DanBoris

Another worst case option is to swap the bad pin another one on the connector that is not needed. There is at least one signal that is not used by cartridges, but it is used with the voice module.

Re-soldering joints would be a good next step. Yes, having a bad RAM chip, or bad processor or video chip could cause this, but I always lean towards the simple things first, dirty connections and bad solder joints.

An official 5200 version was half complete before the crash came and the project was abandon. The original author did start working on it again in recent years but I don't think anything ever game of that.

In case anyone needs it.... http://atarihq.com/danb/adventurevision.shtml

This probably isn't a video problem, but something preventing the game code from executing properly. First thing would be to give the cart connector a good cleaning and then check the solder joints on the back. If you have a multi-meter you can also check that you are getting good voltage to the system. Check between pins 20 and 40 on the microprocessor (IC7-8048) and be sure you are getting 5V. If any of the chips are socketed, carefully remove them and re-insert them.

No, those were the only to I had. I would be great to see them all scanned. The two I had were stapled in the corner so it was easy to remove the staple and run them through a sheet feed scanner.

Yes, I remember you, good to see you active on these forums. You should talk to Kevin about doing an interview, it would be good to have one with someone who helped run one of the user groups. BTW, do you have any of the JACS newsletters? I scanned the few I had and put them on archive.org, but it would be great to have more if you know anyone who has some.

I was cool to hear the mention of the JACS user group since I used to be a member of that group. I also remember Bob Whipple who ran the group for part of the time I was there. It would be great if you could get an interview with him.

There shouldn't be any issue running a 32 bit app on a 64 bit machine, so it might not be the bit size that's the issue. For example I am running 64 bit Windows 10 and DASM runs just fine.

It's nice to see someone still using me sprite demo code! 1. You are right, 6 bytes would be enough for each DL, but I setup the code presuming you would have more then one sprite in a game. To save memory you would want to size the DL's appropriately for your game. 2. As Eric pointed out rebuilding only the DL's that change would be tricky. Not only will sprites move from one DL to another, they will often span two DLs. SInce most of the time you won't be able to predict how much needs to be re-built you need to allocate enough time in each cycle for the worst case anyway. 3. Yes, you can use the memory for other things, but a lot of it will get filled up with graphics data.

Does anyone know what the licensing terms were for the Action runtime? Did you just have to buy the runtime once, or did it have to be licensed for each copy of an Action language program you sold?

I forgot about R.O.T.O, that was a cool game.

This is a very cool project! Ok, who's up for designing a vacuum tube 6502?

Unfortunately the code is entirely uncommented.

Here are the disks extracted as ASCII files. Most of the files are Syn Assembler files, but the files called MAX on the second disk might be binary. BlueMax.zip

Kevin, Have you thought about trying to get an interview with any of Jack Tramiel's sons? That could be a really interesting interview.

I love this document from the Sorcerer file. It is interesting how much debate there was over the title of this game. Maybe it's just because I am used to it, but I always thought Enchanter, Sorcerer, Spellbreaker were good names for the trilogy. Date: 9 Nov 1983 1104-EST From: David G. Anderson <DA at ZORK> Subject: Re: Z5 and G/R To: SEM In-Reply-To: Your message of 9-Nov-83 1024-EST ********* D/A RESEARCH REPORT ******** After interviewing every man, woman, child and all other life forms on earth, our research suggests: All six names totally and compeletely suck. Selected excerpts from interviews: "Spellbreaker sucks." Bob Thompson Computerland, Middle, Va. "The name Spellsaver reminds me of lifesaver, and I'm one to fidget when I play Infocom games. ..so that name sucks the big one." Rudy Boggs Swampland Software, Swampland TN "Damn it Jim, they can't use Transporter. That's ours. Besides, it sucks." Dr. "Bones" McCoy S. S. Enterprise, Space "Spellstalker reminds me of the television show Nightstalker, so it's been used. And that show sucked just like the name Spellstalker." Freddie Silverman Former president, ABC TV "Nobody knov/s anyone is Possessed until the end. That name really sucks. I wouldn't even use it." Scott Adams Adventure International, Florida "...except for the fact there is no reference to sorcerer, it sounds okay with me. With one exception, the name sucks." Turtle, Enchanter There you have it. A random sampling of responses from our survey. We look forward to serving you again in the future. Enclosed please find 1 invoice. D/A INVOICE ITEM QUANTITY PRICE Interview with every man, woman, 1 $857 Trillion child and all other life forms on earth. Approved, DA Note: We checked with cross-town rivial G/R on this price. They quoted us a price of 858 Trillion.

I stated looking through some of these today, and there is some really cool stuff in there.

A long time ago I had dumped a bunch of my old Atari 8-bit disks, but at the time I couldn't find a tool I really liked for exploring the content of these images, so I decided to write my own tool. Over time, as I got into other 8-bit related projects I added more features to the tool as I needed them and at some point porting it from the original VB.NET to C#. Eventually I realized that I had taken this tool so far that other people might find it useful so I decided to clean it up and make it into something I could release. By other reason for releasing this is to also provide a .NET library for Atari disk manipulation that others could use to create their own tools. To that end I built the tool with all the disk images code in a separate library and am releasing the full source under the GPL 3 license. If anyone finds and problems or wants to suggest features please let me know. Here are some of the features if currently supports: Supports XFD and ATR disk image formats Supports DOS 2.0, DOS 2.5 and MegaImage file systems View boot sector details and disassmbly View sector data in ATASCII format View disk directory even for disks with non-standard directory location Add, delete and extract files from a disk, including extraction of all files at one time View file contents in Hex or ATASCII De-tokenize Basic files with ATASCII display, and extract in ASCII formats. Handles some forms of Basic file protection View Syn Assembler files View the sector map of a DOS disk View the boot record of a disk along with the dis-assembly of the boot code You can download the installer and source herE: http://atarihq.com/danb/atari8bit.shtml

I took a look at the source code for a couple 7800 games and they all lock the system into 7800 mode at start up. This makes sense since the 2600 games obviously would not know to do this, but 7800 games would have been programmed to handle this.

Looking at the schematics it appears that any writes to the TIA addresses go to both the control register and TIA, this would explain the writes to the TIA you are seeing. I am not sure why they are setting bit 4 ($10) when writing to the control register. Maybe this was something that was going to be used but they changed their minds. The lock bit would be set by this code before going into 2600 mode... LF831: LDA #$FD STA COLUPF

Yep, it's in parallel with the regulator, and as the schematics note, it's not on all systems.

Original source code for arcade games in pretty rare. The only other option would be to run the game code through a dis assembler and then reverse engineer the code. It's a tedious process but it can be done.

My only distinct memory of Alladdin's Castle was playing a Major Havoc machine that had the volume turned up WAY to high.

I remember going to my local book store and sneaking a peak in this book, although I never actually bought it.