Rom's Old Era ROM Collection V2 now online!

[Rom Hunter]

Thanks.

 

With the help of Hornpipe2, Omegamatrix and Cybergoth I've polished up my next version even more.

 

My question now is: do I leave the overdumps in or out?

 

I'm still not sure about this.

 

It doesn't feel right to simply throw all these overdumps away (200 ROMs).

 

Any opinions?

 

[Omegamatrix]

I like a nice clean rom set. I think if some rom is floating out there that is 16K when it should have been 8K it probably was dumped wrong as it is a waste of space.

 

 

With the 2K roms it is more difficult. They were basically released doubled up like that as the smallest chip on your Atari board is 4K. Later on Atari did stuff like the 16 in 1 and the games were 2K each on that to save space. So what do you go with? I think the 2K roms help tell people right away if a game is 2K, 4K etc... I say go with 2K over 4K if the info is exactly the same.

[Eckhard Stolberg]

BTW: I also found this Video Life Hack in my Old Era collection, but I honestly don't know if it's really from the 1977 - 1992 period.

 

Any hacker: does this one ring a bell?

This binary originally came from the Digital Press collection. You could ask over there where they got it from, but I suppose it's an unmodified dump of the original game. Compared with the other Video Life binary this one has a single instruction added which limits the random sounds that the game makes at each iteration to only lower frequencies. I guess CommaVid released the other binary first and then got complains from customers about the annoying high pitched tones. So they fixed it for the later carts.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Rom Hunter]

Thanks, Eckhard.

 

 

I like a nice clean rom set. I think if some rom is floating out there that is 16K when it should have been 8K it probably was dumped wrong as it is a waste of space.

 

 

With the 2K roms it is more difficult. They were basically released doubled up like that as the smallest chip on your Atari board is 4K. Later on Atari did stuff like the 16 in 1 and the games were 2K each on that to save space. So what do you go with? I think the 2K roms help tell people right away if a game is 2K, 4K etc... I say go with 2K over 4K if the info is exactly the same.

I decided to leave them in.

 

If you want a smaller version of the collection, you can simply remove the overdumps by searching for (4K), (8K) or (16K) in your Roms map and putting these in another map.

 

Edited January 19, 2008 by Rom Hunter

[Omegamatrix]

Eckhard can you post the rom you are comparing it to?

 

 

At least one of the 2K halves should match or be off by one byte compared to this rom, correct?

 

Video_Life__1981___CommaVid__John_Bronstein___CM_002_.bin

[Eckhard Stolberg]

Eckhard can you post the rom you are comparing it to?

 

 

At least one of the 2K halves should match or be off by one byte compared to this rom, correct?

You are correct. The three Video Life binaries in Rom Hunter's collection are all the same. The game only has 2K of ROM. But it also has 1K of RAM in the first half of the VCS's 4K game address space. So, if you dump Video Life as a 4K binary, you are getting 1K of random garbage in the file. Since this all that is different between the three files, I think the two 4K versions could be removed.

 

I compared the binary Rom Hunter posted to another one that a friend dumped for me 8 years ago. Back then he made me promise not to release the binary to the public. He probably doesn't care too much anymore now that another Video Life binary is available. But since I promised, I can't post the binary here.

 

My binary is only missing a two-byte instruction which limits the possible frequencies for the random sounds. After having another look at the binary I'm not sure anymore which one came first. The two bytes that the instruction uses are the only free bytes in my binary. So it might be either possible that the intruction was later taken out to give more variety to the sounds, or it might be possible that the programmer decided to use the last two free bytes to do something about the annoying high frequencies.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Rom Hunter]

Why not ask your friend if he stil cares about releasing that ROM?

 

[Omegamatrix]

Thanks Eckhard. That was what I needed to know. The hacked verision of Video life does nothing new. One half of it is the correct rom, and the second half is just filled. It has no new programming. It should be removed I agree.

[Rom Hunter]

As I already said, I leave all overdumps in.

 

If you want to remove them from the collection, simply search for the (XK) additions in your Roms map.

 

[Eckhard Stolberg]

Why not ask your friend if he stil cares about releasing that ROM?

OK, I asked him and got permission to post the binary. So, here is the version that still does the high pitched sounds.

vidlife.bin

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Rom Hunter]

Thanks, Eckhard.