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Bypass V2.2 console protection


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Here is a way to run ROM cartridges on a V2.2 console. Plug in the cartridge, then go to TI BASIC (your only choice) and run the attached program. There is embedded code in this so cut and paste will not work. This is a simple assembly program that uses the playground loader. It sets the VDP registers to the values used at the cartridge menu screen, then looks into the cartridge, finds the startup address of the first program in the list and runs the code. This has been tested on Classic99 and seems to work. It's a good first step - it could benefit from a fancier menu, especially if there is more than one option in the cartridge.

 

Silly graphic kept stealing my mouse. ;)

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Here is a more polished version of the utility that lets you run ROM cartridges on a V2.2 console. This gives you a menu which is needed if your cartridge has more than one program. The zip file has two programs: V22RUN will simply run the first program in the list, and V22MENU is the more advanced one that gives the menu.

gallery_34177_1071_4506.gif

V22UNLOCK.zip

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Here is a more polished version of the utility that lets you run ROM cartridges on a V2.2 console. This gives you a menu which is needed if your cartridge has more than one program. The zip file has two programs: V22RUN will simply run the first program in the list, and V22MENU is the more advanced one that gives the menu.

 

 

Sweet! That is once fantastic hack-job you came up with. Great update! :thumbsup: I can only imagine how this would have stung and spit in the eye of TI, if something like this had come out and was freely passed around back in the day. :twisted: I always thought is was poor sportsmanship, and bad for the TI community to prevent others like Atari from playing in TI's sandbox.

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Bloody nice work. This is pure wizardry. I wonder what the TI system developers would have thought about this. Back in the day Commodore engineers swore up and down it was impossible to get 2400 bps out of a stock Commodore 64, and yet we had programs like C-Net BBS (technically 2395, but still worked as 2400) and Novaterm with the CBAT routines from Transactor magazine (I also adopted CBAT for my BBS software.)

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Here is a more polished version of the utility that lets you run ROM cartridges on a V2.2 console. This gives you a menu which is needed if your cartridge has more than one program. The zip file has two programs: V22RUN will simply run the first program in the list, and V22MENU is the more advanced one that gives the menu.

gallery_34177_1071_4506.gif

real sneaky in a good way

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What can be the reason Ms Pac-Man is displaying a garbled font when you run it on a V2.2 console using the V22RUN utility (in Classic99)? I noticed the same for Donkey Kong.

 

Rasmus, can you either post a copy of the cartridge or direct me to where I can download it. It looks like some of the VDP character definitions are getting overwritten for some reason. This should be fixable - but first we have to identify where the problem is.

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What can be the reason Ms Pac-Man is displaying a garbled font when you run it on a V2.2 console using the V22RUN utility (in Classic99)? I noticed the same for Donkey Kong.

 

Rasmus, can you either post a copy of the cartridge or direct me to where I can download it. It looks like some of the VDP character definitions are getting overwritten for some reason. This should be fixable - but first we have to identify where the problem is.

 

 

Sure, here you are.

mspac.zip

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This comes as a total surprise to me! I had no idea that Ms Pac Man runs in bit mapped mode! In preparing VDP ram the character tables are all overwritten. It look like the character definitions for the capital letters are read from GROM as needed and printed on the screen. Because there are 3 different GROM 0's, there are 3 different locations for the large capital letters. Intern has them at >04B0, Classic 99 has them at >04B4 and V2.2 has them at >0491. In V2.2, I think the program is doing what it is supposed to - Ms Pac Man simply goes to the wrong address for the character definitions. I don't see any easy fix for this short of modifying the cartridge. When writing the program, it would have been easy enough to go to the jump table at >0016, find the address of the code that loads the large capital letters, look in the code to find the address of the character definitions, and go from there. Anyway, the program runs fine once you get past the title screen.

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This comes as a total surprise to me! I had no idea that Ms Pac Man runs in bit mapped mode!

 

This surprises me, as well. Does Pac-Man run in bitmap mode, too? Donkey Kong must, since it exhibits the same problems as Ms Pac-Man. Would running in bitmap versus graphics mode lend any performance increase?

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This surprises me, as well. Does Pac-Man run in bitmap mode, too? Donkey Kong must, since it exhibits the same problems as Ms Pac-Man. Would running in bitmap versus graphics mode lend any performance increase?

 

Yes Pac-Man runs in bitmap mode too. I don't think it affects performance, but it uses more VDP RAM, of course. Note the ghosts' eyes. They are not sprites but character/bitmap graphics. A really nice detail, I think.

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Although I've known about the V2.2 consoles for a long time, I've never actually had one until now. I tried out V22RUN with some Atari carts and was really quite amazed :)

 

On a somewhat related note - do the 'GPL Interpreter Simulation' EB bootable module disks not work properly because of the same issues with the V2.2?

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Although I've known about the V2.2 consoles for a long time, I've never actually had one until now. I tried out V22RUN with some Atari carts and was really quite amazed :)

 

On a somewhat related note - do the 'GPL Interpreter Simulation' EB bootable module disks not work properly because of the same issues with the V2.2?

 

nope.. because the only real issue is that the ROM on the console skips the cartridge port when looking for rom based software. The "simulation" is just a menu loading files from disk

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nope.. because the only real issue is that the ROM on the console skips the cartridge port when looking for rom based software. The "simulation" is just a menu loading files from disk

 

Hmm. I wonder why they don't work then. I tried a bunch that work fine on my other system, and they just seem to load and crash.

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  • 1 month later...

 

nope.. because the only real issue is that the ROM on the console skips the cartridge port when looking for rom based software. The "simulation" is just a menu loading files from disk

 

On the odd chance anyone cares... They do work after replacing GROM0 in the machine vs using V22RUN.

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Might be the same problem as Ms PacMan - they assume addresses in the console GROM. My understanding of those (though I have never looked!) is they copy the interpreter to RAM and patch it to run GPL from RAM. Since they were around before the 2.2 consoles, they might be making assumptions that aren't true (most of the GROM data shifted in the 2.2 GROM when then pulled out the ROM cartridge code).

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