S.A.B.O.T.A.G.E. why does this not show up anywhere

[ACML]

Found this in my collection. I can't seem to see it in anyone else's compendiums. Looks like an Apple conversion. Anyone hear of it before?

Sabotage.XEX

[miker]

It looks similar to this one:

 

http://atari.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=5530

[snicklin]

I really enjoyed this game.

[+Philsan]

It's the same game bundled with second generation Ipod Nano!

[Shamus]

I know the story behind this one. Still one of my favorite games on the 8-bit Atari to this day.

 

One fine day this guy who went by the hacker alias "Hacker Cracker" was over at a friend's house and saw Sabotage on their Apple II. He was impressed by the animations: the way the helicopters exploded and little touches like the debris from the helicopters being able to destroy other helicopters and paratroopers, the fact that you could shoot off a paratrooper's parachute and they could go crashing into a paratrooper that had already landed, killing them both. He thought this was a really neat game.

 

It seemed a little unfair to him that the Apple guys got such a cool game and there was nothing even remotely comparable on the Atari. So he decided right then and there that he was going to convert it to the Atari; after all, he said, other straight Apple ports had been done, how hard could it be?

 

He asked his friend if he could make a printout and got the go ahead. So he dug into the Apple II Reference Manual, fired up the monitor, found the load address and the length and dumped the entire listing, in hex, to his friend's fanfold printer. He then took this listing back home and painstakingly typed in the entire listing by hand into a crude hex editor on his Atari 800 that he made just for the purpose.

 

After a while he had a binary file, presumably identical to the one on his friend's Apple II. He then tweaked it to run on the Atari: he constructed a display list to mimic the Apple II hires memory layout, fixed some of the shape tables to have consistent colors, changed some of the hardware registers like keyboard input to match the Atari and was amazed when he was finished with it that it worked at all. Once it was in a working state, he posted to the Edge Of Reality BBS, and the rest is history.

 

So there you have it, an Apple II to Atari conversion done by a kid back in the early 80s with no source code and no help from anyone else.

 

BTW, I think it's a real shame that it isn't up on Atarimania, it really ought to be.

[+Faicuai]

I know the story behind this one. Still one of my favorite games on the 8-bit Atari to this day.

 

(...)

So there you have it, an Apple II to Atari conversion done by a kid back in the early 80s with no source code and no help from anyone else.

 

BTW, I think it's a real shame that it isn't up on Atarimania, it really ought to be.

 

 

...And that kid was you, of course. Right?...

 

F.

[Shamus]

I can neither confirm nor deny this accusation.

[+Faicuai]

I can neither confirm nor deny this accusation.

 

In any case, congratulations to that kid wherever he may be (I know it's in there, somewhere but never forgotten... .

 

I did like the port, and I have NEVER seen it before.

 

F.

[Heaven/TQA]

looks like Paratroopers on the VIC

[Shamus]

If Paratroopers on the VIC-20 is a typical charmode game, then it's probably nowhere near as good as Sabotage.

[Heaven/TQA]

[Shamus]

Yup, not nearly as good, not even close.

[sh3-rg]

Great game, the debris looks especially nice :-)

[Creature XL]

Great game, the debris looks especially nice :-)

Jag version ahead?

[www.atarimania.com]

Added to the database :-)

 

Never knew there was a direct port of the game so many thanks to the author and to ACML for digging up this treasure!

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[+CyranoJ]

Great game, the debris looks especially nice :-)

Jag version ahead?

 

Would there be a demand?