eegad

Got addicted to this game the other night (just found it and played for the first time). Just wondering if there exists a cheat version somewhere (like unlimited strength)....I'd like to finish the game!

I've just discovered an odd problem. Long ago, when the first emulators were coming about (mid-90s), I had the Rainbow 95 emulator. I actually remember spending one saturday afternoon uploading some diskcomm'd atari disk images (at 1200 baud!), and then downloading them on my pc to use with Rainbow. I also seem to recall having a utility that could convert .dcm files to .atr files, and doing that at some point. Well, I just went to use one of those old .atr files and found that they don't work with Altirra or Atari800WinPlus. They report the file as being "damaged" or an "unsupported format". But what's really odd is that if I fire up that old Rainbow emulator (which still seems to work okay in Win7), it WILL load those atr files just fine. Which makes me think that somewhere along the way the specs on the atr file format have changed???? What I can say for sure is that the .atr's that I've downloaded in more recent times are 92172 bytes (single density disks of course). But the old atr's that I converted myself way back when are all 92160 bytes. So obviously something is amiss. Anybody have a way for me to "fix" those old files so that Altirra will recognize and load them??? Obviously all the necessary data is there since Rainbow runs them fine....but something must be screwy with the header data or something.

These were 2 of my favorite arcade games back in the day, and I know of no Atari 8-bit versions. And so I thought I'd ask - are there any clones of either of these games for the XL/XE?? Maybe something a hobbyist created at some point during the past 20 years?? By the way, I do know about Fortune Hunter (I think that's the name), which is based on Venture, but it's not very good.

Calling for suggestions for the best graphics&sound demos...

I'm looking to put together an 8M flashcart with a bunch of Atari demos. All recommendations for this should load as files (.xex, etc) or single-load disk images (no multi-loading, because I want to put a bunch of them, selectable from a standard main flashcart menu). Also would prefer demos that run on 64k machines (stock 800xl), rather than requiring expanded memory. And finally, works on NTSC; doesn't require PAL. Much thanks for any input!

I was watching a speech by David Crane on YouTube the other day, where he was talking about how he made Pitfall, and the programming challenges on the 2600. After watching it, and thinking about other bits and pieces I've heard through the years about the inner workings of the 2600, I have a couple of questions that hopefully somebody can answer for me...


First, regarding the dreaded 2600 flickering. Early games suffered from it (Adventure, Superman, Asteroids, etc). Many (most) later games did not. After hearing David Cranes talk, am I right in assuming it basically comes down to something like this : in the early days, if a programmer wanted to display 6 objects on the screen, he might set up the two 'player' graphics to each be 3 objects and then just display them on alternating frames (ie - frame 1 displays objects 1 and 4, frame 2 displays objects 2 and 5, etc....and so each object is only being displayed every third frame and so they flicker). Programmers later learned to program it in a more complex manner so that each object was displayed on each frame by changing the player graphics on the fly, multiple times each frame...and thus they had to be much tighter in their coding. If I'm not right about that, I'd appreciate a more correct explanation just to satisfy my own curiousity about this topic. Also, I've seen many hacks of games, and I've especially enjoyed playing some of Adventure that add objects and rooms, change the graphics, etc. But what I'm wondering is....just how hard would it be to update the code a bit to just make the original Adventure NOT flicker at all? I for one would love to see some of the early games (especially Adventure and Superman) with the flickering removed. How much is involved in that for someone who knows what they're doing in programming the 2600???

And secondly, Mr Crane mentioned how in Pitfall II, he cheated to get nicer music by "adding an extra chip in the cart". So what kind of chip is that?? Just extra RAM?? An additional sound chip? And in thinking about that, it got me wondering about both Pitfall II and other games that had special "extras" built into the cart.....like I think Mountain King and some others had extra RAM built into them. So how does the Harmony cart handle playing those? Does it just know about those particular games and set aside and use a little bit of RAM from the SD card??? Does it emulate an extra sound chip for Pitfall II (if that's what Pitfall II had built into it). Basically, how does it KNOW to "do something extra" for those special carts when all it sees are a bunch of ROM dumps in a directory????



Just curious....thanks for any helpful input.