rdemming

Great, I send you the money as soon as possible. But does this mean that if you ordered two, registered shipping is 11 euro? Robert

The Dutch TV series " ", the main character uses a Mega STE or TT which is visible in several episodes. Robert

RGB is RGB but you have two different refresh rates. 50Hz in PAL countries and 60Hz in NTSC countries. TV sets with SCART and RGB monitors usually display both without problems although the size of the screen may vary a little. I believe on my SC1224 the 60Hz picture is a little bigger than 50Hz but not much. Robert

A toilet in a bar at Saturday 3:00 am smells better than my Jaguar

It was a text only adventure. Leisure Suit Larry was heavily inspired by this game. Actually LSL is more or less the graphical version of this adventure. You can find it on AtariMania. Robert

Sadly the graphics of the "Softporn Adventure" game was nothing like the picture on the packaging

Kari's earlier flash cart can be programmed by downloading the data from a PC over a serial cable (BJL RS-232 cable). The first rom on the cart is the Lynx program that reads the data from the ComLynx port and flashes it. Of course when the cart is still "virgin" (empty), you could download the flasher program using a BJL* cart, swap the BJL cart with the flash cart, and flash the flasher program to the flash cart. To "hot swap" a Lynx cart you indeed need to make a little modification in your lynx. Robert * BJL lynx program is included in some homebrew carts that make it possible to download programs from the PC to the Lynx ram.

If you provide the PCB also, I would be interested to solder the parts on the cart myself. With only a few components it seems the ideal project to practice my SMD soldering skills Maybe I should take two in case I destroy the first one Robert

Here are some more games with bugs

The SIO2SD version of Mega-Hz does have an extra reset button to reset the AtMega in addition to 5<>3.3 volt signal converters. Robert

Hoi Analmux, Handsome pictures Ik wens je heel veel sterkte en success met de operatie en een voorspoedig herstel. Ik kan me heel goed voorstellen dat de Atari hobby niet meer belangrijk voor je is na zo'n ervaring. Dus hardstikke goed dat je je Atari ervaringen wilt documenteren voordat je je leven anders gaat inrichten. Ik hoop dat je de kans krijg om je toekomstplannen nog te verwezelijken. En ook al doe je niks meer met Atari, je blijft welkom hier. Robert

LOL, since the game is about picking up eggs, I suppose the Easter Egg is a special egg to pick up Robert P.S. As kid I played the Atari 8-bit version quite a lot. I looks much better than all the other 8-bit versions (Amstrad CPC, BBC, Spectrum, MSX and even C64)

Why 16BPP? , with 8BPP (256 colors) it can already look much more modern than the original 4 colors Robert Robert

The game "Recue on Fractalus" uses fractals to render the mountains in realtime. But that is probably not the kind of fractal you meant Mandelbrot and Julia fractal sets are too compute intensive to calculate in realtime on the Atari 8-bit.

I think you meant the 7800 when you said "worse then the A8 soundchip". The 5200 also had the same Pokey chip as an A8 thus sounded the same as A8. The 7800 had the same sound as the 2600 (TIA chip) which is not as good as the Pokey. But two 7800 games (BallBlazer and Commando) had a Pokey chip on the game cart. Robert

You probably don't hear much about it because it works so good I like the FAT loader very much. Very fast and long file names. And very easy to fill a CF-card .xex with files compared with a disk image/picoDOS solution. Unfortunately some .xex files I tried don't like the FAT loader while they load via SIO2SD/picoDOS. But there is probably not much you can do about it. Robert

With only 36 hours to go, project Giana reached its goal Soon, I can finally play a Giana Sisters game legally Robert

TT and Falcon normally used VGA monitors for high-res. There were no special Falcon VGA monitors, at that time you used just a standard VGA monitor on a Falcon. But you can use a standard VGA monitor on an ST in high-res mode by making an adapter cable that feed the ST monochrome signal to all three Red, Green and Blue signals of the VGA monitor. Note that the VGA monitor must support 70Hz (or was monochrome actually 72Hz?). I don't know if LCD screens support 70Hz nowadays as most seem to support only 60Hz in Windows. Robert

This is a RAM cart that is compatible with the XEGS bank-switching scheme. AtariMax/SIC-cart/etc. have other bank-switching schemes that are incompatible with the XEGS bank-switching scheme. Thus this is the only currently available programmable cart that can be used to play unmodified rom-images of XEGS games. Since this is a RAM cart it is easier and faster to program than a Flash-based cart. Therefore it would also be a good solution for software developers that want to develop cart based software and test it on real hardware. Also, this cart could also be used a RAM disk (with special software) that keeps its contents when the computer is off. Robert

As it says the Turbo-Basic cart version uses an XEGS cart, it should also run on this SRAM cart. Robert

Hi Santos, I am planning to make one myself already years ago. I even bought two LP621024D 128KB SRAM chips for it but I never got around making a PCB. So I will take two if you are making them. Will you also supply them without the memory chips as I have already two compatible chips? Robert

I thought leaving the original files intact and only patching it at run-time by a loader is a good thing as the original data is preserved for later generations and you can still see what was involved to remove the protection. And in case there was an error in patching, you still have the original data to correct it. Indeed, the protection is one of the more advanced I encountered on the ST. The first check will just exit the program when it was detected as a copy. When this is removed, there is also a second check. But this check alters some code that makes the game do strange moves well into the game making it impossible to finish a game of chess. Then there was a third check that calculated a check-sum of the program code. But this was not calculated in one go but spread over around 30 moves of a game of chess. If the check-sum did not match (because the game was patched to remove the previous two checks), it altered some more code that made the game crash much further into the game. Since the relocation process also "patches" the program to run from a specific memory location, the check-sum check skipped addresses affected by the relocation process by processing the relocation table too. So much thought was put into the protection. Since indeed the effects of a failed check are not directly visible and a check was spread over many iterations of the game loop, it took more effort than usual. But luckily, the STeem debug option make it more convenient than the old days where I used the excellent Bugaboo. With these kind of protections, it is easy to release a bad crack. But luckily, the owner of the original disk is a enthusiastic chess player that tested the crack extensively. I asked the owner of the original disk and the author of the game if they could find the box/manual and scan it but I got no answer yet. I will ask again. Maybe now the game is on AtariMania they will get stimulated to find it Robert

Hi Marakatti, I've uploaded it to your FTP server and also attached it here for those who can't wait The game in question is X-Chess. I believe it is a relatively unknown game because I could not find it in any of the Atari archives. The .stx image in the archive is a copy of the original including the copy protection. The .st image is the cracked version for those who want to play it on real systems or emulator without .stx support. I've added a loader that patches the program at run-time to circumvent the protection which was quite elaborate. The X-Chess game was published by X-Fun and written by a Dutch man called "Bert van der Liet". It runs in medium and high resolution. And the good thing is that the author gave permission to add X-Chess to the AtariMania archive. Regards, Robert X-Chess.zip

What is the best way to submit disk images to AtariMania? A few weeks ago I've send an .stx image of a game to the e-mail addresses on the AtariMania contact page but I haven't heard since and the game did not yet appear on AtariMania. Robert

My game arrive too but I did not have a chance to try it. It arrived indeed very fast. Thank you very much! Declaring a low value did the trick and it was not held by customs. For The Netherlands the limit is a value of €22. Last time I got some books from Amazon from the US it took 7 weeks to arrive because customs was so slow. And then I had to pay import tax of around €8 plus €12.50 administration costs which is ridiculous high compared to the tax I had to pay. The bad thing is that you do not only pay taxes over the value of the goods but also over the shipping/insurance costs which is crazy because those are already taxed in the country of origin. Robert