They Sold A Million - Denied ?

spider

Pretty sure these were not denied before although devoid of the denied games.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0011371 First one

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0017181 First one (alternative)

The only reason I see in them for their status is the Ultimate title, namely Sabre Wulf

The only variation is Spy Hunter vs Beach Head on each 'edition' of T.S.A.M

Could these not be put back minus said denied title please ? :) , if not no problem just curious that is all. As its one game per side it should be easy to just not have a Tape2/Side1 . tzx present maybe.

Talking of which when they were available minus denied titles, the JSW version did not work, I've since obtained a working original one from this compilation if required.

leespoons

Yes it'd be good to have both versions particularly as TSAM II is available (minus tape 2 side 2 which is Knight Lore).

Would be good to do this for all currently denied compilations actually but that's a huge job I guess.

I must've owned this at one time as I remember wondering why someone had bothered to save the "JetSet Willy Loading" message as a SCREEN$ via Speedlock...

LCD

Maybe selling one million was not enough and they still trying to sell another million, making the games denied...

fog

LCD wrote: »

Maybe selling one million was not enough and they still trying to sell another million, making the games denied...

perhaps the combined total was one million ? :)

JSW is problematic on TSAM , due to the different loader and perhaps the frequency range of speedlock ? that + the age-ing of tapes not helping.

jamorski

I have all of the T.S.A.M compilations, wasn't aware that there were different loader versions on them. I think I'll .tzx them now for my collection.

leespoons

I found a tzx of TSAM on an old hard drive and JSW won't work. I think this is because there are no pauses in between the first Speedlock header and the main data (in fact there are no pauses in between the BASIC lead tones and data at all, they've all been taken out)

spider

leespoons wrote: »

I must've owned this at one time as I remember wondering why someone had bothered to save the "JetSet Willy Loading" message as a SCREEN$ via Speedlock...

Sort of. :) , I've taken mine apart lately although I was after the built in (apparently) saver routine. The basic present when its running is the normal Software Projects loader with a couple of minor changes, mainly to load the game and saver via microdrive and then call the 'saver'. Quick pic:



I was going to do a topic about this as I wanted some help, maybe later. Figured the loader zapped it and replaced it with standard code although grabbing that section of ram during loading did not help. SP1 is not encrypted as best as I can tell either.

jamorski wrote: »

I have all of the T.S.A.M compilations, wasn't aware that there were different loader versions on them. I think I'll .tzx them now for my collection.

Yeah all speedlocked. Please let me know if your TSAM version of JSW will load via the 128/+2 loader, mine demands 48K mode although I suspect given two versions of this one the later one may have a tweak or an extra bit of Basic as some Speedlock did to get around it.

djgarf

just checked both the speedlock versions of jsw that are in tosec and neither of them load in the +2 loader
thought it was odd that they have left the protection system in but skipped over it
what exactly is the saver ment to do?

leespoons

djgarf wrote: »

just checked both the speedlock versions of jsw that are in tosec and neither of them load in the +2 loader
thought it was odd that they have left the protection system in but skipped over it
what exactly is the saver ment to do?

So is that the Speedlock saver?

So it's generating the screen from within BASIC, then loading the game code from Microdrive, then RANDOMIZE USR 65024 is the code to save the whole lot via Speedlock (including all 6912 bytes of the screen)?

Or am I grasping the wrong end of the pointy wooden thing again?

spider

leespoons wrote: »

So is that the Speedlock saver?

So it's generating the screen from within BASIC, then loading the game code from Microdrive, then RANDOMIZE USR 65024 is the code to save the whole lot via Speedlock (including all 6912 bytes of the screen)?

Or am I grasping the wrong end of the pointy wooden thing again?

As far as I understand it, that's correct the call to 65024 will call the saver routine (which saves 16384 onwards) trouble is the code around that when its running the game is not far off Matt's original code ie the TRS stuff.

I stopped execution at the very last moment (by hand until I can remember how to stop SL and have it drop to basic) of it loading and examined that area and it appeared different so I guess speedlock moved the original code back (I've not actually checked to see if anything was hidden in the screen data) as the code at that location is different at the end of the loader before SP does it stuff compared to running.

The SP one contains a JP (HL) and the 'running' game contains a JP NC 41284 (probably original) , HL seems to be pointed to 6411

Not sure if SP is designed to kill its own saver when its finished running or not.

I did ask ages ago for a SP builder as it was so widely used I'm surprised it did not exist somewhere still although only the Alcatraz builder (difficult) is around.

I'm stuggling to go much further as I don't really understand what I'm doing but am trying to learn this as its fun. :)

djgarf

it loads the main jsw code lower down (at 25000) then at the last minute a small piece of code gets moved from 62006 to 23296 which then copies the game code to the right place before setting the stack to 24999 and making the jump to 33792 which executes the main game
the saver code is not actually saved with the main game code

spider

djgarf wrote: »

it loads the main jsw code lower down then at the last minute a small piece of code gets moved to 23296 which then copies the game code to the right place before setting the stack to 24999 and making the jump to 33792 which executes the main game
the saver code is not actually saved with the main game code

Thank you for explaining. :)

At least I know now what I was looking for what not present which is a shame in a way.

leespoons

Another thing to remember (although I don't know if it's important or not) is the padlock protection was disabled for the TSAM version - I wonder if the code for this is still present or if it just gets bypassed altogether?

Once I had TSAM I don't think I ever bothered to load the original again.

spider

leespoons wrote: »

Another thing to remember (although I don't know if it's important or not) is the padlock protection was disabled for the TSAM version - I wonder if the code for this is still present or if it just gets bypassed altogether?

Once I had TSAM I don't think I ever bothered to load the original again.

Its still there, I think the usual three byte change to fix it was not quite used though I'd have to check what they actually did. Certainly the "enter code at grid location..." is present around 26400 ish onwards. I'm not sure if they keycode map is still present, probably. :)

EDIT... I always patch mine with 34480,195 34481,202 34482,135

djgarf

the padlock protection is still there, open the tzx in tapir, open up the last block of code and look at 26416 and you can see "enter code at grid location"