wee doors banging

I’ve released an updated WHDLoad patch for Kaiko’s insecty shooter Apidya.

This release fixes a bug in the game’s collision detection that would prevent entry to the bonus rounds on level 2 and 4.

Download the patch, instructions and pre-installed image from girv dot net or from the Official WHDLoad Website.

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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Back in 1999 I created a version of Daleks in Javascript. It’s been offline for some time as, by today’s standards (if not 1999′s) it uses some very, very bad Javascript and HTML. But I’ve now hammered it back into some sort of working order for modern browsers and it kind of mostly works. Sorta. You get it…

Is it legal to write programs to patch old Amiga games so that they will work on newer Amiga hardware than they were designed for? This is a posting I made in the excellent English Amiga Board forums regarding the legality (or lack thereof) of WHDLoad patches for old Amiga games.

Noldor from CPC Zone has posted some clever source to automatically decrypt Appleby Associates Amstrad CPC tape loader (a.k.a. the “GO! Loader” as it first appeared on U.S. Gold “GO!” branded games). Outwardly these loaders are characterised by a three digit counter smoothly counting down to zero, usually in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Sixteen years after Apidya was first released, KillerGorilla and I have uncovered an entire bonus round on level 4 that has not been seen until now !

I’ve released an updated WHDLoad patch for Kaiko’s insecty shooter Apidya.

The big news for this release is the discovery of a previously unknown bonus round on level 4 !

You can read more about this quite amazing find in my article here.

Download the patch, instructions and pre-installed image from girv dot net or from the Official WHDLoad Website.

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

If you liked this article, why not subscribe to the RSS feed for more?

You may also enjoy these great related articles:

• apidya whdload 2.03 released
• apidya whdload 2.04 released
• apidya whdload 2.00 released
• apidya whdload 2.05 released
• gravity force whdload 1.01 released

Tonight I started work on adding support for the “Racing Masters” compilation version of Tengen’s Hard Drivin’. Fortunately this version was almost identical to another compilation version so it wasn’t too difficult to fix. I also took the opportunity to add a couple more icons and update the readme, licence and installer script to the latest templates.

It’s not all sweetie mice though, as I discovered another two compilation versions that I never knew about before, so I guess some work lies ahead for this one yet!

At present, at least three more versions of the game are known or suspected to exist and may be incompatible with the current patch:

• Action 5 compilation
• Summer Smashers compilation
• Sport Games Hits compilation

If you have any of these versions or know where I can get them, please get in touch!

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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You may also enjoy these great related articles:

• hard drivin’ whdload 2.03 released
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It seems there was some developer accidentally code left over in the recent 2.00 release of my Apidya WHDLoad patch, resulting in players starting the game with a healthy 20,000 points before even firing a shot!

Oops! My bad!

This little problem has now been fixed with the release of version 2.01.

The bad 2.00 version was never released on the Official WHDLoad Website but my server logs show a few keen folk managed to grab it from this site before I was made aware of the problem and pulled the downloads. To prevent any future problems, I’ve decided to make version 2.01 and later deliberately incompatible with high scores saved by version 2.00. If all you use is 2.00 you’ll be fine. But, if you try to use your high score file with a later version of the slave, the file and all the scores in it will likely be overwritten with the default score table.

I’ll say this very clearly: DO NOT USE 2.00

Apologies for the fark up!

Download the patch, instructions and pre-installed image from girv dot net or from the Official WHDLoad Website.

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

If you liked this article, why not subscribe to the RSS feed for more?

You may also enjoy these great related articles:

• gravity force whdload 1.01 released
• apidya whdload 2.00 released
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• apidya whdload 2.03 released
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I’ve released an updated WHDLoad patch for Kaiko’s insecty shooter Apidya.

Mr. Larmer and Harry had created the 1.xx series of patches, but this is a brand spanky new patch, totally recoded from the ground up. It retains all the features of the original patches while fixing many more access faults and other bugs that still lurked in the game.

It was a bit of an epic effort, with the final slave source code weighing in at a hefty 2137 lines, and I’m glad to see it finally done! Now there’s just the inevitable bug reports to igno… I mean “deal with”…

Download the patch, instructions and pre-installed image from girv dot net or from the Official WHDLoad Website.

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

If you liked this article, why not subscribe to the RSS feed for more?

You may also enjoy these great related articles:

• apidya whdload 2.03 released
• apidya whdload 2.04 released
• apidya whdload 2.05 released
• apidya whdload 2.02 released
• apidya whdload 2.01 released

I’ve released a new WHDLoad patch for Magic Bytes’s cowboy based sport-em-up Western Games.

The patch was quite straightforward to write, though I did struggle for a while to get it to work properly on my Mediator equipped A1200. The problem was the common one of extra interrupts generated by the expansion hardware that WHDLoad can’t possibly handle. In Western Games’ case, this was causing the inbuilt Kickstart emulation to hang randomly during play, requiring the game to be exited and restarted to break out of the hung state.

The problems persisted even after disabling the Mediator interrupt system (with help from Elbox), so I eventually gave up, patched out the remaing OS calls and moved away from a KickEmu based slave altogether. Big thanks to Psygore for the idea!

Download the patch, instructions and pre-installed image from girv dot net or from the Official WHDLoad Website.

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

If you liked this article, why not subscribe to the RSS feed for more?

You may also enjoy these great related articles:

• zeewolf whdload 5.03 released
• gravity force whdload 1.01 released
• apidya whdload 2.03 released
• apidya whdload 2.04 released
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