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Old Artari Game Programmer from 1980's needs help


RetroDan

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Originally it was for help getting an emulator working on Mac witth three games I did back in the 80s.

After much trial and error I got it to work with all three, however, and you are going to get a real laugh out of this, I FORGOT the password for Crypts of Terror so I cannot play it.

 

So I`m asking if anyone knows the password, or can find it in an old instructiions.

Also many were sold without a password for the first level, so if any collector could email me a copy of my game, that would be sweet.

 

RetroDan-at-GMail.com thanks.

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YES a copy protection.

I knew that the program would get passed around but probably not the password. :D

It's OK now I remembered it after 30 years. I'd like to repair it, because all the copies I see

with the protection stripped away are broken. When you enter the crypts there is a sword and a key, but not in the copies.

What would be the best way to "break into" the BASIC TOKEN File and untokenize it before I re-release a repaired version.

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Edited by RetroDan
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Is it just plain Basic?

It's easy to break into programs with emulation where they've attempted to make it hard to.

e.g. many programs will disable the Break key. Just change location $11 to 00 to simulate Break key pressed.

 

Basic token file? I'm not sure what you mean. Any resident Atari Basic program is stored as tokens, binary line numbers, forward pointers etc to save memory.

One typical way to make a program harder to hack was to corrupt the variable name table, do you mean that?

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Hi Dan,

 

Great to see some of the programmers from the time make themselves known on here, it might be worth saying which emulator you are using, I have a feeling its a MAC port of Atri800 but whatever the score I'm sure the bods on here will be able to help.

 

What were the other two games you wrote and would you mind them being archived on places like Atarimania and the Atari Software Preservation initiative that are both parties on here?

 

Whatever the answer thank you for wanting to fix the poor crack out there, much appreciated and good luck with the help, I can never remember if there's a way to run Altirra on the Mac but if there then that is the most useful in the debugging stakes and accurate emulator out there at present.

 

Paul..

Edited by Mclaneinc
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OK, the copy at Atarimania, NFI. Cas image and it just does nothing, machine type 800 or XL.

 

The Atr at AtariOnline works though. It's a Dos disk with Autorun, the Basic program and 2 data files.

Looks like I was right - the variable name table is overwritten such that every variable is "A".

 

The way to fix... not sure if there's a ulility out there that undoes this sort of thing.

The problem is there looks to be about 37 variables in use, so you'd probably need to do some creative hacking to expand the length of at least some of them to 2 characters then hack the names so they're all unique.

 

There are programs out there that can list Atari Basic tokenised files but I don't know if any can deal with corrupted variable name tables.

 

This is the disk image from AtariOnline: Crypts of Terror (1981)(Inhome Software)(CA)pw MAGICBASIC.atr

Edited by Rybags
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I can never remember if there's a way to run Altirra on the Mac but if there then that is the most useful in the debugging stakes and accurate emulator out there at present.

 

Paul..

Yes, you can run Altirra just fine using Wine (http://www.winehq.org) or CrossOver Mac (commercial version of Wine). Wine translates the Windows library calls to calls the Mac understands. Obviously, Avery doesn't support running Altirra like this, but it's worked great for me. Since it's the most updated 8-bit emulator, I just run Altirra on my Mac and I haven't bothered using the Mac native emulators for awhile.

 

Bob C

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Thanks Bob C, I had a feeling it did work but I didn't want to mix up OS's by mistake..

 

And yes, Avery has made it clear that he's only doing a Windows environment and as the source has been up since day one and no one has taken up the hassle of porting it then its a great job there other environments out there that can run it as it is :)

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Do you happen to know if there is a sword and a key in first crypt.

All the copies I've seen so far, and the Utube video walk-through show a hacked version where you just wander around till you die because sword and key are missing.

 

I've given up on the idea a detokenizing the file because I "nailed" the variable name table and all the variables would be "A."

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Edited by RetroDan
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