CharlieChaplin

Superpacker 6.8 is out now - maybe the bug is fixed there ?!? (Cannot test, since it does not seem to run under Win XP 32 Bit)

Oh, I bought one cable from Mr. Robot and will also buy one or more from you - in case they do not sell. But I guess they will all sell pretty fast... (hopefully they are long enough for 600XL/800XL/1200XL computers). By the way, did you ever think about... errmm, creating new AVG pcb's that fit into Sikor's cart. cases ?!?

Who started shipping candy ? I would say the candy man...

So is The!Cart, currently available at Abbuc shop for 75 Euro...

... and then they want Paula and Jerry, MP3, AC3, Dolby Digital, THX, dts, The London Philharmonic Orchestra in a chip, Alan Parsons soundstudio on a chip and whatnot... (And your A8 no longer sounds like an A8.)

You are right that the menu is not as responsive as it should be. This BXL version simply came as two files on a disk: a) *.BXL program and b) *.FNT (maybe a DOS was also on the disk, do not remember). But there was no Basic XL or BXL runtime on that disk, so I copied the files onto a disk with DOS 2.5 and put Altirra Basic on it and the program seemed to work fine. In other words, I made no changes to the BXL program... (you could try Basic XL or BXL runtime and check if it is faster there)... Homesoft also has a single fileversion of Tactwar available, maybe that one is better and more responsive in the menu ?!? Of course I would not mind if someone creates a complete new version of Tactwar. e.g. in another programming language (Action, Mad Pascal, C, Assembler), with a more responsive menu, with more than just one map and maybe the computer using different strategies...

Think Tactwar was on the Pooldisk Too, but evil as I am, I attach it here. As said before, the faster version was written for Basic XL and I used Altirra Basic (V1.54) instead... TACTWAR_BXL.zip

Hmmmm, I am not a fan of most war simulations by SSI, Avalon Hill and others, but surprisingly I really like Tactwar originally written in Basic and quite slow, but there is a faster version in Basic XL available that also works fine with Altirra Basic. Another war sim. I like is Infantry Squad. While the disk is not copy protected (and can be copied with a sectorcopy program), the Basic program has various protections - e.g. list protection (can be easily removed, but then the program does not work anymore), file protection (change the order of the files on the disk and it does not work anymore) and other things (Reset + Break protection, etc.). The game is very slow and not as easy as Tactwar, but therefore you have 20 different maps which require different tactics to win... And errmm, I like Mahjong/Mah-Jong and Shanghai type games, so besides the commercial Shanghai (from Activision, ported by Peter Sabath from the C64) and Taipei XL 1.1 (by Martin Lange), I also like Mahjong XE which does NOT require 128k, but also works fine on XL/XE computers. Afair, there was also a Mahjong type game in the old Antic magazine written in Basic...

It is in the Silly Pack 2k17, see link above (post #12) or use this direct link: http://www.wudsn.com/productions/atari800/sillypack2k17/sillypack2k17.zip Download the whole pack and unzip SillyPack2k17-Weplash.img (approx. 62MB), then rename to e.g. Weplash.AVF and copy it onto your AVG cart.

...and to answer my own question: We plash works fine from AVG cart., if you have a PAL system and rename *.IMG into *.AVF. It's a short but very nice video by Nir Dary from Israel for Silly Venture 2017.

Did you try the Homesoft version ? Combined the hundreds of segments into as few as possible... - DC1 unpacked (uses page 1) - DC2 packed with Superpacker (still uses page 1) - DC3 packed with Code 3 cruncher (no longer uses page 1, but the title screen looks ugly in blue-white instead of black-white) NOTE: This fileversion does not have highscore saves, so in the eyes of the author "it is useless"... just like 99% of my carts and tapes that do not have highscore saves... Deathchase.zip

Q: A cart with RAM ? A: RAMcart. Originally available in the 90s in Poland as 64k/128k Ramcarts, later also as 256k and 1MB Ramcarts and nowadays as 1MB, 2MB or 4MB Ramcarts: Info at atarionline.pl (use e.g. google translate) ebay: a) 1MB Ramcart b) 2MB Ramcart c) 4MB Ramcart For the old Ramcarts (64k, 128k, maybe also 256k ) there were drivers available for DOS II+D and afair Bewe-DOS. For the new 1MB-4MB Ramcarts there is no software (or driver) available yet, as it seems...

Hmmm, now reading the topic about Silly Pack 2k17 again, I notice there is the "We plash" demo-movie by Nir Dary on it that originally requires an SIDE-2 with CF card - it is available as an image file. Could this demo-movie run from an AVG cart as well (e.g. when changing the extender into .AVF) ?!? Is it PAL compatible ?

Well, Reharden was released at Silly Venture 2017, so it can be found on the Silly Pack 2k17 by JAC! as a fileversion. Quoting JAC: "* Reharden - Now runs from DOS 2.5, packed 58K to 37K" Silly Pack 2k17 EDIT: Added 90k bootable ATR, XEX fileversion and textfile... Reharden.zip

Ordered and already paid for all four cartridges. Cannot wait to play LiteRally...

Laura will be sad to hear... ----- Interested in all these game cartridges (and sending an E-Mail to Retronics). But errm, did XXL also create some new levels for Laura* and if so, do they work with U1MB ? (*New Adventures of Laura)

And what about the AVG cart. or the Ultimate cart ? I would still prefer a standard (non-filled) vector version running on standard 48k or 64k computers. But if you can program it in such a way that one can choose between filled vectors (with UNO/AVG/ULT) and non-filled vectors, just do it...

The JHV will be an online-JHV this year, taking place on november 14th, at 6p.m. So the results will be available no sooner than that (not in october as all the years before)... see e.g. the starting page of Abbuc www.abbuc.de

Aren't Parrot sounddemos using the .DIG extender? If so, there is at least an XL player and an XE player available for Parrot samples. The XE player was done by Pedrokko in Atari Basic. Some AA member named Mathy once copied these Pedrokko disks into ATR images, but when copying the 10 disks or disksides he forgot to turn them over to the B-Sides (and copied the A-sides twice). Since then, whenever I copy a real disk into an ATR image I do the "Mathy-check", i.e. I check if I really really turned the disk over to side B, after I copied side A... DIG.zip

Think this Peter Gunn demo and the disk is somewhere on the Pooldisk, e.g. here: http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/PoolDisk%20Too/ Problem is there are several thousand ATR images on it. Found the disk once and copied the Atari Magic Show demo from it and added it to my demo collection, but not the Peter Gunn demo... Attached is the Atari Magic Show demo on a 180k disk image in packed form (think I used DJ Packer)... use Option "I" to load it... DEMOS02.zip

Yep, will not work with Bas2COM or BAS2XEX or similar programs. But may work with asking Homesoft to do it for you... ;-)

Think double sided was not a necessity, since everyone used flippies back then (not only on the A8). The 1050 simply should have been true DD / 180k right from the start. Maybe even the 810 should have been DD / 180k right from the start, because then no-one would ever have had the idea to make the 1050 do only 130k... Next topic: Why did the 810 end up with "single density" ? Hmmm, if we can trust Wikipedia, then 5,25" DS/SD disks with 180k (90k per diskside) were available since 1977 and 5,25" DS/DD disks with 360k (180k per diskside) since 1978. Guess the DD format was too new (and too expensive) when the 810 was designed on paper...?!?

Regarding Bad Apple... the above mentioned version for the!cart can be found e.g. in the SillyPack 2018 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=80216 There is also a 1MB XEX animation of Bad Apple by playsoft, this one requires 1MB of RAM and is available in four versions with different graphic resolutions. Think it does not have sound (music). http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=7388 Next there is a 1MB version of Bad Apple by R0ger with music, which requires an atarimax (8MBit/1MB) cart. or similar (post #1 for PAL and post #68 for NTSC). And there is an approx. 6MB ATASCII version of Bad Apple by Pirx that requires a large storage device (either a HDD device or similar for fluid performance or a SIO2xyz device for some fun / frame drawing) but runs from stock hardware (post #16). There is also a Rapidus (+HDD) version of Bad Apple by TeBe. http://madteam.atari8.info/index.php?prod=scena And last not least there is an AVF video of Bad Apple for the AVG or SIDE cart. So we have more than enough versions of Bad Apple on the A8.

Think that all the audio (speech, music, sfx) is coming from tape and they used a simple Poke 54018 (or something like that) to start playing from tape. While the video is running they either just continue playing the tape with no control from the computer or they could have used short blips on the tape (like PDI did with standard tapes and standard recordings*) to mark where they are and make the computer stop the tape and continue playing when nescessary. All video is coming from the!cart... * advantage: the Educational System Master cart. (CXL 4001) is NOT required then, e.g. with tape titles like Invitation to Programming 1, 2, 3 or The Adventures of Oswald, Sammy the Sea Serpent, etc.

Afaik, this is the (old) one level demoversion - it runs with 128k RAM. It's only missing the title screen, 17 more levels, the intermissions and 95% more stuff. But other than that, it's fairly (in)complete...