krewat

Anyone know of a data restoration service that can handle "delicate" floppies? I used one a couple of years ago for some Commodore 64 floppies, but they were in good condition and read just fine.

I wouldn't hold out much hope for ANY CG events. There's a CHANCE I might be able to get the source code off the floppy, but other floppies like this that I have attempted have all met with disaster. The media came right off them and nothing was read. For some reason I was able to get Impossible Mission intact, but only by pulling individual blocks off a double set of backups to make up for the read errors. I have so far been too afraid to screw with the CG floppies. The thing that makes it even more horrible to read is that I wrote on them with a 1.2MB floppy drive in 360K mode. The 1.2MB floppy has, I believe, a narrower head, and the drive I wrote it with was slightly misaligned. So on each wide 360K track, there exists the previous wide 360K track, and an overwritten narrow track. Experimenting means removing even more media from the floppies, so it's a "do or die" process. I intend to take another stab at it at some point, but, seriously, and I REALLY hate to say it, but CG for the 7800 might be lost forever. And that's assuming that it was in any shape to actually run. I don't remember making much headway on the conversion before I ended my relationship with Computer Magic once and for all.

No, no source code was in the box. I used that for notes a long time ago. Interesting fact: The only copy of the source code was on paper. Epyx did not provide us with a binary copy of the source code. Brian Richter and I had to type in the source code by hand and then convert it. I got so good at converting code on the fly that I could read the paper source and type converted code. Not that there was a lot of "conversion", more like read a section, and then type it in in whatever environment I was using. I think Brian's method was more of a "type it all in, go back and convert it later".

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm so sorry over the years to have gotten some people's hopes up, and not delivered. I will soon. And no, the box in the image did not have any source code in it. Sadly. That is long long gone.

Back from the dead. Took a look at the IM code today and figured I'd tantalize everyone. It's only been 10 years...

Thank you I still think of fixing IM at least every week or so ...

I really don't remember. I think it was about space. Development was a fixed price of, I think, $25K.

http://atari.kilonet.org/files/Atari-Summer-Games-Manual-Markup.pdf The markup sheets (or whatever you want to call them) for the Atari 7800 version of the Summer Games instruction manual. As you can see, Skeet Shooting and Pole Vault were removed. I think I ran out of space*. I actually have no recollection of this manual, and it's obviously a photocopy of someone else's editing, but there are original (blue) marks on it. Again, no idea why Computer Magic Ltd. would have this, I don't think we were involved in the printing. * I used bank-switching for each "event" using a menu in the first bank. Still no idea why I ran out of space. Maybe out of time, though.

Was just looking at what I had of Cal Games, and trying to piece together what sources I have. Some of it is unreadable, which means I'd probably have to decompile the binaries - which I do actually have some of. I'm trying to get a game plan together on what I want to tackle first. I think fixing IM is top priority, as that will get me back into developing for the Atari again before I try to tackle anything else more complicated.

** ASTEROIDS FOR THE ATARI 3600 ** In the file BASE78.S: ***************************************************************** * * * 7800 Base Unit Rom Code * * Modified Asteroids with a bit of O.S * * 16-May-88 * * * * Dave Staugas, programmer * ***************************************************************** * * Of course, the instant I found this, I googled it, and of course it's already out there: https://github.com/videogamepreservation/asteroids-7800 Oh well... I got a little excited

Maybe, depends on what you want to pick on - LOL but yeah, there's a very small piece of one of the games from Summer Games that I managed to get working right - and now can't get anything off the floppies. Anyway...

Which is exactly why Impossible Mission is almost 90% of the time unsolvable But in regards to games that are total turds, I remember some disdain towards video gamers at that time in history, and that they could basically sell almost anything if the TV commercials looked good enough. Which they did, selling games that absolutely sucked using commercials that showed things that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual game play.

Gah, no, nothing to report, sorry to say. Thanks for the bump though, it gives me a reason to look into it again and resurrect the dev environment.

Correct, there are only 35 puzzle pieces scattered around. Some of them will/may wind up in terminals. So at the most, 35 pieces will be found, usually less. Foo...

Mmm... maybe I'm wrong about something. be right back.