Favorite obscure game

[Bryan]

Was there ever a fixed copy of Nautilus?

 

Not sure, but could soon be

 

The problem is the RTI again, however, the loading

routine is a bit clever. The game code/data is interspersed

on the disk with the value 1, but the distance to the next '1'

varies. Hence, if you change any byte then the data gets

loaded incorrectly

 

I'm away over the weekend, so I'll have a go on Sunday night.

 

Take care,

 

Mark

 

I have a file version, would that eliminate the loader issue?

 

Also for an obscure game... I loved Dan/Dani Bunten's Cytron Masters.

 

-Bry

[liquid_sky]

I was always a fan of avalon hill's vietcong

[andylama]

Mars T is awesome!

 

I wasted alot of time playing this game - Here is an ATR

 

This is great on an emu since you dont have to wait long for the world to build

 

It gives new meaning to "it's a small world"!

 

Oh my gawrsh! I'm stunned to learn that anyone here has even HEARD of it, let alone played the damn thing!

 

I played that game for mega-hours when I was in my mid-teens! I even hacked out an "improved" version of it that I wish I still had.

 

That ultra-distinctive "prompt noise" that it makes is permanently etched into my brain!

 

"HISTORIAN SAYS: ANYONE'S GUESS"

 

Ahhh, memories!

[Bryan]

As for Nautilus, it appears to occupy $800-7680 and the offending code you mentioned appears at $3860, but I can't find in the file, so you must be correct about the loader. I wonder how easy it would be to dump RAM and make an exe out of it.

 

I guess this bit of erroneous code got passed around a lot, huh?

 

-Bry

[Bryan]

Here's a copy of Nautilus I made from a RAM dump that has no custom loader. It still has the RTI bug, since when I tried to scoot the code back 1 byte (At offset $3034) and patch it, the sounds got screwed up.. I'm gonna go back and try again.

 

(in other words, this one is a straight loader but requires Translator. Execution starts at $1D00)

 

---------------------

 

Update... I fixed it. There were 2 places where the modified code was called. This version is fully XL ready (now it just needs Wrathchild's seal of approval).

 

-Bry

nautilus_fixed.zip

[Wrathchild]

Update... I fixed it. There were 2 places where the modified code was called. This version is fully XL ready (now it just needs Wrathchild's seal of approval).

 

Congrats! Worked for me, I had actually just logged on to upload my version!

 

I shuffled to routine after to RTI forward a couple of bytes by dropping one of the repeated LDAs and shifting its STA. Change the RTI to a

PLA and RTS et voila. Oh, and change to JSR to the shifted rotuine.

 

All good fun

 

Mark

nautilus.zip

[Bryan]

Congrats! Worked for me, I had actually just logged on to upload my version!    

 

I shuffled to routine after to RTI forward a couple of bytes by dropping one of the repeated LDAs and shifting its STA. Change the RTI to a

PLA and RTS et voila. Oh, and change to JSR to the shifted rotuine.

 

All good fun    

 

Mark

 

Ahh.. I moved the code before the RTI up one (into some trailing zero's following the table of software titles that are shown during the intro), and made a vector patch, then I had to find where the routine was called and update those. Your way sounds a little simpler, though. Did you convert the original loader stuff, or use my straight loader?

 

-Bry

[Wrathchild]

Did you convert the original loader stuff, or use my straight loader?

 

From the original... I'd worked out that $1D00 was the start

and verified that nothing between $800 and $1CFF was being used.

Stuck a break point into the A800Win debugger and saved the raw

data once it was in place ($1D00->$72FF). Then completed by adding

a little bootloader sector to set the reset vector etc. Luckily the uncompressed game was <256 sectors and so can be loaded in one go.

 

Who's got a Gorf ROM image then?

 

Mark

[Wrathchild]

Back to the topic... (we got a bit carried away )

 

"Liverpool" was a very good football manager program.

The actual 'Football Manager' which I'd played on the ZX81 before,

took an age to arrive on the Atari, and then it wasn't so good

as everyone else had graphics.

 

IIRC, Liverpool was written in basic and just came on

cassette as it used all of the 48K.

[Bryan]

Did you convert the original loader stuff, or use my straight loader?

 

From the original... I'd worked out that $1D00 was the start

and verified that nothing between $800 and $1CFF was being used.

Stuck a break point into the A800Win debugger and saved the raw

data once it was in place ($1D00->$72FF). Then completed by adding

a little bootloader sector to set the reset vector etc. Luckily the uncompressed game was <256 sectors and so can be loaded in one go.

 

Who's got a Gorf ROM image then?

 

Mark

 

How did you determine that 72FF was the end? I'm showing stuff loading out to 7680.

 

The GORF file I have already works.

 

-Bry

[Shannon]

I'll have to supply a longer list later, but how about the k-razy games (all of them jump straight to that one routine instead of using the vector).

 

mario brothers, moon patrol have sound issues unless loaded in translator mode.

 

Berzerk wont run.

 

I'll add more later.

[Goochman]

For the Mars Tesoro crowd - anyone know a way to get more $$$ to start with? Id love to have unlimited funds just to search the whole ocean! I got pretty far in the game once but it is not very forgiving - go a bit too deep and you're finished!

 

An unlimited $$$ version of this game would be sweet - hint hint

[andylama]

For the Mars Tesoro crowd - anyone know a way to get more $$$ to start with?  Id love to have unlimited funds just to search the whole ocean!  I got pretty far in the game once but it is not very forgiving - go a bit too deep and you're finished!

 

An unlimited $$$ version of this game would be sweet - hint hint

 

 

Actually, I'm working on it. Will post an ATR when it's ready. This may take a while tho, as I'm in the midst of moving.

 

I once had a "tricked out" version of the game, that I hacked for my own personal enjoyment back around 1984, but that disk is long gone. I'm still nostalgic for that game, so I'm going to be re-doing the modifications.

 

...and the $$$ won't be unlimited, but it will be more realistic. As it is, $10K only buys you about 4 days at sea, and not enough to recover a treasure valuable enough to keep you going for deeper dives. The verbage could (will) be better also.

 

BTW, thanks to Jindroush for hipping me to his utility that reverses the effects of the nuisance STMCUR pokes. That is brilliant!

[Goochman]

I actually had over 100K once - but this game is not very forgiving

 

Let me know where to change the $$$ amount if your're not going to hack a seven figure starting amount

[andylama]

Will do, when I can.

 

Maybe I could just whip up a version that asks you how much cash you want to start with? Would take all the suspense out of the game though.

 

One thing about the code: it's written in Atari BASIC, but it's somewhat obfuscated, so I'll hafta dig for it.

[Bryan]

Will do, when I can.

 

Maybe I could just whip up a version that asks you how much cash you want to start with?  Would take all the suspense out of the game though.

 

One thing about the code: it's written in Atari BASIC, but it's somewhat obfuscated, so I'll hafta dig for it.

 

It's funny, but now that I've been doing so much Assembly, I find BASIC very hard to read. Probably because it sprawls the screen, and it's hard to comment it to any real degree

 

-Bry

[andylama]

It's funny, but now that I've been doing so much Assembly, I find BASIC very hard to read. Probably because it sprawls the screen, and it's hard to comment it to any real degree

 

Agreed. And when they compound matters with deliberate obfuscation, as is the case with Mar Tesoro (e.g. "GOSUB TT*N7+DIVE"), it's just a MESS!

 

I seem to remember reading that this type of obfuscation was done because supposedly the BASIC interpreter is able to interpret variable/constant references a few cycles faster than hard-coded values. I never knew if this was really true, but I remember reading that about 20 years ago. Seems counter-intuitive.

 

...and it's still a mess.

[Jetboot Jack]

I don't know about making the code harder to read, using varaiables to control jumps is a MUCH better way than hardcoding in line numbers, also saves you a few bytes and is faster!

 

Its far easier to debug no hard wired jumps, you can interrogate variables to determine logic flow and trap bad jumps much easier....

 

The easiest way to make an Atari Basic program hard to read is to mess with the Basic tokenization table, like Football Manager did!!!

 

sTeVE

[andylama]

I don't know about making the code harder to read, using varaiables to control jumps is a MUCH better way than hardcoding in line numbers, also saves you a few bytes and is faster!

 

Its far easier to debug no hard wired jumps, you can interrogate variables to determine logic flow and trap bad jumps much easier....

 

The easiest way to make an Atari Basic program hard to read is to mess with the Basic tokenization table, like Football Manager did!!!

 

sTeVE

 

 

I understand that, but when you see a jump vector expressed as a complex equation of CONSTANTS, ya gotta wonder what the intent was. IIRC, this is the case with Mar Tesoro.

 

OK, maybe not complex, but still.

 

Well, at least the author didn't bugger the tokenization table. I think I've seen that, and it ain't pretty.

 

I find it ironic that the platform is still as compelling as it is, from a coder standpoint.

[Hulsie]

"The Institute" from Screenplay was always one of my favorite rarities. It was the game that introduced me to the whole VERB+NOUN-style of adventure gaming that I grew to love. Sure, the vocabulary might be pretty limited and the game itself is ridiculously hard, but the graphics and storyline are excellent. Has anybody else played this game? I attached the file for anybody who doesn't have it.

the_institute.zip

[andylama]

Here you go. All I did here was bump up the starting cash from $10K to $100K and a couple subtle tweaks to the text during setup.

 

Otherwise, Mar Tesoro..."monty haul" version (obscure D&D reference)

 

Will eventually post the "improved version" someday....

 

Enjoy

tesoro_montyhaul.zip

[Shannon]

Two games that I always found fun. The first probably more intruiging then fun. Was

 

snowball (I think that was the name) - a game where you have snowball fights. Very interesting and a cool snow generator.

 

special delivery - a game where you get to play santa clause!

[Bryan]

I revived this topic because I went back and modified Nautilus again to make the executable smaller. The fixed EXE I posted a while back is much larger than the 800 only versions floating around because the original decompresses a bunch of stuff. For this reason, it isn't possible to just fix the instructions in the file itself.

 

Anyway, the solution I used to fix the file this time was to patch the startup code to modify the interrupt routine after it has been expanded and relocated in RAM. Anyway, here's a smaller fixed NAUTILUS.EXE.

 

-Bry

naut.zip

[Goochman]

I wish Naut had a good 1 player mode with score so I could include it in the HSC club - I really enjoyed this game

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

is there already a fix for "Bandits" available, so it loads on the XL/XE computers without the translator disk ?!? And how about the "Tail of Beta Lyrae" ?!? -Andreas.