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"The Writer's Tool" by OSS


dwhyte

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I have a good dump of the writers tool cartridge... the porblem is that the current emulator cannot run the image

 

WritersTool.zip

 

 

ndary,

Do you have the boot disk that goes with the Cart. I think you have to have the disk for it to work.

 

 

Its inside the ZIP file

 

ndary,

My bad. I replied before even opening the zip. Thank you so much for posting it. I've been looking for those 2 ATR's for a long time. Thank you for all the support you've given the Atari Community over the years.

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I'm expecting this program to open the curtains and make the tea by the time we get it running. icon_smile.gif

 

 

Do you think the author of Altirra could get "The Writer's Tool" to work on his emulator.

I have no clue. I've tried the ATR in conjunction with the cart image in Altirra and Atari800WinPlus, without success. Altirra seems to support a narrower selection of cart formats, so perhaps there's something that can be done. I'm still uncertain about the cart image: I have trouble understanding how a supposedly comprehensive application like TWT (unfortunate acronym) can be packed onto an unbanked 8K cart, accessory disk or no accessory disk. I was looking forward to some headway being made on this, but the technical app-minded people seem to be rather quiet at the moment. :)

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From the brief look I had at the cart...

 

- it didn't appear to RUN the cart, it just has an INIT pointing to an RTS.

- the cart has JSRs to code that resides around $8xxx in RAM

 

Most importantly - for some reason the cart appears to have been dumped improperly. I created one with the 4K halves swapped and it at least appears to be valid insofar as the vectors/flags at $BFFA-F are now proper.

 

The control flag $BFFD only has bit 1 set, which means to allow a disk boot but don't run the cartridge.

 

 

See if this one works any better:

 

wtoolf.zip

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You can't "Run Cartridge" with it - it only has an Init vector which points to an RTS, Run vector is unused (zeros).

 

I'd say you'd need to boot one of those supplied disk images with it, then load the relevant program if it's not already in Autorun.

 

Maybe it's not XL-friendly - might be worth trying a 48K 800 config.

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I tried it with Atari800Win Plus 3.1 as XL/XE 64K NTSC disabled Basic and SIO patch. Used "new" ROM and "Extension" disk and got Title screen (see attachment), but ultimately it goes to Self Test menu or Atari Memo Pad (e.g. if use OS-B).

 

I was able to do the same thing in A8WP 4. It didn't seem to make any difference whether I disabled the SIO patch or not, other than the fact that it went into the self test quicker with it enabled.

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Years ago I took apart my WT cart, dumped it with my Thompson Proburner in my 800, and hacked around and eventually got the dump to work. Here is the archive I put together about 9 years ago. It contains the two WT disks (extension & dictionary -- the extension disk must be used to boot). It also contains the original output file from my Proburner as well as some scripts to produce a rom that will work in Atari800Win+ (OSS M034 format). The file to use with the emulator is called "writersToolEmulator.rom". Its 16k because I had to append it to itself and flip the banks around to simulate the behavior of the OSS hardware.

 

-retrobits

 

for some reason the attachment didn't seem to work. Here is a link:

Writer's Tool Dump Project

 

Just tested it again today and my 16k hack still does work in Atari800Win+ -- you need to boot with the extension disk in D1. It would be better if the emu was updated to support the raw dump from the eprom burner.

Edited by retrobits
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It would seam to me that the AUTORUN file on one of the disks is the real Writers tool and the cart is used as a form of copy protection.

Being on an orange OSS cart, i believe that the whole cart can be disabled to use the ram under it.

 

James

Edited by sup8pdct
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It would seam to me that the AUTORUN file on one of the disks is the real Writers tool and the cart is used as a form of copy protection.

Being on an orange OSS cart, i believe that the whole cart can be disabled to use the ram under it.

 

James

Almost reminds me of TI-Writer for the 99/4A. It required the cartridge, but the program was essentially disk-based; the cartridge was little more than a copy-protection "dongle."

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Brilliant - thanks! I've never felt such anticipation surrounding a program (mainly because the OSS stuff is always intriguing). Looks a pretty lean and efficient program. I guess we need some docs for it now. It does appear to have some interesting features, and the proof reader is supposed to be pretty fast.

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  • 1 year later...

Just tested it again today and my 16k hack still does work in Atari800Win+ -- you need to boot with the extension disk in D1. It would be better if the emu was updated to support the raw dump from the eprom burner.

Just wanted to add - emulation of the 8KB TWT cartridge format (named "OSS 8KB cartridge") has just been added to the sources of the Atari800 emulator, so the next release (when it comes) will have it fully working. (The Windows build of the current source snapshot is available here - get the version marked "2065".)

Edited by Kr0tki
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Seems to work in Altirra 2.0 beta 6, maybe before hand as well.

 

Put extension disk in D1:

 

Open a cart as a OSS 34M

 

OSB & XL work fine with 48K min

 

Edit, been working since 1.8beta 16, I should know, I posted the message on here.. :(

Edited by Mclaneinc
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