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Atari 7800 Homebrews and Hacks Thread


Trebor

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Wow, you guys lost me already. LOL I am new to this whole emulation thing so i haven't a clue on how to go about manually hacking into files and i sure don't want to mess anything up on my computer trying to do it. I emailed the guy who designed the emulator. He said it worked for him back when he designed the emulator. He said if i couldn't get it to work, he would send me the rom he used to test with. I am going to wait and see if that works first. If not, i guess i will have no choice but to try what you recommended here, although i may need some one to hold my hand and walk me through it step by step.

It would be nice if prosystem was updated and released. Such an easy way to play games. I have tried emulation years ago with prosystem and wii7800 it worked great.

The wii7800 was the best. 2 button controlls on the wiimote. I tried BBCQ and with the save states you can play as good as Oyama.

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I heard back from the designer. He sent me the rom he tested with and it works. I told him that i was trying to use the different versions of the rom that are scattered about in that thread like the one that makes the dots smaller so they look more correct. Not sure why those don't work and this one does. Anyways, i at least have a working copy now. Thanks for the help! :)

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If you decide that you want to get the others working as well, let us know. As I said, it's been rare that a rom from the forums didn't work here on the Wii.

 

Well i'd still like the most recent version of Pac-Man Collection that has the smaller dots and whatever else has been upgraded on it at some point. I'd also like to get Froggie as well. That one didn't work for me either.

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Well i'd still like the most recent version of Pac-Man Collection that has the smaller dots and whatever else has been upgraded on it at some point. I'd also like to get Froggie as well. That one didn't work for me either.

 

Did you try this version of Froggie?

The zipped bin as downloaded works just fine for me in Wii7800, other than the music(I guess, I haven't heard this one on real hardware) which is ear-piercing in the emulator.

 

As for Pac-Man Collection, of these, both "Pac-Man Collection (NTSC).A78," and

"Pac-Man Collection (Pokey).A78" worked just fine for me as downloaded(not zipped.)

 

I had no issues on my Wii with .bins or .a78s, zipped or unzipped. Assuming you are ejecting your SD card safely from your Mac after writing to it, if you are having difficulty with zips that you've created, you may need to fix them from the command line. FWIW, I'm using Linux on my PC.

 

 

 

--edit-- Urgh. The editor is inserting links that I don't intend, and eating text as a result. I think I have it mostly under control now.

Edited by fluxit
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I've tried most of them actually but i will try the ones you've recommended again. Do i need to change these to zips? Froggie is a BIN file and the Pac Coll is a78. DO i just change the filename or do i need to actually zip them?

 

You can just use them as downloaded. Definitely don't change the file extension if you aren't actually zipping or adding/removing headers.

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This is strange. Now all the roms work that i tried before. Maybe the test rom that i was given by the guy who made the emulator had some kind of file that alows the rest of them to play. Weird. Either that or my Wii had some glitches going on before. Is there a rom of Donkey Kong XM on here? I have gone through the thread for it and never saw one.

 

Edit: Nevermind, i think i found it. Gotta test to make sure.

Edited by ATARIJAL
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I see the same issues here with Crazy Brix and Defender on Wii7800.

 

Defender does work on MAME on my PC though. It looks great, no sound or gameplay yet though.

 

As for your previous issues, it may be that your Wii was glitched from a program that was run previously. With 'homebrews' on the Wii, if something doesn't work, always try turning off the Wii, and restarting before giving up on something that interests you. Some things really don't work, however.

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I have one more question. Is there a way to get or buy the complete rom for the Donkey Kong XM version? The game is awesome but it goes to the high score screen after the second level. Right now, the emulator is the only way for me to play 7800 games so i would need the rom to play the whole game.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 5 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

 

A complete list will be maintained in this opening post, including edits for updated links or new entries after they are publicly revealed.

Developers are presented alphabetically as are the titles listed under them.

 

If we can get at least half the new games on cartridge and on the market in the next year, that would be a big increase in the # of titles available for the 7800 library. I have to keep an eye on this to make sure I am not duplicating something someone else is doing.

 

I know Albert here on AtariAge and Video61 at AtariSales can produce cartridges, have what they need in stock, here in the United States. We know the physical end to make real cartridges, ebrom burning, labeling, packages, takes time for each title, so having more than one person publishing the games does help. Also the competition does keep the prices fair. I know people can also do their own. Their was an organization called GR8 (Great) doing some games for the 8-bit in Europe, but now defunct.

 

Maybe we can include a list of publishers or people able to make the physical cartridges.

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  • 1 year later...

Hello!

 

Doing some archival work, I recently tracked down a demo / hack / homebrew from the older years that was picking away at the back of my brain.

I thought it should be included on this list.  It originates from John Saeger and Eckhard Stolberg, and was known only as "Backdoor".

 

BACKSTORY: In 1999/2000, 7800 encryption was still a problem to be figured out.  It wouldn't be until a couple of years later when somebody had

found the Atari 7800 encryption key on an old Atari hard drive, and then a7800sign was born (at least, that's my understanding of the story).

During the few years without official encryption being available, a creative method was found as a means to circumvent the problem.

One could take the last 4K of certain Atari 7800 games (which of course, were already signed) and place those at $F000-$FFFF.

There would only be 2 problems:

  • There was a question of the legality of such a move.
  • A user was beholden to whatever Start, Interrupt, and BRK vectors were defined on the 4K ROM that they borrowed.

Options were limited, because the 4K had to include code that jumped out of the signed 4K to another section.  But, a few were identified.

 

I found the original posting with backdoor.bin (we'll call it v1) here (1999):

https://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/199912/msg00002.html

The binaries are attached to the discussion, but the link with the source code is a dead link.

And, to make matters worse, this page is so old that web.archive.org didn't capture it (from what I can see).

However, there is good news.  The source code to this 1999 version was captured and preserved on a webpage:

http://quadrun.tripod.com/

 

An updated version was made in 2000 (we'll call it v2):

https://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/200001/msg00066.html

Unfortunately, this also points to the same dead webpage, and no source or binaries are attached. But, I DID find the binaries / source on my computer, safely preserved.  Before I post them to this thread, I'd like to do some due diligence and do a "best effort" search track down John S. or Eckhard S. to make sure they're okay with it.  Since technically there was a legal "grey area" on some of the content due to the aforementioned encryption workaround, I'm not too keen to post them without permission.  However, if someone else can find these binaries/source at a public link somewhere, that would likely also be fine.

 

If I get the go-ahead, I'd like to mirror both of these versions on one of my github pages too, as a backup plan.

 

If you wanted to read up on the "is it legal" discussion, it was pretty well documented on the Stella mailing list:

https://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/199911/msg00045.html

 

Anyway, I hope this is useful.  I'll post more when I know more.

 

Edited by Propane13
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Great archival work. These historical roms definitely need to be preserved.

 

I find the topic at hand stimulating... sometimes I play a "what if the encryption routines weren't found" game, and look for potential workarounds for the lockout. (other than the discussed frankenrom approach)

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1 hour ago, Propane13 said:

...

BACKSTORY: In 1999/2000, 7800 encryption was still a problem to be figured out.  It wouldn't be until a couple of years later when somebody had

found the Atari 7800 encryption key on an old Atari hard drive, and then a7800sign was born (at least, that's my understanding of the story).

...

Per Dan Boris: "...in August of 2001 the real solution surfaced. First the folks at Classic Gaming Expo released the original Atari ST utility that was used to generate the validation code. Frank Palazzolo then used this file to help create a PC based utility for creating the validation code: a78sign.zip..."

??

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8 minutes ago, Trebor said:

Per Dan Boris, "...in August of 2001 the real solution surfaced. First the folks at Classic Gaming Expo released the original Atari ST utility that was used to generate the validation code. Frank Palazzolo then used this file to help create a PC based utility for creating the validation code: a78sign.zip..."

??

 

Note that the timing of the encryption code finding is kind of fascinating for me.

August 2001 lines up with my "internal" release of my old color demo that I had finished on August 4, 2001.

It's funny how around that time, the "real" fix was almost available.  It changed everything going forward.

 

In the spirit of archiving things, here is the (now public) source code for my Color demo from 2001:

https://github.com/johnkharvey/color7800

You can see how much it leverages from backdoor's source code.  It definitely helped me get my start.

 

Also, it's funny to me how there's a video of it available:

 

Would it be possible to add a link to the source code repo under "Color (Demo) | Nov 07, 2009 | Done"?

I think it may be nice to have for archive purposes, just to be complete.

 

Regards,

  -John

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