Sonar Prototype Found

[Thomas Jentzsch]

29 minutes ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

Fantastic stuff, and my hats is off to you Thomas for amazing wizardry.

There's no way to add some A.I. to this is there? To make it a single player experience too?

I guess that would be possible. But the original games of 1977 also had no AI.

[+sramirez2008]

1 hour ago, jonreddick said:

Thanks for your efforts, Thomas. Update video and credit given where it's due!

 

This really is special. Thanks for showing it off and thank you @Thomas Jentzschfor your additions to this gem. Now if we could just have a OG CIB version.😉

[JeffIrok]

This is great!  Thanks for releasing it!

[Omegamatrix]

I love this little game, and agree that Atari should have released it. Oh well, at least we got Basic Math...

[_The Doctor__]

On 3/24/2023 at 10:42 AM, jhd said:

 

When the individual made the donation to the museum, did he make a formal assignment of copyright as part of the donor agreement? (Assuming that the donor actually owned the copyright; it may belong to a former employer if it was created in the course of his employment.)

 

I worked in the heritage sector for ~10 years. Getting a formal assignment of copyright from the donor was the practice from about the 1990s onwards. The problems arose with older donations where copyright was not assigned to the institution, and the donor was either dead or unreachable. There were numerous collections (especially photographs) that were in limbo because of these rights issues. Where possible, we would deal with copyright retroactively, but that was only rarely an option. 

 

Private individuals can "take their chances" and effectively ignore copyright law, but public institutions do not have this luxury. 

 

We would provide a "reasonable" number of copies of documents and photographs to the donor if requested. I do not ever recall having received a donor's request for materials that could not be duplicated using our in-house facilities. This may be a consideration if the museum lacks the equipment or facilities to duplicate the games and so must outsource the request to a commercial service. The cost of the service must be borne by someone.   

Then the situation should be taken up with the survivors/family of the person who donated so it can be returned to them and they can release it however they wish. This whole business of sitting on things in limbo shouldn't be the prevue of institutions but rather of the family, survivors etc and the wishes of the person from whom they came (living or deceased)

[jhd]

33 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Then the situation should be taken up with the survivors/family of the person who donated so it can be returned to them and they can release it however they wish. This whole business of sitting on things in limbo shouldn't be the prevue of institutions but rather of the family, survivors etc and the wishes of the person from whom they came (living or deceased)

 

I agree completely, and in a few cases I was able to track-down the rights holder and get the issue settled. 

 

Sadly, museums and other heritage institutions are not detective agencies. We can send a letter to the last-known address on file, but we simply lack the resources to find people, and even moreso their descendants. 

[_The Doctor__]

ancestry.com etc etc., my space, family finder, spokeo, there's a zillion of them and normally all are found in small time frames, even white pages, yellow pages, associations

dunno

Edited April 17 by _The Doctor__

[Thomas Jentzsch]

On 3/23/2023 at 9:12 AM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

The ROM has about 350 bytes free, so fixing the issues should be no problem. Maybe I will have a go for it.

 

BTW: The free bytes are occupied by Adventure prototype code and data. So the EPROM must have been created during or after Adventure development. And the Adventure data contains some graphics, which cannot be found in the final game. 

 

The walking "birds" are interesting. And the chalice looks slightly different at the top:

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I finally contacted Warren to ask him about the "birds". He kindly answered me immediately:

Quote

It is true that in an early prototype of Atari 2600 Adventure, I had a bird creature for a while. I called it a road-runner. It had a 2-image walking (or running) animation---as you showed in your email. I never could figure out what the road runner should do, so I got rid of it. It's not in Adventure's final ROM...

 

I'm surprised to hear that the road runner graphics survived in some other 2600 ROM. 

 

Hope that's useful info.

It is, isn't it?  

[Tempest]

27 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

I finally contacted Warren to ask him about the "birds". He kindly answered me immediately:

It is, isn't it?  

I had spoken to Warren and he told me the same thing.  I thought I had mentioned it in the review, but I guess not.  

[Thomas Jentzsch]

10 minutes ago, Tempest said:

I had spoken to Warren and he told me the same thing.  I thought I had mentioned it in the review, but I guess not.  

Or I missed it. 

[Tempest]

57 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Or I missed it. 

No it wasn't there.  I just realized that I put that info on the Adventure page:

 

http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/adventure/adventure.htm