307 replies to this topic

[AtariNerd]

Me too! Me too!

I'd love a cartridge, but at least try to get something that works properly in an emulator, if nothing else.

Have we told wrathchild how attractive/awesome s/he is?

[eegad]

How is it possible that I never stumbled upon this until today??? All I can say is HOLY CRAP! Alternate Reality was my all-time favorite Atari 8bit game....I still play it once or twice a year via emulators, and have been keeping my original character going for like 25 years now. Anyway, I just found this thread and grabbed the AR cart file, put it on an 8meg flashcart and fired up my 800xl. Couldn't believe it - very cool and very impressive! The only thing that makes me sad is that this project seems to have fizzled out.....or did it possibly get moved and resurrected elsewhere? Any new info? I would love to see an AR flashcart be completed that allowed for character saving (and maybe a way to import an existing character?). Yes, I would definitely be willing to support the cause by purchasing a cart when available.

[eegad]

Even if we never do get to see the AR cart as it was originally planned, I'd still love to plug in a cart and just play with a temp character for a while.....wander the city, listen to some tunes in the taverns, kill a bunch of creatures and find some treasures. But there are two problems with that....one big, one solved.

The big problem is that the game is unstable in it's current format & crashes randomly. I tried playing around in Altirra's debugger today a bit, but I'm stumped (it's been a LONG time since I played around with Atari/6502 assembly!). The crash always seems to occur during an NMI / DLI, and always seems to be of the sort where a JMP or JSR is encountered and the program jumps to an area which appears to have code that's modified during program execution (the code in those areas changes as time goes by)....and sooner or later the program jumps to that area and there's a bad/garbage instruction there and it bombs. My guess is that it happens when encounters with certain creatures are about to occur, but I can't say for sure. Since it self-modifies, I can't search for it with a hex editor in the .rom file, so I'm beaten for now. All I can think is maybe there's some glitch/error with whatever way the disk data was transferred/converted to the .rom, or with whatever bank switching scheme is used to swap data in and out. Anyhow...

The second problem is that always starting out with a new character is just too hard. I'd rather play with a higher level temp character so that I don't get killed off so easily. That problem I solved. I hacked a version where your temp character starts with stats of 150 each, 255 hit points, and (sometimes) 255 gold pieces (sometimes you get random # of coppers, sometimes you get 255 gold....not sure why, but what the heck).

I've attached the file in case anyone else wants to play around with it. Would love to see someone figure out the crashing problems and patch that someday.

Also, my apologies to any purists who don't like the idea of cheating the game, and also to the creator of the original cart conversion if he's not happy about seeing his efforts hacked at - no offense intended; just trying to make it more functional since it appears to have been abandoned.

Attached Files

•  Alternate Reality w cheats.zip   330.71K   12 downloads

[Wrathchild]

Although I'd love to say "never say never", this project took a long back burner as the focus required to get it to the next stage is quite large and finding such a window just hasn't happened for too long. Ideas (in my mind) of picking it up keep occurring but regulars here may have notice I've "backed out" a little of the A8 coding scene over the last year and that's been a conscious move as requiring more focus on family life has pushed my involvement here to mainly reading threads and periodically posting.

Specifically the need for a Cart version of the City & Dungeon has fallen away IMO as there are the SD drives that can mount images and I believe these can permit a fan to run these games reasonably well, so I'd recommend taking a look at that option.

[Xebec's Demise]

I always envisioned an AR cart as more of a "must-have" product, actually similar to memory upgrades and SD drives, than a 'needed' item.

[Rybags]

The problem I see with Flashcart is that writing to the game disk.

1 Meg cart required, and the blocksize is 64K. Also consider the time, it'd probably end up slower than the floppy version.

An alternative might be to use RAM instead, and flash the image when a game save takes place, but then you're talking the need for 256K RAM or better since an entire 88K disk would have to be cached.

Maybe the best solution would be to have the entire game file-based, and have some sort of mini-DOS tucked under the OS.
Or, put all the disk sectors in an image which you boot from emulated drive or mount as D1: in IDE type real devices and adjust the program with the needed sector offsets.

[Wrathchild]

A mini-dos would have to also use its own variables, you cannot use any existing OS stuff due to its use of zero-page, page 3 etc.
Seeing as the game already had its own I/O routines for its sector encoding I would better see that could be removed and ported first to a 'standard' sector model.
The cart image has the existing I/O rewritten to read from the equivalent offset into the images held in ROM and so no issue there.
The issue, and place where I've stopped, was more down to the nature of the I/O routines also being coded into the modules/overlays (e.g. going into an Inn). This means that these also need to be patched, either after they are loaded (as I do currently) or patched and re-saved into the disk images (which requires encoding).
Saving back to the disk (which seems to occur with the module loading/unloading) is a City thing, the Dungeon doesn't have the same level of protection and so would theoretically be more easier to do as a cart. In an 8Mbit cart you can still put an 040 and an 010 chip in there, so the game image can reside on the 040 and character and game state stuff can go on the smaller chip with 16K erase sectors. Also it wouldn't need to be erased each time, a bit-mask header could be used to indicate the next free slot and the save writes to that slot and then knocks off a bit (1->0) from the header. When the header is all zeros then the sector is erased and started again.

[Gunstar]

I'd love a cart version, but it seems like far to much trouble for little results, especially with SIO2PC and warp speed loading. I use one real drive, load disk 1 with it and use it for my character disk. I set up the other disks as images with write-to ability on the PC and when I quit, I remember to save the disk images current state. makes for very speedy gameplay as it is. Very few disk swaps since 2 drives can be used with the City, and 4 drives supported drives can be used with the dungeon, that and 128K support.

Edited by Gunstar, Mon Oct 24, 2011 5:16 PM.