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testing your games with VDD?


Mike Harris

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I received my VDD today and as much as I would have loved this 30 years ago it only makes ADAM just a bit more bearable.

 

The other issues is I am spoiled with the ease of emulators.

 

To the point...

 

Has anyone figured an easy way to inject test cartridges onto a copycart disk or similar program?

 

All my tests up to now have been failures and I do not know if I should pad the end of my game to get a perfect round number, the programing or what.

 

The VDD comes with a sorts of manual that suggests using programs from the DOS era but if I know you guys, someone out there has created a modern tool.

 

TIA

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Eric Pearson released this Windows tool in 2018....

 

I re-wrote "ADAMDsk" by Payton Byrd in to "ADAM Image Manager" and added all the features I wished "ADAMDsk" had. All the features are listed below. If you have a Virtual Disk Drive or IDE interface using CF or SD cards you will probably find this utility useful. I wrote it under Windows 10 but I expect it will work with Windows 7 or 8 also. It is a version 1 so all the "use at your own risk" warnings apply. Rename the file to a .EXE to run the setup.

Features:

ADAM Image Manager allows you to manipulate the contents of ADAM DDP, DSK and IDE images on your PC. It was inspired by ADAMDsk created by Payton Byrd.

ADAM Image Manager follows the disk interleave structure of ADAM DSK images.

- Copy from an ADAM DDP, DSK or IDE image to another ADAM DDP, DSK or IDE image.
- Copy a file from an ADAM DDP, DSK or IDE image to your PC.
- Copy a file from you PC to an ADAM DDP, DSK or IDE image.
- Copy a file from a CP/M DSK image to your PC.
- Copy a file from your PC to a CP/M DSK image.
- Delete an ADAM file in any type of ADAM image.
- Rename an ADAM file in any type of ADAM image.
- Examine/Change the Attributes of an ADAM file.
- Examine/Change Volume attributes.
- Crunch an ADAM image, removing deleted files and wasted space.
- Block copy from image to image and to PC file.
- Create new ADAM image media DDP or DSKs.

ADAM Image Manager v1.0 (2018) (Eric Pearson).zip

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Use ADAMem SDL with ADAMem Manager and make sure to tick the Coleco ADAM switch. Mount your rom image, mount the Copycart disk image, mount a blank disk or DDP images, Launch ADAMem, CopyCart loads and then create a CopyCart media from the blank image and proceed to dump the mounted rom image.

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A lot of steps but I am eternally grateful.

 

I think one of my future projects will be to create a simple program that will take a rom and overlay it onto a default boot disk/adapter that you can boot up in a real ADAM.

 

 

The frustration come from real product. Emulators work fine.

 

Here is something that should piss you or anyone else off, it did me.

 

I decided to test my "Never used" ADAM that I paid 1k for.

Smoke blew out and the DData drive went crazy.

 

Never used in 30 years and it blew up.

 

Everything looks clean inside except the smell. So I took all the working chips, the roms and put them in my development machine so at least I now have revision 80 instead of 57 and a better Coleco sub board.

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ok....

 

FINALLY

WOW...That is about the jyst of it. A struggle just to get it onto a real ADAM is part of it then REALITY sets in.

 

My character runs great, very smooth so far.

 

Colors suck and I have no real shading or gamma control so this port has to go into some changes.

Who would have thought that an Atari 2600 had a better color system than a Colecovision.

 

 

That NMI is a pain too. Works great on the emulator and screws everything up on the real deal.

 

I also have to contend with the backdrop, overscan, border or whatever you want to call it.

 

 

sigh........

Edited by Mike Harris
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I always wondered if it were possible to bypass the TI chips normal output and get closer to the bare metal. After all, the TI chip has to work with the standard NTSC signal to build up it's output, right? Theoretically it should be possible to get graphics similar to the Atari.

 

Keep in mind I'm only theorizing here.

Edited by LoTonah
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