Battlezone XE for Maxflash cart and 64k machines

[tep392]

I just finished a version of Battlezone XE that will run off the Maxflash carts on a 64k machine. Tested on my stock 800XL and worked great. You can find BattlezoneXE along with the Mario BrothersXE version I did right here.

 

tep392

[Rybags]

Do you know if it's got any self-destruct protection code in it?

 

With the versatile bank select/switching available to VBXE, we can run all kinds of banked carts using it too. Of course though, the bank-select code needs to be changed, but I already accomplished it with a couple of hours work on Mac-65.

Edited December 12, 2009 by Rybags

[tep392]

Do you know if it's got any self-destruct protection code in it?

 

With the versatile bank select/switching available to VBXE, we can run all kinds of banked carts using it too. Of course though, the bank-select code needs to be changed, but I already accomplished it with a couple of hours work on Mac-65.

 

None that I found, but I didn't read through every line of code. The original XE cart copied 2 8k banks of code/data into ram and then switched through the remaining data off of rom. I didn't change this basic structure. I only changed the references to rom bank $8000-$9fff to point to $a000-bfff. There were some other minor things I had to change and I also added some code to search the flash cart for the start of the rom files. This allows some flexability when designing multigame carts with the maxflash software.

 

Perhaps Atari didn't find this necessary because the process of converting to an executable format isn't so trivial. 8k-16k carts are much easier and might warrant some self destruct code.

[Rybags]

I support that theory too... not too many people would have been able to make banked carts back then, plus Atari under Tramiels were lazy WRT development on the A8.

 

I looked through another banked cart... think it might have been RoFractalus. Seems it also just uses the cart as a kind of big ROMDisk and copies most of it to RAM.

 

I might give one of these big games a go (converting to run from VBXE banks)... I've already got a Battlezone cart, so I'd likely try it on a game I don't have.

[Thorsten Günther]

I looked through another banked cart... think it might have been RoFractalus. Seems it also just uses the cart as a kind of big ROMDisk and copies most of it to RAM.

 

I suppose most of the XE releases that were converted from older disk based sofwtare will have code like this (e.g. Lode Runner, Ballblazer, etc.) instead of having been rewritten to run on minimal system RAM. The 600XL and 400 werde long "forgotten" by Atari in 1987, so it was much easier to make such "primitive" conversions.

 

Were the XEGS published with up to 16KB of RAM and/or instead of the 5200, this might have been different (5200 RoF and Ballblazer show these games only really need 16 KB of RAM).

 

Thorsten