Eckhard Stolberg

Tempest, are you sure that Exocet was originally an Ultravision game? I think it was also released by Tang Electronics Co. under their Sancho label. I always thought that the Sancho games were legit and original. Ultravision and Froggo seemed to me more like distributors of the same pirate games that everyone else had too. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

A quick addemdum for the relationship between Bit Corp and Puzzy: I just had a look at the Puzzy label scans at Gamereset, and they do have a copyright message by Bit Corp on them. So I think that proves that Bit Corp and Puzzy are indeed one and the same company. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Yes, I would say that Puzzy and Bit Corp are the same company. The PCB in the Goliath Phantom Tank that I've been mentioning looks exactly like the one on your picture. But it also has a metal shielding over the EPROM, which is soldered to the board through the two holes on the left and right of the EPROM. On the back of the board under the EPROM it says 2732, which specifies the size of the chip. My comment on the Video Gems hacking protection was supposed to say that there indeed must have been a problem with real pirate companies, that removed the onscreen company name from the copied games. If it were really Atari or Activision, who were only selling their own games under a different name, then Video Gems wouldn't have to fear that their games got pirated. And I didn't mean to put Bit Corp in the center of the VCS pirate world. In fact I think that Suntek was much bigger as a pirating company than Bit Corp was, since it seems to have been delivering to more distributors around the world. But maybe that's just my German view, since most of the pirate games that Quelle sold were comming from Suntek in S.S. cases. The reason I've been talking so much about Bit Corp is because you asked for the connection between Zimag and VidCo. I was just trying to prove that the games in question were comming from Bit Corp and that this company has a tradition of having their games distributed under different labels by different companies in different part of the world. I think VidCo and Zimag were just the US distributors of the Bit Corp games. Why they have some games in prototype form that haven't been released under the Bit Corp label as well and that haven't been pirated from any other company either, is still a mystery though. But Bit Corp has released more games than Zimag, so for the relationship between these two companies I'd say that Bit Corp was the manufacturer and Zimag was just a distributor. Also note that the Bit Corp version of Open Sesame has a sampled voice that is played while a picture of a castle is showing, while the Zimag version of "I want my Mommy" does not. I can see how that part could have been removed during the process of porting the game to NTSC, as outputting samples during a display is a timing critical thing, that might not work too well with the different NTSC parameters. But finding enough free space in the game to add a complicated title screen like that for the PAL version doesn't make much sense. As for the Donald Duck game and the other Atari prototypes that are said to have been released in Brazil, I think they might just have been pirated. On this board we have seen many people who found those EPROM players that were done by people at the cartridge manufacturing companies. And obviously there has been a trading of pirated EPROMs among those people back then. Maybe some playtester at Atari made a copy for a friend, who made a copy for a friend and so on. Eventually these ROMs reached someone working at one of the pirating companies who decided to release it? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The Phantom Tank cart with the Goliath label and the Bit Corp case also displayed Puzzy on the screen. But I think Puzzy was just the name that Bit Corp tried to release their games under. Similar to OnBase Co. and their BOMB label, or Tang Electronics Co. who released their games as Sancho. The label style for Bit Corp and Puzzy is almost identical, and they both use the the same game number. These numbers start with PG, which I think stands for Puzzy Game. Why they switched to Bit Corp labels later on I don't know. Your Immies and Aggies prototype seems to have the screws exposed. Maybe you could open it up and check out if the inside of the case or the PCB give any hints on who build this cart? On the quote from the book: I'm not sure if he is really talking about the right type of Puzzy carts here. They were also pirated in the Suntek / S.S. style, so they could be mixed up with those. Goliath for example released both, games with the Bit Corp style cases with wrap around labels and Suntek S.S. style cases. I think the Bit Corp /Puzzy games were properly licensed while the others were pirated. In fact Gamereset mentions in their Goliath / Hot Shots listing that the company got sued by Ariola for copyright infringement for one of the Suntek games. Ariola was the official distributor for Activision games in Germany back then. This also might prove your theory wrong that Atari and Activision actually controled the pirate market. Especially since the S.S. games pirated just about any 4KB game from any company, and Thomas Jentzsch found some anti-modification check in some of your Video Gems games. Also I have a HES Donkey Kong cart, that uses the same case as the Bit Corp multi-games with switches. So I think Bit Corp might have been doing the manufacturing for HES as well. As for the relationship between the Brazilian companies and Bit Corp: If you look at the CCE games list that jahfish posted, you can see that the first nine games are the same nine games that Bit Corp released. One of them is Open Sesame, which is the PAL version with the sampled voice. The NTSC version of this game is called "I want my Mommy", and doesn't have the voice at the start. Somehow I get the feeling, that the more we discuss this topic, the more complicated thing get. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@Marco: Bit Corp must have been a pretty big company. Remember the Amigo thread where I pointed you to a Bit Corp advertisement? If they were big enough to produce homecomputers based on video game systems, they sure could have made quite a lot of pirate games. I think they only put the Bit Corp/Puzzy name on the games that they designed and distributed themselves. For the pirated games (as well as their own games) that they did for other distributors around the world, like Quelle, they probably used generic labels. Also there are those multi-game carts that have the same system for the serial number that Bit Corp used. These carts contain Bit Corp's own games as well as pirated games from Activision, Coleco etc. Telegames uses the same type of cases with the slots for the game select switches for their silver label games. I once opened up a Goliath version of Phantom Tank and all the parts of the case had BIT type numbers. The board was also the same that was used in real Bit Corp games, so Bit Corp must have been selling their games under different brands too. Also keep in mind, that Bit Corp games have a copyright of 1983, which was shortly before the crash. Maybe we would have seen more games written by Bit Corp directly, if the market hadn't collapsed. Maybe Pizza Chef, Immies and Aggies, Mysterious Thief and Fire Spinner were actually Bit Corp games, but only got released in Brazil, because elsewhere no-one was interested in VCS games anymore at that time? @Jahfish: As I've said in my last message, I had opened some of my pirate games. Among them were some in the S.S. style case (with and without the initials on the back). The boards in them said Suntek or SAE. Other boards were identical to these, except that they didn't have a name on them. Some of them had EPROMs on one side and an inverter chip on the other. Others used real production ROMs which listed UMC as the chip manufacturer and Suntek as the customer. The games that I have opened had different labels from Quelle, Rainbow Vision and Goliath. Other games that I didn't open, like a Funvision game with the V-style case, display the name Suntek on the screen. So I think that the pirate games with the wrap-around label were made by Bit Corp, while the others (especially the S.S. style games) were made by Suntek. Who was behind these companies I don't know. Maybe Marco is right and they really were Atari's subcontractors in Asia. After all, Suntek is probably a pretty generic name in Asia, and they copied Atari's dust cover mechanism for their cases exactly. And I think someone in Australia found an Atari brand console with many build in games. Some of these games were hacked versions of games by Atari's former competitors. But I heard that at that time Atari had usage rights to the games from many of those companies, which also allowed them to release Q*bert and the 32-in-1 cart. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@jahfish: I agree with your theory that most of the pirated VCS games came from only very few companies. I think these companies are BitCorp and Suntek. I have opened some of my pirated carts from different sources, and they all had boards in them that were either by Suntek or BitCorp, or they had boards, that didn't have a name on them but looked very very similar to a board from Suntek or BitCorp. I think the S.S. stands for something like "Suntek Software", since Suntek probably was an electronics company and the VCS games were their first Software products. A VCS company called StarSoft doesn't exist. Some time ago there was a little info on Gamereset, where someone confessed that he had made up this name when he was asked by a trade partner in the USA what the S.S. initials meant. But I think this bit of information was lost during the redesign of the Gamereset site. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Marco: Anyone know more about how these companies were related? And where in fact did we ever get the name Emag from? Most of the games by these companies were also released by BitCorp/Puzzy with a different title. They even use a similar case. BitCorp's games were also distributed by other companies all over the world, like Goliath or Quelle in Germany. Even the CCE list that jahfish posted a little further up in this thread starts out with the BitCorp games. I think Gamereset has some pictures of BitCorp prototypes that are similar to the carts on the picture you posted here. So I suppose that Zimag, VidCo and Emag were just the distributors in North America for these games. BTW, is Mysterious Thief the game were you control this phantom like guy who has to climb up a house front to steal valuable things from the windows while avoiding the guards and the dogs? I think I have this game on a Quelle S.S. cart, which could be another hint for the Taiwan origin of this game. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

No, setting bit 7 high would turn off the colours, so your values should be fine. The problem must be somewhere else. Maybe there is something wrong with the way how you switch between the display modes? If the colour changes were off by one line because of the way how the line interrupt works, maybe changing CTRL too early can cause problems like this? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

It might really be that you accidentally disabled the colours. The text at the top and the bottom of the screen is only in various shades of grey too. Maybe you ahould check the highest bit of the CTRL register. This controls the generation of the colour signal. If it is turned off, you can get a clearer picture in black & white, which can be useful for text. As for the joystick buttons, you should really download a copy of the "Stella programmers guide". It describes the programming of the VCS 2600. The sound and controller part of it are still used in the 7800 in 7800 mode. If you don't want to seperate between button A and B on the same controller, you can read the buttons from INPT4 (left joystick - address $000C) and INPT5 (right joystick - address $000D). The state of the buttons can be seen on the highest bit. All other bits in these bytes are undefined, so you shouldn't assume any state for them. And if you can solder (or know someone who can), you can turn your 7800 console and a surplus 7800 game cartridge into a development system. Then you can see for yourself how your game works on a real PAL console. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Adrian M: Question: I noticed that the game Kangaroo is licensed from a company called Sun. By any chance, is this Sun Microsystems? No, it is a Japanese company called Sun Electronics Corporation. Their game devision later got renamed to SunSoft. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

In the PAL mode the garbage is gone in both screens now. But you are still asking for the START button in the title screen, while you are actually checking the SELECT button. Traditionally the button labeled RESET is used for starting a game, if you don't have a game oprions menu in the title, like most of the later 7800 games. On my system it's pretty difficult to change the game modes. Maybe you should have another look at the code that is checking the SELECT button. Also the colours are still too dark. It looks like an all black screen with an occasionally appearing white square. And I don't really like the delay that the GO! logo causes. I find it easier to play, if I can start right after the last tone has appeared. After all the game is relyinf on the short term menory, and mine seems to be very short. Not beeing able to see any colours and forgetting most of the sequence during the display of the GO! logo, my highscore is probably not worth mentioning here. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That's probably why you mentioned the AtariAge website in the show. I hope we don't get another slashdot kind of experience now when all the Arte viewers come rushing here. BTW jahfish, now that all the flea-market vendors know your face and how much you are willing to pay for Atari games, are you going to give up collecting for a while, or have you already prepared a clever disguise? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The Goliath version of Galactic was hacked to display the company name at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately the person who did this didn't quite know what he was doing, and therefore broke the game display in the way you described it. The Funvision version used the unmodified ROM image, so it play normally. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Some days ago jahfish mentioned that Arte is going to have another report on him and the convention in Frankfurt in the Tracks show. I checked their website, and the topic listing for tonight's show mentions "Atari Freaks". So, if you can receive Arte, you might want to tune in tonight (friday) at 19.00 cet. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

There are some multi-games with menus by HES. But on all of them the games were slightly modified, so that they wouldn't interfere with the bankswitching logic. The Cuttle Cart offers a 64K mode that is similar to the Tigervision bankswitching. It has one 2KB bank fixed at the end of the address space, and can map in the rest of the 64K in 2KB chunks at the start of the VCS ROM space. If you re-assembled some 2KB games to use this assress space, you could fit 28-30 games into a multi-ROM like this, depending how much space you need for the menu display. But you would have to program the menu yourself. So either way, without at least some basic VCS programming skills, you wouldn't get far. Sean Kelly's multi-cart probably uses it's own bankswitching scheme, that makes sure that the games don't accidentally switch the bank while they are playing. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@John: Your explainations sound plausible. But instead of making your DLL more complicated, I'd suggest using one more STA WSYNC. This will halt the processor until the start of the next scanline, which would solve your problem just as well. And if you are using interrupts, it's always good to save the acuumulator, the x- and the y-register to the stack and restore them just before the RTI. Otherwise there is always a chance that the interrupt might happen, when the state of one of there registers is still needed. The DMA halting the processor shouldn't be much of a problem, unless you are doing some timed action. But during the game calculation that is probably not very common. So there is no real need to cram the game calculations into the VBLANK time. You can also use a DLI at the end of the visible screen to call your game logic function. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

If a Colecovision controller works as a Booster Grip replacement, then the 7800 proline joystick should work too. You just have to unplug the red and the yellow wire from the main board. Then the buttons will connect pin5 & pin6 and pin9 & pin 6 without connecting them to the ground line. This seems to be what the right button on the Coleco joystick does too. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Sorry, but I'm not sure that I fully understand your question. As long as you don't want to call a different interrupt routine, there should be no reason to rewrite the jump vector for your interrupt routine. The only problem that I could see would be if you were not using the right part of the RAM. Remember that you only have the area from $1800 to $27FF for RAM. And two 192 bytes large parts of that area are also mapped to be accessed from the zeropage and from the stack. So if you for example put your jump vector in the zeropage, and then overwrite the corresponding addresses in the $1800-$27FF area, it might appear as if the jump vector would get lost for no reason. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The game has been solved pretty quickly after it's release. The game would display a secret code at the end, and Greg Troutman had a little contest on the Stella list where the first person to send in the code could win a copy of the Dark Mage source code. (Hey it's a programmers list after all ) And in case you are wondering, the first person to send in the right answer was me. The game is pretty easy to solve. You just have to make sure that you don't give any item away, that you still could use somewhere else first. This situation can happen more than once in Dark Mage. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

If the bases should still be visible in the 'disabled' state, you should probably use a bit brighter colours. On my PAL system, they are hardly visible. I only noticed them when you told me that they should still be there. What I meant was this: The lower base is purple in PAL. It's square consists of several scanlines. In the 'disabled' state the last scanline of the lower square is still showing in bright purple. Maybe you forgot to update the last display list that contains this base? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Save Mary uses the superchip RAM. I think problems with this chip led to the change in the 7800 design that made later consoles incompatible with Decathlon etc. At least some people who did Chad Schell's fix to get Decathlon working on the 7800 reported occasional problems with other superchip games. Also there seem to be differences among the different VCS consoles when it comes to certain TIA graphics tricks. For example the score in Kool Aide Man. It gets positioned in a rather strange way. On one of my 'big rainbow' Jrs. and on all of my PAL 7800s the score numbers get positioned partly on top of each other, which triggers a constant collision, which makes the game unplayable. Also on my 7800 based cartridge reader there were some bankswitched games that couldn't be read at 7800 speed. I had to write a special reading routine that forces the 7800 to 2600 speed. The games you mentioned also all use that same bankswitching method, so timing differences might be part of the problem with your prototypes. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The game screen looks good now (except for the colours). I like the big messages. The lower square always shows the last line though, even if that square is disabled. The title screen still has some garbage lines at the bottom, but there are fewer than in your last demo. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The controller and sound part was taken from the 2600, so you can find information about it in the 2600 programmers guide. As Dan has said, you can read the buttons from INPT4 (address $0C for player 0) and INPT5 (address $0D for player 1). If bit D7=0, then either button for this player is currently pressed. On the 7800 you can also read both buttons on the controller individually, which is not possible on the 2600. But you have to set up the 7800 do be able to do that. At the start of your code you have to do: LDA #$14 STA CTLSWB (address $283) LDA #$00 STA SWCHB (address $282) Then you will be able to read the four buttons through INPT0 - INPT3 (addresses $07 to $0B). If bit D7=1, it means the button reperesented by the registers is pushed. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That's a very interesting find, Marco. Where did you get these from? And what's the game in the top right? Immies and Aggies? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Cybergoth: I'd like to know if the 7800 Impossible Mission ROM released on Atari Age is the PAL or NTSC one, or in other words, is it worth trying to finish it? I don't think MESS really emulates PAL 7800 games yet. So if the game plays on MESS like you would expect it, it's probably the NTSC version. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg