Shamus cart trick for the XL/XE

[Lord Thag]

I showed this to a collector buddy of mine, and he thought I should post it. The red cart version of Shamus is listed as being incompatible with the XL/XE computers in the DP guide, which is technically true, as it locks up the system at the title screen.

 

Unless, that is, you hold down the select button when you switch the system on, which will jump you to the difficulty select screen, at which point, the games is perfectly playable.

 

Dunno if that's of any use to you guys, but there you go!

[Ross PK]

Interesting stuff nonetheless.

[Fres]

Hey, that's pretty cool. Just tried it and it works fine. You mentioned the red cart version. Was there more than one?

[Rybags]

That trick also works with the cassette/disk version of Nautilus.

 

Normally the game will lock up on the rainbow title screen but holding Start skips ahead to the attract mode game screen and you can play normally.

 

Similar with Slime - from memory you could hold Start to avoid the lockup but the game would usually crash once you played a certain amount of levels.

 

And (I think) tape/disk Shamus had a similar problem, and holding a console key would "fix" it.

[Ross PK]

My Americana cassette of Shamus seems to work fine. Maybe it's just the Synapse version?

[Rybags]

Probably.

 

Most of the Synapse classics came out before the XLs - back in the old days when direct OS calls were common, and software often squeezed into 16K by using "spare" RAM locations <$400 that were later to become critical to the stability of the OS.