Dear Adam users:

All Coleco Super Games contain a file manager table. This table includes the start block, amount of blocks in the screen, and the buffer location, (where the screen is to be put in memory). I learned this from the first Technical manual that I got my hands on. The information was a little vague, but with a little trial and error I was able to locate one of the tables. The job at hand was to simply change the blocks to fit on a 160K disk.

Example of a Table.

    0
128
    1
    0
  16

The first number, (0) is part of the start buffer location where the blocks will be placed. We multiply the second number by 256 and add the first number. The start of the buffer for this screen would be (32768). The third and fourth number is the first block of the screen. You figure it the same as the buffer, (fourth number * 256) + third number. In this case the first block is (1) and the fifth number is the number of blocks of the screen. When the file manager routine in this Super Game looks at this table it will place blocks (1 - 16) starting at memory location (32768). A Super Game can contain several of these tables dependind on the number of screens in the game. Next time we will take a look at the Super Game Buck Rogers.



Super Game Mods. By Jim Walters Part 2.

Buck Rogers Planet Of Zoom Super Game Mod., originally done in 1985 by Jim Walters.



The first and biggest problem is to find the file manager table. I used the TOOLKIT program from SmartDSK III. TOOLKIT has a search feature, that will search for, up to four bytes at a time. Start with block (0) and load in 16 blocks. Search for a (1, 0) and when a match is found, check for a table. I located the table in block 6. The first section loads blocks 1 - 16 starting at location 32768. This is the first screen, the second screen is loaded at 9216 and the third is loaded at 48384. To modify the game to work from a 160K disk we need to first add up all the blocks to see if they will fit. I came up with 149 blocks counting block zero. I thought I remembered Coleco advertizing this game as 256K ? Now, we need to do a little changing, for it to fit on the disk. Check the table below to see how I moved things to fit. It could be done differently and to load a little smoother.

		                             (102) 
0, 128, 1, 0, 16 - 0, 36, 17, 0, 10 - 0, 189, 151, 0, 9, 
		
      (27)                 (111)               (38)
0, 36, 29, 0, 11, - 0, 189, 163, 0, 10 - 0, 36, 41, 0, 12 
		
       (121)               (50)               (134)
0, 186, 174, 0, 13 - 0, 36, 53, 0, 9 - 0, 186, 187, 0, 11 
		
      (59)              (68)               (145) 
0, 36, 65, 0, 9 - 0, 71, 75, 0, 10 - 0, 36, 222, 0, 4 
		
       (78)                (91)               (101)
0, 186, 85, 0, 13 - 0, 48, 131, 0, 10 - 0, 88, 141, 0, 1