stardot.org.uk

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 8:44 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...

I've updated my decode script (in python) and added a JSON version of the decoded data; this shows the weird way it does rooms and messages. For example: { "location": 21, "message": "17 (You are in the main control room. There is a slot for a fuel capsule and a lever.)", "image": 8, "flags": 3, "ac...

In regards to text compression, there are a number of ways, most of which depend on the source text and can vary. I sort of touched on this when I did my port of the Scott Adams engine (http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=SAGADiary#Step_One:_Compress_Incoming_Data). I end up going co...

Thanks for this; I reverse engineered the system a while back, but to actually see the generating code allows me to double check a lot of things!

Unfortunately I've got a couple of weeks of busyness so won't have time to do much more on it, but to answer some questions: Graphics are plotted with OSWRCH statements, using VDU 25. They stored in a compressed fashion as described below. The graphics window is set to be &80 - &480, &1c0 -&3c0; thi...

Ghidra's good (used it in anger a couple of times) with one main problem: it tries to guess the value of X or Y when used in indexed or indirect mode an places the label there.

This makes some loops get the label in the wrong place.

I've put up the (80%) commented disassembly of Superior's Stranded that I've been working on for the past week. It's not quite complete, but I could probably write an interpreter for it with what I know (including graphics). It's not the best adventure, but the way it does messages, rooms and object...

Attached is a dump of the messages and rooms (it's not perfect as I didn't bother with punctuation and capitalisation). Plus the python code I used to dump in.

Thanks; I mainly just want one for prototyping - I'm not expecting to make anything production ready any time soon (I'm a massive amateur at hardware).

I've been thinking about doing some experimentation with one of my elks and attaching it to custom hardware. I'd rather not solder directly to the edge connector, so as a few of you have made custom boards, is there a preferred model of edge connector I can rig up to a prototype?

Not really; it's pretty standard 6502 adventure code.

I randomly found this sitting on my desktop and have done a bit of reverse engineering on it - extracting all the messages and locations. That's the good new. The bad news is that there are absolutely no clues as to the author in the message base, and not much space in files to have a hidden signatu...

The IT security world (or at least the reverse engineering) has been playing en masse with NSA's ghidra (https://ghidra-sre.org) disassembler, an open source version disassembler and decompiler, similar to IDA pro. As it supports 6502, I had a go with it last night and with some mangling it comes ou...

CASA only has 4: https://www.solutionarchive.com/list/pl ... %2Cdragon/

• Blue Dragon
• Dragon Adventure
• Dragon Quest
• Dragon's Tooth

Thanks all; I have a couple of Electrons in a water proof tub in the garage which I think work, so I'll steal the ULAs from them.

I noticed that both non-working ULAs have totally different sockets for the same chip. Lack of parts on later Elks?

I've been going to my stock of old computers to try and get things working, I've had some successes (one Oric resurrected), but I've got two Electrons that are being difficult as I suspect the ULAs are toast: The first one had a flaky power connected, which was due to the solder being dry and crack ...

I wrote a basic openup library years ago (my local drive has a date stamp on the files of 2011) and a simple dumper, this can be found on my github page: https://github.com/tautology0/dataconve ... ter/openup

The code is a bit hacky.

Interesting - it's not one I've heard of - I can add it to CASA.

The database system was originally written in TRS-80 BASIC and published in a magazine. IIRC only Adventureland and Pirate Adventure was in this format. Later games were coded in machine code, but the database format was unchanged until QP3. The engine was cloned by Brian Howarth, which led to the M...

Bearing in mind the standard version of Island of Xaan has 8 KB of unused memory; I'd expect something special, like graphics.

(Maybe not quite 8KB on the Electron as it doesn't have mode 7.)

Newsflash - in August 87's Electron User Pendragon column Robico announced that due to unprecedented demand for the re-released version of Magus' Village of Lost Souls, Blazing Star will not now be released until the Autumn. Stick with me on this one, I'll hopefully find further clues later on as t...

I have a half written Interword convertor somewhere, that I could probably mangle to do Wordwise.

One of these days I ought to properly script these up to convert WW/View/IW to HTML (or similar).

Oh the good news is that once I replaced the Oric-1's voltage regulator, the computer works. Woo! It's only taken me five years to get to this point...

I know how OE and CE are meant to be used, but I found following the flow in the datasheet brought back random results; forcing them permanently to ground worked every time. I've just powering the EPROM straight off 3.3V and it works perfectly. This means I can revisit it an make a setup that will a...