Dragonstomper ROM?

[StanJr]

Is this even possible? I'd like to experience this game first-hand (I've only seen screen shots and demos), but don't have a copy of the game and all its extra hardware so the only way I could is through the emu. But is it even possible to make a ROM of the stupid thing?

[Alex]

Yes.

[moycon]

Has anyone? And how would you go about doing it? I have the commodore 64 emulator that emulates the disc drive or the cassette drive. Is there a supercharger emulator that works the same way? I remember as a kid my friend had a supercharger. But only had like 2 games for it...One was Communist Mutants from Outer Space the other was something like Starmaster. I'd love to try out the others...Especially DragonStomper!!

[Ze_ro]

As far as I know, all 2600 emulators will handle Supercharger games properly. The problem is that a company still owns the games, and is still making (some) money from them. You see, Cyberpunks is selling a CD with all the Supercharger games on it (It's intended for use with a Supercharger or a Cuttle Cart), and Bridgestone Multimedia gets royalties from it, since they technically own the rights to these games (How the rights got to them I have no idea... I thought Epyx took over Starpath, then Atari took over Epyx?)

 

I'm not sure if Bridgestone has actually asked people not to distribute the roms or not, but since they're probably one of the only companies around that's still profiting from them, then they generally aren't distributed out of respect (As opposed to all the other roms... no one seems to bother trying to sue anyone for distributing them over the internet). If you look around the internet enough, you'll probably find them though. Just don't expect them on big names sites like AtariAge.

 

In case you're more interested in the technical aspects of these roms rather than the legal aspects, I'll cover that too: The way these things were originally dumped is that the "sound" on the tapes was recorded onto a computer, and someone smart reverse engineered the way the data was actually held in the sound samples. By knowing all the modulation and stuff that goes into it, they simply wrote a program that can take a wav file and extract all the binary information from it. They can also go the other way to make a wav file from a binary file (This is how the homebrew community works). These binary files can be understood by the emulators without any problem, since it's essentially just another form of bankswitching to implement.

 

Now, you may be wondering "But, what about games that are multi-load?" Well, here's how things work: you can either have individual binary files for each load, or you can concatenate them all into one file. If they're individual though, the emulator won't know where to find the next load, so you'll only be able to play up until that point. If all the files are concatenated, the emulator will just load the next 6k when appropriate (I'm not sure how it knows when to load this, but it seems to work).

 

I hope that answers your question(s). In case something wasn't clear, just let me know and I'll try to elaborate. However, there's probably others on the board that understand both the legal and technical aspects better than I Basically, if you want to play any of the Supercharger games, you can simply buy the CD from Cyberpunks for $20 (or whatever they charge for it, I can't remember). Once you have this, either convert the sound files into binary files (or are these on the cd as well?), or just feel free to download the binaries off the internet, content with the fact that you've already paid for the rights to do so.

 

--Zero

[Albert]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ze_ro:

I hope that answers your question(s). In case something wasn't clear, just let me know and I'll try to elaborate. However, there's probably others on the board that understand both the legal and technical aspects better than I Basically, if you want to play any of the Supercharger games, you can simply buy the CD from Cyberpunks for $20 (or whatever they charge for it, I can't remember). Once you have this, either convert the sound files into binary files (or are these on the cd as well?), or just feel free to download the binaries off the internet, content with the fact that you've already paid for the rights to do so.

---

 

And for those who don't have a Cuttle Cart yet and would like the ability to play virtually any 2600 game on a real 2600, I highly suggest going over to Chad Schell's site and ordering one. He quickly sold out of his first batch and is presently working on another around. The Cuttle Cart includes the Stella Gets a New Brain! CD, so you can legally play all the Supercharger games and won't have to hunt around for them on the net.

 

..Al

[slapdash]

I think Stella Gets A New Brain is $30 by itself, but yes, it comes with the Cuttle Cart. Damn fine bargain, if you ask me.

 

Now, Atari did NOT take over Epyx -- rather Bridgestone bought out Epyx for some other properties they'd done. They had some kind of agreement with Atari, but nothing was ever done with it really.

 

Also, though Bridgestone hasn't specifically cracked down on ROMs, they don't seem particularly interested in releasing the games to the public domain. There was a time they were going to allow posting images online, but I can't remember if that was ALL of them, or just a couple.

[mos6507]

The CDs are only $20 now, and it's only $50 to get the CD and both videos (plus shipping and handling of course).

 

 

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