Chris Crawford Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 I have begun a project to make publicly available all the source code and documentation I can dig up from the old days. This turns out to be harder than I thought. I sent a bunch of my old Atari floppies to a fellow at the Atari museum and he was able to recover about half of them, for which he produced a CD-ROM with all the old floppies in .ATR format. Unfortunately, since I don't have an Atari emulator, I had to decode the text files by hand, which took some effort. Moreover, the results were still rather garbled, so I have to go over them by hand to do what I can to clean them up. I'm currently working on the source code for Eastern Front (1941). The big job here is the long text explaining what each module does. I'm still digging through it. Those diskettes contain a lot of stuff that I'm sure people would be interested in. I believe that the fellow at the Atari museum posted them all as .ATR files. They included my source code for a number of aborted projects: Western Front 1944, Last of the Incas, and other stuff. If you guys don't have access to this stuff, I can make it available. I also discovered a bunch of printouts of source code in the attic: Eastern Front Scenario Editor, Wizard, and Excalibur. I intend to scan these and convert them into ASCII source. That too will take some time. In the meantime, if anybody here could convert an .ATR text file into ASCII, I would much appreciate the help. And by the way, I also found a reference that says that I *did* in fact study Ed Rotberg's scrolling code before making Eastern Front (1941). My statement above is therefore incorrect. Chalk it up to failing memory. 16 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carmel_andrews Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 (edited) Did you intend to upload the relevant files so someone can help Edited August 24, 2013 by carmel_andrews Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 Good point; I hadn't noticed the upload capability. Here are a bunch of the documents explaining Eastern Front (1941) source code. Eastern Front 1941 Essays 2nd Disk.ATR Eastern Front #2 archive Second Edition.ATR Eastern Front 1941 Essays.ATR Eastern Front 1941 Old Version.ATR Eastern Front 1941 scenario editor.ATR Eastern Front Archive Cassette Source.ATR Eastern Front Archive.ATR 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carmel_andrews Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Did you intend to upload the relevant files so someone can help Please note, I wasn't trying to be rude or disengenous Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tezz Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Extracted files from disk "Eastern Front #2 archive Second Edition.ATR" are attached with ASM files converted to ASCII EOL. Eastern Front #2 archive Second Edition.zip 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Cool stuff, thanks Chris for sharing. And Here are a lot of guys who can help you out (as Tezz already did) I love 6502 game source codes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 what kind of assembler did you used back in those days? Tezz... what about running the source through an "legacy assembler format" to MADS? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 what kind of assembler did you used back in those days? Tezz... what about running the source through an "legacy assembler format" to MADS? Eastern Front (1941) was built with the Atari Assembler-Editor Cartridge. Later on we moved to the Macro Assembler. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magic Knight Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 (edited) Thanks Chris for sharing this. Im sure many on this site appreciate this. Its been a long time so far where some previously available has been considered long lost; and you have been an inspiration both past and present! Edited August 24, 2013 by Magic Knight Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fibrewire Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Thank you Chris, much appreciated and glad to have you here! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+slx Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 @Chris, thank you for caring for the community and continuing your Atari software evangelism after so many years. It's an honor to have you here! Thanks for contributing to the greatness of the Atari 8-bit computer universe by providing my teenage self with great software and writing about programming these wonderful machines. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 25, 2013 Author Share Posted August 25, 2013 Can anybody translate the essays to ASCII? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tezz Posted August 25, 2013 Share Posted August 25, 2013 (edited) Can anybody translate the essays to ASCII? Those two atr images appear to be corrupt as far as I can see. I'll check them now again via dos 2.0 >Edit: I can see data on the disk sectors but no file structure Edited August 25, 2013 by Tezz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 25, 2013 Author Share Posted August 25, 2013 Those two atr images appear to be corrupt as far as I can see. I'll check them now again via dos 2.0 >Edit: I can see data on the disk sectors but no file structure Ah! Thanks! I went directly into the files and recovered a lot of the text, but as you say it was badly corrupted and I've been slogging through it correcting the errors as best I can. I'll post the final results when I'm finished. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
russg Posted August 25, 2013 Share Posted August 25, 2013 (edited) The essays are ATRs inside ATRs, hard to extract, need editing. I didn't succeed with the essays at all. I think if the disks were re-done, they might just be single atr and easy to recover. New folder.zip Edited August 25, 2013 by russg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 25, 2013 Author Share Posted August 25, 2013 I realized that the simplest way to distribute this stuff is simply to ZIP it all up and post it here. This is a ton of stuff, much of it junk. Pick through and, if there's any text that you can recover, please post it here. Chris Atari Stuff.zip 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roydea6 Posted August 25, 2013 Share Posted August 25, 2013 Essay are missing the boot sectors and seem to be some sort of Word Processor file.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tezz Posted August 25, 2013 Share Posted August 25, 2013 (edited) Incase nobody is able to recover the actual essay files from the disk image, attached is all the raw data extracted from the "Eastern Front 1941 Essays.ATR". It'll need time editing it manually but it should be all there. EDIT> Does anyone have turbo dos 2.x by Reitershan so I can replace the missing VTOC? the disks at aol don't have the utilities included. EDIT2> It's ok, I've found turbo dos now Eastern Front 1941 Essays.txt Edited August 25, 2013 by Tezz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tezz Posted August 25, 2013 Share Posted August 25, 2013 (edited) ok, that's now recovered the files somewhat from the corrupted disk image. 1.TXT 2.TXT Edited August 25, 2013 by Tezz 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 Thanks so much for dropping by and uploading your old disks! Some real treasures there, particularly all the rarities and prototypes -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 I love that quote from 2.TXT... in the DLI section: "The former method should be practicable; I don't know why I couldn't get it working. There's a lesson here: don't hold out for the elegant solution which eludes your grasp when an inelegant but workable solution is accessible." btw. just remembered that I have a De Re Atari Book in the Attic... maybe next to Alternate Reality: The City+The Dungeon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 26, 2013 Author Share Posted August 26, 2013 I have cleaned up the documentation for the Eastern Front (1941) source code package. It was badly corrupted, and portions are simply gone. I did the best I could with a bad situation and managed to reconstitute some of the most important stuff. Unfortunately, I could not find the original package, and so none of the hand-drawn material is here; I have only the stuff that I could find on the diskettes. If anybody has the physical package and would be willing to scan all the hand-drawn material, that would help greatly. In any case, I attach the zipped package containing the source code and the explanatory essays. Have fun with it. I spent far too much time cleaning this thing up. I have other work to do! Eastern Front Source Code.zip 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bob1200xl Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 Where are the physical disks themselves? What were they created on? Perhaps some of the missing data can be recovered on a second attempt. Bob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magic Knight Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 Has anyone been able to load & run the scenario editor and/or load 1943/1944 data files? Either they are corrupt or im loading these in incorrectly? (using Altirra and win800plus for convenience) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Crawford Posted August 26, 2013 Author Share Posted August 26, 2013 I have a lot of old Atari floppies. I sent them all off to a fellow at the Atari museum. He read what he could and sent them back, including a CD-ROM with all the files he could pull off them. As you can see, they were pretty badly corrupted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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