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Posted: 08/05/2006 - 21:11
by Analog-X64
I had to order a "Final Cartridge III" from Holland because you couldnt get anything like that in Canada at the time.

Awesome Cartridge I used it to do amazing things like rip parts of games and mash them with others. Figured out how to rip music+player routine and have the music play on its own.

Amazing when you think it was pre-internet and friends around me where not interested in C64 or computers and so Information was very hard to get.

OH and it came with 2 buttons one was for freezing and the other for reseting.

PS: I still have the cartridge but the contacts are very bad...anyone know how to repair it?

Posted: 08/05/2006 - 21:24
by Nickenstien
I would have given my right arm for one of those when I was kid!! (but i made do with a bit of selotape and a paperclip, McGuyver style :D ), hehe.

Posted: 08/05/2006 - 22:40
by Vosla
@Analog-X:
I personally preferred the Final Cartridge II because capturing a picture didn't destroy the freezed program. I exchanged the FC II with a FC III and was slightly dissappointed though it had a nice GUI. Expanded the module with a cable remote, still works today.

As for the Contacts:
If they are just slightly damaged by sliding in & out the expansion port, look for fine soldering tin and solder some material on the contacts. Needs to be very thin and cautious work. You may sand it down a bit. If you are kind of rich, take gold instead.
If conductor paths are about to come completely apart, think about soldering cables to the good ends and use some experimental circuit board + more soldering tin to improvise new contacts. Ugly but works.

Ugliest method ever (near-MacGyver-like):
Just had to improvise a datasette port plug. Thin cardboard + staplers + some tape & the cut off end of the datasette cable. No swiss army knife.

Posted: 09/05/2006 - 7:59
by moog
Datel's Action Replay 6.0 cartdrige is awesome one. I wrote for it program for searching music player in memory from $0400-$ffff.

Posted: 09/05/2006 - 13:49
by Moad'Dib
moog wrote:Datel's Action Replay 6.0 cartdrige is awesome one. I wrote for it program for searching music player in memory from $0400-$ffff.
I didn't need any code to get players or music note data from memory. I only needed a memory dump (M command in any monitor program).
I watched the memory dump scrolling on the right and I recognized that if music data in the observed memory segments.

Men! Just like Matrix!! :D

So I find the music and player sectoin, got the note data and player code to make it work at any enviroment... At this time I had a collection of more than 200 great musics with its own player code.

Posted: 09/05/2006 - 13:52
by moog
$0400 is an address of screen memory :). So this searcher was very handy :).

Posted: 09/05/2006 - 16:33
by Analog-X64
Vosla wrote: As for the Contacts:
If they are just slightly damaged by sliding in & out the expansion port, look for fine soldering tin and solder some material on the contacts. Needs to be very thin and cautious work. You may sand it down a bit. If you are kind of rich, take gold instead.
Thanks for the advice, that is exactly what the problem is, damaged from sliding in and out (insert your own porn joke here).

I'm very good with soldering and such so I will give this a try.

Posted: 09/05/2006 - 16:35
by Analog-X64
On of the tricks I used for both C64 and Amiga was to prefill the memory with Data I recognized so fill $1000-$CFFFF with $AA $CC $AC etc... and than load the program in and freeze it or jump into monitor.

I would than scan through the memory and I could tell where Data started and ended based on when I saw my prefilled Data.

Posted: 09/05/2006 - 20:38
by Nickenstien
Analog-X hehe I use the same trick now when im programming :D except I initialise memory with 0xDEADFACE so i can see what my memory manager is using :D, and when I release memory I fill it with 0xFEEDF00D so I can what was previousley allocated when debugging :D

Posted: 10/05/2006 - 14:40
by Analog-X64
Nickenstien wrote:Analog-X hehe I use the same trick now when im programming :D except I initialise memory with 0xDEADFACE so i can see what my memory manager is using :D, and when I release memory I fill it with 0xFEEDF00D so I can what was previousley allocated when debugging :D
Its a simple but very effective trick :)

On my Amiga 1000 I modified the Kickstart v1.3 Floppy using a disk based hex editor I cant remember which, so that when I did a reset all memory was intact and not cleared like it would normaly.

I couldnt do that on my A2000HD.