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Some VIC cart dumps


ianoid

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I am messing around with the Chip Tester Pro CartRip functionality and I had these two unusual carts sitting around. They should be raw binary dumps. Can these be converted to cart files and used with emulation like VICE or on flash adapters? It's perfectly possible I have the file names reversed. 

VIC20 Minijini VICTerm 40.JPG

VIC20 - Minijini VIC20 - VICTERM40

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I'm not sure how those dumps were generated. They mostly look like mush to me. The 16K ones should be split into two halves: 8K at $6000 and 8K at $A000. The 8K ones that attach to $A000 should have a cold start address at the beginning, usually in the $Axxx range. Yours contain $29DF or $29FF. Compared to known good dumps of e.g. Pharaoh's Curse, none of the strings are found and frankly I don't see any valid 6502 code in your dumps as well. VICE monitor decodes it as a lot of "illegal" opcodes that in combination make no sense.

 

I'll have a closer look later, but I strongly believe your cartridge dumper is failing big time.

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I compared two known dumps of VIC Term 40 with yours. In case data was scrambled bitwise, I tried to see if there are any patterns in common when it comes to the text strings (BAUD RATE, DUPLEX etc) but I fail to see any matching pattern. Not even the number of spaces between strings match to a single byte in your dumps. I believe you have the wrong settings for the CartRip or something else is bad, assuming those cartridges boot correctly on a VIC-20 so they're not complete bit rot to begin with. Then again that would be maximum unfortune if you got five cartridges and all are damaged beyond repair.

 

Edit: I saw that the CartRipVic adapter has an indicator for what should be front side of the cartridge. Surely you didn't turn those cartridges upside down (rotated 180 degrees if you like)? It probably would be very bad idea.

Edited by carlsson
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The Chiptester Pro does some work in the way of checksums, and if I recall, at least one of the carts was recognized by checksum, and I think it was Pharaoh. 

 

I'll circle back with Evie and see if she has any idea of what is going on.

 

Thanks for checking these out. I hope to have some good rips soon.

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Hm, surely the data dumped from the cartridge is not hashed against a protective key of the cartridge ripper software to prevent spreading dumps? Hopefully Evie can help you figure out what is going on, and from there the rest of us can help you make CRT images or whichever format VIC-20 cartridges want to be in. The dumps on Zimmers tend to be PRG files with a two byte load address, nothing fancy but I understand that CRT holds more meta info and may be easier to attach in the emulator.

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After a very brief look, it still seems like mush to me. For instance both Pharoah's Curse and VICTERM should have various text strings in them, but I can't find a single legible one. Also after adding a load address to VICTERM and going through the code with the monitor, it still is a mess full of illegal opcodes called in a long row.

 

I'm not sure what you are doing with the dumper. Do these cartridges still boot on a real VIC-20, so they're not damaged by now?

 

Someone else is free to take a look, but right now I'm afraid it would be a waste of time unless one comes up with a method to unscramble the data.

 

By the way, did Evie confirm that the CartRip indeed dumps ROMs unprotected, so it isn't some kind of scheme to prevent you from distributing those online? I have no idea about how this hardware and software works, and it would seem extremely odd if that was the case, but these days you never know.

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Huh.. does the program recognize the cartridge itself, or the dump that you posted?

 

For instance, a known good dump of Pharaoh's Curse has the following data at $6000:

2060 0161 4a62 4063 6264 ab65 4e66 5267

 

Your dump has the following data at the same address:

addc cfd6 2c29 7ffe 0d48 5775 e452 5fbb

 

Notice the pattern 60 - 61 - 62 - 63 that has no obvious match in your dump. Even written out in binary, I'm having trouble to find the pattern:

 

01100000

01100001

01100010

01100011

 

vs

 

11011100
11010110
00101001
11111110

 

Btw, you mentioned checksum - surely the ripper doesn't automatically hash all data against a checksum?

Edited by carlsson
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Yes, I can use cartconv to make CRT images out of these.

 

The question is which environment you are planning to use the images. I noticed that VICE never has supported CRT when it comes to VIC-20, only C64 emulation. For VIC, there are few other formats (Behr Bonz, Mega-Cart, Final Expansion, UltiMem and Vic Flash Plugin) supported beyond generic ROM dumps. In theory I can make CRT images and then mount those in C64 emulation just to see that the data is there.

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Here are the converted files. I noticed that the cartconv tool that comes with the latest version of VICE actually supports creating both 8K and 16K VIC-20 CRT files, so I recreated those. However the VICE emulator doesn't seem to support mounting those, but apparently THEVIC20 does?

 

Edit: Aha, one can Autostart CRT images in VICE, but not mount them in the cartridge dialog, at least not in the SDL2 version of the emulator.

 

My analysis of the files:

 

Pharaoh's Curse (16K), Story Machine (12K actually) and Vic Term 40 all are binary identical with the dumps on Zimmers.

 

Protector is slightly different. Your dump says COPR.HES,1983 V1.1 while the one on Zimmers says COPYRIGHT HES, 1983 AND JALA. I haven't studied the game more in detail to see what else makes it different, if yours is an earlier version of the final game. What does the label look like, does it resemble a production cartridge?

 

Mini Jini wasn't previously archived, but seems to boot properly.

VIC-20 Mini Jini.prg VIC-20 Pharaoh's Curse 60.prg VIC-20 Pharaoh's Curse a0.prg VIC-20 Protector.prg VIC-20 Story Machine 60.prg VIC-20 Story Machine a0.prg VIC-20 Victerm 40.prg

VIC-20 Mini Jini.crt VIC-20 Pharaoh's Curse.crt VIC-20 Protector.crt VIC-20 Story Machine.crt VIC-20 Victerm 40.crt

Edited by carlsson
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