Raxoft/Scorpion stuff not in SC database

[Patrik Rak]

Recently I wanted to mention my Merlin copier to someone and I was surprised it wasn't preserved on WoS. I remember talking about it with someone and linking it on the WoS forums, but anyway. So I did dig few more things from my archive which were not preserved but which might be. This is the link:

http://zxds.raxoft.cz/taps/misc/raxoft-extras.zip

The quick summary of the content as follows:

merlin.tap - My best copier, using all the fancy features like compression and real time counters. Using just one line provided most memory available. The only pity is that on 128k, deleting individual blocks was terribly slow...

gandalf.tap - Precursor to Merlin, used better compression scheme but was way to more complicated, taking more memory. It even used the top bit of R register! In the end it didn't pay off, except for few games which Merlin couldn't handle at once.

satan.tap - Short text adventure, in a way parody of Satochin (if you can even parodize that). Released as an April's Fools joke, so it doesn't have a proper ending, you can just die in dozen obscure ways.

spacecrusadersdemo.tap - Teaser for the the Space Crusaders game which never materialized. Features bouncing scroll (which I believe became called FLP later on) which we later used in QANG, and my AY rendition of Popcorn intended for the game, so it used just 2 channels so the third one was free for sound effects.

iqtest.tap - My conversion of "funny" IQ test which I believe I converted from a C64 BASIC listing I got from a friend of mine, mostly just as an exercise for proportional printing routine.

amigav13.tap - our "Amiga emulator", little demo/joke we put together, featuring Milan Matousek's faithful rendition of the Amiga hand. Notable for the amount of peripherals it tests for and detects and comments about.

progforhackers.tap - Example of the protection against reverse engineering I wrote, like Speedlock, Alcatraz, or Fuka's Arnold. I believe it used every trick in the book we knew back then and then few more. For example, it uses plain LIST command to run the machine code and I remember being particularly proud of getting the infinite POP loop work on both 48k and +2 models. Might be interesting for people who are into this type of things.

vast.tap - My version of the V.A.S.T. monitor/disassembler by Tomas Rylek. One day I found the listing by chance in Franta Fuka's cupboard, and was surprised to learn that there is also V.A.T., which not many people knew about. I retyped it into Pikasm and added few extensions, like soft-tracing (which just emulates things) until given address in addition to hard-tracing (which uses JP for breakpoints). It was slow but essential for breaking some protection schemes.

vat.tap - My version of V.A.T., the matching counter part of V.A.S.T., which could be loaded anywhere in memory (unlike V.A.S.T., which was always in screen memory) and could use any third of the screen for output. The combo was essential for protections which used the screen memory itself. Both versions even include super-short "penetrator" code, which was easy to load somewhere into memory and when it got executed, it loaded the VAST/VAT at that location while preserving registers. This way you could continue decoding stuff which utilized almost all memory during its operation.

vastsrc.tap - The Pikasm source code of the V.A.S.T./V.A.T. combo.

vastsrc.z80 - Snapshot of the above source code, already loaded in Pikasm.

pikasm.tap - Pikasm by Tomas Rylek, with enhancements by Petr Vones, of Melody Music fame. This is what almost everyone around here ended up using. It is enhanced compared to the version which is already preserved.

zizala.tap - While looking for the above, I was surprised to find this. It's one of the first programs I have written for the ZX Spectrum, variant of the infamous Snake game. I thought it was lost in space and time already.

Maybe someone finds some of it worth preserving.

Patrik

[Patrik Rak]

pikasm.tap - Pikasm by Tomas Rylek, with enhancements by Petr Vones, of Melody Music fame. This is what almost everyone around here ended up using. It is enhanced compared to the version which is already preserved.

Hmm, my bad, I assumed the preserved version is the Rylek's original because of the tape name it uses, but I checked it more thoroughly now and it is in fact the version enhanced by Vones as well. Curiously enough, though, that tap is some 12k larger and if you check why, it is visible that it includes the source code of the graduating work of Hynek Med, who was coincidentally my school mate, one year younger. It seems Hynek perhaps created this version after loading it from some snapshot, cleared the source code (but it remained in memory), saved it as a tap and this is what somehow got included on WoS.

So, despite the versions being the same code, my tap is the pristine version, which I got from Petr Vones himself.

BTW, the Czech manual for Pikasm (which I wrote some 30 years ago and which was later amended by Richard Cvach) can be found for example here: https://sam.speccy.cz/zxtools/pikasm_man_cz.txt

Patrik

[R-Tape]

Recently I wanted to mention my Merlin copier to someone and I was surprised it wasn't preserved

Patrik, PM sent