stardot.org.uk

I don't fully understand the Scott Adams format, so I'm not totally sure what "actions" means in this context, but I wonder if that's why the Beeb version has bugs -- because it's missing some actions or has the wrong set of actions or something..? An action is a sort of thing that does something. ...

Yeah I was looking last night - that datafile appears to be the one from the TRS-80 version of the game. The BBC version has a totally different number of actions; the Atari version looks to be running on SAGA+ - which is a later version of the data definition file. I'm having to remind myself of st...

Yeah, this does means that picking the right source data file is important - the provided adv14b looks to be the AI UK one (using the Howarth engine).

I need to extract the Atari/PC/C64/Apple II version to a raw data file. Unless I can find a raw one.

A quick look around other games. US AI C64, PC, Apple II, Atari have the dashoard with:
The Spectrum version (UK AI) reads the same as in mine:

Yeah the code from the standard adv14b.txt reads: 140) 5 64 [LOOK DASH] ? PLAYER_IN (29 = cockpit of the jet car) -> 2 = PRINT(I see) -> 51 = PRINT(starter button & glove compartment.) -> 46 = PRINT(The cockpit is) -> 73 = CONTINUE: 141) [Cont'd] ? CLEARED_BIT (22) -> 47 = PRINT(open) -> 102 = PRINT...

Right fixed a load. In terms of the dashboard - this appears to be a difference in the adv14b source file. I'll need to extract the version from the the original beeb version to see what the differences are.

Another one - there needs to be a linefeed before "Play again?". If it happens, say from the freeway.

Right; managed to mangle a full word wrap and sorted the message formatting as shown below. fullwrap.png At this point, it's in beta for you guys to play through and test. I still need to update the code on github as it had changed a lot! Graphics are the next step; but these may have problems and w...

Well that was fun; I spent an hour wondering why when I added an "lda #0" it stop recognising verbs.

Turns out that I was at the byte limit so my code was bleeding into the data. Oh well word wrap working now, except for objects.

I've been working on templating the engine code for the different types and engines and supporting mode 7 colours (whilst still allowing the use of MODE 1 for the mysterious adventures). There's still some problems, such as word wrapping and the line feeds between printer messages; but it's getting ...

Doing some mucking around I can get a (MODE 4) room image into about 2K using a simple RLE encoding. The problem is that there's 27 unique room pictures.

This is going to be close to the limit for DFS unless I can think of a better compression route...

Enthar Seven was released on Risc OS I think I have a dodgy copy of it somewhere.

It used the 6502 tube to run the game; but with MODE 12 (or 15) native graphics.

Ah; I'd already done the C64 version. These have the rooms with a room number and the graphics are slightly smaller.

[ETA: the C64 version does horizontal pixel doubling, so it may be possible to scale this easily - or even reproduce it from the original graphics]

Attached are the graphics I extracted from the Atari version (I have some code to allow me to do the C64 - I may revisit that and look for the difference). In terms of displaying; the graphics are too big really - you really need at least half the screen available for text (mode 4?). This is why the...

To be honest, I wrote most of the code 9 years ago. Most of the time I spent trying to understand my code and reverse a bad design decision. Having some native MODE 5 graphics would be great - I ripped the Atari graphics a while back (they're stored as raw data on disc in a simple run length encodin...

I've templated my source more so I can tune stuff depending on whether it has graphics or not. So this version will be safe for PAGE at &1900. I've tried to add the original colours; but it's a bit buggy. The linefeeding is to do with the differences between Scott Adams and Brian Howarth games, so I...

An update - the bug with INVE was due to a logic error when I expanded conditions to greater than &ff. I didn't include a !boot; you need to: *load buck *engine I've played half way through the solution and it looked right to me. I think I may have been mistaken on this being only the demo version. ...

Pre-alpha version of Buckaroo Banzai for the Beeb.

Some commands, such as INVE don't work. But I got a way through it.

I started converting this to my custom Scott Adams engine; but ran into problems. I could retry this if I can find some free time. I've added a couple of comments to the Issues section of the Github, btw! :idea: Yeah I noticed - including beeb2sf, which I wrote back in 1994; so that may require me ...

Ah yes I remember the problem - it is that there are &10a actions but I only use one byte to store the number of actions; which means I need to patch my engine. to support more than &ff actions.

8bitAG wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 12, 2020 8:26 pm

This is the ScottFree version...

That is the demo cut-down version; not the full one.

I started converting this to my custom Scott Adams engine; but ran into problems. I could retry this if I can find some free time.

Just in very pre-Alpha at the moment, as there's a long way to go and I need to work out how the hell I'm going to convert whichever printer driver they use to a real definition. But, here's the View file: hint1-view.png And converted directly to an ODF file: hint1-odf.png I'm planning to expand thi...

I've pretty much completed the disassembly, I just need to update the github and finish the modern version of it.

The game is really simple, except for the very basic bytecode scheme it uses.

It appears to just have a chunk of MODE 7 data and translate it to its own format. At the start we have a shape header: 00 DA - Appears to be the size of the shape 00 40 00 00 80 - Unknown 27 - width of image in characters 00 00 80 - unknown 05 - height of image in rows 0F C6 - unknown 34 30 30 0D -...

The file FRAME is just a MODE 7 screen (i.e. you can just *LOAD FRAME 7C00). Looking at FULL now

Any chance of a version with a toggle/cookie setting for the colours to be inverted so that those who have bad astigmatism can actually read the site without blurring or after images?

(White text on a black background is quite unreadable on modern monitors for a lot of people.)

The Fourth Dimension protection was one of the weakest ones out there and could trivially be removed just using !Zap (as a hex edit and as a place to store the decrypted files).

BiTD it used to take < 20 minutes to remove the protection from one of their titles.

CMcDougall wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 11, 2019 9:44 pm

Cart if any interest :
Edit Pic added as old browser on mobby phone won't do it

It's for a Psion II organiser - I have one of those somewhere, although no carts for it.

My first attempt to render the graphics semi-natively. I translated my dumped graphics instructions to a simple basic program and ran it on BeebEm emulating a Master (as flood fill is built in). It's not quite perfect - something's a wee bit off with the colours, I suspect it's because I'm using the...