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Propane13

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Posts posted by Propane13

  2. Posted

    I'm wondering if maybe I switched DASM assemblers or something.  I swear I didn't see this when I did my first disassemblies.  Does 2.02 work differently than 2.12 in this regard perhaps?

     

    Hey there,

    IIRC, the different versions of dasm should work the same way withe the different outputs from distella (-f or no -f).

     

    FYI, I'm glad to see someone actually using distella version 3.0 (as far as I knew, it didn't seem to take off too well).

     

    regards,

    -John K. Harvey

  3. Posted

    Raiders of the Lost Ark.

     

    1) When I was younger, I'd remember waiting in the map room for 10 minutes for the sun to come up (leaving the room for a snack). Then, once the sun did come up, I'd forget which controller was which, and fall into the valley of the poison, either because I wasn't using the key when moving or becuase I'd use the correct controller, moving it a hair in the up or down direction.

     

    2) That danged hole with with the branch over it; that's a nightmare to get past.

     

    3) Once in the ark's mesa, getting the schovel stolen by a thief!! aah!!!

     

    4) Once digging for the ark, getting the controllers messed up, and pressing the "drop item" button instead of the "dig" button.

     

    gaaah!!!!

     

    -John

  7. Posted

    Hello,

     

    When using DASM, if I have a snippet of code, followed by an ORG that forces a bunch of default bytes to appear, is there a way to change this default value (say, from $FF to $00)?

     

    Example:

    ORG $FF00

    dc.b $01,$02,$03

    ORG $FFFC // now, $FF03-$FFFB will fill with a default value, usu. $FF

    dc.word Start

    dc.word Start

     

    Thanks!

    -John K. Harvey

  8. Posted

    Hello,

     

    I need some information about the 6520 chip that the atari 8-bit computers use. I did some research, and it looks like the most useful parts for me are the following 4 bytes:

     

    PORTA

    PORTB

    PORTACTL

    PORTBCTL

     

    Problem is, I don't understand

    1) what they do

    2) the bit-level breakdown (i.e. if I set bit 6 of PORTACTL, what happens?)

     

    Can anyone aid in providing me this information, or a place where I can look?

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  9. Posted

    64K - Not all that common, IIRC. REAL SPORTS BASEBALL (though I have no idea why) is one.

     

    Hmm... Was this one just improperly dumped?

     

    144K. Extremely rare. Only two games I know of fit this category ... ALIEN BRIGADE and CROSSBOW. With the latter, I still wonder what they did with all the space.

     

    It's mostly graphics data for every screen.

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  10. Posted

    Hello,

     

    I'm going through my bins that I downloaded when I got PCAE a long time ago, and there's this ROM file called mao17600.bin. It doesn't really work. Does anyone know if this is anything at all, or if this is just garbage that I should throw away?

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  11. Posted

    Hello,

     

    I posted this in the Atari ST forum, with little response. So, I figured I would duplicate the post here to see if I can catch any fish.

     

    I'm looking a little lightly into Atari ST programming (just to learn a bit about what's involved in the whole process), and I was wondering if anyone knows a good site where I can find some sample Atari ST code that shows how the ST does music on its POKEY chip. Anyone have any suggestions of where to find such info? I assume some source code music demos need to exist somewhere... Is there a general ST mailing list archive like the STELLA biglist for the Atari 2600 where I can start looking?

     

    Thanks everyone,

    -John K. Harvey

  12. Posted

    Hello,

     

    I'm looking a little lightly into Atari ST programming (just to learn a bit about what's involved in the whole process), and I was wondering if anyone knows a good site where I can find some sample Atari ST code that shows how the ST does music on its POKEY chip. Anyone have any suggestions of where to find such info? I assume some source code music demos need to exist somewhere... Is there a general ST mailing list archive like the STELLA biglist for the Atari 2600 where I can start looking?

     

    Thanks everyone,

    -John K. Harvey

  15. Posted

    To be honest, well.... this kind of disturbs me. A lot.

     

    For about 8 months now, I knew that Lance at Video 61 was creating 3 Atari 2600 SuperCart titles. Problem was, that a suitable 2600 board and hardware could not be found, so they were placed on a 7800 board. The "extra graphics" I don't think are anything at all. Lance had mentioned that if you put the ROMs on a 7800 board, the graphics "cleaned themselves up automatically". Being a programmer, this didn't make any sense whatsoever to me. Todd Frye's genius for Save Mary (very redeeming after Pac-Man) in my opinion should not be tampered with by people wishing to "clean up" his work, and my guess is that no one did. Anyhoo, the 3 titles were Save Mary, Shootin Arcade, and Klax 2600. It looks like Klax 2600 isn't out yet.

     

    Why re-release *New* Klax and Sentinel 7800? This is taking away from those who have already put in gobs of effort to do this. I know that Tizoc and Lee Kreuger worked really really hard to make these. Lee's price = $40 (http://home.earthlink.net/~resqsoft/products.htm) There was a lot of effort and love for the 7800 demosntrated in these productions. And, they're cheaper than the $45. My advice is to buy from them.

     

    The prices on Atari7800.com have always been astronomical, and I don't think are a deal. They look to be ripping off people who don't know that they could do any better with a little bit of extra looking, as they can get the same thing for 1/4 the price.

     

    A mindlink game? Who's going to play that? AFAIK, the mindlink sucked as a peripheral.

     

    In my mind, keeping everything a secret until now has been detrimental. I'm just glad that I didn't produce any carts of my Impossible Mission bugfix, as I'd probably be screwed in selling them now. And why didn't you inform me? That's just gonna piss me off. Jindroush, have you created any copies? If so, you're probably pissed as well. Of course, since no one bothered to check with me, there's no reason I can't release the same thing independently for 5 dollars less (hell, I envision it could be done for $30 or even $20, depending on HW costs) just because I love the hobby and want people to experience the 7800 for what it is. I'm not a business. :)

     

    Sorry for the negative attitude, but this information looks like a lot of people are getting screwed, both out of money and out of their efforts because of some secret stuff done "in the background".

     

    Note that I will be posting my Impossible Mission bugfix ROM info later today, so people can play it on emulators. I was planning to save it until I did some publishing, but now... what's the point?

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  16. Posted

    One of the weird things about th test cartridge was the fact that to put it into 2600 mode, it put the mode into TEST MODE A, which according to the manual is "something you're not supposed to do, ever". So, further on, it may be testing some interesting writes to CTRL, or doing some other bizarre behavior outside of the scope of the manual. These potential oddities that come up during the ROM's execution may be what's causing it to fail.

     

    I do know that it takes awhile for the actual diagnostics to occur. Have we waited a sufficient amount of time to see if it actually does work? Maybe support is already there, but we're stopping the cart before it's finished...

     

    If TEST MODE A dumps the 7800 into 2600 mode, then I wonder what TEST MODE B does?

     

    -John K. Harvey

  17. Posted

    Hmm.. is the DMA (i.e. MARIA) on the 7800 smart enough to pull the RDY line low while the 6502 is in phase 1, or is it not necessarily smart enough to do this? Just a curious thought.

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  18. Posted

    I have them all in a self extracting .rar at 2.23mb if you are too busy to zip em all Mitch. I used all the roms here at aa, and your roms on the games that didnt work until you fixed them, aka double dragon, f18, and so-on.

     

    Do you have this posted somewhere? I think I'd like to do the "start-from-scratch" method, and wipe out all bad files from the beginning.

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  19. Posted

    I wouldn't expect the diagnostic cart to work-- it basically tests the limitations of the 6502 hardware, and then if there is something funny happening, it goes into "Atari 2600 mode" to display a yuk face. I've got a partial disassembly of it, but it's not very exciting.

     

    If you have a hacked Atari 7800 or can find a way to put the 7800 cart in your 2600 cart, the yuk face will come up, as proof that it's running 2600 routines. It basically does a write to RAM at $2000, re-reads it, and if it's different from what was written there, it goes into 2060 mode. Likewise, any further errors dump it into 2600 mode. So, support of this cart is probably quite useless, and may entail a bunch of work.

     

    -John K. Harvey

  20. Posted

    Just an idea:

     

    Would it be possible to put the all working files into a big zip file somewhere? Otherwise, I'd have to download each version and do a file-compare against the version I have to get up-to-date. Of course, this requires some space...

     

    -John K. Harvey

  22. Posted

    I never got a Title Match-- hmm... now that I think about it, I only assumed it to be worth about $30. How much do they usually go for on ebay? I guess my lack of paying attention may be costing me. How much did they cost other people?

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

  23. Posted

    I was wondering-- does the 6502 experience any erratic behavior if you HALT the processor during a complicated multi-cycle instruction (i.e. a post-indexed indirect Load instruction)? Basically, if in the middle of processing this instruction, wil a HALT followed by stopping the HALT have the processor act as normal, or will some of the instruction fetch's get messed up, or is there some sort of dependency on the data bus?

     

    I'm not a hardware guy, so I hope I phrased this right. Let me know if you need more clarification. Hopefully, I asked it correctly.

     

    Thanks,

    -John K. Harvey

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