Urchlay

She definitely sounds like a keeper

I have recurring dreams where I go to some store (sometimes a real store, sometimes fictional) and find piles of Atari stuff, new in the box, some real items and some imaginary... and there's always a reason I can't get them. Usually I don't have any money... Sometimes I just had the other recurring dream where I wreck my car (so I don't have any way to get them home). Sometimes because the store closes and they kick me out. Wish I could remember some of the fictitious stuff from those dreams. Games that don't exist, weird-colored consoles, or a console that has a keyboard like an Atari 800 but a woodgrain finish like a 2600... With typical dream-logic, I always recognize everything (Hey, look, it's the Atari 839 Ethernet adaptor! I always wanted one of those...), but most of it doesn't stay in my memory for very long. I'm one of those people who stays asleep until the last possible second before I have to get up and get ready to go to work, so by the time I'm in the shower it's all gone. You're a lucky man... you have a girlfriend who actually shares your interests. I always get stuck with the ones who have 500 pair of shoes and another pile of 300 mismatched shoes that they won't throw out because they "have the other one around here somewhere". That or the ones who want to convert me to their religion (why were they dating a "heathen" in the first place? I have no idea)... and plenty more I won't talk about on here (it's a family board).

Sort-of... the game just never gets very difficult. How many points you can get is a function of how many hours you can spend playing it... at some point, your hand will get tired, or you'll have to go to the john, or whatever... unless you get bored first. Which is not to say the game is *bad*... It's good for a quick blowing-stuff-up fix, and sometimes that's exactly what you need.

The composite output mods are basically the same as the S-video mods, you just tie the S-video chroma and luma together (perhaps with a resistor). There are a couple links in the 2600 FAQ, right here on AtariAge: http://www.atariage.com/2600/faq/index.htm...=2600#othermods I'm not so great at soldering, but I was able to do the Ben Heckendorn mod to one of my 4-switchers. It's the simplest of the mods, and is supposed to have the worst video quality... but it's light years ahead of using the RF modulator. There are also a couple of people on this forum who will do the mod for you, for a reasonable price (or there were... any of you guys still doing this?)

The only thing about Space Jockey is that it's completely mindless... it just goes on and on, there's no goal (not even levels to clear), no idea that you're accomplishing anything. It can be fun for a while, but it gets old pretty fast. I liked it better when I was a kid.

From their FAQ page: So, it's not quite a Stelladaptor replacement (since the SA supports paddles). Also, no mention of the 7800... Am willing to bet it won't support both buttons (neither does the SA). The Colecovision and Intellivision adaptors are cool though... too bad there's no 5200 one.

Hmm, can you not do something like... int done = 0, aborted = 0; SDL_Event e; while(!done) { if(SDL_PollEvent(&e) && e.type == SDL_KEYDOWN) { // could check for a specific keypress here, or just abort on any keypress aborted = 1; done = 1; } else { // emulate/disassemble one instruction, set done=1 if it matches the "runto" string } } if(aborted) { print("aborted due to keypress"); } else { // string was found, do whatever with it }

Ugh. I was never happy with how "runto" works, and meant to get rid of it or fix it someday. What it's actually doing is disassembling each instruction as it's executed, and doing a string compare... which is slow, and can get stuck, like you said. One idea might be to have the "runto" loop check for a keypress while it's running... which will probably make it even slower, but at least you won't get stuck in an infinite loop. Question for you: When you use "runto", are you just giving it an address (using it like a quickie breakpoint), or are you using stuff like "runto RTS" to run until the next RTS instruction? That's a good question... as far as I know, no other debugger has anything that works quite like it You aren't losing me permanently... just my build hosting. Though I might have to disappear for a while if I don't find another job pretty quick. No money = no 'net access at all, and maybe no place to live either. I'll get it sorted out at some point, though. I always do...

...and this is different from the current mentality of console gamers how, exactly?

Her *brother*?! Does this mean the old Saturday morning Pac-Man cartoon was set in Alabama? 'Cause she was his wife, too

Hm. Different POKEY music, you mean, or did it actually use the tape for audio playback? So in most cases (all cases?), the disk version is preferable to the cassette?

Uhhh, settle down, Beavis Yup, you're absolutely right. I was just checking the first 16K against the second 16K, which is why I thought it was a true 32K ROM... I don't know much about the 5200, never heard of that type of "wicked" doubling. Many thanks.

So... what other games came in multiple different versions like this? All I can think of right now are Dig-Dug, Qix, and Centipede, all 3 of which came out on the 8-bit, and later on were rewritten for the 5200 with different/better graphics... then unofficially ported back to the 8-bit. Well, and there are several versions of Pac-Man (with and without intermissions, and with different dot-eating "waka waka" sounds). I never bought or copied any games on tape back then, were there any games whose cassette versions were significantly different from the disk and/or cart versions? I pretty much retired my 1010 recorder the day I got my first disk drive (well, after I got done copying all my programs to disk, anyway).

Tengen Tetris for the NES is a port of the arcade game, which is why it was the only one that didn't suck...

Also the other way around: Nintendo sued Tengen (aka Atari) over their Tetris for the NES. Too bad, it was a lot nicer than Nintendo's NES Tetris.

Bet he uses the other one, the white one mounted on top of the stick. That's the only one I use when I play with a Wico (does anyone actually use the red one? Never seen anybody do that...)

Didn't Imagic get sued over Demon Attack? Was that Atari, or someone else?

Unfortunately that one *only* works with MyPicoDOS... better grab the fixed version. Hopefully not too many people downloaded the broken one. I've always loved this game, even the buggy version I started out with in nineteen eighty-mumble. You should definitely give it the playing time it deserves

I downloaded the one in the forum post, I thought that was the one that would not load? These are the segments that were in that file: ,,,(many lines of wacky segments deleted) I repacked it into a single segment EXE (0xe00 - 0xbfff) with no crazy init routines. Wow, you're right, that was a crazy bin file... I thought you were talking about the one I posted earlier (in this thread, as montezumas_revenge_disk_release_bin_conversion.zip above). It also wouldn't load (except with MyPicoDOS for some reason). We are talking about different files, if you point me at the file your having trouble with I'll see if I can fix it. Actually, I seem to have fixed it myself. The run address is bogus, though I still don't understand why it works as a boot disk. It always helps to actually disassemble the code you're working with, instead of blindly trusting the boot header Here's the fixed version: montezumas_revenge_disk_release_bin_conversion_FIXED.zip I tested this one with DOS 2.0S, DOS 2.5, Fenders 3-sector bootloader, and MyPicoDOS. The only screwy thing is that it locks up if you press System Reset under either Atari DOS (there's code that sets DOSVEC, which is supposed to make it survive a reset, but it ain't working). I may fiddle with it some more, but probably not tonight.

I only ever tested it with MyPicoDOS... just now I tested with DOS 2.0S and Fenders, and it won't run with either of those (and I don't really understand why). Not the same file... yours is the Utopia prototype, mine is the Parker Bros. released version. ...but you're right, something's wrong with my file, and I don't understand what. I've got 3 segments, like so: $FF, $FF (exe header) $00, $70, $FF, $AF (load address $7000, end address $AFFF) (...16384 bytes of data, the actual game code...) $E0, $02, $E1, $02 (load address $02E0, aka RUNAD, where DOS will run the program after it's loaded) $3C, $70 (2 bytes of data that get loaded at RUNAD, the actual run address, $703C) $E2, $02, $E3, $02 (load address $02E2, aka INITAD, DOS will JSR thru this vector for the init routine) $4E, $70 (2 bytes of data that get loaded at INITAD, $704E) The run and init vectors came straight from the boot header in the boot sector of the .atr image... So... What did you see that's wrong with the way I segmented it? I'm working from memory and from the OS equates list... if I've screwed it up, I don't even understand how... but you're right, it won't work with DOS 2.0, so *something* is screwy. Help! ...and I wonder how come MyPicoDOS has no problem with it. Hm.

I was just looking at a hexdump of the 5200 ROM... want to know what the extra 16K of ROM is used for. More levels? It's totally bass-ackwards, because the original Utopia version was 32K, and so is the 5200 version... they cut it down to 16K to create an A8 cart that they never released, then bloated it back up to its original size, but didn't put the music/boss/bat back in? I'm sure each step down that road made sense at the time, and it only looks funny in hindsight. I guess the real "gold" version would be to convert the bin I uploaded into a cart image, since that's what PB originally intended. You're probably right, the disk release was probably just cheaper/quicker to do... To turn it into a cart, I'd have to disassemble and re-org the code (binary/bootdisk loads at $7000, the cart port starts at $A000), probably could do without much trouble. Hmm...

My hat is off to you... anyone who introduces a girl to the Atari increases the Atari-playing female population, and that can only be a good thing (OK, you didn't say "girl", for all I know she's old enough to be my grandma, but it's still a good deed)

You said it, brother! Right, that's not the PB version at all, and wasn't what I meant when I said "proto" (though you're right, it *is* a prototype). I think of this one the "Utopia proto". Right, there are (at least) two versions by PB. One is the cart version, which is an unreleased proto of the game. It plays like the release, but it has the buggy room and the sound effect is missing when you kill something with the sword. There may be more than one version of this: I'm not sure if the two .bin conversions I have are the same (other than the "cracked by" titles), and not sure whether either one is the same as the ROM image from atarimania.com... but they all have the buggy room and the missing sword sound. I think of this one (or two) as "the PB proto". The other is the disk version, the actual release by PB. I've only ever seen it as an .atr image (and I first found out about it from a thread you started a while back, I think). It's a boot disk with no DOS or filesystem. I think of this one as "the PB release". What I thought you were looking for (and what I've been looking for) is a standalone binary load file conversion of the official bootdisk release. Utopia proto. ...it makes me really sad: it's the nicest one. I'm watching the title screen repeat while I type this, and I wish PB had just finished up this version instead of stripping it down to fit a 16K cart. PB disk release... doesn't have the bugs. As far as I've been able to determine, this one's never been made available as a bin (xex, or whatever) file. *That* is what I thought you were asking about: a bin version of the PB disk release atr image. Yep, and someone posted it to this thread My pattern doesn't hit the buggy room except when I forget where I'm going, but that's from years of playing the buggy PB proto and not knowing about the released version. I'm willing to bet the 5200 version doesn't have the buggy room, or you'd have seen threads on here asking for a fix... I second your plug! I've got a MyIDE+Flash and his version of the SIO2PC, and they're both amazing. Well, there's a good reason the bugs are part of all the Atari 8-bit cart images: PB never released the game on cart. Any cart image you find is a leaked PB proto (though I'm not sure whether more than one version exists). As for the 5200, I need to try it out and see whether the bugs are there. Bet they're not though. For one thing, the 5200 ROM image is 32K (the buggy A8 cart images are 16K). Potentially, the 5200 version might have more levels or something... Anything else I seem to be confused about, I'm not. I may still be *wrong*, but at least I'm *sure* about it Think so. Now, one more wrinkle... Edit: removed attachment, as it was broken. See my other post below for a fixed version. That's my own conversion (just now finished) of the PB released .atr, to a binary load file. For me, it's the "holy grail" version of the game, *assuming* I didn't mess it up (only play-tested it for 5-10 minutes). Weird thing is that the boot disk only has 16K of data (128 SD sectors). So why couldn't PB have released this version on cart instead? That was their original plan... which must have changed for some reason. If they'd been planning a disk release all along, they wouldn't have removed the title screen, bat, boss, etc., I wouldn't think.

Unfortunately the cart version is a proto that's got a couple of nasty bugs. This is the same as the version I downloaded from a BBS back in my 300 baud days... it has one particular room on level 1 that basically crashes the game (keeps you from ever being able to pick up or use items again, making it impossible to finish the game). There are other differences, too (some missing/different sounds, and the proto level 1 seems harder than the released version's level 1). Paranoid's asking about the released disk version, which someone posted a link to, above... but he wants a binary load version (and so do I). I'm about to try my hand at converting it, but I dunno how successful I'll be. ...Actually, he said "the 5200 version", but I'm almost 100% sure the 8-bit disk version is the same as the 5200 version. Paranoid, is that right?

Damn, that was quick! Many thanks... I played through the first couple of levels, it seems OK. Most likely, the protection that writes to the cart address space only happens once, when the cart runs from its run address. That's when it crashes with the binary I made last night. I doubt they'd bother to add further ones that happen some time after you've finished a few levels... Out of curiosity, what tool(s) did you use for this? I was going to give this a shot, was planning to modify Atari++ to have it detect writes to ROM. Looks like I don't have to now (though I still might... sometimes I reinvent the wheel because I want to understand how wheels work).