disk images of other 8-bit machines like the C64 and Apple ][.)

Omnivore is more than an Atari binary editor. It can also create and edit maps using character-based graphic tiles. For instance: many games use the 5-color ANTIC modes 4 or 5 to provide a complex scrolling background while using much less memory than the multi-color bit-mapped modes.

In addition to supporting more platforms, I also intend to add support for editing character sets and player-missile graphic shapes.

Note that this is still beta-level software, so caveat emptor.

Binaries are available for Windows 7 and later (64-bit only) and Mac OS X 10.9 and later and at the home page or directly through the github releases page.

Binaries for linux are not currently available, although I would like to provide packages for Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Gentoo at some point.

To run on linux, you'll have to have a Python 2.7 environment set up. How to do this will depend on your distribution, but there's a good chance that a basic Python 2.7 already exists.

I'd recommend using a virtual environment so you don't clutter up the system python, but if you're willing to risk it, the virtualenv step is optional:

virtualenv /some/path/to/your/virtualenv
source /some/path/to/your/virtualenv/bin/activate

Then, install with:

pip install omnivore

On some distributions, you will need development libraries to install wxPython 4 because pip needs to compile it from source. On ubuntu this is:

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev

And on Gentoo this is:

emerge -av net-libs/webkit-gtk

If you're interested in hacking on the code or making bug fixes or improvements, you can install and run the source distribution.

• python 2.7 (but not 3.x yet) capable of building C extensions
• git

Your version of python must be able to build C extensions, which should be automatic in most linux and on OS X. You may have to install the python development packages on linux distributions like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Windows doesn't come with a C compiler, but happily, Microsoft provides a cut-down version of their Visual Studio compiler just for compiling Python extensions! Download and install it from here.

I'd recommend using a different virtualenv than the one used above because it's possible that python packages that the git source depends on may be at different versions than the current published version:

virtualenv /some/path/to/your/development/virtualenv
source /some/path/to/your/development/virtualenv/bin/activate

Get the source from cloning it from github:

$ git clone https://github.com/robmcmullen/omnivore.git
$ cd omnivore
$ python installdeps.py
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

Once the C modules are built (the Enthought library requires a C module and Omnivore has those several Cython modules for graphic speedups), you can run the program from the main source directory using:

$ python run.py

The Cython extension is used to speed up some of the time-critical code (like repainting all the character graphics), but it is only required if you were going to debug or recompile those specific .pyx files. Cython is not needed for hacking on the python code.

Should you change a cython file (currently only omnivore/utils/wx/bitviewscroller_speedups.pyx), use the command python setup-cython.py to turn that into a C extension, then use python setup.py build_ext --inplace to regenerate the dynamic libraries.

Omnivore will be able to be extended using plugins based on the Enthought Framework which are discovered automatically at runtime using setuptools plugins.

The plugin architecture is documented by Enthought, but is not terribly easy to understand. I intend to produce some sample plugins to provide some examples in case others would like to provide more functionality to Omnivore.

Omnivore, the Atari 8-bit binary editor sponsored by the Player/Missile Podcast Copyright (c) 2014-2017 Rob McMullen (feedback@playermissile.com)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Copyright (c) 2006-2014, Enthought, Inc. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
• Neither the name of Enthought, Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

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