22 replies to this topic

[Allan]

Since the Atari 5200 Ultimate SD Cartridge is about to be released and one of the cool features is that you can have the manual on the cart, I thought it would be cool if we could start a manual conversion project.

I started doing a couple.

1. Berzerk
2. Congo Bongo
3. Necromancer

and Classics did

4. Laser Gates

Many of the regular releases are in text form here at Atariage. They just need to be reformatted for a 40 column screen.

You need to cut everything off at 39 characters or it will add an extra line underneath.

If anybody wants to help just post which ones you will do so we don't duplicate our efforts.

Allan

Attached Files

•  Berzerk.txt   4.48K   63 downloads
•  CongoBongo.txt   4.24K   50 downloads
•  Necromancer.txt   12.75K   54 downloads

[RAGINxxXxxCAJUN]

Good idea! I don't have any manuals

[RAGINxxXxxCAJUN]

Here is a big list of 5200 game manuals in text format. After all of them are done someone should make it a torrent file so they can get all of them at one time

http://www.atarihq.c...uals/index.html

[Allan]

RAGINxxXxxCAJUN, on Thu Feb 17, 2011 1:22 PM, said:

Good idea! I don't have any manuals

http://www.atariage....l?SystemID=5200

All the ones that have the little open book. Just cut and paste them into your favorite text editor and reformat them.

Allan

[Allan]

RAGINxxXxxCAJUN, on Thu Feb 17, 2011 1:25 PM, said:

Here is a big list of 5200 game manuals in text format. After all of them are done someone should make it a torrent file so they can get all of them at one time

http://www.atarihq.c...uals/index.html

I think making them into a torrent would be a slight overkill. We'll just zip them all and post them here.

Allan

[classics]

Great idea, everyone finding and formatting their own manuals would end up being pretty tedious.

I did prepare manuals for Necromancer and Shamus Case II, so save yourself the work on those two. I'll post them along with the ROMs.

I don't have any other manuals at the moment. The 8-bit manual scans over at Atarimania are probably a good starting point since pretty much all 5200 games are ports of the 8-bit versions. I used the 2600 manual for Laser Gates.

Steve

[RAGINxxXxxCAJUN]

Allan, on Thu Feb 17, 2011 2:15 PM, said:

RAGINxxXxxCAJUN, on Thu Feb 17, 2011 1:25 PM, said:

Here is a big list of 5200 game manuals in text format. After all of them are done someone should make it a torrent file so they can get all of them at one time

http://www.atarihq.c...uals/index.html

I think making them into a torrent would be a slight overkill. We'll just zip them all and post them here.

Allan

Ah true. It's only text files. I was thinking more of the screen shots

[Greg2600]

Do the manuals show up on the SD cart somewhere? Do screen shots?

[Allan]

Greg2600, on Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:51 PM, said:

Do the manuals show up on the SD cart somewhere? Do screen shots?

Yes. Here's a shot of the Berzerk manual.

It's backwards because of the camera.

Allan

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[GroovyBee]

Wouldn't it be easier for somebody to make a quick app in Perl, C++, etc. that takes in the text file and auto formats it as required? I suspect it'd save a ton of work.

[Allan]

GroovyBee, on Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:54 AM, said:

Wouldn't it be easier for somebody to make a quick app in Perl, C++, etc. that takes in the text file and auto formats it as required? I suspect it'd save a ton of work.

Yes it would. Any volunteers?

Allan

[GroovyBee]

How about specifying what it has to do and then interested parties can take it from there.

[Allan]

GroovyBee, on Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:00 AM, said:

How about specifying what it has to do and then interested parties can take it from there.

That is a very good point.

It needs to take a text file and have it 39 characters wide. It also needs to end a line if it sees that a word is going to cross the 39th column so that a word doesn't get split up.

That's about it.

Allan

[GroovyBee]

How is a line terminated? Is it carriage return and then line feed e.g. $0D,$0A or carriage return only e.g. $0D?

[Allan]

GroovyBee, on Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:33 AM, said:

How is a line terminated? Is it carriage return and then line feed e.g. $0D,$0A or carriage return only e.g. $0D?

Looking at it with BBEDIT text editor with invisible characters shown, I only see the carriage return so I am assuming it's just a carriage return.

Allan

[GroovyBee]

Does the output file need any particular extension?

[Allan]

GroovyBee, on Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:53 AM, said:

Does the output file need any particular extension?

.txt

Allan

[GroovyBee]

If nobody steps up to the plate I'll see what I can do next week. No guarantees on that because my retro development time is pretty maxed out at the moment.

[Allan]

GroovyBee, on Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:58 PM, said:

If nobody steps up to the plate I'll see what I can do next week. No guarantees on that because my retro development time is pretty maxed out at the moment.

Thanks GrooveyBee.

Allan

[GroovyBee]

Is there a bitmap of the available characters in the display font?

[classics]

GroovyBee, on Fri Feb 18, 2011 1:06 PM, said:

Is there a bitmap of the available characters in the display font?

The default display font is a the standard ATASCII just modified a little. Its the font 'document.fnt' thats included with the Maxflash Studio application for the 8-bit. I'll attach a photo of what the whole set looks like.

The character set is loaded from the card dynamically at each startup from sd5200.set. This is to allow it to be customized by each person.

If the character set is missing, the standard ATASCII set is used from the 5200 BIOS.

Steve

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[classics]

Greg2600, on Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:51 PM, said:

Do the manuals show up on the SD cart somewhere? Do screen shots?

You can select a .txt file and it will display on screen.

Or if you are browsing rom images and want to see the manual for a game you just highlight the rom image, for example it might be 'bounty bob.rom' and press '3' on the keypad. The SD cartridge will find and display a file called 'bounty bob.txt' in the '5200\manuals' directory and return you to the directory browser where you left off when you exit the text viewer.

Steve

[GroovyBee]

Find attached the Ultimate SD cartridge manual mangler :-

 A52mm.zip   4.97K   34 downloads

Windows only I'm afraid.

Simple to use :-

- Just browse to the *.txt file to convert.
- Hit the Convert button.
- A file will be created with the same name as the original but with ".usd.txt" appended to the end.
- Done!

Weird characters will be replaced with a "?" in the file created.

Any issues let me know.