Alternate Reality: The Dungeon Atarimax cartridge.

[magnusfalkirk]

5 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

It all works on real hardware, but emu maybe not, does side 3 provide atarimax romdisk save area?

It may work on real harware for you but it didn't for me. Those three pics I posted are from running The Dungeon cartridge image on my Atari 800xl via the Side3 cartridge. On the Atari800MacX the game runs but I can't save anything. I'll have to take another look at that in the morning to see if maybe I was doing something wrong.

[_The Doctor__]

real hardware being the atarimax cart. side 3 might not have a romdisk saving area...

[Wrathchild]

Indeed, both the SIDE3 and the Atari800MacX would need to support/implement the flashchip write capabilities in order for saving to work

Edited December 14, 2022 by Wrathchild
Doesn't save to Disk

[Mclaneinc]

Not read whole thread but sometimes these cart enabled games still try to save to disk drive..Tried that?

[magnusfalkirk]

Okay, I'm going to say this again, with emphasis, I CAN NOT GET THE ALTERNATE REALITY: THE DUNGEON CATRIDGE IMAGE THAT WILHEIM MADE TO RUN ON MY ATARI 800XL! So I don't know if I can even create a save disk and try to save anything to it since the game won't run. The 3 pictures I posted earlier are what I see on the monitor hooked up to the 800xl when I try to boot The Dungeon! The problem with saving is when I run the game in the Atari800MacX emulator. I can create a save disk, and the game says a save disk was successfully created, but when I tell the game to save, and it says it saved, when I go to play again using the character I saved it says there is no character on the disk.

[Wilheim]

23 hours ago, magnusfalkirk said:

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.

I think they could be an incompatibility issue on side3 on emulating an Atarimax cartridge. Do you have an original Atarimax cartridge to test it on?

 

On the other hand, I’m not sure if Atari800mac emulates the flashing properties of the Atarimax cartridge. Can anyone confirm it?

Edited December 14, 2022 by Wilheim

[magnusfalkirk]

No I don't have an Atarimax cartridge and unfortunately the only Atari emultor there is for Mac OS X is the AtarI800MACX.

[+MrFish]

18 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

real hardware being the atarimax cart. side 3 might not have a romdisk saving area...

5 hours ago, Wilheim said:

I think they could be an incompatibility issue on side3 on emulating an Atarimax cartridge.

Regarding this post: Problem with Atarimax image on Side3

 

Calling @flashjazzcat

 

[flashjazzcat]

AtariMax emulation with the high start bank was fixed some months ago with JED or loader update or a combination of the two, IIRC (if there was a problem at all; I forget), but JEDEC EPROM flashing is not emulated, so anything attempting to use it won't work.

Edited December 15, 2022 by flashjazzcat

[+Spaced Cowboy]

24 minutes ago, magnusfalkirk said:

No I don't have an Atarimax cartridge and unfortunately the only Atari emultor there is for Mac OS X is the AtarI800MACX.

 

There is also Atari++ by @thorfdbg on this site

And atari800 (which is what Atari800MacX is based on, using the SDL output) is active most recently about a month ago

 

And (for the more specialized, non-graphical use) there's mini65-sim by @dmsc, which I've just integrated into my build-process for xtal 

[magnusfalkirk]

I don't see anyway that I can use any of those other emulators. Both Atari++ and atari800 are designed to run on Windblows, and Like you I have a Mac, since I'm using Atari800MacX. I don't have a Windows machine, don't want one, I have used Apple Computers starting with the ][+, the //e, the //c the IIGS, since 1980. Then I transitioned to the Mac line starting in 95. Got back into the Apple II via emulation and then real hardware at an estate sale. Currently have two GSes, one with the AppleSqueezer expanded memory/accelerator. A //c+ and a //e. 

 

Had to use windows machines in the military from about the mid 80's to retirement in 97. Don't care for Windows, have never liked it. Now if you can tell me an easy way to use either Atari++ or atari800, I'll be willing to try.

[+Spaced Cowboy]

Atari++ definitely runs on the Mac, I know because I downloaded and compiled it last night  One minor issue (a missing semicolon in new.hpp which clang presumably chokes over where gcc doesn't) but after that 5-second fix, it compiled and ran just fine.

 

Atari800 has an SDL target and you can definitely get SDL apps running on the Mac - again, I've done it. I've not specifically compiled atari800, but the atari800MacX is "just" (it's a significant piece of work, I'm not trying to put it down at all!) a Mac-friendly wrapper around the SDL port. Since Atari800MacX development stopped a while ago now, and the original Atari800 is still under active development, you might be able to get it to work better for you. Again, I haven't tried - what I have works great for my purposes

 

[magnusfalkirk]

Is there anyway you can send me copies of those programs already compiled? I don't know anything about compiling programs on the Mac, in fact I know very little about programming at all.

[+Spaced Cowboy]

I've attached the atari++ binary, that's straightforward to compile, the atari800 one looks more involved at first glance.

 

Whether it'll work I'm not sure, I'm running an ARM Mac so it's probably compiled for ARM...

 

 

atari++.zip

[magnusfalkirk]

Okay, I downloaded the zip file and opened it up. I now have a Unix file and if I double click on it it just opens the terminal. What program do I need to use to compile this so I can try running it? I'm using an older Mac, this to be exact: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014). Or am I just SOL?

[+Spaced Cowboy]

So a few things:

 

1) This is an arm64 executable, and there's no intel code in there, so yeah, you're going to need to compile it yourself.

 

2) You'll need xQuartz installed to run it

 

3) I don't think it does AtariMax carts - at least it's not on the home-page (linked above). You could try asking @thorfdbg if it does. 

 

There's a few things you have to do to get it compile - edit the new.hpp and also get rid of a few flags in the makefile, run 'configure' (which might mean installing homebrew or Macports) and installing X11. 

[Wrathchild]

Atari++ does support flashchip writing as I shared the work I'd done on Atari800WinPL at the time and this was integrated (recoding the C as C++)

Edited December 18, 2022 by Wrathchild

[Stefan Both]

On 12/13/2022 at 1:55 AM, magnusfalkirk said:

... 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. ...

Using V9 bin on real hardware, posted a few posts above.

(800xl, U1MB and MaxFlash cartridge 8mbit)

Same problem. It's asking for Disk 2.

Where is the correct/newest V14 ?

BOOTCartridge/Alternate Reality - The dungeon/Ardungeon.rom

This one? Or is it V12 and I have to utillize

Update V13 and V14 after flashing V12?

 

Sorry, it probably sounds silly, but I'm not familar with github stuff.

 

Greetings 

 

Stefan 

[magnusfalkirk]

Got my cartridge of Alternate Reality -  The Dungeon in the mail today from Wilheim. I'm impressed with the packaging, the manual, the map and the cartridge itself. I'll check it out tomorrow, along with the copy of Adventure II that I recently got from the Atari Age store. Thank you Wilheim for the work you did on this and I expect to have hours worth of play out of this.

[magnusfalkirk]

Got an email from Wiheim today asking if the cartridge made it okay and if it runs on my machine. Put the cartridge in the 800xl and turned it on. Was able to create a character save disk, create a character, walk around the dungeon a little. Saved the character and then reloaded the character. So it plays well.