Shawn Jefferson

Is there an updated APE for DOS package available? I couldn't get my SIO2PC to work with APE for dos the other day... What settings should I be using?

I just received my copy of Alpine Games and spent an hour or so playing it last night. Overall, I think it is a great game. A multiplayer mode would have made it even better, but I understand the difficulties where that is concerned. Maybe one day Duranik can be convinced to do Alpine Games: comlynable. I think they will sell well over 150 of this game in the next year or so. A few observations: Biathlon: Since you have two bars at the bottom of the screen that you watch to press the joypad and buttons at certain times during the skiing, I found myself looking exclusively at the bottom of the screen. I couldn't tell you what the graphics in this part of the game look like. Probably a better control mechanism where you can look at your on-screen skier would have been better (much like speed-skating.) Slalom: This is awesome. The graphics rock, the control feels "right" to me and easy enough for gaming losers like me to complete a run, but also hard enough to pose a challenge. Skating/Snowboard half-pipe: Interesting control scheme (was this borrowed from another game? I never played Winter Games.) Unfortuantely, I find the tendency to press diagonals on the Lynx (at least for me) really makes it hard to pull off the cool tricks. Also the delay between entering the command and the skater actually performing them is, IMO, too long. Still, it doesn't detract from the game play too much and the reflections of the skater on the ice is a cool effect (I'm assuming using the lynx's hardware stretching and tilt effects?) Bobsled (or BobSleigh): this is damn hard! What are you supposed to do? I tried a couple of times and couldn't get to the end of the course. The manual is not too specific about what to do. Snow-board rush: the manual says: "pass the flags on the right side to avoid a penalty." An easy mistake to make when writing a manual in English, especially when it isn't your native tongue. You have to pass the gates on the side with the "low" pole-thus the "right" side (maybe they should have said "proper" side? Ski jump: this is pretty cool and I like how your poor guy slides through the screen on his face to the crowd laughing when he wipes out. I didn't really see the "hi-color" effects in the game, but I guess they are there. Maybe I'm just used to seeing more colors from playing games on more modern hardware that it didn't seem out of the ordinary to me. I find the game fairly hard, but I'm not a very good gamer. I play just to relax now and then... I finished dead last in every event when I tried the Competition mode after practicing for awhile! LOL! Your world records are safe from me! All in all, I'm glad I bought this game, it's a very polished release.

I've got two working Lynx Is and one dead (Q12) Lynx II. That must get us to at least 8 !

This guy says he wrote the original on the Spectrum. I assume that you could ask him what the story is to the game?

http://www.atariarchives.org/ Check Mapping the Atari (if you haven't already.)

I've heard that Atari800Win has many debugging features that are turned off in the normal build. You can compile a version with all the debugging features on and it includes stepping, etc...

Oh, I just read your other message in this base... the version of cc65 you are using is not support by Ullrich von Bassewitz or http://www.cc65.org/ since it is a special port of an old version specifically for lynx development. I also think that it only supports K&R syntax, not ANSI syntax. There are some projects in the works to get a lynx library going for the supported, cross platform CC65 from cc65.org. I started one, but got sidetracked... besides their are smarter men than me working on it already. HTH.

I can't answer your questions but I can tell you that there is a mailing list for questions like this and Ullrich himself can answer them for you. As far as I'm concerned, these guys know their stuff inside and out. http://www.cc65.org/

Well, I think you want to hook up pins 4 and 3 to the center of the RCA jacks and the ground pin 2 to the outside/shield of the RCA jacks I think. It might be better to just buy a cable at your local electronics store or from ebay, unless you want the sense of accomplishment from building your own.

Composite out is easy because the 800XL has this at the monitor jack. It's the chroma/luma interface(S-video) that is missing the chroma signal. From: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/atari-8-bit/faq/ Monitor Jack (all but 400, N. American 600XL, XE Game System, SECAM systems): 3 1 5 4 2 1. Composite Luminance (Composite Video on 600XL) 2. Ground 3. Audio Output 4. Composite Video 5. Composite Chroma (not on 800XL(most),1200XL; grounded on 600XL) You can get a 5 pin DIN to RCA cable that will make it easy to hook up any monitors/TVs to your 8-bit. I've got one that has 4 RCA jacks. All it takes is some trial and error to figure out which is which. I've since labeled mine so I always know which is which. If you want to mod your 800XL for s-video (chroma-luma) then search the web for "Supervideo 2.1" Keep in mind that you will lose the ability to display artifacted color (gr.8 games usually) and you will have to switch to composite video to regain the artifacted colors for those games that require it.

Sorry, I don't have any answer for you, but I don't see why it won't be possible... I thought the hardware took care of this automatically (centering the screen on PAL vs. NTSC) ? BTW: that looks very cool. Is there a possibility that we will see some c64 conversions soon?

Some late model 800XLs may have chroma at the monitor port. I received an email from someone who said that their's did. It also had the Freddie chip. Of course, I haven't seen one myself.

Atari800Win 3.1 and above have network play capabilities don't they? I don't know if it works, or if it works with paddles though. I think you would have to write the game to use the gamelink hardware for real hardware network play which probably means a complete rewrite.

It gives you two serial ports and one parallel port, if I remember correctly. I think that you need special cables since the size and pinout of the ports on the 850 are not standard.

What? You want me to actually read the messages as well as download the attachments, try them out and complain?

It doesn't work correctly on NTSC machines. You guys and your pesky 1/50th of a second vblank timing...

LOL! In the other thread you two were arguing about which machine was better, now you are arguing about which machine was worse (for the musician)! Sit back, take a deep breath, and remember this is just a hobby... No offense, I am even learning something from listening to both of you talk about the machines.

Seperate video (chroma-luma) is generally considered to be better. Some of the 8-bits (XL series generally) needed a simple modification to output this though.

I'm afraid that was me that was thinking about porting Galaga. Bill Kendrick posted some proof of concept graphics in his Super-IRG mode and I thought it would be a good little project. Unfortunately, beyond that little quick and dirty thing I whipped up, I haven't done anything with it so far. One problem I have is the graphics. I suck and drawing graphics... another problem is that I'm not sure the colors that you can get with Super-IRG mode are going to be enough to draw all the creatures... they might all end up having the same colors as the bee. I started another project, a sprite (PMG) editor that is about half-way done too that I thought would come in handy... Anyone else with more time feel free to run with the idea!

Has anyone sourced the Q12 part for the Lynx II? I've looked around at some on-line electronics stores and they didn' seem to have it.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...2&category=3528 Relatively low BIN.

When will it be done?

The symptom of the Q12 problem is that the power button doesn't work to turn the unit on or off. You can short one side of the Q12 transistor (can't remember off the top of my head which one) to ground and the unit should power up. It sounds like your problem is more serious possibly. Does it do this with different games? You may just have to clean the contacts maybe. What about power? Do you have a consistent power supply, does it do this with batteries and power adapter? My Lynx II showed some strange behaviour like this when the batteries were dead. My power jack is also "twitchy", meaning that you have to have the adapter plug, juuuuust right for it to work. I haven't taken it apart to desolder-resolder it yet. Good luck!

He seems to be the man! With an 8k or 16k cartridge it may be as easy as dumping the $8000-BFFF area to a file, and removing any cartridge checks (trying to overwrite the cartridge area) and then slapping on an EXE header to the front of the file which loads the data into $8000 (or A000, whichever). I'm betting most of those small cartridges have been done. With larger cartridges that bank switch, well you have to hack up the code a little more so that it either does not bank switch (which I guess means you would have to move some of the code to lower memory and then fix all the jumps) or as someone else said, change the bank switching of the cartridge into expanded memory bank switching. Either way, a large cartridge image is much harder to hack into a disk loadable executable file. Luckily, most have been done and are available on the net. These are the files you would need to download to get a "cartridge" game on the AtariMax flash cart. For cartridge images, the Hollex cartridge does that doesn't it? Don't know much about that.

An EXE is an executable file (one that you can load from the AtariDOS L. command). Usually they have the extension of EXE, COM, BIN, XEX (for the emulator), etc... They CAN be a hacked cartridge, or a hacked disk game (hacked into one file), or something that was designed as a single file.