Eckhard Stolberg

I'm not quite sure what you are up to, and it's a bit difficult to analyze what's wrong with your code without seeing it, but here are some things that you might want to check: If you want to utilize the SC multiload feature, you have to make sure that the CC gets set into SC mode. You can reach that by making your menu binary 8448 bytes large, or by enforcing the Starpath AR type for the transfer. All other loads should also be in SC format. So you should also make them 8448 bytes large, or make sure that the Supercharger is selected as the output device. Before you can access the loading routines in the CC BIOS, you have to enable it first. On a real SC you should wait about 1000 cycles before you access the BIOS, before you have mapped it in and powered it up, but I'm not sure if that is nessessary for the C as well. I hope this helps you to find your problem. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Actually I think Freeway is inspired by an old Atari arcade game named Space Race. It was two players trying to fly though an asteroid field that consists of horizontally moving lines. See Space Race at KLOV for reference. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

In a display list entry you can specify the starting address for the graphics data and the number of bytes to load. The DMA will increase the low byte of the address by one for each byte that is has to load. Also it will increase the high byte of the address by one for each line that the display list covers. So the grahics for the second line in a region has to start 256 bytes after the first byte of the graphics for the first line. Therfore you will need a 4KB block of graphics data for a 16 line region. If your lines need less than 256 bytes, than you can store the graphics for several 16 line regions in the same 4KB block. If you need more than 256 bytes per line, then you need to split up the graphics data into several 4KB blocks, and have several display list enries in the display list for that region point to the appropriate starting address for the graphics data. I hope this answers your question. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

There is a German advertizement for the BitCorp Amigo as well as some homecomputers based on console systems at the 8bit-museum (chose Werbung/Übersicht/Bit Corporation). The Bit60 looks pretty much like the Amigo with a keyboard, so maybe your theory about the expansion ports being a leftover from the conversion is correct. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Curt Vendel has a PDF on his atari-history website with the programming manual for the 3600 (prototype name of the 7800). This text the the same as the programming information that comes with the development board, except for the name of course. The rest of the manuals were mostly style guides and information about the ST based assembler etc. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

No, Albert was talking about the screenshot function in z26 and Stella. But I think PCAE has the posibility to save and load game states. Maybe you should check out this emulator. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That was a bug in some versions of z26. We have fixed that in the current version (1.51). Seem's that it's time to upgrade again. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

On a related note: Parker Germany also released some of their games in a different box style. This happened for the normally shaped cartridges as well. The boxes open on the front side and have the top-right corner missing. The boxes also have the "Weltbekannt durch Monopoly" logo on them. Did Parker use this box style in other countries as well? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Scott Stilphen: I've messed around with hacking other games, and they all ran fine. What is it about Monty that Z26 is so picky about? The other games would work with the default settings like Atari's F8 bankswitching for 8K games or joysticks as the controller. If your game uses anything non-standard, you have to enable it yourself with the command line. Montezuma's Revenge for example uses Parker's E0 type of bankswitching. This is enabled with the -g3 command line switch. So at the DOS prompt type something like z26 -g3 MontyPat.bin and it should work. For released games we try to identify the ROM with a checksum and enable everything automatically, but for hacks you are on your own. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by MaO: This is a Frogger cart from HES. I don't think so. HES usually used similar cases as Activision with the wrap-around labels. I think some time ago we had a discussion here where Marco posted a picture with 10 different versions of Frogger and the HES version was one of them. The cart in the auction has the same graphics and design as the normal Frogger label, but it says "Weltbekannt durch Monopoly" under the logo. I don't think HES would use this version of the Parker logo. The cartridge case of this game is similar to the one Atari used for some of their silver label games. It has one of those dust protectors that you can push in with a finger. The only difference is that the Frogger cart has some raised lines on the sides to increase the grip. I think Homevision used this case type for some of their games. You can see a scan of the label on my picture page. The link was mentioned in a previous post a bit further up. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

moycon: Most Frogger carts in Germany are just like the ones in other countries. And I think Frogger is the only game that Parker produced in this alternative case style. So the German label Frogger cart is pretty hard to find in Germany as well. How much this is worth to you, I don't know. jah fish: Are you sure these are really Sancho carts? All the ones I have seen so far had a case similar to the Activision one, with a wrap around label. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That's the "1st CD Edition" by Rainbow Arts. Basically the adapter lets you use a CD player in place of the datasette tape drive. It had a little loader program encoded like the normal tape programs, and then 10 games encoded in a way that would load faster through the tape port. The games were: David's Midnight Magic Leader Board golf Mission Elevator Impossible Mission Dropzone Loderunner Solomon's Key Jinks M.U.L.E. Fist II Also the CD contained 10 songs from Chris Hülsbeck to listen to on your CD player. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Ze_ro: I saw this before somewhere, but I can't remember where! It was in a gallery on a web page somewhere with pictures of other weird and bizarre cartridges.... now if only I had saved the URL... That would probably have been my site. The game is a German Frogger cart. It has the logo of Parker Germany on the label, so I'm sure it's not a pirate cart. The cartridge case is the same that Homevision used. Parker Bros. had a factory in France and Homevision was supposedly located in Belgium, another frech-speaking country. Homevision was probably the only European company that wrote and manufactured it's own games in the early 1980's, so I think Parker Germany might have outsourced the production of some Frogger carts to them, when the game was so hot that they couldn't fullfill the demand themselves. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Scott Stilphen: Nice avatar/logo, Eckhard And to quote the other poster too: "Thanks!" Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

John Saeger finally found some time to release a new version of z26. This one fixes some smaller bugs and autodetects Ewok Adventure correctly now. You still should use the -5 command line switch, if you want to play PAL games at the original speed, though. As usual, you can get the newest version here. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The fighter on 2600 Double Dragon doesn't have purple skin. That only happens when you play the PAL game on a NTSC system (or the PAL ROM image on an emulator in NTSC mode). Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

When I try the NTSC version of Ballblazer on my PAL 7800, it pretty much does the same thing. So I think you are out of luck here. You would either have to get another cart, or replace the ROM chip in you NTSC cart with an EPROM with the PAL game on it. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The ROM works nicely in Stella and PCAE too. For Stella you need to put a file called "stella.pro" into the working directory of the emulator and add the following lines to it: ---cut here--- "Cartridge.Name" "Star Wars - Ewok Adventure" "Cartridge.MacName" "Ewok Adventure" "Cartridge.Filename" "ewokadvn.bin" "Cartridge.Type" "E0" "Display.Format" "PAL" "" ---cut here--- I'm sure Voch will release a new version of the inofficial STELLA.PRO file shortly, which contains the proper checksum for this game as well. In PCAE for DOS you just need to start the ROM with the 'P' key for "Parker Brothers bankswitching". I don't know about the Windows version, but I think that a way to enable E0 bankswitching for a game exists as well. For z26, I have just added the nessessary code to the autodetection routine, but I'm not sure how long it will take before we can release it, as John is very busy at the moment, and we might need to fix some other bugs as well. I also updated the code for Playbin for the Cuttle Cart, so Chad might release a new version of that too sometime soon. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Looks like CMC might be a good choice for the ingame music on a cartridge based game, as the sound files probably don't get too big and since the replay routines probably don't take too much processing time. I was able to find a disk image for the CMC program from the links you provided in the 7800 board that runs in emulators, but I'm still looking for some commented source code for the player routine. Do you by any chance have a well commented source code for a CMC player, that you could share with us? Thanks, Eckhard Stolberg

There are some ST based tools that came with Atari's development system. I once saw the disk images on the net, but I forgot where it was. But you probably wouldn't want to work on the ST anyway. The tools it had were an assembler, a graphics converter, that extracted sprite data for the 160 pixels with 4 colours mode from Neopaint files, and a sound effects editor for the TIA, that did it's output through the dev cart. I wrote a similar sound tool for DOS, that works with a 7800 with a new BIOS chip installed or a VCS with a Supercharger or something similar. The modification to the 7800 is pretty simple for PAL machines and would also allow you to test your code on a real machine, if you would also modify a 7800 game cartridge into a RAM cart. You probably wouldn't want to do music with the TIA though. Some 7800 games, like Ballblazer, came with a POKEY chip in the cartridge, which might be much better suited. If you have some good sound editing tools and music playback routines for the POKEY, maybe you could share them with us. I'm sure the people on this board who are currently try to programm the 5200 would also appreciate those. The PC cross-assembler that most people use for programming the 2600 and the 5200 is DASM 2.12.04 by Matt Dillon and Olaf Seibert. It might be a good idea to use this for 7800 programming as well. And for Dan: Scrolling is pretty easy on the 7800 too. You have to set up a DLL for 243 lines, but only 192 or so get actually displayed (for NTSC 7800s). And you can set up more than 243 lines without a problem. The MARIA would just ignore the one that are too much. So for vertical scrolling you can just set up a 16 lines region in the invisible part in the top of the screen. If you reduce the number of lines for this region, the screen would scroll upwards. When you have reached zero lines for this region, just reset it to 16, remove the topmost 16 line region of the actual display from the DLL and add a new region DL to the invisible part at the end of the screen. Horizontal scrolling is also very easy. For each object you can specify a horizontal starting position in the DL. There are 256 possible positions, but only 160 of them are on the screen (this is also true for the 320 pixel modes). If you position an 8 pixel object at position 255, then the last 7 pixels would be wrapped to position 0 in the same line. So if you'd increase the position for all your objects by one, your screen would slowly scroll to the left in an endless loop. With the character mode, you can easiely build up a tile based background, that you can scroll left and right. Whenever a tile has disappeared on one of the sides, you can rewrite the tile list, that your DL points to, and that way create an even larger background than the 256 pixels. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I don't remember the command line switch right now, but I'm sure you can specify the bankswitching type in Makewav as well. Then you could get a working WAV file for Video Life that you can burn onto a CD. You might want to check the Cuttle Cart documentation. But I think Bob Colbert will update Makewav sooner or later too. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Eine komplette Liste aller von Quelle verkauften VCS Spiele habe ich bis jetzt auch noch nirgends gesehen, aber einen guten Überblick mit vielen Scans bekommst du bei Gamereset. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by Spector: and I heard that PAL and SECAM are interchangeable That's true for most VCS games, but not for the consoles. The number of scanlines for SECAM and the European PAL versions is pretty similar, and since that is the only thing that the games control, Atari decided to put both versions on the same cart. Since the available colours on both systems are different though, the games have to accomodate for that as well. Most of the PAL VCS games from the pre-crash era handle that with the Colour/Black&White switch. "Colour" selects a set of colours that looks good on PAL systems, and B/W selects a set of colours that looks good on SECAM systems and also on PAL B/W TVs. This is possible, because SECAM VCSs only use the brightness information from the colour values written into the VCSs registers. Later Atari VCS games and most third-party titles don't have a special SECAM colour mode though. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The Video Life ROM works nicely on the Cuttle Cart. But since it was released after the CC, the CC software won't be able to autodetect the correct bankswitching type. You can either get the updated version of PlaybinCC from Chad Schell, or just set the type to "CV" in the dropdown box manually. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Oh come on Spector. Andrew took all the time to explain the different VCS versions so nicely, and you still don't believe him? Seriously though, there are many different versions of the VCS around. There are even different PAL versions, since for example the carrier frequency for the sound signal is different between British PAL and German PAL. As Andrew explained it, the only thing the the games control is the number of scanlines per frame. Everything else, including the actual encoding of the colour or sound information is done by the console. On my VCSs it even says "PAL-B" or "SECAM" on the label on the bottom of the console. And the SECAM VCS definately doesn't work on the PAL-only TV. It only works on the multi standard TV. The different VCS versions I know of are: NTSC -- used in north America and Japan PAL-I -- used in Great Britain, Australia, Hong Kong etc. PAL-B -- used in most of continental Europe PAL-M -- used in Brazil SECAM -- used in France So if you are going to buy a VCS from a different coutry, you might want to make sure, that it you have a compatible TV available. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg