Eckhard Stolberg
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Posts posted by Eckhard Stolberg
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PANDA?
in Atari 2600
quote:
Originally posted by jahfish:sancho have licenced from panda, i believe that's the chronology ....
I'm not so sure about that. If you look at your Sacho boxes, you'll notice that it has a copyright notice by Tang Electronics Corp. from Taiwan. So I think Sancho is just a game label from TEC, just like Onbase sold their games under the Bomb label. And like other Asian game companies they had their games distributed by different companies in different countries.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Originally posted by -^Cro§Bow^-:Speaking of this...Eckhart:Have you ever thought of programming the bios to allow the Joystick to be used to navigate that thing and use the fire button to select which mode you want?
The design goal was to make the transfer as easy as possible, so since I always had to take the 7800 over to my Computer, that tangeling joystick cable was always in the way. And since having the menu required one of the inputs to be in a certain state at the start of the game, I thought the reset switch would be the least problematical for most games.
But if there really is demand for this, I guess I could add additional joystick support for the menu.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Tempest,
that depends on what you are talking about here. PAL is just a way of encoding the colour information into an existing B/W TV signal. It has been applied to many different B/W signals, so there are many different versions of PAL.
If you are talking about PAL consoles, those won't work properly on NTSC TVs. Your TV won't be able to decode the colour information properly and therefore only show a B/W picture.
If you are talking about VCS cartridges here, you might have more luck. The European versions of PAL all use a higher resolution and a lower framerate than NTSC. For the VCS this information is in the cartridges, which is why most PAL games roll on an NTSC TV.
However, PAL colour encoding was also applied to some South Amarican TV standards. I think the Brazilian TV standard is actually working with the NTSC resolution and framerate. Atari's cheap solution to this was to hack the NTSC consoles a bit and just release the NTSC games over there. I'm not sure if they bothered to change the colours in the games too, though. But for you this would mean that Brazilian (pirate) VCS games would probably not roll on your TV and might also show proper colours.
I think CCE is a Brazilian company, this might be why the game is working for you.
BTW since Tempest is so close to the 1000 posts barrier, does anyone want to guess what is going to happen when he crosses it? My guess is that Alex and Albert will just send him their bills for the exceeded transfer limit, as he is obviously responsible for most of it.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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What you experiance happens when you try Kool Aide Man on an emulator that doesn't support this game properly or on some of the newer 7800 consoles I think. If you look closely, you'll see that the digits in the score display partly overlap. This causes the game to detect a constant sprite collission, which is why KAM is always bouncing back and forth. In z26 we cheat a bit and force the score display into the correct position. That way you can actually play the game. But of course you could also play it on the Cuttle Cart on a real VCS.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Albert,
As I've told you in email, I'd gladly help you or anyone else who wants to try to port the 7800 transfer program to Windows.
As for some of the Dumps being bad: Some games have a little trouble being read at 7800 speed. For those cases I have added the -a command line switch, which will try to read games with 26Fx bankswitching types at 2600 speed. If you read out a game several times in a row and you always get a slightly different ROM image, you might want to try this. I was able to get all my problematical games to read properly that way.
BTW, one of the reasons that Cowering lists so many alternative images for certain games is that some of the ROMs floating around the net for a very long time have some of the bytes wrong that don't really affect the gameplay on the emulators. So bad dumps surely isn't a problem that we invented with our cart reader.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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But you are forgetting the Atari Corp. board number C300633-001 Rev C from 1989. This is the board that can be equipped for NTSC as well as PAL. Therefore all PAL 7800s are using this board. It is certainly incompatible with the Activision games. I wrote a little experimental routine for my cartridge reader based on this board, that allows me to read Decathlon, Robot Tank and Space Shuttle with it. The resulting binaries work fine on the emulators, but I still can't get the games to play normally in the 7800. Therefore I'm pretty sure that there must be a bigger problem than just worn out contacts.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Basically you have to pick up the four parts of the spaceship from the little boothes and drop them at the marked corner while avoiding to be cought by the monsters. It is important that you put the pieces together in the right order. If a piece currently doesn't fit, you have to take it back to the booth where you found it. Also you can pick up the little energy blocks from the center of the screen and use it to generate temporary barriers for the monsters.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Bradford never inplemented support for the Pifall 2 extra chip. Therefore you won't be able to play this game in the Stella emulator. It works in PCAE and z26 though.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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It works fine on my version of StellaX. You have to put the STELLA.PRO file in the working directory of StellaX. A minumum enty for Elevator Action could look like this:
; Elevator Action enty in STELLA.RPO
"Cartridge.Name" "Elevator Action"
"Cartridge.Filename" "elevator.bin"
"Cartridge.Type" "F8SC"
""
You should make sure that the file name is spelled correctly including the capital letters. Or, if you know the checksum of the game, you can use that entry instead of the file name. But I'm sure the guy who maintains the STELLA.PRO file will update it with the proper information soon.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I think you are right. In the original background story Nebulus (it's spelled without the 'o') was the name of the world. AFAIK they didn't gave a name for the little creature. However in Nebulus 2 for the Amiga, it's name was Pogo, I think. So why isn't that an option in your contest?
On the name change to Tower Toppler, I think in the US the computer versions of this game were distributed by Epyx (which might be the reason why Atari got the game on the 7800). Epyx had a habbit to always change the name for European games, that they were distributing in the US, for some strange reason.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I got my Cuttle Cart yesterday and thought I'd let you know that it works nicely on my PAL system too. So all PAL users who were interested in getting a CC, but were a little unsure because Chad didn't have the possibility to test it on a PAL system, don't need to hesitate any longer. You can just go over to Chad's website and order your copy right now.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Actually the cart reader ONLY works on the parallel port. If you were able to connect the 7800 to the serial port, you probably build the wrong cable. I'm using Win95 and my parallel port is set as "simple parallel port SPP" or something similar, in case this matters.
Since I have had complaints about timeouts that turned out to be misunderstandings about the procedure, let's make sure that you do everything in the right order.
1. Plug the game cartridge into the 7800 console and make sure it's seated properly.
2. Turn on the 7800 console.
3. Push the RESET switch on the 7800 to set in in transfer mode. (Better practice that with the 7800 connected to a TV set, so that you can see if the onscreen menu goes away as it shoud. On some consoles the RESET key is so worn out that it might not register each pressing.)
4. Start the PC transfer program with a command line like:
7800ctrl -tTEST game.bin
If everything works correctly, the 7800 should now autodetect the bankswitching type and transfer the ROM data to the file GAME.BIN. Under some circumstances the autodetection might fail. In these cases you can override the detection with the -t command line switch. BTW, Asteroids 2600 is an 8K game (26F8) and Megamania is a 4K game (264K).
The best way to test the resulting binary is with an emulator like z26, as the 7800 RAM cart doesn't support any of the 2600 bankswitching formats. OK, if you'd take your Cuttle Cart, that would probably be even better. If you want to try to transfer the ROM to the 7800 RAM cart, you must make sure that it is plugged in properly and that the transfer routine has been started on the 7800 before you start the PC transfer program. Otherwise you will get timeouts with no data transferred at all, as you desribed.
If the transfer starts but times out somewhere in between, then there is a problem with your setup, though.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I don't know anything about the 5200 graphics system, but I think the following should work for the number display:
Put the display list in RAM, so that you can change the pointers for the graphics of the digits, or whatever the 5200 needs to display a number.
Store all numbers that are supposed to be displayed as binary coded decimals (BCD). BCD variables can hold decimal values between 00 and 99 instead of hexadecimal values between $00 and $ff. Each digit takes four bits of the byte. This makes it easy to mask out a digit and generate a display pointer from it. The 6502 allows you to do decimal calculations when set into BCD mode with the SED instruction. The CLD instruction takes the processor back to binary mode. Therefore you can easiely increase the level or add some points to the score without having to worry about converting binary values to decimal.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I haven't seen a SECAM 7800 yet, but I know that the PAL ones use a normal TV plug. But on the other hand, most of the later releases of 7800 games came with a photocopied instruction sheet in French stuffed under the shrinkwrap. So the 7800 part of both consoles seems to be compatible. I'm not sure about the 2600 part though. But if you ever find out, I would be interested in this information too. A PAL 7800 with build in RGB output would definetely be interesting.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I just thought I'd let you know that this month's issue of the German video game magazine "Man!ac" has a full page article about the VCSp, in case you haven't seen it yourself already. It sure helps when the chief editor is a fellow big name classic game collector.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I just remembered the game I was thinking of. Your description of Treasure Below sounds a lot like SCUBA Diver by Sancho. Are these games the same, or just similar?
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I also think that this is just a cheaper way of manufacturing game carts. FWIW, I have seen several Taiwanese pirate games that are exactly like this. They seem to be later releases with smaller boards and cases too.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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quote:
Originally posted by Ze_ro:This is probably a stupid question... but how did you know it was the Japanese version? Was it still boxed?
Yes, the game came with box and instructions. There is nothing on the cart itself that identifies it as a Japanese version. If you line, you can see scans of the box and the manual on my picture page.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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quote:
Originally posted by Tempest:It's hard to see but I believe those boxes are for the Japanese Atari 2800. I've seen a few of those boxes around, but I've never seen an actual cart.
I think the Japanese carts are exactly like the US ones. I found a Japanese Realsports Tennis on a fleamarket here in Germany, and the cart was the normal NTSC cartridge with an US label. The funny thing about this game is that it has a DM price sticker, so it must have been sold in some German store. And it's not as if there are too many Japanese speaking people here who use a NTSC VCS in this PAL country.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Ok, thanks for the desriptions. Now I'm really envious. And I was so proud before, when I found boxed copies of Missile Control and Surfer's Paradise.
Any chance that you could read out the ROMs of the three other games, even if it only were to do some screenshots with an emulator in order to turn me from envious to jealous? And of course that would allow us to compare the games with all the pirates. Treasure below sure sounds like something I have seen before. If only I could remember the name of that cart ...
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Actually the game is based on a board game called Rush Hour. Since it has a pretty simple setup Brian created a version of it for the VCS. But since he was new at VCS programming he only managed to fit 26 levels into his first version. Thomas liked the game so much, that he decided to program a new version from scratch just to see how many levels he could fit in. His version ended up with 600 levels. Thomas asked Brians approval before he released his version and Brian didn't mind. So the only thing that Brian could take credit for on Thomas' version is that he was the one who started Thomas' interest in the game.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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Starpath games should be detected automatically. There is no need for any command line switches. You just have to make sure that the binary is 8448 bytes long for single load games, or a multitude of this for the multi-load games. Multi-load games need to be concatenated into one single file per game. If you have a game with three loads for example you would type on the DOS command line prompt:
"copy /b load1.bin+load2.bin+load3.bin mload.bin"
Then you should be able to play mload.bin under z26.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
[ 07-31-2001: Message edited by: Eckhard Stolberg ]
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Aha, I see. They really seem to be different games then. So how does Steeplechase by Video Gems play and how does it look like? And do you have Treasure Below too?
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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I'm convinced that Lady Bug is real. Just look at the screenshots in Digital Press. The DP guys have such a long experience with reviewing VCS games and they have contacts with so many of the old VCS programmers, that they sure would be able to come up with faked screenshots that the VCS would actually be able to generate, if they really wanted to fool us. The fact that the screenshots of Lady Bug are obviously so much beyond the VCS's capabilities can only mean that the DP guys are forced to hide the real truth. It's all a big conspiracy, I'm telling you. Trust no one, especially not me.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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PAL Space Invaders Variation?
in Atari 2600
Posted
Personally I have three copies of the darker version and one of the brighter version, which also plays a little faster BTW. The brighter version I got in a trade from Christian in France together with a SECAM VCS. The funny thing about it is that Christian mentioned to me how his personal copy of Space Invaders is just too dark on his PAL 7800. All of these version are in PAL format, BTW. I have no idea on the rarity though.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg