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Shamus

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Posts posted by Shamus

  2. Posted · Edited by Shamus
    :)

    Well, it wouldn't be the first time they got things wrong.  As far as I can tell, OP STOP interrupts are controlled by bit 2 of INT1 ($F000E0), not by some magick bit in a STOP object.  No doubt the guy writing the documentation (LOL) was pulling his hair out.  :)

    • Like 1

  3. Posted · Edited by Shamus
    Corrections : P

    O_STOPINTS has nothing to do with the STOP opcode (at least according to the JTRM); the OP ignores anything in bits 3-63 of a STOP object.  It looks like it should be some kind of interrupt control bit, but it matches nothing (the closest is INT1 [$F000E0], but it should be $4 in that case instead of $8).

     

    Dunno what to tell you other than, what do you need it for?  Does it really do anything?

     

    N.B.: STOP is *not* a pseudo-op, it's a geniune, bona-fide, real as real can be opcode.  : )

  4. Posted · Edited by Shamus
    Should have checked the bug tracker first :-P

    If it's useful to your workflow, we wouldn't object.  It will have to pass review though.  ;)

     

    EDIT: I believe this is addressed in bug#167.  If it isn't, feel free to submit a patch.  RMAC is now up to version 2.0.20.  :)

  5. Posted · Edited by Shamus
    misspellings :-/

    "The stories are obviously authentic."  How would you know?  Have you had any experience with psychopaths?  Do you really believe that you could tell when one was lying to you?

     

    For myself, and many others, anything that Kieren "The Liar" Hawken has touched is going to be a hard pass.  Enjoy your wonderful sales numbers, and your obvious lack of integrity.

    • Like 4

  6. Posted

    Those "magic hash tables" are really DFAs (Deterministic Finite Automatons).  Ever since I learned about them in my uni days, I've always thought they were the closest things in all of CompSci that you could label as "magic".  :D

    • Thanks 1

  8. Posted

    2 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

    A few months ago, they said "weeks not months."

    "I ran out of gas! I got a flat tire! I didn’t have change for cab fare! I lost my tux at the cleaners! I locked my keys in the car! An old friend came in from out of town! Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!"

    • Like 3
    • Haha 10

  13. Posted

    25 minutes ago, PixelsLtd said:

    But, then I saw Kieren's 15 page statement. To be frank, because of all the evidence I'd seen here I had pretty much decided he was probably guilty and I was very sad about it, I felt like I had been betrayed by a friend and somewhat groomed and used for my closeness to certain other people.

    This is, unfortunately, how Mr. Hawken operates.  He has done this with many other people; curried their favor to advance his career in order to make inroads in whatever community it is that he is attempting to insinuate himself into.  Once he figures out that you're of no more use to him, he will delete your contact info and never give you another thought.  This is not conjecture, this pattern has been seen over and over again.  It's not just someone's opinion, there is a literal mountain of evidence showing this.

     

    All this giving Mr. Hawken the benefit of the doubt has only allowed him to continue to victimize other people.  And this is the thing, Mr. Hawken is not a ordinary, decent person.  An ordinary, decent person would have taken stock of themselves, would have felt the pang of empathy and considered the wrong they have done to other people, would have apologized for their wrongdoing and asked for forgiveness.  Need I say that Mr. Hawken has been doing this kind of thing for more than fifteen years?  And not once admitted any wrongdoing?

     

    I know it's hard to admit to yourself that you've been taken in by a psychopath, I've been there myself.  And there is absolutely no need to feel sorry for him; he certainly doesn't feel sorry for you.

    • Like 11

  14. Posted

    On 2/13/2020 at 2:52 AM, SamDyer said:

    My name is Sam Dyer and I run the publishing house Bitmap Books.

     

    I’ve been asked multiple times on Twitter and Facebook as to whether Kieren Hawken is involved within our new book – Atari 2600/7800: a visual compendium. These questions have come out of the blue and I (maybe naively) wasn’t expecting so much interest in his involvement. We engaged Kieren back in 2019 to come on-board as part of the team to help create the book and he has ghostwritten some parts, along with other writers. It’s important to say that I’ve had no issue with his work and the working relationship has been fine. 

     

    Our books are very much a team effort so the overall writing is a combination of many contributors, including the original developers. When we cannot reach the original developer for a game, that entry is ghostwritten – something we’ve done since our NES book. When listing contributors on our website, we don’t tend to list ghostwriters and traditionally these have been credited within the book, not publicly. 

     

    I had no idea of the interest that his involvement would incur. The book was a HUGE undertaking and around 9 months of work and officially licensed from Atari. It has has been verified and fact-checked as best we can by other Atari enthusiasts and proofreaders. This is something we do on all books so I’m confident that it’s as accurate as it can be.

     

    If you guys wish to boycott the book based on the above then I can’t stop that, but I wanted to publicly state the facts regarding Kieren’s involvement and squash the speculation.

    I have very good reason to believe that you were warned about Kieren well in advance of publication of this book, and that the reply that came back from your publishing house was "he hasn't done anything to us, so piss off".  It is precisely this attitude that has allowed Kieren to continue to cause trouble for the past fifteen years, that, and the bizarre lack of certain people to name him for his misdeeds when they are so overwhelmingly documented and incontrovertibly true; as if what's being reported is merely conjecture that can and should be given the benefit of the doubt.

     

    Kieren isn't just some random guy on the internet causing internet drama, he is a person who has repeatedly demonstrated not only a willingness to lie about himself and his own accomplishments, but also to lie about other people in order to damage their reputations, set people against each other, and even worse.  He is what most people, looking only at his pattern of behavior, would politely call a psychopath.  In his mind, he is never at fault, ever; every bad thing that has ever come his way is always and can only be the result of external factors beyond his control.

     

    As bad as that is, he is also known for taking other people's work and portraying it as his own; he will also make up whatever he thinks will sound plausible to the gullible.  He portrays himself as an expert on all things retro, even though it's easy to see through this puffed up portrait he has made of himself.  It baffles me how anyone could take such lazy, dishonest work seriously, especially when a little digging will yield the truth about him and his shoddy writing.

     

    Again, he has been doing this for fifteen years.  And so when I hear of his involvement with a book like yours, I have no choice but to take a principled stand against it as having him profit from it in any way is an affront to everyone who has integrity and is doing their best to put out good, honest work.  Further, by embracing him and putting his input into your book, you have invariably lowered the quality of it as anything he writes cannot be trusted to be accurate, knowledgeable, or factual.  This is not a matter of opinion, this is, again, a matter of incontrovertible fact.  And, since you won't even tell us which parts he contributed to, we have to assume that all of it is tainted.

     

    And again, I have good reason to believe that you were warned about him well in advance of publication, meaning that you are not being forthcoming here Mr. Dyer.  You say you want to "publicly state the facts regarding Kieren’s involvement and squash the speculation", but, given that you were warned about Kieren and decided to have him involved anyway, makes it seem more like you are trying desperately to minimize his involvement and deflect any blame from your company for the decision--which you made--to bring him on.

     

    And so, this is a definite, absolute no; I will never buy a copy of your new book as it lends credence to Mr. Hawken and gives him unearned prestige; not only that, I also refuse to enrich Mr. Hawken as a matter of principle, and anyone who enables him to be so enriched, such as people like yourself.  Good day to you sir.

    • Like 7

  15. Posted

    6 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

     

    image.png.baf1febea3cdd07d4d87486dba0c6301.png
     

     

    I don't believe for one second that Kieren Hawken would ever off himself as he's too much of a narcissist and psychopath to do such a thing.  As a matter of fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a bold prediction: he's going to go radio silent for a bit, then spread a rumour that he killed himself.  That's right folks, you heard it here first!

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

    On 11/3/2019 at 3:29 AM, www.atarimania.com said:

    That would be fantastic. Of course, the coders would need to be convinced about the enterprise first :)

     

    BTW, I really like the 4 am cracks. Maybe a number of titles are not doable because of the double hi-res or other things but there are many neat titles in the collection: https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am

    I've been following 4am's exploits for some time now.  :)  I like his cracking work as well as the WOZ preservation work.  Lots of goodies have been turning up there.  :D

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    On 10/31/2019 at 11:18 AM, www.atarimania.com said:

    Yes, I'm aware of all the games we had from the Apple back in the day and the XXL conversions - though I forgot about the more recent SABOTAGE, thanks for reminding us of that one! - but my emphasis was more on all the excellent titles which relied less on heavy graphics or animation.

     

    How about all the adventure games like Masquerade or Alpine Encounter? Maybe even all-text programs like Rambo - First Blood - Part II? There are also some great strategy / simulation games from the mid to late eighties that the Atari never got. Also, for some reason, I really dig some of the educational software that exists on the Apple. 

    Sabotage is really, really old (it was converted in the mid-80s or so)!  ;)  Converting Apple II software shouldn't present too much of a problem, especially if it's single loader stuff that lives in 48K (like Sabotage).  The Apple's larger disk size is also a consideration when doing a conversion, but again, not fatal.  Things would start to get tricky with software that requires 64K or more, as obviously memory mapping has to be dealt with; also things like double hi-res, 80-columns, paddles, etc.  In retrospect, maybe it would have been easier to port Bard's Tale I-III from the Apple ports as opposed to the Commodore ports...  It would be nice to have a port of Ultima IV with music (why, WHY Origin did you omit the music???), a port of Ultima V...  Hmm...

     

    At any rate, yes, doing conversions from the Apple II should be imminently doable, as it didn't have much in the way of custom graphics and sound hardware (like the Commodore had); though it takes a pretty good understanding of the internals of not only the Apple II, but the Atari as well!  :)  If anyone wants to do a port, I'd be more than happy to share my expertise.

    • Like 2

  21. Posted

    My guess is that these images most likely (since they're about 4x larger than typical) have each quarter track from their source A2Rs represented in their respective WOZ files.  The WOZ images could probably be reduced in size as it's very likely that there are duplicates among those quarter tracks.  As far as AppleWin is concerned, I wouldn't take anything coming from that emulator seriously as it doesn't seem to properly support WOZ images of any kind (it would seem they're making some kind of assumption in their WOZ handling that is incorrect--what would they do with an image where each quarter track is actually unique?).

     

    TL;DR: There's nothing wrong with these images, though it's very likely they could be shrunk down in size because of duplicate quarter tracks.

  22. Posted

    Hmm, I would have thought that the Ultima Trilogy would have surfaced by now, but I guess 4am (and whomever else is putting out fresh WOZ images) is too busy with other things (that guy is a machine :), and yes, I saw the pix of the hundreds of pounds of floppy disks at KansasFest).  So here's a version I made a while back, and I'm pretty sure they all work.  Don't know who did the original A2Rs, as they didn't put their name in the contributor field.  :(  They're in WOZ1 format, as these were done before there was a realization of the need for a WOZ2.  :D

     

    N.B.: If the emulator you use doesn't detect a Mockingboard in Ultima III, you can force the MB configuration screen to come up by pressing CTRL-M when booting up. 

    ultima-trilogy.zip

  24. Posted · Edited by Shamus
    Formatting : P

    We were there for the weekend, and it was nice to see a developer's booth there for a change instead of all the other vendors selling "pixel art" and other pop culture crap that had no relevance to anything "retro gaming" related (there was a lasik booth there FFS).

     

    Sadly, it seems like the quality of CGF has been steadily going downhill year after year, as it seems the focus of the event is now mostly on people shifting junk rather than on games on old systems.  Some of the things we noticed this year compared to last year:

     

    • Only two panels this year, and one was the same guy from last year (the This Controller Sucks! guy), the other being a couple of authors of retro-themed books (to be fair, I thought they were interesting, but I seriously doubt they'll be back)
    • Fewer arcade machines than last year, and most of the machines had their sound either muted or turned down very low
    • Fewer bands than last year
    • More vendors selling things only tangentially related to retro gaming, if at all related

     

    We all agreed that the best thing at the show was the Spiderman pinball (at least this year, they had the pinballs on free play, last year they didn't) which, while ten years old, isn't exactly retro.  There were only four pinballs there as well and the others weren't exactly stellar.  Same goes for the arcade machines they put out, they weren't exactly great and there were at least of couple of iCades mixed in as well (why bother with crap like that?).

     

    I'd say unless the organizers do something to radically change things for the better, I can't see them lasting much longer.  I don't know if we'll attend next year, especially if it keeps going on its downhill slide like it has for the past few years.

  25. Posted

    For some reason I thought that this had been posted on Atari Age some time in the distant past, and if it has, the search can't find it.  So I'm posting it here, now, for your reading pleasure*.  :)

     

    *Reading pleasure not guaranteed, your reading pleasure may vary

     

    N.B.: This is version 8 by John Matheison, if there's interest in the earlier version I will post it in this thread as well.

    Jaguar Technical Reference v8.pdf

    • Like 3
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