Wrathchild

For me, fav. music is: Draconus & International Karate Effects: Alley Cat and Kennedy Approach (My 3 year old does love Fractalus - though naturally I haven't shown her the alien yet) Mark

For me that was "Elite" on the ST, but then again - including the waiting time for "Hardball" or "Leaderboard" to load from tape probably equates to the same amount of time

If not Go, then why not Ataxx? The C sources for a Palm version which has good AI is at : http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~manohv/ataxx.html

After cutting my teeth on a 1K ZX81 (occasionally borrowing a 16K RAM pack from a friend) with a cassette deck, one Christmas my brothers and I were bought the 16K 600XL with tape deck pack but my parents had also got Defender on cart - very cool. So after a couple of years typing in listings, buying/renting tape games it was time to upgrade to an 800XL - by this time Dixons in the UK were selling these quite cheaply (about £80 I think) but we couldn't stretch to the pack with a disk drive. It wasn't until I was at college that I persuaded a friend's brother to sell me his drive, around that time I'd also bought a MAC/65 cart - far more powerful than the assembler editor I had been using previously. The 800XL followed me through uni - good memories of attending the Atari shows at the Novotel in Hammersmith/London and the journey up to Stafford for the Alternative Micro Shows where I helped Dean Garraghty out on his stand for 2 or 3 years. After getting a job and moving to Reading around 1994 I wasn't doing to much Atari-ing until around 1998 when I started getting stuck into helping out with getting the CC65 cross-compiler project for the Atari's established. That led me into re-commencing my reworking of 'Elite' and also using my IDAPro disassembler to examine the code of a number of C64 titles I'd like to see on the A8 one day. I remember getting bored of comp.sys.atari.8bit in the early 2000's, but finding the AtariAge forum mid-2002 as (IMHO) the best point for A8 activity/assistance. csa8 is a little better these days and I occasionally look into atari.org. I don't speak Polish and so can't follow those boards. The continual bettering of A8 emulation, combined with using a PC for compilation, graphics/music preparation etc - help with the A8 continuing to provide worldwide enjoyment. I enjoyed attending AtariAda in the Czech Republic this year - I just love Fandal/Raster and Emkay's "Cubico". I'm going to stock take my A8 collection soon as I've been stockpiling a few XLs in order to build internal myIDEs into. Quite a few disk-flashcart ports in the pipeline too - then I'll probably get back into the C64 ports of The Sentinel and Bard's Tale. Take care all, Mark

Thanks, something like that already there, explains the use of the 'Quote' button: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=67853 But to answer your question, no.

[moan] Just an observation, but people seem to be over-ly quoting . Perhaps it is just a by-product of how this new forum works? It seems that the 'Reply" ' button against a post always quotes and the 'Quote' button to the left of it does nothing? Therefore you tend to have to use the '+ Add Reply' button instead if you don't wish to quote. My complaint here (hope I'm not alone ) is that people logically press 'Reply' but aren't then editing the quoted text and it ends up making a thread pretty unpleasant to read through. Forget trying to print one. [/moan]

So, if your chars can be saved to the much faster cartridge, what is the purpose of that? 881600[/snapback] People may only own one flashcart and wish to use it for something else and then return to their Ultima position later :!:

Send me the sound routine and I'll see if there's space anywhere for it The game itself is a 48K title, so running on the 400/800 isn't an issue. The 64K machines take advantage of the extra RAM by using it as a disk cache for some of the more often swapped overlays. Regards, Mark

I'd written my own loader so this 'skip'would have been left out. I can code this in without issue for the next release. Regards, Mark

Have to disagree there. IMO, there does need to be an indication of 'activity', that the CPU is busy and will not respond to you. In the orginal game, this is the disk-drive itself - without it I found the delay in action odd. The pauses are significantly long enough to require a form of indication. To that end I'll be retaining the single-line version I initially outlined. There is an I/O issue on real hardware at the moment during the game so once this is resolved I'm happy to release another build to let others provide feedback on this. Regards, Mark

You're correct. To summarize: 1Mbit (128KByte) cart has 16 erasable blocks of 8KBytes The switching model gives 16 banks of 8KBytes. 8Mbit (1024KByte or 1MByte) cart has 16 erasable blocks of 64KBytes The switching model gives 128 banks of 8KBytes.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...item=8197190364 One way of working out who you're bidding against in future I guess Just don't anyone dare bid for the next 'AR:Dungeon'... that's mine

Secondly, but very messily done, here's a layout for the text over a background image. I think the "Philip Price's" could could down in size a little and then 'Alternate Reality' made a little larger, maybe even keep the red colour used on the box? Also, the whole backdrop could be decreased in prominance as was done with the gate in #20? Mark

Going back to earlier suggestions I made, here's the text only label with a header. The alternative here is to use a bitmap from the game as header instead of the box's.

Hi Dan, Its on the Atari CD-ROM available from http://www.dgs.clara.net/ Regards, Mark

I think the PBI bus is an example of an under utilized feature of the XLs, however that maybe because we like to keep things compatible as possible with our older brothers and sisters .

You don't know how slowed down that is! It can go a lot faster Notice how it finished a few blocks short? That's because the original loader only uses 127 bytes from a sector. As I'm using 128 it completes early. I tried to alter the 'start' point accordingly so it would end up in the correct place, but due to something (can't recall what), this isn't liked and the thing goes haywire. I may revisit this and pad my sectors with a dummy byte so that it uses 127 bytes again. Regards, Mark

This kinda sums it up, surprised no RAM upgrade though For some reason the A8s just still don't seem to have met their potential. There's always something else we know they CAN do. E.g. be part of a TCP/IP network, utilize many USB devices My own Holy Grail is seeing Elite ported, Sheddy has Space Harrier, Analmux has Super Mario Bros 3, Heaven=Boinxx, TMR=Reaxion etc The others seem better able to focus on 1 project at a time than me though

As of Atari++ 1.40 (and I think 1.41 too) only the AtariMax cart supported was the 1 MegaBit cart, so the AR image won't currently run under this emulator. Hopefully Thomas will come out with a new release soon with this added. You'll need an updated Atari800Win Plus with flash support. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...e=post&id=31088 This should become mainstream in their next (beta) release. Regards, Mark

I'd recommend anyone to go for Dean's Atari CD-ROM. Great value for money! Plus memories of those AMS shows . http://www.dgs.clara.net/

Certainly if the C64 had a port then that would have made the task a bit easier. Otherwise the Apple II would probably be the closest to what the Atari could do?

Good post with good arguments. Bank erasing: Writing works like any Eprom, all bits are initially high and then you write the bytes you want - effectively setting some of them low. So yes, you do need to erase first. I'm not sure if you can start writing within a bank at a specific point. If so, you could maintain, for example, a byte that tells you which next free 'block' is within the bank. E.g. $FF is block zero, $7F=one, $3F=two ... $01=7, $00=bank full. Or even, if the first byte of a block within a bank is '$FF' then it is free, but set to $00 would mean its used. Hence, when a save is done, you can move to the next bank. However, at some point you'll want to erase a save 'block' in which case the seven other blocks in that bank would also be erases. So sticking to one save block per bank is the simplist way to go. Dumping a cart: Easiest way is with an Eprom reader/burner. Hardware also exists to dump A8 carts - even those with bank switching. E.g. Bounty Bob Strikes Back dumped to make the 130XE bank swapping version. Encrypting a cart is useless as the Atari would have to have the decrypted on-fly, meaning extra circuitry on the art board to do that, which means that - although an Eprom reader may not produce a useable image, anything simulating the Atari reading a cartridge would get the data out correctly. Regular Cart: Makes no difference - also, as described elsewhere, all other cart models don't particularly suit Alternate Reality. The flash model (using $A000->$BFFF only) is the one to use. Yes a read-only 'PROM' (one time write) version could be done - but we'd lose out on the 'flash' character saving - meaning people WOULD need a disk drive.

Wow, that takes me back, this was a submission I did for Dean Garraghty's News Disk way back. Its called 'Fancy Font Display Routine' and shows its age. I'd say that the stuff seen the the Czech/Polish demos would probably be better for you, but I don't have the sources for those . So, the ATR in the zip has a working example, just boot up with basic and type: RUN "D:EGFFDR.BAS" The sources (Atari Asm Editor IIRC) and docs are included. Regards, Mark ffdr.zip

Its a flash cartridge, so there's nothing stopping someone from dumping it, hacking the rom image's save state area and then flashing it back to the cartridge. Sure it takes a little longer than with a disk, but nothing can (and will) be done to prevent this, sorry. Mark