Urchlay
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Posts posted by Urchlay
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ROM images are typically uncracked and won't run from RAM, even if they could be loaded. The best thing to do is find the EXE version, which will be pre-cracked and have the required address headers already added.
Speakin' of which... did anyone ever release a cracked exe of the Parker Bros. 8K Frogger cartridge?
I've so far found about 8 copies of the Sierra On-Line disk version, which is very nice... but I wanted to play the cart version because it's the one I had when I was a kid.
I have a ROM image of it, plays great in an emulator... if I had to, I suppose I could drag out the EPROM burner, but that'd mean either gutting a working cart or waiting for an empty board to get shipped to me. Would prefer a software solution (as usual).
I tried converting the ROM image to a binary load file, but of course it didn't work (probably the copy protection you speak of).
Anyone have this?
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How about you buy a Vader or 4-switch woody for cheap, steal the part you need from that, and keep both heavy sixers in working condition?
Either that, or talk to some of the more hardware-oriented people here, someone might have a spare RIOT they'd part with.
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There's a disk image floating around on various archives on the 'net, called ape_warp.atr or something similar. It contains a copy of DOS (2.0 or 2.5, I forget) plus an AUTORUN.SYS that patches the OS by copying it to the XL RAM area under the OS and altering it.
Presumably, after you boot this disk, you could easily write a little BASIC or Action or whatever program to copy the ROM image to disk.
I dunno if this is the same APE Warp OS that's in the 32-in-1, but it definitely does say "APE WARP OS" on screen when it's patching the OS.
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On both the NES and SNES pads, the data is latched and then read one bit at a time. TG16 pads are read four bits at a time (either the D-pad or RS12). I use the Genesis 6-button controllers, the old CX-40 sticks weren't bad either but I haven't had any for a long time.
Hm, so the modded NES stick that works on a 2600 (which I've heard of, but not seen) was basically done by bypassing the electronics and hooking up the D-pad and buttons directly to the wires of an Atari joystick cable? This one was a NES joystick, not a pad, but it'd work the same way...
I don't much like D-pads. Might like them better if I'd grown up with them (stuff like that almost always boils down to subjective preference, not objective reality). I can use a CX-40, but my weapon of choice is the Wico Command Control. Every time I see one of those for sale somewhere, I snag it.
I've got a pair of Atari "Euro" gamepads, for my NES-lovin' friends who are afraid of the Wico or CX-40. They feel about like original NES pads to me.
Hmm... I suppose it wouldn't be hard to build an Atari-stick-to-NES adaptor, by gutting a NES pad and wiring the contacts on its board to a DB9 jack. Of course there'd only be one button (unless I used a 7800 stick, yuck).
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It is impossible on NTSC machines due to clock differences
No wonder I remember this game being hideously difficult...
Wonder how hard it would be to disassemble it and create an NTSC version that runs at the correct speed. Maybe I'll give it a shot.
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So do they need to be modded to work?
Nope. Sega Genesis or Sega Master pads will work unmodified. Only one of the fire buttons will work, though (I can't remember which). If you've got a pad with auto-fire, the auto-fire won't work either (at least, not that I remember; it's been a while).
Corollary to this: you can play Sonic the Hedgehog on a Sega Genesis with any Atari joystick. Actually, you can play any game that only needs one button, and that doesn't require the start button to start the game.
NES pads need to be modified, of course: they don't even have the right connector to plug into an Atari.
SNES pads would need more work: they have more buttons than they have wires, and use some sort of serial protocol to encode the directions/buttons.
Am pretty sure the TurboGrafix 16 gamepads will work on an Atari, too, but I haven't owned one in 10+ years so I might be remembering wrong.
As far as the E-bay auction goes... I wouldn't bid more than $5 on it, and I definitely wouldn't pay the BIN price. That plus shipping would be over $7 per controller... But I live pretty close to a game store that sells Sega controllers for $4 each. They're only the 3-button kind, but that's all you'd need for Atari use.
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Wow, whoever has that auction up is really trying to milk the Atari name. All those pads happen to be are just simply a pair of Mega-Fire 6-button controllers for the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive. That's all they are.
From experience: they're terrible for Atari 2600 games. Never tried them on the 8-bit, but I'd expect them to be just as bad.
Some of that is undoubtedly personal preference (I grew up with joysticks, and will keep using them forever), but probably not all of it.
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Just stay the hell away from the Willem at all costs. The Top200X is not bad for the price. It's USB powered\program and is also auto-detect.
Does anyone have any experience using the modern USB EPROM burners with Linux or BSD? I've got an old 1980s vintage burner that works great (uses serial port at 9600 baud), but it'll only burn older model EPROMs... one day I won't be able to get those any more, though it's not a problem for now.
I'd love to hear success stories, but even failure stories might give me a clue what model to get (or avoid).
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Favorite 2600 for nostalgia purposes: Original heavy sixer. I don't actually own one though
Favorite 2600 for daily use: 7800 (with Cuttle Cart 2). I use it for gaming and for development.
Favorite overall Atari unit: Atari 800 with GTIA and revision B OS ROM... though the 1200XL runs a close second.
To the guy that likes the XEGS: the detachable keyboard is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if the start/select/option/reset buttons were on the keyboard instead of the console
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Hey, is there a way to actually clean the pins inside an Atari?
I know Nintendo they have cleaners. But doesn't seem very easy
to get in those slots of an Atari Consoles. Anyone have info?
Use 90% or better isopropyl alcohol, or contact cleaner (from Radio Shack, if you can find one that still carries it, or from Fry's, if there's one nearby). You can also buy cleaning solution from a video game store, but most of the time it's just alcohol (and usually overpriced).
Whichever you use, put it on both sides of the card edge connector on a cartridge. Standard Atari carts have a cover over the connector, either use a cart by a different manufacturer (one that has exposed pins), or use a small flathead screwdriver to open the cover on an Atari cart. Clean the cart connector with a q-tip (but be careful not to leave bits of cotton behind), or an old T-shirt you're going to throw away. Then, re-apply the alcohol or contact cleaner to the cart connector.
After you've got cleaner on the cartridge, insert and remove it from the console a few times. If the pins in the Atari were really dirty, you may be able to see the junk that comes off them. In that case, clean the cartridge again and repeat the process.
If you used alcohol, wait a while (at least an hour, more is better) before you power it up: 90% alcohol is still 10% water...
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I worry about the longevity of my Atari's and I'd rather try to extend their lifespans by not using them if I don't have to.
I don't see the point in NOT using the real hardware becuase you think your extending their lifespans. What's the difference if your not ever going to use them anyway? They might as well be broken since either way, your not using them.
...actually, depending on where he left them sitting, they might break while in storage. My 800 and 1200XL keyboards both died during the 7 years I left them in the attic.
(Yeah, I know, the attic was a bad idea, but it was that or the dumpster, at the time...)
jacobus: If you have 14 Ataris in climate-controlled storage, that's probably a lifetime supply for you, your kids, and probably their kids, too. Those old machines are built like tanks, they'll keep working for a *long* time if you don't abuse them (like I did).
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Hm, what about using a real Atari, but with emulated disk drives (SIO2PC)?
I'm to the point where I don't have much desire to use real disks any more... they're tiny, slow, and unreliable compared to my 750G RAID-5 array. I have some working drives, and I don't plan to get rid of them, but they're not getting much use now.
If I were setting up a "standalone" Atari, not connected to a PC of any kind, I'd use a MyIDE... that's still "cheating" though (it's using modern tech to overcome the limitations of the real thing). Not that it would stop me.
...or what about people who use a real Atari, with SIO2PC, and a PC TV capture card as the "monitor" for the Atari? I'm not one of those (I love my Commodore 1702), but they're out there.
Actually, if I could, I might use a PC keyboard with my Ataris. Not one of the modern "squishy" ones: I'd use a real IBM Model M (the original IBM AT or PS/2 keyboard).
I guess the ultimate form of this would be an Atari on a PCI card... you'd plug it into your PC/Mac/etc and it'd use the host system's display, keyboard, storage, and maybe its serial port and game controllers. Not sure I'd ever replace my good old 800 with anything like that, but it'd be a neat solution to the "I don't have enough space to set up my Atari" problem that keeps people using emulators when they'd rather be using the real thing.
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Are you sure that's not the stick from the Flashback 2?
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I was using an emulator exclusively until a couple months ago when I finally got the chance to get my Atari 8 stuff out of storage.
The emulator is still useful for "games night", when friends come over and we play "old school" games... The real Ataris are set up in my bedroom, which doesn't have space for that many people, and which doesn't have the 36" TV. At some point I'll be moving a real 800 out there, but I have terrible luck with people spilling drinks in consoles (my 5200 got destroyed this way).
The only other time I've used an emulator lately was to test a demo that needs 128K. I don't have any working machines with upgraded RAM right now.
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I do not have the same problem on the NTSC screen anymore. This may be because I use the Chroma/Luma signals and a Commodore 1702. My screenshot would be similar to the right screen.
Yep, that's exactly why...
Makes Autoduel and Ultima IV kind of ugly, though.
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Load"*",8,1
Why the last ",1"? My eighth grade computer class's (yup, we had computer class..a room of about 40 C64's) instructor always taught us to load this way. In fact, the ,1 is not needed at all. Or is it? A vintage mystery! Or at least to me....
Am not really a Commodore guy, but I remember this one...
The ",1" means to load the program at the address it was saved from (in other words, it means "don't relocate this program when you load it", because normally the LOAD command would relocate it to wherever the start-of-BASIC pointer was pointing to).
Was needed for some programs, particularly ones written in pure assembly (without a BASIC loader), and most of the time (all of the time? I dunno), it wouldn't hurt to add the ",1" when you didn't need it... except I think if you were loading a program originally saved on a PET or a VIC, adding the ",1" would cause problems because the default BASIC program area on the other machines conflicted with something important on a C64.
Eh, was that vague enough? Sorry... someone who actually knows this stuff will probably correct the above mess
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So can most modern TV's in America display a PAL signal?
Multi-standard TVs are rare to nonexistant in the US.
I have got a multi-standard DVD player, but if I play a PAL DVD on my NTSC TV, it looks like crap because the player is inserting extra frames (made up of a combination of two existing frames). I can tell the DVD player to put out a PAL video signal, but my modern TV can't display it (it just rolls).
I also have a really old (1976) color TV that can display a PAL signal... sort of. It can handle the framerate, but not the PAL color encoding scheme (so I'd get a black & white signal from the DVD player in PAL output mode, if the TV had a composite or s-video input). I can also play PAL Atari 2600 games on it, which play fine, but with the wrong colors.
I think the reason you never find PAL-capable TVs for sale in the US is that so few people are interested in importing consoles or movies from outside the US (whereas in PAL countries, people want to watch the latest Hollywood stuff, whether it's been released there yet or not. A lot more movies are made in the US... which says nothing about their quality). If I hadn't gotten addicted to Dr. Who at a young age, I probably wouldn't know there *was* another TV standard (well, I would by now, from reading this board).
From what I read on here, it sounds like multi-standard TVs are standard in Europe... that a new PAL-only set might be hard to come by. No idea if that's actually true...
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I've discovered that at least some of my terminal emulation problems might have been caused by a flaky SIO cable (not dead, just flaky).
Will give Omnicomm a shot later tonight. I never tried it because I thought it needed an Omnimon OS, but the docs say it runs without it. I should have RTFM'ed before now...
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Maybe I had/have an older copy. I recently unpacked some of my Atari collection but haven't had time to play with it much. I can look for my copy of VT10SQ, but unfortunately, I don't have a way to transfer it to my PC at the moment. Still, I could try it on my 800 and verify that it works. IIRC, there was a similar program called Ansiterm that was also a dumb terminal but supported the ANSI character set. That also ran on my 800.
OK, I actually found a version of it in the Holmes archive. It's called "V10SQ.ARC", and it lives on disk 2, under "Atari Archives/Telecomm". It's not quite the same as the one I have (has a "(modified for XL by K. Knutson)" in the title screen, although my copy also runs on an XL), but there's documentation in the .arc file.
It's kind of academic anyway, I've found that both versions only support 300 and 1200 baud. I'm wanting to use it for a direct link to the serial port on my Linux box, which should be able to do 9600 bps easily (and 19200 too, but maybe not with an 850 with the standard driver).
Unfortunately I can't use a VT52 emulator: the Linux programs I want to run (BitchX or irssi IRC clients) need a terminal that supports scrolling and clear-to-EOL, which vt52's don't. Too bad: I'd actually be content with Bobterm (even at 40 columns).
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I remember that as VT100SQ ("VT100 squared"), but yeah, it emulates a dumb terminal. I ran it on an unmodified 48K 800 as that was all I had 15-20 years ago. Could the program be having a problem with some of your other hardware?
I don't see how... It didn't run on the 800, so I swapped the 800 with the XEGS (unplugged SIO cable from the 800, plugged into the XEGS). If it didn't like my SIO2PC or something, well, it was still attached when it worked on the XEGS. I used the same DOS 2.0 boot disk image for both, too...
Maybe it was a different version you had, that worked on the 800?
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"*" and "?" as wildcard characters have been a fairly universal standard, going back to the mid 1970s or even earlier.I think these wildcards came from the original CP/M.
I think CP/M stole them from UNIX, and UNIX probably stole them from something like Multics or TOPS-10 or CTSS...
Still doesn't explain why "$" is for the directory... maybe because they only parse the first character looking for commands, and if they'd used "D", it would have meant you couldn't ever have a filename beginning with a D? The ASCII code for $ is 32 less than the code for D, that may be why they chose it (back then everybody had to memorize most of the ASCII codes anyway, so it would make an OK mnemonic device). Are the other Commodore disk commands also punctuation characters (format, delete, rename)?
To get sort of on-topic... I just got a digital camera, so I'll be posting photos of my Atari stuff soon... not sure about photos of me though
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OK, I found another floppy with a copy (or at least, I think it's the same as what's on the bad disk).
Here's a .zip archive (includes bare Atari executable and an ATR image):
Maybe someone will recognize it... When you run it, you see a banner like this:
222 2 2 VV VV TTTTTTTTTT 11 00 2 VV VV TTTTTTTTTT 11 00 2 VV VV TT 1111 00 00 2 VV VV TT 1111 00 00 22222 VV VV TT 11 00 00 VV VV TT 11 00 00 VV VV TT 11 00 00 VV VV TT 11 00 00 VV VV TT 11 00 00 VV VV TT 11 00 00 VV TT 111111 00 VV TT 111111 00 by Dave Bailey and Alex Stevens (with help from a few others!!) Version 0.7
I've no idea whether this can be found in any of the archives on the 'net (Holmes, etc), but if not, I guess I've done my part for digital archaeology...
Edit: I've just found out this won't run on an 800. It seems to need at least a 64K machine (works on my XEGS). Bummer.
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I can log on to the 'net here in Baltimore MD by a shell accountfrom the public library.
I wish the libraries here were that cool... last dialup shell account I had was at Ga. Tech, and they got rid of the modems years ago.
Of course, these days, I can provide my own (all hail the penguin!), but I miss those days still...
I have used OmniComm for years,as it has 80 columns,VT100,and Kermit and X-modem
downloads. Also baud rates up to 9600bps.Has been a real workhorse for me.
I'll have a look at it. I'm basically going through them all, crossing off the ones that don't work for me.
I don't know about "VT100SPA.COM", but you could try "ICE-T". It also has an 80-Column display and comes with some drivers.
Ice-T is nice, but I'm looking for something that'll run on an unexpanded 800 (or perhaps a 1200XL, but the 800 has the best display and keyboard). The version of Ice-T that works on an 800 has issues (screen gets garbled if there are too many VT100 escape codes coming in, I end up with a blinking cursor as tall as the screen!)
I tried a couple versions of Kermit (K65), but they're worse: they actually crash after a couple of minutes.
ANSITERM looks like it might be nice, but the version I have crashes if I load the 850 driver, and doesn't crash, but doesn't work either, if I don't.
Flickerterm doesn't work (says it can't find the R: handler, even though I know I loaded it), but I couldn't stand to use it even if it did.
I'll give Omnicomm a shot, and keep digging through my floppies to see if I have another copy of the VT100SPA emulator (I was pretty good about backups in those days). If I find it, I'll post it here: apparently it didn't make it into any of the Atari 'net archives.
None of this is really crucial anyway, I'd probably use a VT100 emulator once, to log in to this site and post "Hey, I'm posting on my Atari"
If I were going to seriously use a serial terminal, I'd probably use my DEC VT220 or VT420 (surprising what you can find in a dumpster, if you know where to look).
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according to the SIO2OSX website, the recommended adapter is one made by a company called FTDI, although I would like some guidance as to which one (US232R-10, US232R-100 [i believe this is the same as the US232R-10, but with a longer cable] or the US232B).
Hmm, one of my two adaptors that wouldn't work with the CC2 has an FTDI chip. Can't remember whether it was sold under the FTDI brand name or not, though... I'll have a look when I get home. Mine didn't work, so maybe you should avoid buying the one I have.
I do remember that my FTDI adaptor doesn't have a built-in cable. It's just a piece of plastic maybe 2" long, with a standard USB plug on one end and a 9-pin serial connector on the other. It can be plugged straight into a hub, without using a cable at all (though this blocks the USB port next to it).
I've used this same FTDI-chip adaptor with Linux to connect to the CC2, and also to connect to an Atari 850. It works great for both. I should try it with my SIO2PC, too.
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Picture Quality on LCD TV
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You might try running the Atari RF signal into a VCR, and hook the VCR up to the TV with scart or composite... this may or may not help (the VCR's tuner may or may not do a better job), but it's easy.
You could also try digging through your TV's on-screen menu and see if there's a fine-tuning control. Lots of modern TVs don't have them, or if they do, it's hidden behind a "service mode" code you have to type on the remote (first you have to find out what it is, though. Google is your friend).
Another thing I've seen that helps on modern TVs is to hook everything up, get it running (with fuzzy picture), then tell the TV to go through the "channel detection" routine. Unfortunately this will probably mess things up for normal TV-watching, though you can fix it by having the TV do channel detection again without the Atari hooked up. This basically does the same thing as a fine-tuning control would let you do.
If you're comfortable with opening up your Atari, you could also try to fine-tune the RF modulator. There should be a hole in the metal shielding that you stick a flathead screwdriver in and slowly turn, while the Atari is playing a game. Actually there are a couple of these tuning pots, you want the one on the modulator itself (should be the one that's closest to the place where the video cable is connected inside the Atari). It sounds like you're in a PAL country (you said "daft" and "scart"), so you might want to talk to someone who's done this on a PAL Atari before (I've never even seen one in person).
The ultimate solution to all your Atari video problems, of course, is to do one of the s-video or composite output mods, and quit using the RF signal entirely. Even someone as fumble-fingered as myself was able to do the simpler of Ben Heckendorn's mods (the passive one, resistors only), and the results are beautiful.