johnmac@fawlty.towers.oz (John MacLean) (10/02/90)
I have at least five 3.5" ProDOS disks containing these "old classics".
Yes, I said ProDOS.
I converted most of them a few years back using one of two methods:
- convert the whole 5.25" disk to a sparse file, and build in an RWTS
to logical block half translator.
- convert DOS 3.3 file to ProDOS file along with any necessary loaders
and an RWTS to ProDOS MLI translators.
The first three disks consist of 27 games each - yes, that's 81 games, and
the remaining disks contain five 5.25" games each.
You can put all of them onto your hard disk (which I have done in the past)
and have a single scrolling menu.
The main problem is that you cannot quit back from the games (for obvious
reasons - the game was never designed for this, and thus does not have a
quit option). Once you start a game, you need to re-boot to get out.
I did think of a couple of solutions (eg: re-route the apple-control-escape
control panel vector and make this quit back to the menu program) but never
got around to implementing them.
I'm pretty sure I do have "Castle Wolfenstein" and "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein"
and most of the other "classics" mentioned as single ProDOS files.
I would distribute them all if it wasn't for copyright. My plan was to
distribute the menu program, along with the converter programs (all
automated), but I never got these converters clean enough to distribute
them. That way I could not be held responsible for any games that "illegally"
got distributed (it is in quotes because you could not buy any of them even
if you wanted to).
John MacLean.
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Snail: Tower Technology, Unit D 31-33 Sirius Rd, Home: +61 2 960 1453
Lane Cove, NSW 2066, Australia.eej07047@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (10/03/90)
I tried converting Castle Wolfenstein to ProDos, but I failed. Did you use the Basic.System file at all? or did you try and write a routine that would act as a go-between from Castle Wolfenstein to the MLI?
seah@ee.rochester.edu (David Seah) (10/06/90)
In article <139800034@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> eej07047@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > I tried converting Castle Wolfenstein to ProDos, but I failed. > Did you use the Basic.System file at all? or did you try and write >a routine that would act as a go-between from Castle Wolfenstein to the MLI? Castle Wolfenstein did some sector-level reads during room-to-room excursions and in particular (if I remember correctly) directly read the catalog track from sectors $1 to $B (this was originally DOS 3.2) to find its files at one point. The value that did this (and prevented direct conversion from 13 sectors to 16 sectors) was in the file @INIT,A$880 at 187A. Change it to #0F, and everything worked fine. My notebook doesn't say whether or not Castle Wolfenstein used the "^DBLOAD FILENAME" trick to do DOS commands from machine language, but that would definitely create a problem in converting to ProDOS (it's not supported anymore). Most MUSE games tended to do this (ala RobotWar). -- Dave Seah | Omnidyne Systems-M | INET: seah@ee.rochester.edu | | "User-Friendly Killing Machines" | America Online: AFC DaveS | ^..^ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+