First post, by carlostex
- Rank
- l33t
Hi friends,
since the first hardware became available for 3 voice sound on non-Tandy PC's i sorta became the official curator for patched binaries, that circumvent PCjr/Tandy 1000 machine detection, in order to playback on third party hardware. Back then, there was only the lo tech Tandy card, but today, we have a couple more options.
In the 3 years that have passed i patched mainly a few Sierra AGI versions, some old Windham and Telarium adventure titles, and the early Lucasarts adventures. ripsaw8080 contributed with Thexder and helped with Maniac Mansion, Scali if i remember correctly, contributed with the CGA version of Skate or Die. And little more was done since.
Last couple of months i've been working hard to compile a list with the games that were patched, and those that were left to patch. In the meantime, i patched quite a few more and i have uploaded them to ftp.oldskool.org already. There are a lot of games that do not need patching at all, and quite still a few left to patch.
There were games that sounded wrong when using port redirection. I found that the reason for it was that some titles write not only to port 0C0h, but also to port 0C1h. The TSR redirectors at the time did not listen to port 0C1h, thus wrong music was heard. So i contacted a few people (dreamblaster for the TNDLPT tool, and matze79 for the TNDY.COM tool) with some instructions to correct the problem. Thanks to that, this issue was mostly fixed.
This is still a work in progress, some games i lost a lot of time trying to patch, but i've been unable to, although it does seem possible. One such example is Accolade's "Bar Games". Other titles like "Defender of the Crown" or "Budokan" present their own challenges. My main tool has been IDA Pro, but i have no experience disassembling booter titles or DC's. "Budokan" is an even weirder one, as it seems to be encrypted in its own way.
So i'm attaching the main document, which lists the games that have been patched and what executable has been uploaded for them. As i stated before, you can get the binaries at ftp.oldskool.org, cortesy of Trixter aka Mobygamer.
