Turbo Freezer won't freeze properly?

[OmaOhneBH]

Hi guys,

got a Turbo Freezer 2011 a while ago, today tried it out first time, trying to freeze Donkey Kong Junior later in the game, did it like in this video hitting [ F ]. After that, hitting [ C ] brings me back in the game right to the point, where I freezed it and I'm able to continue playing - however, only if I don't remove the Donkey Kong Junior cartridge before. By turning the Atari off, removing the cartridge, turning the Atari on again, and hitting [ C ] the game won't continue at the point I freezed it, showing only broken graphics, nothing happens. Same happens when saving the snapshot to bootdisk [ S ] or ramdisk [ R ], tried several cartridges. Have I done anything wrong?

 

 

[Mclaneinc]

I don't know much about the TF, but I do know some cartridges have  protection to check to see if the game is actually in the area set aside for cartridge software so can't be overwritten, or if it's somewhere in normal ram, so knows it's not a real cart and normally overwrites that area.

 

Wait till someone with a TF replies, what I have said is a possibilty..

[OmaOhneBH]

Freezed Pac-Man cartridge looks like this:

 

[HiassofT]

This is expected. You have to make sure you use the same hardware setup (OS, RAM upgrade, cart, right bank in case of bankswitching carts etc) when you restore a snapshot as you used when saving the snapshot.

 

Freezing with a cart present and restoring without may work at very rare occasions, sometimes you have to manually change GINTLK to prevent a hard-lockup on restore, but if some code in the cart tries to trash the memory contents in the cart area you are pretty much out of luck (well, you could patch/crack that but then it's better to use a cracked XEX as you won't have the hassles with that).

 

so long,

 

Hias

[OmaOhneBH]

42 minutes ago, HiassofT said:

This is expected. You have to make sure you use the same hardware setup (OS, RAM upgrade, cart, right bank in case of bankswitching carts etc) when you restore a snapshot as you used when saving the snapshot.

 

Freezing with a cart present and restoring without may work at very rare occasions, sometimes you have to manually change GINTLK to prevent a hard-lockup on restore, but if some code in the cart tries to trash the memory contents in the cart area you are pretty much out of luck (well, you could patch/crack that but then it's better to use a cracked XEX as you won't have the hassles with that).

 

so long,

 

Hias

 

Not sure if I get that! I use a 600XL (internally upgraded to 64k of RAM), standard OS, nothing special. I just played Pac-Man (cartridge) again, I hit the freeze button, I chose [ S] SAVE EXTERN > [ B ] BOOT... saving procedure to disk was succesful, boot loading from that disk without cartridge inserted failed tho ??‍♂️. I did the same thing Nir did in his video at 12:48 (he used Pitfall II cartridge instead)

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by OmaOhneBH

[Mclaneinc]

What HiassofT did was confirm my theory as to one reason for it. Remember that the people who made the carts didn't want you to be able to play the cart without having the cart in the machine, some of them added protection to the cart code to check to see if a real Read Only Memory ie cart or ROM. Being that it's read only you cannot overwrite the code because its also real hardware. With freezing software normally copying the cart to Random Access Memory ie RAM it can then be overwritten / corrupted by any protection code in the cart. Not all carts had protection, but this is the most likely reason it is not working.

 

Try (if you have the cart) using a cart that Nir is shown to have dumped, there's a few video's about the Turbo Freezer (well there was), have a look at them and if that same cart works for you then there's nothing wrong at your end, if it does not work then report back

[HiassofT]

Simply speaking: Nir was very lucky it worked without this particular cart. In general it won't work though.

 

so long,

 

Hias

[OmaOhneBH]

Got you! Alright, thanks guys! I was afraid the Turbo Freezer's flash memory could have been faulty.

 

 

[Marius]

On 12/4/2021 at 2:24 PM, HiassofT said:

This is expected. You have to make sure you use the same hardware setup (OS, RAM upgrade, cart, right bank in case of bankswitching carts etc) when you restore a snapshot as you used when saving the snapshot.

 

Freezing with a cart present and restoring without may work at very rare occasions, sometimes you have to manually change GINTLK to prevent a hard-lockup on restore, but if some code in the cart tries to trash the memory contents in the cart area you are pretty much out of luck (well, you could patch/crack that but then it's better to use a cracked XEX as you won't have the hassles with that).

 

so long,

 

Hias

Even with the same hardware setup, it is still possible that that is not enough. In case of bank switching carts, getting back to a previously saved state is not working, since the cartridge did reset to bank #00 on a powercycle. 

It's all the nature of carts. You are right: better use XEX version if you want to use freezer for this kind of things