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OT: Oregon Trail handheld, Target store exclusive


Lathe26

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Hoping to get one of these Oregon Trail handhelds tomorrow. Oregon Trail was first computer game I ever played, but it was at school.

 

Anyway on more serious note where I live it is still a state of emergency from the Nor'easter. There are still over hundred thousand people without power. We lost power for about 48 hours but are very lucky to have been fine since this afternoon.

Edited by thetick1
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http://www.philipbouchard.com/OT-book/OT-chapter01.html

 

The above page doesn't say directly but this quote indicates that the main game was still BASIC with graphics, animations, and maybe UI in assembly. [And they did have BASIC compilers for the Apple II back in 1984.]

 

"To write a program entirely in assembly language was very difficult and time consuming, compared to writing a program in BASIC. But Applesoft allowed you to mix the two languages, through a technique called & hooks. You could write most of the program in Applesoft, and then use an & hook to call an assembly language subroutine whenever you needed to display a paragraph of text or an image on the screen."

 

Still it doesn't tell us anything about this handheld version. The 1985 Apple II version is very similar to the 1990 DOS version and very different than previous versions that were done in a much more limited version of BASIC. The Intellivision version was likely ported from the older 1978/79 game as I don't think the BASIC source to the 1985 version is available. I'm assuming the 1985 version is still copyrighted and this handheld is licensed with access to the source code a possibility.

 

Ok, I can now confirm that mr_me is correct that some Applesoft BASIC shipped in the 1985 Apple // version of Oregon Trail. Either my memory was failing me previously or maybe MECC made it too hard for my younger teenage self to load into Apple BASIC interpreter.

 

Note: this applies to the 1985 Apple version of Oregon Trail. At this point, we only have the educated guesses as to what is in the Oregon Trail handheld.

 

Short version

I found a disc image for Oregon Trail, read up on how Applesoft BASIC was tokenized in memory and disc, and found a chunk of Applesoft BASIC I was able to translate successfully by hand.

 

Deeper Technicals

I read up on how Applesoft BASIC was tokenized (i.e. how a line like 10 PRINT "Hello, world!" was converted to be stored in RAM or disk) at these sites:

After downloading the image for disk 1 of Oregon Trail, I read up on the track/sector layout and a little bit of the common filesystem. However, it was faster just to search the disk image for a section that looked like tokenized Applesoft BASIC. I found a section at file offset 0x0000A019 that was the following. I only am showing this short segment for education purposes.

49 1B C1 0C AD C6 53 44 C4 BA 43 45 24 D3 28 44 
C8 50 35 29 22 20 6D 69 6C 65 73 22 3A BA 43 45 
24 D3 28 4D C8 50 35 29 22 20 6D 69 6C 65 73 22 
00 63 1B AB 0D 4C 30 D0 C6 44 3A 82 4C 30 3A 49 
28 38 29 D0 50 46 3A 9D 3A B1 00 C9 1B AC 0D 57 
31 D0 31 3A B0 33 33 30 30 30 3A AF 52 46 4C 2C 
22 4F 52 45 47 4F 4E 2E 49 4D 41 22 C5 53 41 3A 
AF 44 46 54 2C 37 2C 53 41 3A BA 43 4C 24 3A AF 
49 4D 41 47 45 2C 31 30 2C 31 30 2C 31 36 30 3A 
AF 49 4D 41 47 45 2C 31 30 2C 31 30 2C 33 30 3A 
AF 41 50 50 2C 22 52 49 56 45 52 2E 4C 49 42 22 
00

If you attempt to detokenize this, it turns into the following:

3265 IF NOT SD THEN PRINT CE$ INT(D+P5)" miles":
       PRINT CE$ INT(M+P5)" miles"
3499 L0 = NOT D:
       NEXT L0:
       I( = PF:
       NORMAL:
       RETURN
3500 W1 = 1:
       GOSUB 33000:
       & RFL,"OREGON.IMA" AT SA:
       & DFT,7,SA:
       PRINT CL$:
       & IMAGE,10,10,160:
       & IMAGE,10,10,30:
       & APP,"RIVER.LIB"

This looks like the Applesoft BASIC, including the & hook mr_me mentioned above.

 

This has been a fun and educational learning experience. :)

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Guest LiqMat

First off, I want to thank JasonlikesINTV for turning me to this thread after sending him his Intellivision mug.

 

I went out tonight to immediately pick up two of these, BUT Target is chalk full of incompetent employees. First Target I went to said they had never heard of it and looked it up on their handheld device and could not find it. I asked them to double check. Nope, they did not have it according to their search. Turns out they had plenty, but had no clue. Called a second Target and same thing. Nope, don't have it. Finally called a Super Target in my area and they said all the Target's have it in my area and the other two Targets I spoke with had no clue what they were talking about. He was right. The Super Target had nine of them and the other Target stores who said they didn't have any had four each.

 

If you are still looking for them they are in the toys section next to the other Oregon Trail game products which were located in the board game section of the toys area. Hope that helps someone find them quicker. This thing is SUPER cool and I love the look and feel of it. The only downside to a collector is you will have to carefully open every one of these for long term storage because unfortunately the batteries are already installed and as we all know they are going to leak eventually. I also am a tad disappointed they do not recommend rechargeable batteries for this unit. I'm guessing because of the voltage difference in rechargeable batteries from standard batteries.

Edited by LiqMat
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Woo hoo! I just found a bug in the handheld!

 

In a nutshell, if you play a round, then die, and then play a 2nd round, the result is that your "Health" and "Miles traveled" are NOT restarted. Since you likely died the first time in "Very Poor" health, that is how you will start your 2nd round (unless you buy food to start with in Matt's Store). Also, the miles traveled just keeps adding up with each round (I noticed the bug when I had just started my ~8th game and had 2500 miles traveled on my first day). This does not appear to be a serious bug since the health will go back to Good if you get food and miles traveled doesn't seem to be used for anything other than displaying a number to user (at least that I've noticed).

 

Steps:

  1. Turn handheld on
  2. Select "Travel the Trail"
  3. Name your party and purchase items from Matt's Store. Don't buy any food since the intent is to die.
  4. Select "Continue on the Trail". Note the "Health" and "Miles traveled" on the 1st day.
  5. Play this 1st round until everyone is dead. Don't hunt or buy food to expedite this.
  6. After the tombstone, select "Travel the Trail"
  7. Name your party and purchase items from Matt's Store. Don't buy any food since this fixes the "Health" bug (no effect on "Miles traveled" bug).
  8. Select "Continue on the Trail"

Result: "Health" is Very Poor and "Miles traveled" is a few hundred miles.

Expect: "Health" is Good and "Miles traveled" is 0 miles.

 

post-37124-0-63881900-1520405018_thumb.jpg

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The above steps were also tested in both the Apple II 1985 version and the MS-DOS 1990 version (via emulators). Neither of those versions showed this bug.

 

I think this shows that either the handheld's code is a new rewrite or that porting the code introduced this bug, if from the above versions.

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Some people at the LGR Vid have their own ideas on what's going on in the hardware...

 

he says he does not trust the batteries if they are indeed gp batteries then they should be pretty good

gp has made good cells for a loooonggg time lol i used them in my old rc10 back in the day

and i still have a few batt packs that are still working today

Edited by discgolfer72
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Target? Oh they bought Zellers and went broke...

 

lol... even if Target was still around here, they likely wouldn't be carrying them here. Seems Basic Fun makes these exclusivity agreements with the big stores and they are US only. The other mini arcades at WalMart from Basic Fun (Bridge Direct) are US only... oh well at least when the wife wants to go shopping in the US, I have something to look for. lol

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In the Basic Fun line there are the following coming sometime:

 

Defender (The rom is actually in the chips of the Rampage units)

Ms Pac Man was revealed at Toy Fair but only the bubble packed version which will likely be similar to the PacMan

Tetris was also revealed at Toy Fair.. again only the bubble packed version was shown.

 

I'm curious to know which game is the mysterious #9 in the WalMart line... likely Defender but who knows.

 

As for the My Arcade line:

 

Heavy Barrel is out this month

Caveman Ninja (aka Joe and Mac) is out this month as well

There is a Namco line coming late spring, early summer with PacMan, Galaga, Mappy, Rolling Thunder, Dig Dug with planned releases!

 

And for the Tiny Arcades:

 

Galaga

Frogger

and maybe Dig Dug? These were shown at Toy Fair but I'm not certain of release dates on these.

 

Replicade has Centipede 1/6th scale unit coming out April for Kickstarters

and also Tempest slated for August.

 

oh... and yes, I'm an enthusiast for these arcade machines... lol.

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Guest LiqMat

Anyone who's going to PRGE, please pick me up one of these :D I'll pay you back, honest! I can't see them sitting on store shelves 7 months from now... sigh.

 

How many do you want? I could always ship them to you. There are crap loads of these sitting on shelves right now.

 

Actually, come to think of it. Doesn't Cmart live near the border. He could pick a few up for you on his next beer run. :-)

Edited by LiqMat
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How many do you want? I could always ship them to you. There are crap loads of these sitting on shelves right now.

 

Actually, come to think of it. Doesn't Cmart live near the border. He could pick a few up for you on his next beer run. :-)

 

Just one. Shipping is a hassle + $ though. I figured maybe PRGE would make it practical.

 

And yes, yes he could :P

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