_The Doctor__ Posted June 10, 2020 Share Posted June 10, 2020 (edited) 10 hours ago, Faicuai said: v8 is working on Incognito and XL/XE OS loads!!! The problem experienced on v7 has been mitigated. (NOTES: v7 has code that directly manipulates TRIG3 ($D013) and GINTLK ($03FA) at rom-file offset 0218h, and then at 0230h. What is interesting is that v8 DOES have 0218h code present, but 0230h has been removed... If, in the future, it is absolutely necessary to manipulate / equate values read from $D013 into $03FA, and we want to make sure things run on Incognito/800, Antic-DMA has to be shut down first, prior to any GINTLK ($03FA) writing. The above is due to a significant bug on Incognito (on XL/XE mode), in which reads from $D013 produce a range of floating-bus data if ANTIC is on, and $D0 if Antic is OFF, all of which are DIFFERENT than official XL/XE OS values for this register (O or 1). It is an incompatibility. Cheers! I'd double check your explanation and wording (cross I's dot T's have someone look at & correct) and send to candle cc fjc privately so a fix can be done. this something the two could actually handle as the process is now better understood. With this ironed out maybe it will make things easier to find and square off another issue as well. Edited June 10, 2020 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted June 10, 2020 Share Posted June 10, 2020 4 hours ago, Wilheim said: Great! Glad to know it's been fixed. The GINTLK writing is still present, this time at 0236h on the V8 rom. I think that the problem was because I wrote GINTLK right after turning off the cartridge without disabling NMIs, so to save some bytes at the $480 RAM zone. The LDA and STA instructions just takes 6 cpu cycles, so I thought that it won't be a problem, because I tested time after time in stock XL/XE computers. But looks like that in your Incognito configuration, the VBI just begins in the middle of this 6 cycles. That's what I guessed. To solve it, I decided then to turn off the NMIs, then turn the cartridge off, write TRIG3 to GINTLK, and enabling NMIs again. It takes 10 additional bytes, but I think it's worth to do that way. Just as an anecdote, let me tell you that the Dungeon skips the OS VB interrupt, so there's no need to update GINTLK during the game. I think that another way to prevent the hang up is by making a VB inmediate interrupt that takes TRIG3 and write it into GINTLK. That way, when the OS VBI begins, it will always have the same value every frame. I did this in the cartridge dumper I recently published. Just to let you know, the GINTLK writing is used on two ocassions: the first one is when it exits to boot the disk or cassette, and the second one when it starts the init routine at $480 right after the credits title. @Faicuai, by the way, could you try to dump the cartridge content with that dumper? I want to see if it's possible with Incognito. On the other hand, I would like if someone can test a City character transfer, specially one who is at a Dungeon entrance. I want to check that everything is working fine. I tested with newly created characters, but I'm not sure if it keeps the inventory, money, battle gear, etc. Cheers! this bit of information showing the gymnastics, cycle and byte eating, would be good info as well... not only to help them understand, but to help or patch / fix other properly written software to get around the incompatibility and problems by the current incognito in use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted June 14, 2020 Author Share Posted June 14, 2020 Well, I think the game is working ok in your configurations. If there’s a bug in the game, please let me know, specially if you can finish the game. I’m wondering if the time on the first credits screen is ok. Or do you think I could make it to take more time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted June 14, 2020 Share Posted June 14, 2020 3 minutes ago, Wilheim said: I’m wondering if the time on the first credits screen is ok. Or do you think I could make it to take more time? You should make it longer. There's no reason not to provide time for looking over the credits screen. You could even require a joystick or keyboard button press to proceed past it. I never minded doing that for intro screens, as long as there weren't like 7 of them. Haha... 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eegad Posted June 15, 2020 Share Posted June 15, 2020 Awesome! Will have to try this over the weekend. Would love to see The City turned into a cart as well. I know somebody here started working on it years ago, but never quite got it working.... It would load up and let you start playing, but after a few minutes it would crash, I believe when it went to load certain types of creature encounters. Anyway, great to see the Dungeon finally converted to cart. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted June 15, 2020 Share Posted June 15, 2020 (edited) 2 hours ago, eegad said: Awesome! Will have to try this over the weekend. Would love to see The City turned into a cart as well. I know somebody here started working on it years ago, but never quite got it working.... It would load up and let you start playing, but after a few minutes it would crash, I believe when it went to load certain types of creature encounters. Anyway, great to see the Dungeon finally converted to cart. It'd be even nicer to have them both on one 8 Mbit cart. Edited June 15, 2020 by MrFish 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted June 15, 2020 Share Posted June 15, 2020 7 hours ago, eegad said: Awesome! Will have to try this over the weekend. Would love to see The City turned into a cart as well. I know somebody here started working on it years ago, but never quite got it working.... It would load up and let you start playing, but after a few minutes it would crash, I believe when it went to load certain types of creature encounters. Anyway, great to see the Dungeon finally converted to cart. Phillip Price seems to be one of those special kind of genius. I wouldn't hold my breath on someone cracking what he did properly. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kyle22 Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 Is @Philip Price still checking in on AA? Hopefully he sees this thread. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 6 hours ago, MrFish said: It'd be even nicer to have them both on one 8 Mbit cart. Unfortunately, due to the flash architecture, it’s possible to put only the Dungeon on this cartridge. There are about 128 kbytes available only. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 45 minutes ago, Wilheim said: Unfortunately, due to the flash architecture, it’s possible to put only the Dungeon on this cartridge. There are about 128 kbytes available only. I forgot these games were so big. Atarimax needs to make a new format that supports 16 Mbits, or more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 2 hours ago, MrFish said: I forgot these games were so big. Atarimax needs to make a new format that supports 16 Mbits, or more. Theorically, it is possible to squeeze the Dungeon+ character disk into a 4 Mbit cartridge (512 Kbytes). The problem is that the flash cartridge uses 64Kbytes sectors to be erased. That forced me to use an entire 64K for the header of the disk and the 4 save states. That occupies a total of 320 Kbytes, considering that the character data uses only 5 kbytes aprox, so it could only take 20 kbytes to store the entire character disk. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 (edited) New V9 version! Added feature: - Put a waiting routine of 3 seconds during the credit screen. An exclamation point appears when the loading of the intro is completed, so you can skip the wait by pressing a key, consol key or joystick button. It's stored in my GitHub repository: https://github.com/Wilheim1977/ARDungeonCartridge Hope you like it! Alternate Reality - The Dungeon v9.bin Edited June 16, 2020 by Wilheim 4 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 Next best thing would be a monolithic ATR version that supports turbo SIO and IDE types that use their own SIOV. For what it's worth, when I attempted to crack Dungeon there is an override where it can be forced to assume a lower RAM system (even 48K ? ) From memory you got it by holding a console key at a certain time during early load. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 1 hour ago, Rybags said: Next best thing would be a monolithic ATR version that supports turbo SIO and IDE types that use their own SIOV. For what it's worth, when I attempted to crack Dungeon there is an override where it can be forced to assume a lower RAM system (even 48K ? ) From memory you got it by holding a console key at a certain time during early load. I think it shouldn’t be that difficult. You should back the SIO registers up from page 0, 2 and three, by then make a standard SIO call. I think some place on the $2000-$23ff address zone would be an alternative. About the override, that’s right, by pressing select. What I did on this cartridge is forcing to detect 48k ram, so the upper ram is available to put a new cartridge loader routine 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted June 22, 2020 Author Share Posted June 22, 2020 Well, today I programmed this small utility for the Dungeon cartridge. It's a transfer utility from disk to cartridge or vice versa. I think it would be useful to backup your character into a floppy disk or putting your old characters into the cartridge. To load it, just put the cartridge and the ATR image on D1:, boot the computer with OPTION pressed and it will boot the Mydos disk. Then you load the file ARCHAR.XEX. How to use it? Press SELECT to define the operation (Disk to cartridge or cartridge to disk) and START to begin the process. The program checks if the source (disk or cartridge) has a character disk. Otherwise, it will display an error message. The source code is on my GitHub repository: https://github.com/Wilheim1977/ARDungeonCartridge Hope you like it. Cheers!! DiskARTransfer.atr ArCharExample.atr 8 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phlod Posted July 6, 2020 Share Posted July 6, 2020 I noticed that during the Initializing screen, when the game normally enumerates the disk drives it detects, it doesn't show 128K as I'm used to seeing when playing on hardware with 128k or more. Is that normal or is there something I need to do to make the game see my extra RAM when playing off the Cart? Or is that not possible for some reason on the Cartridge version? Thanks for the conversion! I've been playing it for hours now, and it's so nice to not need to flip disks! Even on an emulator it was annoying. Now I'm thinking of strats for speedrunning the game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted July 6, 2020 Share Posted July 6, 2020 @Phlod I think this was covered earlier in the thread but as the game is accessing code & data from cartridge banks there is little/no gain from utilising the extended RAM. Effectively, in the original that is used as a disk cache along with some of the memory under the OS. As Wilheim forces the game to think there is just the 48K RAM, this permits the routines to handle the replacement ROM & virtual disk access code to use the RAM above 48K. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted February 23, 2021 Author Share Posted February 23, 2021 Bumping this thread. Just checking if the conversion is working ok. Have anyone found a bug on it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xebec's Demise Posted December 9, 2022 Share Posted December 9, 2022 @Wilheim @Wrathchild I think I just witnessed the end results of your amazing work on this project and thought you would enjoying seeing too. Alternate Reality The Dungeon - Atari 8-bit home computers - Unboxing and first time playing Where do you have these complete boxed games for sale? Has anybody made any progress on The City? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilheim Posted December 9, 2022 Author Share Posted December 9, 2022 14 hours ago, Xebec's Demise said: @Wilheim @Wrathchild I think I just witnessed the end results of your amazing work on this project and thought you would enjoying seeing too. Alternate Reality The Dungeon - Atari 8-bit home computers - Unboxing and first time playing Where do you have these complete boxed games for sale? Has anybody made any progress on The City? I have some boxes. Please mp me to see details. Currently I don’t have any progress about the City. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ocelo Posted December 12, 2022 Share Posted December 12, 2022 On 12/8/2022 at 8:31 PM, Xebec's Demise said: @Wilheim @Wrathchild I think I just witnessed the end results of your amazing work on this project and thought you would enjoying seeing too. Alternate Reality The Dungeon - Atari 8-bit home computers - Unboxing and first time playing Where do you have these complete boxed games for sale? Has anybody made any progress on The City? Thanks for the shoutout on my Twitch video! Here's the YouTube video of the same stream. Great game and I look forward to playing it again on stream! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magnusfalkirk Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 (edited) Here's a really weird thing. I can run v8 and v14, that I downloaded from GitHub, on the Atari800MacX emulator. If I put those images in my Side3 cartridge and try to run them on my stock Atari 800xl I get the follwing screens when I try to run the images: The first one is the screen with the alien ship over the city. I get maybe a quarter of that. The second one is where you get your character statistics. Which is a garbled mess. The third one is asking for side 1 of disk 2. No matter what I do it continues to ask for side 1 of disk 2. I don't understand why they would be fine on the emulator and mess up on the real hardware. Edited December 13, 2022 by magnusfalkirk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magnusfalkirk Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 I just discovered another problem with the cartridge image and this is in the Atari800MacX emulator. I've created a save disk. Then created a character. When I have my character in the dungeon and press S to save, then pressing Y yes I want to save the character, the game will say it saved the character. When I press space to continue playing and select E to use existing character the game says there is no characters on the save disk. This was using v14 of the game from your GitHub repository. I thought that might be a way to get arouind the problem with the images running from the Side3 cartridge, guess not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 Can you post the pre and post images of the save disk as that could help @Wilheim check? Does the MacX emulator work in anyway like the Altirra emulator in that an ATR image can be mounted in different ways, i.e. can be virtual 'in-memory' and then needs telling to write back to the filesystem or can directly update the ATR file? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 It all works on real hardware, but emu maybe not, does side 3 provide atarimax romdisk save area? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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