Powertran Cortex

[Hugo Bento]

Great, finally i find something about Cortex.
Was just talking to my dad, while he repaired his Oscilloscope, and we talked about Cortex. Made me quick google it, and great, new info.

You guys should really make a Wikipedia Page for Cortex. It deserves it.

So my dad has a cortex. He got it when he was working at TI.
It was a great computer, he assembled it, and he thought me and my brother at the age of 8-9 how to work with it, and how to do some light programing in Basic.
It was an wonderful computer.
Specially the games that we had. We loved to play those old Golf and platforms games.
Thanks Tony Rowell, the Cortex made quite an impact in my family life.

Anyway my main interest in cortex is this little gem of a platform game, called Burglar. Where a small fat guy much like Mario goes around collecting sacks of money, keys, jumping on conveyor belts, walking on degrading platforms etc.
For me this game is truly a masterpiece.

Does anyone knows anything about this game ? Who wrote it, if there is any port to another platform, or an emulator that can run it ?

[nige the hippy]

Looks in good condition but doesn't appear to have the disk chips or RGB/V9938. Probably cost a fortune to ship to the US too

Big toroidal transformer in the back at least there wouldn't be the weight of the disk drives

[Ksarul]

And it looks like several folks are interested in it too. . .maybe we could replicate the 9938/9958 mod. board. I have several 9958s. . .and one V9990. We'd just need the layout redone to do a short run of the boards. I could do that using ExpressPCB if we had a copy of the original layout.

That one at least has the cutouts for the disk drives in it--mine has a solid brushed aluminum plate across the entire front of the machine.

[andyp]

I still have a copy of the Burglar game on cassette but I don't know who wrote it.
My Cortex doesn't have any disk drives so when I eventually get it working I'll have to use an old tape player.

Has anyone tried using an MP3 player instead of a cassette, do you think this would work or would there be too much data lost in the file conversion.
Or does anyone know of a particular format that would work.

[nige the hippy]

Apparently mp3 does work, although it shouldn't. I personally would stick the tape in a tapedeck connected to the pc, and record it as a .wav then email it to the chap who was looking for it (and the other chap with the archive, so we can all play it). wav's preserve pretty well all the data, so even if the tape has degraded a bit it might still be possible to rebuild it, I'm less sure how the mp3 compression would cope with dropouts & print through, which tape is subject to.
(I've been to a wedding today so a bit worse for wear!)

[Ksarul]

Looks like Cortices are going up a bit in price too--the one on Ebay sold for more than twice what the last two sold for. Was the winner anyone on the list here? If not, we should probably try and get them in.

Also, the guy on Ebay that had the TI chips seems to have more of them. I just purchased a lot of TIM9904s from him, along with some TMS9901s.

[nige the hippy]

quick check... the rom files, there are 6 extra bytes, is it a crc/checksum at the end, or is the "ROM1 " at the beginning the extraeneous data?

EDIT*****

I've just answered the question, the "ROM1 " at the beginning should probably be removed from the binaries, I've just checked the source code listings and it's offset by 6 bytes.

Could have been a waste of postage andyp!

[andyp]

Nige the hippy,

Eproms in the post and on their way.
I decided on recorded delivery to prevent them getting lost, I hope this doesn't cause you any additional hassle.

[tms9995]

quick check... the rom files, there are 6 extra bytes, is it a crc/checksum at the end, or is the "ROM1 " at the beginning the extraeneous data?

EDIT*****

I've just answered the question, the "ROM1 " at the beginning should probably be removed from the binaries, I've just checked the source code listings and it's offset by 6 bytes.

Could have been a waste of postage andyp!

Just to be sure, the CORTEX.BIN file in the emulator directory is a pure binary image of the 3 eproms plus a 4th 'blank' one to take it up to 32K. There are no padding or checksum bytes so the 3 ROM files can easily be correlated with it to confirm you have the right data in the programmer etc.

[antiquekid3]

Apparently mp3 does work, although it shouldn't. I personally would stick the tape in a tapedeck connected to the pc, and record it as a .wav then email it to the chap who was looking for it (and the other chap with the archive, so we can all play it). wav's preserve pretty well all the data, so even if the tape has degraded a bit it might still be possible to rebuild it, I'm less sure how the mp3 compression would cope with dropouts & print through, which tape is subject to.
(I've been to a wedding today so a bit worse for wear!)

I have a SWTPC 6800 with the tape interface, and instead of recording to a tape deck, I tried recording to my MacBook using Audacity. After recording, I exported the file as an MP3 into iTunes. I have had no problems so far reading an MP3 file and sending it to the SWTPC. I don't know if the Cortex uses the 300 baud Kansas City standard or not, but if it does, it's just having to distinguish between two frequencies, which aren't that hard to reconstruct from an MP3 file.

I think it'd be nice to have a website devoted to these sound files for different machines, along with the source code.

Kyle