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Pixel Productions (circa 1982)

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 11:06 am
by siccoyote
I've been looking around and disovering the games released for the vic 20 and I have been quite taken with the games by Pixel Productions. With the quite polished design and cinematic feel of their productions which is unusal from what I've seen on the platform usually.

The Trader Trilogy
Encounter
Starquest
Zor
Subspace Striker
Brainstorm
Harvester

Unfortunately I have searched high and low and can't find a prg or .d64 version of Brainstorm or Harvester, only tap files, which won't work on the sd2iec.
I don't suppose anyone knows any way to get the prgs out of the tap files?

https://mega.nz/#!g88xnKZS!W0y5XVVdnDhS ... X9gs8GEvZA

Re: Pixel Productions (circa 1982)

Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2021 11:19 pm
by oracle_jedi
Well, just 2 years late!

I was reading back through older posts and noticed this request, and as it happens I was recently gathering all of the Pixel Productions titles together on a single disk. I've also attached a second ZIP with the same files in PRG format.

This collection incudes Harvester and Brainstorm, although note - they are for the unexpanded VIC, whereas everything else needs a 16K expansion.

The Trader trilogy in this collection has been further modified to be NTSC friendly, as well as loading each subsequent part from whatever disk drive the last part loaded from.

Re: Pixel Productions (circa 1982)

Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2021 12:56 pm
by orion70
Thank you so much. Excellent titles, they make a great compilation!

Re: Pixel Productions (circa 1982)

Posted: Wed Feb 17, 2021 3:09 pm
by nbla000
I'm happy to see that one of my first program "DISK-LOADER" of about 15 years ago, is still used from many users for their disk collection.

Re: Pixel Productions (circa 1982)

Posted: Wed Feb 17, 2021 6:23 pm
by oracle_jedi
nbla000 wrote: Wed Feb 17, 2021 3:09 pm I'm happy to see that one of my first program "DISK-LOADER" of about 15 years ago, is still used from many users for their disk collection.
DISK-LOADER is awesome! Is there an official tool for creating the SEQ file? I hacked together something for now, but if there is a better tool I'd love to have a copy.

Thanks!

Re: Pixel Productions (circa 1982)

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2021 5:44 am
by nbla000
oracle_jedi wrote: Wed Feb 17, 2021 6:23 pm Is there an official tool for creating the SEQ file? I hacked together something for now, but if there is a better tool I'd love to have a copy.
There is my DISK-WRITER of course ;-)

From the old (no more existing) web page:
Disk-Loader is a Basic program for the Commodore Vic-20 (unexpanded or with any memory expansion) that allows to quickly load programs from a disk drive.

Technically it reads a sequential file “DISK.SEQ” that you must write before to read the floppy content, thus you need a Disk-Writer program too.

This “strange” approach allows to load looooong directories, also from unexpanded VICs, without ?OUT OF MEMORY errors.