Mr Robot Posted September 17, 2022 Share Posted September 17, 2022 You can always get the files from https://atari8bit.net/a8sp/ but the error you are seeing is not the zip file, it's the unzip tool not knowing how to deal with the unicode characters used in the file names. There is no way to store the character encoding info in a zip file and tools like unzip are old, only support ISO character encodings, usually only a single encoding per archive, and and they struggle with unicode characters. The files will still unzip correctly but the names will be a bit messed up. Modern decompressors will ask for the encoding if they don't recognize it but afaik its a limitation of the format. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 19 hours ago, Stephen said: Nice - when did you get online. 1987 for me, 300bps, 1200XL I still have the XM301 I used with my 800xl, which I also still have... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 1 hour ago, leech said: 20 hours ago, Stephen said: Nice - when did you get online. 1987 for me, 300bps, 1200XL I still have the XM301 I used with my 800xl, which I also still have... I should have clarified that. My 1st experience of getting online was at a friend's house. He had a 1030 modem and a 1200XL. I saved and bought myself an XM301 which I used with my 48kB 400 with a b-key. Very soon after this I got a 130XE for xmas, and upgraded to an SX212. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rcamp48 Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 (edited) Post deleted and moved to a new thread by request. Edited September 18, 2022 by rcamp48 Moving entire parts of my post Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rcamp48 Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 (edited) Post deleted and moved to a new thread, by request. Edited September 18, 2022 by rcamp48 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farb Posted September 18, 2022 Author Share Posted September 18, 2022 8 minutes ago, rcamp48 said: Because all of this hardware will cost over $2000 US , and I was wondering how many users would be interested in Subscriber access for life for a certain amount , have not decided yet how much, but I will have Telnet, FTP, Secured access to all of this plus a secured web page. May I kindly ask you to move this conversation to its own thread? I don't want there to be any confusion that this is associated with the preservation project. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rcamp48 Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 Sure no problem, Farb... Russ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rcamp48 Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 7 minutes ago, Farb said: May I kindly ask you to move this conversation to its own thread? I don't want there to be any confusion that this is associated with the preservation project. Thanks! Gone..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dukdukgoos Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 On 5/5/2015 at 1:48 PM, Farb said: I personally am using the data to auto-generate a Clrmamepro-style .dat file that can be used by anyone to organize and maintain the images preserved by the project. Do you think we could get an "update pack" when a new release is made? That is, a zip with only the new and changed files plus the DAT for the new release (which is already available now). This would allow us to update to the latest version using ClrMamePro or other ROM managers to process the previous release plus the update pack to make the new release while saving bandwidth by avoiding redownloading the whole thing again. Files that were only renamed or deleted between releases would be handled by the ROM manager with the DAT file without needed additional space in the update pack. Atari files are small so it's not a huge deal to download the whole thing every time, but doing things efficiently is always good, and if we start adding more cassette WAVs or raw Kyroflux images the releases could get much bigger in a hurry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DjayBee Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 (edited) 28 minutes ago, dukdukgoos said: Do you think we could get an "update pack" when a new release is made? I actually thought about doing this while I prepared the latest torrent but was too lazy to do it the right way. I had extracted all files which had changed but this still would have been some 400 MB because of many renames to sets and I expected people to be majorly confused about this. Doing it the right way is possible for anybody out there who downloaded the full torrent and has the latest one because ClrMame DAT-files are always part of the torrent. You "only" need to: extract the latest set to a temporary directory rebuild this extracted set using ClrMame Pro and the DAT file from the set before to a trash directory. The important part here is that you set ClrMame to delete everything rebuilt from the source directory pack up what is left in the source directory post it together with the DAT file from the latest set remove the temporary and trash directories Edited September 18, 2022 by DjayBee 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farb Posted September 18, 2022 Author Share Posted September 18, 2022 We don't track changes in the preservation database currently so it would take effort to do so. As you said, since the Atari files are pretty small, Internet connections are so fast these days and our release cadence is low, it doesn't really seem like a problem worth solving at the moment vs. us focusing on other priorities. Besides, the stream of new contributions has slowed down considerably, so I don't expect our current release cadence to continue once our pending backlog is processed which will likely happen over the next release or two. The DAT files that are included in every release could be diff'ed and a list of changed files created. So it should be possible for an entreprenurial community member to create update packs if they really wanted to. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farb Posted September 18, 2022 Author Share Posted September 18, 2022 Haha, @DjayBee beat me to the response 🙂 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
E474 Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 On 9/17/2022 at 8:45 PM, Mr Robot said: You can always get the files from https://atari8bit.net/a8sp/ but the error you are seeing is not the zip file, it's the unzip tool not knowing how to deal with the unicode characters used in the file names. There is no way to store the character encoding info in a zip file and tools like unzip are old, only support ISO character encodings, usually only a single encoding per archive, and and they struggle with unicode characters. The files will still unzip correctly but the names will be a bit messed up. Modern decompressors will ask for the encoding if they don't recognize it but afaik its a limitation of the format. Hi @Mr Robot, Thanks for the info. The latest archive hasn't actually made it to the site you linked to, so I went with the atari-celler one. I've had problems with non-ISO filenames previously, I couldn't burn a backup of the pigwa archive using k3b due to them, so I had to tar everything into a pigwa.tar file, then use 7zip to compress the tar file to 23GB volumes, suitable for burning to multiple BD-Rs. I think this would preserve the filenames. It does take forever though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Robot Posted September 18, 2022 Share Posted September 18, 2022 3 hours ago, E474 said: The latest archive hasn't actually made it to the site you linked to, so I went with the atari-celler one. It has now, I was a little behind the times! ...and it's now in https://atari8bit.net/dl/ 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dukdukgoos Posted September 19, 2022 Share Posted September 19, 2022 (edited) 18 hours ago, DjayBee said: I actually thought about doing this while I prepared the latest torrent but was too lazy to do it the right way. I had extracted all files which had changed but this still would have been some 400 MB because of many renames to sets and I expected people to be majorly confused about this. Doing it the right way is possible for anybody out there who downloaded the full torrent and has the latest one because ClrMame DAT-files are always part of the torrent. You "only" need to: extract the latest set to a temporary directory rebuild this extracted set using ClrMame Pro and the DAT file from the set before to a trash directory. The important part here is that you set ClrMame to delete everything rebuilt from the source directory pack up what is left in the source directory post it together with the DAT file from the latest set remove the temporary and trash directories Yes, that's exactly the process I had in mind, as it ensures all renames and deletes are handled by the DAT and don't need to be included in the update pack. I went ahead and made an update pack for the current release. Comes in at a much slimmer 102mb. Could be helpful for those who haven't already got the full pack. Optimally the update packs would be posted and archived on the archive sites (https://atari-cellar.net/ and https://atari8bit.net/) along with the full releases. 1210149540_Atari8bitPreservedSoftware2022-09-10UPDATE.zip Atari 8bit Preserved Software 2022-09-10.zip Edited September 19, 2022 by dukdukgoos zipped the DAT for faster download 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Kline Posted September 19, 2022 Share Posted September 19, 2022 6 hours ago, dukdukgoos said: Yes, that's exactly the process I had in mind, as it ensures all renames and deletes are handled by the DAT and don't need to be included in the update pack. I went ahead and made an update pack for the current release. Comes in at a much slimmer 102mb. Could be helpful for those who haven't already got the full pack. Optimally the update packs would be posted and archived on the archive sites (https://atari-cellar.net/ and https://atari8bit.net/) along with the full releases. Uploaded and available in the Cellar. --Tim, An Atari owner 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dukdukgoos Posted September 19, 2022 Share Posted September 19, 2022 14 minutes ago, Timothy Kline said: Uploaded and available in the Cellar. --Tim, An Atari owner Great, thanks! It looks like you already had the zipped DAT on your server (35382958_Atari8bitPreservedSoftware2022-09-10.zip) so you don't need mine if you want to delete it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SoulBuster Posted September 19, 2022 Share Posted September 19, 2022 I think an update pack is a great idea as long as the full pack is also uploaded each time it is updated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted September 19, 2022 Share Posted September 19, 2022 I'm quite happy with downloading the whole thing, even if we suddenly found a load of missing titles, I can see the overall size being anything over 5gig (more than double the current size) and I very much doubt there will be that much stuff found (obviously I hope I'm wrong). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Robot Posted September 19, 2022 Share Posted September 19, 2022 Available in atari8bit.net/dl as well. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Great Hierophant Posted September 21, 2022 Share Posted September 21, 2022 My friends found a copy of Chuck Benton's version of Sierra's Frogger for the Atari 8-bit machines while trying to redump the PC version. Sierra did not mark their labels with the version of the software they contained in the early years and they bought up as many disk only options as they could find back in 2014. Unfortunately they were unable to find the PC version in their copies but found many copies of John Harris' version (which is already in the archive) and one copy of the Benton version. I have attached the Kryoflux dump Frogger-Atari-Benton.7zof the Benton version and an ATX image made from it. It works with my 48KiB 400 and SDrive Max and Altirra.Frogger-Atari-Benton.7z Frogger_Sierra_Chuck_Benton.atx 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firebottle Posted September 24, 2022 Share Posted September 24, 2022 (edited) Tried to load the file "Computer Baseball Strategy (1982)(Microcomputer Games)(US)[!][CLOAD+RUN][BASIC].cas" using CLOAD in BASIC and after the first block I get "Error 21". Tried auto-loading it with BASIC and it changes the background and border color and drops to the Ready prompt. RUN doesn't do anything, LISTing shows nothing, but according to FRE(0) the program is taking up space in memory. Tried auto-loading it without BASIC and it again changes the background and border color but curiously shows HEX:BB 12 (see below) Note that I tried this with Altirra and AVGCart, same results with both. Edit: I looked this up on Atarimania and it says "Press N when HEX:BB 12 appears on screen, N again after Y TO SAVE? and Y after PLAY GAME?." So I guess this is a machine language game... Edited September 24, 2022 by firebottle RUN & LIST & Atarimania Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firebottle Posted September 24, 2022 Share Posted September 24, 2022 (edited) I should add that the game seems to be only looking for a single alphanumeric character for pitch or swing choices despite allowing/displaying multiple characters. In the case of pitch selection valid characters are C D E F G and O. For swing, any number 1 thru 9 works and the letter O. Other than "O" which you can use to change players, I have no idea what the rest stand for but at least you can kind of play the game. Edited September 24, 2022 by firebottle choices Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farb Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 On 9/21/2022 at 2:25 PM, Great Hierophant said: My friends found a copy of Chuck Benton's version of Sierra's Frogger for the Atari 8-bit machines while trying to redump the PC version. Thanks for the contribution! 14 hours ago, firebottle said: Edit: I looked this up on Atarimania and it says "Press N when HEX:BB 12 appears on screen, N again after Y TO SAVE? and Y after PLAY GAME?." As a general rule, when having problems loading one of the dumps we publish, you can first check the page on our website for that dump. In this case: http://www.a8preservation.com/#/software/dump/345 14 hours ago, firebottle said: So I guess this is a machine language game... Thanks for pointing this out. I have corrected BASIC -> machine language in the database (which automatically updates the loading instructions). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Great Hierophant Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 (edited) A friend of mine noted that both Choplifter! (1982)(Broderbund Software)(US)[a][!].atx and Choplifter! (1982)(Broderbund Software)(US)[a2][!].atx in the a8preservation archive replace the copy-protection check at $067D with a JMP past it. In other words, these are cracked disks. Should they have the [!] label attached to them, which I understand to mean a pristine dump of original media? Now if these images were made from a budget re-release disk, that might explain why they were cracked. Companies were known to do budget re-releases and eliminate copy protection which was not cost-effective to replicate. Can anyone shed more light on the subject? Edited October 14, 2022 by Great Hierophant Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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