itaych

One more cheat. To disable the time limit for completing a level: e 84c3 ea ea ea

Anyway while I'm here, have some cheat codes. Type these commands in the Altirra debugger. Infinite lives: e 8f68 ea ea ea Green bugs won't steal your hat: e 960f 0 Red items won't kill you: e 9608 0e b0 19 Walk through red items (this pretty much ruins the game): e 9605 0 Be careful though, if you enter places you're not supposed to reach yet the "wall" counter will drop below zero making it impossible to finish the level you're on. So enjoy responsibly.

Didn't really want to start a new topic for this, but can anyone identify the tune used for background music in this game? It was also used in K-Razy Antiks and probably a dozen other games in the 80's. Edit: the song is When Johnny Comes Marching Home... Yay for google.

Altirra configured as a standard NTSC XL/XE computer with built-in Atari Basic works for me. Make sure you're not running the file I mentioned in my previous post, that's the corrupted one. The other one (TT3_Page_Flipping1.atr) works fine. Or perhaps you meant tutorial #1? In that one you do need to manually load the next example after ex. 4, see the docs. Note that I've uploaded a cleaned up set of all 15 tutorials with nearly complete documentation at this link.

Hi all, I've just finished a rather intensive weekend project, and what better place to post about it than a thread that's just recently turned 18. The goal of this project was to sort out the mess of multiple versions of Tricky Tutorials that are floating around - some corrupt and unusable, some containing files that were not part of the original published version and added by end users (including, in one instance, myself! (*)) - and reach a complete, clean and hopefully definitive collection of this software and its documentation. I searched far and wide for every possible copy of the tutorial disks and their manuals. This included my own hard drive, Atarimania, the Internet Archive, this thread and others, as well as a big old binder full of documentation lying in my closet. I spent many hours collecting the material, scanning missing manuals, and just for the heck of it - understanding and reconciling the differences between the various disk images until I narrowed them down to no more than one or two versions of each, all in working order and the differences known and (mostly) understood. The result of this effort is an archive containing all 15 Educational Software Inc releases (though #4 is not genuine, see below), plus an alternate versions subfolder containing Santa Cruz Educational Software releases of tutorials 1, 2, 4, 5, as well as a couple of curiosities: a disk containing ESI releases of both tutorials 2 and 4 with a startup menu to select between them (**), and a version of tutorial 8 with slightly different text in the title screen's scroller. There are also two different demos for use as in-store continuous displays. As for documentation, many manuals were up on Atarimania (I converted #11 from images to PDF), and I found 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 on the Internet Archive. There is also a PDF containing 1-6 together from this thread. Finally I scanned my own copies of 8, 9, 14. They are not the original manuals but nearly 40 year old photocopies, so they're not perfect but I think they came out all right. The end result is full documentation for all tutorials except #15, whose manual seems nowhere to be found. The multiple different versions of the disk images posed quite a challenge (there were 2-4 binary different versions of each), but after factoring for things like disk corruptions, unnecessary files added by users, garbage in empty areas of the disk, different MEM.SAV files, etc. - I was able to delete most of the duplicates to end up with just the versions posted here. I was very careful to ensure I wasn't deleting anything of any importance. I believe everything here is archival quality, equal to or better than anything else available online. I recommend posting these versions to the appropriate archives. Please let me know if anything seems wrong or doesn't work (I did some pretty thorough testing but not 100%). Enjoy! (*) Attention @www.atarimania.com, your current copy of #14 contains some of my hobby code from 1991-1992. See here for how I think this happened. (**) I have no idea why this Franken-version exists or where it originated, but it was useful because there is no available standalone version of ESI release #4 - so I made one by taking this one apart. I took a copy of this disk image, removed the tutorial #2 files and made it auto-load the #4 title using the AUTORUN.SYS taken from one of the other disks. I guess that could count as cheating but my educated bet says there is no difference between this "reconstructed" version and the real published release of ESI #4. If this one doesn't make it to the archives however, I'd understand. Tricky Tutorials - itaych - 20210418.zip

Thanks for putting this up! I'm always looking for more of the Tricky Tutorials since I basically grew up on them but my collection is incomplete, so I went over these disk images, comparing them to what I already have. To my astonishment I found that two of them in particular contain not only the Tutorials themselves but also a few other unrelated files - with my name on them - dated 1991-1992. What had apparently happened was that in the early 90's I was writing various hobby projects, and since Atari compatible floppies were scarce (the high density ones you could buy for the PC didn't work) I used any free space that I could find. The Tricky Tutorials 3 and 14 didn't fill up an entire disk, so I happily used the empty space for my own projects. Several years later I got an SIO2PC cable, which meant I longer needed floppies (everything was backed up to the PC) and Nir Dary (@ndary) was happy to take them off my hands. At some later point he backed up all those disks himself - including some that apparently I had missed when performing my own backups - and put them somewhere online. From there they spread forth, and these two Tricky Tutorial disks ended up in this collection. Since these files are floating around anyway, let me explain what they are: in disk image Tricky Tutorial 3a -basic.atr: sir1.asy, sir1.obj: this is part of an Assembly language paint program I was working on with my brother Nitzan. There are additional source files that are absent, so this is not very useful as is. Note that the Tutorial files in this image are corrupted beyond repair so this image is basically useless. Use TT3_Page_Flipping1.atr instead. in disk image Tricky Tutorial 14 -basic.atr (which is also the image presently downloadable from Atarimania): desktop.bas - a prototype file manager program with joystick controlled GUI. It displays the disk directory, you can click on the File menu and that's pretty much it. Anything else will either do nothing or crash the program. vbi.* - some VBI source and object code, plus the binary converted to a form includable in a Basic program. I'm not sure what it was used for (it's not the same as the code used within desktop.bas). readme.bas - doesn't do much, loads an 80-column font and switches to it. Screen remains at 40 columns. col80.fnt - an 80 column font. col80mak.bas - converts col80.fnt to col80.lst, for merging the binary font data into a Basic program. col80.bas - a TurboBasic program that displays a text file in 80 columns. No Assembly used so it's extremely slow. However scrolling is achieved by display list manipulation so that part is actually very fast. Crashes at end of the file. This was basically an early proof of concept for what eventually grew to become the Ice-T terminal emulator. @videofx - if you're still looking for these disks, may I suggest looking at https://atariage.com/forums/topic/22905-tricky-tutorials/ - all 15 tutorials are up there. Also I've just finished a major collection and cleanup operation on these, I will post my results in that thread shortly.

Transfer > Xmodem send.

This is really annoying. Did the authors of SpartaDOS just assume that no one will ever want to use that extra memory? Isn't there some system call that could tell DOS to release that memory, and reload that code from disk when the application exits (like most other DOSes do)?

Considering the fact that I'm out of memory, not much! I did want to iron out some things and make an 'official' (i.e. not alpha) release, but I haven't found time to deal with it in years and the memory issue has been frustrating me. I think in the alpha release Ymodem-G will hang because the popup notification window with the warning message, will cause a buffer oob check to fail - probably no one uses it so no one cares, but it's the sort of thing that I wouldn't let slip by in a real release. @flashjazzcat, I've reviewed the sources, all single use init code is overwritten after running.

There is a startup routine that gets overwritten but most of the init code must remain resident because Ice-T was designed to survive a push of the Reset button. But perhaps some of it is single use, I'll look into it. Thanks!

An extra 3 kb could be great, though I'm worried that (a) these addresses are not necessarily correct for all OS versions including third party ones, and (b) I'll break SDX.

Sorry if I sound like an idiot, what are these overlays you speak of? And where did you find information on how TurboBASIC works? Did they publish example code for this technique? Thanks.

This might be possible if I hardwired Ice-T to run with a specific serial port type, but as it is there's no choice but to use the standard R: device, and there's no way to tell it to disable interrupts and work in polling mode.

This may make sense when the only interrupts in the system are the VBI and the keyboard, but in my situation I need maximal performance while there is constant I/O going on, and as far as I understand there is an interrupt for every single byte incoming over the serial port. This happens >1000 times/sec and I worry that adding even the slightest overhead will slow the system down noticeably. I'd have to see what the ROM does and implement the same thing myself. (it might just call the R: handler which is already in RAM so perhaps this is not so difficult.) Also any IOCB call to disk/printer/serial/keyboard (gotta love those clicks) must also switch PORTB, and must itself not be located in the OS RAM - so this is definitely not a "set and forget" solution with zero restrictions. As for SDX, well in my scenario the extended RAM is already taken so SDX gets completely ruled out. Not sure how happy the users would be about that.

I'm considering doing a little more work on Ice-T. Trouble is, I'm out of memory. The only remaining unused memory is that under the OS ROM and I'd like to make use of it. Why did I never use it before, you are surely asking? The reasons are several: I didn't need it. XE banked memory provided far more than what was necessary and was the easiest to use. I didn't know how to do it without instantly crashing the system. Even if I did it, I wouldn't know what areas in memory would be safe to use without breaking disk, printer and serial port I/O, all of which must remain available. The OS VBI routine needs to keep running, the keyboard interrupts need to be serviced as usual. There are also probably a few things I've forgotten or that I'm not even aware of that need to keep working. Some working environments (various DOSes, custom OSes, etc) themselves use the XL memory for their own purposes, making questions 2 and 3 even harder to answer. I also need to worry about not breaking them. Well, issue 1 is no longer correct. For issue 2 I could probably do some research and figure it out (I'd still appreciate getting the answer here), but 3 and 4 have me stumped. Of course if these issues have been discussed elsewhere I'd love a link. Cheers