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wesmond

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wesmond last won the day on April 25 2021

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  1. Indeed, I was sad to read this this morning, in my random "check to see if Ben has anything new in his catalgoue" which I'd periodically do. I had a few conversations and orders with Ben over the years; always cheerful and chatty, if quite an eccentric character from that particular "era" of computing. Clearly loved Atari, loved talking to folk about them, and as far as I could see, seemed to still live somewhat in that era, running things from his Atari ST I believe. You had to have quite "flexible" expectations of timing and methods (and maybe some help from someone in the USA - thank you!), but that for me was part of the experience, and I was glad to be in touch with him a bit. Thanks and farewell Ben, and my sympathies to those who knew him more than I did.
  2. That's was it - it was ticked, and unticking it sorts things out. (Not sure when/how I ticked this...) Many thanks Phaeron!
  3. Hi all, I've run into a problem with Altirra - or my configuration of it most likely - but I'm not sure how/when this happened. It seems the keys I press which are mapped to joystick directions and fire button, are being treated both as those joystick actions, and also key presses. So when playing the new Bruce Lee game, on every keydown event, Bruce moves a tiny bit, and the game goes into **PAUSED**. If I then push and hold the same key, it unpauses and is ok while I hold it there (Bruce keeps running...) until I let go, then the next keydown event will pause again. I wondered for a bit if this was something strange in the new Bruce Lee, although everyone else is having a whale of a time, so sounds like my issue. But anyway, I went back to the original Bruce Lee, and I have the same constant-pausing behaviour. I'm sure I've played that before without those issues, but I don't know what I've changed to get there. So I tested with both the release Altirra 4.01, and the test-21 above, and with changing the profile settings between Raw keys / cooked keys... no joy. I also tried moving the mappings from the cursor keys to the num-pad keys, but still the same. I'm on Windows 10 (Pro) 21H2 (19044.1706). Altirra 64-bit, emulating a standard 64k XL PAL. Any ideas on what's up? Thanks as always, Wes
  4. Hi all, I'm having an odd problem playing both versions in latest Altirra (tried both the 4.01 release, and 4.10 test 21) - I have my joystick mapped to cursor keys, and left control. Every time I press a cursor key, the game goes into "PAUSED" mode. If I then press the same key and hold, it's ok and I can run for a bit, but if I stop and start again, or change of direction, it PAUSEs again... Must be something in my config as I guess some of you have already played it on Altirra? I've tried the raw/cooked/full scan keyboard modes - all the same... Is there anything I've missed? It looks awesome - can't wait to play it through, and thanks for all the work on it. Wes
  5. Yes - I suppose the whole idea of loading from vinyl is quite quirky in itself, and my suggestions are fairly ridiculous ? Having a vinyl with tracks so you can quickly choose which awesome Cascade 50 game to play is... well... without want to be unkind, I think it's more than Cascade 50 deserves...! For Invitation to Programming and others... I guess there would be a hardware challenge as the tape motor is programmatically turned on and off at certain points for the user to think and answer questions. The heads stop turning pretty quickly on a 1010... For that to work on vinyl, I guess you'd need (a) a way of stop/starting the turntable from POKE 54018, and (b) longer gaps at the stop points, as I'd imagine it would take longer for the turntable to spin up and down... Did someone mention stereo being possible earlier? As I guess a technical exercise to prove it, there are those tapes that played audio on the other track while the game was loading... nostalgic memories of opening up the 800xl with the 5 red tapes... Lone Raider and European Countries and Capitals had the audio track while loadig... and later, I got States and Capitals, and Invitation to Programming II which did it...
  6. @Fred_M and @ivop - what about The Goonies for longest multi-level loader? What about the tape version of International Karate? Choose your background by which vinyl track you play... Gauntlet and Phantom will take some beating though. Or, Cascade's Cassette 50 (or there's another similar one I don't have - King Size was it?) would be either amusing or disturbing (I'm not sure which) to see on vinyl... Or a slightly different idea - what about the "talkie" kind of tapes - Invitation to Programming, or the Atari/Longman conversational language tapes... It's all too exciting, I'm getting carried away...
  7. Hi all - I also voted for the Lightgun project, if there is hope that it might make some real Atari games usable (in a different way, true) on real Atari hardware, should you not have a CRT screen any more. Can any emulator make it possible either? I fairly recently got Crossbow and CrimeBuster, but other than being nice boxes on the shelf, have not had the TV hardware to try them. A few years ago, I wondered whether an original Nintendo Wii remote with the sensor bar could be somehow interfacted to (hacked) and the signal converted into what the Atari would need - I guess by doing some maths with the ANTIC sync signals to "emulate" the delay and feed results to the joystick port. But it's way beyond my expertise... W.
  8. In case it gets missed - accidentally posted this in an older topic...
  9. To fill in some gaps... here are all/most of the type-in listing from Monitor (UKACOC). It was hard to know where to draw the line, as there are shorter listings in each "Cracking the Code" tutorial, which I didn't do. Perhaps another round up of those later... See the index.txt file in the zip for info about all the files, and also an annotated word document highlighting what I think I've added from the missing files document above. Sometimes a little hard to match things up. PS - late typo - my index.txt was unsaved... it's missing one line at the end:- Issue 21: JOYTYPE.BAS - p44-45 - by John Pilge - Joystick driven word processor... monitor_listings.zip
  10. Yep, that's it. I set Altirra to Hardware type 400/800, PAL, OS-A, and then "insert" the Basic cartridge, and it works. Thanks for the pointer!
  11. I think I might have typed in your 5-liner once upon a time... ?
  12. Thanks - I thought that might be the case. To be fair, this is 1982 code, pre-XL era, so the landscape of OS versions was different I guess when this was written. My purpose here is to archive what was written, rather than using it or making it compatible code, so it'll be about confirming for myself I've typed it and compiled it correctly, and adding some notes on how it could be used...
  13. Hi all, I'm triyng to type up some old listings - this one is some ASM from Monitor issue 2, p27 (http://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/UKACOC_Newsletter_No_02.pdf) - a flashing cursor sort of utility by Jon Williams. I think I've transcribed and compiled it correctly, but I'm getting a lock-up hitting an illegal instruction at $FCBD when I call USR(1536). I guess this is after the JSR $FCB3 on line 1210. I'm wondering if the JSRs are specific for a particular version of the OS, and/or BASIC, but that sort of thing is a bit outside of my Atari knowlege. Attached is my listing, the XEX I compiled with MADS (via Eclipse/WUDSN with a couple of edits - *= to ORG, and spaces after .WORD at the end), and a bit of basic to get ready for the USR(1536) call. Any ideas appreciated - it's good to be able to test I've got these type-ins right. Thanks, Wes FCURSOR.LST fcursor.bas FCursor.xex
  14. Found it - ALT+Backspace seems to toggle the behaviour on/off... I must be catching that now and then when I'm attempting to edit in a hurry! W.
  15. Hi @phaeron - I have managed to randomly trigger this again. Clues of what may have brought it on: typing a decent sized basic program, probably a couple of hundred lines. Realised I'd typed a line number wrong, and had overwritten an existing line... listed the line, edited the line number, pushed return, bit of a pause, and then it had switched into the weird sound/slow key repeat like earlier. As before, I'm in XL/XE OS ver 2, with Atari BASIC rev C. The debug info overlay says... Underflow count: 155 (rising slowly if I keep typing - is now 171) Overflow count: 21890 Drop count: 261 (rising very slowly if I keep typing - is now 267) Measured range: 24576-24576 (128.0 ms) Target range: 15360-34560 Incoming data rate: 31671.64 samples/sec Expected data rate: 63337.41 samples/sec Mixing mode : mono I'll try and trigger it in a repeatable way. And will leave the current one running in the background if there are more things to try. (Unless windows 10 update force reboots my computer without asking me... again...!) Thanks! W.
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