The Beginnings of Space Spartans

[BSRSteve]

Several months ago, Bill Fisher found among his stuff (in his attic), a T-Card of Space Spartans that is a build of Space Spartans at the time it was handed over to Bill and I, after Mike Minkoff had started to look at what Brian Dougherty had been developing when he left the company.

 

As you can see (I think), there are lots of things different about this version, as well as lots of stuff which don't work at all yet.

 

But I will let you guys draw your own conclusions. Lathe26 ripped this rom earlier this year when I was in Seattle visiting my son, so I hope it is in a format that is easily usable for the standard emulators.

SpaceSpartansDougherty.zip

[mr_me]

It has this extra screen that represents a single sector space, you have to fly around to get to the aliens.  I doubt the controls were finalised; it's a little awkward in this early version.

 

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Do you guys have a copy of the French language Space Spartans?

Edited December 19, 2019 by mr_me

[IMBerzerk]

Wow, that would have been pretty cool.  Sad it was taken out of the game.

[BSRSteve]

That screen is a three-dimensional navigation screen. It didn't seem so cool to us, though that is really the main thing that was mostly working.

[BSRSteve]

On 12/19/2019 at 1:45 AM, mr_me said:

Do you guys have a copy of the French language Space Spartans?

Yes (and German and Italian), but without an international voice unit, we haven't been able to get them working. (I have shared it with INTVnut)

[+Lathe26]

1 hour ago, BSRSteve said:

Yes (and German and Italian), but without an international voice unit, we haven't been able to get them working. (I have shared it with INTVnut)

That's very interesting.  This means that there an international Intellivoice actually existed, at least as an unreleased prototype device.

[BSRSteve]

39 minutes ago, Lathe26 said:

That's very interesting.  This means that there an international Intellivoice actually existed, at least as an unreleased prototype device.

I am sure I had some sort of international Intelivoice (probably just the different ROMs, but perhaps something more). There is some initialization code that INTVnut has not figured out (last I talked to him about it). I don't remember what I had to do there, probably setting up which of the three languages to use. The main thing I remember dealing with was the change in syntax for speaking the various numbers (the teens and above). We have also found some of the tapes from the international recording sessions and Nurmix has digitized some of them. It has kind of gotten on the back burner for now, though.

[mr_me]

A copy of those recordings are on the Rocks CD.  If you get the games to run the only thing missing would be the number of aliens and energy level.

[decle]

OK, so something like this cannot be posted without curiosity getting the better of me... ?

 

...and as is sometimes the case, this ROM is very interesting for reasons other than gameplay.

 

The memory map of the ROM starts at $4040 rather than the normal $5000, which is strange.  The game still has its normal cartridge header at $5000, with 4K of code through to $5FFF.  However, it also has over 1K just hanging out between $4040 and $454A.  Why would that be?  Why not just let the code run on from $6000 through $654x, like every other 6K+ game?

 

The answer to these questions might be on page 41 of the APh Datawidget User Guide.

 

The APh Datawidget had 8K of RAM for program storage, but this RAM has to start at the boundary of an 8K page in memory ($0000, $4000, $6000, etc).  So to get the RAM to reside at $5000 it was necessary to set the start address to $4000 and then disable the first 4K of RAM.  This bit of the setup is described in step 8 on page 41 of the manual.  So the largest program a standard Datawidget could debug is just 4K.  Doh!

 

Seeing the strange memory map I wondered whether the chunk of Space Spartans code between $4040 and $454A was relocated there as a workaround to allow it to be debugged on the Datawidget.  Disassembling the code I found that was legit, was called during gameplay and did run correctly (i.e. not a ROM dumping artefact).  I speculated that by ignoring the instructions in step 8 and reenabling the 1K segments at $4000 and $4400 it would be possible for the Datawidget to use this area.  The reason the game code starts at $4040 and not $4000 is to avoid clashing with the repetition of the STIC registers from $4000 - $4021.

 

Up to now this has only been a bit of idle speculation.  However, in the course of their book research Tom & Braxton recently turned up the following 1982 memo from David Stifel, which they gave permission for me to share - nice one

 

stifelLinkageMemo.pdf

 

The memo describes how to link games larger than 4K using the APh toolchain, it also covers the memory limitations of the Datawidget and how to sidestep them by relocating code down at $4000, whilst noting the need to avoid the problem addresses from $4000 to $4021 (it also provides a work around for $4800 should the program be bigger than 6K).

 

So whilst it is not guaranteed, I think there is a fair chance that this version of Space Spartans was set up for debugging on an APh Datawidget and for this reason it has a weird memory map.  And I for one think this is pretty cool ?

 

[Walter Ives]

On 2/6/2020 at 11:07 AM, decle said:

The APh Datawidget had 8K of RAM for program storage...

Nothing was stationary. Chandler's group bought a Datawidget with 16K RAM and APh apparently had larger ones still, including some that emulated Mattel's page-mode ROMs.

On 2/6/2020 at 11:07 AM, decle said:

The memo describes how to link games larger than 4K using the APh toolchain, it also covers the memory limitations of the Datawidget...

The problem this memo was trying to address could *probably* have been transparently dealt with by simply bridging two contacts of the rotary block select switch so that the 8K of widget RAM was doubly addressed to respond in both the $4000-$5FFF and $6000-$7FFF blocks. But never mind that; we'll just fix it in software.

  

These picture snippets were pirated from IntellivisionDevelopmentBackInTheDay.

 

On 2/6/2020 at 11:07 AM, decle said:

... and how to sidestep them by relocating code down at $4000 ...

Fortunately the linker's multiple PSECT support made that trivial. The only reason this memo was necessary is because the new programmers were still wet behind the ears.