Shamus

Yeah, I've run into the specifications issue. I now know that specifications are more of a 'this is the way we wish it worked, but it doesn't always'. We have better than specs, so I believe we could make that happen. At least to an extent.

If there's interest in such a thing, we would seriously consider it. We might find it useful too.

It's a regular Atari font file (though it *is* 1025 bytes long instead of 1024--hmm...). With some judicious bit unpacking/rearranging you could use it to create that bitmap file that you need.

If MESS is being actively developed then I say more power to 'em. The last time I looked at it (admittedly, a while ago) it couldn't really do all that much. I think I gave up after three or four games failed to run. <shameless plug> Virtual Jaguar is still in development (believe it or not) and once we get the memory subsystem into a state that isn't complete failure we'll probably have a minor release. The next major release will be when the blitter is 100% accurate (according to the netlists we have). Hopefully we can fix up the rest of it as it really is in sorry shape. </shameless plug>

Was there something wrong with the Heist Network crack of the Dungeon? My brother and I played that one all the time without encountering any problems. Solved all the quests, etc. Of note: I did buy a copy when it first came out directly from DataSoft. You can't begin to imagine the disappointment that me and my brother went through when we booted it up, created some characters, and immediately got attacked by FBI agents. Obviously DataSoft goofed up the copy protection on those disks; sometimes I wonder if that version ever got circulated or not.

Have to agree, OSS made some really fine stuff. I used Mac/65 back when it came on floppy and when the cart came out with built-in DDT, that was just luxury. But then they came out with Action! and I found myself using that more often than not. Even stuff that eventually got coded in ASM was prototyped in Action!. As far as trucks go, I have a Ford but I ain't proud of it. /me hangs head in shame

A roundish player with a method of picking oneself up (so to speak) sounds an awful lot like Starquake to me. But that's probably not it either.

@Heaven: Ultima III did have multichannel music (unfortunately Ultima IV did not ) and I'm pretty sure that the music stopped during disk access--after all, it was pretty much a straight port from the Apple II version.

I remember that an older version of Atari800 used to run the cartridge image correctly. I wonder what happened to cause it not to work anymore?

I also have cart dumps, from my own carts, of Action!, Basic XL & Basic XE that show up as missing on the database as well.

The City definitely had a layered protection scheme, but once you got past the encrypted checksum routine there was nothing else--at least nothing else that extensive playtesting by my brother could find (I spent all my time making maps while he spent his time levelling up ). It really was quite a challenge to get past all the obstacles that stood in the way. Now when The Dungeon came out, I remember thinking that its protection scheme wasn't nearly as complex as The City's--probably because Mr. Price wasn't involved in it that time around. But yeah, my brother and I (and others) extensively playtested the crack and didn't run into any problems. At least if anyone did, news never reached me. One other thing I did with both of my cracks was to replace the useless sector copier on the B sides of disk 1 with a very useful character ressurrector.

I'm only being partly tounge-in-cheek--I know about this stuff but I don't feel comfortable in divulging the details. If I didn't live in one of the most litigious societies in the world, I could speak more freely about such things. Sorry if that came across as snotty-teenager-nyah-nyah-nyah! That isn't the way it was meant.

Number one for all time for me was Action!, because you could do amazing things with it. If it had a better built-in assembler facility it would have been the perfect language. It was nice in that you could use it to prototype assembly code and see if graphical kernel ideas would work. Number two would have to be assembler in the form of Mac/65, and the cartridge form with the built in DDT. Damn, the built-in DDT made me just a tiny bit less envious of the guys who had Omnimons. It was fast assembling and it didn't suck they way that the old ASM/Editor cartridge did. Number three (and it's just barely below number two) was Basic XL/XE, and mainly because it brought procedures to BASIC. Wow, what a concept! Plus it was my number one way of doing throwaway prototyping before I got hold of Action!. It had other niceties as well, but the only one I can remember clearly was the DPoke statement.

One thing to keep in mind is that the protection utilized fuzzy sectors. Unless that's a VAPI image, you might run into some trouble. How do I know this? I ain't tellin'.

Thanks, this is definitely appreciated! I have quite a few tokenized source files laying around that I would have had to expand by hand (load in Mac/65, LIST out to HD, etc)!

OK, here it is. It's mind boggling to think that 128 bytes could be such a significant difference. But I guess if it's 6502 ASM, then it's understandable. I did write a patch to see if I could make it work and I *was* able to, though I doubt it looked right--some of the missing code is in the middle of a DLI. NOTE: The attached file is really an ATR just renamed. Strip off the ".zip" portion of the filename to use. d0003___Guitar_Wizard_AtD_SD.atr.zip

I think you're overthinking this--all you'd have to do is make disk images of those floppies and let people who want to extract the source from them worry about the rest. I've written (as I'm sure many others have) utilities to extract files from disk images. It's really not a problem.

This isn't necessarily true, unfortunately. For example, there is no copy anywhere to be had of Guitar Wizard I have a copy but unfortunately one of the sectors was a 'doubled' sector and so it doesn't work. Wished I'd known that back when I got it.

For myself, cracking was a matter of doing it for the challenge of the thing as well as an ideological thing--to me, so-called 'copy protection' was intentionally inflicted brain damage on a piece of software and it was my duty to remove it. Even on games that I bought. Although later on in the game, when I was contacted to do some deprotections by an outside group or two, I had to wonder why they were bothering with such crapware. Personally I never would have released some of the garbage they put out there but I guess it's like someone said, a release is a release no matter how lousy it is. And for the record, I did manage to crack AR:TC though it never did get a wide release. Now that was one hell of a tough nut to crack!

I'm about 20 miles west of the capitol in the Drippin'/Spicewood area. I'm sooo glad we ended up here and not in Round Rock or Cedar Park.

Yup, I'm in the Hill Country--the only decent place to live in Texas (IMNSHO, of course ). Well I suppose east Texas isn't so bad either, after all, that's where I was born. As for west Texas, fuggetaboutit. I've been through there enough times to know that I would never want to live there. My condolences to those of you who do; especially those of you who are unfortunate enough to live in El Paso.

Wow! Did they really say that? If so, you'd have to be really naive to believe that--after all, how could you actually use the damn things without destroying them? I've heard of some pretty outrageous schemes, but that takes the cake!

I know that Analog released the 8-bit Compendium as an answer to people wanting the first few issues, but it would still be nice to have those. It would be nice to see an electronic version of the Compendium and also the Analog 8-bit Extra book that they did. Once upon a time I had both of those, but in moving they were lost.

This got me to thinking that oddly enough that there aren't too many run 'n jump titles for the A8--at least that I remember. Out of the ones I remember there's the too difficult Snokie (horizontal scroller w/peguin hero), the utterly bizarre Mission on Thunderhead (OK, it's kind of a hybrid, sosume ) and the excellent Spelunker. Ah yes, now they're coming back--Cohen's Towers (bleh), Ghost Chasers (okayish), Burt's Brew Biz (same), Mountain King (fun!)... I can think of more but they're almost all single screen run 'n jumpers like (er) Jumpman, Hard Hat Mack, Donkey Kong, Mr. Robot, Nuclear Nick, Mouse Trap (horrible, but it kept you coming back for some reason) etc. etc.

And here I thought it was something pedestrian like Albert forgetting to pay his domain service. I have to say, explosions are much more exciting! Yeah, I missed it--but I refuse to admit I'm addicted! Hm, the parallels to another AA is kinda weird, no? Atariholics Anonymous? I swear, I didn't inhale! I didn't know the fumes were toxic! Halp!