| Posted By
Csabo
on 2021-04-10
13:15:39
|  Crackerball has been found! Check...
Crackerball has been found! Check it out in all its glory, or read on for a bit more info.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2021-04-10
13:15:39
| Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
Well, the long search is over!  I'm going to go out on a limb and make an assertion that other than me, probably only Luca was interested in finding this old one, so... at least one person will be happy.
There's a bit of a but... here. The version we have not has been "restored". Huge thanks to MCG, after quite a bit of back and forth with him, he sent me two versions which were pretty much the original, but unfortunately both broken. So, using those two, plus the already existing "Cracker Ball 4", plus TBL's version, I recreated the original. Not a small task, but hopefully worth it.
Cracker Ball 4 was actually really close to it, but with a couple of cheats applied, and some bugs (due to randomly overwritten bytes, $FF28, etc.).
I will say that I'm confident our version is 99.9% the same as the "original". There was really only one small issue where I had to make an executive decision: the paddle's initial position is stored on zero page variable $21. This isn't being initialized by the game, and most of the cracks had some extra code tacked on which did that. Therefore that had to be added. Otherwise... this is pretty much it.
My final comment here will be to say that The Mad was a very, very clever guy (well, I'm guessing he still is)  One of the greats, really. This game is definitely rough around the edges, but... It was written in April of 1988, and just two months later he released the Invincible, which includes this code (in the knockout subgame). Then, in the same year he goes on to create Godzilla, then Mesél Az Erdő, and in '89 he drops Digital Ball. Talk about prolific coding... I wonder what would we have, if he didn't move on to Amiga, etc.
Thank you for reading my rant, Csabo out.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2021-04-10
19:20:58
 | Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
Exactly I'm really really happy for this! Crackball rested in the hypothetical side of the ancient history of the scene for sooo much time, and Csabo faced a monumental task to set it to new life from ashes taken here and there! Incredible work, wooo!
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Posted By
JimmyCoupe
on 2021-04-13
10:31:58
 | Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
Make that 2 people , I love seeing lost games being found for the forum.
Good find and thanks for making it available for us all. The wait for the Plus4 Adventure Pack should also be over soon, a nice forum member on here is trying hard to recover his version as we speak.
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Posted By
aNdy/Cosine
on 2021-04-13
13:16:42
 | Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
Interesting story and good job on 'merging' the various versions!
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Posted By
GeTE
on 2021-04-13
16:07:26
| Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
What do I read in this thread: "probably only Luca was interested in finding this old one"? 
This isn't real, isn't it? CRACKER-BALL.PRG (in a size of 17kb) had been already in the bunch of software I send you last year!
Maybe you should always take a deeper look into archives ... 
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2021-04-13
17:37:10
| Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
"[...]in the bunch of software I send you last year!"
Do you mean me? I don't recall getting anything from you last year - certainly not Crackerball. (Double-checked, I processed 31 packs last year: 264er_Fan, Charlemagne*4, ChristianT., Chronos, Dillo, Iwan*3, Kichy*7, Lacus*5, MCG, Plus4Punk, raze, RoePipi, Sanya, Verona*2)
Also, pretty sure 17K can't be the right one - the original version is uncompressed. Did you actually check your version?
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Posted By
Luca
on 2021-04-14
02:05:10
| Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
GeTE your collection includes Crackerball/TBL and Crackball 2, resepctively filenamed "CRACKER_BALL.PRG" and "CRACKBALL_48-TPI.PRG"
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Posted By
GeTE
on 2021-04-19
06:43:31
| Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
Ok, well ... I remember that I might have had the original version but I think I have deleted it. Why? because I was always jealous when watching the C64-guys with their cracked and trained versions of games that have had an intro with music on top.
And I? I only had my own cracked tape games (with Novaload Copy System or Sys-Cracker) transfered to disk. That was so boring that I kept only the enhanced versions of software if I luckily got one for the plus/4. Must have been the same with Crackerball too.
PS: I still feel in the same way today and I celebrate when you do thinks like Tomcat +4 World Special Edition 2010 or Ghost Town +8 [PAL/NTSC]. *thumbsup*
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