GGN and Showaddywaddy were at the party (watch this space for a more complete report), and during the compos they noticed that a brand new game from T.O.Y.S. was released. They decided that they simply had to do something about it. So they managed to get a copy of the game, added two trainer options, and wrote an intro, all while the compos were running!
So, none of that "Lazy D-Buggers" talk from you lot, we can be fast when we want to!
Without further ado, feel free to download and enjoy Chroma Grid, trained. You are welcome!
* (The above story might or might not have been true. Sometimes it's best to not let the facts get in the way of a nice story!)
Saddened by this, I tried running the demo in my own hardware, only to get the same freeze.
Yikes!
Long story short, I took a closer look at it and quickly discovered that the demo works fine on all machines except 4Mb ones! (of course it won't run on 512k machines but that's by design). After gaining this insight, it wasn't too to devise a fix of the demo for 4Mb machines.
Without furhter ado, here is the patched demo as MSA and ST disk formats.
Enjoy this not that well known demo!
Been a while since we've released a patch. However SHW had some spare time on his hands and decided to crack, file and train The Jetsons, mainly due to a 100% crack not existing on the ST. I doubt many have even seen the vertical scrolling parts, never mind levels 2,3 and 4.
Wobbly intro coded by Showaddywaddy with gfx by Ukko and sonix by DMA-SC. I've given the intro a little spruce up for 2024. Enjoy
Since the previous news item Showaddywaddy and GGN were morally obliged to visit Sommarhack party in Sweden yet again. As always, it was an excellent experience! Not too many people so there was a change to speak to everyone at length, great discussions, lots of new and old stuff shown, a great walk around the party place to do the quiz, and so many more positive points. We really can't thank enough the whole crew for organising and letting us participate.
Not to come off as ungrateful, we dutifully went to the party with Atari gifts. SHW created Lostmax during the party, showcasing two previously unreleased Mad Max tunes, and GGN offered an Atari ST (etc) port of Adam Is Me (original).
"All right, that's all fine and well. They've partied out, but it's been month since that party. What have those lazy D-Buggers been doing since then?" I'm sure people are asking. As a matter of fact, we've been quietly been working in the background towards a big project. It's very boring and grindy, you can take a peek at it below:
I can't be very specific right now, but I think that people are going to like it when it's out. But there's still heaps of work until this is done. And of course we have more projects in the pipeline apart from this, but we still can't say much. So we ask you to exercise some patience, and all will be revealed in due time, it hopefully won't take long.
So this is all for now. Wishes for great holidays and a happy new 2024!
Get the intro from Pouet or Demozoo
SNDH archive
Read the SNDH blog entry
We've been bringing you hacks since 1986 under a number of different guises. Here's one that crosses our multiple generations. Originally cracked in 1987 by Hot-Knife, then packed for Automation in 1990 by Cyrano Jones. Finally fixed in 2022 by Showaddywaddy for hard-drives and all TOS (including Falcon). Here's Microleague Baseball.
MLB MSA version MLB ZIP version
2023 update, now runs from medium res.
MLB MSA version MLB ZIP version
Hello ship mates.
A news item? Hell yeah... all because of the Nova demo party!
You see, yesterday I had a look at the new ST demo Mind The Bend The Mind, it features a rather nifty 4 plane bit bender which gives a nod to the Andy The Arfling demo screen in the Total Apathy demo.
Total Apathy? well.......
Way back in June 2019 we released the demo Total Apathy. This originally had a planned release date of 1991! Anyway, Total Apathy was indeed an appropriate title as the demo was never finished. Fast Forward to 2019 and we finally gave the demo the release it deserved at the Outline party in NL - sprucing it up with an intro an wobbly menu.
A week before release Cyrano Jones/The Law sent me SIX MORE Apathy screens which had been intended to be used in the demo. However, by then it was too late to significantly change the menu code. We therefore decided to allow the screens to be accessed by secret means!
Fast forward once again to August 2022, and NO ONE has ever discovered how to access the screens (unless you were told by GGN!).
Well now I will put you out of your misery, I must admit I implemented quite a devious way to access the screens.
Anyone remember the legendary Virtual Escape demo by Equinox? How did you access its hidden screen? Well by pressing the ESCAPE key on boot up of course!
Now try this with Total Apathy - a message appears saying stick it in. Stick what in??? D-Bug menu 1A obviously......where it all began. Then, when asked, re-insert the Total Apathy disk.
Now you can access 6 additional screens by pressing F7-F10 and 1-3!!
Phew, finally these screens see the light of day - 30 years later!
Hope you enjoy these lost treasures.....
Showaddywaddy
Hope you're all good and ready for a new year. Let's hope this will be the year we contain this dreadful pandemic and only a bad memory of it will remain...
Anyway, on to happier news. I was delighted to see a release today by DHS (Synth Sweeps and MPC Beats), which motivated me to package up and release the MP2 patch I made for Evil (which is a continuation of Ray/tSCc's MP2 patch).
Long story short, Evil requested some help on IRC with NoCrew's MP2 player (using Ray's D2D patch) because he had issues with file sizes larger than 16Mb. The #1 unwritten rule of #atariscne is: always help Evil when he asks for help. So I started reading the player sources, then the DSP code, got confused, suggested a few things, and when they didn't work I took an even deeper dive into the code. Finally the next day I had a fix for him (which came to me right before I went to sleep, thanks brain!). He tested the fix and it worked for him. Hooray!
So without further ado, here's the fix, which also contains some tips on producing MP2 files.
Happy coding, and again happy new year!
The dreaded Covid-19 pandemic in its 2nd year, lockdowns, demoparties canceled, Atari release numbers on the decline, so on and so forth.
Clearly we had to step up and do something to cheer people up this festive season! And so we did, with the help of our good friend The innovator/Newline.
Recently tIn had another stab at compiling the Hatari emulator to run on a browser (using the popular emscripten compiler toolchain). After an undisclosed amount of swearing and battling with cryptic options, he succeeded! Then he created a web interface around it and added the whole Demozoo Atari release library, et voilà: The AtariAviary was born. Truly a marvel of our times!
GGN was one of the people who beta tested the Aviary before public release and provided some UI feedback to tIn. So once it was released he asked tIn if he could share his work so we could tailor it to the D-Bug/Automation database. Luckily it wasn't a huge amount of work to make the Aviary work with our disks, and now we are very happy to give it to you all good people!
A few notes before we let you loose with it:
- For now Firefox based browsers run it really slow. Please prefer Chromium based browsers. This might get fixed in the future. We also have reports that Safari's performance is also ok.
- You can type on the "Filter" box to real-time search the database
- Click any of the titles shown on the search results to automatically download the disk image, insert it to Hatari and reboot
- If you click on the floppy disk icon next to the game title, the corresponding disk image will be downloaded and inserted into Hatari without reset. This way you can handle disk swaps
- The buttons below the Hatari do pretty much what you'd expect: Change RAM size, change TOS version to 1.62 from 1.02, Enable hard disk (currently disabled), reset the emulator and choose a random menu (very handy if you're stuck on what to boot next!)
- We do not yet force STE mode for the titles that require STE. So you will have to do that yourself!
- In the event you get a "D-Bug - error!" message on red background, then something bad has happened. There are a couple of disks we still don't have but they exist on our database. In any case, you can get in touch with us so we can take a look!
- Joystick emulation is enabled by default. Use arrow keys + right control.
- If for some reason you want to change something in the configuration, press F12 while focused on the Hatari screen and you should get the emulator's menu so you can tweak settings.
- We will continue to improve the experience with more features and fixes, bear with us
That should be all for now. We now leave you to have fun with our little offering!
Click the following link to visit the D-Bug Aviary: Link!
Merry Christmas and a happy new year from D-Bug!
Around 2018 our Czech friends got in touch with us as an issue of a Czech-only Atari diskmag Narsil was protected. Of course we gave them a hand, so issue 50 was finally released to the public!
All was fine until about last month where more issues previously assumed lost surfaced. Again our assistance was requested, and again we gave a hand!
So even if you don't speak Czech do check out the magazine, it seems well crafted and the text displayer is interesting, mixing text and graphics. Our contribution was for issues #2-#10 and #50.
That is all for now, take care everyone and see you soon - hopefully!
Another quick re-release of an Automation menu. This one relates to the game To Be On Top by Rainbow Arts. There are very few cracks of this game, just ours (by Neil) and Jabba of Superior spring to mind. Anyway the game is damn hard and unforgiving. So whilst ripping the music out (to SNDH) I decided to train the game so you are able to view the end sequence. Apart from that I have updated the menu code slightly adding a sid-i-fied Star Paws tune and bouncy scroller. So download Automation 306v3.
Revision 2021 online among other nice releases brought us a nice surprise: Hemoroids' Square v2 demo, which was shown back in STNICCC 2015 is finally out. Rejoice!
Unfortunately, it did not work on our MegaSTEs even though it was marked as an STE release (In our experience the two machines are really very compatible). Upon further investigation, it seemed that it didn't work on TOS 2.xx in general. So GGN decided to take a peek at the problem.
After bypassing the protection (nice try guys ;)), which was assumed to be the trouble, the demo still refused to run even with the TOS checks removed. Also it seemed allergic of hard disk drivers as well. Fast forward a lot of experimentation and he had a working version... mostly. The ending tune by Furax would freeze the machine. At this stage Showaddywaddy entered the arena, with his vast knowledge of fixing tunes for all the Atari 16/32 platform. He made a quick fix for the tune. It didn't work, so GGN followed his lead and fixed the remaining issues. The demo then ran start to end on TOS 2.06 from hard disk (with 4Mb of RAM) and floppy (with 2Mb of RAM).
All this happened in the day the demo was uploaded to Pouet and Demozoo. We contemplated releasing it as-is, but where's the fun in that? We needed an intro!
A quick poll around a few of our friends wasn't very hopeful, so we would probably have to switch to intro coding yet again. But at the last minute, Excellence in Art sent us a mostly working intro. Some modifications later we had everything up to everyone's satisfaction.
Without further ado, grab the release here or comment about XiA's intro on Pouet. Read the instructions in the supplied text file just in case, and most of all: have fun!
Just a real quick release. A number of people mentioned wanting a patch to the classic Bitmap Brother's game - Xenon. Nothing too taxing, just to remove the annoying joystick wiggle feature which often resulted in an untimely death mid battle.
This is now removed, however it can still be selected using the space bar - to toggle from ground vehicle to space ship.
Original crack by Hot-Knife, patch by GGN, un-wiggled by SHW. Exclusive intro music by Modmate.
The app has a pop up share message which appears every now and again. A user asked if this could be removed. Mmmmh we are in 2020 so I do not see a problem in implementing this. The author was contacted however unfortunately he's now lost all his source code.
So, I dug into the high level soup and voila - Sound Lab 1.1....D-Bugged.
Update - here's Sound Lab 1.11 as well.
Remember, if you like this program please still consider paying the shareware fee!
We're back at Nordlicht 2020 to present you Kako milo, a mashup between the STE port of Bad apple by Fenarinarsa and the excellent parody lyrics by Gasman.
No need to thank us. You're welcome.
We have finally updated Trans D-Bug Express to version 1.05.
This version has quite a number of significant changes, briefly - works on any memory configuration, improved speed (fastest MSA reader on the ST), Drive B support, compatible with ST, STe, Mega STe, TT and Falcon, uses low level FDC code (no BIOS routines!), allows BPB to be skipped. More info in the readme contained in the zip file.
Enjoy
To lighten up the mood slightly, here's what we've been up to lately, in chronological order:
New domain name
For various reasons we now have a second domain name running in parallel to our old one. We welcome the new kid on the block, https://d-bug.me! Please note that if you have issues with accessing the site in either of the two domains, don't hesitate to get in touch with us stating the problem and we'll patch it up sharpish.
rmac and rln website
Prehaps you've heard of these before, perhaps not. The fact is that GGN has been helping Shamus of Underground software (Virtual Jaguar fame) maintain and extend an assembler and linker aiming to support all Atari platforms, from the 800 to the ST, Lynx and Jaguar.
rmac and rln are direct descendants of the official Atari ST dev tools: Madmac (by Landon Dyer) and aln (By Alan Pratt). The tools currently support most of the CPUs found on Atari platforms including 68000, 68030, the Jaguar custom CPUs, the 6502 etc.
Alas, the tools never had a home page of their own, but instead they relied on forum posts and obscure repositories if people wanted to check them out. Well, no more! a brand new site was created for the pair which includes history, download links, comprehensive manual and a fun (we hope!) theme. So, without further ado, you are very welcome to visit http://rmac.is-slick.com to get informed, and perhaps, who knows, even try the tools out!
(Just as a footnote: rmac is now listed on Wikipedia too, yay!)
SNDH blog
Remember this one? The thing where Showaddywaddy once every few years writes a random post about things? Well, it's been updated! This time featuring two sizzling items: the glorious conclusion of "From Hull and back" and the first in a series of music ripping tutorials. Go have a read, it's well worth your time!
Outline 2020
Since most of the parties this year are moved to the online format (it beats having no parties at all), all our releases have been remote. To kick off things, Showaddywaddy wore his PHF hat yet again to participate in the highly competitive 256 byte compo! With an ST release of course, and a game to boot!
PHF Rally came third in a highly competitive mixed platform compo, which is either a great achievement or proof that people are always name voting. In any case, a place in the podium for SHW!
Gubbdata 2020
What? What's all this nonsense about Atari entries at a Commodore party????
We'll spare you with our thought process (because there mostly wasn't one), but it sounded a good idea to GGN, tIn and XiA to start a demo from scratch for that part roughly 3 to 4 days before the compo deadline.
Visuals accompanying music is probably one of the most literal translations of a demo release. GGN and tIn heard a preview version of the tune XiA had composed and thought it would be a pity to not have some fun things showing while the music is playing. Initially destined to be released at Sommarhack, it is not an invite for that party! We just liked the logo, that's all. Honest!
Despite the harsh deadline we had plenty of fun rigging this up. It ranked 3rd (again!) in the Other Platform Demo competition, not bad... considering there were only 3 entries! We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Hedning of Genesis Project and Troed of Sync for the patience and support during the party. (meaning: a super extended deadline)
Sommarhack 2020
Finally for now, GGN and tIn made their (virtual) presence at Sommarhack by doing a ST port of a well known Atari 800 product:
Yes, Mona made its way to the Atari ST computers. This little gem by Ilmenit was ported to various platforms (see click on the link to the original and read the Pouet thread for more info), but the ST was left out in the cold. GGN and tIn thought they should rectify the situation, and they did!
The port keeps the 256 bytes limitation (something that only one ZX spectrum port has managed so far), even though the 68000 has on average double the size for an instruction than the 6502! This means that we managed to squeeze the same functionality with less instructions! ...or did we? A quick look shows that the Atari 800 version uses 52 instructions and the ST version 49. How did we do it then? Well, you'll have to wait for the eventual write up. Be patient!
For some reason this ranked first in the 256 byte compo tied with SFMX's entry. Thanks everyone for voting for us. And an even greater thanks to Ilmenit for the original which is nothing short of a masterpiece, if only for the concept itself.
Winding down
And that was 2020 so far from us. As for actual D-Bug activities... yes, they're still coming, hang in there.
And most of all, stay safe!
See you around...
"Hello folks,
I'm thinking of organising some kind of Atari get-together at my gaff next year."
When Tat of Avena invites you over for a few days, how can one refuse? Damo, GGN, Gwem and Showaddywaddy certainly didn't! The premise of the whole gathering was to just relax and have some Atari time together, possibly work on something fun. A few of the participants were reluctant at first as they claimed they cannot code (such modesty!). They were however calmed down by the host saying that nobody would be forced to code anything. So after a date was agreed upon (21 to 23 February 2020) people booked time and arranged their transportation to the "hack".
First to arrive at the place was GGN, one day before everyone else, due to flight schedules. Things stated looking bad (or good depending on how one looks at the situation) when after a lovely dinner GGN started working on his entry for Outline, while Tat was deep in unpacker territory.
A few days prior to the party he had finished a rough-but-working depacker of the LZSA1 packer. Little by little the LZSA2 depacker started working and by early next day everything was ready: both versions of the LZSA depack algorithm are now available on GitHub. So that's already one release before most of the people had arrived - oh no! Also, GGN's tests showed that LZSA packs better and depacks faster than LZ4, so it's even a useful tool!
Late in the evening the rest of the crew started arriving: Grazey, then Gwem, and last but definitely not least, Damo. Here you can see everyone inside a local pub the next day.
With us were 1 STE, 2 STFMs (including Showaddywaddy's infamous orange sprayed one) and one Falcon, what more could one ask?
Once everyone settled in and had a good night's rest, things took off: The water boiler was working at 100% capacity in order to keep up with the tea demand, snacks were being passed around and generally the mood was great. People were even productive, which is unheard of! Meanwhile, word has got out that a party called "tathack" is happening and that it was populated exclusively by 1337 people (although none present at the place saw any), so around Saturday noon we were asked something really scary:
"whens the deadline, remote entries?"
Oops, busted! Sure, Gwem was set to release a new version of MaxYMiser (which of course he did), but that's pretty much it. Remote entries meant there was supposed to be a compo of sorts, so it was starting to feel a bit like work! Not to worry though, we set the deadline at midnight GMT and hoped that people would not carry on their threats of submitting something. GGN started working on a potential release but it was soon apparent that at least one more day was required to get everything to run properly, so with heavy heart that idea was abandoned. Grazey was still working on his Outline release and preparing something that will be released soon(!), Damo was working on his tracker, Tat was working on his release (for another party).
So, apart from MaxYMiser, there was nothing for the compos. And then the blasted Spice boys carried out their threats and submitted not one but two entries! Oh well!
To ease the tension of waiting for the compo deadline (snacks, food and tea also helped plenty) Showaddywaddy suggested a gaming compo. After a couple of false starts in trying to find of a suitable game, we settled upon Gemini Wing.
The poor rabbit soon lost its smile as it witnessed the general level of the contestants. The less said about this compo the better. People in the know probably have a rough idea of who won the compo (or just took a look at our fancy results file)
So, compo time! Luckily GGN had brought with him a pre-production devkit made by Ultra of Cream, ultraDev which made sending the entries to the compo machine a breeze. Big thanks to Ultra for this splendid piece of hardware!
House rules dictated that there would be only one voter, who was certainly the most qualified and knowledgeable in Atari demoscene culture in the house: Newton the cat. After both entries were shown (and the crowd indeed have a lovely time watching them - many thanks to the Spice boys for sending entries on such a short notice!) Newton considered the matter very carefully, judged both entries on their merits, and promptly disqualified both. Everyone present was gutted but rules are rules. Oh well...
Get the releases over at Pouet and have a good laugh - we certainly did!
After all that excitement people were exhausted. So it was mutually agreed to get some rest for the final day. Said final day turned out pretty uneventful: after a long and lovely breakfast people slowly started packing up, saying their goodbyes and going on their merry ways.
There are of course a lot of things left out in this mini report: all the small talk, tracker ideas, collaboration, info exchange, etc etc. However, these are the things that cannot be conveyed with words; one simply has to be there and soak up the atmosphere. It could have been bigger, more organised, better advertised. Or it could even have been smaller. In the end everyone that was invited had a lovely quiet time (after all we're all old, right?!?) and we're sure that everyone present would agree that this was the perfect way to open the Atari 2020 demoparty season.
We are very grateful that Tat invited both D-Bug members to hang around with the rest of the people. His hospitality was top notch, the tea service was excellent, and everything else was just lovely. Nothing more to add here, so catch you all later! Outline is just around the corner, and Sommarhack isn't that far either!
Hello!
It's time again for yet another time capsule post, so let's have a round up on what those lazy people at D-Bug were up to since the last time.
No new releases this year :(
Oh boy we came close. Spirits were high, the releases are very close to ready and tested (and at least one of them super rare!), the menu was being coded, but...... Unfortunately we ran out of time and steam. Our release was supposed to be submitted to a demo party (we won't say which, that would be telling) but the intro was over ambitious and would require graphics and a lot of work. Coupling that with the looming deadiline and the fact that we went to that demo party to see people and have fun, we made the hard decision to hold back until everything would be proper ready.
The sad fact is that we didn't continue working on the release after the party as focuses and interests shift occasionally. But rest assured, we will have something out soon! (fingers crossed!)
With that out of the way, let's cover the guys' other activities.
Outline
What year would be complete without our favorite Dutch party? Both Showaddywaddy and GGN had to be there for 4 days of carelesness, fun, and a bit of hacking as usual! (and of course lending a hand to the compo team as Shw's Mega STE had the honour of running the few Atari releases!) The usual Atari people of the past years were there: SPKR/SMFX, TiNKer/Lineout, Havoc/Lineout, CiH/Maggie, Felice/Maggie, tIn/Newline (it was a pleasure to meet a legendary person from the 90s, we hit it off imediately), Tronic/Effect, LFEE, Beetle/Cyanoacrylate Dreams, Gaz. And of course people from other platforms like Fra/Resistance, Gasman/Hooy-Program, TheBat/Guideline, Numtek/Guideline, and so on and so forth.
This year was a bit special as the party bids farewell to the Willemsoord location. So we made an effort to show something worthwhile for the compos!
First of all, a new demo!...well that's not true at all, but it was new to most of the people - just not to us!
Total apathy was the name of what was destined to be the Bad Brew Crew's mega demo. Sadly the demo was never finished (and yes the irony is not lost to anyone - the demo's name was prophetic and probably the main reason for no release!). But a lot of the screens were floating about in old backups of backups. Some of them were used as D-Bug menus, some were leaked into compilations. However they were never released into a single pack with a menu and all. Shw wanted to release this for a long time now and this year he finally made the effort to put everything together.
Since the whole project started in the early 90s Shw thought it would be appropriate to put everything on a boot floppy with custom loading code etc, none of that fancy hard disk the kids do these days! A small intro was put together by Shw and GGN, things were tested thoroughly (as usual) and that was it.
(Of course one week before the party Cyrano Jones sent us a few extra screens he found that we didn't have so we had to re-master the demo disk - d'oh! But no matter, it was all done in time)
(Hidden screens? What's that?)
But that's not all! Since the start of the year GGN was hacking away at a utility that statically converts Z80 code to MC68000. The reason for that was for him to port over a game from the ZX Spectrum (boo!) called Maziacs (thanks to SPKR for mentioning this game). The rationale behind the tool was to have the gameplay code behave 100% identical to the original version, not trying to guess what the game did and replace the graphics and input routines with native 68000 code. Thanks to the brilliant as usual SH3 we have a title screen that matches the conversion's chosen name (Bugziacs, feel free to download and try it out btw!) and new graphics that were drawn during the party by TiNKer we released a much more polished product that was originally envisioned.
We won't bore you with the details here, GGN has written a quite long article explaining the whole process and a bit of development history, you're welcome to go and read that!
8-Bit symphony
Yes, we were there! How could we miss that event when it was being orgainsed in Showaddywaddy's home town (Hull)? That's right, we couldn't! Not even one month has passed since Shw and GGN met and now they were off to see the first symphonic concert of tunes from the 80s. We teamed up with gwEm/PHF, Tat/Avena (another mythical Atarian from the 90s we had the pleasure of meeting this year, we're on a roll!), and of course Tronic and Gaz were there. Was it good? Well, you'd have to be there for yourself, we won't share opinions here.
There's not a lot to say here as this wasn't a demo party but everyone had a relaxing time talking about looming deadlines and stress from demo coding ;). All the same it was a nice weekend in rainy UK.
(also, as Tat put it: "The unforgettable Serena Williams")
Sommarhack
Without losing steam, GGN joined the merry Swedes at yet another edition of their lovely Atari party. Again many lovely people gathered together in such a small place: Evil/DHS, XiA/SMFX/The twist team, Acca, SPKR/SMFX, Modmate/SMFX, 505/SMFX, Wiztom/Aggression, Deez/Evolution, Baggio/Evolution, gwEm/PHF, Damo/Reservoir Gods (and what a pleasure it was meeting him again after so many years!), Britelite/Dekadence, Ricky Martin/Decadence, Daniel/New beat (AKA Dan Dan the beer man!), Freeco/New beat, Instream/Nature, Hencox/Nature, PeP/SoS, Nerve/Ephidrena (again, lovely to see again after a long time), Frequent/Ephidrena (like we said, meeting legends this year!), Emphii/Extream, No/Escape (beyond words, so happy to meet up again), Mikro/Satantronic, Sedma (yeah yeah giants etc)...
So what we had in store for the party? Well, Ambermoon Music Demo - something that Shw and GGN worked in many many many many years. Every time we would pick this up, reach to the point of 99% being done, and then something would happen and we'd put it aside. This year we just had to release it as the tunes (which Showaddywaddy got from Big Alec many years ago) were finally leaked out. Our hand forced, we decided to make a final push and get it out the door. By no means a big feat (especially compared to the top notch releases we witnessed that night at the party), but at least better than no release!
It was one of those parties that one wishes could never end, or last for 2-3 days more so as to catch up with everyone and have fun. All good things must come to an end though so people parted ways, big hugs all round and that special feeling one has after meeting people like family.
Sillyventure
So it turns out that Sommarhack wasn't the end of our Atari activities for the year. We didn't plan for that though. We were happy to be idle and enjoy life for a while. But, well, accidents do happen...
SMFX were conjuring up a demo to celebrate their 3rd year of Atari activities. As pretty much everyone knows now, it is basically a reimagining of Razor1991's 2011 demo . Accidentally (ho ho) SPKR asked GGN to lend a helping hand, and he reluctantly accepted, not knowing how he could be useful. After re-acquainting himself with the demo (8 years is a long period!) GGN asked where could he be helpful and spkr pointed him to the part of the demo that featured a 3D landscape.
Again by accident (no joke!) GGN remembered the fractal landscape of Ooh crikey wot a scorcher which gave birth to Killing spree which GGN helped bring into presentable shape for Outline 2014! The source was out there, so why not make use of it? So sure enough the code was stripped down and beaten into working with SMFX's demo system with not much fuss (which speaks volumes for Manikin's code if anything!). Finally the glenz vector end part was reimagined and GGN generated the bouncy sprite paths for that. That's it, the rest is SMFX's work and don't let them tell you otherwise!
"We accidentally released" was released at the party and you can see the result for yourselves by clicking the link!
What's next?
So that's pretty much it for this decade. People mostly knew all the above without reading this page. So what's next for D-Bug?
Like we said, we do intend to get back into making menus. This year didn't go as planned and we're sorry, but there's no use crying over spilled milk. We plan to rectify this!
And a small plea at this point: As much fun as it is doing everything in-house, it can sometimes become overwhelming. Putting a menu together requires some resources like menu code, graphics, music, testing. So if you feel like contributing anything, we'd be more than happy to accept!
Also, Showaddywaddy has been secretly donning his Grazey hat and ripping out tunes from pretty much everywhere for the SNDH archive. A new release has been well overdue, that's also coming soon!
Next year it'll be D-Bug's 30th birthday, so we plan to celebrate it with a bang (or two)! We hope you'll join us in the celebrations!
With love for the scene,
GGN and Showaddywaddy
Just because we haven't been updating this website doesn't mean we weren't busy! So, what happened since the last news item?
Arkos Tracker 2 replay routine for the ST
As you can read from the tracker's website, \"Arkos Tracker 2 is the evolution of STarKos (an Amstrad CPC Tracker) and Arkos Tracker 1 (A Windows-only Tracker)\". Its author (Targhan) publically asked if anyone would take up on the task of making a ST version of the player since the Amstrad CPC and the ST share pretty much the same sound chip (AY-3-8912 vs YM2149F). GGN was intrigued at the possibilities this opened, primarily since this would enable people to compose tunes on PC (or Mac) and play directly on ST. So he overcame his fears (and disgust!) for the Z80 CPU and started on a port of the player code to good old MC68000. The details of this are probably good enough for an article of their own so I'll save it for now.
After a few days of staring at instruction manuals, register descriptions and trying code in simulators he had a working prototype that could play tunes that took a whopping 6 scanlines of CPU! Hooray! After a few optimisation passes, the CPU usage dropped down to about 3.5 scanlines (worst case). Which is great, but what to do with it?
Outline
That's when XiA came into the picture*. The tracker did seem nice to use for him and pretty soon he started composing chiptunes again, something he hasn't done in a few years! Around this time the Outline demoparty was looming and we had nothing to show. On a whim GGN started mashing around some visualisations for one of XiA's tunes, thinking it would be enough for a small entry. This was 3 days before the party started! Around that point XiA started throwing assets and code at GGN that he and his lovely wife Acca had prepared in the past. They all looked lovely, so how could those not be used? Lots of effort, bug fixing and contributions by TiNKer at the party and we had something that resembled a demo on our hands! We called it \"LovelYM\", it ranked 3rd place out of 5, and you can view/download it on Pouet as usual. As a final remark, the initial design document for the demo was to show a raster bar to indicate how much CPU time the replay routine took, so we think we exceeded those expectations by far!
As for Outline itself - we had a blast once again. GGN, Showaddywaddy, TiNKer, SPKR, Havoc, D-Force, TheMatch, Beetle, Tronic, CiH, Felice, Lisu, JAC!, they were all present to keep the Atari flag up in the party and the compos :). And of course not forgetting people from other platforms like the Guideline folks (Numtek, TheBat), Alpha C who took care of the compos, and too many other people to mention here.
As expected, it wouldn't be a proper party without D-Bug coding! So Showaddywaddy wore his Grazey hat and ripped a few musics for the good of humanity, while GGN succeeded in adding SID voice support for Arkos Tracker! The results are publically on Github, so you are all invited to check it out and use it in your projects!
Finally, GGN and Showaddywaddy and his friend Gaz spent a few hours walking around in rainy Amsterdam after the party - good times!
Sommarhack
After an exhausting party like Outline, surely we wouldn't attempt to do anything other any time soon, right? You would guess wrong!
To keep it short, we did yet another demo with XiA! And documented the process here. GGN and Shw were again present at the party (wooo, two parties in the same year - madness!) and, as expected, good times ensued! Shw was almost thrown in the river because of World Cup shenanigans (namely, England beating Sweden during the party), GGN beat everyone at the gaming compo yet again (yawn!), and the GGN/XiA/Acca demo scoring first place at the Twist compo. No idea how this happened but as usual you can see the result for yourself on Pouet. Enjoy!
Nordlicht
Okay, so surely that was it for us for 2018? Two parties, two demos? Ehhh, nope!
Nordlicht demoparty was holding a 512 byte executable compo. And GGN walked into Arvenius (AKA wysiwtf) of Titan during Outline, who is one of the organisers of Nordlicht. An entry was promised, so something had to be done about it!
pLOLsma was written as a part in The Twist demo, but was left out for various reasons. The core code was written by GGN during the flight to Sweden in about 1 hour, and was beaten into submission 2 hours past the deadline for Nordlicht remote entries. No regrets, it is what it is, the promise was not broken :).
Beyond Brown
Time jump to yesterday, when we finally mustered enough courage to release a sister site/blog/soapbox/whatever into the wild. Beyond Brown had been stewing over a slow fire for a few years now. It was meant to be for our entertainment, jotting down things or writing a few words that were not fitting to other online mediums (forums etc). But over time word got out and people asked about something more public. So here we are. We still think it needs a lot more content (one major reason for not releasing it earlier) but at least people have an easier way to access whatever content is there.
Upcoming items
The observant among you must be screaming right now. \"Fine, but what does all this has to do with D-Bug??????\". So nice of you to ask! GGN and Shw have been talking lately and thought that we might as well start producing a few CDs again! First up will be a demo compilation, and then who knows...
Stay tuned for the future - it's coming soon-ish!
* Well, it was a bit earlier than that, but the narrative sounds better this way!
Bello!
Created by members and close collaborators of D-Bug, today marks the first release by Bello Games, entitled bexa64n!
To put it simply it's a game rendered inside a puny 64x64 window and plays not unlike a famous indie hexagonal game :). The reasons for this release are:
1. To give a teaser preview of a bigger release in the works called Bexagon
2. To give Atarians a new game they can play right now
3. To be the first game that has a dual release (Jaguar/Falcon030) using a single source base! The whole game was written in our very own dialect of Basic called Bello Basic which (with only a few exceptions) can generate the two very different binaries from the same source base which perform identical!
And that's pretty much it. Visit the above links, download and enjoy this first release. And stay tuned for more!
D-Bug was really active back then, releasing a lot of games for newer Ataris and adding hard disk loading capability. During that frenzy we decided we should put an end to our Compacted Disk series, releasing our last menu as a full CD-ROM which contained new stuff plus all the older menus and patches. (Shortly afterwards we would put most activities to the backburner and pursue other fun stuff to do). During the period we were gathering things to put in CD #200 we received an email out of the blue. It was from our friend n0kturnal and contained a Pasti image of a really rare game on the ST - Robbo! Reports say it's so rare that it only ever sold 80 copies in all! What a boon for us - we could include something really special!
I drew the short straw and got to work taking it apart and making it hard drive and Falcon friendly. Everything seemed fine, we tested a lot of levels and it all seemed fine. So it was greenlit and included into the final CD.
Fast forward to last Sunday when I got a friendly email from another pole, bartek030 informing me that my version of Robbo actually had a showstopping issue that would freeze the game past level 44 (if I remember correctly!). Oops! And not only that, but he also sent me a link to atarionline.pl where there is a page devoted to it, including an interview with the creators thanking the people who cracked it but a pity it wasn't working fully. Double oops!
So back into Robbo I went again, fixing all issues and exposing the in-game trainer so this time I can verify that the game goes all the way to the end sequence (which is very nice, you should check it out :)).
Enough talking, now grab the new updated version and have fun! And who knows, maybe in 10 years I might backport all the literally hundreds of Atari 800 version levels to this version! (if anyone wants to help, get in touch!)
Grazey brings you SNDH update 4.7! So go grab it and don't forget to leave a comment on the blog!
Look! Third post in one month - world record! Does this mean D-Bug is finally back in action? Who knows!
In the meantime GGN spent a couple of hours on new year's eve to make a pitifully small Falcon intro using a brand new TiNKer pic and an old tune by 505. It was planned to add snowflakes dancing but since it didn't snow in Greece he decided to go for realistic weather model instead ;) (that, or he ran out of time because he tried to do everything at the last minute). Get it here. In a bizarre twist of events an unknown person sent us a ST/STE version - grab it here. Here's also the Pouet link if you're so inclined to leave a comment!
So, news:
Showaddywaddy and GGN attended Outline again and it was a blast! Not many Atari people or Atari activity in there but those who were there made it worthwhile. And while we were there we thought "Why don't we win the Atari demo compo?" ;). And so we did: HipSid, Grazey's brainchild that combined Mad Max tunes with SID voices, ranked first in the compo! You can read a very brief note about it on the SNDH blog. With about 10 hours of non-stop music action it is well worth a download!
GGN also attended Sommarhack, but with less one month to prepare something for the compo more complex endeavours weren't feasible.
With about a week or two left for the party, GGN got a request from Lotek Style of tSCc. Specifically, an old music disk by EKO called Epidemic has never behaved properly - the intro would run but the music selector would crash violently. A quick fix was made for it, yet many issues still remain: there is a lot of screen tearing on the 3D objects in the background which (given the short time frame) weren't apparent to fix. Also a tune was missing, and that's because this music disk appears to be a port of a PC music disk of the same name - the tune in question is an 8 channel .mod file, something that the player was not capable of playing. Fortunately Lotek managed to source a 4 channel version so cheers to him and the person that did the conversion (details are a bit sketchy, either the tune was converted using a tool or was hand fixed).
So with the music disk in a state of "works, not that great but at least it gets the job done" it was time to let it out for the world to yawn at (sorry!). However, since Sommarhack was just around the corner it looked silly not to release it during the party. And a release there without an intro looked quite poor, so something had to be done :). The initial design was to use an old and unfinished intro (from 2004 no less!) and just use an old tune. So I set out to debug the code, convert some old logos to monochrome, use an unreleased tune from Dubmood and just be done with it. But then something unexpected happened: after describing my idea to people, they sending me assets! XiA sent a 3 minutes and 30 seconds tune, TiNKer drew some tiled backgrounds. Now I actually had to put some effort in it - oh noes!
The whole ordeal took about 3 days, and it was finished 2 days before the party. Nothing exciting to say about these 2 days apart from having to join everything into something that wouldn't make people fall asleep. Somehow I suspect it was not too successful at that ;). One thing worth mentioning is that it works on both RGB and VGA and maintains proper sync with the music - not that many Falcon productions do that :). In any case it ranked 4th at the compo, and you can download it here and check it out for yourselves, or watch it on YouTube.
In other news, GGN and DML of TPT teamed up to bring new versions of the gcc compiler to the ST! Each had their own reasons to do this which is another story, but you can read more about the work and getting the files from an experimental blog/soapbox/call-it-what-you-will, Beyond Brown where a few people just dump their thoughts and texts in no particular order or discipline.
The year is not over yet so there might be something from us still, so stay tuned!
As for CJ? Well, he's quite happy in Jaguar land. Head over to the Atari Age forums if you want to say "hi" to him!
Of course not!
Here's a small demo we made in cooperation with Excellence in art and the lovely Acca! To our knowledge this is the first intro that is distributed in source code format only. To run it, you must assemble it! Fear not though, because we have bundled the assembler that was used to develop the intro (rmac) as well as a script that can assemble it. Hopefully it won't be a huge bother for people :).
It is dedicated to a very special person, we hope that the person in question sees it and likes it!
And that's it, merry Christmas and a Happy new year!
Back in July GGN visited Sommarhack, and he had a jolly good time too! The usual place, nice people, laid back atmosphere, BBQ, conversations, jokes, plans - what more could one want from a party? Releases maybe? Yes there were releases!
...sadly one didn't work as expected :( - and it was a bummer because it looked really interesting. I know Evil/DHS did his best to make the demo work, for you see the demo is Rebirth by Cybernetics. Originally the demo wants 2 floppy drives which are a rarity on its own, but the real kicker was that the track loader is a bit too sensitive to timings (or the disks were faulty, I don't think we'll ever know). End result is that the demo looped around a specific part for 5-6 minutes - we thought that was the flow of the demo so we were bummed about it :(. Evil assured us that the demo actually goes on and has other parts. Sadly it ranked low on the results...
When I got back home I got myself a copy of the demo and went to work to make it run from hard drives. I even got in contact with Metal Ages (the coder of the demo) while trying to patch it (I tried to make it run as a stand alone .prg, but by the time Metal Ages replied I had already fixed it - sorry Jerome!). And I was getting ready to slap my usual loader and release it in the wild.
And then in a weird case of synchronicity, !Cube of Aggression messaged me, asking me if I had any releases because he wanted to code an intro for us! I happily accepted. And waited. And then waited some more for the logo. And then waited some more till he got back from vacations. And then I got the final version, added the intro to my stuff, did some last minute debugging, and here we are: Rebirth, single parted, hard drive installable! (it even fits on a 800k disk, yay!). 2 megs of ram needed sadly, but hey just upgrade your STE :D
Enjoy!
We've updated Trans D-Bug Express to version 1.03. Bug fixes and added features, the main being that you can change the retries during read using F2/F3, it is also possible to quit out of a read using F10. Oh and F1 now makes TDE write an MSA file even if the maximum number of retries have been used up. See the read me for more info.
And now that we have TDE, Shw has imaged some of his old dodgy disks which Fcopy and MSA couldn't image. Therefore the Dumping Ground is updated!
PHF/D-Bug/Kua/Live co-production!
We have lots of little internal utilities stashed on our hard-drives. One of which sees the light of day with a lick of paint and some added polish. Released at Outline 2015 but not making the compos as we didn't know which category to enter it in! TDE is a little MSA imager which has many advantages over existing programs including lush Ukko graphics and industrial Kraftwerk sonics by gwEm. See readme for full docs.
YouTube video here!Showaddywaddy has been busy as always on the SNDH archive, ripping tunes to the end of time. He also released an update to his SNDH editor, visit the link to grab it. He also has a blog that he updates... sometimes - lazy boy ;).
Cyrano Jones has been having most of the fun lately: he finally released his Jaguar graphics library called RAPTOR that makes coding on the machine much easier! Then he got bored waiting for good games to come to the Jaguar, so he started porting ST games to the machine, something that many people thought it was hard or impossible! Well, just for his own amusement here's Rick Dangerous, Gauntlet II, Mercenary, Buggy Boy, Bubble Bobble, Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh, Carrier Command, Super Sprint and Metro Cross! So now nobody has an excuse for not getting a Jaguar - ther are a handful of good games for it :). Also, here's a small writeup on the process of porting a game to the Jaguar.
Finally, GGN has been all over the place! First he provided patches to Jookie's terrific CosmosEx device, mainly the translated driver, so D-Bug games will load from network drive - yay! Also added the TT compatibility, and by the looks of it will beta test the next generation that will be Falcon compatible! Then, in December he ported 2 Basic dialects to the Jaguar that work with CJ'S RAPTOR library! AtariAge has a dedicated forum for RBASIC (ported by GGN and CJ) and RBASIC+ (ported mostly by GGN). A lengthy writeup on how this happened can be read here (Caution! Wall of Text in there :)). Last week he released a demo called Baby, instant soup doesn't really grab me for the Global Convention of Worldwide Demo Developers International, Inc. 2015 and came first! And today he took the time to check out a Falcon demo (sent to him by Lotek Style) by Hydroxid that refused to run. Not any more! Love vs Darkness by Hydroxid is here for your pleasure!
So that's it for now - see you in a few months when we can be arsed to post again!
Shw and GGN were present at Outline (as usual) and they even brought gifts! A very special gift too as this release was hiding in the dark for more than 20 years! And by no other than TLB - not every day you expect to see a new release by them, right? :)
Killing Spree was sent to us by Lowlife/Hotline and we thought it'd be a good idea to release it at the party. So we worked on the sources a bit, chained them, added a small intro just enough to play Spaz's quartet tune (I suppose people know which intro this is when they look at it!) and added an unreleased Scavenger tune so the main game won't be silent! It ranked 2nd on the competition, but who cares, it's TLB stuff, enjoy! Mega thanks to Lowlife for the sources and TLB for allowing us to release it!
In other news, our friend KrazyK has been busy converting Automation and D-Bug menus to Windows platform, and just today we received a new batch of remade intros from him. Download and enjoy!
Automation 151
Automation 388A
Automation 406
Automation 445
D-Bug 137
D-Bug 188v2
So, to business! Seems like Futur Minds have made a small boo-boo in their Snork megademo, which in essence crashed the machine before running the ULM screen. Well, after some digging I managed to extract the file from the disk and run it.And was a bit surprised at what I saw... Download it for yourself and I'm sure you'll be too!
Just a quick fix for you this time, Evolution by Exa, that fabled Falcon demo that few people can manage to get running on their Falcons has been fixed! (it ran flawlessly on my machine at least :)). Download and enjoy - remember, RGB only!
Automation 245
Automation 274
Automation 384
Automation 430
D-Bug 88
D-Bug 136A
D-Bug 178
D-Bug 185
D-Bug 191
Again, thanks to CrazyK for his efforts!
Update!
Automation 225
Automation 240
D-Bug 49A
D-Bug 153A
Arkanoid 2
The Bard's Tale
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Bubble Ghost
Lemmings
Great stuff Klaz...
We're going to release each menu in sequential format, starting from 0 and going all the way to 512. However, the condition to release a menu will be that at least one of the games in that menu gets reviewed. We'll try to do as many as we can, but if you think you can help, feel free to join in!
Check our dedicated sub-forum here and have fun!
Dugger
Fire and Ice
Good work with Braybrooks nasty O.S. Klaz ;)
We have moved servers yet again! So what does it mean to you?
- Better speeds!
- The base URL has changed slightly: It's now instead of dbug/
- The RSS feed link has changed to rss.php (only Chrome still seems not to like it but since W3C's feed validator says it's ok, Chrome can go **** off :))
- The forum URL remains the same.
- http://dbug.atari.org redirector has also been fixed.
We're still fixing up dead links from the site, but they're so many of them we might miss a few! Contact us if you want something that points to a bad link!
Many thanks to Linkvitch of U-235 for the gracious providing of web space and stuff :)
Oh, and as a gift to all you that bore with us, here's Roller Coaster Rumbler all fixed up and ready to run from your machines' hard drives :).
Note: The built in save games now use ULS. F10 quits to desktop.
Now, tune in tomorrow for the dramatic conclusion to our Xmas trip...
Well, then. It's-a-mee! Staaaaarioooo! And I have my own Christmas special called Stario's Christmas! Geddit while it's-a hot-a!
Actually here's a seasonal game :-
Winter Super Sports 92
Bit of a cheek for Flair to pack the game with Pack-Ice and change the header to TSM! Very naughty.
While you ponder that, download and play Gem'X, a title we haven't released in the past. So now your collection is more complete. Rejoice!
Your wait is over!
This is it!
The real fun starts here!
We have for you....
Impact? WTF's that????
Well, it's a cool Arkanoid clone and it plays great! Don't give too much notice to the graphics, it plays very good! But don't take our word for it, try it out yourself!
Now, go get Warped already!
Hell if we know, but at least you can now command her in an effort for her to infiltrate a castle and do the nasty with a guy that's tied up. You filthy perv.
WE LOVE IT ANYWAY :).
But we really can't control ourselves. Sorry.
RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN! GOOO! GET TO DA CHOPPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
Seymour Goes to Hollywood was supposed to be a game in the Dizzy series, but in the end it was decided to give the game a different character because the Oliver Twins decided that they didn't like real-world direction the game had taken.
We seriously hope that there's no trace of what they were smoking back then.
No?
Well, we don't care, you're getting Sargon III anyway. So there.
No matter, we have something for you. Geoff Crammond's forgotten masterpiece, The Sentinel, has its day today. Read the manual, learn to play, enjoy!
...Well, we're not :P, so here's a so-so PD game to get the month started. Not even the guy who requested wanted it in the end, but that's not an excuse not to release it! Give it up for... The Hoog! The Hoog, ladies and gentlemen! The Hoog, give it up!
Now that we brightened up the place a bit, we thought we'd let you know that we've been sneakily slaving away for brand new patches, and starting tomorrow we're releasing them, one per day 'til Christmas (and who knows, maybe beyond that)!
So, make yourselves comfortable, get a cup of your favorite hot beverage and let us be your Atari's host for this month :)
Go get it!
And he (Klaz) gives you.... Gauntlet!
Tonic Tile
Bombuzal
Airball
Chase HQ
Erik
The object of Downfall is to guide your character through a never-ending chasm on a series of platforms, carefully avoiding rising above or dropping below the viewable area of the screen. Reboot have released the game free for download in ROM, BJL, and CDI format. The source code to the game is also freely available to download from the Downfall website.
All fixed now tho!
Ah! There you are!
See? We released something today! It's a Falcon game! And it's not very good! But we did it without watching first! So it'd be a shame to delete it! Oh by the way, the game is Zodiax and here's the sound update for it. Try to enjoy it. We didn't.
Oh, and happy new year 2011!
Enjoy, and back to hibernation!
Anyway, release #6 is here: The Lost World. Released for free by its author last month or so.
The reason for this release is very simple: the game runs perfectly fine on all plain 1mb ST/E machines, it will fail on anything else (i.e. if you load a lot of accessories or auto folder programs, or use a large hard disk cache). This version was tested on all Atari machines we could get hold of without any hiccups.
The second reason was to add some music to it. By sheer coincidence, Grazey of the PHF opened his drawer and found some unreleased Mad Max tunes and lent us one :). The archive has two versions of the game, one with music and one without (for the purists among you).
Anyway, that's quite enough for now. We'l be going back to sleep now...
You can re-download the game from yesterday's link, it is updated!
I guess Prince of Persia will bring back fond memories to most people. It did bring lots to me! Run, jump, slash, drink potions, timed switches, fun times!
Patching it for, well, anything that has TOS 2.06 or above was a complete hassle. Never mind the sample players being totally weird to begin with, the game would crash long before that. After a bit of thinking, that was fixed and so were the sample players (sort of). Then the joystick wouldn't respond! Then the fixed sample player would crash due to some bizarre code! Finally there was the hurdle of finding a copy of the game with the correct files (this proved to be a nightmare, as even Pasti versions have corrupt files).
In the end I had to mix and match files from various versions. Which led me to include both the English and French texts of the game. In the folder "Images", there are 2 folders called "English" and "French". You can copy/overwrite the files to "Images" and magically you''ll have translated the game! (If anyone has more languages, send some disk images!)
Anyway, that's quite enough. I did my best with it, hope it works on all machines and that you enjoy it. Oh, and as a bonus for you peeps with older machines, you get a brand new intro from !Cube/Aggression :)
P.S. If you haven't already, check out Jordan Mechner's old journals archive where he describes, with lots of details, the creation of the game :)
P.S. 2: If you''re whining about Cube's intro working on old machines only, it's because it needs an ST/E to function properly. MSTE owners can watch the intro by holding ALT while loading prince.prg (make sure you switch to 8mhz first!)
Anyway, Evil/DHS asked me to remove the registration details from a registered version, so I thought ""oh whattahell"", and I spent 3 hours and did it!
So, head over to DHS, grab the archive, read the README and have fun with it!
Head over to their website for further information.
Jaguar ULS:
A quick and easy method to create encrypted, bootable Jaguar CDs from your homebrew binaries.
CD Encryptor for Skunkboard:
A patched version of the BJL encryptor to work from skunkboards!
Beebris Tribute:
A kick-ass conversion of Beebris (available for the ST on our extras page, and HD fixed on Patches) for the Jaguar platform, with a premium version (Beebris SE) available to purchase!.
Head over to their recently refurbished main site here!
You might have noticed that the last couple of days the forum has been in maintenance mode and that it redirected to a URL that didn't work. Well, this is mostly because once again our generous hosts (www.streamline.net) have misinformed us and we went into panic mode trying to get everything up and running within a few hours.
Anyway, we managed to sort out our new home. The forum is already online and waiting for you here, while the main site is mostly up and running, but with a few quirks still need to be sorted out here.
We're really sorry about the downtime, so we decided to give our gracious hosts the Christmas gift of bandwidth consumption early. This means we re-uploaded all the CD parts up till #2, so you're free to go berserk on them! Merry Christmas Streamline!
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Here's a version of IK+ "that doesn't spaz out on an STE" - I thought uploading it today "would be nice."
(PS. Doesn't work on Falcon or TT)
I said, "Next," goddamn it! This is not the DMV!
Oh, and D-Bug CD200 (Part 4/18) can be found here.
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for
that week ;-)
(BTW, part06.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
D-Bug CD200 (Part 6/18) can be found here.
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part07.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
(P.S. link fixed)
D-Bug CD200 (Part 7/18) can be found here.
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part08.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
D-Bug CD200 (Part 8/18) can be found here.
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part09.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
Featuring:
Not unworking load/save (unlike some other version)
Not quitting after 2 minutes gameplay (unlike some other version)
Not missing the 4 missions on the data disk (unlike some other version)
Not requiring 4mb, just 2mb (unlike some other version)
Only one loader (unlike some other version with 3, 2 of which bomb)
The complete picture from the box-art (unlike some other flickery version)
Non-hilarious bodged up crack/patch (unlike some other version)
Also, the ULS code was not developed just days after the public release of the GAMEX source code. We are still waiting for the release of GAC (which was supposed to be a complete revolution for HD patching) so we can throw this ULS crap away.
Many thanks to Remo Williams for the manual, psygnosis.org for the box art, and sewer software for the keyguide. Not forgetting RobC for the source crack.
Enjoy folks!
D-Bug CD200 (Part 9/18) can be found here.
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part10.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
D-Bug CD200 (Part 10/18) can be found here.
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part11.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part12.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part13.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part14.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part15.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
I forgot to swap the files over and give you the next rar on Sunday. I'll do it when I get home from work tonight :-) (Promise!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part17.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(BTW, part18.rar is gone now - hope you snagged it!)
One file a week, until Christmas. Please don't try to guess the filenames for the other parts, they won't be uploaded until the news goes live for that week ;-)
(a) Do not upload the contents of the CD online. We will be hosting the CD online ourselves sometime, but it is our wishes that noone else would do that before us.
(b) Do not include any of the contents of the CD to any compilation that's meant for profit.
(c) Do not sell the CD. Charging for the postage is, as always, acceptable, but personal profit is out of the question.
It took us years to compile all this data into the CD and we didn't ask money out of anyone. We released the CD free of charge so that all people will enjoy its contents. This doesn't mean that we want people to profit from it.
If you notice any acts that violate what has been written above, please notify us by email or on the forum.
Enjoy!
Pirates! was an easy one to do, but a damn good game all the same! The archive contains full docs and is set up to work on all machines. However, if you play it on anything other than a Falcon then copy the file from the ST folder to the game folder for that extra little bit of performance boost :)
Civilization seemed much easier on surface, but it took an unexpected long time to get going right. SSR from Automation has patched some Falcon problems a long time ago, and we would have been content to release that as-is, but it had problems on machines with more than 4 megs of RAM (even Steem in fact!). After fiddling out with it, the bug was found and killed (read more about it on the intro text!). While we were looking at the code, we also found a huge WTF regarding the game palette: it was actually stored in 12-bit (i.e. STE) but it was chopped down to 9-bit (STFM). So the offending code was taken out and now it looks better! Finally, full docs have been included (both in scanned format and text).
Many thanks must go to Remo Williams for extensive testing and providing with the manuals.
Right then, back to sleep!
So, I'll say it here in simple, easy to understand words for them.
D-BUG / AUTOMATION are ***NOT*** Reboot. We're just hosting them.
Clear? Good. Now STFU about Jaguars. We're all ST/Falcon here. Jesus, if I'd known what a complete farce the Jaguar people were like I would never have released Jetpac.
Anyway, get the fixed version here, and we'll be off to sleep again.
Have fun!
We have donated them a chunk of real estate on the internet at our domain hosting, and you can find them here.
Good luck folks!
Jetpac is available for download here, at the link below, where it says CJ's Jetpac port for the Jaguar (yay!). I think we made that clear enough. It's been a perfectly good enough link method to use for hundreds of Atari ST/Falcon owners for years, but apparently people with Ataris without keyboards need additional help. (Not including Lynx/26xx/56xx/72xx owners who are, frankly, above all this nonsense)
So..... Jetpac is not on CD-200 and is freely available for download from us. Please do not host it elsewhere, but feel free to link to it.
K?
Our bootsector
CJ's Jetpac port for the Jaguar (yay!). We strongly suggest to buy, borrow or steal a Skunkboard for your viewing pleasure. BJL or similar solutions should work too.
But! Being the sneaky D-Buggers we always were, things are going to be different for this, our final voyage into menu land.
Less than 30 disks have been produced, and they have been issued to a few select people via mail and Outline. The image for CD200 will not be hosted online by us for quite a while (if ever). Yes thats right, if you want it you will have to get it the old fashioned way - via the postal service! So eagerly await that jiffy bag hitting the doormat one morning in the future!
We ask that if you do receive one you do not make it available for download anywhere, but that you pass it along to someone via mail.
We will be opening a thread on our forum for you to post images of the parcels you receive (please photoshop your address out!) - on request we can even tell you which of the master copies your copy was reprouced from.
So, what is on CD200 I hear you ask? Well, for starters its a tad larger than our normal 820k disks.... as it is a CD-ROM containing
* CD200 Ninja Remix (F30 Amiga TFMX), Jim Power, Robbo, LethalXS Beta, Substation - All HD installable and F30 fixed (Except LXSBeta!)
* All D-Bug menus released to date.
* All patches released by us over the last few years, and several new ones that we have not put online.
* The latest build of ULS3 along with supporting documentation and example files.
* Content from our website.
To everyone active in the Atari scene - we salute you!
Cyrano Jones / Showaddywaddy / GGN / Melcus / Dubmood
Rolling Thunder.
He lied.
For more information about this great prototype please visit http://www.jamiewoodhouse.co.uk.
Here's Sideways! [ZIP] / [MSA
The only way to describe E-Swat is with utter amazement! Quality control isn't what it used to be!
From the most wretched hive of scum and villiany (D-Bug Central) we bring you The Empire Strikes Back.
You can always count upon,
Come and find the one they call...
DUCKULA!
Grab Death Strike and be amazed by the graphics and sound.
The only thing it could possibly be is Motorhead
Grab Action Fighter!
Which has absolutely nothing to do with Battlehawks 1942.
If you need any further information, or think something is incorrect in the documentation (or ULS code) then please feel free to participate in open discussions on our forum.
This build contains many bugfixes over the last version I made available for the public and I strongly recommend anyone who was working with the code to upgrade immediatly.
Happy patching!
XJ220 ULS HD Installable - So just like nearly all the other entries in their database, the HD installable field is wrong for this one too.
Note: Not fixed for Falcon/TT (And not likely to be either) - Needs lots of RAM (The 'original' did as well)
Whoops! Seems like I missed out a few files - Ah well, I did say it had been years since I did one! I've updated the zipfile link above so please grab it again and sorry for the inconvenience.
Face Off.
Bet you never thought you would wish the first sentence would be true?
Another gem from Zeppelin. Grab International Truck Racing.
We thought we'd give it an extra mention here because James is actually a member of our testing team. Oh, and he dared to interview us and actually publish the interview. So, download the mag and enjoy!
We want you to find the game in this and post where you found it to the forums!
Here's Nightreed the Non Interactive Movie.
Grab and flush Round The Bend.
Time to play with your balls in Star Trash!
Welcome to Stun Runner!
An old proverb goes like this: ""If you can't say a good word about something, then don't say anything"". So we choose not to say anything about Global commander (aka Armageddon man)
Today we have Their Finest Hour - The Battle For Britain.
Why? Well, we feel it's nice to have a manual and a keyguide for a flight sim (Thanks to RemoW and Heavy Stylus for these
It's also nice if a HD installed version actually works and saves to HD. Unlike some other recently released version.
Here we have Violator. A nice scrolly shooter to start March off with.
Anyway, today's release is Shadow Dancer. As one of our playtesters commented....
"16Mhz speed significantly faster. As easily measured and verified in NDTWPS (Ninja Dog Tail Wags Per Second)."
Till next time!
- Kelly Bundy
To quote from his site:
"A phrase I encountered on the Lemon Amiga site sums up this game quite nicely: Asteroids on steroids! Prepare for a sore thumb if you intend to play this game for more than just a few minutes. Not much more to be said ... it runs a bit faster on 16MHz machines, but still plays very well at that speed."
Grab it Here!
P.S. For those of you that use the RSS feed, please note that we have changed the link in order to provide us more flexibility, so please update that on your RSS reader!
Mega-Lo-Mania.
D-Bug give you James Pond (Underwater Agent)
Nothing more to be said as I
Anyhow, let's fix this: For yesterday we got Sonic boom. The extra speed from faster machines is definitely an improvement on this.
And for today, we could just mention the brilliant service DHS opened 2 days back called VideoDB (which you should check out, since it's excellent!). Browsing through the lists of captured demos, we came across Kruz'z Beyond demo, which is an excellent (but not well known) demo, which doesn't run in STEem due to emulation inaccuracies during the protection bit (which is conviniently stored on the bootsector). So we thought we'd fix this, and we did!
Phew! That's enough for today. See you (hopefully) tomorrow.
If anyone can work out how to play this please let us know! Anyway, click here for Flip-it and Magnose!
Meep! Meep! Road Runner
Here's Torvak The Warrior
Maybe tomorrow... "I'm covered in bees!!!!"
This time he's done one of our all-time favourite games, Flying Shark
Head over to his website and grab a copy now!
That machine still does not exist, but this version brings it a little closer to playable.
Here's Pitfighter!
Did we mention it was Cracked and Filed by Iceman? Because it's rude to take credit for someone else's work.
Oh, almost forgot. Here's the link.
Again, we link directly to his download page. Enjoy!
I feel a scroller-esque text message coming on. Appearing soon on a website near you (All done, and in testing! At least we don't have to squeeze them together into 800k chunks!)
Kid Gloves II, Flip It and Magnose, Sonic Boom, Predator II, Judge Dredd, Pro Boxing Simulator, Defenders of the Earth, Alien Storm, Star Trash, Pitfighter, Battlehawks 1942, Shadow Dancer, Double Dragon II, Violator, Bad Company, Stun Runner, Motorhead, Their Finest Hour The Battle for Britain, Astro Marine Corps, Mega-Lo-Mania and Robozone.
All 1mb (min) memory / F30 / non-wanky-easy-clicko versions with HD load/saves! So that's what is in store for February. See you in 24 hours ;-)
More tomorrow!
Only took him 19 years! Today we give you all Total Recall.
"If I am not me, den who da hell am I? Now, dis is da plan. Get your ass to Mars."
Don't forget where you got it from and come back tomorrow.
This time it's Steigar, which was requested by a few people (Apparently some people have a STOS fetish? No, I know it's not STOS but it could have been!)
Anyway, more sterling work from him. We've linked to his site as usual.
In the words of "The Littlest Hobo" ...... "Until tomorrow I'll just keep moving on."
(And now hopefully you will have that annoying tune stuck in your head all day... my work here is complete!)
We were asked to fix this a while back by one of our testing team and it has been in the test queue for a few weeks now so it's time to let it fly.
Enjoy Captain Fizz!
The cache option has been left selectable so you can see how insane things are - so please don't report any bugs when using cache.
See you in February!
So if you wish to engage in your masochistic tendancies, have a floppy disk ready because here is Codemasters' Advanced Rugby Simulator.
We'll have something better for you tomorrow. Promise. Maybe. Just have to wait, won't you? Yes.
Well it will be with this one... here's Terminator II - the first title to make it out of the door using ULS 3.12. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with it.
So.. 29 days.. 29 releases... not to mention the 50 for December. That's a lot of time invested by us and our testing team, and I doubt we can maintain the release rate for much longer while preserving our quality control. So, if you want to continue to leech away at not only our files but also our enthusiasm, why not just start this download going and walk away without offering to help. After all, the ST scene is huge, right? Someone else will do it. Alternativly, click here and become part of it all.
D-Bug - Quality and Quantity. But not if we're taken for granted. The quality will never slip, but without more testers you can bet the quantity will.
Go and visit his website and check it out - you won't be dissapointed.
However, through Rebellion all you are likely to get is a feeling that the screen should somehow be scrolling. Still, its a fun little game.
Enjoy!
So, waste some HD space and install and forget it. That's what we've done.
So here's Blinky's Scary School
So... no comments about the latest releases on the forum? If nobody is going to play them maybe we can let our testing standards slip?
What do you mean you don't live in the Southern Hemisphere?
Here's Advanced Ski Simulator. I'm not sure about what is so "advanced" about it as it's just left, right, and mash fire to move forwards until you crash painfully into the first tree.
Maybe F10 is the Advanced part?
Runs on ST/F30/TT - 1mb.
Here's Spikey In Transylvania for you all to enjoy. Or un-enjoy. Or whatever :)
Until tomorrow.....
With no write up and no guarantee of it working fully, here's WWF European Rampage
Legends of Valour! - a large, sprawling RPG featuring some very nice 3D texture mapping, which is vastly improved on the Falcon.
Please read the scroller on the intro for some specific instructions and remember that you MUST run it from ST-Low Resolution.
Probably not the best game in the world, but definatly not the worst, and suprisingly good fun for such a simple game idea.
ALSO:
I've re-uploaded Video Kid as yesterday's release contained the wrong .TOS file and will crash - Sorry about this, the game gave us a lot of problems during patching (several test versions) and I must have grabbed the wrong one to upload for you.
Enjoy all 18 levels, or give it a miss and catch the re-runs.
Thunderblade requires 2mb.
Would you like to join the D-Bug testing team? Apply here if you think you have what it takes!
Here's Warzone.
Quite a nice Commando / Ikari Warriors rip-off - Looks like it might be using the 'Frenetic' game engine, only this time they put a game in there with it :)
1mb, etc ;-)
"I never thought it was humanly possible, but this both sucks and blows"
Here's The Simpsons - Bart vs The Space Mutants
1mb, all systems (including the TT!)
Grab it here!
Here is Psygnosis' Shadow of the Beast II which really would have been better off left on the Amiga :)
I'd say 'enjoy' - but I think 'endure' is more accurate.
Req: 1mb, runs everywhere except TT.
Enjoy Ork!
As you all know, a complete working collection of all the major menu crews cannot be found anywhere online in one place. We hope to rectify this with this section.
The contents are being uploaded as this news item is being written, so please give us a few days to get it all online.
Automation and Bad Brew Crew menus will be made available after we have released our DVD with them on.
Comments about this post can be made on our forum. Please let us know if you find any of the missing disks, or notice any of our images are corrupted.
Righto now it's the 2nd in server-land (corr, wasn't she the baddie in Blake's 7?) let's let another one escape into the wild.....
Double Dragon III - The Rosetta Stone is quite a nice game, and now you can install it to your hard drives.
Treasure Island Dizzy
Fantasy World Dizzy
Magic Land Dizzy
Spellbound Dizzy
Prince of the Yolkfolk
Crystal Kingdom Dizzy
Fast Food
Kwik Snax
Bubble Dizzy
Panic Dizzy
Enjoy!
(And a happy new year from all at D-Bug)
Jupiter's Masterdrive is the lucky winner!
So that's another year done. We certainly had lots of fun once again, we hope you did too. We already have stuff ready in the pipeline which are ready to be released, just have to pass through quality control.
Hope you're all getting drunk instead of reading this, and have a nice year!
From Shw we have the ultimate 'spit the dummy' game - Brat!
No temper tantrums now!
Shw of D-Bug gives you Wizkid
As usual it's HD installable and works on all flavours of Atari's. Hi-Scores are also saved to HD.I still prefer the original Wizball on the C64, but at least it makes up for the monstrous ST Wizball.
Here we have Darkman
Runs with 1mb, F30, MSTE.. ad nausuim
(Again I forgot to post it, Dalek Attack is 1mb as well)
Based on that classic episode that we all remember so well, where the good Doctor climbs onto a flying zimmerframe and enters the London sewers shooting Daleks with a torch. Ah... the memories.
Here's Dr Who - Dalek Attack
All together now.... Allons-y!
Here's Hook! - Fully HD with Load/Save, Falcon Fixed, etc, etc (Requires 2mb)
Enjoy!
Requested by a forum member (*waves* to Heavy Stylus!) we have here quite a neat game - Bonanza Bros
If you have a PeST connected (and it hasn't been updated by Techie Ali) then the game will lock on the player select screen. Please, no bug reports about this one!
1mb/HD/ULSv3/NoBrain la-de-dah.
Next up is Gremlins 2: The New Batch, requires 2mb, HD, no HOLE, and you don't have to GAC up anything to play it.
(Release 42 for December I do believe?)
Next up, a cute platform game called "Viking Child"
Enjoy.
Another request... another quick fix! And this time, it's a really good game!
So, without wasting my time writing this dribble, click here and download Rubicon!
Requires 1mb, runs from HD/F30/Blah blah blah blah.
Anyway, this time, hopefully for the final time anyone sees this title, it's Final Fight
Run's in 1mb, HD, yadda yadda yadda you know the drill.
PS. Extase is 1mb... just thought I'd add that as once again I forgot to mention it in the news.
Here's our (new) version of No Second Prize
This one is happy in 1mb (So much for ULS requiring more RAM!) and has working HD compatible load/save.
Here's Extase
Something a even more different than something completely different!
Monty Python's Flying Circus
2mb.. Fully HD.. Done in 8 minutes (With witnesses timing) Oh how my ULS hurts, maybe I should have used my brain instead?
Here's Elite
This one runs in 1mb, all TOS (Of course, also Falcon), and obviously has full load/save support from the in game screen - Plus you don't need any poncy twaddle in your AUTO folder ;-)
This one obviously lets you load and save your progress, as we doubt very much you'd complete it in one sitting..... Of course, it also works on the Falcon (Dodgy shadow register YM writes removed)
(Requires 2mb)
BTW. F19 will work with 1mb of ram. I forgot to add that last night :)
This version will save the roster to the HD, so no annoying floppy required (Hurah for ULS!) - Also included is a quick key guide and a rather hefty combat manual (Thanks HS!)
Enjoy!
and 
Here's Plutos!
Here it is, the game Defender wished it was: Socks from your Gran for Christmas!
What else is there to say? Patching and testing this game gave all of us the shivers, we are all so proud we could present you such quality... Really... Stop reading and go play this....
Yes! It is! Here by popular demand, is the patched version of the megamighty Edd The Duck!
Quote from the game: "This Checkers program is the outcome of work by 3 independant authors". We think that this sums the game's quality up neatly. Enjoy!
Well, in between all of those he wrote this little gem of a game, called Monkey Business!
How High Can You Try?
This one only took us an ice-age to fix. Almost 99% of the code was incompatible with the Falcon. In fact, we re-wrote it completely in STOS.
An awesome little game that took us several days to fix for the Falcon.
I think you'll agree, it's better than Wings of Death.
None of us are having much fun doing this again this year. Maybe it's a sign of the times, with the Atari scene decaying away. Anyway, before we lose all interest completely here's all we had ready.
Dragonbreed
Switchblade II
Pro powerboat simulator
Helter Skelter 90
Dogs of War
Batman
Cloud Kingdoms
Crackdown
Lure of the temptress
Robocop III (HD only - NOT F30)
P-47
California Games
Mean Machine
Space Gun
Wings of Death (Falcon enhanced - uses the Amiga 7-channel tracks - thanks to Cream for the replay code!)
Out-take: Moonshine racers
See you again next year.
Best wishes, D-Bug!
Eldritch the cat sure made some crap conversions on the ST, but when they sat down and did a game on their own, the results were amazing. So, whey didn't they do that in the first place?
Anyway, Falcon and TT (well, MegaSTE too) owners are especially in for a real treat when they witness the increased frame rate their machines offer. So grab 2 friends/enemies/etc and get playing Projectyle!
Anyway, this is a criminally underrated game (in top 100 lists etc), so we figure we might do it some justice and bring it up to speed with newer hardware than the humble ST.
Here's Harlequin
What? More platformers? Well, why not? Fiendlishly difficult but hugely addictive. Run and hack your way to victory this time! (See, it's NOT the same as Turrican)
What better way to start up the festive season than a good platformer? Lots? Well we guess you'll have to make do with Turrican here. There were around 14 patches to the code needed to make this run on the F30, but here it is in all it's glory (overscan included). Run and Gun your way to victory... we're sure its the ANTIDOTE for december blues.
Also, STOT participants, start your engines! This month you're in for a hell of a ride!
It would be curious to see how many people actually bothered to read this far instead of downloading the game and having fun! Probably very few ;)
I playtested this all the way through on the Falcon. I can honestly say... I hope I never have to see this again. Oh, and 'M' is your in game friend, I wish I'd found it sooner!
Don't worry, the good stuff starts tomorrow! (Promise!)
This time it's The Untouchables.
With no fanfare, here is Chips Challenge
shooter "Goldrunner" - while here, on our site we present a title that really deserved having all the stops pulled out
for it.
D-Bug of the ULS Consortium present to you "Geoff Crammond's F1-GP?"
Passwords: English: cars French: il German: auf
Of course, it wouldn't be D-Bug without a sparkly intro from GGN and some rocking music from Dubmood!
But that's not all!! Check the top bar of our site here and you will find a new link! ULSv3 - Yes, this new loading technology is now open source for anyone and everyone to use (With one exception, hehe).
Let the ST HD-Revolution begin!
It really seemed easy to fix: Just fix the sample player and away we go! But then it started crashing around at random. In the end I noticed that it worked on RAM configs up to 2MB and not more (can't verify the original does this, as I used Vapour's version, but I suspect it does). So there began a pretty weird debugging session, with the certain Evolution member playtesting each version I pumped out (thanks :)). In the end I fixed that, the sample player, made it init and exit properly (resolutions setup), fixed it for TT and even tested it on my CT63, where it worked flawlessly! Lastly, as the playtester whined for a trained version, I took a shot at that (and believe me, I really regret it ;)). It loads and saves properly, so you can take a saved game, load it on your favorite hex browser and change values around offset $5114, which is where the stats are stored!
Well, that's it for this time. Download it and shout "Boobies!"
The Chaos Engine! The thinking man's shoot em up, just had to have a good treatment!
This took me a lot of time to do: The HD compatibility part was relatively straightforward, but then the gfx came garbled on Falcon and TT, which baffled me for quite some time! After that was fixed, the module player was botched to work on Falcons. Then I thought "oh, let's add a trainer!", which itself became a nightmare due to the game's code! I only managed to find infinite money before giving up. Lastly, due to a bug in the game (I presume) the game would lock up on the TT, and then it wouldn't work in STE mode, so I had to force plain ST mode (sorry!). Finally the cache was introducing problems on the MSTE, so it had to be disabled by default.
Enough blabbing, go play it :)
We will update the patch page with his work shortly.
Anyway, the horror stories for this game's code will go on and on and on till the end of time. Here's my experience: Firstly, the game wouldn't work on a 030 machine at all (yay for crappy programming!). Then, after I got it to work, it somehow corrupted the display on the Falcon only (setting resolution in the rasters code, how clever, NOT!). You can still see these glitches on the loaders, but they don't affect the game too much, so I thought I'd leave those (too bored to patch those ;)). I think I might start a thread on the forum just for this. Anyway, download and have a laugh!
1. Eldritch certainly lost one of its nine lives for the scrolling in this one, it was bad at 8mhz, now its fast and bad at 16mhz. Here's Flimbo's Quest from System 3.
2. Ok, it's not as good as Gauntlet II but it is way better than Gauntlet - Here's Warlock: The Avenger
P.S. GGN says: "my god it's a boring game"
Also, Chuck rock is re-released, as 16MHz wasn't working on Falcons. Grab it from the link in the news item below this.
If you have troubles transferring the files across to your Ataris, then read this, I hope it'll help you!
P.S. If you get a disk request just press space!
P.P.S. Who said that only CJ is allowed to make mistakes? I accidentally uploaded a version in which the reset demo didn't work, if it doesn't work for you simply re-download the archive :).
I.E. We thought this week we'd release stuff forgotten on our hard drives not released for one reason or another... Not anything terribly new or groundbreaking, but what the hell, we took some time to do them.
Today's treat for you is Llamazap, a fun shooter by the long haired weirdo, Yak! One of his last games for Atari, definitely worth checking it out. Oh, if you don't know, you need a jagpad to play it. Cheerio!
The game is called El dia mas largo and it's unfortunately in Spanish. The source code is included though, so anyone want to do a translation is welcome to!
A lot of fiddling around was required with it, but now it works on your Falcon 100% too! The music driver for each screen had to be patched, the 3-D screen didn't work at all and the floppy kept whirring when Crapman loaded. Well, you can consider all these nuiances a thing of the past now.
Of course the demo will crash If you select ChipMon II, but as that was meant to be run from the desktop, we included it in the same archive for you. Now, click and enjoy!
P.S. After 2 years of meddling and over 15mb of data in the Epic folder, seems I uploaded the wrong version of the loader. Here's the correct one, sorry - CJ
Dubmood featured on French TV channel M6. Not that very creative since the idea of the reportage was that all of the audience of M6 should understand what its about. And then cut down to 1minute. But hey it's the mainstream media! (that explains the super mario tune they forced me to put there). Still fun! "avec ton propre sound tu est unique!" hell yeah! I bet gwEm is glad maxymizer passed on TV too. Primetime and all that. hop hop! click click
January / February 2008, a quiet month for D-Bug, release wise that is. We say release wise as we've been beavering away in the background giving the web-site a much needed overhaul. To be honest the site has not changed much since conception in April 1999. The site is now totally database driven, this allows easy updating of D-Bug / Automation news, dynamic web pages and a much needed search feature. This is only the start, expect more new features over the coming months. Automation anyone?
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 / TT by GGN
Well, we said it was going to be big, didn't we? How's about 5 disks big? Join our main character in this epic adventure and crack the case, while gazing at the gorgeous graphics and animation and immerse yourself at the beautiful atmosphere, dialogues and puzzles (and plugging your ears at the crap sound :P). Of COURSE we didn't forget the Falcon, since this is probably the only version that runs on it!
We hope you enjoyed these past 25 days as much as we did, and you filled up your hard drives with quality games (and tossed your old floppies away ;)) It's been a fun ride through 2007 for us all as a group, and we wish all who read this, along with their nearest and dearest, a very Merry Christmas and a fantastical New Year.
D-Bug will be back in 2008 to finish the CD era (Finally! Yeah! Only one more menu to go! Whoohooo!) and be active on Atari! Remember folks, we're in this bacause a) We love Atari, b) We like what we're doing, c) We like to hear you enjoying it!
A few very special greetings from D-Bug go to: ChrisTOS and Kradd for STOT and the Falcon League, Klaz, Elite and all the demo groups out there still showing the world that Atari isn't dead!
Sincerely, Cyrano Jones, Dubmood, East Cracking Group, GGN and last but not least Showaddywaddy
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 / TT- 2mb Hard Drive by SHW
It's Black Lamp with Mark Coleman graphics! Well slightly improved gameplay just gave me
enough motivation to give it the D-Bug treatment. OK, so Download it. That's an order.
Check back tomorrow for the grand finale of this calendar! We guarantee it's going to be BIG!
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 / TT - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
When asked for a blurb, the D-Bug people gave the following 3:
- "You can't be arsed to write a comment on the boards. We cant be arsed to write a comment here. Leech away"
- "Game. Works. 030 machines. hard drives. Play it."
- "3 days to Xmas and Santa Claus is checking his list. Now be good children leech this game and stay in spirit, don't be devious"
Choose your favorite one and be happy!
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 - 1mb Hard Drive by Cyrano Jones
From the Dawn of the ST comes 'The Black Lamp' - This was originally a classic Atari 8-Bit game but was updated for the Atari ST range of machines. Again, another much under rated title that deserves to be played because while frustratingly difficult, it is also immense fun to play (Especially now with SHW's trainer!)
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 / TT - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
In the future, the key word is "control". All will be controlled, your habits, your personal life, your brain, your bodily functions, your opinions. People will be flung into an arena and battle against fierce monsters. Sounds like Atari Forum then, right?
Anyway, this one's by Eugene Jarvis. Eu-ge-ne Jar-vis. Name not familiar? Bad boy!
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
Who needs source code to fix games? Not us! Enjoy possibly the only good Ocean game to come from France! Yes, its Toki... Please don't expect the fullscreen at the end to run on your 030/16mhz based machines! Quite a lot of patching was required to get this to work on the Falcon, but the end result was well worth it.
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 - 4mb Hard Drive by GGN
Not much of a game in there, but that's Reflections for you! Worth alone for the Space Harrier sequence, so get it and start shooting things on your 16/32s!
ST / STe / mSTe / Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
We're almost done here this month, so what better way to wrap up things than an
overhead racing game in which you get to blow your opponents away? This almost
works on the TT, but halts because of something we can't figure out yet.
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
It runs on your Atari
From TT's down to ST
It's all a bit to nerdy
To tell you what we fixed
They're creepy and they're kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They're all together ooky, They work on your Atar-ooky
The Addams Family."
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 1mb Hard Drive by Cyrano Jones
Happy Easter! Wait, its Christmas. Oh well, we're early - sue us!"
ST / STe / mSTe / TT / Falcon030 - 4mb Hard Drive by SHW
After years of research the U.S. Military finally discovered how to train seals to swim around underwater and spy on the Russians. All it needed was a bucket of fish and a camera strapped to the seal's head. Once the intelligence was gathered, the seals would return back to the zoo they were using as a cover for their secret covert operations. Or it could be about the elite military group, who knows? Anyway, prepare yourselves for The Untouchables! (With different graphics)
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 4mb Hard Drive by Cyrano Jones
What's Christmas without horrible cheap sweets? Zool is a bit hard to keep down, but at least now it runs quicker! The game was released in two flavours, STFM and STe - but for some reason the STe version refuses to run on the Falcon, so for that path we suggest 16Mhz to compensate! Machine selection now is automatically made by the loader, I guess there were Chupa Chups in the cookie jar :P
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
It's freezing here in the UK (and probably Greece, who knows?) so heres some Indy Heat to warm you all up!"
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
So far we haven't made enough shoot'em'up fixes this month, so let's make it up for you with a not so well known one (but still fun!). Please note that player 1's joystick is the one on the mouse port :)
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
Bored with Gauntlet III already? Well, we can't really blame you. Anyway here is a game released in the twilight of the ST gaming era. We like it, so we fixed it. Any questions?
No?
Thought so! Now download and enjoy!
Maybe you were expecting another fixed game? Well, we'd love to give you another HD, Falcon, MSTe, and TT fixed game, but instead D-Bug are proud to present to you Menu 198! (With two fixed games) Both games have been sitting around for quite a while now, so we felt it was time to kick them out of the door and onto your Ataris!
Gauntlet III was cracked, packed, fixed and trained by CJ. Outzone was cracked by CJ and packed and fixed by GGN. Music as always by the mighty Dubmood! - Only 15 days left for the Big One! (And I bet you all thought it would be a menu at the end!)
This is a dual format menu, it will boot on both ST and Falcon systems. Copy the files in the root of the disks to a folder on your HD to install.
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 1mb Hard Drive by GGN
More Ocean action and another great arcade conversion. What are you waiting for? Click!
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 1mb Hard Drive by GGN
Don't be a whineyboy - kick back and have a blast this Christmas with the Bitmap's Classic 'Xenon' fixed up for hard disk install (as always!) and more recent Atari machines.
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
The almighty god Thor is on his way to fight for freedom and yaddayaddayaddayadda.... Look, just download the game, it's got lovely graphics, it's tricky and now it works on 030 CPUs. Is that enough info for you?
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
This needs no writeup. Download and play this classic game now!
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 (now fixed for TOS 2.06!) - 4mb Hard Drive by Cyrano Jones
The game that made 'Second Samurai' possible! Hack'n'slash your way towards enlightenment - just like shopping in Tesco!
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 1mb Hard Drive by GGN
Have you been naughty or nice? The people living here were naughty, but GGN was nice and fixed it for you to play on more recent Atari machines!
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 2mb Hard Drive by GGN
Quite possibly one of the most breathtaking 3D in a game on an ST - now ever better with 16Mhz options. GGN brings the classic 'Interphase' to the HD/030 era and also includes level select options! Special Christmas cheer to Elite! As we are the oldest active Atari group around, it's always good to see some of the scene names from the past again. Let's hope it helps to revive the good old days again where crackers were real crackers, packers were real packers, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri we're real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri!
ST / STe / mSTe / TT/ Falcon030 - 4mb Hard Drive by Cyrano Jones
"Next on Sky One: When Robots Attack!!! Will you Escape From The Planet of the Robot Monsters in time to see what we have for you tomorrow? In our opinion a much under rated game, that is a lot of fun to play. Don't forget to come back tomorrow!"
No stale chocolate behind this day. To kick start we bring you Psygnosis' Leander!
Please note that we tried and tried to make the intro work on the Falcon and the TT, but in the end,
decided it wasnt worth the effort, so it is skipped on these systems. The game, however, works perfectly on all flavours of Atari so click and enjoy.. We'll be back tomorrow, and every day, up to Christmas Day, so be sure to come and click again!
Leander ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 4mb HD by CJ
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by CJ
Interphase ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Badlands ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 1mb HD Drive by GGN
1st Samurai ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 (now fixed for TOS 2.06!) - 4mb HD by CJ
Golden Axe ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Fire & Brimstone ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Xenon ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 1mb HD by GGN
Parasol stars ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 1mb HD by GGN
D-Bug CD 198 A
D-Bug CD 198 B
Creatures ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Heavy Metal Heroes ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Indy Heat ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Zool ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 4mb HD
Navy Seals ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 4mb HD by SHW
Chuckie Egg ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 1mb HD by CJ
The Addams Family ST/STe/mSTe/TT/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Super Cars II ST/STe/mSTe/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Awesome ST/STe/mSTe/F030 - 4mb HD by GGN
Toki ST/STe/mSTe/F030 - 2mb HD by GGN
Smash TV ST/STe/mSTe/F030 / TT - 2mb HD by GGN
The Black Lamp ST/STe/mSTe/F030 - 1mb HD by CJ
Devious Designs ST/STe/mSTe/F030 / TT - 2mb HD by GGN
Gods ST/STe/mSTe/F030 / TT- 2mb HD by SHW
D-Bug CD 199 A
D-Bug CD 199 B
D-Bug CD 199 C
D-Bug CD 199 D
D-Bug CD 199 E
Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
As some of you may, or may not, know, the Moderators of Atari-Forum have banned our entire group and have also been editing posts from people who have posted about this. We have apparently been banned for suggesting that some of their recent releases have games which are "not very good". Now, people regularly point out that our current and past releases are "not very good" (as is their right) but we never, ever, see any moderator action against these posts. How is it ok to slag us without reprimand, but when we fight back we get shit? Moderators should moderate, not dictate.
Recently we've been having tongue in cheek old-school flame-parties with our good buddies the Pompey Pirates. I'm sure Juggler didn't take any offence with our banter and neither did we with his comments. Even the co-founder of Automation stated that the 'English humour' was often mis-understood. However this was the other main contributing factor in us been banned.
With this in mind, please read the following link for more information. The hypocritical nature of the bannings, and the editing of posts by other users has driven us to make this public instead of settling it in a quiet discreet way like we originally intended.
AF/AL: As per your last email. Can you please carry out our requests.
Yes, it's Gauntlet II! And as usual, you will find it ST/STe/MegaST/MegaSTE/Falcon Hard Disk compatible/8-16Mhz and also this time, trained with extra health for those of you not brave enough to fight the dragon!
This disk also features two new and exclusive tunes composed for us by new D-Bugger, Dubmood. Expect a lot more fantastic YM noises from us in future releases.
D-Bug wishes everyone who attended Outline 07, and everyone who couldn't make it, a very Merry May. Welcome Red Wizard! CJ/SHW/GGN/ECG/DUBMOOD.
Many thanks to Silver Surfer and Brume for allowing us to lurk on their hosted forum for many years. However we think the time is now right to go it alone, ploughing a long lonely furrow in the ever diminishing scene world of the Atari ST.
We don't see our forum as a rival to the DHS forum, AF or AtariAge. It's simply a platform to talk all things D-Bug and Automation.
We'll try to be nice, if that's at all possible. Ask us anything to do with D-Bug or Automation and we'll endeavour to help you out.
Automation / D-Bug active still since 1988
P.S. note that we have a RSS feed running as well, can't say we try to keep with the times ;)
Not a disk drive was purring, and no atari mouse.
The sceners were older, hung out with no hair
In hope that ST D-Bug could be bothered to care.
The files were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of the 80s danced in their heads.
And CJ and Shw and GGN from the hall
said have another gift, Merry Xmas one and all.
D-Bug proudly present menu 196 a/b.
134 with autoMenu prg size NOT 14,018
135 with autoMenu prg size NOT 22,734 or 50,191
141 with autoMenu prg size NOT 19,156
267 with autoMenu prg size NOT 5,856
509 with autoMenu prg size NOT 6,912 (original released by Voodoo)
510 with autoMenu prg size NOT 21,070 (original released by Voodoo)
Mindbomb Demo by The Lost Boys,
Cuddly Demos by The Carebears,
Syntax Terror by Delta Force,
Dark Side of the Spoon by Unlimited Matricks,
Decade Demo by Inner Circle.
Presented to you on D-Bug 193 a,b,c,d & e! Cyrano Jones. Note: The only issue with these menus is that Dark Side of the Spoon's overscan doesn't work with MegaSTE's, but the original was like this as well :)
Leaving Teramis (Automation 262)
Harlequin (D-Bug 39)
James Pond 2 - Codename Robocod (D-Bug 15a)
Moonshine Racers (BBC 47 a/b)
Resolution 101 (Automation 293)
Robocop 2 (BBC 32)
Speedball 2 (BBC 36)
Streetfighter 2 (D-Bug 100 a/b/c/d/e)
The Untouchables (Automation 223)
Wizkid (D-Bug 80)
Of course even D-Bug can't fit 11 games on one disk. That's why we've included an installer program (with new gfx/sound by C-Rem and gwEm respectively), the installer will copy all the files from the original menu onto your hard-drive and install the new loader. Full source code and ULS documentation is included on the disk. Expect more ULS titles soon... and if you're nice we might even take requests.