AR: City FlashCart - the next stage

[Gunstar]

It would be great if we can get all these locations opened up. Not only would it give us more to explore, but I know that these places closed by the Palace would be an integeral part of your moral alignment. Not to mention if the code is actually there to join the guilds and aquire spells, it would add an entirely new dimension to the game like it does in the dungeon. I'm totally on board with your ideas at getting these things working now that I know they are already in the code. As a matter of fact, and no disrespect to Wrathchild and all his flashcart work, but I would consider getting these things done far more important than getting it on flashcart to save some swapping and waiting on disks. Especially with SIO2PC&A.P.E already greatly reducing load times from the original floppies. Of course if both could be done, great, but I've been playing it for years with floppies and have gotten used to the loading and swapping which also helps with the nostalgia aspect to me.

The flashcart is great and would greatly improve the game, but I think adding these missing game parts back in would eclipse the benefits of flashcart gaming, IMHO. I would think anyone who is already a fan of the game and are used to playing it the old fashioned way would agree with me, if not, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?

[+remowilliams]

It would be great if we can get all these locations opened up.

I don't think there is any code for those locations. AFAIK, they would have been opened (and had code for them) in the expansions that never came out.

[Gunstar]

It would be great if we can get all these locations opened up.

I don't think there is any code for those locations. AFAIK, they would have been opened (and had code for them) in the expansions that never came out.

You need to go back and read a bit more of this thread, it was already said that the code DOES EXIST in the game! The whole point of my reply above was that I thought the same as you, that it was never finished/started or whatever, and now I've been told different.

Edited November 12, 2006 by Gunstar

[+remowilliams]

You need to go back and read a bit more of this thread, it was already said that the code DOES EXIST in the game! The whole point of my reply above was that I thought the same as you, that it was never finished/started or whatever, and now I've been told different.

I did read the thread. I only see Xebec asking Wrathchild if the code exists I haven't seen anywhere in any of the threads, or any other AR material any mention of code for broken/blocked off places actually being in the game.

 

Or do you know if there is code on the disks for the establishments that are Closed by Order of The Palace, which you could edit to load?

...

5. "Death Trap" establishments, does the code exist for them and if so can they be fixed? If not I would leave them as they have become a part of the character of the game - dangerous.

[Xebec's Demise]

Well, let's get to the bottom of it and find out the facts. What does everyone know about non-functioning establishments?

 

First of all, I know for a fact that there are actually two fully functioning guilds which cannot normally be accessed without an edit:

 

Mercenary Guild			32E, 55N
Power Wizard Institute	 25E, 44N

I know for a fact that the following establishments exist, but do not know the state of their code. What I do know is that when entering them the game goes through a complete load, just as it would for any other establishment. For a fraction of a second graphics appear before the game dispays a message that they are closed by order of the Palace and then the game automatically exits from them similar to the way it does when you have a bugged character from using the wrong Disk 2:

 

  House of Ill-Repute		 42E, 35N
 Maximum Casino			  39E, 36N
 Jacks Fitness Academy	   54E, 4N
 Davids Weapons Trainers	 23E, 47N
 Armstrong Builders		  25E, 50N
 Apollo Trainers			 26E, 46N

Eobet's Alternate Reality Hompage states that the following two establishments exist on the disks, but do not have a location coded onto the map. I also recall someone writing that there were two establishments that were bugged, which resulted in the so called, "Death Traps," I dont remember exactly who, but I believe it was either a Datasoft rep, Philip Price or Jim Norris. I'll have to search for it, but here are the two establishments which are actually on the disks but have a problem with their map locations or do not have a location set:

 

  Grogs Weapons Trainers	 Not on the map
 Flash Weapons Trainers	 Not on the map

Anyone else know anything?

Edited November 12, 2006 by Xebec's Demise

[+remowilliams]

Ah, see that's a bit more of what I was looking for

 

While I know that the establishment/deathtraps may do the regular loading/swap routines, I don't think there is actually any code for them to do anything, especially in the greater sense of more than just a place to visit. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

 

It's such a huge loss that PP's planned expansions never occurred. They would have taken the groundbreaking AR to another level.

[Xebec's Demise]

If only Datasoft hadn't been so greedy and paid the man! Bastards!

Edited November 12, 2006 by Xebec's Demise

[Xebec's Demise]

Here is a disk directory listing form Jim Norris' AR City viewer source, which gives locations for:

 

Disk Side Sector  Start  End	 What it is
2	2	01A7	0800   17FF	Closed by palace program file1
2	2	01CA	1800   26FF	Closed by palace program file2
2	1	02C6	2700   27FF	Closed by palace data

 

The City Viewer its linked in the AR: City thread.

 

Right click to Save As file, then open it, otherwise it will be scrambled.

ardir.txt

Edited November 12, 2006 by Xebec's Demise

[analmux]

@ Wrathchild

 

Any progress on this project ??

[+kheller2]

Not sure if this was covered before but the "death traps" are called "toast squares".

Also the Resurex program (I think it was that) patched the game to allow exporing some more areas, but it didn't open the establishments.

 

I remember reading somewhere that later modules would indeed unlock sections of the City that were mostly complete.

[Wrathchild]

Nope - but please keep hoping and believing

 

Still a few things to get out the way first as we're 5 weeks

moved into a new house... BUT (and that's a big BUT)...

mother-in-law comes over from Czech to help out with our

little one's and so I could get some 'focusing' time to apply

to this project - so the tasks then will pretty much be as

I've outlined before. Either:

 

1) take AR:City as it stands and force it to run in 48K

mode and then use the area under ROM in a 64K machine

to 'hold' the swap data that would normally go to disk.

If this permits the game to work more correctly then

then 'swap' will be extended to write/read to flash memory

in the cart instead

2) bring AR:Dungeon upto the same point as AR:City.

As is stands I have the cart booting the intro but that's

not so clever and I need to put the same (well - very

similar) sector load replacement routines into this.

3) It is really really tempting to just disassemble the

existing AR code and get it into a state I can rebuild

it using CA65. This would then permit me to incorporate

any code for the flash stuff a lot easier.

4) Another approach would be to produce a disk version

without any protection at all, that is - decrypt all sectors

and write them back to disk using standard I/O and then

modify the games loader code not use any checks.

With these images it may then be possible to correct them

for use in an environment such as MyIDE.

 

BTW, those are in order of preference, though I have to admit

I am inclined to get my Infocom carts working first.

 

For 1&2 - after that is the writing of the new saving/loading

to/from cart stuff and so that's why 3 is so tempting. Also,

completing 4 would require 3 also so it may still be better all

around to go down that route, but I will try 1 first.

 

Thanks,

Mark

[Wrathchild]

Not given up - just a lot going on in my life at the moment to give it the focus it deserves.

 

Ah, Real Life™ at it again

Hi again,

 

Just thought I'd take some time (though when I should be sleeping) to clarify

what was going on here as I wasn't really able/up to disclosing it before.

 

The company I worked for, Dendrite, was doing a round a redundancies in

Europe in the name of 'Operational Effectiveness' during the last quarter of 2006.

After the consultation period, my role was deemed to be redundant (much to

the surprise/annoyance of my clients) and though my company kind-of hoped

I'd stay in some other capacity, that wasn't for me. So it wasn't until December

that it was properly confirmed that was I was finishing that month, so I'd been

working hard to deliver some things before I went and was not focusing to much

in the way of Atari things as we had new baby and new house in the pipeline.

As it transpires now, Dendrite have just been bought by their European

competitors Cegedim.

 

On top of all that was my father being diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer

which had grown into the surrounding area (e.g. stomach wall) and so

he had some major surgery in December that thankfully went extremely

well and he's continuing to make a very good recovery from it.

 

So Real Life™ now has me currently job hunting, which could be going better

but I'm currently holding out for something 'right' rather than just something

as I have some money coming in from evening work and redundancy (though

I'll try not to eat into that if I can help it). I could also contract in the meantime.

Worst comes to worst I can even sell my ~1000 Dendrite stocks now as the

takeover boosted the price from $12.5 to $15.5 so that would cover the

mortgage for a few months more . Shame as those were for long service .

 

So appologies for not being able to progess this great project as quick as

we'd all like - but for a couple of years I was literally doing between 4 and 6

peoples jobs in running 3 major (and busy) and 2 minor Pharma clients as

Technical Manager, Technical Project Leader and more often than not

Senior Developer too. January this year has allowed me to enjoy time with

family and then February saw the house move. Some of you may also recall

that my eldest daughter (now 6) has special needs/developmental problems

and as from the beginning of February she's begun taking steps by herself

which has amazed us as we thought this wouldn't happen for a few years yet!

 

So as things are settling into a routine here I'm happy to ride the wave of 'up'

I feel now and hopefully I will continue to find rest-bites to further my A8 projects.

 

Take care,

Mark

Edited March 20, 2007 by Wrathchild

[The Eidolon]

Thanks for the update--very sory to hear about your father. Pancreatic cancer is a very

tough one, and hard to detect early. Best wishes for your family and for real life, so to speak.

[danwinslow]

Hang in there Mark. Someone as talented as you will not have many employment issues. Sorry to hear about your father; I just lost my mom to ovarian cancer after 4 years of fighting it. That was a lot longer than they thought she'd last...but she's stubborn.

 

I wish someone would pay us to develop a8 stuff.....that would solve a lot of issues.

[Wrathchild]

Cheers guys! (also to those on the Wednesday chats who helped too by just being there)

 

Eidolon's right, "hard to detect early", Dad was uncomfortable 6 years ago and Mum convinced him to be checked so he went along - no evidence of anything - and that experience then put my Dad off going forward again (men/illness/doctors/hospitals - we don't tend to do that if we can help it do we?!).

 

Dan, sad to hear of your loss - such a long fight - fighters are to be admired!

 

RE: payments - I have had a couple of take-aways (shared with the family of course) on dontations from kind people grateful for my FlashCart efforts to date - but yes, the thought of doing A8 full time is a nice one! 2006 was good for the A8's though and 2007 looks like it could be equally as good, if not better.

 

Mark

[Shawn Jefferson]

Mark, don't let us Atari people pressure you into "burning the candle at both ends", so to speak, sounds like you've got a lot on your plate as it is. I'm appreciative of all you have done so far for the Atari community, and I'm amazed that you find the time!

[Chunder]

Agreed - much as I'd love to see this achieve fruition, there really are some things that are more important!

[AtariNerd]

It's always been a dream of mine to see this ported to cartridge form. Good to see it is within capable hands. Hope all is well with you, wrathchild. Take as much time as you need.

 

:::gentle bump back up the list:::

[phuzaxeman]

Thought you'd all like to know that, after further investigations, I'm now poised to start re-coding the part of the game that swaps out data to the disk when you go into buildings etc, in order for it to write to flash memory instead for later restoring. With any luck, this will mean that the temporary character will behave properly and the map won't corrupt.

 

I'll release a version when that's done and then the following phase would then be to look at the 'save/load character' routines to get those to work from Flash too...

 

Disclaimer - I've recently got EA's "Tiger Woods 2005" for the PC which distracts me on occasion

 

awesome! do you have an estimate date of completion?

[carmel_andrews]

WC....I take it then you will be incorp. the custom SIO routine that Philip Price did in the orig... that's the only way you'll be able to read the data (exactly) into the flashcart and get it working as if it were a disk

 

I say that because i remember reading that the way the routine was written, each time the sio routine loaded a specific sector it would generate different data each time (which would defeat hardware copiers like happy/SA/SA2 etc, even with extensions like PDB files or hardware bit copiers for the SA/sa2)

 

Also, are you hacking the normal version or the version for the xe (as i heard there was a special 128k version)

 

I wouldn't mind seeing the xe version of Eidolon on Cart as well (i've already got an emulator file, xex i think)

 

Lastly did i remember hearing you right talking about re doing bounty bob on cartridge, as i remember that there's something strange about the tape version that i tried converting to binary years ago

 

the program has 1 loaders and is a 2 stage load (1st stage, going by memory.... force loads in at cxxxh, the main block loads in at 0600h i think...could be wrong) the thing is that both blocks of code change as they are loaded into memory...i.e the data on the disk doesn't correspond to the data in memory...it is somehow scrambled or changed.....

 

Several other games do this, international karate (tape version), warhawk or anything by firebird (UK) and operation blood

Edited June 25, 2007 by carmel_andrews

[Wrathchild]

@phuzaxeman : no progress of late I'm afraid and certainly I'd need to

come up to speed on where I was and where I was heading

Two main phases to overcome, 1st is the swap-out issue which would

get a useable version using a temporary character, then 2nd would

be to begin looking at the saving/loading of a character to cart.

That means messing about with and extending the character menus

which needs some careful thought regarding memory usage etc.

 

I've set myself up a Joomla site that I'm looking to start chronicling

my numerous un-finished works . Should make interesting reading.

 

@Carmel : Don't worry, most things have already been thought over and considered.

Your line of thinking is a little wrong though as FlashCarts don't emulate disks

in the Read/Write sense as a Flash memory chip is broken into a (typically) small

number of blocks, normally 8, e.g. a 1 MBit (128 KByte) chip has 8 blocks of 16K

and an 4 MBit (512 KByte) chip has 8 blocks of 64K. So you can only 'format' or

'reset' a block to all 1s. When something writes to the memory it can only set bits

to 0 from 1, not from 0 to 1. Therefore you can't emulate a disk as the effective

sector size is not the 128 or 256 bytes a DOS would require. I think you might be

able to get flash memory chips with smaller erase-block sizes but we'd probably

need a new cart to utilize it.

 

Also the protection was cracked before by others and so those were used

as a base for initial development, disk protection is only on the first disk

but that's true that SIO is designed to checksum each sector and have that

checksum based on the last sector's so that any (manual) change of the

data would be detectable.

 

I think you must have overlooked these posts for the Lucas' games:

Eidolon : http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=41564

Koronis Rift : http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=42731

(These aren't on the AtariMax site yet, probably I should resolve that)

 

Bounty Bob we went over here:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=74656

Slapping a self extracting or relocating XEX into a cart can be

done by anyone, but would need an XL at least to play it,

i.e. the additional game data is stuffed under the OS.

Using the existing BB cart as a base I was seeing if this could

easily be put onto more common formats (Switchable XEGS

or FlashCart) such that anyone Atari 8-bit owner could run it.

Turned out that the design is very clever (as mentioned in

articles on the web IIRC) as the bank switching is done in a

very well thought way (utilizing the stack) and if you rework

it to take much longer then the game's critical timing loop is

broken and the so the game doesn't work.

 

Best wishes,

Mark

[Xebec's Demise]

Also, are you hacking the normal version or the version for the xe (as i heard there was a special 128k version)

 

I don't know if there is a special version of AR the City specifically for the XE, but I do know that the cracked version I had did perfrom faster with less disk loads on my 130XE as compared to my 800XL. If I remember correctly the XE only loaded encounters once and after that they would pop up instantly with little or no disk load.

 

I have seen version 1.2, so I suppose there were versions 1.0 and 1.1?

 

Time to do some testing and digging around...

[Xebec's Demise]

After downloading all the AR City files I could find and then scanning all the files for duplicates I found many duplicate files with different file names. I also found some sets that had a unique disk one and sometimes two, but we know that is likely due to someone creating a character with their disk 1 and the saves that the game makes to disk 2. However, I did find six complete sets of City disks where all four disks were unique, which does suggest there may be several versions:

 

1. Alternate Reality v1 - files titled "Alternate Reality (v1,s1).atr," etc., 5200/Micro crack

 

2. Alternate Reality v2 - files titled "Alternate Reality (v2,s1).atr," etc., 5200/A-HA crack

 

3. Alternate Reality xfd - files titled "Alternate Reality (s1).xfd," etc., 5200/Micro crack

 

4. Alternate_Reality_The_City US Gold - files titled "Alternate Reality - The City [side 1-1].atr," etc., no title screen

 

5. alternative_reality-the_city - files titled "Alternate Reality The City A.ATR," etc., 5200/Micro crack

 

6. atari 8-bit city with character disk v2 - files titled "CITY11.ATR," etc. 5200/A-HA crack

 

Now, of course there could not be six versions right? I suppose the content of xfd files differ from atr files? But that would only eliminate one set. Differences in the crack credits could account for the differences in disk 1, but what about disk 1 side 2 and disk 2 side 2? Why would those disks be unique in all six sets?

 

All six sets have unique disk files, but going by the title screens, it looks like there may be three different versions; version 1 cracked by 5200/Micro, version 2 cracked by 5200/A-HA, and the US Gold version with no title screen.

 

Any thoughts? I guess the differences in the disks could be compared more closely with a better utility that displays the actual differences in the code - the one I used just scanned the files and marked any duplicate files.

Edited July 25, 2007 by Xebec's Demise

[Wrathchild]

but what about disk 1 side 2 and disk 2 side 2?

Hi Xebec,

 

Differences in Disk 2 / Side 1 would hopefully be explained by the details

written to disk and re-read when entering leave buildings, but I wouldn't

expect to see differences in the other sides (D1S2 and D2S2).

Only speculation, but maybe there were some additional code-protections

(other than those on D1S1) built into the game and one cracker spotted

and fixed that and the other didn't? Another (long shot) guess is maybe

that the 'copy' was tainted somehow (bad read) or data overwritten

accidently during the coding of the patch.

 

Are these odd bytes here and there or complete sectors?

PM them to me and I'll use HexWorks to do the comparing.

 

Regards,

Mark

(and no news of progress to report I'm afraid, side-tracked again )

[Xebec's Demise]

Files sent.

 

I just used a file scanner, so I did not compare the actual differences in the file data, but only compared the files to make sure all disks were unique and deleted all duplicates.

 

It really is strange that there would be so many sets of disks that are different. That was my guess too, maybe several of them only have slight differences. There may be one set that is a duplicate as I was using one to play with after I had scanned all the downloads I found. But it looks like there could be a version 1, version 2, and US gold version of Alternate Reality: The City.

alternate_reality_the_city.zip

Edited July 27, 2007 by Xebec's Demise