Just won this cart on ebay for very little money ....but from what I've read it is not native to the UK so I'm wondering if it will play ok on a pal VIC
It doesn't matter that much realy as it fills another gap in my small cart collection ..but as I've never seen this one before ..I would like to play the game if possible.
Are there many more NTSC carts out there I should be wary of as a newbie collector living in pal country ?
(obviously it will take a short while before I actually have the cart in my hand so any prior info appreciate)
rgds
VS
Yeah the NTSC version go schizo on a PAL Vic20 sadly. I'd love to see a proper PAL cart... if one exists (and someone just hasn't converted the CRT file to work on PAL).
..Thats bad news Mayhem ...
I had a feeling there might be problems.
I guess it might be possible to blow the the PAL cart image to eprom and replace the cart rom physically.
..of course ...this would destroy the authenticity of the cart ..but at least it would be playable on genuine PAL_VIC hardware.
Has anyone ever done this I wonder
rgds
VS
I don't know who uploaded those particular ROMs; I always got the impression they came from the Ward/Paul collection but the source may also be different.
After downloading both Demon Attack images, making a hexadecimal dump* and analysing it, the start address to start with is different: $A383 on NTSC, $A37E on PAL. Out of 4096 bytes, 1780 are identical (same byte on same position - it sounds like Mastermind). 163 bytes can be considered to be in the same position but hold different values. 123 bytes are "injections" - the code/data before and after are the same, but in one file there are more bytes between the common segments than in the other, if you see what I mean. The remaining 2030 bytes are identical, but shifted slightly in memory depending on where the injections are.
I could do a completely disassembly go even further into detail, but considering the numerous differences, to me it looks more like a genuine patch than a late 1990's PAL hack. I suppose this holds true for most of the other PAL/NTSC images too. Actually, if it only is timing issues, it seems a little too many differences?
*) In Un*x: "od -tx1 -w1 -An -v" to get a bytewise dump, one byte per line without line numbers.
The game changes the colors using the raster beam to make more
colorful objects... That's why there are two versions. And I think the
PAL version is a genuine cart. I had an offer to buy one once and I
think I have seen Swedish adverts for it from the time as well....
Also take a look at these reviews: http://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bul ... .php?t=129
/Anders
PRG Starter - a VICE helper / Vic Software (Boray Gammon, SD2IEC music player, Vic Disk Menu, Tribbles, Mega Omega, How Many 8K etc.)
