xzerix

Hi All, I hope I'm posting on the right forum here, but bear with me. Back in the 80's I remember playing Pacman in a small video arcade on a cross-channel ferry (England to France) - Nothing unusual about that you say. But what I remember is that the screen was horizontal, Blinky was Purple and yes, I was the Atari 8-Bit computer version of pacman housed in a video cabinet. I remember putting money in to pay for a game, rather than for time (unlike a Max-a-Flex Cabinet where you pay for time). I also remember getting killed pretty quickly so I'm sure it was Harder than the home computer version. Has anyone else stumbled across such a version? I'm guessing it was probably a hacked up max-a-flex system with a patched version of Pacman to handle the monetisation of the game, I['d be intrigued to now how wide-spread such hacks/kludges were, and if anyone else had spotted one (so I know I'm not dreaming) -Peter

Try the Atari User Basic toolkit - it's what I used to renumber programs back in the day. http://www.page6.org/pd_lib/standard/pd_277.htm

I seem to remember reading somewhere "back in the day" that the creators of the atari 8-bit version of gauntlet had a setup that transferred data from one atari to another at a massive 17k/second via the joystick ports. Does this ring a bell with anyone?

With a fire and warp button, it sounds like an asteroids clone... Possibly astro blaster?

A hex editor reveals some text in the Dump: "SUPER CHIP! ©1986 COMPUTER SUPPORT (UK) LTD" - There were three versions advertised, one for 400/800, one for XL/XE and one for 130XE. Given that the BB0001 version number is in the ROM, perhaps this is the XL/XE version? (Which, I've just realised may be why it's in an 800XL... D'oh!)

The OS Image dumped in http://atariage.com/forums/topic/246862-more-questions-than-answers/contains the text "SUPER CHIP! ©1986 COMPUTER SUPPORT (UK) LTD" and is an OS hack with a built-in memory dumper.

From my (very) Limited knowledge of the hardware of both systems, apart from speed, the 8-Bit's lack of a way of tripplexing the sprites width-wise (e.g. three planes in "Combat", three logs in "Pitfall!") would be a stumbling block, as well as a straight-forward 40-byte wide "playfield" register. As Keetah says, porting is more obvious (see Phaeron's port of "David's Midnight Magic" from the 2600 - there are others too). And of course if the source code is available, that would be more useful. Perversely, I'd like to see a more 2600-a-like version of Pitfall! for the A8 than the existing version, but I guess that's just because it's the version I grew up with

I have a stock XEGS (PAL): A17A3007055. Lovely machine.

I have a single Atari User Casette Tape (I think it's and October issue with Minerunner on it) if there's no dump available, I can have a go.

I tried creating a patched Rev 3 and Rev 4 ROM using the information above. All works ok (under emulation - Altirra) but crashes when it gets to the extended memory test part if you have Either 320k Compy, 576k Compy or 1088k configurations, so perhaps it's just as well it wasn't "fixed". (Altirra's 320k Rambo and 576k options don't cause a problem, so I'm guessing it's to do with how the Compy versions bank in the extra memory?)

If memory serves, the first version of the 5200 had four ports and was NTSC only, and the second version had two ports and was PAL or NTSC. Which Bios are you using - the four- or two-port one?

On an XL/XE PEEK(65527) returns the OS version, so your case is Rev.2 (Usual for an 800XL). PEEK(65528) - and (65529) are checksum bytes for the second 8k of the ROM. I guess these have been changed to accommodate the new character set (and/or any other changes from the bog standard Rev.2 What does the computer do when turned on without a cartridge? Weird that the Basic chip is missing - is the a chance it was scavenged to fix or upgrade another Atari? A good link for info on the Atari is here: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/atari-8-bit/faq - Section 7.1 covers the OS.

Doesn't part of the OS - The Self Test - live at 0x5000? Not an issue soft loading say OS-A or OS-B on a machine or say, XLOS-3 on an XLOS-2 machine (as long as you don't want to use the self-test) but Omnimon etc might use this (I've not checked), so it might not be possible to soft load this and then page it in without finding somewhere else for it to go, and then copy into 0x5000 when it's envoked? Firing up the Hex editor on the Atari translator disk (http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-translator-_15937.html) it looks like there is an entire 10k OS from offset 0x3a10. I can cut it out and use it as an OS in altirra - The usual peeks into 0xfff8/0xfff9 suggest it's OS-A/PAL but it's significantly different to the one we have.... Very odd... -Peter

Hi Guys, I've been tinkering with a hex editor on these files... Omnimon [Alt] [5EDB00C6].rom - No CRC match in Atari 8-Bit FAQ This set is identical to OmniMon87 - apart from the copyright line which is © 1984 David Young, making me think this is the original and the '87 version is the hack of this. The other versions all seem to be identical apart from the rare byte of difference (except Omnimon [2B1D6552].rom which has a hacked title "S.O.D. 1991" and otherwise appears identical to the other "OmnimonXE" set. Maybe the FAQ needs updating? Cheers.

D'oh! That's it - of course! Thanks very much Rybags. I'd previously tried your way (wait vbl, then enable interrupts) but I stumbled across the VBI way and then lost the link, so I had a go at doing it for myself. If its not a daft question why DON'T I need to push the X, Y, and A to the stack and then pull them off after the routine - like a DLI - is it that the interrupt handler does it for itself? Cheers!

Hi all, I'm starting out with VBIs. What I - eventually - want to do is have a table driven DLI with the counter telling it which line of the screen it's on being reset to zero during the VBI. I figured this gives me the greatest flexibility over using VCOUNT especially if I only want interrupts on some lines and not all of them (and it means I can figure out how to do other stuff - play music? - during the VBI) So I've tried: 0600: 68 PLA 0601: AD 24 02 LDA VVBLKD 0604: 8D 4D 06 STA $064D 0607: AD 25 02 LDA VVBLKD+1 060A: 8D 4E 06 STA $064E 060D: A2 06 LDX #$06 060F: A0 24 LDY #$24 0611: A9 07 LDA #$07 0613: 20 5C E4 JSR SETVBV Which as I see it backs up the old interrupt vector to $064D/E and sets the interrupt vector to $0624, which is where the following routine resides... 0624: A9 00 LDA #$00 0626: 8D FF 06 STA $06FF 0629: 4C 62 E4 JMP XITVBV Then I use X=USR(1536) which causes an immediate crash - so what am I doing wrong, please?

I would add "Crossfire" to the list, although there seem to be two A8 versions - one in black and white (relying on screen artifacts for colour) and one in colour. I played the colour version on the 800XL loaded from cassette... Good times

Thanks Rybags - I'd almost had it after all. I'd done the sta wsync before the lda ctable,y which seems to be ok, but the bpl i'd screwed up when I hand-assembled the routine and it was jumping to the wrong place, but not crashing! I think I understand now - Thanks a million -Peter.

Hi all, I'm back to messing around with DLIs again, and trying to figure out how to change colour on every scanline. Say for a graphics 1 screen you can set each line of text to be a different colour, but not every scanline *within* that line of text - I'm thinking something like the "tiger attack" title screen. I guess one way would be to have a graphics mode where you can change every scanline and draw the characters in but is there a simpler way I'm missing? I hope this makes sense!

The 1.02 file is the same as the 1.01 file, but with a 16-byte cartridge header for emulators - rename the extension from .rom to .car and altirra will recognise it

My favourites were the the classic Missile Command, Pac-Man, Qix and Choplifter - all of which I had on cartridge rather than casette so It's easy to like instant loading times. My more obsure favourites were Action Quest and Alien Storm (both of which I had on tape), plus the more common Rockford, Boulderdash and Ghostbusters. I really wish someone would write an updated (and expanded) version of Alien swarm

Hi Guys, I stumbled across a thread on the ATARIMAX product forum where someone has a Swedish/Scandinavian keyboard layout on their Atari 800XL, and it got me to thinking... How did users of Ataris where AZERTY or QWERTZ keyboards are the norm cope? Did they get different keyboards? or have to put up with QWERTY? I've seen a QWERTZ keyboard where the Z and the Y were swapped from their "usual" places and a wiring job done on the underside of the keyboard to "swap" the keys? Or were sets of stickers/replacement BIOSes (e.g. for Czech, Polish, Hebrew) an after-market thing?

I've got this one somewhere. If I can get my hands on a scanner I'll scan it.

Ordered one in Blue There goes all my spare time again...

Try looking for "4464 IC" on eBay. I got mine AGES ago, and I think I found them in the US. Guys, I've out the computer back together with the new memory chips, but without the jumper wires etc - so I still have 16k of RAM, but when I get around one weekend to finishing the upgrade it's one less thing to do Problem now is that I can get the console back together - everything works fine with the keyboard off, but when I try and put everything together there's a big bulge on the right when I try to re-assemble it - is there a knack to doing this?!