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Does one exist? I'm looking for a convenient way to have this game on MyIDE. Image is a bit inconvenient. -Steve Sheppard [typo corrected]

Does there exist a file version of Spelunker?

http://www.retrobits.net/atari/monkey.shtml

* cough * Qix - 58251 - Steve Sheppard

Does this look like the right program? sourcer.zip - Steve Sheppard

Version 3.6 from 1984 should be the final update for content. It's been a while. From the Action! monitor if you type ? $B000 you should get the version number in hex (i.e. 0x36 for version 36). I'm guessing that ICD and/or FTE made the switch to a single ROM and changed the banking scheme and nothing more. - Steve Sheppard Hi Steve- You beat me to it! I never can remember that "Peek" -- I should put a note in the front of my manual. I also found the following review by Brian Moriarity from Analog that is quite comprehensive. (I always liked the articles by Brian M.) I do love Action! -- just wish its math handling was better. http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an16/action.htm You must have been an early purchaser. I was fairly early, and my orange cart is 3.5 -- they probably zipped right through those releases while trying to eradicate bugs. Did your original cart have gold contacts? The early releases had silver/solder contacts, so one of their pitches for upgrading was to get the gold contacts as they replaced the pcb's. My original BXL 1.01 cart had the silver/solder contacts, so I did the upgrade on it to 1.02/gold. -Larry Yup. Very early. I want to say I purchased Action directly from OSS but I have no record of that transaction. Tin contacts, by the way. They need to be cleaned about once every 10 extractions of the cartridge. - Steve Sheppard

Version 3.6 from 1984 should be the final update for content. It's been a while. From the Action! monitor if you type ? $B000 you should get the version number in hex (i.e. 0x36 for version 36). I'm guessing that ICD and/or FTE made the switch to a single ROM and changed the banking scheme and nothing more. - Steve Sheppard

I personally know of 2 cart versions. A 2 eprom and 1 eprom. Both have different switching and I think the lower 4K of the 2 eprom version could be switched off and the ram under it accessed. As for those versions, Maybe it has something to do with when OSS bought the carts somewhere near 1986? James OSS, etc. released at least three versions of Action!. AFAIK, the first widely released version was 3.4. The last version was 3.6. I believe that most orange (two eprom) carts were 3.5. I believe that nearly all black carts were 3.6. (BTW, if someone has a different version, chime in.) AFAIK, all the releases were just to kill bugs -- I don't think they added any new features. The Action! bug sheets were pretty extensive. I have seen that © statement typically will include the dates of all versions; e.g. © 1983, 1984, 1987. Sometimes written as © 1983-1987. When other folks released new manufacturing runs of the cartridge, they could have changed the © statement to include their ownership. (ACS, OSS, ICD, FTE). I'm not familiar with the term "propertymap," but this presumably is what you are referring to. (?) OSS also released two different toolkits. The first was called the "Action! Programmers Aid Disk;" the second was released as the "Action Toolkit." They are substantially the same. I'm not sure about different released versions of the OSS runtime. -Larry I own the final update, 3.6, in an orange cart. I orginally purchased 3.1 (I think) and updated twice. Unfortunately I was required to trade in my cartridge each time. (Update cost was $20 per, IIRC. Unfortunately, I can't remember what problems were fixed with each revision. update I found an older version of my manual in which I wrote the note "Ver. 3.1". I also found an invoice for an Action! upgrade. The version number is not stated but the invoice is dated March 23, 1984. My other copy of the manual also has a hand written note, "Ver. 3.6". Perhaps I upgraded only once. - Steve Sheppard

Works great for me too! Thanks!!! - Steve Sheppard

OK I found a convoluted way of doing screen shots. I have QMEG Plus OS on my 800XL. I freeze the program. Save a snapshot to RAMdisk. Write the RAMdisk to real disk (ATR actually). Reverse the whole process in Atari800Win Plus. Do my screenshot. LOL! Yes, it would be easier just to play the game in emulation but I prefer the real thing and I am overjoyed at a chance to use the paddle controllers! Unfortunately, this does not improve playability. It might even be harder with paddles. Beginner level [cough] -Steve Sheppard

The is great! Thanks Bernd! I can only use the 8K and 16K images for now but games newly on cartridge is wonderful fun. Slightly off-topic but has anyone discovered why the Berzerk ROM image that has circulated for years does not work properly. The game starts but is stuck at the initial screen. The ATR and file versions seem fine but the ROM image is not. - Steve Sheppard

Oops, I think I have the wrong version. The helicopters haven't started shooting at me and the final score screen eventually displays "Cracked 1983 by the Byte Breaker".

um.. yeah.. just before 10K.. OK. Oh, I don't have an easy way to take a screenshot but no worries I just scored 1360. I don't think I will be reaching 10K anytime soon. LOL - Steve Sheppard p.s. On the third level I can't seem to go any faster forward than the motion of the wave. Is that normal? I thought my joystick was giving me trouble.

We can do that... I am not sure how to do it though... maybe you can help me out a bit on that Goochman. I'm terrible at games so the scoring system doesn't really matter to me BUT I like the existing scoring system. Bonus points yeah! Give me a chance to get off the wall of shame! I suggest (if it hasn't already been suggested) a Saturday midnight (ET) end time. That would give most people at least a little weekend, last minute play. -Steve Sheppard

Guitarman: 8K carts are typically mapped to $A000-$BFFF. 16K cart $8000-$BFFF. Right-hand carts are always mapped to $8000-$9FFF. The banks are enabled by the cart asserting RD4 line for the lower bank ($8000-$9FFF) and RD5 for the upper bank. There is no RD5 line in the right-hand cartridge slot of the 800. I'm not sure how the Monkey Wrench II XL cart works but a clever design would be for a cart to only assert RD4 making the cart fill the lower range then allow internal BASIC to fill the upper range. That's one experiment I have never tried I'm curious if the XL/XE computers even support the independent RUN and INIT vectors, $9FFA-$9FFB and $9FFE-$9FFF. I think this is not the case because the MW2 bank of Larry's and my combo carts would initialize themselves upon boot. - Steve Sheppard

Let's see if we can do better. Hoping that I've got the sequence right I tried PLA, LDA #$00, PHA, JMP $8000 (the INIT location). x=usr(adr("h, inverse_h, H, L, CTRL+left_bracket, inverse_CTRL+left_bracket")) ; without the commas and spaces Not an easy sequence to remember. Oh well. - Steve Sheppard

Hi Rybags- Yes, I made my 16K cart with my MWII in the lower address range and Basic Rev C in the upper location. Hi Steve- I tried a couple of things with the XLOS -- first "RUN AT ADDRESS" from Dos to $8000 -- didn't work. Then I tried X=USR(32768) -- froze (remember the PLA). With X=USR(32767) MW came up showing the ML monitor stats and then MW title. That's unusual, but seems to work. If you enter the MLM, the only way out that I've found is to hit RESET, so you have to do the USR thing again. But, the good news is the cart seems to work perfectly as 16K with Omniview. Larry: Interesting. I forgot about the returned value of usr(). That explains the "Error- 9" I get. Even still x=usr(32768) works for me yet all is not perfect. The scroll enable command, ">SE", does not work. 800XL locks up or goes into the monitor and then locks up. It does not seem to matter which OS I am using whether I did the x=usr() bit. - Steve Sheppard

Larry: Thanks Larry. I did not know of MMG BASIC Commander or I have completely forgotten about it. FYI, I just booted the hybrid cart with a standard XL OS. Sitting in BASIC I was wondering what would happen if I accessed the original MW2 cart's INIT routine. Would it it hook itself into BASIC? I tried: x=usr(32768) 32768 ($8000) is the address pointed to by init vector at $9FFE (well, what would be the INIT vector for a right hand cartridge). Sure enough, MW2 did hook itself into BASIC. I can't say I did any signifcant testing but at least the renumbering and auto numbering functions seem to work. Rybags: Oops, did I get it backwards? I guess it would be MW2 in the first half the image and BASIC second. - Steve Sheppard

I don't recall versions that swapped parts of themselves out. On the other hand, the existence of a XL version was news to me so I probably stopped following product development of Monkey Wrench. There were many other BASIC wedges that were less memory consuming. Though these were disk based and possibly limited to specific DOSes. - Steve Sheppard

I will open it and see if it has roms I can read in my burner. If not, I will try and get an image using The Pill, unless there is a better, easier way to get the image. To be honest I never dumped a cartridge back in the day. Recently however, I did just for fun. I used QMEG XL OS 4.04 and SIO2PC. Monkey Wrench is kind of special so I don't know if this will work. This is what I do to dump a standard 8K cart. 1) I setup up a blank single density ATR with AtariSIO (APE would work fine) as drive 1. 2) Go to the QMEG monitor by pressing Select+Reset and then press Return at drive options screen. 3)To dump the cartridge to disk I typed A000.BFFF>1.40 (format is addr1.addr2>start_sector.num_sectors in hexadecimal). note: I would assume that Monkey Wrench resides at $8000-$9FFF. The dump option would like this: 8000.9FFF>1.4 4)Save the ATR that was just written to. 5)To extract the ROM image from the ATR I just used the linux dd command. For example, dd bs=1 skip=16 count=8192 if=MW2.ATR of=MW2.BIN. note: bs=1 means blocksize is 1 byte skip=16 skip the first 16 bytes (the ATR header) count=8192 means send this number of bytes to the output file, the ROM data. That's it. The ROM dump is now in MW2.BIN. I found this method easy. - Steve Sheppard

I'm going to attack this a different way, and I *think* that I did this successfully many years ago. I'll make a 16K cartridge with BASIC and the Monkey Wrench in a 27128 -- a "Basic Wrench." -Larry Larry: I can't answer any of your questions but a couple of years ago I did exactly what you intend to do. I appended a Monkey Wrench II image to the back end of a BASIC image (Rev A, I think) and put the combined image on a 16K cart. It worked fine, well for the little amount of time I actually tried the combination, with XL Boss 2.0 OS with which I was also experimenting on my 800XL at the time. I still have the image and it works fine on my SRAM cart combined with Omniview XL OS, the only 400/800 friendly OS in my 800XL at present. Guitarman: Any chance of making an image of the Monkey Wrench II XL? - Steve Sheppard

I have one. From 1984 (or so) until 2006 it's the only joystick I used. The actual stick is that good. Much better than a Competition Pro, IMO. The Newport Design (as I remember the name) just shines in Pac-Man type games. Unfortunately, the stiff button and shape make it uncomfortable unless you hold it down on a table. Used that way it's pretty decent. Never owned a Wico. I suspect it's probably a much better all-round joystick than the Newport Design. These days I mostly use a Competition Pro (because I don't exactly have a desk for the Atari upon which I can set the Newport Design). - Steve Sheppard

This is a gorgeous looking clone. Plays very smoothly. Too bad Pac-Man can't stay ahead of the ghosts at turns. - Steve Sheppard.

Sorry but I have no advice to offer as to what drive models to look for. I've been considering getting a couple 360K drives myself. I've have had single-sided drives (from an old DEC Robin computer) from day 1, circa 1984. but ufortunately I think the drives (TEAC FD-50A) finally need pressure pads. I'm not sure how that is done. - Steve Sheppard

Remember the floppy drive cables are not twisted (they are straight-through) on the ATR8000 and that you must set each drive to a different drive number. Hope that helps. Thank you. I knew about the cable, I have the orignal Manual, whitch is far better than the one online. I have the cable I used when I first got the ATR8000 and had only one drive. I have allready made a second one and drive still does not work. Both drives have the terminating resistor jumper (which are on because I am only tring to one working at this time) A Google search for Toshiba ND-0801GR indicates the drive is a 1.2 MB drive. I don't believe there is any way to read a 40 track diskette on that drive. You'd want a 360K drive for maximum Atari compatibility. If you do happen to have a 360K drive on the system you can also connect the 1.2 MB and do a custom 77-track format for a 1.2 MB floppy. You get 4004 sectors (about 1.0 MB capacity). You can then produce a version of auto-term that you can later boot from the 1.2 MB drive. Hias Reichl has a PC DOS program called WriteATR, a beta version of which supports 1.2 MB floppies for the ATR8000. You would need a PC equipped with the right floppy drive, of course. I hope Hias is planning to release that version of WriteATR as it is really helpful for producing real 1.2 MB floppies from ATRs and 1:1 interleave speeds things up a bit with the ATR8000. Can't remember any of the details for dealing with CP/M for 1.2 MB media. - Steve Sheppard