Skip navigation.

#

#

### D-Bug Falcon/MSTE Fixes/ULS Update [Atari Falcon/Mega STE]

#### http://www.rgcd.co.uk/

#### http://www.dbug-automation.co.uk/

#### Reviewed By J. Monkman

When I started out working on the first issue of RGCD back in 2006 I had very few contacts in the retro/indie gaming scene, and I initially struggled to find suitable content for the 'extras' section to reflect all my favourite 16-Bit and 8-Bit machines. As a result of this, I chose to deviate from the new-release homebrew nature of the rest of the magazine and wrote a short introductory article about my favourite Atari cracking crew and their new Atari Falcon and hard disk game patches. It turned out to be a choice that paid off; soon after the release of RGCD #01 GGN and Cyrano Jones contacted me to say thanks for the coverage and invited me to their forum - and well, since then we've become good friends and I've even done a bit of work on the side as a beta-tester for their releases (a privilege that few other Atarians enjoy).

Aside from the considerably increased and ever-growing number of hard disk patched games available for download on their site (currently over 270 titles have been fixed for use with all Atari machines - Mega STE, TT and Falcon included), over the past two years D-Bug have been working hard on developing the Atari equivalent of the Amiga's WHDLoad system. ULS, or the Universal Loading System has now reached version number 3.12, and offers a seriously outstanding real-hardware feature that until now has only been available to emulation users; the ability for a player to save the current state of a game to hard disk so they can re-load and continue play later. In addition to this, (and if incorporated in the ULS code for a particular game) it's also possible to save screen shots in the native .PI1/PI2 image format and even quit back to the GEM desktop via a key-press, negating the need to reach over the back of the machine and press the reset button. Although gamers have come to expect some of these options in modern day releases (and emulators), the ability to save progress at any time in a classic Atari game like Goldrunner on real hardware is exceptional and D-Bug really deserve kudos for their work and dedication.

Like WHDLoad, ULS is publicly available for anyone with sufficient coding ability to use, and it's release has seen the establishment of 'The ULS Consortium'; a technology sharing group to further improve the code and ideas. Veteran Atari scener and Bavarian coder Klapauzius was the first to sign up, and the fruits of his labours can be downloaded from both his regularly updated site at http://www.klapauzius.net/ and via links on the D-Bug patches page - and with ULS proving itself as a immeasurably helpful tool for D-Bug's internal team to quickly fix their own back-catalogue of cracks (I've been on MSN with CJ while he has fixed a request within five minutes!), over the past few months the onslaught of newly-patched games has been overwhelming! Atari favourites Turrican, Microprose's F1GP, Elite, Lemmings 2 and Rubicon have all received the ULS treatment, and as a gamer I have to admit that it's hard to keep up with the groups intense daily release schedule.

Although I'm sworn to secrecy regarding some of their more recent ventures, CJ, GGN and SHW have agreed to participate in an exclusive interview about the development of ULS, their on-going patching work and their experiences within the modern Atari scene...

(Note that due to copyright reasons (and sheer volume of files!) these patches have not been included on disk. However, they are all freely available from D-Biug's website at http://www.dbug-automation.co.uk/)

##

As way of introduction, please could you give a brief paragraph or two about yourself?

[CJ] SHW is a cheeky, geeky looking lazy northerner with no dress sense who takes forever to fix anything and usually needs assistance to make it work. He is famous for his trademark typing errors and Dennis Taylor glasses. One day he plans to get a black and white cat, start a job as a postie and roam the country reliving the life of Was Not Was.

[GGN] CJ is a bald redheaded git that could crack faster than you can spit. Currently he has no brain cells left so he coded ULS to hide his inability. SHW and GGN got fed up with him being in the same hemisphere as themselves, so they sent him on exile to Australia where he spends all day stealing wifi internet and using the same Dubmood track in all his patches. When he grows up he wants to become a Mac owner.

[SHW] George is a pasty looking Anglo-phile with an un-healthy fascination in the debugger – Monst. He has a compulsive trait for nicking and storing other peoples joysticks and the handy knack of ULSing games nobody wants to play.

With your previous group Automation already well-established and dominating the Atari cracking scene back in the 1990's, what were the reasons for starting up D-Bug as a new crew, and how did the newer members like GGN and Dubmood get involved in more recent years?

[CJ] D-Bug was a way for us to clean the slate and start again. At that point I had pretty much given up cracking and was more interested in coding the intros and menus. Rob (Vapour) was really fed up with most of the other people in Automation, and I had already left the group months earlier. Rob and myself pretty much always got along well together, so when we discussed teaming up again without all the 'hangers on', which was the main reason I left in the first place, it seemed like a good idea. The rest is history.

After I drifted away (around CD110 or so) Rob carried on doing it on his own but eventually SHW joined. I don't know the D-Bug history first hand for this time period, SHW can answer better . Without SHW joining I really doubt there would be a D-Bug in 2009. He carried the torch alone for so many years he deserves a long service award for dedication! GGN has always been a good friend of both myself and SHW, and after talking with SHW about it one night we offered a D-Bug position to him. We have never looked back since, he's a great addition to the team. Dubmood was sending us music for our exclusive use for a while and one day he asked us if he could be our in-house musician. We were a bit surprised we hadn't thought about asking him ourselves first, so saying yes was a very easy decision to make.

[GGN] Well SHW and CJ asked me around 2006 if I wanted to join in to help them out. My resume was simply "I'm handy with a debugger" :)

[SHW] I'd known Rob for many a year. He used to go out with a girl near me so she would visit with her new bloke and often copy the disks from Vapour whilst he wasn't there sometimes before they'd even been released! (Naughty!) I really wanted to support Automation, I sent him some Neochrome pics which I'd drawn but they were crap compared to stuff Wayne or Ian C could cook up. I really needed a niche so I embarked on music-ripping. I sent a disk full of rips to Rob and he started using them on menus, it was a nice change to see menus without the ubiquitous Whittaker or Hippel tunes. Round about menu 119 he asked if I'd like to join D-Bug and compile the menus and I jumped at the chance. I got my weekly jiffy bag of disks with new packs and Rob's tiny scribbled writing describing the contents. The task of compiling menus is harder than people think, believe me! As CJ mentioned I ploughed a lone furrow for a while until CJ resurfaced. GGN joined along with Dub and Melcus. I think we've got the balance spot on now. The most important thing with regards to the crew is our camaraderie and most importantly the ability to take the piss out of each other. This seems an alien threatening feeling for many other sceners.

What are you feelings about the current state of the Atari scene? Is it dying a long, painful and drawn-out death, or has it levelled-out with regard to the number of new productions released each year? Do you think that there'll still be active coders and gamers playing on Atari hardware in five years time?

[CJ] Tough question. Overall, it's in decline and I doubt anyone could deny that. There is still a core group of people who regularly release things though (I hate the word "production" - it's so melodramatic) and that is good (Hi Paradize and DHS!). What I have noticed is a general increase of 'romskiddies' who just collect 'roms' for their emulators - they don't even call them disk images or files. They are easy to spot and exhibit the Pokemon Syndrome (Must collect them all!) I guess that also explains why 'Afterburner' is our number one downloaded patch, because it's surely not because of it's astounding game play experience. I'd like to think that as long as there is a way to enjoy Atari people will still be using them. After all, how old is the 2600? That's still alive and kicking.

[GGN] It depends on what you call a 'scene' to be honest. Cracking scene? Demo scene? Users scene? Forums scene? All-Atarians-in-one-scene? Let's face it, no matter how many games exist on the ST, people get bored with them and move on. Some of them come back, most don't - it's only natural. And well, if Atari's still work after 5 years from now (and STEem engine works on newer PCs) then there's a chance of people playing with them.

[SHW] I surely hope the scene will still be here in 5 years time. I remember when I attended the ST News conference in 1999 people thought Richard Karsmakers was mad for setting a date for the next party in 2011. People suspected it would simply be old grey haired fat middle-aged people running the Union demo on state-of-the-art emulators. But I'm sure come 2011 new products will still be released - after all it's only 2 years away!! What really gets me are the people who spout off but don't put anything back into the scene. So salutations to DHS, Lineout, TSCC, Cream, RG, Paradize and Elite.

Regarding ULS, was WHDLoad a major influence? How long has it been in development, and how (in layman's terms) does it actually work?

[CJ] Was WHDLoad a major influence? Well yes, but only in the sense that it existed at all. What was the real influence was acquiring a MegaST with a Megafile hard disk. It's easy to get all excited about an old computer again when you have a reasonably large and fast storage device. That is, until you realise nothing works from it.

I was talking with SHW a fair bit at this time but neither of us were really doing a lot on the Atari. Anyway, a few weeks later I mailed him a copy of Robocop II that I had fixed up to load everything in one go so it would run from the hard disk, just to show how simple this could be done. I didn't really think I'd be doing any more but he put it out on a D-Bug menu anyway (CD 185) along with an intro I had started about 14 years previously and finally got into a releasable state. I think being involved in a new menu after so many years got my interest up a bit, but there was a long gap between that and the next thing, which, to finally answer your first question, was ULS 1.0.

The first ULS fixed games were released Halloween 2005, but we had them in internal testing for several months before that. We knew we were onto something quite big right there but could never quite get it perfect enough for mass use. It was difficult to use, and clunky - and didn't really work with everything. It went through a significant re-code for v2.0 but it was still nasty to use. I think all up we did about 12 patches with ULS v1.0 and v2.0. SHW then managed (somehow) to get me interested in HD fixing other games, but they couldn't easily be done with ULS and I ended up using the old 'ram disk' approach on them (Cannon Fodder, Lethal XS). At this time we were not supporting the Falcon, mainly due to the fact that I didn't have one. That all changed shortly afterwards when I managed to acquire not one, but two F30 systems. Unsurprisingly, ULS didn't work on the Falcon, and so it got shelved and forgotten while we concentrated on patching games using ram disks. Large games required more memory, and this is why a lot of our earlier fixed releases require more memory.

Now we flash forward to 2008 and plucky upstart Klapauzius had seen the ULS code we released in 2005, and had written his own loader around the same basic principles. We were quite surprised to discover that his fixes worked on the Falcon. This prompted me to completely re-write ULS from the ground up, making our own Falcon compatible version. Work started on this (ULSv3) on the 4th October, 2008 and the first ULSv3 fixed game from us was released on the 28th November 2008. We have been working to improve it's stability and add extra functions to it since then, and now consider it pretty bullet proof. So, sorry for taking such a long rambling road to answering your question but there you have it.

As for the third question, how does it actually work - well, as GGN once put it... "automagically" ;-) It actually works by replacing the load routines in a game with it's own code to handle disk I/O and other functions that most games will disable and make unavailable in order to run. As it loads files as required (as opposed to having to hold all the files at once, as with a ram disk) it has a much smaller memory footprint. This is why our latest ULS fixes need far less memory.

[GGN] Well CJ answered that question far better than anyone else could. Suffice to say that so far I've patched 2 or 3 games with it in under 2 hours without even knowing exactly what the inner bits of ULS do! I mostly helped out with the testing, Falcon/TT compatibility and some very-hard-to-trace bugs. Anyway, point is, we're pretty sure that ULS v3 is a robust loading system, and it's in fact very easy to use without knowing the inner workings.

[SHW] It really helps that CJ knew the in's and out's of Automation loading systems. He's a great encyclopaedia of $fffff8604 stuff! The current release of ULS has come on leaps and bounds since v1, unrecognisable in fact! It has just about everything. I'd guess my favourite ULS I've done so far is Gods, although I did one at Christmas (so far unreleased) which like Wings of Death adds Amiga TFMX music, so watch out for that!

Although the source code and documentation are available for download, so far only Klaz has stepped forward to join the ULS Consortium. Is this because it's particularly hard to use? What level of skill is required to ULS patch an Atari game to run from hard disk?

[CJ] Very little skill is actually required to use it. Most of the source files for the "stub loaders" (The part that holds the ULS code and starts the game up) are less than 5k in length and only really have around 20-30 different lines of code in them between each other. I would say anyone who can code a demo screen in assembler is more than competent enough to be able to ULS or HD fix a game (or, at the very least, their own demo). Why is there only us and Klaz? I really don't know. It can't be due to lack of interest, our web server log files show that our releases get downloaded many times.

[GGN] Well, I think that most of the people that use Atari's just want to have a quick blast from the past, not to contribute anything. Even less actually have any coding knowledge, so the end result is what we currently have.

[SHW] Yeah I'm with GGN; 95% people "want want want". I guess it's that we're a strange breed to still be 68k-ing in 2009… but I've been a strange breed from the start to have missed only 11 Hull City home games since 1980!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the CD-era will come to an end this year with the release of the long-awaited D-Bug #200. When it's over, will you miss the old format of compact floppy disk menus? And when can we expect to see the complete Automation/D-Bug DVD?

[CJ] I, for one, won't miss it a single bit. Getting everything to fit on an 820k floppy disk, with a menu, and have it running on ST/MSTE/STE/Falcon is a royal pain in the arse! Not to mention the scroll texts! And really, with all the mass storage devices appearing for the Atari these days, and with our recent releases, the Atari floppy disk isn't too appealing now. As for CD200 and/or the DVD..... *cough* over to GGN and SHW *cough* (Runs away!)

[GGN] I didn't contribute to too many menus, but I have done some PD compilations for my own use over the years, and I know it's very annoying to get them bug free and working exactly how you want them. Actually very little stuff is left for the Automation/D-BUG DVD. So I'd say it will be out "soon" :)

[SHW] As CJ said CD compiling was a nightmare. I really don't think people realise what a drag it was/is. I've only released menus 157 to 199 but even that made my eye-brows go white! I really respect all the major demo crews in the past, it wasn't till I compiled menus that I realised the amount of time, effort and… love that goes into 'em! I can't wait for #200, it's a real shame that there aren't any mind-blowing games around now which deserve a D-Bug #200 presence.

Aside from continuing work with ULS and patching old games, are there any other D-Bug projects in the pipeline? Do you have a special release planned for this year's Outline party?

[CJ] We do have something in the pipeline for our favourite platform but again, as to if it will ever see the light of day is something not worth puzzling over, and we usually have something planned for Outline. If we actually get around to doing it, or doing it in time, is another matter!

[GGN] We always have something in the pipeline. That's what I like in this group - one drags the other into activity. The brainstorming sessions we have produce some really neat ideas! Three heads are better than one!

[SHW] Pipeline? Pipeline?!! Bloody loads, from a personal point of view there's still the Automation/D-Bug DVD... but it's just motivating myself. If I give it 100% of my time then that means no other Atari stuff... I might release a 20 minute demo like we did (under PHF) 2 years ago.

Moving away from the Atari 16/32-Bit range, are any of you active or interested in other platforms and their respective scenes? Have you ever experimented with releasing productions for other platforms?

[CJ] I'm kinda interested in the Atari 8 bit scene, and along with GGN have helped to set up an A8 archive on the 'net. It was the first computer system I owned, so I still have a soft spot in my heart for the A8. RobC also has a strong Atari 8 bit background, so it's kind of fitting for Automation and D-Bug. Aside from that, no not really. I'd like to maybe do some Jaguar stuff, but the entire Jaguar Community (read: bunch of ass clowns) annoys me so much that I just can't see the point.

[GGN] Well there's still so much stuff I want to do for 16/32 Atari's that I'm not even considering using another platform to be honest. The Jaguar, from CJ's description doesn't sound half bad, maybe if I get my devkit up and running I'll try some stuff on it. Or maybe learn some proper 6502 and do some A8 stuff (I was too little to understand assembly when I had my 800XL).

[SHW] I still have a slight interest in the Amiga scene. I've got disk boxes of rare demo-packs which I really must DMS/ADF up as according to those 'in the know' they aren't online anywhere! But it's really just a passing interest, Atari is where my heart is. I've never owned a console in my life unless you count Grandstand's Astro Wars in 1981 and I've not got any games installed on my PC apart from mine sweeper.

Time for an old but gold question; Atari vs Amiga (ah, the happy memories of old playground arguments)... Back in the 1990's were you ever tempted to move over to the Amiga? What is it that you preferred about the Atari that kept you loyal to the machine to the extent that you are still active in the scene all these years later?

[CJ] Nope, never. Most of the people I knew at the time had one, but I was never that bothered. I don't know what has kept me interested... Brand name loyalty? :)

[GGN] Back in the 90s I didn't have lots of money so I couldn't own more than one machine. The ST had games and applications, so it suited all my needs. Well, seeing some Amiga versions of some games made me jealous, but not enough to shell out money to buy one!

[SHW] I actually owned, and still do own an Amiga. I just never was in the same kind of circles as with the ST. Coding wise I found the ST much more accessible even though myself and Cal (PHF) actually converted an ST commercial game to the Amiga (which shall remain nameless!) but that's as far it went for me. Music ripping on the Amiga was much easier due to there been far more dominant formats (e.g. Protracker, Future Computer and TFMX) so I stayed on the ST side, slowly ripping chip tune after chip tune after chip tune.

Thank you for participating in this interview. Is there anything else you'd like to add before signing off?

[CJ] Retro is the future of gaming!

[GGN] Peace on Earth and Atari FTW :)

[SHW] Keep the faith, ST till I die!