Flying Shark

[+Lee Stewart]

Hi friends!

 

I have tried to load the game in Classic99 (as a cartridge). But it does not appear in the title menu. What did I do wrong?

 

How are you trying to load it? Selecting from the Cartridge menu, adding to Classic99.ini or some other way?

 

...lee

[+Lee Stewart]

How are you trying to load it? Selecting from the Cartridge menu, adding to Classic99.ini or some other way?

 

To set up “Flying Shark” to appear on the TI-99/4A title menu from Classic99’s menu , choose “Cartridge”-->“User”-->“Open...”, find the directory/folder in which you saved flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin and open it. This setup is only temporary. You will need to do it every time you start Classic99 and there must be an ‘8’ just before “.bin”.

To set it up to appear on Classic99’s “User” menu, you should put a copy of flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin in the “MODS” folder and then set up a user-cartridge section in classic99.ini. If you do not have any user cartridges listed in classic99.ini, the following should work:

[UserCart0]
name="Flying Shark"
rom0=8|0000|80000|MODS\flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin

See Chapter 10 in the Classic99 manual for more information.

...lee

[Count9929A]

Hi, I have tried the first way you describe, as usual. I did exactly what you describe, with the file downloaded from this thread. I also tried with the file taken from the Game Shelf, and get the same behavior: the emulated TI resets, but the title menu has only the TI basic option.

I have to say that I use Classic 99 v. QI368 on OS X via wine (I know, it's not a supported way to use Classic 99, but works fine, up to now). Maybe a need a newer version?

 

 

 

To set up “Flying Shark” to appear on the TI-99/4A title menu from Classic99’s menu , choose “Cartridge”-->“User”-->“Open...”, find the directory/folder in which you saved flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin and open it. This setup is only temporary. You will need to do it every time you start Classic99 and there must be an ‘8’ just before “.bin”.

To set it up to appear on Classic99’s “User” menu, you should put a copy of flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin in the “MODS” folder and then set up a user-cartridge section in classic99.ini. If you do not have any user cartridges listed in classic99.ini, the following should work:

[UserCart0]
name="Flying Shark"
rom0=8|0000|80000|MODS\flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin

See Chapter 10 in the Classic99 manual for more information.

...lee

 

[+Vorticon]

Append 8 to the filename

[Count9929A]

Append 8 to the filename

 

filename is (as in the thread):

 

flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin

 

Moreover, filename of the Game Shelf version is: flying-shark-8.bin

 

:-(

[+Lee Stewart]

Hi, I have tried the first way you describe, as usual. I did exactly what you describe, with the file downloaded from this thread. I also tried with the file taken from the Game Shelf, and get the same behavior: the emulated TI resets, but the title menu has only the TI basic option.

I have to say that I use Classic 99 v. QI368 on OS X via wine (I know, it's not a supported way to use Classic 99, but works fine, up to now). Maybe a need a newer version?

 

It is possible that version is before non-inverted ROMs were supported. The latest version of Classic99 is v399.003. Download it from @Tursi’s site, HarmlessLion.com.

 

...lee

 

[Edit: Answer is still the same, but I responded to the wrong post. ]

[ti99iuc]

 

filename is (as in the thread):

 

flying-shark-v1.2.1-8.bin

 

Moreover, filename of the Game Shelf version is: flying-shark-8.bin

 

:-(

 

I tried both version and working for me on Classic99 too

I also published the same version v1.2.1-8.bin on the ti99iuc website

and it works.

 

I am last version of the Classic99, be sure you are using one updated version.

[Asmusr]

https://js99er.net/#/cart/flying_shark

[PeteE]

Hi, I have tried the first way you describe, as usual. I did exactly what you describe, with the file downloaded from this thread. I also tried with the file taken from the Game Shelf, and get the same behavior: the emulated TI resets, but the title menu has only the TI basic option.

I have to say that I use Classic 99 v. QI368 on OS X via wine (I know, it's not a supported way to use Classic 99, but works fine, up to now). Maybe a need a newer version?

 

I use classic99 on OSX via wine, so that should be okay. One other thing to try: what version of the console do you have selected on the System menu? The option "TI-99/4A V2.2" will result in exactly the symptoms you describe, so please be sure select "TI-99/4A" instead. (The V2.2 console has protection that only allows TI-made cartridges to appear in the menu.)

[Tursi]

Also try opening the Debugger and read what it has to say about the ROM loads. Maybe it's as simple as it's not finding the file for some reason. When you get into emulation annoying things like spaces, slashes and quotes start becoming really important.

[Count9929A]

Hi all,

 

following your suggestions I have found that the problem it's not only with Flying Shark, but also with other cart, as Don't mess with Texas. It seems that the carts whose name has an '8' just before the ".bin" extension are the problem. I don't know the technical details, but I do know that these are a specific type of carts.

In the debugger window, the "Loading file C: ... " line for the carts that don't work is *not* displayed. As if the files are not recognized.

 

The problem is not the console version, I have selected "TI 99/4A" in the System menu

[Asmusr]

Hi all,

 

following your suggestions I have found that the problem it's not only with Flying Shark, but also with other cart, as Don't mess with Texas. It seems that the carts whose name has an '8' just before the ".bin" extension are the problem. I don't know the technical details, but I do know that these are a specific type of carts.

In the debugger window, the "Loading file C: ... " line for the carts that don't work is *not* displayed. As if the files are not recognized.

 

The problem is not the console version, I have selected "TI 99/4A" in the System menu

 

Did you try to update Classic99? QI368 is 35 updates old.

[Count9929A]

i should try... shame on me

[Tursi]

Hi all,

 

following your suggestions I have found that the problem it's not only with Flying Shark, but also with other cart, as Don't mess with Texas. It seems that the carts whose name has an '8' just before the ".bin" extension are the problem. I don't know the technical details, but I do know that these are a specific type of carts.

In the debugger window, the "Loading file C: ... " line for the carts that don't work is *not* displayed. As if the files are not recognized.

 

The problem is not the console version, I have selected "TI 99/4A" in the System menu

 

Well, one note is that Don't Mess With Texas is not a "C" type cart, which is non-banked CPU memory (cartridge or otherwise).

 

The convention of <name><type>.bin is only used when you use Cartridge->User->open -- ie: you are forcing Classic99 to guess what you're loading. 8.bin means a non-inverted bank-switched ROM, which is probably correct.

 

You can post your Classic99.ini (to the Classic99 thread rather than here, maybe) so we can take a look at your setting, or if you're using cartridge->user->open, copy and paste the log in the debugger window right after the open so we can see all the messages (again, better to the Classic99 thread than here). Classic99 has been able to open type 8 ROMs for a pretty long time, but I guess it's possible that 35 updates ago was before we introduced them. So.. update too.

[TommyB]

I'm a few years late to the party, but I wanted to add to the praise of how amazing this and other modern projects are! It's so far beyond what I remember the TI being capable of back in the 80s.

 

The 99/4a was my first computer. It was my 1982 birthday present, and I spent every waking minute of the whole summer that year trying to recreate Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and others on it with Extended Basic. It has always been special to me, but I hadn't kept up with it in the years/decades since.

 

That changed a couple of years ago when I saw some YouTube videos about it. I got the itch to dig my TI out of storage, bought a FinalGROM cart from ArcadeShopper, and relived some awesome childhood memories. 

 

I recently placed an order for a TIPI for Father's Day (my wife says she never knows what to get me haha) and I'm looking forward to trying out new things with it. I've read through the "assembly development" and "smooth scrolling" threads here and would like to try my hand at assembly language programming. I installed xdt99 and IntelliJ Idea on a PC to write code, and will use Classic99 to test before transferring over to the TIPI to run on real hardware.

 

I also downloaded the Flying Shark source that Rasmus has kindly shared on Github (thanks for that!). I'm hoping to learn from it and reinforce what I've read in the threads. I tried to compile the code by launching the "makelevels.bat" file but I see a lot of "deprecated use" errors in the output like this:

 

xas99.py -R -b source/level1-rom.a99 -o build/level1-rom
> level1-rom.a99 <1> 0002 -        aorg >6000,0
***** Error: Cannot use bank with AORG directive (deprecated use)

 

I guess this is a question for @Asmusr or @ralphb, but I would love to hear suggestions from anyone on how to fix this.

 

I can look for older xdt99 versions that support banks with AORG directives, but I'd like to learn the new way to handle this. Googling didn't turn up much on it unfortunately.

 

I'm also happy to create a PR to submit the changes once I get it working with the latest xdt99 version if that is helpful/wanted.

 

Thanks for reading! I hope to contribute to the fun someday.

[Asmusr]

1 hour ago, TommyB said:

I guess this is a question for @Asmusr or @ralphb, but I would love to hear suggestions from anyone on how to fix this.

I don't remember how it worked. What happens if you just remove the ",0"?

Edited May 31, 2022 by Asmusr

[PeteE]

14 hours ago, TommyB said:

I tried to compile the code by launching the "makelevels.bat" file but I see a lot of "deprecated use" errors in the output like this:

 

xas99.py -R -b source/level1-rom.a99 -o build/level1-rom
> level1-rom.a99 <1> 0002 -        aorg >6000,0
***** Error: Cannot use bank with AORG directive (deprecated use)

 

I guess this is a question for @Asmusr or @ralphb, but I would love to hear suggestions from anyone on how to fix this.

 

I can look for older xdt99 versions that support banks with AORG directives, but I'd like to learn the new way to handle this. Googling didn't turn up much on it unfortunately.

The ",0" indicates the bank number from I recall, so it would be written like this in the latest xas99:

       aorg >6000
       bank 0

 

[TommyB]

Thanks for the replies!

 

@Asmusr, I tried removing the ,x options. The compile errors went away but only one ~8k levelx-rom file was created per asm file, so later parts of the makelevels.bat file failed. 

 

@PeteE I changed the aorg >6000,x directives to be separate aorg >6000 and bank x directives as you suggested, which also compiled fine, but I was greeted by a clear screen and random noise when I pressed 2 for Tiger Shark on the TI menu screen.

 

Now that I know about the bank directive, I looked it up in the xdt99 manual at https://github.com/endlos99/xdt99/blob/master/doc/MANUAL.md#banked-output. Based on the documentation, I tried changing "aorg >6000,0" to "bank all, >6000" and the remaining occurrences of aorg to "bank 1", "bank 2" etc. This also compiled okay, but the resulting files were around 15K each instead of 8k, and the same clear screen and random noise was seen when I tried to launch the cart.

 

My last attempt was changing "aorg >6000,x" to "bank x, >6000" and not having a bank all directive. This change got the output files back down to 8K each, but still with the same results.

 

One other difference to note - the output files no longer contain the base address as part of the file name. For example, "level1-rom_6000_b1" is now being named "level1-rom_b1". Any idea if that is expected with the bank directive or if it indicates I've done something incorrectly?

 

I may punt on this for now. Trying to fix this is way above my expertise currently. I only tried building Flying Shark to confirm I had installed everything correctly. I can't even claim to know enough to be dangerous yet! Thanks again for the quick responses!

Edited June 1, 2022 by TommyB

[TommyB]

Adding one more attempt after my last comment... I read the xdt99 docs a bit more and thought that the order of the directives may be important, so I tried placing the bank directive first, followed by the aorg directive, like so:

 

bank 0

aorg >6000

 

This thinking was based on the manual's statement that "Within each bank, all *ORG directives may be used, without leaving the current bank".

 

Unfortunately, that produced the same results of getting a blank screen and a non-stop tone that sounds like the beep when you press 2 to select the cart.

 

So, to recap, removing ",x" from the aorg statements allows the code to compile but doesn't produce as many output files.

 

Using "bank x" and "aorg >6000" statements in either order, or "bank x, >6000" without an aorg directive, gets a compiled bin file but nothing but a blank screen when I launch.

 

Maybe I will solve this someday once I have more experience.

Edited June 1, 2022 by TommyB

[+retroclouds]

Makes me wonder if xas99 should support version strings.

Haven’t checked if that is already the case (ofcourse it’s always possible to do something with conditional defines)

 

Anyway, that’s one of the reasons why I like to stay as long as possible on a particular xas99 version.

Having said that, For my own needs I’m currently building a docker image for the xdt99 tools.

 

With that in place I can have multiple container images supporting the different xdt99 versions out there.

For building the container image you specify what version you’d like to have and everything else happens automatically, python image is fetched from dockerhub and xdt99 source code from github, and so on.

 

Thinking about it further you could have a batch file that builds the necessary container image, fetches the TI-99/4a assembly project from github and assembles it.

[Asmusr]

10 hours ago, retroclouds said:

Anyway, that’s one of the reasons why I like to stay as long as possible on a particular xas99 version.

I also postponed upgrading from xas99 v. 1.8 for several years, but now I've done it and I need to go back and revisit all my source code to check that it can still be assembled. Not a very exciting task, so I hope there will be no more breaking changes.

[TommyB]

10 hours ago, Asmusr said:

I also postponed upgrading from xas99 v. 1.8 for several years, but now I've done it and I need to go back and revisit all my source code to check that it can still be assembled. Not a very exciting task, so I hope there will be no more breaking changes.

I must admit, the idea of breaking changes for a 40-year-old computer didn't occur to me when jumping into revisiting the 99/4a. ? 

 

I am interested in seeing what changes you have to make for it to build if/when you do that. I may have something else set up incorrectly, as I haven't been able to build Bouncy's Obstacle Course or Knight Lore either. I'm on a new Windows 11 laptop, using the latest Python and JRE as well as xdt99, so it could be any of those things.

Edited June 2, 2022 by TommyB

[Asmusr]

I have pushed a fix to build Flying Shark using the latest xdt99. I changed aorg,n to bank n, added _6000 to the output filenames, and last but not least I forced it start at the right address (>a000 instead of >2000) by adding a branch at >2000. I haven't found out why updating xdt99 would cause it to start at the wrong address.

[Asmusr]

On 6/2/2022 at 2:50 AM, TommyB said:

I am interested in seeing what changes you have to make for it to build if/when you do that. I may have something else set up incorrectly, as I haven't been able to build Bouncy's Obstacle Course or Knight Lore either. I'm on a new Windows 11 laptop, using the latest Python and JRE as well as xdt99, so it could be any of those things.

Knight Lore should also work now (using makecart.bat). Obstacle Course is still having problems, which I posted about in the xdt99 thread.

[TommyB]

On 6/3/2022 at 11:14 AM, Asmusr said:

I have pushed a fix to build Flying Shark using the latest xdt99. I changed aorg,n to bank n, added _6000 to the output filenames, and last but not least I forced it start at the right address (>a000 instead of >2000) by adding a branch at >2000. I haven't found out why updating xdt99 would cause it to start at the wrong address.

 

On 6/3/2022 at 12:15 PM, Asmusr said:

Knight Lore should also work now (using makecart.bat). Obstacle Course is still having problems, which I posted about in the xdt99 thread.

Thanks for the updates! I will take a look at the Flying Shark changes to see what you did differently than what I tried. I didn't know the _6000 being in the output filenames was important and didn't notice the problem with the wrong start address. I am happy to hear it wasn't me or my new laptop!

 

I pulled down the beta of your fantastic Pinball99 game and was able to build it without issue, so I thought maybe something with bank switching wasn't working right since Pinball99 isn't using banking.

 

I will follow along on the xdt99 thread to see when/how that is resolved.