Rings of Saturn crack uploaded to Asimov - and new secret key found

[Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com>]

Greetings,

One of the few remaining nibble copies I found among my disks was this old game from Dakin 5/Level-10 called "Rings of Saturn".  It's sort of a shoot 'em up in space crossed with some space travel type themes.

I didn't see a preserved image available around anywhere, so I thought maybe I'd have a go at cracking this nibble copy and making a disk image available.

Oh, how rusty I am.

But, I persevered through some fairly impressive boot tracing obfuscation, remembering things as I went (and perhaps learning anew), until at last I had captured the pieces I needed to normalize the disk (along with their DOS).  My goal was to produce a disk that was faithful to the original, at least as far as the handoff point to cold starting their DOS.  I think it would be possible to produce a single load version, but there are some interesting artifacts on the disk (like what looks to be source code fragments on track $08 at least).

I might write up the boot trace info from my notes, and I did save the original boot code pieces in files, but that will be another project, as it will take some detail to properly explain. It was pretty neat what they did though, so I would like to preserve that too. It would just be a very long write up.

Anyway, I don't have docs for the game, but here are some notes:

ESC leaves the title screen
Numbers 1-9 change the MPS speed
V toggles the view screen (one is looking forward, the other looking back as you travel)
N toggles 'noises' (sound on/off)
P pauses, until you move the joystick
S toggles shields

The point seems to be to travel from some space base into the rings of Saturn, and once you arm the phasor, you can blast things that appear (rocks, alien ships).  Beyond that, I'm not sure what all the goals/rules are.  Docs would be good... (there may be more controls).

In the process of examining the code to see what keys did what, I found a check for #$1D, which is a Ctrl-] character.  When you're in the 'game over' screen, where 'G' will start a new game, entering this secret key will display the name of the programmer, Daniel Minardi (who can be found online via searching, BTW...).

So, in addition to playing around with normalizing the disk, there was also the bonus of another secret key to be found.  Now, where'd I put that list of them...  :)


Anyway, image has been uploaded to Asimov in incoming, not sure what directory they'll choose to place it (should be games/action, I think).

]HR