This should make the Plus/4 World demo-enthusiasts (cough...*Luca*...cough) happy! BSZ/NST send some goodies our way: - Would you like to see Stinky's First demo? Now you can! - What, there was a part that never made it to The 2nd? For realz, yo! - Speaking of which, did you know that The 2nd has a hidden mode, and that the "notes" file was stuffed onto an already full disk? Read the author's notes! - Who could have been responsible for Kedvenc Sidplay? BSZ has a few words about this piece of software as well. Big cheers to BSZ for digging these up from his old disks (and his memory)!
Plus/4 World returns to its gaming roots by the addition of the Hall Of Fame. This section is a combined high score list for all games. LanMIK had the right idea on our forums, but a forum post is hard to maintain. The dedicated page makes it easy to see all scores in one place, and thanks to our site's database driven nature, the scores are also automatically listed on the game's and the submitting person's pages as well.
So, play a game, give it a try and submit your own score. Some things may be rough around the edges, so any feedback (Does the submission flow make sense? Are the layouts useful and coherent?) is appreciated. Game on!
Yes, the most used emulator of the Commodore 264 machines needs a further tuning on several points. Gaia collected several improvements in the past months, also thank to all the users helping with their feedbacks, notes and requests. And finally, YAPE has reached version 1.0.4!
What will find into the new version? - /LOAD:filename to type text on startup from a text file - improved ("increased") oversampling - forward looking adaptive sound buffering - more accurate interim CPU read cycles - joystick setup crash fixed (64 bit build) - 192 kHz sound frequency got not saved in previous version - clear byte ready inaccuracy for 1551 fixed - minor IEC printer clocking fix - removed obsolete emulator ID
Run to the download page to get now your proper YAPE build (x32/x64).
>examine mailbox In the mailbox you find Deadline.
>get deadline Taken.
>examine deadline After careful examination, you conclude that Deadline is a new converted game by gc841. It's Infocom's 3rd title, one that was never ported to Plus/4. The game is a murder mystery, you control a detective who has 12 hours to solve the death of a wealthy industrialist. The game requires disk drive and takes up one full side.
>help You find that the original C64 manual has been scanned and is available for your perusal. You also notice that the original covers have been added for completeness sake.
>contemplate You ponder, consider and reflect upon all things. You decide that the next step is to download the game and heap kudos on the people responsible for it on our forums.
Again, 7 new triplets of game endings! Classic commercial games from the 80ies and homemade pseudo conversions from the golden era of the scene, all mixed together, in one big cauldron of finals you've never barely imagined to be.
Erich/Unlimited from Germany is here with the last issue of Club Info of the year. Club Info 128 is the latest issue of the German disk-mag. Side A is full of articles covering a wide range of topics: scene news, tips and tricks, game information (including very detailed coverage of Rebel Planet), hardware and more. Side B has to recent and new releases. So start up those C16/Plus4s (or launch your emulator) and take a look. Enjoy!
In few days, from one to the other one, Fabrizio Gennari has updated our prefer tools to convert, manage and archive the Commodore tapes, in order to prevent all of them from the degradation by time: WAV-PRG and Audiotap.
WAV-PRG allows the user to extract T64, .PRG o .P00 files from Commodore tapes and creating Commodore tapes from T64, .PRG o .P00 files. The new version 4.0.1 has notable improvements, especially for 264 machines users, so let's read'em: - the tape extraction part has been rewritten. Now, a single plug-in can support several loaders (a loader supports one tape format) and observers (an observer examines data that have just been read from tape, and guesses the format to be used for the following data). Because of this, one can choose the loader Default C64 as start-up loader, and in many cases (not all) WAV-PRG will automatically switch to a different loader to load the rest of the tape. This reduces the need of guessing the right plug-in for each tape; - you can drag and drop files onto the main window to start the conversion of such files (multiple files are supported); - WAV-PRG can now read TAP v2 files (those using half waves): this adds support for some Commodore 16 formats that use an inverted waveform with respect to the rest of the same tape. So far, only a C=16 variant of Freeload is supported: supporting others is a matter of adding the respective plug-ins; - WAV-PRG can create clean TAP files (in a fashion similar to Tapclean) from TAP or WAV files; - the Windows command-line version (wav2prg.exe and prg2wav.exe) is now downloadable from the site (in the past, you had to compile it yourself). Useful, for example, to batch many conversions with a single script or .BAT file.
Audiotap is THE tool for creating TAP files from tapes and record tapes from TAP files. Its enhancing usually follows what the previous tool performs, but here we are the very special feature of version 2.0: once selected the type of file (TAP, WAV or DMP) and format (C64, Vic20, C16, tape Version 0/1/2), you only need to drag'n'drop on the tool's window a bunch of files, and...magic in the air: a single TAP pops out, with all the files merged in one!
Thanks Fabrizio, letting us to preserve tapes, you stopped the time for real!
Being the most popular multiplatform Commodore 8-bit machines emulator available since several years, any new version's release of VICE is a most yearned, and the VICE 2.4 released just some days ago doesn't miss that fame too. Although the Plus/4 emulator included Xplus4 doesn't match yet the same degree in emulation of other competors, the whole project has big shoulders than anyone else, and a bright future can be easily expected for it in the near future.
Here is the full list of changes having an impact on the Plus/4:
** General ---------- - New SDL based MIPS Windows NT port. - New SDL based native Dingoo port. - New monitor commands: autostart and autoload. - Rewrite of the sound system, output is now mono/stereo selectable. - Split off the 5x0 model from the 6x0/7x0 models in xcbm2, new emulator is called xcbm5x0. - Split off sid player from c64, new program is called vsid. - New maintainer for the polish translations, they are now 100% up2date. - New IEC FD2000/4000 drive support. - New 1541 drive sounds emulation. - 1541 drive emulation has been greatly improved.
** PLUS4 changes ---------------- - The TED border mode can be selected now (none, normal, full, debug). - PLUS4 model can be selected.
You are now watching the largest at-once software update ever done on Plus/4 World site, counting in something less than 150 entries of missing stuff, game cracks, translated ones and fixed releases.
All this material was just there, in the well known archives of Plus/4 stuff we've sieved for so much time, but it has never been included before due to its difficult cataloguing into a well organized archive. After all these years, we've learnt quite much of the history around the 264 series and the sceners'habits, and nowadays we feel to be ready to sink our teeth into the soft matter of what regards the very early days of the scene: badly performed digi attempts, type-in utilities from old mags, the widest spreaded frq and digi converters and tape turbos, the first letter writers, the founding fathers of game cracking and much much much more! There's no room to describe all the single cases, you have to do no other than follow the list, click on it, read the data, download and try, all by yourself. We may chitchat taking certain genres as argument, anyway. Let's see some.
Cracks The C16/Plus4 scene has never got a particular culture about cracks. We've just seen how cracked games were sold in Italy in the newsstands'collections format, but those were not properly "cracks", they rather were badly renamed hacks. And again, loading the original copy from tape with a selfsigning 5 lines long BASIC program...well, it's not properly a real crack. In this update, there are several ancient cracks, I mean: real cracks, some lame-ish, some with a professional cracktro, many of them made by mythological crews we've known only because somebody did greet'em in some obscure demos: The Trolls, D.I.S.C., Alvo (which will later become the author of Yttrium), DBC, ... And TTI, the most ancient real cracking group we've got infos about at this time: they come from 1986, sirs! TTI was the group of the famous Floppy Robby, and now we know why this Dutch guy was so famous: he wrote three of the most widespreaded tape turbos (together with Nova Turbo), even used in commercial releases: all the different versions of Fast Save. Just look at the pictures gallery and jump off of your chair, due to your memories assaulting your brain!
Music converters Pigmy did the first frq converter, Wit did the first wave (digi) converter. After them, almost every real coder did his own converter, someone from scratch, someone inspired by, someone just hacked and brutally copied. Some were fast and screentime saving, some others were closer to the original SID and raster-consumpting. Trying to reach completeness, here are most of them.
Digi demos Everybody wanted to hear his own Plus/4 singing like Madonna at the time. Between 1987 and 1988, even type-in from magazines has begun to introduce the home computers into the world of sampled music, and releasing 56K of a digi demo has been affordable for anybody capable to write 10 SYS 4144 MADE BY YYYY. Moreover, it was quite simple to hack samples from C64, and much more simple to hack Plus/4 samples from other users. In the February of 1988, Crazy Music has come, and nothing would have been like before. Finally, we have an almost complete compendium from the best older digidemos to the very bad hacked ones.
Crillion Its title screen has references to the original by Oliver Kirwa on C64'er, it contains a copyright sentence for Kingsoft, it's sane'n'safe, it looks like original, it smells like original. Could it be the original Crillion? Oh well, if not yet, the closest thing to the original copy we've seen ever!
Bits and bytes - No, there was something unreleased yet signed by Pigmy: Digital Drums! - With Plot Editor V1.7, Oscar Maestro from EVS allows you to easily run a plotter over your prefer hires bitmaps with no particular skills in ML - if I would have been one of the fans from the compilers side, I would never miss Austrospeed Recompiler by Ceekay - Horror Times 01 is the one and only issue one of the magazine project signed GOTU by the great duo Action and Harry - Before programming games like Pilot-X, Jens Engel lets the magazine "RUN" publish his fantastic tool Data Analysis - The Wizard And The Princess...speaking Polish? - Apos got his nick with this Word-creator - Csavargás A Gombák Birodalmában cracked by... oooh in the end! Mr. Gregory, the most hated user ever, badly touched in a lot of scrolltexts! Why all this rage, anyway? Who that knows, must speak! - we didn't find Fantastic Screens 1, so look into your own archive and give us a bellring!
You all know how much we like big products which see the light after a long work phase. But several times we have complained about the lack of easy stuff, created for fun to enrich the scene.
In the very end, SVS married this latter philosophy too, and today he comes to us with a compiled Pong clone, an 'emugame' to play on an emulator running at the suggested rate of 300% speed, just to live 70's again on the beloved BASIC V3.5. Its name is, of course SVS-Pong. Give it a try, have fun and come back to do better if you can!
We got mail from Brazil, writing that while cleaning out his stuff, he found a copy of Ürtojások. He scanned it and we've uploaded it, another "WANTED!" note can be removed.
We have two more covers added today, they are courtesy of Lacus. Not only the covers, but the programs themselves are new: two educational titles: J Vagy Ly and Kultúrtörténeti Kronológia (XVI. század). The former teaches grammar, the latter teaches history. Check them out (or at least the cover art).
Thanks to both guys for making our collection richer. Keep on looking for retro stuff!
I told you we stored tons and tons of unreleased endings! We must spit'em out in a big hurry, or the folder that contains all of them will explode! And this time, we managed to show you some of the very longer bigger wanted ones!
Do you remember the italian treasure, that mountain made of tapes tapes and tapes again we got in May? Well, dumping old files like'em hasn't been the easiest mission you can argue, but it worked most of the time, luckily. Some scans of cassette covers and manuals have been taken too, and it's now time to spread around some of those gems.
Of the whole cake, this part represents the slice of commercially re-released games. These cassettes were sold in computer stores just beside their original ones. Although few of the programs were games and tools made from scratch, for the largest percentage they're raw hacks unregarding the copyrights, often with no elements changed from the source. At that time, the italian law didn't consider the home computers software production in the same ways as other intellectual property assets, and somebody had thought to make money from this void of rights, either founding short living publishing houses just to copy and release, or releasing compilations of hacked games thru newsstands. Somebody was so much out of law and common sense, to hack'n'release previously hacked material, in order to release it under no publishing rights. Some others changed their view, and tried to pay copyrights to the original software house, purchasing the rights to do that.
Some words about Super 16. Super 16 is a newsstand collection, containing Winter Sports, Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Foglia), Autosprint, Boat Race and Baseball. It has been published as a supplement of the long lasting periodic newsstand publication "C16/MSX" by Editoriale Foglia, with a little paper as software manual plus bonus articles as usual. This must be intended as a first attept for a forthcoming serious cataloging of all the newsstands'releases as "Byte Games", "C16/MSX", "Linguaggio Macchina C16/VIC20", "Computer Set", "Go Games" just to name the notables ones, with their papers and covers. And, yes: the treasure contains an igniting core of those cassettes :)
On another note, we didn't make a news item for a recently released picture. Room 309 was drawn by Leon (C64), but Murphy created a Plus/4 version of it as well. Rumor has it that Murphy is now the coder for the upcoming game "4 Floors" (read about it on Facebook), and he will make a Plus/4 version as well.
The fantastic spreadsheet created by SVS of FIRE crew jumps to a higher level, and it goes overlays! SVS-calc 2.0 makes deep use of the Austrospeed's overlaying technology. Now, a frequent disk access ensures perfect embedding of the single code's operations into the main compiled code, allowing even bigger operations to be performed and saving more memory for user's data. This is the most notable one in a series of both evident and little improvements. The main new features have been listed by the author in a text which comes together with the new manual, colorful and clear to read. Let's see them:
a) PRINTING (to printer or to file -- CBM or ASCII) b) SORT (horizontal or vertical -- ascending or descending) c) CTRL-B for blanking managing d) Blanking is animated by a raster color bar increasing of size. Every 5 completed frames, it becomes transparent to let user view process status. e) RENAME and DELETE options. They are integrated with DIRECTORY. f) GRAPHS can be embedded into current grid. g) AREA SELECTION by cursor movements + SHIFT. Selected area is visualized reversed and can be freely resized. When an area exists it is prompted every time an input is requested (and inside INPUT box by [STOP]). h) NAMES to refer a string with any value (cell coordinates, cells zone, text, formula, another NAME). They can be used inside formulas (ex.: name TOTAL="A1:C20"; formula can use it =sum(TOTAL) ) i) LOAD can be launched just viewing DIRECTORY. j) Flexible CONFIGURATOR (instead of Standard or Reduced versions) on system boot. User can set how many rows and other dimensions in order to leave free RAM as he needs. k) Automatic MEMORY WARNING window message, to warn user when free RAM becomes too little. l) INFO window to show all parameters of current configuration and sheet. m) SCREENSAVER 2 modes + test, with settable delay. n) AUTOSIZING of column width on the basis of contents of all its cells (by Menu or by CTRL-L) o) Separate disk units setting for 1) System; 2) User files; 3) Print outputs. p) New funtions VAL(), DAYS(), WDAY(), LOOKUP(), SECONDS() q) Option to view free memory as Kb or as bytes. r) CLEAR can erase the whole sheet or only a zone. s) SEARCH feature can optionally limit the searching inside the Selected Area if existing. t) [F3] resets screen font after a crash and enables Basic editor :-? u) FONTS selectable and switchable from a working spreasheet (4 different original new fonts) v) Control codes (color, reverse, blinking) can be inserted inside the text of a cell. z) Selectable world-area date format (DDMMYY / MMDDYY) - (Week' 1st day)
Absolutely complete and professional, SVS-calc 2.0 is a little jewel to show big code on slow machines. Just to cite the manual:"...this program needs 1/16000 the memory of Microsoft Excel, and runs on a system 1500 times slower, whereas an F16 fighter aircraft flies 'only' 800 times faster than a walking man". At the same time, SVS-calc_2_0 is not (only) that pretty cool example of fine code's optimization on an ancient computer: it's a tool which must seriously have to be used for actual job's purposes and day-by-day usages, thought to be comfortably used on emulators and set to their chance of speeding-up the whole system.
No words can be enough to deeply describe a so elaborate tool, you have to download it and try by yourself. And who knows, if you'll take advantage from it quite a long time, you'll end to discover the easter egg that lies somewhere into it ;)
Nooo can't believe this! We missed to constantly add game ending! It's a real scandal, 'coz we even did add a link in the main panel of this site! Sorry sorry and sorry again for this unforgivable sin. We must expiate the big fault. Hence, the christians'bible says: seven are the capital sins, so we entered seven new endings triplets, for an overall of 7*3=21 new endings!
In the end of this summer, here comes an unexpected Italian present from nowhere. Oh well, "nowhere" is not the right word: the present comes from a well known source of pretty juicy things!
Italy in the '80ies: so many Commodore users and a lacking law about those new media copyrights. In this environment, the newsstands became the real fulcrum of software distribution, both for big packs of hacked games and for legal original stuff.
The other great retrieval has been Music Master (Jackson), a fantastic collection of music stuff on a single tape, including some demos and a little tool to play on the keyboard (Sintetizzatore). No doubt the best of the whole pack is Music Editor, that allows anyone to compose TED tunes and save'em with an ML player, in order to use them into anyone's own program. The three included demos are: Natale, The Beatles and Marcia Turca, the 2nd does not have to be confused with The Beatles (Hack).
Erich/ULTD is here with the 3rd Club Info issue of this year. If you don't speak German and want to skip the articles, head straight to the B-side. It contains recent and new releases, including: Beast (a PETSCII movie), Florbingel (a strategy game) and Dr. Help (an Eliza-like conversational program).
Gaia has also gotten into the spirit of converting games, and he converted a recent C64 game called Swarmed. It's a cute little shooter in 2K, check it out and enjoy :-)
Let's imagine that one fine sunny day in 1986, a young Plus/4 fan visited his C64 and/or ZX Spectrum owner friend. At their place, he saw a new exciting game called Rebel Planet. While reading the cover, his eyes picked up on the following words: "When loading REBEL PLANET for a Commodore 16 or PLUS 4 computer, ..." He held the piece of paper high and after a triumphant exclamation, he rushed out the door and towards the nearest software shop, much to his friend's bewilderment. "I must have this game!" he murmured. However, store after store the answer was the same: we don't have this title for the C16/Plus4. Once reality started to sink in, our young Plus/4 fan started wailing...
Dry up your tears dear imaginary youngster, for the long awaited day is here! Rebel Planet is a GTW (Game That Wasn't) no more, it now exists on the Commodore Plus/4 (unfortunately it requires 64K RAM extension on the C16). So, after that lengthy intro, what are we really dealing with? It's a standard text adventure with hires graphics, and not an easy one. The story is based on the Fighting Fantasy book. The game also contains a built in manual (which in turn contains some info necessary to complete the game). Give it a try if you're so inclined. Enjoy!
Of those 5 releases, we've collected in the past several slices of their existence, from box covers to some sparse programs. Having a complete one, let us know more about all the others: any title includes one diskette with the main programs, and two tapes with 8 lessons, 2 any tape side. The disk has a sort of copy protection, obtained placing an "error 22" into the empty and free track 18 sector 18. All the stuff included is strictly NTSC compatible only, although they're all written mainly in Basic.
This month proves to be unusually abundant in new releases - not that we're complaining :-) Atari vs Plus/4 has just been released by carrion. It's a picture show containing 14 images. The originals were created by Atari graphicians Piesiu and Ooz. Download it, or read more on the author's blog.
A new, 7 image picture show was released today by carrion called Lazus Vs Boris. As the name suggests, it features converted images from graphician Lazur and painter Boris Vallejo. Check it out!
A new demo called Metamerism has been released by Bauknecht & TEK, taking 1st place at Evoke 2012 in the "alternative demo" category. It's astonishing, download it and enjoy!
A whole year passed, and Gaia relaunchs the YAPE, the widest used emulator for 264 series machines, in its V1.0.3 reincarnation. This version is a sort of global bugfixing one, in order to have a clean start to a further rework of the older parts of his code (the interface first of all), to get a better way in reading which events are performed time by time, to improve the GUI.
But now, this one, showing the following retouches: - properly implemented printer repeat bit image data (CHR$(26)) - SHA/SHY/SHX improvement on page boundary crossing (unseen in any programs out in the wild so far) - memory dump into text files - added 192000 Hz sound frequency - carriage return in printer bitmap mode fixed - folder drive setting no longer reset when printer emulation gets enabled - awkward crash in the monitor fixed - bug in the debugger when breakpoint got disabled on ignored CPU crash opcodes - minor memory map issue in true 1541/1581 drive emulation - memory dump command in external monitor - video recording glitch
Run to the download page to get now your proper YAPE build (x32/x64).
Today brings a very pleasant surprise: a new game, Sabrewulf is released. The game - which is a bit similar to Treasure Island - runs on a Plus/4 or a 64K-expanded Commodore 16. It's a faithful conversion of the ZX Spectrum game by gc841.
In the game, your task is to guide Sabreman through a 256-screen jungle. He must collect four pieces of the lost amulet and then exit the maze. Of course the jungle is filled with dangerous creatures, including the invincible Wulf itself. Sabreman can also collect valuable treasures, and find jungle orchids in various colors, each granting its own special effect with picked up.
Like many Spectrum games, the gameplay is hard, but one can get into it with a little practice. Big cheers to Gary for converting this game, now hurry up and download it!
We used to catch the bigger fishes in the scene to serve'em in large dishes on your table, and satisfy your appetite for Plus/4 software. But time passes, and some little tiddlers have got caught in the nets, too little to be individually pointed out. This mass of seafood began to grow day by day, and now it's time to trash out this residue of heterogeneous stuff.
So let's see what's in the box! First of all, we missed all the gems usually released on C16 Plus4 Computing magazine, an ancient monthly appointment full of new games, interesting readings and useful tools. We're talking about several early versions of, say, Destructor and Jail Break, brand new games like Connector, tools that we've never seen before like Biorhythms. Higher quality gem between all the others is the early version of Leaper, released under Star Soft as Leaper (Star Soft). Some new entries from the obscure side of the Plus/4 commercial games: Miner (Astralog) is another retrieved tile to complete the Astralog's history, and one of the featured games in Astralog Four Pack, how rare!. Rainy Day II collection is one step far from being completed in his 25 games, missing one game only. Meanwhile, we added Spacemaze, Jackpot and others too, in the hope we'll find all of them once day. Chronos did his springtime cleaning too, and what's jumped out is a bunch of rarites, especially the second side of Dark As U demo, which worked after a bit of fixing. Other programs followed too, game previews like Minesweeper V2.2, digi demos like No Sleep, tiny pretty converted games like Remember.
In the very end, there's the mare magnum from which weird releases and rarities have been catched. Elite Trained is a rare trainer for Elite (Csory) from the author itself, working on 1551 only; and, talking about 1551 stuff and Csory, a 1551 drive version of And Justice For All popped out from nowhere; after years with the 2nd part available only, 3M Demo 1 surfaced; 1551-demo, the official demo disk for the 1551 drive has been stored too 'coz missing it here is a nonsense. And when we find software we claimed for in years, we celebrate with all of you: Sethack, the complete D-mon, the original Chipy by Kingsoft, the most wanted Huey C-16.
We've added the releases and results from this party at record speed! The new releases from the party were: 16 KBytes, Édesanyám, I Will Go My Way, Atilla, Welcome Stranger. Thanks to the organizers and the sceners for making the party happen, and congrats to all the compo winners!
For party reports, photos and videos, head to the Features section: Arok 14 Party Report, or check the forum thread (both continually updated).
The next Infocom game we're taking a closer look at is The Witness. The game is a murder mystery, and you play the role of a detective. C16 Chris sent us the scans for all the "feelies" inside the box: a matchbook, a telegram, newspapers, etc. We've also added all the scans for the 26-page manual. Check it out and enjoy!
C16Chris sent us the next installment of the Infocom stuff: Suspect extras are here! In the game, you play the role of a reporter, and you're invited to a costume party, where the hostess gets killed. Inside the box comes with a 26 page manual (which is actually "A Practical Guide To Murder Manners" :-)) and a TON of extras, all containing clues. Should be a fun read, even if you're not going to actually play the game.
C16 Chris sent us the 3rd installment of his Infocom archive, this time it's Cutthroats. It's an adventure game (or "Interactive Fiction", if you prefer the fancier title) where you play the role of a diver, looking for sunken treasure among shipwrecks. The box contains two booklets and a few additional game materials, all of which can be found on the game's page.
The second addition to the database today is from recently-registered and first-time-contributing member Hans. He noticed our call to action on the Adress C16 page (looking for the other version of the cover), and since he happened to have it, he fired up his scanner and got to work. This release (a German database program) is in sharp contrast with the above mentioned game: instead of booklets and extras, everything you need to know is shoehorned onto a single page.
Thanks guys for these covers, they found a good home in our ever-growing archive of everything Plus/4.
Here it comes, in the end! We were waiting for it! It's signed by Gaia, our prince in emulation, it also takes with it all the experience of TLC, and most of all it plays genuine TED based sound on your PC!
Let's turn seriously professional to announce this. Attila Grósz, in collaboration with Levente Hársfalvi, has finally released TedPlay V1.0, the first public version, stable and working. TedPlay emulates and reproduces the audio of a TED based machine. It can perform that by loading several types of files: the main format will be the brand new .C8M file format, but the player can also handle PSID/RSID format files with .TED extension, and .PRG files with executable inner player. TedPlay considers adjustable volume and playback speed, playlists managing, multiple tunes control, on/off turnable channels and player's reset. TedPlay requires SDL.dll in the .exe folder to run.
There's further work to spend on this first release, which aims to work with the new .C8M format but does not have a dedicated .C8M compiler/editor yet. At the moment, we suggest to download the current High Voltage TED Collection release, test the emulator with the .PRG files you will find in the /player folder, then report any bug to the authors: they're currently working on it to make it bigger and stronger! You will see, there's no change to play .PRG files with multiple tunes: don't care about that, when all those files will be converted in the new format this trouble will be gone forever.
Because of this, High Voltage TED Collection has just been updated to 263 single files, with some fixed and moved tunes, new hacks from games and several new entries in the /musicians folder (Koko, Alf, Tony Kelly, Shelmie, the one and only music on C16 signed by Martin Galway, finally a decisive blow on Csabo's releases and many many more!). The HVTC has been and will be paused for a little while, until the new format will take place as regular standard.
Say thanks to Gaia and TLC for their absolutely fantastic work, and please help'em to improve their marvellous creature named TedPlay!
A powerful tool dedicated to all the coders out there now includes the 264 series Commodore machines, and that's great news! Arthur Jordison, author of the all-embracing CBM Program Studio has released a new version the 25th of this month, and, beside all the fixes and addons he has wedged into it, he tuned it in order to work for C16 and Plus/4.
You can now enter both BASIC and machine language into this versatile package, and see how your code works directly compiling it as .prg file and sending it to run on your prefer emulator. No more desperately seeking the bugs all around, no more troubles with typing long BASIC stuff (hey, it's 2012, we're in the cut&paste era!), and several other extras, including sprites, characters and tilemap editors!
It's a first release, it smells like it would need debugging, so feel free to contact the author for any needing. But first, give it a try: it undoubtedly worths a run.
Lacus got his hands on another rare Hungarian tape: 21-es (Blackjack). It was released by Ápisz - some form of that company still exists, but they mostly sell paper, stationary and office supplies. This release (like all their releases we found so far) can only be described as a "budget" release, there's not much cover artwork to be seen. Nevertheless, it's good to have it in our archives! Be sure to be on the lookout for other oldies, you never know what you're going to find!
C16 Chris sent us the second installment in his quest to archive everything that is Infocom. (It's unfortunate that this news item missed Towel Day by a few days.) This time we present you with the box contents of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Inside are the 26-page booklet, the 16-page instruction manual (which was printed in a less-than-optimal color...), and the same Infocom Catalog that came with Planetfall. There's also Fluff!, Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, a Microscopic Space Fleet and more... Very funny stuff, if you know the books. (If you don't, read them!) Big thanks to C16 Chris for these, enjoy!
Erich/Unlimited released the 2nd Club Info issue of the year. (For those who are not familiar with it, Club Info is a long-running German language disk magazine, with a new issue every 3 months.) Side A is chocks full of articles covering a wide range of topic (the recent passing of Jack Tramiel, tips & tricks, software reviews, etc) with the occasional funny cartoon thrown in. Even if you don't speak the language, you might want to check out Side B, which has recent and new releases. Cheers to Erich for his continued hard work!
MMS is here for the second time this month with a new picture show release. He writes:
Beasts of tons run and kill around the forests; no man could stand against them! Once they tramped and ruled Earth, now they are just very peaceful bones... Fortunately they are just history... Dinosaurs.
Who likes to watch the arts about them? Everyone? Then it's your time! Check the marvelous arts set to the highest available Plus/4 resolution. I made this GFX slideshow with the great Istvan Varga converter. I hope you will like it, I did my best to finetune it as much as possible.
C16 Chris returns with an old fashioned cover update: he's scanned just about everything that can be found inside the box of Planetfall. The package contains an information booklet, which is quite humorous and definitely worth a read (especially the questionnaire). Also included is a 16-page Infocom catalog, detailing all of their adventure games. There's also a lot of other additional game material, which can be found on the game's page: a "Stellar Patrol" card, postcards from various planets, reference cards and several personal letters. All of these add to the depth and help the players immerse in the game's universe. Check it out and enjoy!
Today we step back in time taking a look at the classic Commando style clone Legionnaire that has kept us entertained for many years now. Tape images are one thing and as awesome as they are sometimes it's quicker to opt for the PRG versions when you want to get straight into the action. Well thanks to the coding skills of none other Csabo he has been busy working on a PRG version of Legionnaire that not only fixes the missing black boarder, but also adds the tape loading screen!! If that wasn't enough to get you excited... it runs on a stock Commodore C16 with 16K too all complete!!!!!
Many thanks Csabo once again for giving Legionnaire some beautiful restoration and allowing us to preserve this beyond it's normal means as it was meant to be seen! As always follow the link to grab your own update PRG file from HERE.
"...In the Land of Plussy where 8 Shadows lie!". Straight coming from the holy Plussarillion book, here comes a brand new picture collection on one single disk's side. Our friend MMS selected for us a bunch of interlaced high resolution FLI pictures (IHRFLI) from a big choice of more than 200 of them, in the pure shiny splendor of IstvanV's great graphic format. Pictures come from scenes of the famous movie series, and from some illustrations by Alan Lee and John Howe. And the whole stuff loads in turbo mode both on 1541 and 1551 drive. Beware watching for too long time, or you'll hanker to have more!
Again, new rare covers found and archived! Our search for new, rare and obscure covers, doesn't loose its own boost, thanks to several faithful suppliers, and with our constant eyekeeping on the usual auctions'sites around. For any of them, we got full service, with front covers, inlays and cassette pictures.
It's Bear, the dude who has sent to us some very rare Hungarian covers, first of all the most wanted Karate's! In the hope we can put our hands on the tape's image too in the near future, let's get this first. Same words for Német Teszt too, which now shows the one and only cover that we have from International House Budapest, another developing division of the noted Novotrade. Last, but absolutely not least, a never seen Danish original software (now tagged as missing!) dated 1985, coming from a truly obscure software house called "LSA Software": Database (LSA) necessarily enters the holy field of the most wanted software from today.
The long long walk throught the road of Italian re-releases continues. Our friend Ricky74 has posted on some social networks so many pictures representing his own software collection for various systems, a collection which does not miss C16 cassettes. After our request, he quickly sent us scans of the Armati's Shoot It re-release, a never heard before Super Soccer from Playvision, and a rare Golden Software re-release for Wacky Painter. Thanks for all of them!
Rumors say there's more and more to come yet, stay tuned!
If your still suffering with post traumatic stress disorder after your short lived military service in the game Gun Law then your nightmares are now over! As a treat we have got to work and recorded for your viewing pleasure a complete end to end run playing Gun Law with no cheats being used at all on a real Commodore C16. Yes you can indeed reach the end with a little practice and patience straight out of the box as the game was intended to be played, but get this... As we complete the game once to the point of been taken away by E.T. your see the game restarts with your remaining lives. However, something tells me the bad guys are even quicker now and just like a noob Gun Law is rapped of his 5 remianing lives with-in minutes! We hope you enjoy!
Csio/Monarchy coded and released a cool invitro (or Invitation Intro if you prefer) for the upcoming Arok Party, a yearly multi-platform retro-computing party held in Ajkarendek, Hungary. The release features some nice effects, music by Vincenzo, graphics by Poison, and of course all the necessary information about the party. There's still over two months left, which gives everyone interested plenty of time to make arrangements to get there. Enjoy!
Where's the current BASIC line? How to RS-232? How to play high-pitched white noise? Where to find ALL the infos you need, even if you type BASIC lines or you manage to tame the TED by machine language? A new version of Ultimate Map is out right now!
SVS improved this very useful .XLS, in order to have the most complete memory mapping for the 264 machines. Both RAM and ROM chapters are now enriched by adding several new data (about RAM usage, IRQ specs, keyboard routines and other minor infos); keyboard matrix has been added too; TED's registers are now straight compared to the corresponding VIC-II ones; the PET-ASCII codes chapter has been fixed and new finds have been added too.
You no longer need to read all those .txt you collected in the past years because you would need to know how that certain register works: you exactly know where any info lies! Download the brand new Ultimate Map now!
A very short note, just to inform you that the High Voltage TED Collection project has now reached 200 single files!
Once again, fixes and new tunes: the first confirmed tunes made by Kabo/MB, Kevin Moughtin's music, Herman's, ALF's original demotunes, the complete Brigitte Gertz and more!
So, delete the whole previous collection (that's the way to do at any new update!) and download/unzip the new one!
Yesterday I was going through issues of the Hungarian diskmag SCN News, and found something interesting. Number 24 mentions a certain "Optimal Real", a picture show by Chronos. Reddi (the then-editor of the magazine) isn't around nowadays, but Chronos is, so I asked him what this could have been (since there's no record of it anywhere in our database). To my surprise, he delivered it to me within a few hours. Thanks to this, we have a never-before-seen demo, using IFFL technology. (IFFL stands for something like Integrated File Flexible Loader, there are other variations but no clear definition.) Regardless, check the demo out!
Why should we read these old magazines? (I know, a lot of them require understanding Hungarian or German.) By using this little utility, it's possible to extract the magazine text into readable, searchable format. This in turn helps with the software archeology. Based on which games/demos are announced as news, we can figure out the release dates when none is provided. And, occasionally, we can find something rare and exciting, like in this case. But most importantly, to me, reading through the old mags is a nice trip down memory lane. I feel as if part of the scene, and it's a great feeling. Keep the Plus/4 alive!
Erich/Unlimited is here with the latest issue of Club Info. The German disk mag is packed with articles, as usual. From the B side of the disk: - Draw in polarkoordinaten, Achimedische Spirale, Ellipse/Parameter, Circle envelope, Spiraleffekt, Roehengraphik, Sechsecke, Club Info 125: files that accompany the "Tips & Tricks" chapter. - Green Things From Outer Space: Erich touched up a C64 guy's game. - Awari/Mancala, Zahlenraten: a game converted from the PET and a number guessing game. - Worlds 2: a story with PETSCII graphics. - Garfield Comic: a new demo from Erich. Thanks for this stuff to Erich, download it and enjoy!
An unexpected treasure turned up on our forums from Nino: Galli. It's a side-scrolling platformer (this genre is somewhat of a rarity on our platform), and it runs ok a C16 to boot. It was developed from 1989-1995, and it now finally sees the day of light. Definitely worth checking out! Click the link below to read the original post and comments.
Uuuuuh we missed for so much time, did you feel the absence? Well, let's end the silence, we're back to give you the 5th chapter of our saga. Here comes a new big bunch of lost and forgotten stuff rescued and reloaded from the personal archive of Moldi!
Leitmotif of this issue is: omg we've completely missed some magazines! There's a whole series of Doki News issues hidden out there we've never heard about! And now all the five in the row are stored here ready to be spread. And talking about mags, here come from the sands of time two missing issues, part of well known collections: No News! 4 as one of the last Delta System releases, the even more obscure Korak Times 9 and Lamer News #008, with the latter one being misteriously created by TGM of Scorpions. Fresh stuff on the utilities side too! Char-editor 2.0 is the powerful tool coded and used by Attila Kardos to finish off his games, and looks like a Botticelli for chars. The original version of 64'er Masterbase Plus/4 (aka Masterbase) has found its way to the surface, and so have done a couple of disk tools coded by TFSS. I've seen several times some texts on screen displayed with big chars, and now we've found the editor which produced'em: Mega Writer I by Dr. Mad/EVS. At last, the most wanted F-C Trans Plus/4 has been saved from the dark, TLC was searching for this one since years!
What about the demos? Well, first of all, a perfectly working version of CAD Box Demo has been found, and we're now able to enjoy the whole trip into the Doky and Cop's coding. The Moldi's archive preserved very rare demos, and some are beginning to come out of the hole: Metallica Demo created by TBC and Radio Speech by TYCB are from that side, and others will follow for sure. Do you know that W-Man coded a second adult oriented picture show? Well, the retrieval of Porno Show 2 has given us the chance to clean up some lost x-rated stuff (demos games and...educational too?) that were missing into our archive, and some of them are very old (e.g. Picture Show 1 by MAT!). Oh yes, this is that particular update ;) Who said games? Légicsata (LEH)! This bomber-style game written in BASIC and dated 1988 has various interesting and original addons to the traditional bomber game, but it has difficultly spreaded because of the unlucky homonymy with the most famous Légicsata, but now justice at last, it's here! Moreover, a working version of Aranyalmák, cited in an old Hungarian magazine, has been found and stored, although we don't know yet who is SABE, claimed to be the coder.
Finally, after what seems like a very long time I have the first beta release of Diag264, the diagnostic ROM and test harness for the Plus/4, Commodore 16, Commodore 116 and other 264 series machines.
You can find a complete description of how it works and how to build the harness here. Cartridge and kernal ROM images for both NTSC and PAL versions of Diag264 can be downloaded from here:
If you would like me to burn an EPROM for you, let me know which flavour you want and I will gladly do so for the cost of 5 CHF plus postage. At the time of writing this post, that's about 3 GBP, 4 EUR, 5 USD and 1250 HUF. If you would like me to modify an existing cartridge for you, you can mail it to me and I will do so for an additional 15 CHF, depending on the demand.
Please feed back comments, suggestions and questions you might have, either to this forum or to the email in the document.
The 2012 edition of the Hires Color series is here, directly from Erich/Unlimited. In Hires Color 6, the usual pack of 32 images (hi-res ones) can be found for your viewing pleasure, made possible by the Magica driver. Cheers to Erich for this release!
As a Christmas present, Lacus has got something special in reserve for us: a big bunch of covers and TAP files from some Hungarian cassettes. Thank to him, now we can brag about having the original Digital Ball, Ürkaland, Invincible and Kitörés programs in TAP format, and all their missing cover scans too! Also included in the box, Magyarország's TAP file of the Keresd A Térképen educational series, and better working TAPs for Bip-bip and Bigyulabolt, all of them equipped with their respective cover scans. Complete service again for Turbó-15 in single release, a rare one. Covers'addon for Bombázó Visszavág and Csodálatos Simon too. Hey, and what about the TAP file of Kémiai Kötések Azonos Atomok Között? It has come from the dark, we only saw it appeared!
Meantime, in a southwestern country, Luca has won an online bid regarding some Italian's tapes of resold hacked games, with lots of Visiogame cassettes! It has been a very bad surprise: many of those tapes seemed to be frayed out, and the only fully working tapes which still miss in our archives were Colors Guardians and Edy Ant, so now their TAPs are in. Every dirty trick has been exploited in order to recover some data from those tapes, with no result, bad luck! Heh, next time we'll be better. Looking forward the time we get a good tape of any of them, we now have cover and tape scans of Colors Guardians, 2Games, Aeroblitz (cassette scans), Crazy Brush (cassette), Dedalus 3D (Visiogame), Edy Ant, Interceptor, Kargon Wars, Magic Golf (cassette), Olimpya, Small Jones (cassette), Space Fortress, Toto Pronostici.
One down, countless to go: Planetfall has been found! Erich/Unlimited was the one who managed to create a working backup D64 for this game. Previously it was the only missing Infocom release. This should dispel any doubt regarding this elusive game: it was released and it's finally here.
If you don't mind the somewhat slow gameplay, definitely give this one a go. If the reviews (from other platforms) are to be believed, it promises to be a very good adventure. Big thanks to Erich for getting it into our archive!
Let's imagine that one fine sunny day in 1986, a young Plus/4 fan visited his C64 and/or ZX Spectrum owner friend. At their place, he saw a new exciting game called Rebel Planet. While reading the cover, his eyes picked up on the following words: "When loading REBEL PLANET for a Commodore 16 or PLUS 4 computer, ..." He held the piece of paper high and after a triumphant exclamation, he rushed out the door and towards the nearest software shop, much to his friend's bewilderment. "I must have this game!" he murmured. However, store after store the answer was the same: we don't have this title for the C16/Plus4. Once reality started to sink in, our young Plus/4 fan started wailing...
