(Automatically translated into English) This application is Taptexte, a typing training software dedicated to Atari 8-bit computers (400, 800, 600XL and 800XL). How did I end up with the Taptexte diskette in my hands, that's the story I'm going to tell you… As a child, I had a first generation Atari VCS console then, as soon as I discovered the computer, programming has become my main concern. My beginnings in development on this machine led me to meet some great people. One of them is that of a developer who had worked for Atari France and whom, to respect anonymity, I will call in this story: Mordor.
Parly 2 BHV

Mordor and I were the same age and both lived in the town of Chesnay. Our first meeting took place in the micro-computing section of the BHV, in the Parly 2 shopping center, in front of an Atari brand demonstration computer: an 800 XL. My parents couldn't afford this dream machine, so I went there every day after school to indulge in the joys of basic programming. Consequently, it was there that my best encounters took place. One afternoon, while I was finishing the programming of a Space Invaders in text mode whose barrel I manipulated with the Q and W keys, I heard a nonchalant voice behind my shoulder "That's not bad". I turned around to find a teenager a little taller than me, with a neat blonde hairdo, and whose self-assurance was beyond doubt.

The discussion that followed was for me of a new nature: I shared my passion with someone who understood me: we had a common interest in Atari programming. Our first contact ends with an exchange of telephones. So we began to see each other and we saw at one or the other to talk about programming and games. in the end, our meetings only took place at his house, because his student studio was better suited than my parents' living room, in the middle of which was the only screen in the house: the family television. Mordor made me understand the interest of machine language, of which he gave me an impressive demonstration, revealing that it was about 200 times faster than Basic. It is also at his place that I discovered particularly original gameplays, such as Spy vs Spy or M.U.L.E. (the latter is still today my favorite game on Atari 8 bits, which is also the case of Alexey Pajitnov!)

One day when I was at Mordor, he told me that he had entered into a relationship with Atari France and that they had commissioned him to develop a typing learning tool called Tap'texte. The application was rather well done: we saw a representation of the keyboard (including the flashing key to hit), as well as the two hands, with a flashing finger indicating what to do. Following the end of the marketing of the XL/XE range, the project had finally been abandoned and Atari France had then instructed Mordor to port it to the Atari ST. But I seem to remember that this other version finally suffered the same fate.

The end of a relationship
At this time, Mordor began to abandon its 800 XL to concentrate on the Atari ST and graciously gave me its floppy disk drive, which gave wings to my projects: this new acquisition gave me a boost and I I began to develop games on games. This period, during which Mordor switched to the ST while I continued my journey with the XL, marked the end of our relationship. I don't know what happened to his porting of Tap'texte on the Atari ST and I don't know today what happened to Mordor. But I have a grateful thought towards him for what he passed on to me and for the widening of the possibilities in programming from which I benefited in his contact.

To give you an idea of ​​what Tap'texte looked like, I made a representation of it from memory. Since my memory of it is quite vague, I figured I wouldn't stray much further from the original by porting it to the Atari 2600.

Note to programmers
Of course, taking into account the technical constraints of the Atari 2600, the title is made in Playfield, the keyboard is composed by the two Players (repeated with flickering), the hands are in Playfield (with a finger flickering like a missile) and finally at the very bottom, the word entered by the user is displayed in scrolling thanks to the two players.

About three years after publishing this article (originally written in October 2019), I searched for Taptext in my diskettes, because I remembered that Mordor had left me a copy. After meticulously digging through my three boxes of floppy disks, I managed to extract the only version I had, but this posed a loading problem since only the first sectors were loading before crashing. Knowing that Atarimania was looking for a version, I offered my floppy disk to Bertrand and Franck, telling myself that they would certainly have advanced techniques to recover most of the data. Fortunately, Bertrand was able to copy the entire floppy disk without any problem, and Taptexte is now available for download on the Atarimania website.