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Atari 800 - Best Game Pack : Releases


starwindz

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There's already a pretty excellent demopack gamebase out there and for me I don't see the relationship with a gamepack, in the end its down to Starwindz as he gets to do the front end coding but me personally I'd suggest getting the demopack which I'll try to find links for.

 

What I would say needs to happen is a one by one test of the demo's under Altirra, if there's one source of content that will show emulation bugs its demo's, its not a job I'll be doing any time soon as I still need to do the one by one for the gamepack but as my time is centred around my daughters health at the moment that itself won't happen. As soon as I send this I'm straight out the door and down to the hospital with my wife for an important review meeting. Things have gone well with her weight, in fact she's now at 100% perfect weight ratio for her pelvis but other issues now have come out that mean she has to get loads of therapy etc.

 

BUT, I'm not abandoning the gamepack, in fact I need it to be there to take my mind off stuff.

 

https://archive.org/details/DemobaseAtari800

 

I'd suggest making sure you use the latest beta of Altirra with that gamebase..

Edited by Mclaneinc
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A little note about the demos posted, inside is one called Gigantic Gerry, its a moviemaker made animation and not for kids in any way shape or form :)

 

Just in case..Its one I remember from the old days and although it made us laugh its got rather explicit sexual content..

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A little note about the demos posted, inside is one called Gigantic Gerry, its a moviemaker made animation and not for kids in any way shape or form :)

 

Just in case..Its one I remember from the old days and although it made us laugh its got rather explicit sexual content..

LMAO - I shouldn't admit to knowing that, and immediately laughing when I read the title.

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LMAO - I shouldn't admit to knowing that, and immediately laughing when I read the title.

 

Worse still there also a disk called Mr Happy that anyone expecting Happy Backup will be in for a shock..

 

its Gigantic Gerry just renamed after his not so little 'friend'

 

Instead of back up its more 'up the back' so to speak...

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The first time I ever saw a modem was my buddy's 1030 connected to his 1200XL. He found this demo on a local BBS. I've never been able to find it since (not that I spent much time looking). I think it was written in BASIC. It was a black screen, with graphics (redefined char set I believe), using the "red" artifacting colour. It was just a guy sitting on a bench having a wank. No sound - nothing. He got in SO much trouble - lost his computer privileges for a few days for that one - LOL. This would have been mid 87.

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That's one for Starwindz to answer, at the moment he's on business in Austria so you might have to wait for an answer..

 

Just realised there one little issue with a Mac real version, there's no version of Altirra for the Mac and from Phaerons comments there's no plans for one from him either, since some of the settings need to use Altirra for compatibility issues and Atari800win no longer being worked on it makes a Mac version even harder although A800 I *believe* has a Mac port(?) so might be able to be command line configured but most of this would be down to Starwindz IF he has any Mac coding knowledge and more importantly, the time.

 

Paul.

Edited by Mclaneinc
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Hey gang, long time lurker, first time poster. :)

 

I've been enjoying the "Best Game Pack" since ... I don't know, middle of last year? I love the work and I appreciate the time and energy put into it by those involved.

 

Playing a few games today and I fired up "Drol". I don't think I've done anything wrong, but there's no way to pass the first level. The dog with the jet pack doesn't show up. I tried both Altirra and Atari800WinPlus from the front end and they have the same behaviour, so I think it's probably the disk image itself.

 

I fired up Altirra with a Drol disk image I have from some other source, and was able to play through to level 3 without issue (I got slaughtered on level 3...man that's tough).

 

Some friendly feedback - keep up the good work when life and energy allow.

Edited by everklear
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This more than anything is why I need to do a one by one test on all the images, unfortunately time is a really precious commodity at the moment for me and Starwindz, I really need to go through ALL the images as I have done with many, with my knowledge of the emulators and as a collector of the games I can spot where people have submitted by accident both trained or poor cracks, its so easy to do which is why it needs one person to sit and check up to a point the validity of settings etc..

 

Sadly the time to spend to play x amount through the game is where we rely on people like yourself to highlight possible duff images...

 

Thank you for highlighting this and I'll check the image provided, please would you be kind enough to tell me what version of Altirra you are using...

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The first time I ever saw a modem was my buddy's 1030 connected to his 1200XL. He found this demo on a local BBS. I've never been able to find it since (not that I spent much time looking). I think it was written in BASIC. It was a black screen, with graphics (redefined char set I believe), using the "red" artifacting colour. It was just a guy sitting on a bench having a wank. No sound - nothing. He got in SO much trouble - lost his computer privileges for a few days for that one - LOL. This would have been mid 87.

 

There's quite a lot of porn out there which in the days lead to the odd moment where my wife walked in as I was booting up a fresh bunch of disks I'd collected only to see some physical act wobbling about on screen leaving my wife wondering if this was why I liked the Atari :)

 

Thankfully she saw me playing games 99% of the time..

 

These days its worse because while I'm trying to database hundreds of unknown disks I have my daughter wandering past when she's home from the hospital and on screen pops up a soul destroyingly (new word) large phallic item or some sex act in 16 shades of grey going on and its always at those once in a hundred disks that they choose to wander in to the room and look at the screen.

 

No wonder I'm on depression meds :)

 

What makes me laugh is that I'm not a porn person and in these days of 4K displays and 1080p TV's the only type of porn that unwittingly get to see is on 30 -40 year old computer disk images in a quality you have to squint to make sense of it :)

Edited by Mclaneinc
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Disregard, I was able to deal with the issue.

 

A tip to the developers:

 

Yes, Windows is case-insensitive. But that really pisses off those of us who are trying to use this database on UNIX based machines (whose filesystems _AREN'T_ case insensitive.).

Please try and match the case of the actual filenames. I had to do some crazy find -iname gymnastics to map things.

 

-Thom

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Also, i'm seeing the preference of using the mode E hacked versions of games, often not providing the original high-res versions of the games (Hard Hat Mack is a fantastic example, it looks _terrible_ in refactored mode E, as does Lode Runner.)

 

Can we please use the original non-hacked versions when possible?

 

-Thom

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I'll try to remember to add the Hires versions or remind Starwindz to when we get back to the project, obviously the 0E's were used because initially the gamepack was emulated display only (now it will allow images to be loaded up into Aspeqt (forget the name) and played onto real hardware) and artifacting was incorrect so 0E's at least gave some colour.

 

I can't say when as we are both incredibly busy for vastly different reasons...I'm going through hell at the moment...

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I can give accurate video mode settings for games that use artifacting, and if wanted, we can have a discussion on it. Altirra and Atari800win can both do accurate renderings of the artifacting if coaxed properly (and the defaults that they come up with, are not optimal for many games of the period).

 

e.g.

 

Choplifter was written on a CTIA Atari 800. As such, the default artifacting colors are expected to be blue-brown, which can be simulated with the appropriate NTSC filter on Atari800win, or in Altirra using the NTSC filter, both using a burst phase setting of -0.6 (aka, negative 60 degrees phase). You can tell this is correct, because using these settings, the Blue and red on the waving flag are correct.

 

Drol also expects this artifacting, and Pinball Construction Set also expected this artifacting. You can tell this is correct, because the girl's hair is brown, as is the beak on the flying bird.

 

I can keep going, if wanted... :)

 

-Thom

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It would be interesting to know what you set your Altirra video settings to in the colour department, and yes, pretty much any US product that was in hires was set to take advantage of the NTSC artifacting, there are very few hires games that are hires for the sake of it.

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I would love to see the correct artefact settings and proper hi-res versions of these titles in the gamepack!

 

sTeVE

 

Well its easily do-able as Starwindz uses Altirra in portable mode so a cfg with what people perceive as the correct artefacting settings can be put in place. As I said before, the only reason the mode E stuff was used was because emulators before could not use real hardware so artefacting settings were a little guess work so it was easier to use the hacked mode E stuff so some colour was seen.

 

At least with the gamepack you can now mount titles on to Aspeqt and boot them on a real NTSC tv and see them as they were meant to be seen....ish.....

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Now I have come back to Korea via Montreux in Switzerland from Austria. I stayed two days in Montreux for the meeting with some business person and also for my short vocation. :) When I came back to my company, new heavy works awaits me. However now I think I have to prepare to get back to the game pack project. I hope it may be started again in May or June.


@Mclaneinc

Could you please help me to make up a to-do-list that I have to do when I come back to the project? :)


(P.S.) Some scenery photos I have took in Montreux

20150306_081147_HDR.jpg


20150306_182040_HDR.jpg


20150306_183909.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

I actually stopped at Palm Bay many years ago when we drove up from Miami to Orlando via Cape Canaveral, mind you we stopped at Palm Beach and all the tourist places on the way :)

 

Nice place Palm Bay...

 

Made a lovely change from smelly old London :)

Edited by Mclaneinc
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