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Eckhard Stolberg

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Posts posted by Eckhard Stolberg

  3. Posted

    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

  4. Posted

    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

  5. Posted

    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

  6. Posted

    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

  7. Posted

    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

  8. Posted

    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

  10. Posted

    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

  12. Posted

    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

  13. Posted

    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

  14. Posted

    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

  15. Posted

    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

  16. Posted

    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

  18. Posted

    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

  19. Posted

    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

  20. Posted

    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

  21. Posted

    I don't think either of you has a PAL copy of Solaris. On the VCS the games are responsible for synchronizing with the TV themselves. Some games try to use the time it takes to do that properly for other things as well, and Solaris is one of them. Not all TVs are able to recognize the resulting sync signal. But if your TV has a Vhold knob you should be able to adjust the rolling without messing it up for the other NTSC games or the TV broadcast.

     

     

    Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

  22. Posted

    Actually PAL is just a different method for encoding colour information into an existing B/W TV signal. The different frequency and number of scanlines comes from the underlying B/W format. Therefore using a NTSC console on a PAL TV (or vice versa) would result in a colourless picture.

     

    Since PAL is mostly used on TV systems with a higher resolution than NTSC, PAL VCS games are programmed to generate a higher number of scanlines. So when you play a PAL VCS game on a NTSC VCS with a NTSC TV, the picture might roll, sice the TV can't handle the lower frequency. Playing a NTSC game on a PAL VCS with a PAL TV usually works fine with a stable picture. You would get black bars above and below the picture though.

     

    Due to the way how Atari implemented the PAL colour encoding in the VCS you won't get any colours, if the NTSC game does an odd number of scanlines. Some of Atari's older titles and many games from the smaller third party companies suffer from this.

     

    But even if you can get a stable picture with colours from a NTSC game on a PAL system (or a PAL game on a NTSC system), the colours will be quite different, since the PAL VCS and the NTSC VCS have a different palette. For most of the VCS games this doesn't matter much though.

     

     

    Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

  23. Posted

    I think Atari is only the shirt sponsor for Olympique Lyonnais for their matches in the European competions. This Year OL is playing in the champions league. This league is made up of last year's champions of the national leagues plus some runner-ups from the bigger leagues. So OL has to be quite good to get in there.

     

    But even though there still is one game left for them in the first champions league round, OL has lost too often to qualify for the next round. So we probably won't see the Atari logo on their shirts too often anymore this season.

     

     

    Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

  24. Posted

    The SAP player is basically a limited emulator of the Atari 800. It only emulates the 6502 and the POKEY. Most Atari computer games set up a periodic interrupt that happens once per frame or so. This interrupt executes a routine that writes new data to the POKEY registers, if nessessary. In this routine you can also increase or decrease the frequency devider value in every frame to simulate a vibrato effect, or create a volume envelope like in the C64. The SAP files basically countain these routines ripped from the games, plus some information for the player, like how often the routine has to be called or which game the routine was taken from. The exact SAP format can be found in the DOC directory of the sound archive, that you can download from the link that OldGuru mentioned above.

     

    I'm pretty sure that most of Beethoven's music can be found in MIDI format somewhere on the net. There might also be a free- or shareware version of a notation program available that lets you view MIDI files in sheet form.

     

    There were several music editors for the Atari 800 available. For example there was the "Antic Music Processor" in issue 12/88 and 06/89. I think you can download it in an emulator friendly format from the antic archive website or something similar. However I wasn't able to find any information about the file format of the AMP, so this program might not be too much of a help to you. There probably were better tools in the Atari demo scene anyway.

     

    And a note to OldGuru:

    As you probably have noticed yourself, the files in the SAP archive have been taken from PAL games, where the frame rate is 50 Hz. If you use one of these songs in your game, how do you prevent it from running too fast on your NTSC 5200?

     

     

    Thanks, Eckhard Stolberg

  25. Posted

    Pitfall II already is emulated in z26 and PCAE. The extra chip also provides the spite graphics data, so you can't easily remove the code that reads from the extra chip. You would have to do a major rewrite of most of the display routines, and I'm not sure that even then you would be able to achive a similar result. So I don't think you would be able to get this game going on the Supercharger or the Cuttle Cart.

     

     

    Caio, Eckhard Stolberg

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