Leaderboard

Hi all, In celebration of the 35th anniversary of Jet Set Willy this year, I've written a new definitive conversion of the game for the A8 from scratch featuring hi-res colour, 50/60Hz sprite/screen updates, bug fixes, the Rob Hubbard music and an accurate conversion of the sound effects. Back in February after taking a hiatus from A8 programming for a year, I was reading an issue of Retro Gamer magazine where they'd mentioned that Matthew Smith would be attending Play Expo here in Manchester in May. Inspired by the opportunity to meet Matthew in person I started to look into the technicalities of rewriting everything and developing a full colour recreation of the game as I did previously with Manic Miner. I didn't have any prior intention of creating a new conversion of JSW with other projects awaiting continuation but as I looked into it I thought why not surpass my previous effort with MM and so before long I'd started working on the game fully. I thought rewriting all of the procedures for the char based method would be a fun challenge and I certainly thoroughly enjoyed working on it over the months, particularily the realtime drawn rope. I spent considerable time planning and working on the implementation of the colouring for each room to ensure that the interupts and mid scan changes (where nessasary) were as optimal and minimal as possible. Whilst carefully designing all the room implementations with various trials and itterations I concluded that there were several that benefited from non-inverted colour ordering so I adapted all of my procedures to deal with both inverted and non-inverted rooms to achive the goal. I gave extra consideration to the "Entrance to Hades" death room. The colouring of the original game dictated that the large guardian sprite was dark but of course Miner Willy is always White in the game so this was another room that I decided I was able to work around things with non-inverted colour ordering and writing a special procedure specifically to calculate a sprite overlay for Miner Willy. With the design of the room I made it possible to free the missiles to utilise color3 with the 5th player for that purpose. You'll rarely ever see this room but in persuit of ensuring I did everything as best as possible I continued to make sure that all aspects of this classic were well represented in the final game. I've included the Rob Hubbard music from the A8's commercial release and the sound effects have been recreated to be accurate to the original Spectrum game. Developing the missing sound effects with Manic Miner was something I intended to come back to so that MM would be complete so I made sure to solve them whilst working on JSW. The original Spectrum beeper effects use short CPU hogging loops during runtime which resume again after a continuing pass of the game code to give that famous stuttered effect. With my version of the game being developed for single frame 50/60Hz, that wasn't an option so after contemplated a solution I considered making use of a POKEY timer to precisely cut the volume after a specified duration to accurately replicate the same effect. After discussions with both Avery and Lyren (many thanks to them) including integrating the keyboard IRQ into the procedure I had a working solution to implement. When I was initially mulling things over I wasn't sure whether it would be possible within the XLs stock 64Kb RAM as JSW is 3 times the size of MM with 60 rooms and with more developed procedures. JSW is also a free roaming game so I'd need to have additional buffers for the switch between the rooms. With the carefully written optimised interrupts, the RAM used for the 60 JSW rooms were within target and with everything else written there's unused RAM remaining from our usable 62kb even with the inclusion of the music. Many fixes have been implemented (or rather acknowledged and corrected) so the game is now presented more closely to how Matthew had originally intended. Firstly the official fixes released by Software Projects: There were four critical bugs with the released game which prevented completion. These were eventually addressed by Software Projects and these fixes have all been taken care of with this new A8 version. The most famous bug of all in JSW was the Attic bug, this was caused by an incorrect y-coordinate of an arrow definition, one of the bytes is an index into a table of screen buffer addresses and should always be an even number, but the value of the byte was 213 making the arrow procedure overwrite and corrupt several rooms making them impossible to navigate. The official fix corrected the arrow y-coordinate. One item on the far right in "Conservatory Roof" was also uncollectable as a nasty was blocking it, the official fix removed the nasty. In The Banyan Tree it was impossible to access the room above (A bit of tree) from the right-hand side which is nessasary as you need to access "Conservatory Roof" to collect the items via the ledge on the lower left in Under the Roof. the official fix replaced a wall tile with a floor allowing you to pass. There was an invisible item in "First Landing" which was also unreachable. As you need to collect all the items this meant that the game could never be completed. The official fix moved the item to The Hall where it still remained invisible. I've taken the liberty of giving the item there a definition of a shield for the A8. Other less obvious bugs: The conveyors in "West of Kitchen", "The Nightmare Room", "The Wine Cellar" and, "Tool Shed" were all actually corrupted. This was caused by a bug in the room rendering code. If a graphic data byte for one of the room tiles matched the attribute byte of the conveyor tile to be drawn, the Z80 CPIR instruction exits early leaving HL pointing at the wrong address and therefore rendering a corrupted conveyor. Additionally with "The Nightmare Room" the attribute byte for the conveyor was shifted by one byte back making it appear flashing green/cyan rather than the correct red definition. The conveyors are now presented in all of those rooms as originally intended by Matthew. Furthermore in "The Nightmare Room" with the byte shifted back it fixes the definition of the ramp which previously had a gap at the bottom. The same bug in the code causing the CPIR instruction to exit early also caused the nasties down the right hand side of "A bit of tree" to be corrupted. I decided to leave that one alone as it doesn't affect the game and I'd rather it stay the same not to make unessasary changes and keep the game as it's remembered. The item in the Swimming Pool was automatically collected as soon as Willy entered the room. This bug does not occur in the new A8 release. Contradictary to the scrolling title screen message that Willy must collect all the items before midnight, The original game ended abruptly at 1am regardless. This has been fixed in the new A8 release. Using the Spectrum map created by Pavros in 2012, I've created my own map with screenshots of all of the 60 rooms which is attached below. Key presses during gameplay: H - Toggle between music and sound effects (Your last status will also be remembered when starting a new game) A - Pause Attached is my initial v1.0 release which is PAL only for the moment, I'll get around to the nessasary ammendments for NTSC machines. You should be able to load from any device, I've attached an ATR with the executable autobooting on a DOS2.5 image. I hope you enjoy playing through the game. Tezz Edit: 17th November 2019: the original attachments have now been replaced with the final PAL, NTSC and hybrid compliant release. jsw2019.xex jsw2019.atr

The following is personal opinion. I've long said that, "your most ardent detractors are on your side, they want things to be better; they just might suck at communicating it." This applies to both sides here. Both sides have people who are a bit zealous in thier beliefs about Atari's efforts thus far. It's clear that the Pro Atari side including Atari itself are not familiar with the nature of managing an online community. When a inconvenient quest is asked you address it; Even if you don't have a good answer. If you remove it and/or ban people it looks like a cover up and that you have something to hide. It's worse when you do it habitually. I think that with the VCS the word "Troll" is a convenient excuse for some to keep themselves insular. And given that Atari SA has at this point not made an effort to keep their PR team in check is tacit approval of sweeping information and questions they don't like under the rug. It wasn't until there was an uproar that got an update. Unfortunately it will always look like a reactionary effort.

I haven't dipped my toe in the water until now, but feel motivated to write - regardless of the provocations, misinformation, he-said, she-said... despite all of that.... the professionalism of the company spokesperson(s) pretty much says a lot about the professionalism of the company itself. What a walking disaster.

MY NAME IS ANDREW WERNER, MY AUTHORITY IS ABSOLUTE! but, seriously- this is what happens if you have an opinion different than their groupspeak. you know what really ticks them off? daring to show proof that you're right

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), 35 colors. Philsan_MonaLisa.xex

Recently re-watched Tremors, that's a damn good movie!

I joined AtariAge in May 2006. I had spent the previous seven years attempting to build a start-up company during the dot-com boom-bust cycle. It failed, horribly, and left me in a state of misery, dejection, and despair. I was burned out, and partially catatonic from 2004 until 2006 from the entire experience. I discovered AtariAge, and rekindled my love for the Atari 8-bit computers, where I started. and I started coding for the 8-bit, again. and it helped me remember why I loved computing in the first place. ...and I found my way back to sanity. Since then, retrocomputing has been a constant fixture in my life, to counter-balance my day job, to keep reminding me, why I do what I do. To keep me sane. We all make each other better. Thank you. -Thom

I did yea, I spoke with him for a few minutes after his talks. He's always been famously elusive so I never expected to get the chance to meet him in person. I was glad to hear he was such an Atari fan. Matthew is brilliantly eccentric and highly intelligent although life hasn't treated him as well as he deserved and by his own admission he also hasn't looked after himself well either over the years. One highlight meeting Matthew was him signing "I didn't get paid for this" on all the cassette covers that people had asked him to sign

Jose, would you be willing to live in North Dakota for, say, 6 months ? I could pay for your return plane ticket (LIS -> ORD), pick you up at Chicago airport and drive you home, where you could stay at the top floor of my house (there's 3 unused rooms). You thus wouldn't have to worry about accommodation or food. Obviously, I wouldn't ask any money. Climate-wise, it's colder than Portugal, but we actually don't really get air below -40 'C, so it's not that cold either (except for the windchill, which does unfortunately, every now and then, cross into the -60 territory, but if you don't go out those days, it doesn't matter). Change of scenery might, however, tremendously help your heart and beat the inevitable depression (which can be a very nasty bitch, from a painful personal experience) and you would get better. And, I got the Ataris here - U1MB, Falcon, Jaguar, soon also Lynx...

I don’t want to go into the psychological intricacies of why some of the mods of that group may be acting the way they do, but I have some theories about people who get overly angry and power hungry over trivial amounts of power and the social trauma they must have experienced throughout their life to act that way. It’s sad in more than one way. I love video games. I love these 35 year old cartridges and machines, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But I can’t imagine getting as angry as they do over this stuff. I get passionate about my friends and family, politics, my research, etc. I almost wish my life was so careless and stress free that I could get that heated over this stuff.

You can see the problem on the photo. Look at solder pad 57 just to the right of the ribbon cable. You can see that the two solder holes are open (the pins fell out). Pad 57 is for the space bar. This is the common flaw of the Hi Tek keyboard. It is fixable. You need to insert two pins back in, but there is a trick. I use a metal pin constructed from those cheap Christmas ornament wire hooks since they are malleable and not too rigid. You need a multimeter to test continuity. Insert the two pins and you will have to feel around until you get continuity when you press the spacebar. When they are positioned to get continuity when the spacebar is pressed, very carefully solder them without moving the pins. I've done this on three Hi Tek and had a 100% success rate. You need patients to insert them in the right position. No continuity when the space bar is not pressed and continuity when it is. This failure is usually attributed to too many enthusiastic sessions of Defender smacking the spacebar (smart bomb) too hard. The load is passed into the PCB and it eventually de-bonds and the solder pad releases the pin. You have both pins to contend with. One warning: Be careful not to leave the solder iron on the PCB Pads (location 57) too long. You might be-bond the trace on the PCB if it gets too hot for too long (been there, done that).

The real reason I post these bits of code is to get a free lesson from DMSC

What is the point of that group, anyway, other than to make Andrew feel like he's the boss of something? They only want to hear good news, but if that existed, they wouldn't need a super-exclusive private club to discuss it. Just thinking about it fills me with depression and sadness.

I found the need to do some bit rotation in FastBasic and figured it would be better just to write a small bit of assembler code. I thought I'd post it here incase anyone found it useful. data rotate() byte = $68,$68,$A8,$18,$68,$AA,$68,$2A,$48,$8A,$2A,$48,$88,$C0,$00,$D0,$F2,$68,$AA,$68,$60 r=adr(rotate) result=usr(r,88,2) First number in the USR statement is the number you want to bit-rotate, the second number is the number of left rotations you want (I didn't do right rotation 'cause I didn't need it) So this will do the follow to the bytes: 00000000 01011000 00000001 01100000 Although I wrote it to pre shift some graphics it could also be used for doubling a number (each rotate will double the initial number) and it's faster than normal mulitplication eg. a=usr(r,b,3) will double a number 3 times (b*2*2*2) which equates to: a=b*8 Disclaimer: I'm not great at assember, so use at your own risk

I wrote a program which let you configure device, mount and create new ATR images into SIO2SD. It is not as sophisticated as Pajero's configurator, but I think, that it is easier to manage - as it is not required to remember a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Of course there is a possibility to use SIO2SD Manipulator as "configurator", simply rename sio2sdman05.xex to sio2sd.xex and upload it into root directory of SD card. sio2sdman05.xex sio2sdman05.atr

Finally pimped my ride...

http://madteam.atari8.info/uzytki/foxmode.7z prototyping program, Fox Mode 12++ / 0++

Sorry for the delay - went out to buy a new dishwasher and microwave today. I take my truck to the store, choose the stuff, and they say "Oh - we don't stock anything in the store, it's in a warehouse 75 miles north. We'll deliver it for free on the 14th". Anyhow - sent the VHD file I am using and a few screenshots of the emulator settings.

For sure they were teletype terminals. We only got to use them once and then it was over to another college where there was 1403 with Fortran and cards. I only got 2 programs to run between Sept and Christmas break going there once a week after high school classes. That machine had 8Kwords of "CORE" memory as I recall. ?

Atari demonstrably bans people they find inconvenient. No more, no less. It's not for personal attacks, hate speech, the "trolling" catch-all, or any of their other silly excuses. The Parker siblings, the Werners, Lucas...these are simply useful idiots for the cause. Foot soldiers. Enforcers. Atari won't disavow these morons because they'll gladly do Atari's dirty work.

Or apathy at times, at least for me, but it is also surreal. I am trying to think about anything in the gaming world that has gone on like this and so far down this road, and I can't think of something this bizarre. Pash shenanigans don't come close (that game watch thingie? Never followed that...). I was tired and I first read that last bit as "post sarcastic responses to himself", but that would not surprise me either.

You may have already read this, but GPL Interface Specifications for the 99/4 Disk Peripheral is my go-to document for all things related to the details of the TI disk DSR, especially for levels 1 and 2 access. ...lee

I guarantee you that's the case. These people are all about "protecting the brand".

As per others, brilliant job, its a superb conversion, sadly I find these games really tough these days but that's me and no fault of this marvelous conversion. As for Matt, was he ever diagnosed with anything, he sounds like classic Aspergers.Usually brilliantly creative but with a skewed look at the world and often total no self care.

He'll probably end up banning himself, since he jumped to the conclusion that Atari VCS will be released soon without any corroboration whatsoever.

Well I can consistently get into the 275,000 to 325,000 range. This was my best run after learning more about the game. ? I won’t qualify as He-Man here but maybe She-Ra? ?? 438,350

Hey, Currently trying to tie loose ends, starting a new big project and all.. so here are the final wining/loosing pics, in 36x48 and with the latest colors provided.. Enjoy ! ending.zip

I, too, used to sell really well on eBay. It's significantly harder now to get the same attention over the last year or so. Fees have gone up, people yelling at you because "you charged me taxes" which I have no control over. Just a pita. Glad I've slim lined my collection and gotten to a point I rarely have to sell anymore. Can't stand the place these days.

I love Pac-Land so much I used it for my Pac-Man fanfic back. 1930s Pac-Land BW https://imgur.com/a/5XJ7tSC Pac-Man Movie Fanart. https://imgur.com/a/odG5GZe I already done a Box Art on Pac-Man Collection, Baby Pac Ill do some for this one^_^

...under the 7800 console hardware: Pac-Land Main Theme Music - RealHW.mp3 Pac-Land Death Tune - RealHW.mp3 Pac-Land Fairyland Melody - RealHW.mp3 Pac-Land Intro Melody - RealHW.mp3

Every time I steal some little kids handheld at the playground, I always play it for a while before taking it to the pawnshop.

Manchester England England, Across the Atlantic Sea... Let the sunshine in... Jet Set Willy 1986: In my eyes this version is crap! http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=2122 Jet Set Willy 2007: This plays somewhat better... http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=5676 The Big House 1990: Reminds me of JSW, nice game... http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=3227 Jet Set Willy 2019: Not played yet, so let's wait and see... Thanks for another conversion! Now someone could write a big review and compare the four A8 versions (or more, in case I missed one)...

Just scored a PAL 600XL mobo for $20 w/free shipping. If it works, it will be a parts donor for my first PAL 1088XLD build

Today's mission: Survive work (early/short shift), Dishes, Laundry, Buy coffee, Sprinkler stuff, and finally put up a Post-It with the page # I'm on in the atariBox thread.

Ah nice idea, I would hope that would be a simple change. Another idea could be the GTIA console speaker "fifth audio channel" for beeps and blips - but then you're back to heavy stealing of CPU cycles to drive that 1 bit audio like the spectrum, apple etc..

Again these sound so much better in real HW than on my Altirra emulator.

So for example, here's a copy of Classic99 running in the background, with a borderless mirror of the section of the window excluding the menu in front (Classic99 is the active window, but the OnTopReplica is always-on-top): And here's an image of my monitor with an OnTopReplica of the screen image expanded to fill the entire monitor:

An ATR image of the 1050 diagnostics disk can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/a8b_1050_Disk_Diagnostics_1983_Atari Choose Option 2 "Troubleshooting Options" Then Option 3 "Drive Select Switch Test" Then it will prompt before testing accessing each of D1, D2, D3, D4 You can change the drive ID switch while the drive is on, and it will respond to the new drive # without a power cycle.

Full screen is not really one of the things I actively support in Classic99. If it works, great, if not, oh well. Full screen development tools aren't very convenient. I'll take a note on it, but no promises.

I can't read Japanese, but I used to do this kind of thing all the time, especially when other territories got stuff way earlier than we did. Now most things seem to have global launches, or close to it, and I feel like I'm no longer missing out on most things. What's in the Japanese store that makes it worth the hassle of maintaining the other account?

Transaction ID 0CR35753LS989394M. Says you should have it by 10/11.

The search for "Pac-Man" and "not that bad" came up 7367427642764343922 times. ?

Its about getting into a groove, and i usually never turn back to avoid the fireballs...

pressing the left arrow key on a real c64 or the key to the left of the number 1 on vice will toggle the music on and off.

I don't see a problem with the music and don't think that modern releases whether new concepts or ports of 35 year old games should try to be "period correct". The game was created within the spirit of those old cop/bandit chase movies of the Charlie Chaplin era and the music is fitting. Of course like just about any game the option to turn it off is desirable.

Space Rocks and Lady Bug are 2 personal favorites of mine. You got some great games in that lot. Enjoy ☺

Awesome Karri! I'm done with the display I'm sending too. Might have to ship it express, it's cutting it short. Fingers crossed for your boxes being ready on time!

No need for a grimace. We've accomplished more in one evening regarding discovery of what caused the 86L issue than anyone else but the driver's author himself in the space of two years (since it appears he already fixed the problem in 87L). The question now is whether all related 'Error 144' issues are caused by the same bug, and whether all can be overcome by simply updating to the latest FATFS version. That would be immensely helpful - thanks. Since an update to FATFS.SYS very conspicuously fixes the issue in the scenario explored in recent posts, being able to reproduce the same or a similar issue without the involvement of that driver would be quite significant. At a guess, I'd say that the later version of FATFS.SYS follows DOS's example and uses the XDCB for >32MB volumes, while the older driver uses 24-bit addressing with the high-order bits in DUNUSE. SPARTA.SYS in older SDX versions also used DUNUSE in the sense that it would clear it (since no SDFS partition is larger than 32MB), but newer builds of SPARTA.SYS may not bother, since it's expected that the newer FATFS.SYS is used, and the newer FAT driver doesn't write to DUNUSE. Thus the combination of the newer SPARTA.SYS with the older FATFS.SYS causes problems. If SPARTA.SYS in SDX 4.49c cleared DUNUSE prior to writing to the 32MB SDFS volume, no problem would exist with the older FAT driver either.