One for the Archaeologists

[itaych]

Hi all,

 

In the early 80's my older brother copied various disks from his friends. One particular disk had always bothered me because it just never would work properly even though it had no sector errors. Since the games on it were quite old even at the time (Asteroids, Star Raiders etc.) and mostly available elsewhere, the disk basically gathered dust and was rarely touched. When I moved to ATR images, however, I took care to keep a sector copy of it, in case I would one day get around to figuring out what was wrong with it.

 

Well, the day has come and I've finished the cleanup. In the included archive are the original and fixed disk images. The changes were:

• The disk had a bootable DOS 1.0, but DOS.SYS was corrupted causing all kinds of problems. This was fixed by downloading a fresh copy. (The 'fixed' image is the downloaded copy of DOS 1.0, to which I copied all the other files.)
  
• Two of the game binary files (GAMMON and CHECKERS) were unloadable (Error 164). Fixed by recovering the files, which were thankfully not fragmented, directly from the disk image.
  

So what we have here is a disk which autoruns a BASIC-based menu which loads the games. The games are:

• Asteroids
  
• Space Invaders
  
• Missile Command
  
• Star Raiders
  
• Outlaw/Howitzer
  
• Avalanche
  
• Fastgammon
  
• Checker King
  
• Micro Chess
  

To run this disk, you must boot as Atari 800 OS-A (not B!) with a BASIC ROM (any version) inserted.

 

Now, these games are all available from other sources. Why do I bother the community with this disk image? The reason I found it especially curious was that I happened to look at the DOS 1.0 disk image I downloaded from a completely unrelated source (http://mousenet.radt.../ataristuff.htm) and noticed what appears to be the garbled remains of a disk directory at offset 0x0cf9 of the file. This is within DOS.SYS. The really weird thing I saw was that most of the files in that directory list relic are the same as on this disk! This could mean that this disk image has its roots not in the pirate community but within early 80's Atari Inc. Strangely enough, looking at the same place in my original disk, I can see names of different files even though the DOS.SYS itself is dated the same on both versions. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on how this may have happened.

 

Here are a few other notes about this collection:

• The binary files are in a format I'm not familiar with - the first two bytes are not FF FF as usual but 84 09. (Perhaps this is a DOS 1.0 convention?) The files will load, but NOT run, when loaded from DOS as they do not specify a run address.
  
• When loading Space Invaders through the menu, a cheat option is offered (number of lives, and a few others).
  
• You can quit the menu and load WIPE.DUP or LOADER.BAS, these are two other loaders. They have less games or list the same games but have trouble loading them.
  
• Missile Command is slightly different from the circulating version (the title text is missing, perhaps there are other differences).
  
• Some of the games use OS-A specific vectors and are different from the circulating versions, which have been fixed to use OS-B vectors.
  

I hope this is in some way interesting to anyone... and if not, thanks for reading

Disk with old games.zip

[Rybags]

What's strange is that cartridge images would work with Basic inserted in an 800, they'd only work if relocated to a different address.

 

Having directory listing within the Dos itself probably isn't strange. When you write Dos files, some work areas inside Dos get probably get written as well which might include parts of whatever directory was recently accessed.

[Rybags]

Well, this is something I've not seen before.

 

The games appear to be what they are, and run from low Ram addresses, e.g. ~ $5400.

 

So either it's some sort of Atari internal thing that was intended maybe for show or staff use, or some hacker on the outside went to all the trouble of creating source code from cartridge dumps then getting them to reassemble to run at a lower address. That's a trivial job with modern day tools but might have taken days back in the old times.

[itaych]

The fact that a similar directory listing appears as incidental data in a completely unrelated distribution of DOS, along with the different origin addresses as you point out, makes me think this was indeed some Atari internal release. Glad somebody finds this interesting

[sup8pdct]

I do believe that i also had this disk or one with a subset of those programs on it. Also dos 1. I think from memory when i went to put it to atr, it had several bad sectors

I once believed that these programs once came on cassette or disk. I could be wrong tho.

 

James

[Rybags]

Some disk/tape versions of previously cart only games were produced but I don't think it was until the mid 80s.

 

Obviously this release is an early one, it makes absolutely no sense to use Dos 1 since it's memory hungry and buggy.

[Mclaneinc]

Here in the UK I can say for sure that some game collections on disk DID come from Atari UK in Slough and I know the name of the person responsible but fro obvious reasons I'm not saying who.

 

All I'll say is it could be the same person who started for Atari the first ever court case for computer piracy (as far as I know) here in the uk. Twas a guy selling Ms Pac Man on disk via Exchange & Mart..

[itaych]

Ok. Just for the heck of it I decided that I want to repair the original disk image rather than present a fixed version which is actually a fresh disk with the files copied over. So, here are the results of that effort.

• DOS.SYS repaired by comparing to a working version - these were basically several flipped bits.
  
• Corrupt (error-164) files fixed by finding the offending sectors and manually repairing the last 3 bytes. (Side note: Atari DOS 1.0 has its own format, documentation of which is nowhere to be found. But it's fairly similar to DOS 2.0 and easy to figure out.) Interestingly I can find no explanation to the corruptions I've seen here, these aren't a few wrong bits. Diff with the original if you can be bothered.
  

That's it. Hope you enjoy this historically accurate restoration of an internal Atari (or pirate?) game compilation from 1981 or so

Disk with old games - v2.zip

[Stormtrooper of Death]

I once got 4 disks filled with demos and games, from some Polish folks. A friend of me brought it to my place. But one problem:

 

He folded the 5.25 inch disks to fit his jacket. Yeah, things happen when disks are handled by computer-morons.

 

Anyhow, the disks didnt work. So i had to remove the top-cover of my 1050 drive, then copied the disks sector by sector to another 1050.

 

I also had to manually shift the 5.25 inch disk forth and back to get the 1050 driveheads to read the sector correctly.. yeah , felt like being a DJ scratching in the discotheque.

 

After that most of the data was good.

 

Then i used a sector editor and an assembler to re-program damaged sectors hand by hand. Yep, i had knowlege of the DOS 2.5 structure.

 

Took me some days, and in the end, most software worked. (although some graphics were damaged a bit).

 

Today, (in 2012) i sometimes do the same with old computers and laptops. I call this : Modern archeaology. Instead of digging up old dinosaur bones, i use a steady hand, paper towels, etc to clean rust, dust, etc from motherboards etc. And after a lot of patience and weeks of hard work, those ancient dinosaur computer systems work.

 

Feels nice.

[itaych]

Just for fun, here are the 'phantom' directory lists found on these disk images.

 

First of all, on my original disk, we have:

 

* DOS SYS 064

* SOLITARE 087

* PINBALL 045

* ATARI 825 034

* ATARIML 128

* FRED 060

* AUTO SYS 001

* WIPE 001

<cut>

x xxGWUMP 038

* GUNINST 030

* GUNNER 038

* BIOINST 042

* BIORYTHM 038

* STOCKS 074

* ZAxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

(hmm, gunner, biorhythm, stocks.. what were they planning at Atari anyway?)

 

The DOS 1.0 disk from 'ataristuff' contains this list:

 

xxxxxx DUP 007

* STARRAID 070

* STAR 009

* TELEMODMBAS 048

* MICOM BAS 042

<cut>

* OUT HOW 037

* FAST 009

* GAMMON 056

* CHK 009

* CHECKERS 060

* CHS 009

* CHESS 060

* MISSILE COM 070

* MCxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

..note that the latter part of this list an exact excerpt (file names, sizes and even order are all the same) from the list of files on my disk.

[31336haxx0r]

Checkers, Chess,.... Please, just DON'T play the game "Global Thermonuclear War"!

 

 

(Sorry, couldn't resist ).

 

 

On topic: I think I may have seen similar odd file listings when spelunking around on a DOS 2.0 or 2.5 disk using a sector editor. Back then I was like 13 or something and I remember that it had something to do with writing a new DOS to a blank disk. IIRC it was the directory listing of the source DOS disk if you took a directory listing right before creating the new disk using a second disk drive.

 

Or something like that. I really can't remember anymore.