El Destructo

Replaced the TIA in my 6-switch with one from a 4-switch and now the Epyx games work on Harmony. Hope this helps others. Makes me wonder what's the difference between TIAs of different eras?

I'm experiencing the same problem, and started a new thread about it before finding your post. Did you ever find a solution?

This poster had the same problem but says his Harmony plays the games fine on his 4-switch. Strange that this makes a difference!

Revisiting the Atari 2600...my "pre-production special edition" Harmony cart #42 runs everything it's supposed to except these three Epyx titles; all crash out to no signal immediately after loading. At first I thought BIOS 1.05 might be to blame, but updating to BIOS 1.06 made no difference. ROM images run fine in Stella. BIOS and ROMs are the NTSC versions. The console is an NTSC light sixer. Any ideas as to what could be wrong?

Ah, "The Music Player". Does anyone remember the keystroke to switch this program's playback between 8M (8-bit mono), 8S (8-bit stereo) and 16 (16-bit voices, two per channel)?

This is a really awesome project! I'm curious how the menu "sets" the difficulty switches for games like Asteroids. Is the game code patched to read the menu's setting instead? I'd also like to humbly suggest Maze Craze getting the menu treatment. It has a ton of options, enough that the Atari VCS Game Vault gets them wrong! Its "# of robbers" setting doesn't even choose the correct "Cops and Robbers" game type.

Here's a digitized Christmas music demo I made using Parrot in 1986. I've never uploaded it anywhere until now, somehow. Runs on a 130XE with Sparta X cart and BASIC installed. Enjoy! ParrotXE Christmas demo, fast-load.atr

The other files I pulled from that disk are included in the PETRGUNN.ATR image I posted earlier.

Hi! Tried PMing you here but got a "This user cannot receive messages" error. I'd like to add information to the AtariMania entries about my work but I can't register an account on the site. Account #1: el destructo - get a "you didn't activate your account, check your email" when logging in (no email ever arrived.) Account #2: anthony dandrea - Gets to the point where it's supposed to send an activation email, then throws an "SMTP session, access denied" error and no email arrives. Would you please help? Thanks, Anthony Dandrea (formerly known as Tony Ramos)

Found it! Took quite a bit of sleuthing, however: Following CharlieChaplin's lead, I started with the POOLDISK, which I bought as a real CD-ROM back in '95. I copied it to my computer's solid-state drive. I did a multi-file search for "PETER GUNN" on all file types over the entire disk, thinking the program name or author's name would appear as plain text in any disk description files or even the ATR images themselves. This came up empty. Since the search was quite quick despite there being thousands of files, I decided to go a step further and run a multi-file search on my entire ATR library: This time, I got results. Most hits were the Dr. Download BBS demo, but look at the last one highlighted in blue: "J2" is one of the disks where I stored BASIC games and demos back in the day, and the first place I looked for this file before asking the A8 forum. Popped the ATR into Atari800MacX again and checked the file list: No PETRGUNN.BAS, same as before. The data was clearly on the disk, so maybe I deleted it at some point? Disk is in SpartaDOS format, so UNERASE to the rescue: Still no PETRGUNN.BAS. Opening the ATR file in a hex editor showed the program apparently intact, however: I then remembered having a SpartaDOS sector editor, which I located and ran: Tokenized BASIC program files start with two zeros closely followed by the variable list: Looks like the program header is intact! Scanning down, I found the final sector containing the program name: Tagged all the sectors in this range, saved them as a file on another disk, and voila! Found and rescued several other lost files as well: Turns out I had "Turbo-enhanced" the Peter Gunn demo and a few others on this disk to improve them in various ways: PETRGUNN.TUR: Much faster initializing, self-modifies program to insert PAUSE commands in the main loop CHARLIE.BAS: Added a blowing wind sound effect to gameplay SOUNDLAB.BAS: A joystick-based POKEY filter editor to which I added 8-voice support for Gumby-modded computers. PACMAN.TUR is of particular interest; it's a Pac-Man clone I wrote in BASIC when I was 15. In this version, player 2 controls the red ghost until Pac-Man dies, then the roles reverse. Run "PACINTRO.BAS" for instructions. All of this used to load from tape on which I recorded background music and spoken instructions that played while the program loaded. I also wrote Pac-Man II which enabled you to create your own mazes. If I track that down I'll post it here as well. I'd still like to find the complete Atari Magic Show demo disk, though. Doesn't look like I ever had a copy. PETRGUNN.ATR

Parrot XE's primary advancement was the ability to access the 130XE's extended RAM banks for recording and saving longer sound samples; IIRC it could store up to 28 seconds of audio when recording at the standard rate. During the Magic Show I demoed a long-form "How can it still be playing?" sample of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson and maybe another of Sharp Dressed Man by ZZ Top. Regardless, I remember more than one attendee reacting with "Can you record a whole song off the radio? No? What good is it then?" ? Frustrating at the time, but most people weren't tuned into the possibilities of digitally manipulating real audio back then. Another reason for needing the additional memory was to store sounds sampled at a faster rate for better audio fidelity. This was made possible by a new piece of hardware that Alpha Systems created: An external converter circuit in a box that could continuously convert analog audio to digital data. With this new hardware, sample rate was now limited only by the speed of my code! Sampling at full throttle generated very high quality sound, but it consumed the available 128K in only a few seconds. I have a few of these sound files and they still sound quite good today. Plans were to bundle these updates with the new musical playback feature seen in the Parrot II demo. But as development proceeded through 1987 the computing world moved on to 16-bit computers, Atari users mostly abandoned the 8-bit, and we abandoned Parrot II. I was able to preserve all the disks and files but not the hardware: Years later during a move I unearthed the prototype circuit but it no longer worked. ?

Detroit, Michigan. Searching my archives for references to "Atari MAGIC Show" and found an issue of ZMagazine, the online newsletter, containing two first-hand reports. Enjoy! It's a wonderful time capsule.

Ohio. I hitched a ride with the "CEO" of Alpha Systems to demo the new 130XE version of my Parrot software. When I wasn't at our table I checked out the other vendors, met Bob Puff and got an XF Dual Drive upgrade kit, played the 16-player MIDI Maze setup, and more. I only wish I'd brought a camera. What a great show!

That's it, thank you! Can you tell me the filename? I was an exhibitor at the Atari Magic Show and have managed to hang on to the "invite" part of that demo. A magician taps a hat with a wand to call computer logos out of it and zap them into dust: Apple, Commodore, IBM. A butterfly comes out, then the Fuji logo. All the while, the event date fills in one corner of the screen. Then the full info scrolls up:

I'm hoping someone here can help me find a BASIC music demo I had in the '80s. It played the Peter Gunn theme while displaying a column of white eighth notes separated by horizontal lines, one for each voice. As the voices changed pitch their eighth note moved left for lower notes, right for higher notes. Everything was in double-line resolution. The notes were probably sprites and the lines were probably in GR. 7. I think the file was named PETRGUNN.BAS but I haven't found any references to it online. Does anyone remember this demo or know where I can find it?