Krazy Kong (Nufekop)

[paulmil18]

Greetings Everyone! I'm a long time VIC-20 owner (December 1982) and just took it out of storage after many years. I have been enjoying mixing the new technology to use the old tech. But I'm hoping someone can provide some assistance.

My Krazy Kong by Nufekop cassette tape has not weathered the time storm very well and no longer works on my VIC. Using the VICE emulator, I was able to print a copy of the program and thought it would be fun to hand jam it into the VIC. I've checked every line, at least 4 times and yet, while it works on the emulator, the actual VIC only runs the title screen and then to the "Run/Stop-Restore" home screen.

Does anyone know if there is something I would need to do when hand typing in old Nufekop programs?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Paul

[Mayhem]

I want to say the game comes in more than one part, so you’ve only got half the code there...

[paulmil18]

That's what I thought at first, but I only remember it being one part on the tape. In the VIC emulator, it's just one .pgm file and I was able to print out all the lines in that file. Unless there is something loading in that is not visible in the list...?

I just played the original tape in a recorder to hear the start and stop, and it plays for the same amount of time as the new version I've typed in (the original is definitely deteriorated and phasing).

Thanks!

[Mike]

It's quite easy to 'hide' machine code and graphics data behind the LISTable BASIC program, so if the listing contains SYS instructions into the area of BASIC memory without any READ..DATA constructions POKEing them in, those parts would be missing.

To make matters slightly more complicated, these kind of programs tend to fill up the entire BASIC memory, so there's no place to store the file name, when a standard SAVE command is used to make a copy, greeting you with an ?OUT OF MEMORY error. For the moment, especially when you've started once again with the VIC-20, it's beyond the scope of this post to teach you the basics of how to crack a game.

Normally, in emulation, that would be the first step from a *.prg file to transfer it to *.tap file, then to *.wav file and then playing that back on a PC sound card to reconstruct a tape recording. As you can see from the sheer number of transfer steps, that process tends to be rather unreliable. Even if you'll find some people who keep by this method (to enhance the retro experience ), I'd recommend buying a SD2IEC. There you can write the *.prg file on SD card (on the PC), and load it from SD card on the VIC-20 - with the SD2IEC plugged in.


P.S. *.pgm usually refers to Portable Greymap files, a file format found in the UNIX-World. CBM program files have the extension *.prg

P.P.S. if, for the emulation, you already got hold of a *.tap file of Krazy Kong anyhow, you could just try with the method laid out above, i.e. TAPWAV or similar to transfer the *.tap to *.wav and then make a new recording from that

P.P.P.S. It's also possible to hide extra information in the tape header containing the file name. But again, we're drifting into the 'crack the game' land. When your *.tap works, go ahead from that.

[Ghislain]

Greetings Everyone! I'm a long time VIC-20 owner (December 1982) and just took it out of storage after many years. I have been enjoying mixing the new technology to use the old tech. But I'm hoping someone can provide some assistance.

My Krazy Kong by Nufekop cassette tape has not weathered the time storm very well and no longer works on my VIC. Using the VICE emulator, I was able to print a copy of the program and thought it would be fun to hand jam it into the VIC. I've checked every line, at least 4 times and yet, while it works on the emulator, the actual VIC only runs the title screen and then to the "Run/Stop-Restore" home screen.

Does anyone know if there is something I would need to do when hand typing in old Nufekop programs?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Paul

I had a very similar experience with Krazy Kong for the VIC-20 when I was 10 years old. Back then, I only had a VIC-20 without any storage device whatsoever. I would create my own games or type in KILLER COMET and ROCKET COMMAND from the VIC-20 Users guide over and over again only to lose all that I've typed in once the VIC-20 had to be turned off.

I remember playing KRAZY KONG at a friend's house and I found that I could RUN/STOP + RESTORE and list the program. Since he had a printer, I had him output the program listing to it and I brought it home so I could type in the game and play it. Unfortunately, as Mike pointed out, there are graphics and ML appended to the game program and of course, the SYS calls from BASIC would simply cause it to crash. But this problem did cause me to read up on what SYS calls were and I learned something from it.

I begged my parents to get me a Datassette (and I'd forgo several months of allowance money if they did), but they were completely incredulous at the time as to why I would need something like that. But my Dad eventually bought me a C64 with a disk drive and monitor a few years later.

[paulmil18]

Greetings and thanks for all the follow-up. I was really hoping for a "just enter this Poke command before loading the program and all will be well with the world", but I understand that it's a little bit more then that...ok, a lot more.

Again, I thank everyone for all the assistance. This was some great conversation!

Paul

[rhurst]

Forget tape, you can run it on the VICE emulator:

krazykong.zip

Krazy Kong.prg

(2.06 KiB) Downloaded 566 times