playsoft

Thank you! Although it's been mentioned before I'm not sure I can take credit for anything aiding responsiveness(*). In making the aliens smaller I was able to remove some code that set the size registers, but I doubt that had much impact overall. TIX's great graphics make everything seem better but most of the positives were already there from the original team, just that they were restricted to 16K RAM so it didn't shine as much as it should have. (*) For PAL users, having the music at the correct speed, instead of playing too slowly, may make it seem so.

I was surprised to see it mentioned in yesterday's Metro newspaper over here.

The buggy on the title screen uses all 4 player graphics. You can't use them all for the buggy during the game because they are needed for other things (the bombs being dropped at you, the explosions, the rolling boulders).

I didn't do the uphill music because that looks too tricky but everything else seems OK. updated.xex

You're welcome. I hacked my Mega Drive pad for 3 buttons so I will now be supporting it in the future. One question, if I only support 2 buttons should I still label it as Joy 2B+?

So you made everyone else play the harder version! 😀 No level data was changed period, so it will play however the original did. You can look at it with this, a hacked version which is generated to test everything out. It still performs collision detection but it won't destroy the buggy so you can make your way through as many rounds as you like (it does cause some glitching with the buggy at times). cheat.xex

Hi Jason, Not sure I can help as it was OK on my 130XE, booted from cold with Option held and then binary loaded from DOS 2.5 via SIO2PC. It is also OK when I load it from the UNO cart. I don't know anything about mydos or mypicodos. I have a 810 which I will probably set up after Christmas for something else so I can try a real disk then, but I can't see it making any difference. Paul

Nothing in that area was changed but unless I am misunderstanding what you are saying it seems OK to me. Beat the default record: Points get added (2350 + 1900 = 4250) but not until after it prints "You have set a new record!": Play again and beat the new record: Points get added (2150 + 2900 = 5050):

There's no ship capture/release but if you haven't already found it, press 2 for dual ships.

I was able to turn my Sega Mega Drive control pad into a 3 button joystick by (1) swapping around the wires from pins 5 & 7 so that +5V is taken from pin 7 on the A8 (2) removing the 74HC157 multiplexer (3) making the appropriate jumper connections between (what were) the multiplexer inputs and outputs. Note this is an original Sega Mega Drive 3 button controller model number 1650 made in China. I also have a model number 1650-50 made in Malaysia but that is different inside, the wires would be harder (for me!) to swap and the chip is surface mount. This is what it looked like before: And after: It may not work with all the JOY 2B+ hacks because I get small values when buttons B and C are not pressed (5 and 3) and those hacks may be looking for 0. However it does work with the 2 games that I have done, Scramble and Moon Patrol Redux which support Sega and/or JOY 2B+ (since I am more forgiving with my checks). Edit: Just tried the hacked version of Defender and it works fine! As does the hacked version of Dropzone.

Yes, replace the original RMT version with the updated one as you don't need them both.

Yes, many thanks for the report 👍

It's in the original RMT version by Fandal and Kjmann and seemed to cause a problem with some xex loaders (e.g. Ultimate Cart) but not others (e.g. Atarimax). I was not sure what it was trying to achieve by using BOOT. From what I remember there were at least a couple of instances of it so the simplest fix seemed to be to set BOOT to 1 by adding it to the XEX just before the run:

Hi Tezz, I am full steam on my New Year Disk submission at the moment and will be until the end of the year. After that I'll PM you with details of everything that I've done and we can see if there is any overlap in what we are doing.

You can read about the sort of things which are possible with the expansion port here: As for breaking games down in that manner, that's what I did with AtariBlast! for the Ultimate SD cart. However, it is one thing doing that for games that you wrote, because you have the source code and know how they work. Doing that for other games for which only a binary exists would be 100s of hours of work for a programmer. Just to disassemble and fully understand a relatively simple game can take many months. Even then, it may not be possible. If say a game uses a bitmap graphics mode it may need 8K RAM for the screen. If it uses double buffering, so it shows one screen while it constructs the other, then it needs 2 x 8K RAM for the display - and that is all the RAM on the 5200 used up. Even if there was some sort of internal modification available for the 5200, which gave it 48K or more RAM, you would still need programmers to port the games. This would still be a significant undertaking for old games where only the binaries exist. What it might achieve is more new A8 games being made available on the 5200.

Mark, that explains why it's not going right (98 < A4). From the Caverns of Mars 3 topic, Ken used the same thresholds in Beef Drop so you shouldn't be able to go right in that either. Ideally you should get 00 for left/up, 72 for centre and E4 for right/down. Not many old controllers will be perfect, but your values are a fair bit out. I think you might need to adjust the POT inside your 5200 console to calibrate the controllers - have you ever done that before?

Is anyone else having this issue? I have 4 x original 5200 controllers and the game works correctly with them all. Mark, I remember writing a controller test program, searched for it and found it here in post #19. You were also having the same problem with that game! I don't know if you ever ran the test program, but could you please try it and see what values you get (I've attached it again). Run the program and hold the joystick right, the first hexadecimal value is the horizontal POT and should give a value like E4. The game needs to see a value of A4 or greater in order to move right. cal.bin

Yes the screen was put into wide playfield mode in order to reduce the overscan areas. My LCD is pretty good but both my CRT and LCD TV still show some on the left. You can see mine here: There is discussion about overscan here and a possible hardware fix: In order to "fix" it in Moon Patrol you would have to drop one of the colours. At the bottom of the screen where the buggy is, the four normal playfield colours are green, yellow, light brown and dark brown. The inverse colour is white for the missiles. In order to keep the background colour black you would have to sacrifice one of the normal playfield colours; you need to keep green to blend in with the mountains/city so I guess dark brown would become black.

The Moon Patrol hacks production line has closed down for the rest of the year but there is one thing TIX wants to try that I'll look at next year. If that is possible then I will look at these too, the first one would seem possible not so sure about the others.

Thanks for posting the pictures. I was a bit concerned after seeing the Super Community video which had overscan and a black colour change in the display area on the right: The amount of overscan will vary depending on the TV/monitor - yours looks about perfect! My LCD monitor is not bad, a tiny amount on the left: My CRT monitor and LDC TV both show a bit more overscan on the left: I do not see the black colour change at all. In Altirra, if I configure for extended or full overscan, then I can see the overscan on the right as expected. However I still don't see the black colour change.

It is a hack of an old commercial game though, so I'm not sure it is something that should really be sold. However you can get bespoke carts made though the AA store and by other AA users.

The 2600 Cartridge Adaptor is really a complete 2600 without the RF modulator. The 2-port 5200 (and modded 4-ports) have audio and video inputs on the cartridge pin out that you can feed anything into. It would be completely pointless of course, but you could take an A8, tap off the audio and video signals at the appropriate points and connect them to the correct pins of a 5200 cartridge board. There might be a little more to it than that, but that's effectively how the 2600 adaptor was done.

I don't think it could be done via the cartridge port. I am not a hardware guy, but my understanding is the issue is that there's no read/write line to the cartridge. The Atarimax Ultimate SD cart gets around this in it's read/write mode by having one address range for writing ($4000..$5FFF) and another address range for reading ($6000..$7FFF). Writing also suffers from indexed addressing being unreliable, I don't know if this is due to lack of a read/write line or is something specific to the Atarimax cart. Either way, I think any such scheme would only be useful for new software specifically written for it, I don't think it would be much help in porting existing A8 games.

Thank you for doing a 5200 version of your great game!

Tezz, I have no real attachment to Galaga myself, the first time I was really aware of it was from Harvey when working on AtariBlast! Last year I had a dabble with XOR bitmap mode: This year I spent some time trying out character mode as well as plotting the paths myself. I ran the arcade game on MAME (using a cheat) to try and work out the paths. From some of the comments that followed in that topic it is clear that Galaga is held in reverence above any other game that's ever been (or not been) ported to the A8. Because of that, and because I don't have that personal attachment, I can't shake the feeling that it's the wrong game for me. Hence I only planned to spend a limited amount of time next year to see if I could do anything acceptable for the expanding formation and then reconsider my options. I have no doubt you would do a better version than me. If you want to go forward with it, I am more than happy to call it a day (which I might be doing anyway, if I fail with the expanding formation) and you are welcome to everything I've done in case it's of use. I am currently working on a small game for the New Year Disk and I have another game in mind to start after that (which I do have a personal attachment to of sorts).