playsoft

There are a number of hacks on atarionline.pl and I did a quick mod to this one - it does require a 64K machine though (and doesn't seem to work with 128K). Bounty Bob Strikes Back! (1985)(Aackosoft)(NL)(en)Req 64kk-file.atr

Bank switching is really more a feature of the cart than the 5200 itself. The scheme which Bryan used on his 5200 port of Mule can be found here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/69649-5200-game-announcement-now-shipping/?p=856153 The Atarimax Ultimate SD cart supports the 32K bank switching version of this. If your .bin file is 64/128/256/512K long then it assumes it is this bank switching format. The Ultimate SD also supports it's own hybrid bank switching format, with either 8K or 16K banks. The 8K bank switching also allows limited write capability to the cart SRAM. There is information and a demo program here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/221479-5200-ultimate-sd-cart-hybrid-8k-write8k-read-mode/?p=2917347 I guess the other bank switching carts are Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back but I've not looked into those.

The game looks great but you will now have a difficult question to answer: "Daddy, what's a Zombie?" My nephews asked my mum one day when she was minding them. Mum knew nothing about Minecraft and thought they must have seen a horror movie. Mind you, Scoobie Doo was too scary for them at the time.

Thank you, but unfortunately my envelope went in last week's recycling collection. I know the date because I noticed it when I received the parcel and emailed Wolfgang immediately. I haven't heard anything back yet but it is holiday time, so I will give it a few more weeks and then try contacting ABBUC again. Good idea, I will do the same.

How do I renew my ABBUC membership? I received the "30 years ABBUC in a box" a couple of weeks ago and noticed the date on the label was 30.03.15 - so I owe money! Unfortunately I did not note down my membership number. Back on subject, I love the look of The Monk and can't wait to see it. Paul

Missile Command+ wasn't me, but I modified Bug Hunt to use the trak-ball which is on this forum somewhere. Earlier this year I did some work with Darryl on DK and DKJr: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/248578-donkey-kong-jr-atari-5200-arcade-enhanced/?p=3429463 http://atariage.com/forums/topic/249885-atari-a8-donkey-kong-hack/?p=3497095 Since then I've actually found some enthusiasm to get on with the project that was my reason for buying a 5200 in the first place - AB!

I had an enable_interrupts routine in there which didn't. That doesn't seem to be a problem for some loaders, but I just tried DOS 2.5 and it black screened - it loads the attached corrected version ok. zelda.xex

Excellent work. I remember seeing this and other isometric games back in the day and wishing for an A8 version... now there finally is!

Fantastic work Tezz!

And talking of from whence things came, it was Kenfused who did the original 5200 port.

So the regular version is ok for you now? I didn't check whether the RMT version had the same issue. The original xex files I used came from Atarionline: http://atarionline.pl/arch/D/Donkey%20Kong/Donkey%20Kong%20%281983%29%28Atari%29%28US%29.xex http://atarionline.pl/arch/D/Donkey%20Kong/Donkey%20Kong%20%282010%29%28Atari%29%28US%29%5Bh%20RMT%20Fandal%20%26%20Kjmann%5D.xex Ideally programs should initialise all the hardware registers... but neither of these do and I'd imagine there will be others which don't either. In this case I can "fix" them when I do the other hacks but if you encounter any other programs that don't run correctly you should try and load them differently if you can (other loaders may clear the h/w down).

Thanks, the double width was the clue I needed - the registers are not being cleared down, so will be left in whatever state they were prior to the program getting control.

No shadows here. But the colours have changed from the original. Does anyone else have the same issue as Kyle?

Kong is tracked both horizontally and vertically when he stomps the girders. I didn't do it here because I liked the idea of his eyes going out when he falls. Also there are the DLIs which are repositioning that player (which is also used for Pauline's items) so they would have to be disabled. I added one extra DLI just under Kong's head on each level to restore the player used for his eyes/teeth. Adding a different run of DLIs on this level is possible, but a bit fiddly. There's also the change to the playfield to consider, with the 4 lines of girders which appear. There seems to be room for a girder above his head to the right of the score. However the supports would end up encroaching on Pauline which would mess her up as she is xor drawn like everything else. If someone does take up the challenge of replacing the xor code that may be the time to consider it. Alternate images can be added, it's a question of understanding the code enough to use them.

I think there is a lot of potential in GBA style graphics and like you say, not every game needs lots of sprites. I appreciate there will be a lot of people that don't like grey graphics on an A8, but I think the most important thing with getting a game finished is it being something you want to do and find interesting to work on. I tried out the GBA Zelda graphics and I thought they looked great (alternated between modes D and E to stretch them out). I'll never find the time for such a project, but if I did I'd keep it grey and use colour from the PM graphics for Sin City style effects. With that imagination GBA graphics have green leaves, brown paths, blue sea... zelda.xex

Ducks Ahoy! http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-ducks-ahoy_1757.html

Yes, the last couple of evenings have been spent entirely on this - I have never put so much effort into trying to turn a few pixels white!

I'd been working with normal overscan too, so didn't notice it. It's actually the bottom of one of Pauline's items. There are no items in this level but it still draws them, out of the way at the very top of the player graphics area and setting the horizontal position to 0 so they are off the left edge of the screen. However, when I set the horizontal position to line up with Kong those few lines at the bottom become visible. It's an easy fix, I'll stop it drawing anything in this case.

There is an issue with Pole Position's trak-ball detection code, so try the modified version here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/225966-pole-position-wont-steer/?p=3001683

Today I noticed I had a paypal payment go out last month - it turns out my subscription was on auto-renewal. So I paid for 2015 and have just paid for 2016... a fool and his money... but I have cancelled it now and have opened a dispute to see if I can get a refund. Paul

It's only "joystick mode" type control but here's Classics' port modified for a trak-ball in port 2. cctb.bin

It's a hack so you are limited in what you can change without major rework. From what I remember it's a single big DLI routine for all DLIs and all levels. There was another DLI triggered lower down the screen and the colour change there worked perfectly --- until you climbed up the screen and the whole game slowed down. I moved the colour change up to the position it is now and the slow down went away. That was good enough for me as I didn't want to spend any more time on it.

It is just a conversion of the music video from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCaE2CQatF4 The conversion was done on my PC using VirtualDub to split the video into .bmp frames and then a little program to convert them. It works well because it was a pretty good match to start with.

Nice to see a good video of it, thanks!

I don't really know anything about SD cards, I just have the one I mentioned before and a 16GB SanDisk Ultra 40MB/s which both play fine. I did do another video - a play through of Dragon's Lair using the 16 luminance GTIA mode. It's not as effective as Bad Apple but it was an interesting thing to try. I ended up splitting the frame data into a number of smaller files because it was slowing down towards the end. The way the MaxFlash interface works is that you specify the filename, offset and length for each (frame) read. I guess either the seek time increases as the offset gets bigger or there is some sort of caching going on. lair.zip