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Spelunker problem with atarimax demo workbook on 130XE


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Hi All,

 

I noticed a problem with the Spelunker cartridge conversion on the Demonstration workbook of Maxflash cartridge studio.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/239287-in-development-sd-card-based-multicart/page-3?do=findComment&comment=3280461

 

(I'm starting a new topic in the hope more people will see it and somebody may have some insight).

 

Basically, the game doesn't load first time on my PAL 130XE (upgraded 65XE), but will work the second time as long as I only turn the power off very briefly. Power off for more than about 5 seconds and it fails subsequent times too.

 

I noticed this while testing my SD card based multi-cart, but playsoft has confirmed the same behaviour on a NTSC 1200XL.

 

Does anybody else have these problems with disk conversions using Maxflash studio and atarimax cartridges?

 

Robin

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rdea6,

 

Thanks for posting that - I tried it and it works first time on my 65XE & 800XL, but gets stuck with a black screen on my 130XE unless i switch off and on again and try again.

So just the same as the other version I'd tried.

 

Pretty sure this must be something to do with the atarimax diskpacker not being happy with certain machines.

 

Robin

Edited by electrotrains
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  • 10 months later...

Just as a follow up to this old question (in case anybody ever has the same problem)....

 

I decided to investigate this a bit further since it was annoying me... so I downgraded the machine back to a 65XE to check whether the problem still occured with just the base 64k RAM. Which it did.

 

So I figured there was some kind of incompatability between the base RAM installed on this machine, and whatever AtariMax's ATR->Cartridge loader does (since all other software works perfectly on this machine).

 

I didn't want to have to desolder the base 64k (which wasn't socketed) in case my theory was incorrect and therefore decided the easiest thing to do was to swap the lower and upper 64k banks by swapping the ends of resistors R110,R111 (see Jurgen's post):

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/218035-atari-130xe-ram-test-failure/

 

With that done, the 64k DRAMs I'd installed as a 130XE upgrade have now become the base memory of the machine, with the factory installed original 64k RAM becoming the (130XE only) extended RAM.

 

And now everything now works perfectly.

 

Robin

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This is probably an uninitialized memory problem -- in particular, memory location 0, the one memory location in low RAM not cleared by the OS at boot. Spelunker appears to read this value without initializing it first, although I wasn't able to find a value to cause it to lock up.

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