A Blast From My Past

[toddtmw]

Okay. I'm going to say it. I was kind of a pirate back in my Atari days. I used to collect games to collect them, and didn't play them nearly as much time as I spent collecting and organizing them. I kept all of my games catalogged in a (Pirated) copy of Synfile. (A friend had a Happy 810.)

 

Unfortunately, I got rid of the disks when I was downsizing to move about 7 years ago (went into the trash, I regret it to this day).

 

However, I was digging through some old boxes and found a printout of my Synfile list!

 

It's a nice retrospective of what teenage me thought of these games. (Apologies in advance if any of these games were created by anoyone on here and I gave it a bad rating or bad description.)

 

Anyway, I've had fun looking this over and thought others on here might also. (I'm very tempted to try to recreate thes disks exactly like this, just to see if I can...) (Or not...)

 

Atari Software List.pdf

 

Does anyone else have a similar list from back in the day?

 

-Todd

[ivop]

I was recently made aware of this site by F#Ready: http://gotpapers.untergrund.net/

This looks like a perfect submission

I'm considering scanning all the letters I got in the eighties and nineties. They're still in a box on the attic of my parent's house. Unless Silverfish got to them first... Also looking through my floppies if any letters were written on the sleeves.

Edited March 23, 2019 by ivop

[+slx]

I didn't have a list like that but I remember assembling both themed and "stuffed" floppies trying to use up all of the 707 sectors. I even manually modified a floppy with a disc editor and put one sector that wouldn't fit into one of the unused directory sectors. I still have them in a floppy filing drawer with neatly typed numbered labels.

 

I recently found a long writeup probably typed during a boring night duty and explaining various matters Atari (in German) which accompanied a stack of discs a fellow soldier in another garrison which I never met in person had sent to me to be filled with stuff for his newly acquired Atari (I don't recall the details but I think one of our drivers met him on a trip and knew I was into Ataris) - it's getting increasingly hard to believe that and how we met people of like interests before Internet (and even BBS).

[gozar]

However, I was digging through some old boxes and found a printout of my Synfile list!

 

It's a nice retrospective of what teenage me thought of these games. (Apologies in advance if any of these games were created by anoyone on here and I gave it a bad rating or bad description.)

 

Anyway, I've had fun looking this over and thought others on here might also. (I'm very tempted to try to recreate thes disks exactly like this, just to see if I can...) (Or not...)

 

Atari Software List.pdf

 

Does anyone else have a similar list from back in the day?

 

-Todd

 

I'm sorry, I don't think I can take you seriously after seeing you rate Wavy Navy with a C. :-)

[toddtmw]

 

I'm sorry, I don't think I can take you seriously after seeing you rate Wavy Navy with a C. :-)

 

Hey. 20-year-old me had some standards.

[+slx]

 

I'm sorry, I don't think I can take you seriously after seeing you rate Wavy Navy with a C. :-)

 

Well, he rated Shamus, M.U.L.E. and Archon A, so his judgment is not completely off.

[toddtmw]

Wavy Navy was just a stupid Space Invaders wannabe.

[+DrVenkman]

Wavy Navy was just a stupid Space Invaders wannabe.

 

SHOTS FIRED!!!

[gozar]

Wavy Navy was just a stupid Space Invaders wannabe.

 

I think part of the reason is that you had the pirated version, so the helicopters never fired. Try the version here:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/227376-interesting-issue-with-a-wavy-navy-atr/?p=3026370

[+Nezgar]

My dad also had what seemed like 1000+ disks of pirated software, (long gone) and also had it all databased in SynFile+ (which I do have!) ... Took 2 double density disks, and was unusable without 2 drives, otherwise it's endless swapping. It's on my to-do list of disks to archive to ATR. Would be cool to print it out.

[Mclaneinc]

Well done Todd for publishing the list, many were pirates back in the day, I've never hid that I was one and surfed both sides of the fence. I never made lists tho, for me personally I'm one of the most disorganised folks you could meet but in a job situation I was spot on, odd the way it was split. I'm going to have to read this as its great to see what a younger person thought at the time, my thoughts towards some games has changed but I was never in to sims then and I rarely even boot one now...No change really..

 

Thanks for the list Todd, its a saved memory which I love..

 

Cheers...

 

As for your thoughts on Wavy Navy, you Galley Slave!!!

 

(lowest rank)

 

I love that game, so addictive and such a nice variant on Space Invaders clones....2nd thing I did with the game after hours of try to get great scores was to jump in to Omnimon and cheat it (boo hiss)

Edited March 24, 2019 by Mclaneinc

[toddtmw]

To be fair, I hade like 10 pages of games to rate. I probably only played Wavy Navy for like 2 minutes.

 

Like I said, I was much more into collecting than actually playing the games.

[Mclaneinc]

I was the opposite, although when it got to the Amiga time I just felt I was collecting little blue and black squares (the disks) with the 8bits I was just loving to play but because I had so much of everything on hand I never had enough time to play it all. Thankfully during the Amiga days I stopped all the collecting and FINALLY got back to playing.....Your average good software buyer just does not realise the amount of stuff that came through the pirate software channels, even back then....

 

Databasing it all, far too much time needed...

[toddtmw]

Ive actually started recreating this in syn file. Im almost done with the first page.

 

(I needed to do this so I can sort it by disk and start recreating my library.)

[toddtmw]

I'm up to the C's! I'm cheating. I'm doing it in Altirra. Better keyboard, plus I can make a quick copy of my data disk every page so I don't lose it all if there is a data issue.

 

[toddtmw]

This is the picture I mean to attach.

[a8isa1]

 

I think part of the reason is that you had the pirated version, so the helicopters never fired. Try the version here:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/227376-interesting-issue-with-a-wavy-navy-atr/?p=3026370

Oh that reminds me. I need to add the fixed Wavy Navy XEX to my disk set, (Kheffington's set with some but not nearly enough updates)

[toddtmw]

I dood it!

 

Here is the first draft of my retyping of the whole list into Synfile+!

 

retyped games list.pdf

 

I need to do some proofreading and stuff, but it's a good start.

[toddtmw]

if anoyone wants to see the data disk, here it is.

 

Synfile Data Disksingled.atr

[toddtmw]

My dad also had what seemed like 1000+ disks of pirated software, (long gone) and also had it all databased in SynFile+ (which I do have!) ... Took 2 double density disks, and was unusable without 2 drives, otherwise it's endless swapping. It's on my to-do list of disks to archive to ATR. Would be cool to print it out.

 

That's more than I had. I only had ~500 games on ~50 disks and I thought I was the Elite WAREZ guy. Little did I know....

[+Nezgar]

 

That's more than I had. I only had ~500 games on ~50 disks and I thought I was the Elite WAREZ guy. Little did I know....

All the more reason for me to dig out and image those synfile disks, to see how good my childhood memory was haha.

[toddtmw]

All the more reason for me to dig out and image those synfile disks, to see how good my childhood memory was haha.

 

I'd love to see it!!!!

[Mclaneinc]

Top work Todd, I believe all this stuff is as exciting as the games and programmes, it brings a 'real person' touch to it...Even us old Mega Warez pirates (Arrr Jim) had an awkward but important part to play in it all back then.

 

Obviously at the time back then it would have been seen to be an obvious bad part, hey no one argues that piracy was wrong, but historically the piracy and scene allowed for lots of alternate development ie Happy Boards etc which these days are as much part of the Atari folklore as all the other stuff.

[+Nezgar]

Alright, I found the disks, and imaged them last night! (Imaged in both senses of the word, first in the 1050, then the flatbed scanner haha) along with another dozen or so... yeesh time consuming! But nice to have those pictures for preservation / memory jogging going forward... and my dad will get a kick out of seeing this...



Last Backup July 1987... I remember a 132 columns wide printout floating around the office for ages with lots of handwritten notes of new high scores, potentially many not on this.... and I'm only noted on one game I can't even remember.

Anywho... This evenings chore was re-learning how to deal with this unwieldy 2-disk database in Syn-File+... Boot program, swap data disk 1 in, open file, insert data disk 2, then disk 1, ...

 

It's alive! Verdict is 1580 records. This includes multiple titles per disk for binary loads, so some extra work to do later to see number of actual disks...

Record 1 showing the form layout and fields.... Hey I never knew my dad had an Archiver... I thought he only had a Happy 810 then Happy 1050. Will have to ask him about that.

 

Then try listing it off to screen... columns are pretty wide so not much fits...

 

First attempt was to re-index it by disk #... seemed to die into a never ending processing loop reading 1 sector every minute... reboot since it's already indexed alphabetically! in summary... BAD idea.. I started over!

 

 

OK, then I tried to print a report to a disk file on disk 2 (where there is some disk space) but after a few records it asks for disk 2 in drive 1... that's not going to work since it will then try to write the output to the disk in drive 2 that is now in drive 1...

 

Start over again!

 

Now write output to a NEW DD disk in drive 2... and then endured about 30 minutes of manual disk swapping disk 1 and 2 into drive 1 while it writes the output to a file in drive 2...

All the while cursing that

1. it takes 6 mouse clicks to swap disks between drives in Altirra... (A few less with alt-shift D) and...
2. I could have SWORN this could print accessing both disks simultaneously without swapping...

Started over yet again!

Finally I found and tried Altirra's P: printer capture device, and let it print a report to there... First it asks for disk 1 in drive 1... then disk 2 in drive 1 (oh no I'm thinking, not again!) But then as long as disk 1 is then in drive 2 and disk 2 is in drive 1, it will keep going accessing back and forth with no disk swaps! YAY! It starts spitting out entries to the printer output about 1 every 2-3 seconds... kick in warp speed in Altirra and the whole list is dumped in a matter of minutes.

Sample from RAW output:

PROGRAMS


DSK# PROGRAM                    COMPANY          #K'S C/D  FORMAT SD TYPE          DOC BACKUP   MY HIGH SCORE    OTHER HIGH SCORE

---- -------------------------- ---------------- ---- ---- ------ -- ------------- --- -------- ---------------- ----------------


   8 A.E.                       BRODERBUND         48 DISK BOOT   2  ARCADE        NO  ARCHIVER 22,800            
 8   ABC COMPILER ?             MONARCH            48 DISK BOOT   1  UTILITY       NO  ARCHIVER                   
 8   ABRACADABRA ?              TG SOFTWARE        16 BOTH BINARY    ARCADE        NO  DOS      20,590 LEVEL 8    
 8   ABUSE ?                    ELECTRONIC ARTS    48 DISK BOOT   1  GAME          NO  HAPPY                      
 8   ACEY DEUCY ?               EASTERN HOUSE      16 BOTH BINARY    CARD          NO  DOS      $5,087            
 8   ACHILLES ?                 BEYOND             48 BOTH BINARY    ARCADE        NO  DOS      SILVER METAL      
 8   ACTION BIKER ?             ???                48 DISK BOOT   1  ARCADE        NO  DOS      45,499            
 8   ACTION QUEST ?             JV SOFTWARE         8 BOTH BINARY    ARCADE        NO  DOS                        
 8   ACTION! ?                  OSS                24 DISK BANK16 1  LANGUAGE      YES BANK16                     
 8   ACTION! DEMO'S ?           ???                48 DISK BOOT   1  DEMONSTRATION NO  DOS                        
<snip>

And the view from Altirra after the print job was complete. (Atari Attract mode kicked in pretty quickly lol running in warp speed! lol)

 

Alright, now for cleanup... Copy to notepad.... replaced odd " ? " trailers on some name fields - not sure why those are there, they don't show in the program, some kind of end-of-field delimiter? Then corrected double carriage returns on titles that had 'other' high scores. Import into Excel. paste to column A, run Text-To-Columns. Set manual spaced delimiters, set column A to 'TEXT' so it doesn't try to convert some disk ID's to scientific notation. Freeze top row, set courier font, auto-set column widths to maximum entry, and we're looking pretty!

 

 

SO... using excel's 'remove duplicates' function on the "DSK#" column, it is reduced to 194 unique values.... which implies 194 physical disks (at least that were catalogued). Still not a tiny number!

 

Scrolling around in Excel/Notepad so seamlessly through the whole list after the pain to get the data entered and printed back then from a 200K database... wow new respect for the data processing power we take for granted today.

 

Surprises me he had some titles that I was completely unaware of at the time that only discovered recently... "ARCHIVER 1050 (FOR HAPPY)" ... the fabled "HAPPY CUSTOMIZER 3.2" that is not archived anywhere online that I (and others in other threads) would love to find! As a kid, after he sold off this collection to a friend, I still had my own 8-bit with a small set of disks, and for a while I had a chance to copy disks from this archive when visiting them... but of course I would focus on the games back then.

 

So.. Attached is a ZIP of both my cleaned up .TXT and a formatted Excel .XLSX in "Programs.zip", and finally for posterity's sake, attached are the ATR's you can check out with SynFile for yourself if you desire. (Along with I guess a cracked SynFile+ 130XE version, because it runs just fine from an ATR image)

 

Cheers! Thanks @toddtmw for the inspiration to finally excavate this!

 

PS: In my closet adventures I also found an original SynFile (non XE version) manual & disk, and that one boots up identifying itself as 1.01, 64K detected (on a 512K 800XL). Has 1.01 been preserved, or does it need a verification image in the preservation project? The 130XE version reports as 1.02.

Programs Data Disk #1 (S1-SynFile Data).atr

Programs Data Disk #1 (S2-SynFile+ 130).atr

Programs Data Disk #2 (S1-SynFile Data).atr

Programs.zip

[toddtmw]

Wow. Thats a lot. Ill post a more comprehensive reply when I have more time.