Jumpman JR actually does exist ;-) and other things....

[marc.hull]

Back story is required here.

 

A while back I inherited Bill Gaskill's huge floppy library. About once every two weeks I get a box in the mail with about 300 disks in it. I'm up to about 6000 total at the present and for that I am grateful and at the same time overwhelmed with the amount of material.

 

During one of my Friday night disk explorations (I'm near 50 so my definition of Friday night excitement has changed radically in the last 30 years) I stumbled (and that is the operative word here) across something that caught my eye. On a nondescript, well used disk with several files I happened to see a couple named JUMPMAN and JUMPMAO. Now I was skeptical at first thinking that someone had just renamed the files but since it was Friday in the big town I figured what the hell and ran them. Title screen popped up and that familiar tune began and I thought "no biggie, same old same old. " Almost hit reset when I noticed the title screen did indeed say "JUMPMAN and not JUNKMAN" and the graphics were slightly different. A hack ?

 

It had been a while since I had played the game so I thought what the hell and dove in. Played about the same as usual. Graphics were a bit different and I thought well this must be a prelim copy before it was changed for distribution. Levels were in a different order but I figured that must have been changed during conversion to cart form. All seemed about regular until I got to a level I did not remember. "Son of a bitch.... that's a new level." Don't know if I thought that or said it but none-the-less it shocked me a bit. This may indeed be old hat and there are bound to be people who have seen this but it definitely was new to me.

 

I contacted Bill and told him about it and he confirmed that in his opinion it was indeed a different version of the game and most likely the one written by Steve Mildon and submitted to DB for publication. I am guessing that in order to avoid royalties DB changed the title and eliminated this level. That is only a guess but it stands to reason.

 

For a couple of months I have tried to get into contact with Mr. Mildon but even though I figured out where he was I couldn't get a message to him. Finally Cory stepped up and through his contacts made the connection and secured permission from Steve to release the game. (Soap box on) It's never impossible to do things the right way ... (soap box off.) Thank you Cory !

 

So without further ado........ I would like to present courtesy of Steve Mildon, Bill Gaskill and Cory...... Jump Man Jr. in all it's original 1980's glory.

 

The attached file is not a text file ! It is a 90K DISK image. Use TIDIR to extract the files and write to disk or convert to whatever form you need. The two files are ROM1 and ROM2 (I renamed them in my personal convention, rename them what you want.) They are an EA5 executable. Run them on your console or whatever EMU you like. If someone wants to break these down into an more user friendly set of file then please do.

 

This has been release to the TI world as freeware by Mr. Mildon and under no circumstances should it be offered for sale in any manner. If you want to send someone a physical disk then you have to eat the entire cost of doing so, media, postage the whole nine yards..... Period. If you electronically transfer the disk then you must do so with out charging a fee... again Period.

 

This is a pretty neat occurrence IMHO and a hearty thanks should be directed to Bill Gaskill for preserving what could have been easily lost without his efforts. Thanks to Corey for going out of his way to get permission and big thanks to Steve for a really fun fucking game ......

 

Hull.

 

PS.... OVERWHELMED

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

jump.txt

[+arcadeshopper]

TOTALLY WICKED!

Edited March 13, 2014 by arcadeshopper

[+arcadeshopper]

btw i cant seem to jump after dieing once.. might be my machine tho.

 

Greg

[marc.hull]

btw i cant seem to jump after dieing once.. might be my machine tho.

 

Greg

Press the button?

[+arcadeshopper]

Press the button?

 

Tried that.. might be my gk grampack .will try it with just an EA cart

 

Greg

[+arcadeshopper]

 

Tried that.. might be my gk grampack .will try it with just an EA cart

 

Greg

 

Yep that was it.. Doesn't like the EA in my gram kracker works great with the EA cart

[Tempest]

I always thought Junkman Jr started out as an official port and then got changed to avoid paying for it. I guess this pretty much confirms that (unofficially I suppose).

 

Can someone post some screenshots? I'd love to see this but my TI-99 is currently in storage.

[Omega-TI]

 

Can someone post some screenshots? I'd love to see this but my TI-99 is currently in storage.

 

Here ya go...

[Omega-TI]

Back story is required here....

 

 

... has been release to the TI world as freeware by Mr. Mildon and under no circumstances should it be offered for sale in any manner. If you want to send someone a physical disk then you have to eat the entire cost of doing so, media, postage the whole nine yards..... Period. If you electronically transfer the disk then you must do so without charging a fee... again Period.

 

 

Loved the backstory Marc. It was very interesting. I'd love to read more stuff like this on programs we all use.

Now, for the last part, I LOVE IT. I guess that means the eBay pirate better not sell it...

[Tempest]

So which level is the missing level?

[am1933]

 

Loved the backstory Marc. It was very interesting. I'd love to read more stuff like this on programs we all use.

Now, for the last part, I LOVE IT. I guess that means the eBay pirate better not sell it...

Now I understand you could not bear to be this guy's buddy-but you really hate him don't you?

[OX.]

Thanks Marc, it's a shame that Bill Gaskill's collection does'nt reside over on Whtech, who knows what other hidden gems are in there.

[Omega-TI]

Now I understand you could not bear to be this guy's buddy-but you really hate him don't you?

 

Hate? No, that is such a strong word, more like a lack of respect. The fact that you knew who I was referring to speaks volumes.

 

When you read his "About Us" statement, then factor in his actions with multiple copies, this person appears disingenuous (my opinion) to say the least. I was also told by a friend that this person had been caught selling the CURRENT STUFF of an AA member in the past.

 

What would you think...

 

1) If you spent countless WEEKS or even MONTHS writing a program. - then -

2) You release it to the community FREE OF CHARGE, not even asking for a donation. - then -

3) Some dude comes along, copies it, and tries to profit from your hard work.

 

Personally, I'll never knowingly do business with a person if I have to question their ethics.

[+Vorticon]

Great find Marc! I think I will delete Junkman Jr. from the Gameshelf site with the next update and replace it with the original Jump Man Jr version as it should be, with proper credits to Steve Mildon.

[TI-Sissy]

Currently working on Ultimate Planet...

 

small enough?

[+Vorticon]

Apparently not

[Omega-TI]

[Tempest]

Which level was the missing one? I've never played Junkman jr.

[CantStopClicking]

Dude! This is totally awesome! This is one of my favorite games. I got hooked on the C64 version way back in the day, and when I found out it had been ported to the TI, I was so excited I could finally play a C64 game on my TI - and it was GOOD! As I'm sure many of you experienced back then, your C64 and Atari friends were more than happy to poke fun at your "little" TI. Well, here's a poke in the eye Mister!

 

Thanks for sharing Marc!!!

 

-D

[CantStopClicking]

Which level was the missing one? I've never played Junkman jr.

 

I don't recall which level is missing. I did find out which one it was when I was researching it before. I just can't find it quickly.

 

Might check out the Wiki on it though - as it's got some pretty good info.

 

-D

[am1933]

Dude! This is totally awesome! This is one of my favorite games. I got hooked on the C64 version way back in the day, and when I found out it had been ported to the TI, I was so excited I could finally play a C64 game on my TI - and it was GOOD! As I'm sure many of you experienced back then, your C64 and Atari friends were more than happy to poke fun at your "little" TI. Well, here's a poke in the eye Mister!

 

Thanks for sharing Marc!!!

 

-D

Amother game for the TI that matched the Atari/CBM versions would be the Atarisoft conversion of Shamus,as usual though-it tends to be the TI sound that lets things down(funny how practically all the Atarisoft conversions had really poor sound, perhaps they should have spoken to the guys at Parker Brothers).

I would also be confident putting up Q*Bert and Popeye against any other 8 bit converions(yes,yes-I know the TMS9900 is 16 bit)

Edited March 23, 2014 by am1933

[CantStopClicking]

This isn't necessarily on topic but it's been something I've observed while trying to study 4A assembly.

 

To me; it appears that the 16-bit processor of our little TI is the biggest hindrance and limitation. Since everything has to be converted to the 8 bit bus and all the fiddling with byte oriented operations, it might actually have made more sense for it to be 8-bit and eliminate the constant word-to-byte-and-byte-to-word bs.

 

Alas, that is just mere speculation from someone who doesn't know jacksh*t about assembly nor the super depths of designing processors and systems.

 

Cheers!

 

-Dano

[am1933]

This isn't necessarily on topic but it's been something I've observed while trying to study 4A assembly.

 

To me; it appears that the 16-bit processor of our little TI is the biggest hindrance and limitation. Since everything has to be converted to the 8 bit bus and all the fiddling with byte oriented operations, it might actually have made more sense for it to be 8-bit and eliminate the constant word-to-byte-and-byte-to-word bs.

 

Alas, that is just mere speculation from someone who doesn't know jacksh*t about assembly nor the super depths of designing processors and systems.

 

Cheers!

 

-Dano

The Ti99/4 was originally intended to be an 8bit machine but TI could not get there act together quickly enough to reach market in time-they therefor insisted that the the developers utilise their existing 16bit TMS9900 which as is well known now, created probably more problems than it solved.

[+mizapf]

The 16/8 multiplex is not such a big problem; mind that modern PCs may also need to do something similar (64/32 bit multiplexing) when memory is not configured to allow a full 64 bit access. A much bigger problem is that the TMS 9900 processor supports byte operations while it has a 16 bit architecture. AFAIK, Intel chips have (had?) a control line to turn off a part of the data bus, but this is not available for our processor, which, accordingly, has to perform this awkward read-before-write. The TMS9980 also has a 16 bit architecture with an 8 bit data bus and suffers from the same issue.

 

The problem was solved with the TMS 9995 which can indeed address bytes with a single memory access. If only we had that processor for our 99/4A ... (and they messed it up again in the 99/8). It is one of the major reasons why the Geneve is so much faster than the TI (although the 12 MHz clock is divided internally by 4).

[+Lee Stewart]

...

Since everything has to be converted to the 8 bit bus and all the fiddling with byte oriented operations, ...

 

Not entirely true. The scratchpad RAM at 8300h is on a 16-bit data bus (only 256 bytes and usually not all available, unfortunately). The console ROM that contains the TI-99/4A's OS is on a 16-bit bus, as well. Obviously, you cannot write to it; but, reading it is faster than the 8-bit-bus-associated memory. Even the OS is not pure 16-bit access, however, because it is sprinkled with byte-windowed GROM access and GPL access, which is byte-interpreted by the GPL interpreter, which is itself part of the console's 16-bit ROM.

 

...lee