Adventures and RPGs...on carts?

[liquidcross]

Most of the games I want for my 800XL seem to be disk-only. This is a problem for two reasons: a) I have no disk drive, and b) I use a Mac, and all of the PC connection software out there is for DOS or Windoze only (I'm still messing around with Virtual PC and a USB-to-serial connector).

 

What's available in cart form? I know someone was working on putting Ultima IV on a cart, but I don't think that ever was completed, was it?

[+davidcalgary29]

Most of the games I want for my 800XL seem to be disk-only. This is a problem for two reasons: a) I have no disk drive, and b) I use a Mac, and all of the PC connection software out there is for DOS or Windoze only (I'm still messing around with Virtual PC and a USB-to-serial connector).

 

What's available in cart form?

 

AFAIK, no RPGs had a commercial release on cart. You can, however, always ask Nir Dary to burn Klatwa on a cart for you. In addition, you might want to ask Steve Tucker if he can place a few RPGs on a flashcart for you. Still, what would you do about game saves? I don't think that any A8 RPGs ever featured a password save feature.

[classics]

Ultima IV was finished, with save and restore directly from cartridge.

 

http://www.atarimax.com/flashcart/forum/vi...ewforum.php?f=4

 

If you log in there, you can see photos of the cartridge and download the image to burn on your own cart.

 

There are also lots of adventure type games available in the 1mbit flash cartridge forum.

 

Steve

[liquidcross]

Still, what would you do about game saves?

Wouldn't they save directly to the flashcart?

[+davidcalgary29]

I stand corrected! I may just get a flashcart in the future so that I can play the Phantasie series from a cartridge. [/b]

[The Eidolon]

Can the games save to flashcart instead of to disk? I know the custom

Ultima IV cart Classics designed does so, but I had assumed the games

would each need to be modified to allow flashcart instead of disk-based

saves. If I recall, the Ultima IV cart requires a 64K system, right?

I would have bought one, but I had the impression it won't run on

my trusty Atari 800.

 

I'm another one of those Mac-using cart-only people with no convenient

way to transfer files to a flashcart, so if anyone knows of a service to

sell flashcarts with pre-burnt disk games, please let me know. (Or

PM me) I'd love to have a cart version or MULE, Spelunker, Jumpman etc.

 

--The Eidolon

[Wrathchild]

Now's probably a good time to announce a project that has sat on a back burner for a (long) while whilst work (relentlessly) keeps me so busy I'm getting no time for anything

 

After earlier reverse-engineering the Infocom engine and then relocating it to the cart-mem area (search AA for Hitchiker's), I then set about getting together all of the A8 released games and then produced two sets of images for carts (Thanks to JetBootJack and Jindroush for their help with that). These were 256K (1Mbit) versions with 3 games each and 1024K (8Mbit) versions with a cart per genre, e.g. Fantasy, Mystery etc. Therefore these are playable and allow you to save states to disk. However, [email protected] supplied me with the routines to write to the flash cart and so my aim is to incorporate this into the original interpreter to replace the disk write routines. I also wanted to add title graphics (cover scans) for all of the games. So with the space required for the saving, assuming more than one slot will be used, means that the number of titles per cart is reduced (4 or 6 - I'll clarify the titles->cart later).

 

So I need to all of you to give me a proverbial kick up the backside to get this completed, however I do envisage the daytime being pretty full-on until April!. The finished product should end up being available through Atarimax, so that may affect the releasing of 'images' for emulators

 

Screenshots to follow

 

Happy New Year!

 

Mark

[Wrathchild]

Just in from work... yes it is 10.30pm UK time

 

Here's some screenshots (the 4 title menu are 512K)