tjb

Having only been a buyer on Ebay, I have to ask: Why would Ebay prohibit auctions on "prototypes"? tjb

A straight 2600 port fits the computer's controller better. 'S the same reason the computer Missile Command has one turret. The keyboard isn't a good place for gameplay buttons, and one fire button greatly limits your options. Demon Attack, though... no excuse. Honestly, I'm still wondering why Microsurgeon only appeared on the INTV and 99/4a. Did it require 16-bit math somewhere? Good point. I hadn't thought of that. It would have been cool to have nicer graphics and the whole day to night thing, however. I'm sure a straight port certainly makes more business sence especially since the VCS and 8-bit line are closely related. Perhaps in the INTV case it required much more effort and while they were in there decided to take advantage of what the machine had to offer. I'm sure the programmer doing the port has something to do with it as well. While I'd like to think that most game developers of the time had a great passion for their craft and wanted to do everything possible (within time and budget constraints), I'm sure for some it was "just a job" and therefore they did the least amount of work possible. I bet it was more a case of simply not being given enough development time to do any extras. Please forgive my ramblings, it getting late and I'm tired tjb

I was always envious of the Imagic Intellivision ports compared to the Atari 8-bit computer versions. Atlantis is a prime example. Another is Demon Attack. Imagic seemed to take advantage of the INTV's capabilities. I wish they would have done the same for the Atari 8-bit computer versions instead of doing a straight VCS port. I don't believe there was ever an Atari 8-bit computer port of Dragonfire was there? tjb

Ah, thanks! tjb

Can someone tell me the ranges (as in number of posts) for each ranking? I've been at 3 joysticks for sometime and I'm wondering what it will take to hit the 4 joystick mark. tjb

Have a look at http://www.atariarchives.org/. tjb

I don't get out much... tjb

I take it this is a collection of eye-poping demos? Impressive stuff to be sure. Can someone provide a little background? Thanks, tjb

Did you have a price in mind? tjb

Are these genuine Atari-made originals or are they new reproductions? tjb

Besides the 2600 (in no particular order): Atari 5200 Atari 520 STFM Atari 1040 STF Atari 7800 Atari Jaguar Atari Lynx I Atari Lynx II Atari 800XL Atari XEGS Atari 400 Atari 1200XL Atari 65XE Atari 130XE Commodore 128 Commodore 128D Commodore Amiga 500 Commodore Vic-20 Apple IIc Apple IIgs Laser 128 Laser 128EX ColecoVision TurboGraphx 16 TurboExpress Sega Genesis Sega Nomad Sega Saturn NES SNES Gamecube N64 Gameboy Advance Intellivision II GP32 GP2X Vectrex TI-99/4a PS2 I think that's about it. Now that I look at it I can understand why my wife gets upset whenever I acquire more "junk". Anybody else fight those battles? tjb

Wow! That is really cool! tjb

One question: Will Hozer pay royalties to the authors for every copy he sells??? (I can guess the answer) Also, can he legally do this? After all this is copyrighted material. I take it he does not get permission to make/sell copies? tjb

PM Sent. tjb

They didn't buy a few copies only to turn around and resell them for a much higher price did they??? Seems like Albert would probably limit the number of copies he would sale to an individual to keep people from taking advantage of collectors. tjb

How about Asteroids? The 8-bit computer version supports 4 players so I would think the 5200 version would as well? tjb

PM Sent. tjb

#36 tjb

USA Serial No. 83S DA 017938 133 tjb

PM Sent. tjb

Interesting. Didn't K-Byte do some titles for CBS on the 8-bit Atari? Like Krazy Antiks? tjb

PM Sent. tjb

PM Sent. tjb

The acid test would be to use that copy of LADS to assemble the LADS source from the book. If it works, and if the object code is the same, we know it's a "golden" copy of LADS. Looks like the source code is scattered throughout the book... and probably full of OCR errors, too The other way to prove it's correct would be for someone who has the book to print a decimal dump (6 bytes per line) and compare each line of the dump to the MLX code in the book... but man, that would be tedious. It's 1142 lines of MLX, if we knew 5 or 10 people who owned the book, we could split the job up and have everyone verify a chunk of the code... but I don't have a copy of it (wanted it *real* bad back in the day though). So far I've been using MLX and only ran into two lines of problems... Are you typing in it from the book or from what is posted at Atari Archives? tjb

That run address can't be right. Location 32768 just contains an RTS, which is why it returns to DOS immediately. Location 32769 contains a "JMP $92CB", and $92CB also contains an RTS... I tried setting the run address to $8004 (32772), which is the first bit of code that doesn't immediately return to DOS, but it just locks up... (time passes while I mess with it...) OK, it looks like your script added a stray byte, $60, first byte after the 6-byte header. The binary you posted has 6853 bytes of object code... MLX uses 6-byte lines, and 6853 isn't divisible by 6... but 6852 is. Since an RTS at $8000 doesn't make sense (the book says the entry point is $8000), I just used a hex editor to remove that one byte, adjusted the ending address in the header down by 1, loaded the file, and got "LADS Ready." I wrote, assembled, and ran a 3-line program with it, and it seems to work fine. Here's the edited binary (zipped to make the forum software happy): lads.zip Cool, thanks! We now have a working copy of LADS! tjb