Thanks for sharing! That "night time" part was absolutely brutal. I can't say I remember this game. I'll have to fire it up on the MISTER since my 128 is still down for the count.
I was that guy screaming at the screen, "No! Don't transfer from F000 to 3000 before disabling the ROM!" LOL! Thank you for great content and such a calming experience to watch. I know how easy it is to make mistakes when you are trying to explain it to a camera, thank you for keeping them in it shows how genuine you are.
I swear I played this game on an "arcade cabinet" in the 80's in a beach town in Turkey. It was not Monaco GP. Later when I got my C64 and played this game I was excited to play a game that was identical to the arcade. Now I realize, that cabinet must have been a custom made with a wheel connected to the paddle. :) Glad to see another video that sheds light to an important part of the gaming history. 31:00 - very interesting, and makes total sense!
Thank you for this video! I managed to dump a strange cartridge I found on eBay ages ago called "The Operating System", but at the time I didn't have the machine language knowledge in order to make sense of the code. Now I can finally go back and take a look at what the cartridge is supposed to do, since there's virtually no info about it on the web. Lemans is one of the first cartridges I got for my C64, although my paddles are the gray ones from Commodore with the fire button up on top. It definitely was an endurance test to keep that button held down with your thumb for a long long time in order to get the high score!
The game reminds me a lot of a more advanced version of Car Race [], which was made for a PET users club in Japan by the late Satoru Iwata, who would later join HAL Laboratory, then would run it, then would end up running Nintendo during some of its most prosperous years. An absolute legend.
Yes, and seeing as the programmer of LeMans is unknown, there's even a chance Satoru Iwata himself worked on this game. We know he programmed the VIC-20 game Star Battle (known as Galaxian in Japan) when he was with HAL Laboratory.
The Video inspired me to dump my own old supergames cartridge from childhood the old school way, but I am not finding it right now in my mess... never dumped a cart on the C64 yet. I ported stuff from cart to floppy using a PC and emulator, but never really dumped a cart myself. I feel the urge to do that now... Great video as always
Must be something like 35 years ago that I played this game... The game felt familiar at first, and once the headlights went on the feeling was acknowledged.
Haha, wow, nice to see your dump working after a few adjustments and retries. It's frustratingly fascinating that dumps like that aren't just straight-across, so they take a good bit of hassle in order to make work!
Even the errors you make are good. When you make errors, and don't edit them out, it helps people see how to correct them etc... always useful, and it's SO much fun to listen to you moan and groan! 😉👍
Well this brings me back! 😄 When I received my first Commodore 64, it came with one joystick, paddles, and two cartridges. One was Sensible Soccer, and the other one was LeMans. Do I recall correctly that the second paddle could somehow "interfere" with the game? Might have been just 6-year-old me making excuses for lack of talent.
This was one of my favorite C64 games when I was a kid! It's been so long since I've seen it that it didn't even look familiar, until you got to the dark part and had to turn on the headlights. Then I remembered everything!
How great to see you do a video on LeMans/Le Mans/Lemans/Lemons! This was the very first game I ever played on a C64, it was a pack-in cartridge when we got our machine new in the 80's, and was one of my all time favourites as a result. I was devastated when my little brother "accidentally" cut the cord on our paddles back in the day and I couldn't play it with them anymore - wish I'd had present-day-me skills to be able to repair them!
I had little brothers cutting my stuff up as well. Especially floppy disks. Weirdest part, they didn't even seem to have any malice in that, it was just some random stuff they did
@11:28; line 7 is I/O line for DE00-DEFF. It's counterpart is line 10 for DF00-DFFF. In the programmers reference there is a section describing all the input/output assignments in the D000-DFFF area, where DE00 to DFFF is mentioned as "Reserved for Future I/O Expansion". Cartridges basically have access to this I/O area. Not sure if the carts you've shown there do anything smart with it. I know for a fact that the "KCS Power Cartridge" uses the I/O section to do some of its trickery and your beloved super snapshot uses it too.
back in the old days, most of us had modified C64 with dual kernel like for example the SPEEDDOS modification very popular in Europe. Booting the machine with a particular key pressed would prevent the cartdrige from starting and you could save them to disk with the built-in ML monitor of the SPEEDDOS kernel.
The Aprospand 64 cartridge expander makes its super easy to dump with MDUMP - just flick the switch when asked. I made a video on it before, BUT love how you go into the CODE!!! Great video!!
This turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it would be! I was expecting you to take the ROM IC out of the cartridge, read it in a programmer, then save the resulting binary file. I was certain that was going to happen when you put the cartridge in the vice --- presumably to crack it open 🙂. Dumping the ROM from a C64 is less destructive and more fun!
As usual, very interesting! I could listen a new video each day. Would be very interesting a tutorial about a smooth assembly scrolling text routine like we see in demo/game intro!
Wow, this was very fascinating, Robin, thanks; it's like you made this video per my request! Because yes, I remember that other video wherein you discussed just a little of how it was done, and I asked how it would've been done without a multi-cart board, since I thought those hadn't been around since the dawn of the 64, and someone said they had been around for a long time, but I wouldn't be satisfied until I knew how people had done it since before those came along, and now you've told us that mods would have to be made to the computer motherboard itself, so NOW I really know; so cool!
Ha, when I was little I didn't know this pronunciation of "Le Mans" that you're going with, so I pronounced it as "leh * MANS" (like the word "man's"), haha! But even this "leh * MAWNS" pronunciation is actually incorrect, because Le Mans is _French._ So it's really more like "LOOH (long) * mah(n)" -- no s, and the n has kind of a soft, nasal, barely-there sort of sound. But Commodore's having used all-capitals doesn't affect the pronunciation anyway, since that's not in a context in which all-caps would come up as a basic emphasis, either because _B/I//U_ were not available, or in a simple pronunciation key.
Great vido again, thank you. There is a type in the work around at 36:19 "change the load address to $F000" should be "change the load address to $E000" ;)
Hi Robin, thanks for the video. Le Mans was also one of my favorite games in the days. I can remember I converted the paddle version to work with joystick.
Neat! I ended up with a couple different versions on disk with joystick control, maybe one was from you? It was surprisingly playable by joystick too, and was actually superior when trying to get out of the pits as it didn't have that flaw of giving the player no indication of the paddle position it would track to when control was handed back to the player.
You are one clever person! I remember buying game tapes for my C64 back in the day. I liked "Magic Land Dizzy" and "Ghostbusters" .. "Robocop" was a different story ha ha
Haha, entertaining that you left one of your blunders right in the video and did reshoot despite saying you wouldn't, but didn't _edit_ all the way. It has a bit of comedic effect!
The first time I played with my userport I had the smart idea to probe it with current meter mode and therefore shorted it (luckyly I shorted power line not CPU lines) so I blew the fuse (only)! You life to learn
You are definitely right about not many games using the paddle controllers for the Commodore 64. I wonder why? There definitely was no shortage of driving games for the system!
It might have just been a supply and demand thing; relatively few Commodore owners had paddles so developers would be reluctant to design games around a controller that a smaller percentage of customers owned. Atari included paddles with every VCS for the first number of years the system was sold so more games supported them. Then Atari stopped including them with the system to cut costs, and we see almost no new paddles games for the 2600 later in its life.
The old cartridge games are still legendary and inspiring 😺👍🕹️. I still have these cartridges... - INTERNATIONAL SOCCER - CENTIPEDE - PANG ...for my Commodore 64 😺👍🕹️. I even saw LEMANS at a finnish 🇫🇮 website, made a bid for that game... and lost it to another bidder 😹.
The bug discussed at 35:30 doesn't affect the ML monitor in THE FINAL CARTRIDGE III. On the FC3, you can issue the command S"FILE",08,E000,0000 and get the full 8K as desired. That's a neat trick with the alligator clips! -- JC
I seem to remember finding a program on a local BBS many years ago that claimed it could copy cartridges for the Commodore 64, but it required you to plug in the cartridge while the machine was already on, which even my 12-year-old brain assumed was a bad idea.
I actually dumped several cartridges successfully by plugging them in while the machine was on, and already running a machine language monitor. I could have easily damaged the machine by hotplugging the cartridge, but thankfully it didn't happen!
@@Dan-mq8inI imagine the "safest" way to do this would be to have one of those multi-cart plug in boards with the switches to choose which cart you want to connect. Luckily Commodore engineers put at least some rudimentary safeguards in there to help protect the C64, knowing that some may not always turn the machine off before inserting the cartridge.
Thanks for all these wonderful retro videos. I was an Apple II user and kind of missed the whole commodore scene. Now I wish I'd had one back in the day :)
Thanks, it's amazing how much there is to explore and learn about these platforms, especially those with such a rich history as the Commodore and Apple machines.
Hi lovely video! I was kinda hoping you would also try to fix the 'second duration' bug in the game now that you have it in memory. Or maybe that would make a neat sequel to this video.
Yes, now that the cartridge ROM is dumped to disk, I can examine the code and understand why this happens and make suggestions for patches. That will be in an upcoming video. Spoiler: it doesn't seem to be a bug, but rather a deliberate game design choice so I don't think I'll "fix" it as such, but still I'll show how to adjust it.
the kibi thing is annoying but it sorta does make sense. Kilo is an SI unit... and Kilo = 1000 of a thing, not 1024. Ideally it would've used something different that didn't conflict from the start. And also would've avoided 1000s of anything coming into measuring stuff like storage as well.
Just remembered some cartridges connecting to every pin. That made them look really premium. Can't remember what cartridge used every pin, or whether or not the pins were connected to anything.
Ah... the first game I ever played on my childhood C64. Le Mans is actually closer to Monaco GP Pro, as that later game has the passed cars counter which the original didn't. The paddle jitter is because of the pots in those paddles being poor quality and rated to only a given number of rotations. They can be replaced with better ones. Of course the other way to dump the cartridge is to open it, desolder the ROM chip and then read it in a chip reader.
Ok, so I have LeMans on cartridge and it works fine on the C64, but it doesn't work in any of my Max Machines. This always confused me as I was expecting it to, and other Ultimax cartridges do work. I wonder if there were different versions of LeMans.
Interesting! It's certainly possible that there are multiple versions. This website walks through all the Max cartridges and the author is only aware of one LeMans version, but there's still plenty of Commodore lore still left to uncover: c64preservation.com/dp.php?pg=ultimax
@@8_Bit Yeah it's weird. I've tried it with other C64/Ultimax cartridges that worked, as well as several Max Machine branded cartridges and the MultiMax multi cart that all work, so I don't think it's an issue with the computers.
There's an article in a mid/late 80's issue of Transactor that details how to put the same kind of switch on the cartridge port, which is what I did back then. It seems like I may have been poking 1 and memcopying some carts down to lower memory, then saving them after pressing my reset button mod to get around missing kernel functions.
Oh wow... I was always trying to copy my carts to tape in the 80s... I had also had Lazarian ( was all I had in 1983!) and couldn't figure out how to copy the data from cart to tape. So seems like it was not possible to do that without hardware? Later I had a tape from someone with a load of hacked games using a FastLoad and it was chocka full of all kinds of carts like International Soccer and the like...
18:52 I totally agree. I won't change to using these silly names just because some manufacturers decided to hoodwink people by quoting power of ten instead of two .. if I got that right.
My official Commodore-branded paddles look completely different. They look more like one of those styles desk phones with an angled flat bar shape because they are trying to look futuristic or something. Dark brown.
Yes, I've got a pair of those too. Commodore originally released both a joystick and paddle set that were totally clones of Atari's from the VCS. Atari brought legal action against Commodore over the joystick, and possibly the paddles (I've never seen that part documented), so Commodore redesigned both and we ended up with the paddles you have, and a joystick with a triangular handle and centered (ambidextrous?) button that's very uncomfortable to use.
If it is a racer, one of the variables should be the number of cars you can pass under the 60 seconds and decrease the timer that was 60 sec they apparently choose to change how fast the timer is counting, so in this one you should have two 'Timers/counters' that changes their behaviour the further you advance in the game.
Heh super snapshot annoyances. This is why I never liked that cartridge and used Action Replay. bank command is one, disk drive monitor, no issues with saving till the end of memory (the fill command is bugged tho). There was other things that bothered me about it too, including that animated intro. But it was proven that it was a hack of datel's cartridges.
What?? Super Snapshot is the original and Action Replay is the hack! You're so enamoured with AR that you've got the facts reversed! :) I'm not joking either, just read the Pokefinder website and you'll see what's been proven.
At open you say they "clone the games", people may confuse that with had drive clone terminology. I'd say they "reverse engineer" the games..... or they program from scratch - reproduce the game.
In the context of video games, "clone" has been the most common word I've heard used. Not that Wikipedia proves it, but their article on the subject is titled "Video game clone" and they don't provide alternate names for the phenomena. I wouldn't use the term "reverse engineer" for it, but "reproduce" is a good suggestion, because most of the HAL games were programmed simply by observing the arcade game and then attempting to duplicate the gameplay on the personal computers they had available.
@@8_Bit Thanks for the reply. I understand your answers, but it just seems to me the visual context of showing chips and people not understanding that the game basically is re-written from scratch, likely without source code, on a completely different design of graphic system and sound chip, etc. It isn't a big deal, but I just thought people might get the impression that 'copying' an arcade game was mostly just accessing the code like you would backup a floppy disk. When making a 'port' of an arcade game is generally a totally from-scratch programming (which you have shown in detail on your other videos, the extensive labor involved in writing a video game, like the Frog pad one).. Anyway, take care.
The Super Snapshot is constantly banking things in and out to be as transparent as possible. I guess we'd have to invert terms for it, so there's the "apparent state" of the machine where I've banked the KERNAL ROM out, but in reality the SS will bank it back in when necessary. Whenever it fetches or stores a byte, it needs to do the appropriate switching first. It seems like a lot of work for each byte, but it's still plenty fast enough for doing things like disassembly or memory dumps.
All you need to have is C64 with Dolphin Dos, as it have built in monitor and can bypass autostart :) there is much advanced way with C128 with a bit modified Z80 BIOS :)
Thanks for demonstrating your superhuman programming skills, Robin! Minor mistakes included... It's pretty clever that Commodore was able to make these cartridges so that they would work on both systems. Are the cartridges or the boxes they came in labeled as Ultimax?
The Commodore 64 essentially switches into an Ultimax (aka Max Machine) emulation mode when those particular pins are grounded, reconfiguring its memory map to match. It was a fairly easy thing to implement (mostly done in the PLA, I think) and it meant that all those great Ultimax games being made in Japan could become C64 launch titles as well. In Japan they were sold as Max Machine cartridges, but exactly the same cartridge (with a different label) was sold in North America as a Commodore 64 cartridge.
0:05 Nice Frawnkaise! 1:32 I've always heard that called "CamelCase". 16:40 The pins of the vertical slots are also exposed on the bottom of the board, where you could wire-wrap them or use teeny-tiny alligator clips. 18:44 You could use the terms "binary" and "decimal" kilobytes, making it extra-clear which you're referring to. 19:24 Why would they put a race condition in the user interface? 35:55 The monitors use end_address + 1 because the Kernal SAVE routine does this.
My understanding is PascalCase has a leading capital letter, while camelCase does not, or at least, it's optional. Thanks, yes, I think I'd rather say "binary kilobytes" than "kibibytes". I'd rather say almost anything else. Perhaps the KERNAL's SAVE routine is also incapable of saving location $FFFF?
@@8_Bit: I assume saving location $FFFF is unsupported and was never even contemplated back in the PET/VIC days where these routines come from. Really, the best way to handle this is to make a program that does a normal BASIC LOAD and RUN and copies the cartridge/character data from ~$0850 to wherever it needs to go, sets the memory configuration, and calls it.
I am incapable of making that sound and I just barely passed Grade 9 French class :) Most of my French pronunciation I learned from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Interesting how commodore made the paddle white colour but the computer itself beige. I feel mildly annoyed by that. Unless it was originally a paddle for the Amiga. 🤔
The paddles were actually made for the VIC-20 (or actually, the VIC-1001 in Japan) which was matching white. They also made a white joystick that, besides the colour and the "Commodore" name on it, was 100% a clone of Atari's joystick for the VCS. It was enough that Atari brought legal action against Commodore!
The official LeMans cartridge is paddle-only, but there are unofficial hacks spread around on disk and tape that modified the code to use joystick instead.
Yes, that last section of the video was to show the difference between a .bin file and a .prg file, and how to load a .bin file from disk into the correct location in memory. There are many .bin files online and sometimes people want to load them from disk and then are confused why it doesn't work.
3 years ago (at 41) I was all into learning BASIC and hoped to program a simple C64 game. Now at 44, I can’t even imagine it being possible. Am I getting old, or have these COVID vaccines, numbed my brain? …… I’m being serious.
Thanks for sharing! That "night time" part was absolutely brutal. I can't say I remember this game. I'll have to fire it up on the MISTER since my 128 is still down for the count.
I was that guy screaming at the screen, "No! Don't transfer from F000 to 3000 before disabling the ROM!" LOL! Thank you for great content and such a calming experience to watch. I know how easy it is to make mistakes when you are trying to explain it to a camera, thank you for keeping them in it shows how genuine you are.
I swear I played this game on an "arcade cabinet" in the 80's in a beach town in Turkey. It was not Monaco GP. Later when I got my C64 and played this game I was excited to play a game that was identical to the arcade. Now I realize, that cabinet must have been a custom made with a wheel connected to the paddle. :) Glad to see another video that sheds light to an important part of the gaming history. 31:00 - very interesting, and makes total sense!
Thank you for this video! I managed to dump a strange cartridge I found on eBay ages ago called "The Operating System", but at the time I didn't have the machine language knowledge in order to make sense of the code. Now I can finally go back and take a look at what the cartridge is supposed to do, since there's virtually no info about it on the web.
Lemans is one of the first cartridges I got for my C64, although my paddles are the gray ones from Commodore with the fire button up on top. It definitely was an endurance test to keep that button held down with your thumb for a long long time in order to get the high score!
The game reminds me a lot of a more advanced version of Car Race [], which was made for a PET users club in Japan by the late Satoru Iwata, who would later join HAL Laboratory, then would run it, then would end up running Nintendo during some of its most prosperous years. An absolute legend.
Yes, and seeing as the programmer of LeMans is unknown, there's even a chance Satoru Iwata himself worked on this game. We know he programmed the VIC-20 game Star Battle (known as Galaxian in Japan) when he was with HAL Laboratory.
@@8_Bit Who is this Hal guy anyway? 😁
@@JustWasted3HoursHereHe appears to be a particularly computer-savvy dachshund.
Thanks for leaving all those "oopsies" in the video, which really provides a cosy and human feeling :-)
MORBO AGREES
The Video inspired me to dump my own old supergames cartridge from childhood the old school way, but I am not finding it right now in my mess... never dumped a cart on the C64 yet. I ported stuff from cart to floppy using a PC and emulator, but never really dumped a cart myself. I feel the urge to do that now... Great video as always
Must be something like 35 years ago that I played this game... The game felt familiar at first, and once the headlights went on the feeling was acknowledged.
The night time drive is a cool idea! Liking that limited sight thing!
Kinda like Activision's Enduro on the 2600, on of the most pleasant games on that platform IMO.
9:13 "This is, the code picking lawyer, and what I have for you today is..."
17:12 You can get those smaller wires with little spring-loaded hooks. That should make sure there's better clearance.
Thanks, I only found out about those after I made this video. I've got some now.
Haha, wow, nice to see your dump working after a few adjustments and retries. It's frustratingly fascinating that dumps like that aren't just straight-across, so they take a good bit of hassle in order to make work!
Even the errors you make are good. When you make errors, and don't edit them out, it helps people see how to correct them etc... always useful, and it's SO much fun to listen to you moan and groan! 😉👍
Well this brings me back! 😄 When I received my first Commodore 64, it came with one joystick, paddles, and two cartridges. One was Sensible Soccer, and the other one was LeMans. Do I recall correctly that the second paddle could somehow "interfere" with the game? Might have been just 6-year-old me making excuses for lack of talent.
This was one of my favorite C64 games when I was a kid! It's been so long since I've seen it that it didn't even look familiar, until you got to the dark part and had to turn on the headlights. Then I remembered everything!
How great to see you do a video on LeMans/Le Mans/Lemans/Lemons! This was the very first game I ever played on a C64, it was a pack-in cartridge when we got our machine new in the 80's, and was one of my all time favourites as a result.
I was devastated when my little brother "accidentally" cut the cord on our paddles back in the day and I couldn't play it with them anymore - wish I'd had present-day-me skills to be able to repair them!
I had little brothers cutting my stuff up as well. Especially floppy disks. Weirdest part, they didn't even seem to have any malice in that, it was just some random stuff they did
@11:28; line 7 is I/O line for DE00-DEFF. It's counterpart is line 10 for DF00-DFFF. In the programmers reference there is a section describing all the input/output assignments in the D000-DFFF area, where DE00 to DFFF is mentioned as "Reserved for Future I/O Expansion". Cartridges basically have access to this I/O area. Not sure if the carts you've shown there do anything smart with it. I know for a fact that the "KCS Power Cartridge" uses the I/O section to do some of its trickery and your beloved super snapshot uses it too.
back in the old days, most of us had modified C64 with dual kernel like for example the SPEEDDOS modification very popular in Europe. Booting the machine with a particular key pressed would prevent the cartdrige from starting and you could save them to disk with the built-in ML monitor of the SPEEDDOS kernel.
The Aprospand 64 cartridge expander makes its super easy to dump with MDUMP - just flick the switch when asked. I made a video on it before, BUT love how you go into the CODE!!! Great video!!
This turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it would be! I was expecting you to take the ROM IC out of the cartridge, read it in a programmer, then save the resulting binary file. I was certain that was going to happen when you put the cartridge in the vice --- presumably to crack it open 🙂. Dumping the ROM from a C64 is less destructive and more fun!
Watching me try to desolder the ROM from a cartridge would be "interesting" in a very different way. Kind of like how car accidents are "interesting".
In my childhood, i modified car in this game with a sprite editor, to a lamborgini, and saved, and i was very proud 😊
As usual, very interesting! I could listen a new video each day. Would be very interesting a tutorial about a smooth assembly scrolling text routine like we see in demo/game intro!
Wow, this was very fascinating, Robin, thanks; it's like you made this video per my request! Because yes, I remember that other video wherein you discussed just a little of how it was done, and I asked how it would've been done without a multi-cart board, since I thought those hadn't been around since the dawn of the 64, and someone said they had been around for a long time, but I wouldn't be satisfied until I knew how people had done it since before those came along, and now you've told us that mods would have to be made to the computer motherboard itself, so NOW I really know; so cool!
Ha, when I was little I didn't know this pronunciation of "Le Mans" that you're going with, so I pronounced it as "leh * MANS" (like the word "man's"), haha! But even this "leh * MAWNS" pronunciation is actually incorrect, because Le Mans is _French._ So it's really more like "LOOH (long) * mah(n)" -- no s, and the n has kind of a soft, nasal, barely-there sort of sound. But Commodore's having used all-capitals doesn't affect the pronunciation anyway, since that's not in a context in which all-caps would come up as a basic emphasis, either because _B/I//U_ were not available, or in a simple pronunciation key.
Great vido again, thank you.
There is a type in the work around at 36:19 "change the load address to $F000" should be "change the load address to $E000" ;)
Hi Robin, thanks for the video. Le Mans was also one of my favorite games in the days. I can remember I converted the paddle version to work with joystick.
Neat! I ended up with a couple different versions on disk with joystick control, maybe one was from you? It was surprisingly playable by joystick too, and was actually superior when trying to get out of the pits as it didn't have that flaw of giving the player no indication of the paddle position it would track to when control was handed back to the player.
Why Have I seen this game reviewed with two different names on two different channels in two consecutive days? This is bizarre. We live in the matrix.
I'm curious, what was the other name for the game?
You are one clever person! I remember buying game tapes for my C64 back in the day. I liked "Magic Land Dizzy" and "Ghostbusters" .. "Robocop" was a different story ha ha
Haha, entertaining that you left one of your blunders right in the video and did reshoot despite saying you wouldn't, but didn't _edit_ all the way. It has a bit of comedic effect!
I take it as a Canadian you know the trailing "s" in Le Mans is silent ;-)
Awesome review. Each video is more beautiful than the last. You reveal all the Commodore's secrets. Great. ❤
Commodore Wizzard!!!. Respect and Regards from Poland.
Very cool. I enjoyed watching you playing the game near the start
Thanks for the chuckles. Always enjoy your videos.
The first time I played with my userport I had the smart idea to probe it with current meter mode and therefore shorted it (luckyly I shorted power line not CPU lines) so I blew the fuse (only)! You life to learn
You are definitely right about not many games using the paddle controllers for the Commodore 64. I wonder why? There definitely was no shortage of driving games for the system!
It might have just been a supply and demand thing; relatively few Commodore owners had paddles so developers would be reluctant to design games around a controller that a smaller percentage of customers owned. Atari included paddles with every VCS for the first number of years the system was sold so more games supported them. Then Atari stopped including them with the system to cut costs, and we see almost no new paddles games for the 2600 later in its life.
"You see, when I turn on the computer..."
* "...a commercial immediately starts!"
The old cartridge games are still legendary and inspiring 😺👍🕹️.
I still have these cartridges...
- INTERNATIONAL SOCCER
- CENTIPEDE
- PANG
...for my Commodore 64 😺👍🕹️.
I even saw LEMANS at a finnish 🇫🇮 website,
made a bid for that game...
and lost it to another bidder 😹.
The bug discussed at 35:30 doesn't affect the ML monitor in THE FINAL CARTRIDGE III.
On the FC3, you can issue the command S"FILE",08,E000,0000 and get the full 8K as desired.
That's a neat trick with the alligator clips! -- JC
That's good that they fixed that in TFC3. I'll have to get Adrian Gonzalez to fix it in his updated Snapshot ROMs.
I seem to remember finding a program on a local BBS many years ago that claimed it could copy cartridges for the Commodore 64, but it required you to plug in the cartridge while the machine was already on, which even my 12-year-old brain assumed was a bad idea.
I had a program back in the 80s that worked like this. It was called Jolly Roger.
I actually dumped several cartridges successfully by plugging them in while the machine was on, and already running a machine language monitor. I could have easily damaged the machine by hotplugging the cartridge, but thankfully it didn't happen!
@@Dan-mq8inI imagine the "safest" way to do this would be to have one of those multi-cart plug in boards with the switches to choose which cart you want to connect. Luckily Commodore engineers put at least some rudimentary safeguards in there to help protect the C64, knowing that some may not always turn the machine off before inserting the cartridge.
Hah! Clever mid-roll ad at 8:48. When you turned the computer on the it did a smash cut to the PlayStation logo intro :)
Thanks for all these wonderful retro videos. I was an Apple II user and kind of missed the whole commodore scene. Now I wish I'd had one back in the day :)
Thanks, it's amazing how much there is to explore and learn about these platforms, especially those with such a rich history as the Commodore and Apple machines.
Hi lovely video! I was kinda hoping you would also try to fix the 'second duration' bug in the game now that you have it in memory. Or maybe that would make a neat sequel to this video.
Yes, now that the cartridge ROM is dumped to disk, I can examine the code and understand why this happens and make suggestions for patches. That will be in an upcoming video. Spoiler: it doesn't seem to be a bug, but rather a deliberate game design choice so I don't think I'll "fix" it as such, but still I'll show how to adjust it.
I spent so much time playing this as a kid the sound effects are burned into my brain.
the kibi thing is annoying but it sorta does make sense. Kilo is an SI unit... and Kilo = 1000 of a thing, not 1024. Ideally it would've used something different that didn't conflict from the start. And also would've avoided 1000s of anything coming into measuring stuff like storage as well.
"Clowns! Ugh. Well, I'm not reshooting all that" - loved that, made me feel more comfortable making/owning my own mistakes :)
Haha, I wondered what it would be like when you just rand this 8K-only dump. Funny to see it behave in that weird way!
I applaude your refusal to use the "kibibyte" abomination.
I maintain to this day that Fatboy Slim sampled this in Rockafeller Skank. The first time I heard it, I immediately thought of Lemans
Instead of alligator clips between pin 9 and ground you could’ve just touched between pins 8 and 9… since 8 is already grounded.
Just remembered some cartridges connecting to every pin. That made them look really premium. Can't remember what cartridge used every pin, or whether or not the pins were connected to anything.
What a great game for one of that vintage.
Ah... the first game I ever played on my childhood C64. Le Mans is actually closer to Monaco GP Pro, as that later game has the passed cars counter which the original didn't. The paddle jitter is because of the pots in those paddles being poor quality and rated to only a given number of rotations. They can be replaced with better ones. Of course the other way to dump the cartridge is to open it, desolder the ROM chip and then read it in a chip reader.
When life gives you Lemans, make Lemanade.
Ok, so I have LeMans on cartridge and it works fine on the C64, but it doesn't work in any of my Max Machines. This always confused me as I was expecting it to, and other Ultimax cartridges do work. I wonder if there were different versions of LeMans.
Interesting! It's certainly possible that there are multiple versions. This website walks through all the Max cartridges and the author is only aware of one LeMans version, but there's still plenty of Commodore lore still left to uncover: c64preservation.com/dp.php?pg=ultimax
@@8_Bit Yeah it's weird. I've tried it with other C64/Ultimax cartridges that worked, as well as several Max Machine branded cartridges and the MultiMax multi cart that all work, so I don't think it's an issue with the computers.
There's an article in a mid/late 80's issue of Transactor that details how to put the same kind of switch on the cartridge port, which is what I did back then. It seems like I may have been poking 1 and memcopying some carts down to lower memory, then saving them after pressing my reset button mod to get around missing kernel functions.
cool! a new 8-bit show and tell by Robin. Let me get some beers.
Oh wow... I was always trying to copy my carts to tape in the 80s... I had also had Lazarian ( was all I had in 1983!) and couldn't figure out how to copy the data from cart to tape. So seems like it was not possible to do that without hardware?
Later I had a tape from someone with a load of hacked games using a FastLoad and it was chocka full of all kinds of carts like International Soccer and the like...
You could have used a single alligator clip and grab both pin 8 & 9 with it.
As a Canadian im surprised you pronounce the “S” in le mans; I thought you guys all spoke French..
Out here in central/western Canada we learned our French from repeated viewings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
"...Thicker to handle more current..."
I didn't notice that it was any thicker, but it does look double-wide.
Ha, of course it has us use the F1 key to start; because Le Mans is linked to Formula One racing! 🙂
Ooh I played a lot of that one as a kid.
17:05 Pin 8 and 9 are side by side, so why not set the alligator clip over those two pins?
18:52 I totally agree. I won't change to using these silly names just because some manufacturers decided to hoodwink people by quoting power of ten instead of two .. if I got that right.
Picked up a Datel Cartridge Dumper via ebay a few years back to do this for myself
Is the super snapshot firmware flashable to fix bugs?
Nice to see a new video!!!🎉
Now that you've got it dumped, you can fix the "BOUNS" that you get for passing ten cars. :D
They skimped on Sega Turbo's pseudo-3D effect, but it's a competent version of the winning formula.
My official Commodore-branded paddles look completely different. They look more like one of those styles desk phones with an angled flat bar shape because they are trying to look futuristic or something. Dark brown.
Yes, I've got a pair of those too. Commodore originally released both a joystick and paddle set that were totally clones of Atari's from the VCS. Atari brought legal action against Commodore over the joystick, and possibly the paddles (I've never seen that part documented), so Commodore redesigned both and we ended up with the paddles you have, and a joystick with a triangular handle and centered (ambidextrous?) button that's very uncomfortable to use.
If it is a racer, one of the variables should be the number of cars you can pass under the 60 seconds and decrease the timer that was 60 sec they apparently choose to change how fast the timer is counting, so in this one you should have two 'Timers/counters' that changes their behaviour the further you advance in the game.
As I'm sure many of you know HAL did many VIC-20 and early C64 games.
For a 16kb rom, this game is excellent
When you saved, do you need to specify the last address or the last+1? You saved from A000 to C000 and not BFFF.
Heh super snapshot annoyances. This is why I never liked that cartridge and used Action Replay. bank command is one, disk drive monitor, no issues with saving till the end of memory (the fill command is bugged tho). There was other things that bothered me about it too, including that animated intro. But it was proven that it was a hack of datel's cartridges.
What?? Super Snapshot is the original and Action Replay is the hack! You're so enamoured with AR that you've got the facts reversed! :) I'm not joking either, just read the Pokefinder website and you'll see what's been proven.
At open you say they "clone the games", people may confuse that with had drive clone terminology. I'd say they "reverse engineer" the games..... or they program from scratch - reproduce the game.
In the context of video games, "clone" has been the most common word I've heard used. Not that Wikipedia proves it, but their article on the subject is titled "Video game clone" and they don't provide alternate names for the phenomena. I wouldn't use the term "reverse engineer" for it, but "reproduce" is a good suggestion, because most of the HAL games were programmed simply by observing the arcade game and then attempting to duplicate the gameplay on the personal computers they had available.
If you look through the 120+ references used in the article you'll see how widespread the use of "clone" is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_clone
@@8_Bit Thanks for the reply. I understand your answers, but it just seems to me the visual context of showing chips and people not understanding that the game basically is re-written from scratch, likely without source code, on a completely different design of graphic system and sound chip, etc. It isn't a big deal, but I just thought people might get the impression that 'copying' an arcade game was mostly just accessing the code like you would backup a floppy disk. When making a 'port' of an arcade game is generally a totally from-scratch programming (which you have shown in detail on your other videos, the extensive labor involved in writing a video game, like the Frog pad one).. Anyway, take care.
Amazing video once again. Quick question: how does the monitor load or print anything if the kernal rom is banked out?
The Super Snapshot is constantly banking things in and out to be as transparent as possible. I guess we'd have to invert terms for it, so there's the "apparent state" of the machine where I've banked the KERNAL ROM out, but in reality the SS will bank it back in when necessary. Whenever it fetches or stores a byte, it needs to do the appropriate switching first. It seems like a lot of work for each byte, but it's still plenty fast enough for doing things like disassembly or memory dumps.
thats really good while talking.
All you need to have is C64 with Dolphin Dos, as it have built in monitor and can bypass autostart :)
there is much advanced way with C128 with a bit modified Z80 BIOS :)
Uh-oh, Robin. There's no such thing as "TTL logic." Guess why.
"BONUS" is also spelled wrong in the game. It's spelled as "BOUNS"! 😂
Yes. Robin, please fix this when you explore the seconds timing issue! :D
Copyright protection thing. The counterfeits will be noticed by not having the typos. 😅
30:41: Oh look, I guess we're getting close to tax time!
Please join the kibi mebi gang
neber !!
Haha, "...which I may have edited out..."
Not so sure of yourself, eh? 😛
Thanks for demonstrating your superhuman programming skills, Robin! Minor mistakes included...
It's pretty clever that Commodore was able to make these cartridges so that they would work on both systems. Are the cartridges or the boxes they came in labeled as Ultimax?
It would have been MORE clever if the Ultimax memory map wasn't different from the C64 memory map.
The Commodore 64 essentially switches into an Ultimax (aka Max Machine) emulation mode when those particular pins are grounded, reconfiguring its memory map to match. It was a fairly easy thing to implement (mostly done in the PLA, I think) and it meant that all those great Ultimax games being made in Japan could become C64 launch titles as well. In Japan they were sold as Max Machine cartridges, but exactly the same cartridge (with a different label) was sold in North America as a Commodore 64 cartridge.
Excellent.
Brilliant
0:05 Nice Frawnkaise!
1:32 I've always heard that called "CamelCase".
16:40 The pins of the vertical slots are also exposed on the bottom of the board, where you could wire-wrap them or use teeny-tiny alligator clips.
18:44 You could use the terms "binary" and "decimal" kilobytes, making it extra-clear which you're referring to.
19:24 Why would they put a race condition in the user interface?
35:55 The monitors use end_address + 1 because the Kernal SAVE routine does this.
My understanding is PascalCase has a leading capital letter, while camelCase does not, or at least, it's optional.
Thanks, yes, I think I'd rather say "binary kilobytes" than "kibibytes". I'd rather say almost anything else.
Perhaps the KERNAL's SAVE routine is also incapable of saving location $FFFF?
@@8_Bit: I assume saving location $FFFF is unsupported and was never even contemplated back in the PET/VIC days where these routines come from. Really, the best way to handle this is to make a program that does a normal BASIC LOAD and RUN and copies the cartridge/character data from ~$0850 to wherever it needs to go, sets the memory configuration, and calls it.
Le Mans i think is pronouned "lemonn" with that nasally "o" the French do. ;)
I am incapable of making that sound and I just barely passed Grade 9 French class :) Most of my French pronunciation I learned from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
@@8_Bitlol
When I was a kid I pronounced it LEE-muns.
Interesting how commodore made the paddle white colour but the computer itself beige. I feel mildly annoyed by that. Unless it was originally a paddle for the Amiga. 🤔
The paddles were actually made for the VIC-20 (or actually, the VIC-1001 in Japan) which was matching white. They also made a white joystick that, besides the colour and the "Commodore" name on it, was 100% a clone of Atari's joystick for the VCS. It was enough that Atari brought legal action against Commodore!
So let’s patch it for 24h and stream a game run in realtime :))😅
Btw for such an early game it’s great game mechanic and paddle well used / does it have a joystick or keyboard mode?
The official LeMans cartridge is paddle-only, but there are unofficial hacks spread around on disk and tape that modified the code to use joystick instead.
I had that! Pitstop 2 was better but it took a billion years to load it.
Pitstop 2 is great but I actually prefer the racing gameplay of LeMans. I understand I hold a minority view on this matter :)
Haven't played it yet, it's still loading.
I bet there is this other way even if we do have a Commodore Max.
The BIN Format is a Eprom Dump usable to burn to a new eprom, this needs no load adress bytes.
Yes, that last section of the video was to show the difference between a .bin file and a .prg file, and how to load a .bin file from disk into the correct location in memory. There are many .bin files online and sometimes people want to load them from disk and then are confused why it doesn't work.
3 years ago (at 41) I was all into learning BASIC and hoped to program a simple C64 game.
Now at 44, I can’t even imagine it being possible.
Am I getting old, or have these COVID vaccines, numbed my brain?
…… I’m being serious.
the trilogic expect cartridge was better
It's kinda reminds me Enduro or Grand Prix from Atari.
Yes, I love these "endless racers". Enduro is one of my favourite Atari 2600 games. But apparently Monaco GP was the original, from the arcade.
@@8_Bit oh! Monaco GP make a lot success here in Brazil, because of Airton Senna (In Memorian), as you know.
Except for the part that reminds me of Atari's Night Driver.
The "S" is silent in the correct pronunciation of "Le Mans".