Denial

Hi Everyone!

Many of the cartridges have labels on the back & the fronts are left open.

Here are some photos!

Cart # 1 - Super Alien


Cart # 2 - Super Smash. Blank Label on one side. Small metalic sticker label on other side.


Cart # 4 - Gorf


Cart # 5 - Clowns


Cart # 6 - Menagerie


Cart # 7 - Cosmic Cruncher


Cart # 8 - Number Nabber Shape Grabber.


Cart # 9 - Seawolf


Cart # 10 - Bingo Math


Cart # 11 - Midnight Drive (with "Night Drive" Label under sticker)


Cart # 12 - Omega Race


Cart # 13 - Home Babysitter II. Bill Wade was the original owner of these carts. He worked at Commodore from 1973-1983. I purchased these carts from Bill's son. I asked what Bill did at Commodore & was given the vague answer that he was a "big-wig" there. Anyone happen to recognize this fellow name?


Cart # 14 - Gorf


Cart # 15 - Rat Race


Cart # 16 - Money Wars

Forgot to mention there were a few more carts that came with this batch, but they are obviously regular production models.

Many thanks for your effort, i think the next step is to grub rom images to compare them with published roms to see if there are differences...

Do you need help ?


PS: It's fun to see labels written with a typewriter

Despite the crappy labels and missing boxes, I'll give you a few bucks for them.

Thanks a lot for doing this. Good to see these cartridges in possession of someone who cares about the history of them.

Hi Everyone!

You're welcome for the pictures, Happy to Share! Feel free to post them to the wiki if you like.

What would I go about dumping the roms?

Also, are there any trustworthy volunteers here who would be willing to help dump these themselves if I feel I'm not up to the task (due to lack of equipment, etc)? I'd prefer a fellow Canadian if possible (so we can avoid sending them through customs, etc).

Best Regards,
Paul

Jeff-20 wrote:Despite the crappy labels and missing boxes, I'll give you a few bucks for them.

Are you sure you're interested? They are pretty old, and I don't even have the manuals!

I wonder if those cartridges may be demo units for fairs, stores and so on. On the other hand why would a store need demo carts before the production ones were ready to be sold?

As for dumping, it helps a lot if you own a cartridge expander that lets you plug in more than one cartridge at a time. Either a switchable one that would let you switch in a cartridge after power on, or a switchable memory expansion that could shadow memory block 5 and then be switched out. We've discussed this before, and I believe both methods should be electrically safe both for the VIC and the cartridges. What we want to achieve is a way to temporarily bypass the auto start so a piece of software can be run to read the contents and store to another device. I am sure there are Canadians well within capacity of doing this.

carlsson wrote:I wonder if those cartridges may be demo units for fairs, stores and so on. On the other hand why would a store need demo carts before the production ones were ready to be sold?

I would think so that they can make an informed guess of how many they are going to sell, so that they can place an order. That's one of the functions of trade shows.
I would also expect that the carts would have more "confidential" labels in that case though.

I have the equipment to dump them, and I'm in Canada (Ontario). However, I'm sure there are more technically minded people who can do it (6502dude?).

I HAVE dumped a cartridge before though, and will do it if you can't find anyone else. I might need someone on Denial to show me the BASIC code, however, required.

See Mike's post in the sticky thread about ROM calls. He describes a very elegant approach to saving a memory block from RAM, that also is easy to understand.

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned before, Denial user "CommodoreVIC20.com" has mailed me all the demo/dealer cartridges mentioned above in order to dump them. I was the only person in Canada that offered to do this (I have the necessary equipment like the switchable multi-slot expander, 1541 to PC connection, etc).

Unfortunately, I don't have the programming knowledge to know how to dump the cartridges - so I'm asking for assistance from the Denial community (perhaps a little program to read memory & dump it to a file of a name specified by the user).

Carlsson recommended I look at the ROM CALL thread, which I did, and I got this piece of information from one of Mike's posts:

Small routines for saving and loading blocks of memory:

SAVE memory block:
Code:
SYS57809(N$),8,1:POKE193,start_lo:POKE194,start_hi
POKE780,193:POKE781,end_lo:POKE782,end_hi:SYS65496

'start' is inclusive, 'end' is exclusive. 'N$' contains the file name. Other device numbers than 8 can be used (also 1 for tape), but the additional ',1' must be kept.

But I don't totally understand what is going on here. I mean, I understand what the code is supposed to do, but I don't have the skill to actually look at that code and know what memory locations are being read, or how to modify it if I need to. I have no idea what the SYS commands are doing.

Although ideally it would be nice for me to take the time to really study this code, I would like to get these rare and valuable cartridges I have been entrusted with dumped (for the Denial community) and back to their rightful owner as soon as I can, so any help would be appreciated.

Mike wrote:SYS57809(N$),8,1:POKE193,start_lo:POKE194,start_hi
POKE780,193:POKE781,end_lo:POKE782,end_hi:SYS65496

'start' is inclusive, 'end' is exclusive. 'N$' contains the file name.

Comment: SYS57809 sets up a file at the given device. SYS65496 starts the save routine. POKE 780-782 are used to pass CPU registers.

ral-clan wrote:I don't [..] know what memory locations are being read,

Start is 40960 (hex $A000), end is 49152 ($C000) since it is supposed to be one byte greater than the actual memory area to be saved. Both these values have to be divided into low and high byte.

From the hexadecimal notation we already see that start_lo and end_lo are 0. Start_hi is $A0 = 160 while end_hi is $C0 = 192.

So this is the final result:

n$="my cartridge"
sys57809(n$),8,1
poke193,0:poke194,160
poke780,193:poke781,0:poke782,192:sys65496

If you need to save BLK3, change start_hi to 24576/256 = 96 and end_hi to 32768/256 = 128.

Edit: I changed *_lo to *_hi in the last sentence. Greetings, Mike.

Okay, thanks. I am beginning to understand this.

So, what memory blocks does this program work with (I'm thinking the standard $A0 and $20?). What if a cartridge only uses one of these blocks, will that be a problem?

I am truly at a loss to understand why on earth you would volunteer to do something and possess none of the knowledge required to do it....