Mrshoujo

Cavelord... I seem to remember this being a German game and somehow I had some help translating it into English. I don't remember if I sector edited it or it had a BASIC listing which I edited. I do remember changing Schlussel which means Key. The translations made the game immediately playable. I don't think I still have the disk. It didn't have the problems mentioned here as it was a program and not a boot disk. I also seem to recall it was on a public domain or something disk. Maybe I'm thinking of a different game but having seen gameplay video on YouTube some time ago maybe not.

Atari DOS 2.5 may have problems accessing Drives 3 and 4. At least that was my recent experience. Also what is Diskfix.com? Anyone ever heard of a disk utility called Tracer? It could load a sector and display it 3 ways: printed to the screen, poked internally to the screen, and a graphic representation in a player along the right side of the screen. This feature had the capability of letting you use a joystick and edit the bytes bit by bit and then write it back out. I fixed the unreadable font on the Paperclip word processor this way. I lost Tracer during some stupid inadvertent placement of a magnetic microphone around my floppies. I recovered other files but Tracer... ??

Anyone ever hear of the sound files made with ASP aka the Antic Sampling Processor? I built the circuit it needed and sampled a lot of audio with it back in the day. Don't know what it used for a header but could be helpful.

A bit late to this party, I recall reading something in an interview of the fellow who wrote Cosmic Ark and he hinted at the starfield being a quirk of the TIA which he discovered and even guys like David Crane thought was ingenious. I don't know if he shared the trick but it seemed like something he kept in his arsenal of programming. Why not disassemble the 2600 ROM to see what he did? If it was possible to drive the GTIA the same way... Probably doesn't have the same quirk.

I wrote a set of MadLib type programs for a college Techniques of Writing class presentation back in the late 1980s. I recorded It on video, too. It was fun.

Aren't Display List Interrupts relocatable code? It could be stored in a string.

Do other cartridges work?

Back in the day, I bought the Parker Bros. Q*bert cartridge (still have it) and it worked fine in my 800XL. So the problem may be in the 130XE.

I propose an alternative mapping of the buttons be available as an option so the controller is held upside down making the directional cross key usable with the right thumb and the "fire" buttons usable with the left thumb. I'm of the group of players for whom the Atari 2600 joystick was perfect as is and subsequently bought the Atari Lynx because it could flip the screen making it so I could play with the direction pad with my right thumb and the A and B buttons with my left. When I converted an NES controller years ago, that's how I wired it up. Easy enough to rip out the chip and solder in the wires from the cable.

APAC "mode" creates a screen display of 16 colors and 16 luminances interleaved. Pro: simulates 256 colors. Con: it's basically 80 column Graphics 9 in horizontal resolution. Jeff Potter's GIF ('jiff') viewer programs can do RGB separation even up to the 160×192 resolution and then quickly flip between the 3 colored screens, but that yields 64 colors. Whereas in APAC ('All Points, All Colors'), it can appear to wiggle up and down by 1 scan line.

Clean the rubber roller with Windex as it's nicer to the rubber than alcohol. The head on the 410 is split channel stereo and simply playing a tape should help align it with the audio coming out of the TV or monitor. After that, there should be a way to check the speed - hopefully not too much wow and flutter to affect loading from tape. The motor of the mechanism should have a hole in it if you need to adjust the speed. It could need lubricated. A drop of sewing machine or non detergent oil would do. Calibration tapes would help here and a meter but then high end audiophiles (like Techmoan on YouTube) are probably the only people with such things. What you should be able to check is for crosstalk between the motor and the audio output of the 410. I hope they're isolated well.

But it uses ATASCII characters. On the ATARI.

Not that I can remember. He has been happy with it. On that note, I had traded someone for Sinistar and Quadrun prototypes and aside from Sinistar still being probably incomplete as it probably was then, it was playable. Quadrun was complete with digital audio sample.

I have the entire run of The 2600 Connection and even wrote a few articles for it. I'm the one who discovered one oddity Easter egg for Crazy Climber. Fun fact: a friend of mine had 3 Crazy Climber cartridges pass through his hands. The one he kept is a working prototype from Best Electronics.

Umm.. I don't know if this counts but... while playing digital sound samples on my 800XL in my upstairs computer room at the time, a cute female friend got on my lap and said she wanted to have s·x with me... No idea what spurred that on. So... Spaghetti fell out of my pocket. I f'ed up that day. Somehow still had fun.

I bought Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the 2600 around 1986 at a store in Columbus Ohio called Video Express, with instructions. I think the box was long gone. My cart looks like your pristine red label cart.

It's not a play on words. It's a reference to the character set. Which is why the Atari version needs to be ATASCII Robots. I mean, come on. Why wouldn't it?

Someone sector edit so it says Attack of the ATASCII Robots instead.

One thing to do is find online repositories of free PDFs of all vintage Atari computer magazines. Compute!, Antic, Analog (not the Sci-fi magazine), and then there's things like Softside and Family Computing. And there's more. Compute! published a Lot of great books like Mapping the Atari which if you're looking to know the hardware, get the Revised Edition. It will go a long way. There are books to getting you up and programming with BASIC or Assembly. Atari Roots is one for assembly. I don't know if you can find Mac65 on cartridge easily, but it's a good macro assembler. Atari even made their own Assembler / Editor cartridge but Mac65 is the one I recommend. That being said, there are things like the 1MB Ultimate flash cartridge for emulating cartridges like SpartaDOS X which I also recommend. SDX doesn't work with TurboBASIC XL as they use the same shadow RAM under the OS unless you have extended RAM. Then SDX uses an extended bank. If you're just looking for games, cool. Easily found. If you're looking to write software, there's lots of information for that, too. I remember briefly meeting a fellow in Columbus, Ohio who was writing an Integer BASIC for the 8-bit. Maybe he completed it. This was around 1986 or so. I don't even know his name.

Could be a bad gear tooth or something similar, probably an obstruction. If it's possible to take it apart, that's your last resort. But try lubrication first.

Just wondering... Did those ROM dumps ever happen??

I helped a friend years ago with submitting his time sheets to the State of Ohio for his assisted living services as an independent contractor. At one point they stopped using paper sheets and wanted it all done electronically. And fortunately they gave him all the info I needed to save him the trouble of buying an IBM clone. First, I had to write a program to let him enter in his data in a manner he could understand, then it would output a file with that data formatted line by line as specified. Think RPG programming where something has to be in a certain column. Then he had to upload it to a Unix system which was accessed via a phone number and transferred using Kermit. Well, I've had a copy of Kermit65 which I never even used before but it had the protocols he needed. I helped him set this all up. He already had his 1200 XL and P:R: Connection ready. I forget if I loaned him the modem, but it worked perfectly up until he got married and moved out except for 1 problem... It ran in BASIC under SpartaDOS 3.2d but I didn't figure on him filling the directory! He used 1 floppy both sides for that entire period. I think I still have his floppy as he handed me a bunch of his stuff when he moved. I hope it survived the storage unit.

I used probably a similar cart dumping program on my 800XL. Does it load up and buzz the speaker with a prompt to insert cartridge and press START? I took it to be using a tight loop to keep the system occupied while inserting the cartridge then if it still buzzed after the cart was seated, it worked. Except my version saved a binary load file. I backed up a number of cartridges that way. Hopefully I'll get to checking to see if I still have those floppies. I have a touch tablet and Atari Artist was supposed to be with it. I had a Chalkboard Powerpad with a version of Micro Illustrator for it, too. Sadly I don't have the Powerpad anymore... (Grrrrrrmble..)

This is an interesting bit of info. I didn't know POKEY was needed to load or send data off the SIO. I thought the 8-bit used the channel the keyboard clunk came from. I guess it goes into 2 tone mode in regard to cassette I/O. Mapping the Atari says to store 3 in D202 to stop the occasional noise after cassette I/O and bring Pokey out of 2 tone mode. So maybe it uses 2 sound channels? It uses a single location D20D to serially input or output bits.

Not trolling. Just getting back into things. Someone left a question and I feel bad I never answered it. Chrome on a tiny Android device tis a bit easier to manipulate than Windows XP desktop and Firefox. Plus I get to sit on my comfy bed than a horrible broken computer chair. Thanks for asking!