evilmoo

Great! that's it! I was looking in the binary, but i didn't find anything at all... is it encrypted in any form? I think it's in there in ANTIC form rather than ATASCII.

The point was that the code could be smaller and faster than inflate/deflate, and that you can load the compressed data into the same area where the uncompressed data will reside and it can decompress over itself, so maybe it could be used in a loader.

"There is also a compression level which needs only 8 kB for compression."

How do I go about producing VAPI images of my own? I've tried looking around the net but I've only found hints about the process, and no actual software used to do it.

Has anyone considered porting this to the 8-bit?: http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/ I think it would be an interesting project, and hopefully it will fit in less than 64K...

If you unzip the download, you will see three GCP disk images as well as a Lords of Space image.

I believe the client is available here: http://www.atarimania.com/detail_soft.php?...VERSION_ID=3040 I think it would be cool to write a server for this... Now if I could finish one of my other nutty projects.

While nobody likes to feel they got ripped off, I think it's counterproductive to dwell on this too much. Personally, my benchmark for value is relative to the price of a movie. If I pay $10 to see a movie, and it is over in two hours, that's $5/hour for entertainment. So with this math, I would say that if you get eight hours of enjoyment out of the Atari, then you've matched the movie rate for entertainment value. Anything over that is fun for free! Obviously it's up to you to determine your entertainment value rate, but I think an Atari will provide you with many hours of fun, and a few hours of frustration too.

You only really need "git" to download the source. I took what I believe is the crack from the Heist version and integrated into the relevant .asm file. After further study, it looks like I probably have some more bits to integrate into the source I've produced so far. I decrypted all of the portions of the disk that were encrypted, and encrypt them again after the corresponding .asm file is assembled. The main idea here is to take existing programs and disassemble them to the point that they can be rebuilt from the resulting disassembly. The reason I stashed my work so far in git was because it seemed like a good tool to allow multiple people to work on it at the same time, hopefully speeding up the work. I don't know how many other people are interested in this idea but I think it would be neat to take interesting games and programs and "take them apart" so that they can be studied by people wanting to learn about them. I used open source tools because they are freely available and this would let me learn more about them at the same time as learning about the programs I'm taking apart. This is probably a lot more answer than you were expecting but I thought it was important to explain the idea behind this.

I believe it's supposed to work if you dial *99 before dialing out through it. I've never actually tried it myself though.

Okay, so after slaving for several hours over a hot disassembler, and hammering together some scripts, I have the following to present to you: First, you will need a development environment like mine. I run Linux but I believe any Unix will do. You will also need to have installed PHP (www.php.net), git ( http://git.or.cz/ ), and cc65 (www.cc65.org). Now, with the following commands, you should see some magic happen: git clone git://git.cluephone.com/atari8/ardungeon cd ardungeon make With any luck, you will see files being assembled, and the resulting file will be called "ar11.img". This is disk 1 side 1 of Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. It is uncracked, but I believe I have included a crack in the s677.asm file, which will be included if you compile it with "-D CRACKED". I know the Makefile sucks, and that there's no documentation about anything, but this was just a proof of concept. I welcome suggestions, comments and patches. You can either reply to this thread or e-mail me at atari8@cluephone.com. I hope to do the same sort of thing with other programs in the future, but we will see how motivated I am. First I have to beat the other four disks into a similar shape.

You might want to post these to the cc65 list so that they can be included in the actual distribution.

Seriously, this stuff is 20 years old. Now is not the time to behave like a snotty teenager with your "I know something you don't know" attitude.

Thank you very much!

Does anyone have an uncracked copy of the Dungeon they could give me? I've been putzing around with some reverse engineering and would like to see the original images... Thanks!