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ranger_lennier

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Posts posted by ranger_lennier

  1. Posted

    I was really glad to hear this. I also immediately thought about Ms. Gorf and the fabled better version of Robby Roto that didn't try to eat your quarters quite so much. There are three versions of Robby Roto source code on-line now, dated 11-20-1981, 12-7-1981, and 12-9-1981. I don't know when those changes were made, but that seems promising.

     

    What's the status of archiving Jamie Fenton's disks? I believe there was some trouble with these before. I'm not quite sure if it was actually a problem reading the disks, or if all the binary data was captured and it was merely a question of how to interpret it. In the latter case, I imagine the development system would help quite a lot.

  2. Posted

    Strong's video game archive site: http://www.museumofplay.org/about/ichegthey have finding aids for a variety of papers (like Ralph Baer's, Carol Shaw's, Jerry Lawson, Atari Games, etc.) to facilitate looking at them in person, but as noted none of those are necessarily online. When I heard them give a talk at Magfest this past January they talked about wanting to get more stuff online, but recognizing that copyright law does limit their options. And Rochester is a little off the beaten path, but certainly there are Atariage members and other game historians who can get out that way!

     

    That's an interesting contrast to The Internet Archive, which seems to be much more of the "better to ask forgiveness than ask permission" persuasion. While I can to a certain extent understand the concern, realistically this is probably the best way to look at it. Can anyone think of an instance where someone has shared information about old, no longer commercially available software, and suffered anything worse than a cease and desist letter?

     

    I hope they at least have such papers privately digitized and backed up off-site.

  3. Posted

    For that matter, if the "clones" really were licensed Studio III systems, does that mean someone at RCA made small modifications to existing games? I'm mainly thinking of Casino/Blackjack where the built-in version on e.g. the M1200 and perhaps the other clones too, allows the player to place much higher bets than the earlier cartridge version. It reminds me of the difference you mention with number of guesses in different versions of nearly the same program, probably not rocket science to reprogram but someone's gotta do it and for a reason.

     

    When it comes to cartridges released on both Studio II and Studio III, I believe that every one that's been dumped has been identical. Obviously that doesn't guarantee that any that haven't been dumped from multiple regions are the same.

  5. Posted

    Hard to say what the exact cause is that some tapes don't convert correctly. When I try to load them into my beta Emma 02 version which includes FRED load functionality they give parity errors. I have put this down to bad quality/old tapes but it is also possible that my tape load code isn't 100% correct. The FRED is the first 1802 machine I have come across that uses a dedicated tape load chip. All others use the 1802 to decide on the timing. For Emma 02 that means I had to include code to decode the wave forms whereas for other machines the 1802 code would handle all that.

     

    Two files I could not load:

    Secret Number, actually the first 10-20 bytes gave errors, the rest I got loaded. When I look at the file, the start of the wave looks corrupted.

    Unidentified, I got about 80 bytes loaded correctly which matched up with a game that was already converted so I 'parked' it

     

    I now see I also didn't convert 'New Studio 2-5 Game Set' I don't remember why that didn't work first time will need to check again.

     

    Is the original recording for "Secret Number" available anywhere?

     

    Do we know what it's supposed to be? I found a couple of candidates in the Cosmac VIP manual.

     

    https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_rcacosmacCManual1978_6956559

     

    Hi-Lo on page 56:

    "This program uses the CHIP-8 IN- TERPRETER at 0000-01 FF. You have 10 chances to guess the value of a random number between 00 and 99 selected by the program. The number at the right of the screen shows the number of the guess you are using. Enter a two digit number and the computer tells you if you are high or low. Press any key to erase this number and then, try again. If you have failed after ten guesses, press any key and the number will be shown. If you are good you will never need more than seven guesses. If you are not so good, alter the program to allow more guesses by changing location 0292 from 4E0A to 4E99."

    Deduce on page 62:

    "This program uses the CHIP-8 IN- TERPRETER at 0000-01FF. This game is an old favorite, described as BAGELS in David Ahl's "101 Computer Games"; "What to Do After You Hit Return", p. 10 and 11 (People's Computer Com- pany); and many other places. The computer is thinking of a secret three-digit number. You should determine this secret number in a minimum of turns, indicated in lower right corner. Enter your guess - using any number 0-9. Each digit will be examined in the same way. For example, the digit in the first location is checked to see if it is the same as in the secret number. If it is, it receives a score of 2; if not, but does occur elsewhere in number, it receives a score of 1; and if not at all, a score of 0. The computer then gives you the total score below your guess as a clue. A score of 6 indicates that you have determined the secret number."

  8. Posted

    I read through the history. That's quite a few versions of the hardware!

     

    Studio II Point-of-Purchase Demo says "code lost". I assume that's the demo cart dumped about a year ago. Or did you mean some sort of source code document, not just the ROM dump?

     

    http://atariage.com/forums/topic/209519-rca-studio-ii-gold-mine-an-interview-with-the-studio-2-production-manager/page-42?do=findComment&comment=3677379

     

    How does the Toshiba Visicom fit in? My assumption has been that Toshiba licensed the Studio II, then made their own modifications and some unique games.

  10. Posted

    If the tape is actually stereo, then the left and right tracks could definitely be useful.

     

    Have you tried any audio filters? One issue I see occasionally is that the waveform drops below the center line, even though the high frequency pattern is still there. See around 2m06.23s, for an example. A high pass filter can help with that. I used Audacity to apply a 2400Hz high-pass filter with 6db rolloff, then amplified it 6.631db. Maybe something like that will process better. The file's too big to attach here, but it's easy to replicate. You might have to play around with the settings a little to see what works best for these recordings.

     

     

    I wrote a program to decode the wav files and posted that binary file... There's some degradation/dropouts in the recording, so these have to be corrected manually. I am going to try and see whether I can use the two signals (left and right) to create a more consistent waveform or even combine the four signals (L & R + second recording) to get a more consistent binary dump.

     

    The program counts the number of zero crossings to determine whether it's a long pulse (1) or a short one (0). There's only a parity bit at the end of each byte as an error check, so it's difficult to ensure that the signal is correctly decoded. On top of that, the different files appear to be recorded with different hardware/software routines: this particular one seems to be newer than some of the others i've looked at, which conform to what is described in the document scans. In the Fred documentation, one of the last annexes describes the newer method...

     

    I'll try to refine the decoder to see whether I get better results...

     

    FliP

     

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    Wow, I need to keep up with this thread better. (I blame a combination of work and the Nintendo Switch.) Anyway, great to see dumps for most of the Visicom carts! I have seen CAS-190 for sale at least once. I lost an auction for it a few years ago. They don't appear often, for sure, but I'm still looking.

     

    The collection of tapes is definitely interesting. Hard to say what's on them, but finding something like an arcade prototype would be amazing. They could be a mix of Studio II ROM files, files intended to load into an RCA computer like the Cosmac, and files intended to load into a more powerful computer or mainframe used for development.

     

    I actually have quite a bit of experience with cassette tape digitization from archiving Astrocade programs. Tapes, like any magnetic media, degrade with time, so it's important to get a a good digital copy. But since the digital data is encoded into an analog audio signal, some amount of signal degradation is surmountable. Here is some general advice on tape archiving. Definitely save in a uncompressed format like WAV or a lossless format like FLAC. Audio compression tends to remove sounds that humans can't easily hear, but those sounds may be essential to a computer. Also, I've found that the quality of equipment used in digitization is important. Use a gold-plated audio cable. They're not very expensive, and it can make a big difference. A dedicated sound card is also useful, as is a high-quality tape deck. Tapes breaking is a potential risk that I don't really know of a good way to counter. They can be repaired, but there will be data loss if it breaks at an inopportune location. I don't know that they would want to loan out a tape, but I'd be glad to try recording them if they wanted.

     

    Once you have the recordings, you need to figure out how the data is formatted. It might use a standard format that already has processing programs available. For example, we figured out that the Astrocade's original interface used the Kansas City Standard, and there were already tools for it written with some Casio systems in mind. Some audio processing filters might also be helpful. I've had good results applying a high-pass filter to Astrocade recordings, but that's just something you have to play around with.

     

    I'm looking forward to hearing more about these, as well as the documents. Are there any plans to make high-quality scans of the paper documents? Even if they're kept in a good archive, there's always a risk of losing unique documents from fire, theft, etc. And of course only the most dedicated will actually travel to Delaware to see them.

    • Like 2

  15. Posted

    billnewsome and I played a few Bowling games tonight. It's different than most versions I've played, since there's no timing elements involved. We couldn't find a consistent way to throw a strike, though. I'm not sure if that's because there's some randomization, or we just weren't lining it up exactly the same way. Our best game, I won 115 to 112.

     

    post-22112-0-30876200-1504490951.png

     

    We did figure out how Flash Bowling works. You play and score points just like in regular bowling, but can also get bonus points for strikes and spares based on where the moving light stops. The light stops as soon as your ball hits the first pin during the first throw. You score more bonus points the closer the light is to the center. At the very center, you can get 700 for a strike and 350 for a spare. At the edge, you can get as little as 50 points for a spare. If you don't get a strike or spare, the position doesn't matter, as you don't get any bonus points. Bill had more success than I did this time, including one 700 point bonus. He won 1829 to 307.

     

    post-22112-0-35881300-1504491330.png

     

    We didn't run into any severe bugs. There was some graphical glitching where the ball's top and bottom halves wouldn't line up quite right during animations. I also didn't like that the position of the aiming tick mark wasn't saved during a two player game. So I'd start out aiming wherever Bill had aimed last.

  18. Posted

    Sideswipe ended up on several WaveMakers tapes, IIRC. It's a pretty good game, though frustrating when it generates a gap you can't seem to fit through. I'm not sure if it's ever literally impossible to avoid a sideswipe/collision, but there were definitely some I had trouble with. I was scoring in the 50s for awhile, but then the stars aligned and I got a 97. Not sure if I'd ever manage to repeat it.

     

    post-22112-0-66548400-1503278331_thumb.jpg

  19. Posted

    billnewsome and I played a few multiplayer races. I also won a two-human game of demolition derby.

     

    post-22112-0-28572300-1503274613.png

     

    post-22112-0-46334400-1503274637.png

     

    post-22112-0-34570800-1503274708.png

     

    We mostly did single-player races to go for the high scores, though. Of course that's probably easier, since there's one less thing to run into and slow you down. Here are our best scores.

     

    billnewsome:

    Track 1: 32s

    Track 2: 43s

    Track 3: 25s

     

    post-22112-0-71187000-1503274744.png

     

    post-22112-0-27812300-1503274858.png

     

    post-22112-0-93108400-1503274906.png

     

    ranger_lennier:

    Track 1: 29s

    Track 2: 36s

    Track 3: 21s

     

    post-22112-0-86470200-1503275035.png

     

    post-22112-0-18577100-1503275064.png

     

    post-22112-0-03763700-1503275102.png

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