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Blackbag

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About Blackbag

  • Birthday 01/04/1973

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Atlanta
  • Interests
    Classic computing- focus on the Apple IIe/IIc/IIgs
    PC Gaming- modern and classics
    Classic console gaming- Atari 2600 and newer
    Arcade- Candy Cabs and Multi-systems
  • Currently Playing
    Bard's Tale 4
  • Playing Next
    Super Smash Ultimate - Dec 7

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  1. I was able to make 3 of the AppleTi cards and tested them today with pneubauer's Kansasfest 2016 presentation disk. Everything works great! I did find that they are incompatible with a ZipChip. Initially, the Ampersand driver would crash, or sometimes it would load but the PRESENT or GAME programs would crash. I tried moving the card to different slots with varying success, but the programs never worked correctly. I tried disabling the ZipChip via their utilities, and making sure the slot speed was set to normal instead of fast, but nothing worked. So I swapped out the ZipChip for a normal 65c02 and everything worked like a champ in any slot I moved it to. I hope to play around with it some more over the long weekend.
  2. BTW, I got an email today that Matthew, the maker of the F18A board, has them back in stock. http://codehackcreate.com/store I saw the KansasFest video and I've been waiting for him to get back in stock to make one!
  3. In my home office I have a IIc with 3.5" disk drive and connected to a VGA input on one of my monitor's via Nishida's VGA adapter. I've claimed a small corner in my basement storage area and have the rest of my Apple II set ups-- currently, a ROM1 IIgs with CFFA3 and zip chip and a platinum IIe with CFFA3 and 8mhz zip chip. I have a second IIe that I've been tinkering with-- It's my frankenstein rig. Whatever hardware seems interesting goes into here for testing/coding/playing. So far, I've been messing with the EDD4+ card, the AppleCat modem, and mocking board, wildcard and A2pi. When not in hardware, I'm playing around in Virtual II for the Mac or Applewin on the PC.
  4. I still use a duo disk and stack just like in the picture, and I remember all my friends with the same set up doing the same thing. Never had a problem with it. Of course, now, I'm in and out of the IIe pulling cards and playing with things I usually have the top off, the duo disk on it's side facing vertically, and the monitor sitting on top of the Commodore monitor I have set up next to it so I can tinker... At some point I'll have it all back together again, but for now I'm absorbed into playing with the AppleColor 80-Column RGB card so it keeps the IIe opened.
  5. In somewhat order of preference-- Bard's Tale III Bard's Tale Bard's Tale II Dragon Wars Wasteland Might and Magic II Ultima II Ultima III Ultima I Auto Duel Pool of Radiance I never played the last 2 Ultima's (sacrilege, I know), but I was a huge fan of the Bard's Tale series and Dragon Wars. Just tonight I was going through the catalog of RPGs on the apple and was looking for one to start playing. Among the ones that I'm considering: Centauri Alliance - Looks neat, but I was never into Sci-Fi RPGs, and combat looks a little tedious. However, I found out it supports Mouse input tonight, which I didn't know it had. Legend of Blacksilver - I played some Legacy of the Ancients, and this is the DHGR sequel, looks pretty nice. Knights of Legend - Really in-depth RPG, detailed, but kind of drags on Dark Heart of Uukrull - Missed this one completely back in the day, heard it was really well done Magic Candle - This one was highly rated back in the day, but never had the opportunity to try it
  6. I thought that it always assumed a Mockingboard was installed also, until I realized that once I cracked the disk, converted it to a disk image and ran it under Virtual ][, it went straight to the game and bypassed the Mockingboard set up screen, even though I had a Mockingboard emulated in slot 4 and it works with other games with Mockingboard support. So I dug into the code a little deeper and found that there is a Mockingboard detection routine in the code. After the first/second stage boot code is executed and their DOS is loaded, code resumes at $8000. Before the mockingboard detect code is run, there's a check for a keypress. If any of the following keys are held down, it forces the mockingboard setup text screen to appear: #$9D - Control-] #$8D - Control-M (Return/Enter) #$CD - M #$DD - ] Otherwise, it continues with the detection phase, which is located at $81c5. The interrupt handler is set to $8220, then it tries to configure the MB card starting with slot 1 and moving up. If a MB at that slot is initialized successfully, it will jump to the interrupt handler and store the slot number in $06, then return. If $06 is still zero, then no MB was detected otherwise it will contain the slot number of the detected MB. It's interesting that they put in a force keypress to configure a MB card. This code is somewhat different from other MB detection code that I've seen in other games, which leads me to believe that there's really no reliable, standard way of detecting a MB, even within the same line of cards from the same manufacturer... If the MB setup code continually pops up at boot, even though a MB isn't installed-- I guess it's possible that some other card is generating an interrupt and somehow the same memory locations are changed to appear as if a MB is installed. Really haven't looked at that too closely, but it does appear that the programmers were concerned with a real mocking board not being detected correctly. I wonder if the force key presses are described in the manuals. RIch
  7. True, but what's strange is that it's impacting the game's disk read code for some reason. It grinds and grinds, like it's stuck in a loop in the read code, and keeps recalibrating the head. Since it's on hardware and I don't have a clean way to break into the monitor, I haven't been able to inspect where it's getting looped at or trace back the reason why. Maybe I should dig out the Wildcard I picked up years ago and see if I can figure out how to use it to break into the monitor and find the PC and SP values and go from there...
  8. I've finished cracking the Ultima Trilogy disks that Tempest sent me. I want to test them over the next day or so and I'll upload them as a zip to Asimov and include the scans of the disk labels and some notes on the crack and a minor patch needed to use .dsk images in an emulator (original protection on Exodus 3 uses Volume IDs). I ran into something interesting with Mockingboard support on the updated Ultima 3:Exodus in the Ultima Trilogy. With an 8mhz Zip Chip on my IIe, I found that when I configured the mocking board's type and slot on the initial text screen at boot up the intro music would play fine. However, once you hit a key to proceed to the actual game, the disk drive would grind over and over and never load the game. If I rebooted and selected None for mocking board, it would then load fine and I could play the game (albeit, without mocking board sound). It did this with both mocking boards that I own. I pulled out every card that wasn't needed with the same results. Finally, I pulled another IIe off the shelf with a standard 65c02 1mhz cpu and it worked fine with either mocking board I tried. I think Zip claimed 99% compatibility with software... Figures that I would hit the 1% corner case 30 years later... Rich
  9. Interesting. Being an Apple II user growing up, I never played M.U.L.E. but it's classic status hasn't eluded my attention. Has anyone created a commented disassembly of the game, or ported it to other platforms in a modern language? Would be helpful to see the game logic. If colors are a concern and there's not a lot of demanding action, I'd agree that DHGR would be nice to use. The simultaneous 4-player control does seem to be a problem, though. Rich
  10. Out of curiosity, i drew out a demo board with the existing sprites. It could probably be done with this size, but the enemy sprites might need to be a bit smaller to allow for the appropriate "swooping" motion as they attack. It sort of feels a bit crowded. Also, for each board, you're looking at 41 enemy sprites to animate/move-- 16 "butterflies", 20 "bees", 4 "tractor beamers" and 1 player. You can have 2 shots active at one time, and there's the star animation in the background. That's a lot going on... Disk image with graphics done in Blazing Paddles: http://204.16.8.40/other/a2galaga/a2_galaga_pic.dsk
  11. Thanks! They're zoomed for some reason (forum or browser?) , the original is a bit smaller. http://204.16.8.40/other/a2galaga/a2galaga.png Rich
  12. I'll up the ante with this-- a couple of apple 2 HGR sprites that _could_ be used for a galaga port. These are approximations, of course, because the HGR palette and layout limits you quite a bit, but I was able to whip these up over lunch in Blazing Paddles. They seem to be pretty good sizes for use in a game. You could get more detail by having a larger image, but at the expense of losing the screen real estate for all the enemies. In reality, these might still be too big, once you try to fit in all of the enemies into the game. If I remember correctly, Atarisoft's Galaxian and Alien Typhoon's sprites are a bit smaller than these. The largest sprite (the player's ship) is 18 pixels tall by 15 pixels wide, and the rest are a bit smaller than that. I aligned the image to be at the leftmost byte boundary. For an apple II .dsk image with the pic: http://204.16.8.40/other/a2galaga/a2_galaga_pic.dsk
  13. Tempest-- Sent you a PM regarding this. We have some history with Broderbund's The Toy Shop. I've got an original Mockingboard and one of the newer Korean Mockingboard clones I could use to test against the list. I agree, having a single location with all the verified Mockingboard compatible .dsk images would be great. Rich
  14. Bump for fred. This guy is first class. Thanks for the TAC2s!
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