rdemming

"Missile Command" - The Movie on its way? Is a movie about communist nukes destroying American cities still actual? I suppose Atari wants to do an upgrade of the game to promote in conjunction with the movie. With the Asteroids Movie already in the works, what will be next? Pong the movie? Or Pacman the movie where Pacman is searching for XTC pills while being chased by the "ghostly" police. So what other old games would you want to see on the big screen?

I don't think that's really true, since a lot of CD releases have a plain-BJL counterpart. I think even non-free CD releases such as Double Feature #1 and Gorf CD are basically just a BJL-like program plus a loader, so they could theoretically be converted (though the authors wouldn't probably allow that). Yes I'm aware of that, but then you loose the loader/intro/menu screen and have essentially a loose program. I meant it can't be converted to BJL loadable program without loosing the coherency of the parts on the CD. And in cases of "Non-commercial" homebrew CDs like Atomix, Beebris, Do the Same, etc, the BJL downloadable program was converted to a CD and not the other way around. Robert

Maybe he meant the Turbo Freezer. I used it to convert tapes to disks by altering the loader to "halt" after loading and then use the Freezer to dump the loaded memory content to disk. So I could also dump the content of non standard tapes like tapes with 1KB blocks or with one big block. I also used it to crack disks like International Karate. Just modified the boot loader to "halt" after loading and decrypting the secondary loader. Then saved the decrypted loader back to disk so I had a boot disk with unencrypted loader. Then I could disassemble the loader in memory using the Freezer and make modifications to "don't care" the disk protection and write the changes back to disk if it worked. And of course I used it to find the memory location for lives etc. Robert

BJL CD-Player? There seems to be some confusion here. BJL is a special program that allows you to upload programs from a PC to the Jaguar's main ram via a parallel cable. You can't use it to load programs to cartridge space. In other words, you can't download and run cartridge dumps with only BJL. And BJL has nothing to do with the CD player. You always need a CD player to run games that are on CD, no matter if you have BJL, Alpine or Skunkboard. Maybe the confusion was caused by the fact that the BJL program can be loaded in several ways, as replacement BIOS rom or as bootable CD. If you have BJL as replacement BIOS, then the BJL bios can still boot from CD or cartridge. Note that homebrew games that usually load with BJL to main ram, can often be put on bootable CD. They other way around, from CD to a BJL downloadable program is not possible unless the CD consists of only a boot track. In other words, commercial CDs and nearly all homebrew CD releases can't be converted to BJL downloadable programs. Robert

Thanks for the fast answer. I will salvage the crystal from the 800XE board and put it on the VBXE and remove the big oscillator from the 130XE board. Robert

Hi Candle, I finally got the VBXE board installed. I have the big oscillator and wired Freddie pin 2 to left pad of X1 (The 14MHz in option) but did not yet remove the C24 & C25 caps on the VBXE board. And J6 is left unconnected. This works only a little bit. When the screen is simple, I got a stable picture, but when the screen is more complicated, it gets distorted. Also when I touch the 14MHz wire to X1, the screen gets distorted. So the 14MHz signal is not stable this way. I suppose it will get better if I remove the C25 and C25 caps. But before I do that, I was wondering if it might be better to remove the big oscillator from the motherboard and put a crystal from an old 800XE on the VBXE board and then connect J6. I think I still have an old 800XE board with those bad Chinese GTIA chips and that somehow is "missing" the Pokey chip Would feeding 14MHz from VBXE to the XE motherboard be more stable than feeding 14MHz from the XE motherboard to the VBXE? And what if I then leave both the oscillator on the 130XE board and the crystal on the VBXE board without connecting J6. Would that work or is that not working because the two clocks are not synchronised then? Robert

82 tracks worked on every drive I've seen. More tracks was only possible on some drives. 11 sectors per track was possible but unreliable. Quite a few 11 sector disks I have are now unreadable. Also possible was sectors with 1024 bytes per sector. Because you needed less sector overhead, a track could store more data. So a track could have 5*1024 byte sectors + 1*512 byte sector. And 1024 byte sectors were not copyable by most copiers. Robert

Your best bet is to get the harddisk fixed games from D-BUG and Klapauzius. Or alternatively you can try the harddisk fixes from ppera. The use of disk images directly is for some images possible with the Image Runner of ppera. But lots of images won't work with it because they don't use the OS disk routines or erase the image runner memory or hooks. Robert

Who was dropping the name for marketing? In the Ninja game or packaging there is no mention of who did the music. It only says the game is by Steve Coleman. But the games and packaging of "The Extirpator" and "International Karate" don't mention who composed the music either while those were from Rob Hubbard. If they put Rob Hubbard on the packaging, they might have sold more copies Robert

A great piece of hardware for the C64, the 1541-Ultimate does this. Its a cartridge with SD-cart that also plugs in the C64 disk port and emulates a complete 1541 drive including the internal processor and memory. And this complete with disk sounds if you plug in a speaker. Robert

The ASMA database says the following about the Ninja tune: COMMENT: Although the C64 version was composed by Rob Hubbard, Hubbard has confirmed that the Atari version isn't his. Robert

They even say that the same SID tune sounds different on different SID revisions and even on the same SID revision because of the variation in the analogue parts of the chip. One thing I noticed of Rob's themes between C64/Atari 8-bit is that the versions are often quite different on each platform while the tunes from David Whittaker are almost the same on each platform. Robert B.T.W. I like the Amaurote title music/level select better on the Atari than C64. The Atari version has the metalic sounding beat (C64 version, ZX Spectrum 128K, (unfortunately not the title music ) )

I don't know why it's not accepting your Zip Code. I will send you a PM. Hi Mathy, If you just fill in the country and no zip code, or just the numeric part of the zip code, it works. The zip code doesn't matter in the price for shipping to The Netherlands. I only hope that $33.45 shipping to the Netherlands for the multi-cart is an error. Strangely the other carts shipping cost range from $18.45 to $23.45 while you would think that shipping costs for every cart should be the same. Robert

Thank you for the picture. I never saw those in my version. And I played all sectors (Cadet mission). Maybe the tape version doesn't have this. Robert

I played this game a lot as kid. I always thought that shooting through an antenna was a feature of the game. You can only destroy the antennas if you hit them at the top or the bottom. What are the gravity balls? If you mean those indestructible "alien barricades" (see manual), I see some of them right in the first zone. Maybe you should try keys 1..6 to set the difficulty level. Robert

The music of Thrust was also composed by Rob Hubbard but the Atari 8-bit conversion is definitely not done by him. B.T.W. Orall Cornelius did convert some Rob Hubbard tunes for some unrelated Atari 8-bit games: Speed Hawk (speedy part of C64 Knucklebuster) Thunderhawk (Thrust inspired) Tiger Attack (Phantoms of the Asteroid) Side Winder II (Zybex music (I know, not from Rob Hubbard but it is a cover too)) I think some of his other musics are also covers. Rob Hubbard did also only a few Atari ST conversions: Thrust Warhawk Goldrunner (Human Race music on C64) Jupiter Probe (was there a C64 original for this?) Robert

Not necessarily. If the cart Kjmann is using is XE bank-switch compatible, it could be the original XE cart image in there. Maybe Kjmann should clear-up what bank-switching scheme is used in his carts? Also some more information about the "Atari XL/XE 8-bit Multi-cart" would be appreciated. For example how many KB is it. How is it programmed. Is it for 8/16KB rom images only or is it possible to have xex files on it. Is it compatible with the MaxFlash cart? Robert

Ooops, I thought I attached the file. Here it is. BTW, it is the Databyte tape version (instead of the Datamost) I converted to a boot disk. Nothing else done with it than just replacing the tape load routine, with a disk sector load routine. Robert The Tail of Beta Lyrae.zip

I listened to those demos and that is a YM/AY emulator. I viewed the file in a hex editor and the executable embeds an YM file, which is a file that contains the numbers written to the AY chip each 1/50th of a second. Thus the raw data. The sounds emulated by this player seems limited. The demo songs seems to contain simple waveforms, not drum noises etc. I wonder if the YM file in the executable can be replaced by another to test some more complex sounding songs. Robert

Did you try the tape version? The tape version doesn't have the copy protection of the disk version. But the intro is gone too. Attached the tape-to-disk conversion I did from the Datamost tape release. Note that it doesn't work on machines with 128KB or more. The game has the possibility to use joystick 3&4 of an 400/800 but on the XE series, PORT B of the PIA is used for bank-switching instead of reading joysticks 3&4. This probably makes ToBL crash. Robert

I've been listening to the song. It sounds great for an Atari 8-bit. But I think there is some confusion here. The software XXL wrote is NOT an AY-soundchip emulator. The song is from some kind of sample tracker (digitised sounds) that does not use AY-soundchip features. The original code just plays digitised sound through the AY-chip (Hereby the AY-chip is 'emulating' a DA converter). From what I see, XXL converted the original sample tracker code that creates the digitised sound to be played, to the 8-bit. Playing of the samples is then done by the Pokey instead of the AY-chip (Hereby the Pokey-chip is 'emulating' a DA converter). This is completely different from emulating the AY-soundchip. You can compare it more with playing Amiga mod files on the Pokey, but in this case it is another mod file format. Robert

You're welcome. Everything works now. I'm glad I could help. Robert

The AY-chip can do three channel stereo (trireo? ). The AY soundchip has three sound channels that each have their own pin on the chip. On an Atari ST those three channels are wired together. But you can cut them loose and feed the three channels to a stereo jack like shown here to have real stereo. Robert

From The Netherlands, I don't see the pictures as well. But www.kilonet.org is resolved to 199.89.231.200 so the DNS is working. But the server does not seem to be online since directly entering the IP address does not work either and a ping to the IP address does not give a response. Robert

I would love to see David Crane's 2600 programming apps but I'm not gonna buy an iPhone for that. I hope to see a version for a regular PC. Robert