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Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative


Farb

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2 hours ago, leech said:

I haven't seen these preserved anywhere. 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Adults-Disks-Atari-400-800-XL-XE-Home-Computer-Games-Photos-C-T-ComputerActive/114295567134?hash=item1a9c8bf31e:g:CAgAAOSwpXxe~iN7

Won't someone think of the vintage pervs?  Ha, thought about doing it myself, but I'm still not trusting my 1050s...

Damn - I didn't pay for porn back when I had my original setup, I can't imagine paying for it now :)

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2 hours ago, leech said:

I haven't seen these preserved anywhere. 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Adults-Disks-Atari-400-800-XL-XE-Home-Computer-Games-Photos-C-T-ComputerActive/114295567134?hash=item1a9c8bf31e:g:CAgAAOSwpXxe~iN7

Won't someone think of the vintage pervs?  Ha, thought about doing it myself, but I'm still not trusting my 1050s...

Wouldn't put those dirty disks in my 1050 ;-)

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21 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

C and T ComputerActive.zip 7.76 MB · 3 downloads

 

Here's a bunch of C&T Computeractive disks, there is some overlap with the disks for sale but not all of them by far.

 

Yeah, I count 21 still misssing.

Quote

113
121
125
126
127
184
702
705
706
707
712
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724

One of which is Adult Pinball!  Who doesn't want to play that???

Edited by leech
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6 minutes ago, leech said:

Who doesn't want to play that???

Who's willing to pay $100 to play that?

 

I have a few adult pinball tables mixed in with all the other PD PCS tables. I think you can find most if not all of them at atarimania.

 

 

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1 minute ago, Mr Robot said:

Who's willing to pay $100 to play that?

 

I have a few adult pinball tables mixed in with all the other PD PCS tables. I think you can find most if not all of them at atarimania.

 

 

Ha, to be fair, I've spent more money on worse things in my life... you know, like Exes.  :P

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Here is the collection from Allan, according to how I filed it here in my archive, so it's either available via Archive.org, or he had shared it here on AA, but I added it to my archives here in late May of this year. Credit goes to @Allan for his perseverance in getting all of this software up on Archive.org!

 

--Tim

 

C&T ComputerActive (Allan).zip

 

Found a link for you at Archive.org: C & T ComputerActive

Edited by Timothy Kline
Added external link to Archive.org
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4 minutes ago, Timothy Kline said:

Here is the collection from Allan, according to how I filed it here in my archive, so it's either available via Archive.org, or he had shared it here on AA, but I added it to my archives here in late May of this year. Credit goes to @Allan for his perseverance in getting all of this software up on Archive.org!

 

--Tim

 

C&T ComputerActive (Allan).zip 2.68 MB · 3 downloads

That was the other place I'd found them (Archive.org) but it looked like it was missing all of the ones listed on eBay.

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Just remember, hairy palms and short sightedness are a problem to people of our age.

 

"Honey, you have hairs on your palms and you are not peeing straight, have you gone back to THOSE sort of practices again!    sigh"

Edited by Mclaneinc
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  • 1 month later...

I just noticed that the "Mr. Do (Datasoft)" version in the latest archive?  CRC "57ACB209" will cause a crash in emulators within a few seconds of starting a new game.  In Altirra this can be remedied by turning off Acceleration  D : Patch I/O.  However I also have discovered that the version available on Atari Mania CRC "CADB7C54" does not have this issue and will not cause a crash with the acceleration on.

 

Anybody interested in looking at the two dumps to determine the difference between them?

 

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I'll assume you meant CRC "5ca7b209" as the preservation ATX. The difference between it and Atarimania's is the starting sector for each track and variations in sector positioning as we would expect from ATX files made from different dumps. The sector data, sector interleave and protection sectors are identical between the two (our criteria for considering two dumps identical). With D : acceleration turned on, the protection check appears to fail on both but it manifests itself in different ways as you have noticed. On our dump, the Altirra A8 machine crashes. On the Atarimania dump, the monsters stop moving and garbage appears at the bottom of the screen. I don't know what behavior a protection failure would manifest on a real Atari. I suspect the differences in sector position could be causing different behavior in Altirra but I have no way of knowing this for sure.

 

Overall, it is not recommended to use D : acceleration when using protected ATX files since many protection checks rely on accurate drive timing. You will find many other examples such as this. I always leave it off and use F1 to accelerate loading if I need to which won't cause protection failures.

Edited by Farb
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Waiting for specialists to jump in but it was found out both dumps actually matched. Ours is very old (2005!) so it may have to do with the way it was imaged back in the day and didn't catch all the subtleties of the protection. If that is the case, we should probably replace it with the newer .atx file to avoid having older versions just floating around and causing confusion.  

 

Edit: Oops... Farb beat me by a few minutes!

Edited by www.atarimania.com
Farb was faster!
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I have a new collection of Atari 8 Bit users group disks primarily from a New York Atari users group that my friend purchased over 30 years ago and she just found , my question is who do I send them to? I no longer have anything that will read Atari software. Russ Campbell

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3 hours ago, rcamp48 said:

I have a new collection of Atari 8 Bit users group disks primarily from a New York Atari users group that my friend purchased over 30 years ago and she just found , my question is who do I send them to? I no longer have anything that will read Atari software. Russ Campbell

I can dump them if you can't find anyone closer to you - not sure if shipping to USA would be cost effective (I'll pay shipping).  I don't have a kryoflux type device, just regular drives but that shouldn't be an issue for these.

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6 hours ago, Farb said:

I'll assume you meant CRC "5ca7b209" as the preservation ATX. The difference between it and Atarimania's is the starting sector for each track and variations in sector positioning as we would expect from ATX files made from different dumps. The sector data, sector interleave and protection sectors are identical between the two (our criteria for considering two dumps identical). With D : acceleration turned on, the protection check appears to fail on both but it manifests itself in different ways as you have noticed. On our dump, the Altirra A8 machine crashes. On the Atarimania dump, the monsters stop moving and garbage appears at the bottom of the screen. I don't know what behavior a protection failure would manifest on a real Atari. I suspect the differences in sector position could be causing different behavior in Altirra but I have no way of knowing this for sure.

 

Overall, it is not recommended to use D : acceleration when using protected ATX files since many protection checks rely on accurate drive timing. You will find many other examples such as this. I always leave it off and use F1 to accelerate loading if I need to which won't cause protection failures.

 

Weird... I was able to play the one available on Atarimania ( In Atari800 ) for several levels with no weird issues.  As for Altirra.. it actually has drive D : acceleration code that can handle most ATX protection formats.  I've only occasionally had to turn it off. 

Edited by Shannon
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1 hour ago, Stephen said:

I can dump them if you can't find anyone closer to you - not sure if shipping to USA would be cost effective (I'll pay shipping).  I don't have a kryoflux type device, just regular drives but that shouldn't be an issue for these.

Sure I can send them to you , I am in Canada so no problem. Russ.

 

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15 hours ago, Shannon said:

I just noticed that the "Mr. Do (Datasoft)" version in the latest archive?  CRC "57ACB209" will cause a crash in emulators within a few seconds of starting a new game.  In Altirra this can be remedied by turning off Acceleration  D : Patch I/O.  However I also have discovered that the version available on Atari Mania CRC "CADB7C54" does not have this issue and will not cause a crash with the acceleration on.

Anybody interested in looking at the two dumps to determine the difference between them?

 

Copy protected images usually require emulation as accurately as possible. Any kind of disk acceleration patch would disrupt the timing severely and emulation would then be far from being accurate. The results are unpredictable. Some protected titles might still work, others will not. Many titles have multiple versions, sometimes with completely different protection, and it is perfectly possible that one would run with acceleration enabled and other would not.

 

Determining exactly why one run with acceleration and the other not, would require some work and debugging that usually is not very interesting and might even change depending on the emulator version. These protected images are supposed to run with maximum accuracy. Thanks for letting us now anyway.

 

4 hours ago, Shannon said:

As for Altirra.. it actually has drive D : acceleration code that can handle most ATX protection formats.  I've only occasionally had to turn it off. 

 

It's perfectly fine if you like to try first with acceleration enabled. As long as you understand that some might not work like that, that's ok.

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While I'm thinking about it.  I noticed something interesting about some of the EA disk protection.  In particular I'm thinking of the game M.U.L.E.  But I'm sure other EA games are affected by this as well.

 

In the Atari800 emulator  I set the computer to Atari 800 so that the game would have access to all "four" of the joysticks.  As you all know typically 48k is the highest the A800 would go.  Well strangely enough the game would stop with the message "remove custom OS".  So after looking into it I found that the protection checks $C000 for omnimon I believe?  Anyways while tinkering around I found out that setting the memory to 52k in Atari800 would remedy the situation.  Also the game is unaffected when in Atari 800XL mode ( but no four ports sadly ).

 

So out of curiosity I tried it on Altirra under the same config ( A800 48k ) and the game loads fine.  After some reading it appears to have something to do with the Atari 800 having a floating bus or something like this?  So I guess the floating bus is not emulated in the Atari800.  Altirra has it as an "option" in the menu but it must duplicate some of the behavior of the bus with that option unchecked.

 

I'm just curious about peoples thoughts on this.

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