USCF Chess and Triple Challenge

[decle]

15 hours ago, Zendocon said:

The original three games work, but choosing Reversi just gives me a garbled screen (but no "CPU off in the weeds").

 

Thanks for giving the script a bash, sorry it didn't work first time...

 

TL;DR Summary: There was a problem related to garbage at the end of some Triple Challenge ROM images.  This new version should work around this problem and is simpler to use as it generates its own quadChallenge.cfg (the .cfg file found in the previous version is no longer needed):

 

quadChallenge.zip

 

 

Details for the Curious: Following a bit of offline diagnosis with @Zendocon, we have discovered that his problem was down to variations in ROM images of Triple Challenge.  Like most copies commonly circulating Zendocon's ROM contains junk at the end of the .bin file.  This appears to be the result of the original dump including the state of the RAM used by Chess.  The initial state of this RAM is irrelevant and it shouldn't really be in the ROM image.  My copy of Triple Challenge has been "filtered" to contain just the 16K decle ROM that holds the game code (8K for Chess and 4K each for Checkers and Backgammon).  Unfortunately, I had forgotten about the longer 44KB version of the ROM, and in its original form the script generates a corrupt quadChallenge.bin when used with this more common image.

 

The enhanced script provided in this post corrects the problem by taking a copy of Triple Challenge and capping it to 32KB (16K decles), before concatenating Reversi onto it.  This should fix any Triple Challenge ROM compatibility issues.  The script also leaves the 32KB ROM-only version of Triple Challenge in tripleChallenge32k.bin / .cfg.  If you have the larger 44KB image, you might want to replace your copy of the ROM with this "cleansed" version.  The 32KB image is functionally identical to the 44KB version and is technically more correct.  Finally, thanks to some ROM merging magic from @intvnut, the quadChallenge.bin generated is now a clean, minimal version that does not need to be patched at start-up by a complex quadChallenge.cfg.  Hat tip as always to the master of Inty tech.

 

If there are any other issues or feedback, just shout!