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Has the "XE Demo Cartridge" ever been dumped


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I know that the "XE Demo Cartridge" contains four common games but I was wondering if the Demo Cart itself has ever been dumped? Atari Mania doesn't have a dump of it and I haven't been able to locate it elsewhere either. Thanks for any info that you might have.

 

 

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I haven't heard it being dumped with an EPROM reader, but the four games were dumped using the AtariMax tools. FULS's archive contains four files named "Demo Cartridge *.bin", this is what you are looking for.

 

Of the four titles only Flight Simulator II is different from the commercial version.

Edited by Kr0tki
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Thanks for the info and link, Kr0tki.

 

Has anyone actually seen the cartridge in action? How does it select a game/demo? Is there an onscreen menu or does the cartridge just randomly select one of the four titles when the computer is switched on?

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Mitch, if you have a full cart dump of it could you please post it here? Thanks.

 

I believe the original dump was one big ROM with all four games and I split it into 4 parts. I think I still have the original dump but I'll have to look around for it.

 

Mitch

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So what happens with the full cartridge dump when it's separated from the onboard hardware? If the full ROM is added to a Ultimate Cartridge or a UNO Cart is it unable to select games? Will it simply default to game #1 each time? Or are there really physically four separate ROMs on the cartridge and switching between them is completely done via hardware? I had assumed that sans a menu it would be one giant ROM image and that switching on the machine would trigger a simple random selection of one of the four games.

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It would seem it uses a latch for the upper address bits with no software control available.

To simulate that with a flashcart you'd need to write back a block to hold the "last game selected" which would be pretty wasteful, an entire block for 2 bits of data.

Also - flashcart = 8K visible at a time, I would think that the games on this cart are all 16K visible at a time. So not straightforward to have working from an Atarimax cart. To do 16K games you have the bottom half or entire game based in Ram. Chances are the games have self-overwrite copy protections present.

 

Doing a random selection wouldn't be of great use - in emulation you'd in theory get the same game every time and probably the same with real hardware.

 

Given that according to an earlier post only one game differs from dumps of standalone versions you'd have to ask why would you want to recreate this?

Edited by Rybags
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There is no real reason at all to want to recreate this. I just got really interested in the mechanics of it all of the sudden. Finding that it's all hardware based makes it both more and less interesting. Certainly less interesting to try to recreate. I guess that what I really need to do now is find a real cartridge for myself.

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I have a 2600 that's got 128 games. 4 position switch with 32 games selectable by power cycling or pressing the repurposed B&W switch.

Like this thing it's an inelegant solution and annoying for the user. So yes, you would question why would you want to recreate it?

 

It'd be like removing the power steering and brake assistance from your car. Pointless nostalgia trip with the side effect of being annoying and inconvenient.

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