Playing bounty bob strikes back in ubuntu

I got inspired to play Bounty Bob Strikes Back by watching youtube videos of longplays. I thought I'd try mame and the a800 driver but it crashed on trying to run the cartridge. I found an xex file but mame doesn't like xex files. So I installed the atari800 emulator under Ubuntu with "apt get install atari800" and it installed but getting the rom paths right was a little tricky. You launch atari800 and then hit F1 to configure, then Emulator Rom Settings, then System Rom Settings and then Find Rom Images in a Directory and then locate where you extracted the atari roms to. It installs a man page so you can type "man atari800" and the config file is ".atari800.cfg" in your home directory.






Unfortunately the atari800 emulator doesn't work properly. You can run the game but the Utility Lift on Level 2 doesn't work. And if you do the cheats listed at http://www.bigfivesoftware.com/emulator/emulator.htm you can jump to different levels but many others don't work correctly either.

My command line looks like this:

atari800 -run ~/Downloads/Bounty\ Bob\ Strikes\ Back\!.xex

and I had to remap the joystick to my preferred CTRL (fire button) and ARROW KEYS arrangement and also remember to save the configuration.

Stuck on level 2:

Bounty Bob Strikes Back! - Cheat Code

Press F3 to enter the option screen.
Use the down arrow to move to the "Special Code" line.
Use left/right arrows to select 61800. Holding ESC will cause the numbers to advance more quickly.
Hold the "F" key on the keyboard and press F3.
Now when you're playing the game you can type any two numbers to jump directly to that level. For example type "05" for level five.

(under the Atari800 emulator, F2=option, so hit F2 to go to the option screen, then go to the special code line and decrement the number to 61800. If you want to go "turbo" F12 will go into a turbo mode so it will count faster, however you are also likely to "time out" of the options screen. Just leave turbo mode with F12, hit F2 again, then select the special code line again and set it to exactly 61800 and hold down f and press F2. Now cheats should be enabled and the special code line will return to zero)



So let's try the c64 driver under mame. I was able to get bounty bob to work, but not with the softlisted disk. I found an Avatar crack that worked and even better it's got trainers!

The softlisted floppy bbsb gives a CHECKSUM ERROR.



The avatar crack works and I don't even have to enter the cheat code if I enable in game keys:

My favorite is F to reposition Bounty Bob. For some reason I had to disable joystick 2 to get the F key to work since it's mapped to ARDFG by default. That's why the command line has -joy2 "" in it.





./mame64 c64 -window -bios jiffydos -joy1 joy -joy2 "" -flop1 ~/Downloads/Bounty\ Bob\ Strikes\ Back\ \ 7HD.d64

I like the jiffydos bios so I can just hit SHIFT+HOME for (SHIFT+RUN/STOP) and it will load it up, as well as getting a directory with F1.



The c64 version runs a bit too fast to be properly controlled for me. If I launch mame with a speed factor of 0.80 (80 percent normal speed) the controls are much easier to handle and less touchy.

./mame64 c64 -window -flop1 ~/Downloads/Bounty\ Bob\ Strikes\ Back\ \ 7HD.d64 -bios jiffydos -joy1 joy -joy2 "" -speed 0.80


Ahh bliss!

How small can you make a barcode in Word?

I wanted to see just how small I could make a readable printed barcode in Word so I wrote a VBA macro to generate barcodes at different sizes to test it out.

Sub insertbarcodefield(ByVal barcodetext As String)
  Selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseStart
  Set myField = ActiveDocument.Fields.Add(Range:=Selection.Range, Type:=wdFieldEmpty, text:=barcodetext)
End Sub

Sub makebarcodetextsize(ByVal text As String, ByVal barcodetype As String, ByVal size As Integer)
  insertbarcodefield "DISPLAYBARCODE """ + text + """ " + barcodetype + " \t \h " + Str(size) + ""
End Sub

Sub dobarcodes()
   barcodestring = InputBox$("Barcode String")
  For i = 400 To 1500 Step 100
     makebarcodetextsize ltrim(Str(i)), "code128", i
     Selection.TypeParagraph
     makebarcodetextsize "a" + barcodestring + "a", "nw7", i
     Selection.TypeParagraph
  Next
End Sub

Lovelite by O'Bryan on Rock N America

Saturday, November 26, 2016
Trying to find things that you've seen long ago

Like this music video that I think aired on the show "Rock'n America" back in the 80s where this gal in this yellow jumpsuit was in some kind of power plant pulling levers up and down. I'm still trying to figure out what that one was. I vaguely remember it being called Love lines or something like that.

The obscure things that you remember and you want to put a name with them.

Well I finally found out what the name of the video was: It's Lovelite by O'Bryan, not Lovelines.

I found a video of Rock N America where he talks about being in a video by O'Bryan and that's all I needed.



The comedy bits were corny but funny. "Know where I can get ahold of any Rock N America?"

I always loved those music video shows like Friday Night Videos, Rock N America and Night Tracks.

Just search youtube for this title: O'Bryan - Lovelite 1984

Why no barcode tag in HTML?

After having so much fun fiddling with Microsoft Word's DISPLAYBARCODE field, I wondered why HTML doesn't have a standard barcode tag. I suppose there's lots of javascript barcode generators, but why not one built in to the browser?

It would be so simple if all you have to do is go <barcode type="code128">BARCODE_DATA</barcode>

I suppose it's not an original thought:

http://jimkeener.com/posts/barcode-html-tag

Discovered MS Word's DISPLAYBARCODE ability

Today I discovered that Word has the ability to display and print barcodes in a document. Yes!

All you have to do is to create a field with Ctrl+F9 and type

DISPLAYBARCODE "BarcodeData1234" CODE128 \t

If you want a smaller code, you can give a height parameter in "twips" 1/1440ths of an inch.


DISPLAYBARCODE "BarcodeData1234" CODE128 \t \h 720

Hit Alt+F9 to toggle the field codes display between barcode and field text.

Beautiful!!


A list of parameters:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh745901(v=office.12).aspx


And you can do all the following barcodes:

UPCA|UPCE|JAN13|JAN8|EAN13|EAN8|CASE|ITF14|NW7|CODE39|CODE128|JPPOST|QR



https://hubpages.com/technology/Mail-Mergeable-Barcodes-in-Microsoft-Word-2013-aka-Bar-Codes

My EDID was going unrecognized until I added video=VGA-1:e

Some strange behavior from my xorg with Ubuntu 18.04:

I have a firmware file set up so that grub will load a firmware "helper" file for my hanns-g 24" monitor.

I put on a VGA extender SR from Gefen to test it out and for some reason it doesn't pass the EDID, which is ok because I've got the kernel parameter drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware.
(BTW the signal from the VGA extender looks pretty awesome for a long cable run).


For some strange reason, it didn't work until I added video=VGA-1:e (which is supposed to enable the VGA-1 output).

Until I added the parameter video=VGA-1:e I would get this dialog upon boot when it tried to restore my previous display settings:




$ cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-42-generic root=UUID=xxx-yyyy-zzzz ro drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=VGA-1:edid/hannsg.bin drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=VGA-1:edid/hannsg.bin video=VGA-1:e

Keen eyes will notice I put the drm_kms_helper.edid parameter in there twice by accident, I just left it in there, it doesn't seem to hurt anything. The last parameter on the line seems to take precedence.

I also tried drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=VGA-1:edid/1920x1080.bin for one of the built-in edids which also worked, and gave ONLY the 1920x1080 resolution.


and running xrandr --verbose shows my EDID is getting read.


$ xrandr --verbose
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3120 x 1920, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-1 connected primary 1920x1080+1200+510 (0x46) normal (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 521mm x 293mm
Identifier: 0x42
Timestamp: 60227
Subpixel: unknown
Gamma: 1.0:1.0:1.0
Brightness: 1.0
Clones:
CRTC: 0
CRTCs: 0 1 2
Transform: 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
filter:
EDID:
00fffffffffff etc.


It's pretty important that my system comes up properly on first boot because the monitor rotation seems to freak out the i915 driver with my dual monitor setup if I switch back and forth between monitor rotation and normal and I get all kinds of weird display corruption and flickering after that. If it comes up "clean" the display looks fine.