Another Eidolon cartridge.

[Wilhelm]

I heard that Wrathchild made a cart version of Eidolon. Without knowing it, I made my own version.

 

It's an ATRAX cartridge, and it uses a completely different cart reading routine. Just look at $100-$1ff, $9fb8-$0a03 and $a0c2-$a1ff.

 

I made another cartridges, such as Goonies, Zorro, Conan, Run For It ... Anything else interested?

eidolon_atrax.zip

[Wrathchild]

Hi,

 

Yep, I hadn't covered that model of cart

 

Welcome to the forum and great work - these conversions aren't

always as straight forward as they might be :wink:

Plus it's interesting to see some of the styles that different coders use -

The Eidolon has some simple filing system code that translates nicely to

ROM and can be used future homebrews.

 

As for recommendations - there are some other threads around, e.g.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=43320

 

I've just got AR: City from Ebay and so may take a look at this, but

if someone else wants to start/has started then please say so now.

 

Others that would be nice are Gauntlet & Winter Olympiad 88,

hey - even something silly like Trivial Pursuit

 

The thing I think of with this work is 'there must be a benefit'.

If the game exists somewhere as an exe, then it can be put

on a cart very easily - e.g. with flash cart you don't necessarily

need to know how to program to make your own menu cart.

You can even put whole disk images on a cart, so a single disk

game is not too much of a hassle to achieve.

 

The benefit. for me, comes from eliminating the annoyances,

e.g. "Insert disk X side Y". In the case of Koronis Rift, the fun

there was getting the sector loads to read from the cart instead

of disk but still allow the saving/loading of game states to disk.

Also, both KR and Eidolon had their own direct I/O routines and

so a normal 'disk-image on cart' wouldn't work by itself.

 

I'm now looking into using the flash cart to save a game

state to the cart - now how cool (NES like) could that be!

 

As I'm getting no response from DB on progressing 'Elite'

I've turned my hand to another similar project - a port of

a game not yet on the A8, 'World Class Leaderboard'.

This is compiled to a state where it can draw a hole's polys

(fairway/bunkers/water) but crashes during the linedraw

routine of the trees (due to change in screen layout between

the C64 and A8).

 

There's other things nearing completion but I'll leave their

identity for another day

 

Best Wishes,

Mark

[Wrathchild]

Oh, I forgot to add - I have also IDAPro'd the C64 code for 'Maniac Mansion'.

If anyone fancies a crack at porting that - or developing something similar,

then I'll pass that on - drop me a message, I'll help where I can.

 

There is a lot of code there! But as quite a bit of the SCUMM VM has

been documented already then it may not be to hard to find the

routines and get the data bytes/words identified and labelled.

 

Regards,

Mark

[Justin42]

I thought Leaderboard did come out for the A8? Or is WCL different?

[Wrathchild]

Don't people use 'Google', etc, anymore

[Justin42]

Just an honest question, since googling for 20 year old games isn't always the most accurate source of info.

 

(I should add that my confusion came from playing LB endlessly on the 8-bit and I knew an add-on disc came out but I guess that wasn't the same thing..)

[Wrathchild]

Granted, but the same had been pointed out already in both:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=39585

and

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=31087

 

No harm done though :wink: