Laser 2001 & Salora Manager - official thread

[@username@]

OK - I will look on ebay!

In the meantime, here's Astro Pinball - should you have a two button joystick.

Added Auto Chase.
Added Planet Defender and Deep Sea - with terrain patch too!

BLOAD $9FC0
CALL -24640

[Mobsie]

Wow, so great stuff here. As soon as i am back home from the hospital ( i broke leg and feet) i will fire on my Laser 2001

[Scouter3d]

Wow, so great stuff here. As soon as i am back home from the hospital ( i broke leg and feet) i will fire on my Laser 2001

Ouch! Best wishes and get well soon!
TOM:0)

[@username@]

Ok - first major issue with the Atari joystick replacement is that Auto-Fire on the three I have looked at use a custom circuit.

There is no physical pin 5!

I guess that's a money saving thing in production.

So the quest now is to find an auto fire joystick with a non-moulded 9pin connector or an fully connected extension.

Looking at the connector

5 4 3 2 1
9 8 7 6

1 - Up, 2 - Down, 3 - Left, 4 - Right, 5 NC, 6 - Fire, 7 - +5v, 8 - GND, 9 - NC

So in the moulded connector, pins 5 and 9 are not even provisioned.

Update - Just ordered a DE-9 female with terminal block - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/263111881170

[Scouter3d]

Hi,

Oh Bolloks, i remembered wrong! Pin7 = 5V :0(

Cheers, TOM:0)

[@username@]

Mouse Puzzle, Police Jump and Stone Age

BLOAD $9FC0
CALL -24640

Stone Age has no demo - but still need to call demo mode for graphics.

[@username@]

Salora Manager BASIC

While prototyping with BASIC, I found that the complete inconsistency in number translations is amusing.

For example, if you use VPOKE / VPEEK - it needs to be VRAM address + 32768. However, it actually sets that address + 1.

So VPOKE 37167,200 writes to 37168 Fortunately, VPEEK(37168) confirms this.

When you use POKE and PEEK they use unsigned shorts to 65535 - so no fancy footwork here.

Moving along to CALL - you need two's complement! So CALL -138 is really CALL $FF76, which is (B1111 1111 0111 0110), inverse (B0000 0000 1000 1001) giving 137, plus 1 == -138.

Putting the creatiVision logo back is simple too. The characters are downloaded with the rest of creatiVision characters - the on screen display has just been turned into spaces ($C0 in VRAM as all characters for CV are ASCII + 160).

I have attached a short basic listing which goes through doing just that - and of course updating the copyright to 2021

[Mobsie]

HI, Thats freaky cool

[@username@]

Like the CV, there is a turbo tape loading mode on the Salora Manager too.

It really is just an artefact of how the loader decides 0 or 1 bits.

Memory location $354 contains the average duration of the first 4096 pulses (which register on the PIA).

It's simple get count (Y) then add and shift right.

Then this code is used to determine the bit state

Code: Select all

ROM:F0FC                 JSR     sub_F108		;; PIA Wait State Change duration (INY)
ROM:F0FF                 CPY     $354			;; Mean result of initial 4096 zero bits
ROM:F102                 BCC     loc_F106		;; If less must be a 0 - CLC
ROM:F104                 SEC					;; Greater than so must be a 1 - SEC
ROM:F105                 RTS

ROM:F106 loc_F106:                             
ROM:F106                 CLC
ROM:F107                 RTS

So by adding enough distance - which is considerably less than CSAVE uses - it has 50% increase on 1 bit over 0 bit (80/40). The minimum it seems happy with is roughly 20% - which is an increase of around 30%, so saving ~30% over normal load time.

Laser 2001 uses pretty much the same loading - but allows for a smaller 0 bit (90/30) - so possibly could be even quicker!.

You can view the mean count after CLOAD or BLOAD by doing PRINT PEEK(852).

[Gabriele72]

Hi everyone,
my friend Luca (MaDrigal) pointed me to this thread (and especially to user Mobsie and Scouter3d) for help.
Recently, I've been lucky enough to acquire a Laser 2001 in its box, although incomplete. It is a german version.
The unit was given to me as non-working but I felt confident I could fix it. That was before I opened it... I wasn't prepared to the horror show (ok maybe you're already familiar with it ): two tightly stacked boards soldered together plus a mess of cut traces and rework wires all around. Even a chip soldered upside down
How could such a thing reach the production lines is a mistery to me...
What I'm looking for is something that resembles a schematic plus ROM dumps, perhaps someone here has them?
I'll be happy to share all the info I can about this unit. Thanks in advance.
Some pics follow: