European Capitals reverse engineering

[tschak909]

I've been assembling cartridges for my daughter to help with her education, and doing them with her, and I have States and Capitals, as it is still relevant today...

 

European Capitals, however, has changed.

 

Has anyone already reverse engineered the data formats inside the program? Europe has changed a few times, since 1980.  (I chuckled when I saw West Germany)

 

-Thom

[Urchlay]

Looks like DATA statements in a tokenized BASIC program. Possibly
you can just CLOAD it, edit, and resave? (Or maybe not, it may be
"list-protected").

[Urchlay]

"Just" data statements... now that I look at it in BASIC instead of a
hex editor, I can see what you mean, ATASCII gibberish. The code that
interprets it is pretty short though.

[Urchlay]

Each country's got one or more DATA lines. First line has the country
name, capital name, and a list of plot/drawto X/Y coordinates expressed
as character data. The last pair is either 2 ctrl-A's (meaning "no more
data") or else 2 inverse zeroes (meaning there's another string of data
on the next line, I guess for countries with discontinous territory).

Also the very first data line, last number, is the total number of
countries. If you were just unifying the former East/West Germanies,
you'd decrease it by one.

For countries that have changed names and/or capitals, but kept the
same borders, you just change the name/capital data. For countries that
merged or split or otherwise changed shape, you gotta draw out the shape
and encode it as ATASCII byte pairs (fiddly work).

[+CharlieChaplin]

Yes,

 

allthough it would be nice to have a more up-to-date version of European countries and capitals, it would be quite some work - e.g. Germany united into one country, Czechoslovakia split up into two countries, Yougoslavia split up into half a dozen of countries, USSR split up into a dozen or so countries... and you never know what will happen to Spain or GB/UK and other countries...

 

[tschak909]

it's fine, this is enough, to change the data.

-Thom

[baktra]

I am wondering if anyone would be interested in re-implementation. Let us say in Mad Pascal or CC65 with better graphical presentation.

Updated and better rendered geographical data, perhaps more objects - rivers, mountain ranges.

[tschak909]

sure.

-Thom

[ClausB]

I wonder if this was a PDI title. Program Design, Inc. did some launch titles for Atari. Is there a "PDI" or something embedded in the listing?

 

[tschak909]

3 minutes ago, ClausB said:

I wonder if this was a PDI title. Program Design, Inc. did some launch titles for Atari. Is there a "PDI" or something embedded in the listing?

 

nope, Bob Polaro wrote this (and the US Capitals version. Ron Borta of Roklan fame took it and made Canada States/Capitals)

 

As for PDI titles, I just ran through the Invitation to Programming series, looking for things to do with my daughter...

 

-Thom

[Marius]

Two things:

 

1:

The capital of The Netherlands is Amsterdam, not The Hague although our government is situated in The Hague.

 

2:

For me the greatest feature of this game was the audio track with the disco music and the spoken introduction of this game. Unfortunately this spoken text is also about Czechoslovakia... so it is not accurate to re-use this audio track... which is a pity.... 

<joke> Perhaps we should change back the states/countries/capitals in real life so they match with this iconic game </joke>