Ian/Mark Keates' Lunar Lander

[BobAtari]

This always looked like a fun take on the arcade hit:

 

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-lunar-lander_20271.html

 

But I've never managed to find a loadable version of it (my emulator doesn't support .CAS files, and it's the only Lunar Lander that doesn't seem to have been put on disk by Homesoft). Anybody know of one?

[+DjayBee]

Since this game was written by @Wrathchild's brother (as he wrote in Atarimania's comments field), he might have what you search for.

[BobAtari]

Fingers crossed, ta.

[Wrathchild]

Hi!

 

Well the original was as strange thing as the first part was a normal binary which used for the loader screen and the second part was converted using a basic to cassette boot tool.

All that was done years ago and so I didn't have any code. However using the VCopy Blizzard tool I was able to extract the two blocks from the cassette image.

 

Then I converted to XEX files by replacing the cassette 6 byte header with and xex header and relevant INIT and RUN values.

By the nature of the first file chaining the second file, I was able to join the two files to make one and so replace that code with a delay and return.

 

However, there was still an issue and this is because the game file loads at $07BA and so does not play friendly with DOS and cart-based binary loaders.

So to avoid that I have employed Exomizer to decompress that area after loading it higher in memory. However that introduced a final issue.

The game uses a display list routine that was relocated to the Stack memory area ($100). This area is used by the Exomiser code and so the dlist code is lost.

So I had to add a final segment to the XEX chain to recall the code that copied it after the decompression and now the game will launch fine.

 

Best wishes,

Mark 

Lunar Lander _ Keates, Ian.atr Lunar Lander _ Keates, Ian.xex

[BobAtari]

Wonderful, thank you