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Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative


Farb

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Here's my contribution to the Atari collection. An archive of the Action Annex BBS from 1982-1996.
Focusing mostly on music, desktop publishing art, a few demos, and some basic software tools related to music.

 

It's not 100% complete, I have 50 3.5" st disks that need the Kryoflux. Omnifloppy or the IBM .ST image maker could not read them.

I will update as I recover the last of the music catalog. "The lost Annex Files...." will the title.

 

But still it's 17mb of zipped files with a catalog of sorts. If there was a label or song titles. I typed them in as disk.txt for each disk as a sub directory.

There are dupes, about 150 on each set, but I wanted to keep the set as it was imaged.

Includes ST Clipart, ST MIDI files, and a few other older music formatted files (CMF, CMS, mode 0 MIDI)

A larger Atari 8bit music which is 95% .MUS files for the Midi Music System 1.0 and 3.0 software.
Plays on the MIDI Max and MIDI Mate. Most of the files for the ST side were converted to MIDI, so the missing catalog disks for the MD series on the ST can be found in the 8bit collection. That is why I imaged everything.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/272773-recovered-clip-art-for-the-st-from-the-action-annex-bbs/?p=3909830

 

Code contributor to the Action Annex BBS, the hardware for it still runs. Both the 800 and 130XE.

 

I need to look this one set of disks over, but I need to verify that I have the source code the MMS 3.0 software which was fixed by Mike Calvin. I need to find out if Hybrid Arts open sourced the code, or abandon-wared the binaries. Anyone know?

I want to see Donna's music on archive.org, so I can say to Mike that her music will live on the net forever. She had a flair for picking the right instruments, effects, and mixing of songs. Her violin and piano expertise made all the difference. She passed away in June 2015.

 

I don't know if the copyright music guys are going to like the MIDI versions of songs. That's a good question.

Most of the songs were pre-ASCAP, public domain from the pre-1950's. Also there are turn of the 20th Century sheet music typed in from public domain books, and purchased at auctions. Some of which was restored from originals for libraries in the area.

 

Cheers!!

Edited by mechanerd
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Sorry for the delay.

 

 

Here's another read at Atari Cash Register. Please try it. Trying to determine if it's better now with cleaner heads or the drive is screwed.

 

attachicon.gifACR try 2.zip

 

 

Your retrials are better, or should I say not as bad. But still they have plenty of errors. It does look like the drive needs a more intensive clean up. It is possible that the drive is damaged. But considering that it got slightly better after cleaning the head, it is probably just still dirty.

 

Sometimes you have to open the drive to really be able to clean the heads.

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We were friends and classmates. We shared the tools we wrote. Some of the "art" is mine. They're superficially similar in layout, but different in gameplay.

 

Interesting information; I'd always wondered about that. The screen layouts are cool and both games are very well done, fun, and highly rated amonst fans of the system.

 

I'm aware of the differences between them; I've spent a fair amount of time playing them both. Xagon is more along the lines of an enhanced Q*bert, while Qb is more like a combination of Q*bert and a puzzle solving game.

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It's time for an updated torrent. As always, thanks to everyone that contributed!

 

Some more findings:

  • Pay-Off, The (1984)(Atari)(GB)

    Needs BASIC

  • Electrician (1984)(Synapse Software)(US)

    NTSC only (to be exact: needs 60 Hz)

  • New York City - The Big Apple (1984)(Synapse Software)(US)

    NTSC only (to be exact: needs 60 Hz)

  • Rommel - Battles for Tobruk (1985)(Game Designers' Workshop)(US)(Side A)

    Does not work. Another bad a8rawconv-conversion with missing sector 707

  • Video Title Shop (1986)(Datasoft)(US)(Disk 1 of 3 Side A)(Video Title Shop)

    needs 64k - Side B runs with 48k

  • Computer Baseball v1.0 (1981)(SSI)(US)(Side A)(Side One)[bASIC]

    In-game copyright is 1984

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  • Rommel - Battles for Tobruk (1985)(Game Designers' Workshop)(US)(Side A)

    Does not work. Another bad a8rawconv-conversion with missing sector 707

 

 

I restored the protection on this a while ago and thought I'd passed it to Farb, may have been missed.

 

Rommel - Battles for Tobruk (1985)(Game Designers' Workshop)(US)(Side A).rar

ATX & SCP images included.

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Electrician (1984)(Synapse Software)(US)

New York City - The Big Apple (1984)(Synapse Software)(US)

Cool to see those Synapse games make it in there considering their disks seem to self destruct easily?

Assuming you mean those two titles that DjayBee mentioned ... These two specifically are usually not that bad, most copies seem to be ok. The most critical ones are those Synapse titles published a little bit earlier, like Zeppelin or Blue Max.

 

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I restored the protection on this a while ago and thought I'd passed it to Farb, may have been missed.

 

It is not a problem of the dumps but of a bug in a8rawconv before v0.92. Up to now all dumps were correct, it always was only the ATX-conversion.

 

The good thing about this - quite often used - protection is that you can even restore and/or crack the protection if you only have an ATR of the original. The protected track 40 is exactly the same on all titles.

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It is not a problem of the dumps but of a bug in a8rawconv before v0.92. Up to now all dumps were correct, it always was only the ATX-conversion.

 

Correct. If you look at the web page for that dump:

 

http://a8preservation.com/#/software/dump/%2Fapi%2Fdumps%2F1266

 

You can see what version of a8rawconv was used to generate the dump. As of right now, it says "a8rawconv 0.8" which has the missing sector problem. I will re-generate a new ATX from the raw dump and this problem should be fixed - it likely just got missed in the heap of other tasks I need to do for all of this :-)

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@mechanerd - thank you for contributing your collection. Unfortunately, this project isn't currently archiving public domain or shareware software but that doesn't mean the contribution isn't valuable. I'm sure Atarimania will be interested in this!

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Merry Christmas from Henry the Ginger Cat of Good Luck

post-44915-0-61825000-1513952832_thumb.jpg

Henry has smiled on us.

Finally delivered after being lost in the Royal Mail for 30 days and then going back to the seller..

post-44915-0-30016000-1513952820_thumb.jpg post-44915-0-13018200-1513952827_thumb.jpg

Both sides have some nasty 26 sector plus tracks for all you protection connoisseurs.

ATX, SCP dumps from both A8 & SCP Tool (5 revs) and a scan of the manual.

**Interesting fact - notice the disk label incorrectly has the same game twice.

 

4 Star Compilation - Volume 1.pdf

4 Star Compilation - Volume 1 (1986)(Red Rat Software)(GB).zip

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  • 2 weeks later...

@mechanerd - thank you for contributing your collection. Unfortunately, this project isn't currently archiving public domain or shareware software but that doesn't mean the contribution isn't valuable. I'm sure Atarimania will be interested in this!

 

You might want to dig into the archive I posted. There are .atr images of the originals for Midi Music System 1.0 and some commercial releases from ANTIC magazine.

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