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My Space Mines game finally on original hardware!


The V-Man

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After almost 40 years.  I finally purchased an Atari 800 so I can play the 2 games I still had a printout of on real hardware.  I had a basic game that I retyped in from compute magazine that I have running on an ATR image.  Space Mines was my Assembly game -  4k in length -  that I wrote and I have it running on an ATR image by using Binary Load "L" on Dos 2.5. 

 

If I want to make Space Mines game a cartridge, with code changes so I can start it at a different address, what would be the quickest and easiest way to make a cartridge?  I have a couple of old Brown carts I can open and replace stuff.

 

All the classic consoles/computers sit at the corner of our office.  I don't know why my child self liked the name "space" in all my titles. ?

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Edited by The V-Man
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tjlazer - Space Mines is the game I'd like to get to a cartridge and sure I'll share that one once I figure out how to get it to auto run, having issues with just renaming the file. 

 

I'm sharing Space Caverns first.  It was the first full game that I wrote.  Written in Basic in 10 hours, I submitted the game in 1983 to Compute magazine and got accepted.  Signed the deal, and did not hear from Compute again for almost 2 years.  Then in 1985 the magazine came out and my game was included as a type-in game.  Made almost $7000 on that game and bought my first car with the proceeds.   It also started me on my career with video games and programming in general. 

 

Run this ATR with "Basic".  Use the original basic if you can, as the XL and other basics run the game much faster and make it far more difficult to play.  The object of the game is to shoot the 4 enemies that are closing in on you without touching any of them or any enemies that are stationary.  Press and hold the Fire Button and aim in the direction you want to shoot.  Release the fire button to move around with the joystick.  When you get to the bonus round then you can "capture" as many frozen enemies as you can in the time allotted.   Rinse and repeat.  Game is good for a few laughs.  :)

 

BIGHMW - For Space Mines, do you know what "code" I would need to be aware of to make it work on the 5200?  I don't have the source code to this anymore, its totally disassembled when I printed it out on my 800xl a few years after I wrote it.  But, I can try. 

Caverns.atr

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13 minutes ago, The V-Man said:

tjlazer - Space Mines is the game I'd like to get to a cartridge and sure I'll share that one once I figure out how to get it to auto run, having issues with just renaming the file. 

 

I'm sharing Space Caverns first.  It was the first full game that I wrote.  Written in Basic in 10 hours, I submitted the game in 1983 to Compute magazine and got accepted.  Signed the deal, and did not hear from Compute again for almost 2 years.  Then in 1985 the magazine came out and my game was included as a type-in game.  Made almost $7000 on that game and bought my first car with the proceeds.   It also started me on my career with video games and programming in general. 

 

Run this ATR with "Basic".  Use the original basic if you can, as the XL and other basics run the game much faster and make it far more difficult to play.  The object of the game is to shoot the 4 enemies that are closing in on you without touching any of them or any enemies that are stationary.  Press and hold the Fire Button and aim in the direction you want to shoot.  Release the fire button to move around with the joystick.  When you get to the bonus round then you can "capture" as many frozen enemies as you can in the time allotted.   Rinse and repeat.  Game is good for a few laughs.  :)

 

BIGHMW - For Space Mines, do you know what "code" I would need to be aware of to make it work on the 5200?  I don't have the source code to this anymore, its totally disassembled when I printed it out on my 800xl a few years after I wrote it.  But, I can try. 

 

Caverns.atr 90.02 kB · 1 download

You would need to convert it into a .bin file and do some other things to make a 5200 version. Of course I would also love to see both of your games (Space Caverns and Space Mines) also available on .xex files as well for all of our 8-bit friends who own multicarts like I do.

Edited by BIGHMW
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Hi Vince, I was a Compute! reader, thanks for the story and for sharing Space Caverns.

 

Here's Compute! article about your game:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue58/space_caverns.html

 

I tested it on real hardware and your ATR works, loaded from modern SIO devices and from the multicart AVGCart (as-is, without SIO cable).

 

1677482733_SpaceCaverns.thumb.jpg.c93f4d958f1b92d174374c67af5abc13.jpg

 

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The easiest way to run from cartridge today is via any of the multicarts (see pinned thread). Most of them should be able to run the xex/exe/com binary file without modifications. If you want a "real" cartridge you need to relocate your code to fit into cartridge space (usually A000 to BFFF) and - if required - keep your graphics/variables out of that range. Plus it needs some init code.

 

All that and a lot more is explained here

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SPACE MINES ATR FILE.

 

This game was made a couple of months after Space Caverns.  It was written on an Atari 400 with a cassette recorder in assembly.  I was learning assembly when I was doing this project.  Because it was without a floppy, I wrote it to run starting on Page 7. By the time I got an 800xl with a drive, I did not have the source anymore, something happened to the tape.  But I had a tape with the object file and loaded it and saved it on the floppy and made a printout.  I had to write a small relocation program so it would start from 33c0 as to not blowup DOS, and relocate it back down to 700.  I did a warm restart to run the program after the relocation. 

 

The total size of the game is about 2k of code and about 3k of hand typed graphics.  All I had left of this game was the printout I made.  So I retyped it back in a few years ago.

 

I liked this game much more than Space Caverns, even though this game never saw the light of day.  In fact, this is the first time anyone other than me and a couple of friends will have ever seen it.  I tried to submit to mags, but they were not interested in an Assembly type-in game. 

 

So, the object of the game.  Maneuver your ship around the play-field and avoid EVERYTHING; enemy ships, walls, and your mines.  You can lay mines by pressing the joystick button as you move. You try to move yourself so that the mines are between you and the hoards of enemy drone thingies that chase after you, kinda.  They head in your direction most of the time.  You advance a level when all the enemies have exploded themselves on your mines. There is an intermission every few levels or so.  This game gets moving really fast.  I think I have only made it to level 16 recently.  

 

I hope you all enjoy!

 

Now on to getting this thing working on a cart and burning one.  :)

 

Philsan - Caverns looks really good on your screen.  My S-Video on the 800 is displaying really bright, so I keep it on composite.

 

Mclaneinc - When I first ran Space Caverns using Altirra Basic, I thought I did something wrong.

IMG_6847.jpg

Spacmine.atr

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11 hours ago, BIGHMW said:

@Philsan Now a 5200 version for us would be great, just do the same thing only this time in .bin format and recode it according to how a 5200 operates, as they run differently and are on different OS even though they both use the same graphics chip.

5200 console, amongst other things, has only 16KB, therefore many games cannot be ported.

But I think this one could be ported.

Unfortunately conversion is not an easy task, way beyond my capabilities.

It's not a matter of converting to .bin format, .bin format is only a cartridge file format (like CAR but without cart type informations), used by A8 and 5200.

 

 

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Thanks everyone, glad you have enjoyed the games.  These games should be played with a real joystick.  Much harder with keys, I've tried.  :) 

 

Here is a build for Space Mines! in ROM format. This should only need 8K for those who have a 400 that has not been upgraded, or who want a ROM file instead.  I've tested this on the emulator, I don't have a way to test this on real hardware, yet. Plan on EEPROM soon.

 

Space Mines! (1983)(Vince Valenti).rom

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On 11/17/2020 at 8:52 PM, The V-Man said:

Thanks everyone, glad you have enjoyed the games.  These games should be played with a real joystick.  Much harder with keys, I've tried.  :) 

You have asked about making 5200/etc versions. Did you say you had the assembly source code?

 

Or is it just that you had the binary as a printout? And then you did a disassembly?

 

If have been going though the same process with games I had submitted to ANALOG back in the day, and I managed to get the Atari Macro Assembler source typed in from old hard copy, and then moved it over to using ca65 to assemble it on my Mac.

 

It was such a delight the first time the XEX was working, and what I hadn't seen in decades came back to life.

 

     https://www.instagram.com/p/CFPkg4UnkOL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

Once you have the source, it is then trivial to have it assemble for a different location.

 

If you had not used Atari OS routines (for example, using E: or S:), then it should not be *too* hard to create a 5200 version from the source.

 

 

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20 hours ago, bhall408 said:

You have asked about making 5200/etc versions. Did you say you had the assembly source code?

 

Or is it just that you had the binary as a printout? And then you did a disassembly?

 

If have been going though the same process with games I had submitted to ANALOG back in the day, and I managed to get the Atari Macro Assembler source typed in from old hard copy, and then moved it over to using ca65 to assemble it on my Mac.

 

It was such a delight the first time the XEX was working, and what I hadn't seen in decades came back to life.

 

     https://www.instagram.com/p/CFPkg4UnkOL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

Once you have the source, it is then trivial to have it assemble for a different location.

 

If you had not used Atari OS routines (for example, using E: or S:), then it should not be *too* hard to create a 5200 version from the source.

 

 

It was a binary printout that I did a disassembly back in 1986.  So when I typed it back in, I just typed the opcodes that were printed next to it.  I did not use Atari OS routines as far as I remember.  I think I would need to "print" out the disassembly to a PDF or the like, and then search for Antic/PIA etc. calls.  Then I would need to change them in binary on Assembler debug and re-save.  That is what I thinking.  It would be a project to do for sure.  Probably take a while as I have to dedicate some time to my "real" job.  :)  I have a rudimentary map of the 5200, I am assuming that ANTIC/GTIA are just offset by the page and all the locations relative to the pages did not change?

 

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22 hours ago, The V-Man said:

It was a binary printout that I did a disassembly back in 1986.  So when I typed it back in, I just typed the opcodes that were printed next to it.  I did not use Atari OS routines as far as I remember.  I think I would need to "print" out the disassembly to a PDF or the like, and then search for Antic/PIA etc. calls.  Then I would need to change them in binary on Assembler debug and re-save.  That is what I thinking.  It would be a project to do for sure.  Probably take a while as I have to dedicate some time to my "real" job.  :) 

If you have a working dis-assembly, I could try getting it to assemble with ca65. That would be a very valuable checkpoint along the way.

 

At that point, it would then make sense to update it to use the various system labels for the various ANTIC/POKEY/etc registers, sensible labels for your own jumps and branches (rather than whatever the disassembler assigned to them), comment the source code, etc.

 

22 hours ago, The V-Man said:

I have a rudimentary map of the 5200, I am assuming that ANTIC/GTIA are just offset by the page and all the locations relative to the pages did not change?

Others should chime in, but the main points seem to be the amount and locations of usable ram, where you'd want to assemble for it to be a cart, and the locations of the registers for POKEY/ANTIC/etc.

 

All of that would be MUCH easier to address if you started from source code that would assemble and resulting binary run on an 800, THEN start using labels to make it easier to relocate, and THEN make the switch to 5200.

 

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ps- since you have custom character sets, etc, alot of your "source" would end up being hex to define that set, and would cut down alot on the actual code to mess with...

 

ie, the start of my own character set file...

 

;***************************************
; chset.a65
;
;  Created ??/??/84
;  Updated ??/??/??
;
;    2020-10-08    bhall    ca65 version
;
;***************************************

; Character set must be on a page boundary

ChSet1:
    .BYTE $00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00
    .BYTE $00,$0E,$1E,$1C,$18,$00,$30,$00
    .BYTE $00,$00,$06,$EE,$FE,$D6,$C6,$C6
    .BYTE $00,$03,$C3,$C3,$C3,$C3,$FF,$7E
 

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On 11/14/2020 at 4:35 PM, The V-Man said:

After almost 40 years.  I finally purchased an Atari 800 so I can play the 2 games I still had a printout of on real hardware.  I had a basic game that I retyped in from compute magazine that I have running on an ATR image.  Space Mines was my Assembly game -  4k in length -  that I wrote and I have it running on an ATR image by using Binary Load "L" on Dos 2.5.

I'm not even to 1983 yet so I've got a while to get there for the podcast, but if you're interested in being interviewed about your experience with the game, let me know.

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