DanBoris

There is no sensor in the 810 for track zero, it just moves the head long enough to be sure it has hit the hard stop so it knows where it is at, this is what causes the gridning sound on these drives. Pretty much anything in the read logic could cause a problem like this. If the drive is unable to read the disk properly it will just keep re-homing the head and trying again. Don't know of an way to troubleshoot this without a scope.

I remember looking at the code PL65 generated back when that "PL65 Cracked" thread first popped up. The took an approach that made code generation fairly easy, but the tradeoff is very inefficient code. Action jumps through a lot of hoops get the code as tight as it does. 6502 is a challenging processor to write a compile for.

It is very cool to see this source code! Thanks to Alfred and JAC for you work on this. I had an Action! cartridge back in the day and really liked the language. I even did some blog posts here that took a look at the 6502 code that the compiler generated.

Did you try cleaning the cartridges and cartridge slot? What you describe is what happens when the system can't validate the cartridges signature.

Kevin, thanks for making this material available, I love to see this original source code! The source files are in Syn Assembler format so I wrote from code to convert the files to plain ASCII. Attached is a file with the ascii versions of the files on disk DiskW_thru16K_081282.atr. The file CLAIMW.SRC appears to be a binary file, not a source file so it is not included. ClaimJumper.zip

http://www.abbuc.de/atari/software-ressort/133-software/softwarereferenz/311-fileformat

You could easily do something like this with a single experienced programmer. One thing you will need to think about is how you would release the emulator software. If you went an open-source route there are plenty of existing open source emulation code that you could leverage to make the process much easier.

Yeah, since we are talking about a system that runs a very limited set of software, simulation may be far more particle then the emulation route.

Disassembly of the roms is not necessary, all you really need is the binary dumps. You say you have access to the hardware, but do you have any technical documentation on it like schematics, memory maps, hardware descriptions, etc? If not you will need to reverse engineer the hardware. At the very least you will need to document the major chips used in the system, you may also need to trace out the key parts of circuit. Do you have any programming experience or are you looking for a developer who can write the emulator?

First thing you are going to need is the technical specs of all the hardware used to run the game. The server sounds straight forward since it's standard apple hardware, but the other hardware sounds custom so you would need detailed specs for it. Next you need the actual software that ran on each component of these system. Once you have these items you can start to develop an emulator. You could write a single emulator that runs all the components of the system, or you could write seperate ones that use TCP/IP to communicate that way you could run from separate machines or run it over the internet if you wanted to.

According to this site, 11 is the official winning score for Ping-Pong http://www.killerspin.com/spin-info-table-tennis-rules#11 Technically a player needs to win by 2 points, but that would have been difficult to implement in Pong. There is also a switch in Pong that can be used to configure it for either a max score of 15 or 11.

http://atarihq.com/danb/a5200.shtml

I was at VCF East a couple weeks ago and saw a presentation by Jason Scott about the Internet Archive. He is actively working on the software preservation part of the Archive but also spoke about the project in general. One of the big things he emphasized was not to worry about whether you think something would be useful to the Archive or not, just give it to them and people will can worry about the value of it later. So I think the Internet Archive would be a good place for this sort of data.

Great work! It's nice to see this driver getting some attention. Dan

That was a great interview. I remember typing a couple of his games back in the day, some pretty impressive work especially for games written in Basic. Hearing about how he has coped with his illness was very interesting. He has a very frank bio on his web site that indicates his illness started in the early 90'. He would have been in his early 20's at the time which is commonly when Schizophrenia onsets. http://jdcasten.info/auto-bio-timeline.html

I plan to be there Saturday.

Nice work on cleaning up the guide! Can you add the information about the control register.... http://atariage.com/forums/blog/52/entry-5118-7800-control-register/

It has been done for all of them: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXscott-adamsXgamesXzcode.html

This wasn't a game that really interested me, but I do have very distinct memories of seeing this game for the first time on the Wildwood boardwalk during one of our summer vacations. I remember virtually every arcade having two or three of these lined up right at the front entrance.

Of the Scott Adams games I have to say Ghost Town was my favorite.

I answer to the original question, marketing. I put a section on my 7800 cartridge page about this a while back: http://atarihq.com/danb/7800cart/a7800cart.shtml

Has anyone see scans of the Coleco Mini Arcade cabinet art that can be printed out to use as replacements? I have a Donkey Kong that has a couple really messed up labels that I would like to replace.

Back in the 80's, the Wildwood, NJ boardwalk. There was at least one arcade in every block. Saw a lot of games for the first (and sometimes last) time there.

I really need to stop coming to the boards, they just make me feel guilty about not working on certain projects.

Here is something you don't see everyday, and un-assembled MITS Altair kit... eBay Auction -- Item Number: 230963528057