Hornpipe2

I've got a side project called Stratlas, which is a tool used to produce full-size lossless compressed map images from legacy RTS games. I added Warcraft support last year or so. (It also does war2, preliminary c&c, and preliminary total annihilation maps.) Information on the old game is difficult to come by at best. One big stumbling block is that the map files themselves are packed away in the .war archive and "built" at run-time. To make custom maps you instead hack up a save file and change the tile info stored there. There is a map editor (warcedit) which does exactly that... it's an ancient tool that only works with the Forest tileset, but you can grab it off the Stratlas downloads page anyway. Stratlas makes its images by parsing .sav files. I have another program that works directly with the raw files but doesn't show starting locations - I don't exactly have permission to distribute it, but modifying Stratlas to work in this way would be pretty trivial. The Stratlas codebase can give some hints, but it's pretty much the bare minimum required to accurately place tiles and objects so it looks right. That leaves big gaps in e.g. fog-of-war info, AI waypoints, starting resources, etc. Most of my info was gleaned from the open-source project Wargus. Buried away in their svn repo is a directory called war1gus, with a file war1tool.c which is used to extract all the game resources for use with the Stratagus open-source RTS engine. Here is a link that you may find useful: http://wargus.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/wargus/trunk/war1gus/ If you're just interested in pulling the data to make your own viewer (or trying some direct replacements in the .war file), and you have a war-file extractor, you can simply get these numbered files from the archive. They are exactly 8192 bytes in size - odd is for tilemap, the even is fog-of-war map. 45 .. 67 -> forest 69 .. 91 -> swamp 93 .. 115 -> dungeon If you have more questions let me know!

Game is too slow for me. I prefer stuff like Dragster - 6 seconds to finish a game! 4969

If it helps, this one will do a 65XE to 320kb. As I understand the XEGS is just a 65XE in a different case, it could be made to work. You'll need to source a CO25953 chip though. http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/5.8-BitComputersSupportArea/7.TechnicalResourceCenter/showarticle.php?32

Edging out a couple of you guys here with 15320

10,370

Sometimes I have better luck when browsing to http://atarimania.com instead of http://www.atarimania.com (or vice versa) - try both and see what happens.

Just to throw in my thoughts: when my friends get together, they always ask "Anyone want to turn on the Wii?" not "Anyone want to play PS3?". Since I rarely play video games by myself, the Wii is the clear winner. It's got mass appeal and approachability that the PS3 can't touch.

I fixed up the list a bit, to only include the 32-in-1 and AtariAge's own 2005 Minigame Multicart. The whole article is screwed and includes things like pirated NES releases, unsourced info, etc. Oh well. ETA: I left out the Australian Paks as they were released by H.E.S. which as I understand it actually pirated Activision's games to make their carts?

I was looking at "Multicart" on Wikipedia and found a supposed list of "official" 2600 multicarts here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicart#Atari_2600 There are five listed: * 32 in 1: Only released in Europe (PAL systems) contains Atari's early hits such as Blackjack, Boxing and Combat * Arcade Pinball 3-in-1 * Boxing, Freeway, Sky, and Tenn Dactor 4-in-1 * Combat 5-in-1 * Super Action Pack: contains Pitfall!, Grand Prix, Laser Blast, and Barnstorming I've never heard of some of these (none have references either, feh). What can anyone tell me about these carts?

This guy shows you how to beat it, if you're curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGdPe1gq4TY

I made 2 changes to mine that may fix this problem. I just installed my first board tonight in a 4-switch & found things were too bright on s-video & composite. Color Bar Generator confirmed that the first 3 bars on the greyscale screen were the same intensity which kills off a lot of detail. The fixes for s-video were: Remove 75 ohm resistor that runs above the FMS6400 Increase resistance on 75 ohm to the right of FMS6400 to about 150ohms I haven't messed with the composite side but I'll bet it's about the same. Anyway, after these two changes, the s-video appears spot-on. LHE were you able to test this out? What were your results?

January 7th, 2010 is a Thursday...

Holy cow! I'd been eyeing a real solder station for a while, but SparkFun has them! Well I've got my order ready...

Hey, that Pong Story link is pretty neat! I had owned a Sears PONG Sports IV off eBay a few years back and played it with college roommates, but eventually re-sold it. Never realized it was actually a re-branded Atari product or I might've kept it around! PS it was in color. Had a bug too, where sometimes a player with 8 points would have their score display as a 0 instead.

Wow, that's a really neat system! I had a Fidelity "The Classic" from 1979 which could still whip me pretty bad even with its lowly 256-bytes of RAM. I got it at a thrift store for something like $5 and resold it on eBay at a profit for $15 : ) It was a nice system, pressure-sensitive squares and wood pieces. That whole site is a good reference for those interested in collecting chess computers: http://www.ismenio.com/chess_computers.html There's also a message board: http://users.boardnation.com/~chesscomputers/index.php I wouldn't collect them, but if I did happen to run across another pressure-sensitive computer I'd probably pick it up as a nice addition to a game room. I still kind of feel that "man vs machine" magic when playing on a physical board that I don't get while playing on a computer screen.

Rom's Collection is a really amazing effort in compilation and Atari game history, and to that end it contains a lot of near-duplicate games released from different publishers for machines worldwide. If you're looking to cull the list down to a "play" set, then you should do two things: * remove any rom with (PAL) in the filename * keep only roms with a ~ in the filename That gives you a unique (no dupes) set playable on NTSC (United States) televisions.

I'm on the lookout here in Conway, Arkansas at the local Kroger stores, but haven't seen these pop up yet. I might hide one until after the holidays and then buy it at super discount prices : )

The 2600 offer just struck me as funny because he didn't have the machine... it's at his sister's house (also in town), so he was pretty much trying to give me something that was hers without asking : ) Yeah I'll be a new C64 user (outside of a little IK+ on VICE). I love the SID tunes - got the HSVC on random here at work most days - so I'm really excited about that... one of the machines actually has a pair of SIDs in it that was a work-in-progress Stereo mod, though some wires have been cut. That's pretty high priority to fix! Those red buttons are for reset (cold and warm, supposedly). I know I have a Fastload-type cartridge. The rest is beyond me. The guy has a couple of kids and an Atari VCS is the only game system in their house - I'm thinking of picking up some common carts as thanks... they have a Driving Controller so Indy 500 is pretty much topping the list : )

Hey guys, take a look at what I got from a (new) local friend! Actually, only one C64 and one 1541 are currently working (that was the price - I take the working systems, I take the rest!). He also offered me a pair of Mac IIci's and his sister's Sears Tele-games, but I figured I was already stretching the Wife Approval Rating far enough. "Maybe next time" : )

I didn't realize POKEY chips were so plentiful, otherwise I would have opted for a dual-POKEY in all my 8-bit computers already.

If you end up giving original Diablo a shot again, and you're not planning on getting on BNet, I'd like to advertise for my personal mod "Diablo Fixed": http://diablofixed.wordpress.com/ I didn't make a lot of progress on it, but it fixes a few of the most obvious bugs in the game (duping glitch, missing innate chance-to-block, monster to-hit, flash bug) and enables a handful of missing items and minor bosses. Note that 1) it's not compatible with any existing characters, and 2) I made a change to the blocking calculations (enabled blocking when spell resists > 0), which is a major annoyance to certain builds at higher levels. Still if you're feeling adventurous, try it out? Patch your game up to 1.09 (or 1.09b), then extract the contents of the ZIP into your Diablo/ directory and overwrite the existing contents. Or copy your Diablo/ directory and overwrite the contents of the new one, that way you can switch between Original and Patched.

Huh, I must've gotten confused with 1.44mb floppies then.

Any idea on the Revision?

This thread is making me sad that I sold my Dreamcast. : ( Sega really was out there doing some very different things with this system. Just one example, I can't think of a puzzle game since Yoshi Cookie with as much advertising budget as Chu Chu Rocket. It's really too bad the system was killed off. It would have been nice if Sega had scaled back their ambitions a bit and carved out a niche market selling "weirdly fun" games to a fringe crowd. But then I'm sure they tried everything they could to stay profitable.

I didn't think the PC could write Mac floppies... hmm.. You're talking high density? Not 800K disks... desiv They were 800k... I found a box in a supply drawer at work and "put them to use" : )